Subway Steak and Bacon Melt

Nom, Subway has a new sandwich. Er, I mean, a new combination. Why is Subway suddenly Taco Bell's idea bitch? It's the same formula these two restaurants have succeeded with for years- ten ingredients, twenty toppings, zillions of permutations. I haven't seen anything "new" come out of Subway since Jared's new wardrobe and the short-lived flatbread.

However, this one looked like it had the potential to be tasty because it touted absolutely no vegetables whatsoever. Vegetables are my most hated nemesis, defeated only by various meat on meat action with occasional extra carbohydrate backup support, like a french fry sandwich. Yum. So I had high hopes for eating this simply because it fit the exceedingly low standards of my no vegetable clause.I tried to order the sandwich with as much accuracy as the photo itself, but had no hint as to what the sauces could have been. I went with classics, mayo and mustard, all on top of hearty Italian bread. The sandwich artist, if that's what they're still calling them, was generous with the shredded steak, using two entire portions of steak for one six inch sandwich, as well as four slices of bacon, neatly torn and arranged to ensure both cow and pig in one bite. I opted for cheddar cheese, which melted perfectly on top.With the sauces and cheese melting together, I let the sandwich sit for a bit so all could solidify and not spill out onto the paper wrapping before me. The sandwich was adequately filled. What looked like a lot of meat in preparation now seemed to be a rather modest serving, but the bacon was plentiful and the cheese and sauces had conglomerated into a beautiful formation.The bread was crusty and a little overtoasted, but provided a neutral canvas for the star of the show, the meat. Unfortunately, the steak had little flavor. I'm not asking for beef carpaccio, but it would have been nice to have more seasoning. It was still juicy and sliced thinly and fell out of the sandwich in bite-sized chunks. With the bacon, it was rather satisfying. I found the sauces to be the dominant flavor where the steak lacked, though, and the last few bites of the sandwich to be almost entirely comprised of mustard. Pretty tasty, but could use some doctoring.

Mint Chocolate Chip Wrigley's Extra Dessert Delights

Sweet Jesus, this is going to bring about another crazy slew of viewers like those damned dessert pills. Seriously, what is it about this obsession with food tasting like other foods but not textured the same? I've noticed it especially with desserts. Dessert gum, dessert pills, dessert track marks on human arms so you can seamlessly inject Hershey's syrup into your veins- on the go!

When I saw these in the grossly overpriced convenience store, I almost peed myself. I've always wanted to make out with someone (you know who you are) while simultaneously tasting like ice cream. Ice cream in the gum section? That's inconceivably gross. Or inconceivably awesome. I can't quite decide. But rest assured, this will not become a new staple of any little Violet Beauregarde.It's funny because it's in my freezer, as though it has actually replaced ice cream. Incidentally, it has not.

Upon unwrapping this, I inwardly cursed myself. Of course it's going to taste like mint chocolate chip ice cream...it's fucking mint flavored gum. Putting that thought aside, though, the taste is predictably interchangeable with most regular chewing gums. It's minty. It's got that slightly sour bite. It's chewy and gets increasingly chompier as the sugar goes out of the gum.And it's not mint chocolate chip ice cream. Aside from the color, that quintessentially inaccurate bright green, it tastes like mint gum repackaged as ice cream. I taste no chocolate and no creaminess, and I was bored by the fifth bite. I don't even know how chocolate would be possibly translated into gum form. Bummer, Wrigley's. You almost had me for a second. I'll just have to find a way around my obscure, impossible fetish.

Eggchiladas

Hoi, readers, here's a recipe incorporating some delicious enchilada sauce. Keepitcoming and I have been making a valiant attempt to reduce carbohydrates in our diet, so in lieu of tortillas or crepes, we decided to make omelettes and fold them over our toppings.

\\Ingredients (serves two)
Four eggs
1/2 cup of cheddar cheese (we used leftover horseradish cheddar and it gave it a fantastic kick)
1/2 cup of sausage- preferably something with a little kick, like linguica or chorizo
1/4 cup of red wine
1/2 cup of black beans
3/4 cup of enchilada sauce
Sour cream
Salsa
Salt, pepper, paprika to taste

1. This is a nice recipe that can be done in easy steps. First, prep your ingredients by shredding your cheese into a bowl and chopping your sausage into bite sized chunks.
2. Put your sausage into a frying pan on low heat with the red wine and let it reduce and simmer until the sausage is crispy on all sides. While that is cooking, beat your eggs with salt and pepper and blend your black beans and enchilada sauce in a blender.
3. When the sausage is done, pour a small serving of eggs, enough to coat the bottom of the pan in a relatively thick layer, into the pan. Let it set and flip over.
4. Sprinkle half the cheese onto the egg, and half the sausage, and fold in half like an omelette.
5. Top with lots of eggchilada sauce, sour cream, and salsa!
6. Enjoy while hot. If you have leftover eggs and toppings, they will keep for the next morning's breakfast.These were a lot of fun to make, though I definitely need to work on getting my egg flip to perfection! The sauce we used, Chavela's, was smooth and intense and very tasty with the black beans. It was the perfect consistency for our dish. Make them at home when the weather is crappy.

Bitar's

Field trips are even more fun when you're an adult, but not when the bus pulls up to the corner of 9th and Passyunk to let all the "kids" off the bus to eat at either Pat's or Geno's. That's exactly what happened to me when I first arrived to the area many years ago. Not getting down with any cheesesteaks, around the corner I went and quickly ran into Bitar's, a Middle Eastern grocery and take-out. And, so Bitar's became the second place I ever ate at in Philly (first was Rangoon).Inside is a small selection of Middle Eastern groceries, pitas and flat breads baked by Soumaya and Sons bakery out of Whitehall, PA, a small case of pastries, and Bitar's own hummus and baba ghanoush in the wall cooler along with other perishables like Halloumi cheese.To the left of the grocery room is a high counter with a few stools in front, and a couple of tables along the window for dining in, but most people grab an order to go. All your Middle Eastern basics are up for grabs at Bitar's, and even bitzzas, Bitar's own Middle Eastern pizza made on Zaatar bread.A vegetarian combo, which includes pita, hummus, baba ghanoush, tabouli, falafel, and stuffed grape leaves, is a good way to cover a lot of the vegetarian options. While there is nothing ground breaking about any of these dishes, I like that Bitar's actually puts some flavor into their dishes.The tabouli salad is assertively tangy with lemon juice, and not shy with diced onions. Smooth baba ghanoush has smokey flavor, but also a little kick of acid from lemon. Hummus is classically silky, and slightly bitter from tahini. Even the falafel balls, which are unfortunately extremely dry, have a bit of spicy kick. And oil haters, fear not, Bitar's rice stuffed grape leaves are not covered in oil.

Given the choice of Pat's or Geno's, Bitar's is the better choice.

Bitar's
947 Federal St., Philadelphia, PA 19147
215-755-1121
Mon-Fri: 10am-7pm
Sat: 10am-6pm
Sun: closed

The Big E 2010

Yesterday was a big adventure for Swagger and I. We took a trip to The Big E, the Eastern States Exposition, in West Springfield to cover the food spread and see what we could find. So, without further ado, here is an official photo montage and review of the 2010 food at The Big E.

My commentary is in one part, and Swagger's is in the next.The crowd at the entrance, near the food booths and state houses.

Foodette: Emu chili for breakfast...a healthy start to the day indeed. While the flavor was very tasty and aromatic, the emu was lost in the sea of beans, tomatoes, and onions, and when isolated, had a slightly grainy and muscular texture. Still flavorful, but it would have been better all by itself in a chili.

Swagger: The chili could have been a little thicker, which could be accomplished by adding more emu. The spice was just about right, could have had a little more heat but it had a good flavor. If I did not know it was not emu chili, I would not have guessed it was based on meat texture. Meat texture tasted like very small pieces of pork.

Golden, yellow, and red raspberries from Massachusetts made a delicious and mouth-watering composition. Regular raspberries are now complimented by their yellow hued cousins.

Maple syrup from Massachusetts is turned into...

Maple sugar cotton candy! It was very fluffy and sweet and had that quintessential maple syrup flavor. Delicious.

Pesto and tomato flatbread from American Flatbread. I think one of them also had an olive tapenade, but we didn't try this.

Foodette: Swagger's favorite treat of the day, maple bacon ice cream. Really delicious maple ice cream with sizeable chunks of bacon in it. Creamy, thick consistency, and a fantastic flavor.

Swagger: Perfect idea put into play. Taste of the maple was very strong and added a good maple taste to the bits of bacon in the ice cream. I could eat this all day every day for the rest of my life. Perfect addition of bacon to an already great thing.

Foodette: Maple cured beef jerky from Vermont. Maple was really a big theme of the exposition. This was really delicious, tough jerky with a good chew to it. In my opinion, this is the very epitome of jerky. We're too soft on the processed stuff. This is where it's at. It fell off in big chunks and we couldn't stop eating it.

Swagger: Was great beef jerky! Tastes like what real gritty beef jerky should taste like and not a slim jim. Did have a nice flavour but did not have enough of the advertised maple flavour. With more maple flavour, could have been great instead of above average.

Foodette: Chocolate covered bacon from Connecticut. While the bacon was delicious, very crispy, and had a caramelized flavor, the overall taste and satisfaction was slightly lessened by the quality and type of chocolate used. It was a very sweet milk chocolate with a slightly waxy, melty flavor to it. A dark chocolate would have highlighted the meat and made the flavor more robust.

Swagger: Great idea and execution, the bacon was made perfectly, crisp yet chewy. The sweetness of milk chocolate contrasted with the salt of the bacon and made the milk chocolate taste too sweet. Would have been perfect with use of dark chocolate.

Another Connecticut treat. We didn't try this, but I liked the bold colors of the packaging and the reference to Watch Hill, a childhood destination of mine.

These were pumpkin fritters, and they were pretty tasty. I was a little disappointed, because at a $5 price tag, I expected actual pumpkin, or at the very least, pumpkin pie filling. Instead, they were more of a pumpkin bread and carried less pumpkin flavor and more spices. Still, they were very autumnal and fried well, with no greasy texture or mouthfeel. Delicious alternative to funnel cake with some powdered sugar sprinkled on top!

It's a little silly, but I think I was most excited to try cheese curds, despite them being a little prosaic. I'm not sure if it was the novelty of trying something cheese-like, but different, or the fact that everything is better fried, but a sample of these just hit the spot. I was glad I didn't commit to an entire order, because they didn't taste too different than actual fried mozzarella, but the sharpness of the cheddar was delicious on its own. Very poppable and very cute.

Foodette: Another fair food staple I was dead set on eating was a corn dog. God, I love corn dogs, and the best to be had are at state fairs, where they're freshly fried and usually customizable with different kinds of sausages. I was surprised to see that none of the corn dogs were freshly fried on site, but this one offered cheese and jalapenos inside. It had a very mild heat and wasn't filled with a lot of cheese, but damn it, it was greasy, delicious, and on a stick.

Swagger: I don't care enough for the corn dog to have enough to say.

Foodette: The cream puff was arguably our favorite dessert of the day. It had a nice, chewy beignet dough base and a massive amount of fluffy vanilla cream inside. It was creamy and huge and delivered a fantastic flavor and texture.

Swagger: Only in 'Merica and the engineers in fatassery can make such a usually small and dainty dessert into such a massive item. The puff is perfectly soft and chewy and the cream was perfectly light and not greasy and leaves you with that oily feeling that you just ate a stick of butter. Perfect dessert creation only in 'Merica!

Hot dogs for your hot dog...we did not eat these.

Foodette: This was fried cheesecake with whipped cream and strawberries. The concept is delicious, but the actual product was mediocre. The batter was thick so as not to melt the cheesecake inside, but that made it chewy and not crisp, and more doughnut like. It was extremely difficult to eat this.

Swagger: The batter was too thick and it was just what it sounded like, a piece of fried cheesecake. Seemed like a better plan on paper but in application and execution, the idea turned out to not be as great. Fried Ice Cream was a much better idea.

Foodette: We saved the best for last, two burgers made of completely insane ingredients. This was an alligator burger. Having never consumed reptile prior to this experience, I can tell you that it's a singularly unique experience. The flesh tasted similar to seafood or onions, chewy with a slight bounce. The burger was plain, but seasoned perfectly, with Cajun spices. For me, the least satisfying part of the burger was the bun. It was too thick and bready and took away from the gator's flavor.

Swagger: The gator burger had a great spicy flavour to it and the taste of the gator meat was distinctively reptilian. Very exotic and was worth the price and wait. Not as insane as the other creations but very very good.

Foodette: Finally, the star of the show, the Craz-E burger. Where else but a state fair could you find a bacon cheeseburger in between grilled glazed doughnuts? This was perfect for people who like salty with their sweet. The yeast-raised doughnuts weren't sticky or greasy and actually made a decent bun because of their breadiness. All the flavors melded perfectly. This was so good. Damn it.

Swagger: The idea of such a abominable creation can only be created in ‘Merica and could be blasphemous enough to warrant a jihad. Yet only in ‘Merica can the engineers in fatassery bring this creation to life and make it just about the most delicious thing ever. This item is truly a testament to what makes the land of the free and the home of the brave great, the ability to say fuck you to every non-christian religion in a godly delicious sandwich worthy of Jesus himself, By putting a quarter pound beef patty, multiple slices of bacon and cheese between a glazed donut. Fuck you Hinduism, fuck you Islam, and fuck you Jews too. God Bless the Red White and Blue! God Bless ‘Merica!

And that covers it. Foodette Reviews thanks Catherine Pappas for media help, and thanks to Swagger for all his hard work on the field! He will be regularly contributing to Foodette Reviews in the near future.

Surf Sweets Gummy Swirls

Holy shit, these are Sharkies incarnate.

Sorry. Hang on. This should probably start with a more formal introduction.

I'd like to publicly and officially apologize to Keepitcoming Love, not for something I have done, but for something that will probably happen in the course of the next twelve hours. I am almost one hundred percent positive that I do not have the willpower to not finish these gummies and share them with you.

This definitely makes me a terrible girlfriend.

Surf Sweets Gummy Swirls are really incredible gummies. They're practically the balls that Sharkies play with, that's how similar and delicious they are in texture. They are little gummy swirls covered in sugar granules, in the shape of gumdrops. They're smaller than gumdrops, with a finer grain of sugar, and a less gelatinous chew. They're like a delicious hybrid between gummies, cream savers, and gumdrops. They're so good.


One package holds about thirty pieces, which is half a day's value for the average adult. There are only two flavors, raspberry and orange, and the cream doesn't quite come out as much in the raspberry as in the orange, which is akin to eating St. Joseph's Baby Aspirin without the repercussions and potential blood thinning, but they are delicious and tart and have an absolutely perfect consistency.


I don't know why I was so surprised that these were so delicious. Food has been surprising us lately, and these are no exception. I need to hoard them and eat more. And purchase a pack for my sweetheart. Also, keep an eye out...I'm going to do a Surf Sweets giveaway and I want your participation, people!

Brothers All Natural Strawberry and Banana Crisps

Here's a snack from Brothers All Natural, a mixture of strawberry and banana fruit crisps. At first, I was really excited to eat these, because I saw the words "freeze dried" and that made me think "astronauts and pee bags," but then I realized that these were not even remotely affiliated with astronauts. I'm all for eating healthy and organic, but to me, these feel like a consolation prize of a snack than an actual treat.

These were interesting. Part of me felt like I was being a good girl and eating something light, and another part of me felt like I was eating baby treats. When I poured them out of the bag, they made a crinkling sound like broken glass on the desk, a slightly disturbing sound for something I would later ingest.


The banana crisps were slightly better than the strawberry crisps, in that they actually tasted like bananas. That was where the similarity ended. They were milky and creamier than real bananas, but not in a good way. More of an, "I think these are overripe" way. On the Official Scale of Banana Hierarchy, (OSOBH) they were one step above plantain chips, two steps above overripe, bruised, mushy nanners, and one step below delicious green bananas.

I have decided not to draw this out for you, by popular request.

The strawberry crisps had a weird tang and crunch, as though they had way too many seeds inside, and left a chewy, sticky film in my mouth. They turned gummy and flavorless as soon as they hit liquid. I tried to resuscitate them with water, but to no avail. They were dead on arrival.


I had a hard time photographing this, because I had so many thoughts about mortality and fruit. I ended up doing a twelve photo composition with simulated fruit husks and a three page dissertation, but it was completely useless and also non-existent, so I've just included some photographs. I wish these were tastier.