Arnold Pretzel Rolls

There is no God.

Or rather, the God we currently have now inexplicably hates pretzel rolls. Atheistic blanket statements aside, I'm pretty sure that part of my life's mission here on earth is to find the best pretzel roll man can possibly make. No pressure, though. I've been through frozen pretzels stuffed with more crap than Adam Richman, pretzel hot dog buns loaded with expensive edible accoutrements, pretzels topped with crustaceans, and disappointing pretzel rolls. I'm all pretzeled out and I still can't find the perfect bread.
To me, the ideal pretzel roll has a foot in both worlds, despite being a freakish monster belonging in neither. It is kissed with a hint of tinny, metallic goodness on its crust and is almost certainly boiled prior to baking, to ensure an airy, yet chewy inner surface that is porous enough to accommodate to even the gooiest of toppings, but yields to a firm bite without vomiting its contents all over the plate. Rock salt mandatory, toasting optional. An idyllic one-two punch at home with ham, mustard, and little else, or with a gluttonous number of toppings. Needless to say, they are freaking perfect, elevating a mere sandwich to a more complex and Bavarian plane. And to date, I had to rely on luck and intense menu research to find these little suckers. Until...not.
Yes, it looks like I meant "now" but it's not "now" because I have to wait. Yes, I peed myself when Arnold's came out with these two days ago and my mom brought them home. And no, these are not the droids we're looking for. Sigh. Despite showing a promising amount of homemade homeliness, these just weren't up to snuff. Six rolls to a bag, with 190 calories each, they appear to be hefty and even slightly irregular from roll to roll, offering charming variations in the waffled base and slits on top. Quite a promising start.
Unadorned, they were bland. Adorned simply, the pretzel's natural charms were squelched. Suffocated under the weight of a stupid amount of toppings, they disintegrated. God damn it. We were so close, Arnold's. We could have had it all. Unfortunately, these just didn't cut it. To the touch, they are light and airy, a little too light. White bread light and Vanilla Ice white with a squishy and uniformly bubbled core. A small bite yielded a sweetly flavored crumbly interior and thin, pliable crust with a hint of alkaline tang from the baking soda. It wasn't chewy at all and had the texture of a thin slice of sandwich bread rather than a crusty roll. Most of the salinity was overpowered by the breadiness as there was no other supplemental salt source, like a scattering of rock salt on top of the roll, to boost its flavor.
The least offensive way to eat this is with a little salt and butter, much like my bagels. This way accentuates the pretzel's natural flavor the most, but still falls prey to the plain bready texture. There wasn't enough irregular definition in the bread's cell wall to allow the butter to melt into any nooks and crannies, and it floated on the top after melting, barely penetrating the surface and leaving the top part soggy and the bottom part flavorless. Were it not for the appeal of the salt coaxing the tinniness out, I wouldn't bother eating this as toast.
As a sandwich, I figured this would be a little more successful. And what better way to do it than to do a balls-to-the-wall crazy condiment orgy on a bun? Do or do not, there is no try, after all. The Italian Job featured condiments best suited to a good bun with no margin of error. If it was a good pretzel roll, it would work. Anything else would disintegrate under the weight of so many sauces. With hot pepper relish, mustard, mayo, Tabasco, ham, American cheese, mango and ginger Stilton 'cause we fancy, arugula, fennel slivers, and freshly cracked black pepper, the Italian Job ain't nothin' to muck with.
And unfortunately, after I removed this ornamental steak knife, all hell broke loose. This is not the right bun for the job, folks. Not in the slightest. See that distended yellow-hued smear on the starboard side of the sandwich? That's the sauce seeping through the bread, sponged up by the fluffy interior. Arnold's, you are a failure.
Bam, she falls apart as soon as I look at her. Another one for the vaults. Successful as a roll, perhaps, but as a pretzel, you're an absolute shame up there with Glitter, Gilbert and Sullivan, and the InstaHang. Looks like it's back to the drawing boards for the time being. I appreciated the initiative on part of Arnold's, but for God's sake, if you're going to go out on a limb, try not to make the product so utterly unappealing that people won't ever want to eat its inspiration again.

Wendy's "W" Burger

Pros about living in New England: we're awesome. Oceans. Ascots. A distinct lack of accents outside of Bahstahn and New Hampshah. Bleeding heart liberalism is pretty sweet most of the time.

Cons about living in New England: We have roughly four fast food restaurants, approximately none of which are ever test markets. In all honesty, that might be my biggest pet peeve. I live in an area a hair too far away from Maine, which carries the McLobster, and lack an appreciation of the irony that would entail eating a McPizza in freaking New Haven, Connecticut, home of two of the world's greatest pizza restaurants.
So what would normally take ten minutes for anyone living in a normal state took FF and I a rollicking two hour drive to go to a better Wendy's than any of the Wendy's around in the quest for the elusive "W" burger. The "W," surprisingly not provoking any jokes or lawsuits from our former president, is actually a play on words, "double...you?" Well, it partially delivers on that front, with two 2.5 ounce beef patties, two slices of American cheese, a loveable cast of vegetable rag-tags, a signature sauce, and a softer, artisan buttered bun. At its best, a burger with an affordable price point for those whose hunger isn't small enough to be satisfied by the dollar menu and those who just don't feel like breaking out the big guns. At its worst, a glorified and more expensive McDouble. Size-wise, it seemed fairly average for a burger, even a fast food one. Not too big or too small. The first immediate issue with this burger was its scent- as soon as I extracted it from its paper prison, a fake nacho cheesy scent emitted from its core. It was definitely freaky, but I ignored it and forged on, figuring the restaurant itself smelled weird or something. The burger is stacked pretty tall, but the height isn't so unreasonably high that it needs to be squished in order to get a bite of every topping in your mouth. And that's good, because the squishy bun practically falls apart with a stern glare.
As far as toppings go, nothing really distinguishes it from other fast food burgers on the market, aside from the special sauce on top. Wendy's describes this as a soybean oil-based, sweet honey mustard flavored sauce. I would normally be all over this sauce, but the flavor of the sauce was so mild that all that remained was the viscous, runny texture and a slick, oily mouthfeel in every bite. Not an appealing way to start the meal. The veggies were incredibly fresh, with the exception of the pickles, limp, translucent shells of their former selves, with an unfortunately mild, bitter flavor, lacking any acidity. The beef was thin and crispy, with a smoky, moist flavor, but had a chunky, chewy texture similar to leftover meatloaf.
Like the release of Justin Bieber into human society, one small thing led to the utter demise of a greater, more complex being, in this case, the poor quality of the pickles led to the downfall of this burger. Without the pickles providing a much needed foil to the assault of cheese, sauce, butter, and a rich bun, the only tangy bite coming from this was the red onions. It's like putting a 1996 engineless Camry in a drag race with a Ferrari. It just can't compete. The dairy elements in this were truly unctuous- heed that as a word of advice from a shameless lactophile. Alone, or scaled down, they might have been somewhat appealing, but all three milk-based ingredients combined completely overwhelmed almost any additional flavor this burger attempted to have, with the aforementioned popcorn butter residue and gooey nacho cheese flavor absolutely persistent and infused into every cranny of the sandwich.
I can understand what the motives were in creating a burger that allowed a maximum amount of toppings for the consumer with a lower price point, and I genuinely appreciate that. Having a somewhat subdued appetite myself, it seems like something I'd get behind when my dollar menu fantasies were no longer hitting the right chords. But the exuberance works against them with an imbalanced flavor and makes for a sandwich that takes away your hunger not because you're full, but because you're mildly repulsed.

Fizzies Limited Edition Fizzin' Apple Cider and Fizzin' Hot Cocoa

Alka-Seltzer: it's not for babies who can't eat Mexican food! Not anymore! Take all the allure and sophistication of being a retiree and combine it with fun, kid-friendly flavors and a freaking wizard. Boom. Fizzies. While I haven't seen a Formula 1 wheelchair yet or a denture-shaped gummy treat, I can tell you that Fizzies have been a nostalgic and omnipresent part of my life for the last few years. My mom grew up drinking Fizzies and the yout' of today saw a resurgence in their cool factor with the short-lived Kool-Aid Fun Fizz product of yesteryear, but now we have a new breed to bring back the effervescent game. Fizzies have come out with two limited edition flavors for fall and winter to warm your MS Painted heart and soul. I love wintry drinks. Personally, I'm of the ilk that believes that America is spending too much of our GNP on summer beverage releases with tired flavors like Longboarding Lime and Orange You Glad I Didn't Say Bikini. I haven't seen a beverage attempt to riff on the subject of "butt-freezing New England winters" since the short-lived Pepsi Holiday Spice, which tasted like mouthwash mated with suicide.

Learning that Fizzies came out with a tablet to mimic hot cider and hot cocoa set my loins aflame and my nose adrippin' with the thought of curling my hands around a nice, hot mug of carbonated retro charm. With a little help from my friends at Amerilab, samples were obtained and I waited for my first cold evening to try these out. Fizzies, as I've explained before, are pretty easy to make. They're as instant as instant gets without making a chocolate-flavored Capri Sun and take about thirty seconds to activate in hot water or milk.

I was instantly skeptical about both of these due to their resemblance of homemade, bathtub brewed hops. The darker of the two, the hot cocoa, was exactly what I'd feared it would be after dropping a fat-free, chocolate tablet into a mug of warm milk. All the fizz had risen to the top of the glass, like the foamy head of a Guinness without the drunken payoff. The flavor wasn't at all like hot chocolate. It was thin and bitter, with a flavor primarily tasting like an unsweetened square of baking chocolate. It felt chalky in my mouth and had a strange additional flavor from the fizziness that I couldn't put my finger on. The hot cider fared much better as a hot drink, but just barely. The absence of sugar gave it a dirt-like, sour tang.It had all the spices and sweet, earthy flavor of cider, but tasted more like teas that attempt to create an herbal replication of a delicious treat without any additional sugars. They come somewhat close, as close as herbs and spices can get, but inevitably miss due to their just not being as good as a sugar cookie, slice of red velvet cake, or in this case, mug of warm, apple cider.

I don't think these limited flavors hit the spot for me, but with a website that classifies cocktails for kids and adults underneath the heading of "fizzy fun," with drinks spelled in the same fashion as The Snake Hole, you can bet I'll be kicking back this summer with a CherCran Blozzom. I mean, holy cow, that Fizzie Pink Gummies drink looks like something straight out of a Thomas Keller interpretation on Lolita. Too bad their wintry inceptions weren't so tempting. For now, I'll satisfy my chilly urges by dreaming of a Lapsang souchong Pepsi Christmas.

YummyEarth Organic Chili Lime Lambada and Chili Mango Mambo Hot Chili Pops

I always consider it a serendipitous stroke of fate when I'm able to purchase something I love for an incredibly cheap price. I'm often able to do so at TJ Maxx, which, despite its selection of heinously unfortunate women's wear, has quite a few end-bin and discontinued varieties of organic food and candy. None of my visits have carried the bounty of last year's Sharkies attack, where I came across four boxes for $2 apiece, but I have picked up a few odds and ends on my visits. Cheap organic saffron for $7 for a gram, sauces and dips from Robert Rothschild, and tiny glass bottles of Voss have only been a few bucks spent to get me closer to my goal of ULTIMATE SUDDEN DEATH PRETENSION YUPPY ATTACK, and today's find was a perfect example of that.



YummyEarth's core philosophy is eliminating "yucky chemical colors and artificial flavors- for the kids." Well, call me Chad and stick me in a customized Ralph Lauren visor and pair of deck shoes. That reeks of an annoyingly self-righteous arrogance almost as much as a light misting of Lacoste Essential on your latest linen Brioni blazer. This flavor seemed unique enough to warrant a spot on the Foodette roster, featuring two hot lollipop flavors for any palate.

The first thing that struck us about these was how completely inappropriate for children these were. The packaging was brightly colored, as were the lollipops, but the flavor was quite spicy and neutrally sweet. The heat was hotter than Tabasco hot sauce, but not as hot as the ogling sesh Roger Mooking was giving Aaron Sanchez's wrapped burrito on last night's episode of Meat- er, Heat Seekers. ("My identity is wrapped inside that little taco." True quote.) Yowza, I felt like I was watching the Oxygen channel, but I digress. This is not a flavor a child would enjoy, but comes wrapped in a package and in a form that would attract and eventually traumatize a child. It's a breach of trust of the fundamental appeal of candy is for a kid. Again, just like Heat Seekers. I'm a pro at this. Not that I care, but it's like wrapping a small loaded handgun in a limited-edition strawberry scented Squinkles package and a $500 gift card to a candy store taped on top.

The Chili Lime Lambada (a traditional South American dance, obvs) was the better paired flavor of the two. I was expecting a slightly more rustic, rugged texture, but the consistency had a glassy smoothness with no pits or bubbles. The lime flavor was sweet, with a sterile flavor lacking in acidity. Very similar to the slightly overripe flavor of Rose's Lime Juice. It blended well with the chili, but was eventually overwhelmed by the sweet sting of the spices later on. Despite only having 22 calories, I lost interest after a few licks and wasn't compelled to consume the other 20 I'd left behind. Neither of us found that the Chili Mango Mambo was a very convincing incarnation of the fleshiness and floral, acidic tang of mango. This was also overwhelmed by the chili, but tasted alone, offered a sweet, creamy flavor that was tasty, but in no way resembling the fruit it intended to emulate. Mango is a very difficult flavor to pin down in a candy or drink without using the actual nectar, and even using that in the lollipop couldn't save it from the heat of the pepper. It was less spiked so much as it was slathered, and unfortunately turned us off both lollipops well before they were done.

Even the weird-assness of the flavors wasn't enough to convince me to eat more of these. Since I'd bought them at $1.50 for fifteen, I wasn't too upset, but if I'd paid full price for them, I may have been slightly peeved. These were just too average and mismatched to elicit any emotion from either of us, other than vague disappointment at the unusually strong heat of the chili peppers. It is also worth noting that YummyEarth tells us that these are "only in limited distribution in places like Miami, Los Angeles, South Texas, and Zingerman's Deli in Michigan." Places with primarily urban demographics, and a deli with customers who wish they lived in the romanticized ideal of an urban area. Nevertheless, these found their way to the frigid shopping plazas of Connecticut, created by yuppies, abandoned by real Mexican flavor aficionados and passed on to the yuppies. And the circle of life goes on.

Phillips Seafood Crab Pretzel

Swagger and I have officially hit the nation's capital for the Fancy Food Show in Washington DC, from tomorrow to Tuesday. We have all kinds of awesome features lined up, the first starting with the farewell to all things fast food for the next three days, that farewell coming in the horribly strange amalgamation of everyone's favorite snacks, the pretzel and the ummmmmmm, crab. Yeah. Nacho mama's cheese. There is cheese on this, though, spoiler alert.

Photo courtesy of dcwriterdawn- I couldn't grab a photo of the sign due to a pack of roving children. The rabies danger was high. But this was roughly the gist of it.

Phillips is a relatively well-known restaurant and frozen food mogul. Sometimes my mom buys their little crab cakes. Originally, we had stopped at a rest stop in Baltimore for some quintessential road trip Roy Roger's, but when I saw this, it was essential that I get it. It's described as a soft pretzel with pieces of lump crab meat embedded like jewels in its surface and in its wide belly, a trait that later becomes the visual equivalent of your belly's later bildungsroman, and drizzled with cream cheese and topped with cheddar cheese.

When I first hefted it up, it really didn't resemble a pretzel. It was more like a cheese biscuit on steroids, with a diameter of roughly the size of my little hand. After breaking it apart, I was immediately skeptical. This was clearly a snack that excelled as a pretzel, but failed as a crab-based treat. The pretzel part, comprised of roughly 80% of the overall composition, was soft and yeasty, with a natural moistness that benefited from, but did not need the addition of copious amounts of cheese. The crab meat was a bit of a misnomer, as it was combined with the cream cheese to form a bastardized crab dip that was dotted on top. And man, we're talking about edible pink Dalmatian spots. It was like crab for the elderly. There was no texture to speak of, but a nice, strong cream cheese flavor and a hint of crab. Hell, it could have been clumps of Old Bay for all I know. That makes up another 10%. The remaining 10% was the blanket, nay, Snuggie's worth of cheese melted on top. The kind of stuff that makes grilled cheeses blush. And frankly, it was unnecessary, despite being good, sharp cheese. It made the pretzel crispier, but super greasy. Sophie's choice, if you will. Or maybe Auntie Anne's. Either way, could have used a little spice to break up the monotony of the dairy orgy inside and on top.

Overall, this is not the best snack to get when there are plenty of other reliable options at a rest stop or a restaurant. Although my curious, grease-loaded mind can't help but wonder what a sandwich of two of these as buns and a crab cake in the middle would taste like. Probably like 2,000 calories of ass. At $8.54 for this half-baseball sized greaseball, the premium price a result of the extra teaspoon of crab, I was surprised I finished half of it before losing interest and passing it off to Swagger.

The Modern Cocktail Modern Margarita Mixers

I'm a broke, pretentious college student, so I really don't have the capital to whisk myself away to exotic locales. The best I can do is find a high resolution stock image of a beach and palm trees, purchase the rights to use said image, go to Staples, have them print out a weather resistant, 7 by 12 foot banner of that image for the low, low price of $200 and plaster it on my wall, throw out my entire wardrobe and replace it with madras shorts and summery clothes and oversized floppy sun hats by Eileen Fisher and pose in front of it like I'm having a great time. I might even hire one or two tanned models to pose with me, alone in my house, in front of a gigantic wall print tacked on my wall as I manically grin in clothing entirely inappropriate for a New England summer.
Alternatively, I could just purchase these "modern" margarita mixers by The Modern Cocktail. They'd give me the ball-breaking satisfaction of feeling like I paid $15 for a cocktail with all of the mediocre flavor and disappointingly low level of alcohol and the bright, tropical neon colors that would provide a potable Bat signal to natives of whatever island I'm inhabiting- "Scam me! I'm a giant tourist with money!" Now that I can do this in my home, I'm away from all those fears. At $7.99 a pack, you get your choice of five different cocktails. You, however, must provide the alcohol and ice. The pack also comes with the ever-hilarious "rimming crystals," which sounds like it might be a fetish involving cat litter as well as body parts that are able to be rimmed much like a margarita glass. The rimming crystals look like tasty powdered sugar but are in fact, salt, and are overwhelming within the composition of the beverage.
However depressing it is that I'm doing this by myself, I can only imagine the sheer level of despair should this product hit a couple whose marriage is on the rocks (HA HAAAAA). Each flavor will make you feel as though the maker of this beverage wants to personally hunt you down and kill your family, or at least try to sell them store-brand soda syrup. The process of making these is fun but also lulls you into a false sense of complacency. You're making drinks! You're wild and spontaneous! Your marriage will be okay and your teenage son will stop killing the neighbor's pets!
And then you take a sip of the classic margarita, the exotic blood orange or mango margarita, or the ever-friendly watermelon or strawberry margarita, and you realize that all of these flavors are terrible and your wife is cheating on you with the disturbingly homosexual-looking man next door named Rafaelo, who regales you with tales of Bermuda in his days of youth, picking fresh pineapples and using them to make margaritas, or whatever the hell actually goes in margaritas, as you frantically sweat and blink and nervously thrust these food coloring ridden bastardizations on him as though you are bringing a gift from civilization and technology. He delicately disposes of them at night and makes sweet, sweet love to your wife.
Rafaelo aside, these are not worth your $8, which in fact, may be better off allocated to that $15 cocktail. At least the bartenders know what they're doing. Unless you're poorer than I and even more pretentious and somehow equate faux mixology and the lingering taste of Tums and cough syrup in your mouth with wealth, polo, and the elite class, these will not satisfy the collegiate cocktail connoisseurs of the country. Cunt. Cabbage. Can't commence creating cocktails. Crap.

IHOP At Home Strawberry and Cream Cheese French Toast Stuffed Pastries, Griddle 'n' Sausage Wraps, and Sausage and Cheese Omelet Crisper

I can't say that IHOP and I are very well acquainted. It might be because all the IHOP locations near me are in crappy areas of town, or out of state, or shadowed by better restaurants. The only one within a 20 mile radius of me is next to Connecticut's first and only Sonic, and when push comes to shove, I'm happier eating burgers in my car than I am eating pancakes next to high school stoners. Oh wait, the stoners flock to Denny's. Disregard that.
Because of my IHOP jeunesse, I look at my experience with the new IHOP At Home line as an anthropological study, as I have never viewed the majestic Cinn-A-Stick Pancakes in their natural, greasy habitat, nor had I watched the brilliant mating rituals of the compote and whipped topping upon a pancake horizon to create the Rooty Tooty Fresh 'n' Fruity. But I knew what to look for. One winter, long ago, Dillinger and I journeyed to an IHOP and feasted upon its bounties.
Needless to say, if eating at IHOP can be considered a journey into Bruce Chatwin-esque territories, eating IHOP At Home is like going to a pet store and playing with abandoned, slightly defective puppy mill dogs. The IHOP At Home line, which I'll abbreviate as IHOPAH, consists of three varieties of frozen breakfast-inspired items, all of them coated or fried before cooking. I took a little trip to my local Walmart Supercenter and checked them out. All of the products were cooked in what seemed like the hellfires of New Jerse- er, hell itself, in a 450 degree oven. Before cooking, they resembled edible, bulbous building blocks.
Starting with the Strawberry Cream Cheese French Toast Stuffed Pastries. The SCCFTSP look pretty when you open the package and when they're cooking, are fragrant, like fresh beignets. They consist of a slightly sweet, crispy dough that, when bitten into, yields a sauce that looks like the end result of a Strawberry Shortcake gang-related stab wound.
The sauce, which appears to be the bulk of the pastry in the photo, only occupies a scant third of the midsection. It congeals after cooling and has a mild, sweet taste when isolated from the pastry- very creamy and fruity, but when eaten together, is really buried in the fried dough flavors.The next generation in the noble line of the IHOPAH dynasty is the Griddle 'n' Sausage, the McGriddle-inspired maple, sausage, and pancake combination in yet another form thrown together in more ways than Taco Bell products. Well, don't get your hopes up, breakfast-craving late-night McDonald's goers. It's just another classic textbook example of "frequently imitated, never duplicated." The Griddle 'n' Sausage smelled like syrup when I opened the package, smelled like syrup when it was cooking, smelled like syrup when I lifted it to my mouth to take a bite, and tasted like grease and meat. What gives? I felt as though this phallic phinger phood was trying to woo me by wearing syrup-scented perfume, much as I tried to woo Keepitcoming by dousing myself in a caustic dose of BK Flame, both equaling in massive failure. Though these were juicy and salty, they gave me a headache and just tasted like fried sausages rather than pancake-wrapped ones.The last of this divine trio was the one I was most curious to try, the Sausage and Cheese Omelet Crisper. Billed as the love child between a McDonald's hash brown and a microwaved omelet, it actually tasted pretty close to its roots. The result is a somewhat bloated rectangle of egg and potato, which took the longest to cook with twenty minutes in the oven, and smelled burnt and greasy when it came out. After letting it sit for a few minutes, I found that it had crisped up and yielded a fluffy, soft interior. Okay, it was more like mushy. The exterior was the crispiest and least greasy of all three, probably because it was the only one that lacked a dough or batter around it.
With the Omelet Crisper, the crust comes from a potato-based coating which crisps up like the outside of a hash brown in the oven. The mouthfeel wasn't quite exactly like a hash brown. It was definitely more dense and floury. It's essentially a giant stuffed tater tot, which makes it delicious. Though I think that the flavor could use more sausage chunks and spices, the overall texture and sensation was definitely that of a crispy omelet. The cheese was gooey and creamy inside and the eggs were more like McDonald's egg squares, but two out of three ain't bad. This was the best of all three, which is like saying that Big Bird was the least gay of all the Sesame Street characters. Nobody wins.
That being said, none of these made me feel very good. I forgot the third and last reason for why I don't go to IHOP very often- it makes me feel bloated and gives me a headache. I have a free monthly biological reaction for those symptoms that I don't need a $10 frozen breakfast gamut of products for. I threw the bulk of these away and went for a walk. If you're not a giant lardass, they're not for you.

Edy's Slow Churned Rich and Creamy Shakes Cookies 'n' Cream

This was a flavor I had tasted before.

This was a taste I knew very well.
The unmistakable smack of disappointment across my lips! The Edy's Slow Churned Shake not only provided a barely passing bastardization of its iconic idol, its instructions for preparation violeted the fundamental core of maintenance this very beverage is based upon. Edy's. It's called a milkshake. Not a milkweaklystirandgiveup. I ate it with my breakfast of minute champions. A small shake and small sliders.
The Edy's line of shakes and smoothies is certainly easier than digging around in the blender, mixing a quantity of shake no human should consume, drinking said quantity, and vomiting later, but it's also very easy for me to plop a scoop of ice cream in a glass along with some milk and halfheartedly mix it. Or melt ice cream and attempt to slurp that out of the glass. Easy. Not satisfying. Edy's attempts to equate the two, resulting in a rather sad beverage.I chose the Cookies 'n' Cream flavor as an impulse buy along with my weekly stash of sliders, curious as to how it translated into a shake and entranced by the minimal packaging- a feature that would later prove to be not ingenious, but simply lazy. The ice cream alone looked like it could be easily repackaged with a packet of instant fudge in a pinch and labeled as a sundae on the go. The preparation called for a third of a cup of milk, the entirety of which slopped and poured over the edges. This amount was also the bare minimum I got away with using without having to dirty another glass. I was determined to see how far I could get on the flimsy receptacle alone. As it turned out, not far at all.
The end result was like trying to drink soft serve. Thick, slow, and bland. The cookie pieces dissolved to nothing and the flavor was cold and flat. The resulting FDA-approved edible Dirty Sanchez moustache I received was the most indignity I've suffered on behalf of a product, and this is coming from the writer who has willingly eaten buffalo chicken salad. I rest my case with this photographic evidence- this is not a product for consumption, much less child consumptions.Also, no less than thirty mommy blogs are seething in rage at my audacity and hatred of the Beloved Mother Grocery Product. Bless Her Eternal Cold Reign! Spoiler alert: They reduce the average milkshake-capable human being into an adult-sized toddler incapable of operating a button-based electronic. SARRRRRY.

California Pizza Kitchen Pizza and Appetizer: Sicilian Pizza and Flatbread with Spinach Artichoke Dip

Keepitcoming is sick, and while purchasing her industrial sized bottles of Aspirin and Vitamin Water at the grocery store, I spied this frozen delight and figured I'd take her on a date just as average as the one I took her on last week when we went to see Water for Elephants and I burnt her house down, neither one worse than the other.

California Pizza Kitchen is quickly turning into the Cheesecake Factory of pizza-based restaurants, if that makes little to no sense at all. Whatever. It made more sense than the entirety of Infinite Jest, which says a lot. With a menu of over 100 items, including appetizers and small bites, the difference between which I cannot determine, and a gazillion pizzas, the total number of which amounts to more teeth than in Robert Pattinson's mouth, you'd think they'd step out of the box for their frozen counterpart, the perpetual ugly stepsister to the restaurant glory, and create a new, different package deal, perhaps avocado club egg rolls with dipping sauce accompanied by a roasted artichoke and spinach pizza, or sesame ginger chicken dumplings with a four seasons pizza, but no, they chose Sicilian pizza and spinach and artichoke dip with flatbread. Yawn. Wake me up when the guy who makes this at home to save time getting laid instead of taking his date out asks her to go halfsies on the cost from the grocery store.

Anyway, at least the food looked decent, looked being the operative term here. Despite my initial disappointment with the selection- CPK's guacamole is one of the best I've ever had, I persevered and started cooking. The cooking process was more complicated than a LEGO instruction book, forcing me to keep the box out and take up half of my cooking space. While cooking this, I noticed that almost everything required either lifting or tearing molten hot foodstuffs with the aid of my bare hands, a fate I neither requested nor deserved.

From a menu-based point of view, the pairings here are kind of strange. For starters, the spinach and artichoke with flatbread combo isn't actually on the menu- the flatbread comes with hummus dip and the artichoke dip comes with chips, but frozen chips would have been pretty gross. Point justified. And the Sicilian pizza doesn't seem to exist, its closest relative on the food chain in the form of the Meat Craver's, the former being a pared down version with less meat. The flatbread was popped in the oven along with the pizza and came out cooked to perfection. The pizza looked really good, littered with spices and herbs and powders and sprinkled with a pretty decent meat topping with visible bacon chunks, large slices of salami, and sausage.

And yet, it had no flavor. The pizza, which was lukewarm by the time it and the accoutrements were whisked to the table, was thick and bland, not unlike a pompous ex of mine. The only indication of meat on the pizza was a slight anise flavor from the sausage, and when the sausage had to share space with the weaksauce-inspired ham and salami, there was little room for it to shine. Neither of us felt inclined to eat more than a slice, and even then, it was like pulling teeth. Robert Pattinson's unicorn teeth. I zoned my sorrows into the flatbread, which was oddly enough, more soft and toothsome than the pizza crust. There was a lot of spinach artichoke dip, and although it was somewhat pureed together into a kid-friendly or Midwesterner-friendly sauce, it was tasty and garlicky and allowed me to occupy my mouth outside of criticizing the pizza.

If going to CPK and taking your date to dinner gets you laid at the end of the night, this boxed set is like falling asleep in front of your computer with your dick in your hand and waking up to photos of your semi-hot second cousin's pool party on Facebook. Come on, man, she's 13. I'd have been happier if this came with a few double vodka Caribbean Sunset Sangria so I could drink and forget about this depressing pizza. Alcoholism has surprisingly practical benefits, kids!