Diet Mountain Dew UltraViolet

While listening to the radio, I heard a commercial for Diet Violet Mountain Dew. I was mildly interested, since it's rare for Mountain Dew to release a flavored diet soda. When I got to work the next day, a friend told me it was available in the snack stand, and I had to sample it.

When I poured the soda, the bubbles at the top (do you call it "head" when it's soda?) were blue, as you can see in the following picture. The drink itself was a pale violet color, much like the various non-diet violet Mountain Dews of the past.


There was a generic berry smell to the soda, but it smelled stronger than it tasted. The first notes were a bit medicinal, giving way to a fuller, but nondescript, berry finish. Unfortunately, I was painfully aware of the artificial sweetener throughout drinking, even more so than with regular diet Dew.

I have to give Mountain Dew an A for effort for putting out a new diet soda flavor, but I don't think I'll choose it again. There are other diet sodas I like much better (Sunkist Diet Sparkling Lemonade, for example).

B-

Mountain Dew website

Raw Food Dinners and Potlucks

Thanks to a couple of friends that are into eating raw, I had the pleasure of being invited to tag along with them to a raw dinner in Newark, DE, catered by Kim Lemberg and Pat Umbel. Kim is a Certified Holistic Health Counselor. Pat is a Certified Natural Health and Holistic Nutrition Counselor. Both Kim and Pam are Certified Raw Food Instructors through the Alissa Cohen program, and together these two ladies host catered raw food dinners, and also host raw food potlucks.

For the extremely reasonable price of $20, I was treated to a truly delicious raw dinner that included a mango smoothie, chili, enchiladas, crackers with salsa, and key lime pie. If you're curious about raw food, these dinners are a great place to discover just how good raw food can be. And that would be seriously good!Kim and Pat are hoping to have one raw food catered dinner in the Newark, DE, area once a month, and one raw food catered dinner in the Gap, PA, area once a month. Here is the schedule so far:

August 27 - catered raw food dinner at the Kinzer Fire Hall in Kinzers, PA
September 11 - catered raw food dinner at the Newark Co-op Limestone Presbyterian Church in Newark Wilmington, DE

Pat holds a raw food potluck the third Monday of each month at the Kinzer Fire Hall in Kinzers, PA. Kim's first raw food potluck will be September 15 18 at the Newark Co-op.

To attend any of these events all you have to do is RSVP by email to Pat (paumble@yaoo.com). And be sure to get on their email list for monthly notices of events, or check Kim's events page (presently not up to date) and Pat's events page.

PattyBakesCookies

I got in another package a few days ago from Patty, a baker from Brooklyn. Patty has been baking for a long time, ever since she was a little girl, but started up her business as part of a dream she and her husband had, and in the wake of his death, worked and worked and now sells her cookies to all!

Patty sent me a selection of her three top cookies- peanut butter, double chip, which is a chocolate chip and potato chip cookie, and cowboy cookie, with chocolate chips, raisins, oatmeal, and coconut.

The cookies were fresh from a recent Irish festival she'd participated in, and were tied with a pretty green bow on top. Each pack of cookies held two, and they're of a good size, so it was more than enough for me!

I tried the double chip cookie first. It was a little crunchier than I would have liked, but was good. This was an interesting experience for me. I've never tried a cookie with potato chips before, and it was a nice and salty, if slightly bland, flavor. The texture of the potato chips was interesting, too. Again, definitely something I'd try again.

6/10- GOOD

The next cookie was a peanut butter cookie. Now, I love a good peanut butter cookie, and the addition of granulated sugar just makes it even better. The cookie was crumbly, and quite tasty. I generally prefer a more complex and differentiated peanut butter cookie, but this was a good and simple recipe. Reminisces of molasses and a sweet, burnt nut flavor were present. A good cookie.

6/10- TASTY

The last cookie I was sent was the famous Cowboy cookie, with coconut, oatmeal, chocolate, and raisins. I don't like raisins in cookies or anywhere, quite frankly, but there weren't enough raisins in these cookies to bother me, per se. The bottom of the cookie was nice and crisp, and the coconut had toasted a little and added some moisture to the cookie's overall texture.

The chocolate chips and oatmeal also added a unique texture to the cookie, creating a rather interesting creamy flavor and mouthfeel. I liked this cookie, but felt that it could have been a little softer. That being said, though, the ingredients were all top notch.

8/10- MMMM!

Patty Bakes Cookies
pattybakescookies.etsy.com

Red Baron Premium Deep Dish Pepperoni Singles

I've been eating out of the freezer lately, going through the deep recesses of my ice box to grab whatever strikes my fancy as edible. I realize that most freezer foods aren't haute cuisine, but shit, it's summer, and damned if I have any effort or motivation to cook something.

Yesterday, while with The Brownie Whisperer, we decided to heat up two Red Baron mini pizzas. These pizzas are roughly the size of a small frisbee, a bedside table clock, or one of Flava Flav's necklace watches. About five inches in diameter, these are pretty large for miniature pizzas. They are about 3/4 of an inch thick, with a nice, crispy crust on the outside.

I strongly recommend making these in the oven. When they come out, the crust is crispy, with a slight oiliness on the bottom, and an almost buttery flavor. The depth is perfectly proportioned- not too crispy, but not deep enough so that the fillings make the pie soggy.

The cheese covers each pizza perfectly, and there's enough pepperoni on the pie so one gets a good chunk in each bite. The sauce is typical frozen pizza sauce- too sugary, reminiscent of a watery spaghetti sauce mixed with kool-aid or something. But that's the norm. I've never had a frozen pizza where the sauce has been decent.

All in all, not a bad snack. I'd easily eat two of these in one sitting.

8/10- GREAT

Bagels, bagels, bagels!

Got four flavors of gourmet bagels yesterday, in the mail.

The flavors delighted me. I was all too pleased to try them. Being Jewish, I've discovered many a bagel in my life. They were a traditional staple of our household in Sunday mornings, and made all sorts of good recipes. Many was the day where I'd come home to look in the freezer, only to find that paper bag stuffed full of bagels.

These four flavors of bagels were no less than the ones we had, some slightly less kosher, though. My sampler pack, from Eleanor, also known as eeka13 on etsy, had a vegan apple cinnamon, a garlic, onion, and the crown glory, a bacon cinnamon bagel.

The bagels came wrapped neatly in wax paper, which I highly appreciated because there's nothing worse than biting into something and finding that whatever it's been mixed with in the packaging has contaminated its flavor. Each was labeled so I could easily seek the bagel I so desired.

The first bagel I tried was the vegan apple and cinnamon. To be quite honest, I wasn't as excited about this bagel than the others, for good reason. I mean, someone managed to put bacon in a bagel. But I popped it in the oven and got on with it.

The funny thing is, it was much better than I had originally assumed! There was an apple glaze on top, and the bagel was delightfully infused with lots of cinnamon flavor. If this was vegan, I wouldn't have guessed. The cell wall definition was great, many tiny bubbles infused in it, with only the smallest of yeast-like tastes to it. Overall, this was a really great bagel for vegans and non-vegans.

7/10- DELICIOUS

The next bagel I tried was the onion bagel, with pieces of purple onion on top. It was attractive, all the bagels were. They are chubby for miniature bagels and have a pretty wash on top to make them shiny.

The onion bagel smelled like onion, but when sliced, the taste had not much onion at all. The top half had it, but not so much the bottom, and I think that was only because the top had the pieces of onion on it to begin with. It wasn't as bubbly with the cell wall, and had a crumblier texture than the others. I wasn't too impressed.

4/10- ALL RIGHT

The garlic bagel was another one that I didn't expect to be as good as the others, but one that completely blew me away. Slicing into it, it had a mild scent of garlic, with a nice texture and softness to the inner bread. When I toasted and ate it with butter, it was like eating garlic bread from a restaurant. It toasted perfectly, with an outer shell for a good, crunchy crust, and a delicious inner fluffiness that was almost infused with garlic flavor.

This bagel was also great with cream cheese.

9/10- AMAZING
The last bagel was the cinnamon and bacon bagel. This was a monstrous bagel, even for a miniature. If this bagel was a horse, it would be a slightly obese Shetland pony. Anyhow, the taste. Unfortunately, this bagel was a little more crumbly than the garlic, the standard by which all bagels are now judged, but toasted up nicely.

Topped with a little bit of butter, this was not a bad bagel at all. I just wasn't as impressed with the flavor as with the garlic. There wasn't as much cinnamon as in the vegan bagel, and the pieces of bacon were present, but not as flavorful. I really wished that this had more flavor to it.

6/10- GOOD

eeka13.etsy.com
AWESOME BAGELS.

Donut Muffins

For a person that rarely eats donuts (it's most certainly for health reasons and not taste reasons), it seems that I have recently come into the donut phase of my life.

A couple of nights ago, I gorged on an array of fabulous vegan mini-donuts from the North Port Fishington Cookie Factory at a potluck (all of their vegan desserts are irresistible!). And just a week before, I made a trip to Reading Terminal Market expressly to chomp on glazed donuts fried up at the Pennsylvania Dutch Festival (glazed won favorite).

But even before that, I made donut muffins, a recipe that's been sitting in my bookmark folder for who knows how long. I blame these simple, and simply delicious, cakey donut muffins for my current donut cravings.

Baked and not fried, you could tell yourself that donut muffins are healthier than regular donuts, but lets not kid ourselves. As I was coating the mini donut muffins with butter to facilitate the sticking of the sugar coating, I was thinking, "Well, this negates any health benefits of baked donuts." But on my second batch (yeah, they're that good), I discovered that you really didn't need butter to make sugar stick to the muffin, especially if you use powdered sugar instead of superfine sugar.

Know what else I discovered? If you're bringing these babies to a gathering, don't sugar coat the muffins until right before. After a half day or so, the sugar (especially the superfine sugar) absorbs moisture from the muffin and crusts up.

This recipe is a keeper. Next time maybe I'll try a cinnamon sugar coating, or dropping frozen blueberries in the batter.
Donut Muffins
adapted from Baking Bites
makes 10 regular muffins

3/4 cup sugar
1 egg
1/4 cup vegetable oil
3/4 cup milk (made one batch with rice milk to good results)
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 1/2 cups flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg

Coating
2 tablespoons butter, melted (optional)
1/2 cup superfine sugar (can pulse regular sugar in food processor to make), or powdered sugar

• Lightly grease a muffin tin with vegetable oil or spray.
  
• In a large bowl, beat together sugar and egg until light in color. Add vegetable oil, milk, and vanilla to sugar mixute and combine.
• In a seperate bowl, combine flour, baking powder, salt, and nutmeg. Then pour into liquid mixture and stir to combine.
• Fill muffin cups 3/4 full, and bake in a 350 degree preheated oven for 18-20 minutes, or until a tester inserted in the middle comes out clean.
  

Bourbon Matcha Mont Blanc

On the last day of our time in Japan last month, my husband and I went to a nearby grocery store in Kyoto to get some cheap things to fill the empty space in our suitcases. That was the only place I saw large packages of single serving cakes, so I decided to try these.

Mont Blanc is a famous and fairly popular dessert in Japan. It is very pretty, and though typically made with chestnuts, sometimes there are other flavors included, like in these matcha cakes. Of course, being a packaged product, I didn't expect these to be as good as the real thing.


Although the box claimed that these had the aroma of matcha, all I could smell was something odd (probably preservatives). Moving past the smell, the taste wasn't really matcha, either. Or at least it wasn't as strong as I would have liked. It might have been masked by the chestnut flavor.

To call the spongecake mild would be kind, as there wasn't much flavor to speak of, and the cream in the middle was not terribly noticeable. Even the chocolate on the top didn't really taste like matcha, just sweet white chocolate. The azuki beans throughout the layers did add a nice texture, and surprisingly, carried their own flavor well.

I might like this more with some actual matcha brewed tea, as I think the bitterness would bring out the flavors in the cake, but on it's own, this cake just wasn't flavorful at all. It wasn't a bad taste, but it was very disappointing. I would like to point out that Bourbon can make good prepackaged cakes. I took some vanilla and chocolate cakes into work, and they were much better.

C-

Bourbon website