Some pictures on Flickr (with images of the finished product).
More thoughts on this at KmikeyM.]]>
Good Day Sweet Awesomes!
Freshly churned homemade ice cream, just like i wish my grandpa used to make.
So we heard about this new Pepsi flavor coming out in Japan called Cucumber Pepsi. It's the sort of drink they will never release in these fine United States, so when Jona went on tour in Japan (1, 2) we decided to check it out and had him smuggle some back to us.
We decided that Steve Schroeder, being the most knowledgeable person about sodas that we know, was the right person to test it out. We set up the following blind taste test:
The results were, "Not crisp enough." and "Too sweet." After removing the blindfold, "The color is good."
So there you have it! Cucumber Pepsi lacks enough crispness to truly be a refreshing cuke-inspired drink and follows the Pepsi formula of being way too sweet.
]]>With three new concoctions and six other theme dishes, BBQ month gives almost too many options! It was the first time I was very full after only one trip.
(Rankings - The ranking system follows the five-star Netflix formula. 1 - Hated It, 2 - Didn't Like It, 3 - Like It, 4 - Really Liked It, 5 - Loved It. One difference is that we will be using small lemons instead of stars.)
This is the dish I was most excited about. The idea that you could turn a Chili Cheeseburger into a liquid is very awesome! But, it was disappointing. It tasted cheesy, and I got a little of the chili (bit not really), but there was no way it tasted anything like a burger. Too much cheese, and there was a lingering hint of school lunch (maybe powdered cheese?).
This salad was really good. Nothing too crazy going on, just a good salad. The BBQ aspect seemed to be limited to the addition of bacon, but I'm a sucker for bacon.
Bread covered in BBQ sauce! This was great. The chicken was totally secondary to the thick application of BBQ. It was like eating ribs. Fantastic!
These were okay. When you label a food 'smokey' there is a minimum level of flavor smokey flavor you need to add that is above what these beans had. This was more of a "hint" than anything else.
Fine as potato salad, but again, not enough BBQ flavor! What are you afraid of Sweet Tomatoes!?
When food is labeled "Old-Fashioned" I think that is code for "boring". However, I really like a macaroni salad.
Solid and good and a nice way to eat a lot of carrot. They didn't call it BBQ or smokey, so I was able to enjoy a simple salad with reasonable expectations and it paid off.
We've all had this, and it's good. It was actually "fresher" than I expected.
This should have been terrible, or at the very least, ignorable. However, it tasted so much like a watermelon Jolly Rancher and it was maybe the best gelatin I've ever had.
The 'Fresh Watermelon' is listed on table menu, but has no sign at the dessert bar. Likewise, the watermelon gelatin is listed at the desert bar, but there is no mention of it on the table menu. Odd. Also, Steve got some wonderful Apple Crisp, and I can't imagine why that isn't listed as an essential part of an All-American BBQ.
Serves 4-5
1 crispy French baguette
1 avocado
4 Tbs. chipotle grain mustard
4 Tbs. butter
12 oz. morbier cheese (room temp.)
1 tsp. sea salt
1 tsp. fresh black pepper
1. Slice baguette down the side, enough to open wide but still keeping it in one piece. Slather one side with butter and the other with avocado.
2. Cut open avocado, pit it, half it and slice into about 12 pieces. Distribute evenly on bottom side of baguette.
3. Using a huge ass knife, remove exterior rind of the morbier. Don’t worry the funky middle layer of ash has little to no flavor. Its there to keep an inner rind from forming between the two layers of cheese. Place small slices along bread. Sprinkle with a mix of sea salt and black pepper. Devour.
Beverage: Lagunitas farmhouse Saison
Soundtrack: Pavement’s Brighten the Corners]]>
Doritos X-13D Flavor Experiment is an impressive effort and a fun chip-tasting exercise. Much like Kettle's test-flavor packs, Doritos has created a new flavor of chip, but rather than let 'the people' choose which flavor to keep, Doritos has released one mystery flavor, and you have to decide what to name it. Of course, in choosing to name it, you also need to figure out what it is.
While it is clearly a marketing gimmick, and I don't like the stilted ways they have crafted to "interact with the brand" I can't help but be excited about a new chip flavor. Especially one wrapped up in blind taste-testing packaging. It's like they decided to make a chip just for me!
I can only hope this is the beginning of a new more creative push for Doritos. While they have been no doubt inspired by Kettle Chips, I would imagine that with Doritos getting into the "crazy new limited flavors" game there will be many, many followers and some truly amazing, weird, delicious, and probably wonderfully terrible new chip flavors coming soon. But back to the task at hand...
The first thing you notice is the Darth Vader inspired packaging. X-13D is clearly a dark experiment by some mad scientist. The X-13D is very front and center, and it doesn't help that this mysterious flavor showed up when my own Lost-mania was at its peak. Clearly there are hints to its true flavor.
The most obvious clue to the flavor is what is printed as Tasting Notes: "All-American Classic".
I'm sure just from that one clue many people have an idea of where we are headed. Turning the bag over and looking at the ingredients, while revealing, is also a very scary idea. These chips are not vegan, hell, these chips aren't even vegetarian!
The initial taste is dill, which I love in a chip! As that fades there is that familiar powdered cheese flavor, and then a rise of smokey something that is quickly killed by a very specific mustard taste. I found that it evoked an immediate sense of a guilty-pleasure. I like this chip!
The front of the package leads us to SnackStrongProductions.com, with the tagline "Take snacking to the next level" and a terrible flash-based interface that looks like a cross between an amusement park and the climatic final scene of a Bruce Willis action film. The waving lights guide us to X-13D which takes us to a new website, x13d.doritos.com where we can complete some very easy "puzzles" to get clues on what the flavor is. Here are the results I got:
Clearly the new flavor is a cheeseburger. Pickle (dill), cheese, the smokey meat flavor and actual beef ingredients, and mustard. I think it goes beyond just 'a' burger however. I think it is 'the' burger. My belief is that this is a McDonald's cheeseburger.
What is the 13th letter of the alphabet? M. Experiment MD. Experiment McDonald's.
Our trip to Belmont Station reinvigorated our conception of Portland as Mecca. It is a quaint shop, filled to the proverbial brim with exceptional beers both known and new. What’s more, we arrived at the beginning of a seven course beer tasting and lecture by the head importer for Shelton Brothers, a specialty distributor of very special beers. At first our throbbing heads kept us anchored to pub stools, drooling over lambics and golden ales brewed at night by dudes with day jobs. After seven rounds of the rare and expensive at no charge, and some cold air from an older beer hack, we shook ourselves out of the hangover and mustered the guts to shop.
The selection at Belmont is outstanding. It took us a good twenty minutes to take in the three walls of reachin fridges and even longer to decide what the hell we were going to cram into our suitcases. The inventory was completely refrigerated, save a few aisles of six-pack overflow in the center of the store. Each reachin was organized according to country of origin: 2 domestic-micro, 2 Belgian, 1 German, 1 Bavarian, 1 English and one more (which housed the seemingly inconsequential). We heard whispering at the bar that most of the regular stock was kept in a low light basement lock up, to protect the integrity of the brews. Shit, these people advertise using special UV filtered lights in the show room to deter early oxidation.
Two sentences ago, we noted something that heretofore had been unknown and impossible for our squeaky little brains to conceive: the über beer store has a bar attached. Not only can you waltz into this place and find the best beers available in our giant unappreciative-of-anything-more-than-piss-colored-fizz country, but you can drink them…in…the…store. Every one of 700 beers advertised has a listed sales price for both takeout and sit-down. So, you’d rather not commit to a draft pint of Stone’s Imperial Russian Stout on that has been aging in quiet darkness under the watchful eye of the Belmont crew for a full year? How about a 750 of De Ranke’s XX bitter? Or a 12oz of dry hopped St. Rouge’s Red, or a goddamn Dogfish Head 120 Minute IPA (20% alc. by volume)? Whatever you want: pull it from the fridge and sidle up to the bar. Proper glassware will be provided by the barkeep.
This store should be your new destination for party fuel, your shopping center for liquid accompaniments to great food, and your pre-dusk haunt for after work unwinding. The closest thing to a flaw that we found at Belmont was empty spaces where wonderful beers (Pizza Port, Great Divide, Lagunitas etc.) would have been. Lack of such solid stock in a place like this can mean only one thing: that beer freaks abound in Portland and they know where to go for drink.
Go to Belmont Station, grab a cold Hair of the Dog, think of us.
Staff: Notably siked enthusiasts who look and feel dearly familiar.
Refrigeration: Nearly everything, except the over-stock shelves, and the seceret underworld, ostensibly cooled by moist North Western soil.
Split Six Packs: Absolutley.
Belgians: Strong focus on micro-belgians like De Ranke.
Micro-Brews: Fantastic selection, all major states and breweries accounted for.
Special Powers: Did we mention the bar?
Achillies Heel: We live in L.A. (you do not).
Location: Here.
]]>
On July 5th, 2006 I wrote about an epic conflict between Lemon and Pineapple. On that day it was clear that Lemon was the winner. But much can happen in the span of nine months, and so today the Lemon will face it itself...
It's Lemon Month again, and now the New Lemon Month must face off against the Original Lemon Month. Will the lack of surprising new flavors make Lemon Month dull? Or have the sands of time ground down my taste buds enough to experience Lemon Month again for the first time? Can they replicate their own winning formula, or even, as crazy as it may seem, improve upon it? Let's take a look:
(Rankings - The ranking system follows the five-star Netflix formula. 1 - Hated It, 2 - Didn't Like It, 3 - Like It, 4 - Really Liked It, 5 - Loved It. One difference is that we will be using small lemons instead of stars.)
Originally this dish rated a four. This time I didn't enjoy it quite as much. Perhaps it was expectations? It tasted fine, but it felt like I was eating at someone else's house. You know that feeling? Where it's the same dish but their Mom makes it different and it tastes a little funny?
Original Rating: 
Updated Rating: 
The only food to ever get five lemons at a Sweet Tomatoes, and the dish that secured Lemon's destruction of Pineapple, I was excited to try it again. Even with the high expectations the cool, refreshing, and Zesty flavor won me over again.
Original Rating: 
Updated Rating:
I have to say, this vat of soup looked disgusting. It was too full, and I think perhaps it had been sitting a while? The rice got all stuck together in the creamy sauce, making for odd lumps. It tasted fine, but the appearance made me wary the whole time I was eating.
Original Rating:
Updated Rating:
They need to rename this and add the word "pasta" in there somewhere. While this is still the best pasta at Sweet Tomatoes, that's like being the least corrupt Republican.
Original Rating:
Updated Rating:
I am not a lover of the muffin. I like them, but I don't love them. Perhaps this is why the Tangy Lemon Muffin (or TLM) only scored a three originally, or perhaps they have improved the recipe for the TLM, because this time around, I really liked it. It was moist like a cake, but not too sweet, and tasted really tangy.
Original Rating:
Updated Rating:
Sweets are not my cup of tea, so I tend to not rate cake and candies as high as something smothered in BBQ sauce. The original HLLC rated three lemons, and I'm very tempted to let that same rating apply here except that I really enjoyed the HLLC this time around. The problem is, it has little to do with the HLLC, and more to do with next item on the list, The Lemon Cream Mousse, or as I call it, Lemon Foam.
Original Rating:
Updated Rating:
Lemon Foam. It's new. It's weird. It's not really that tasty. I mean, it's sugar-free because it's made with Splenda, and is billed as being only 40 calories per serving. It really lacks a distinct flavor, just giving a hint of lemon aftertaste. But the texture is amazing. It's like whipped sticky butter and if it wasn't for the texture and spreading it over the TLM and HLLC I might not have liked it at all.
Original Rating: n/a
Updated Rating:
C'mon. Jello? Ugh.
Original Rating: 
Updated Rating:
Why did this only get two lemons? It's pretty good!
Original Rating: 
Updated Rating:
Clearly the food scientists at Sweet Tomatoes have been spending a lot of time in the lab. Lemon foam? This gets me excited about the other flavor months, such as strawberry foam and pineapple foam! I really expected to like the food less this time around, but most of the foods I rated I higher the second time around. Certainly there is some randomness to this battle, as the food is better when it's fresh, and there is no way to determine how long the food has been sitting (for the LCO and the LCC I suspect quite a while), but you can't argue with the numbers, the new Lemon Month is the winner!
]]>
Following the advice of local vegan warriors Food Fight, we spent today's lunchtime scopin' out the latest addition to Portland's veg-friendly mobile cart restaurant scene, Veggielicious. When I say "latest addition," I mean it: this spot just opened its shutters this Monday.
V-licious serves up the kind of sandwiches that vegans all over town probably already make at home: you know, maybe some cool wheat bread, veganaise, the good Trader Joe's sprouts, veggie cheese slices, a healthy slab of grilled tofu and the lettuce-tomato standards. It works, though, because it's food you already know you like -- and it's somehow more pleasant to eat it when it's handed to you in a nostalgic plastic burger basket by a really nice tattooed guy.
Some menu items are a little fancier: The "Big Mock" is a tasty veggie burger, and the "Egg" Salad Sandwich is a fluffy, cruelty-free pleasure. Steve Schroeder, Veggielicious first-timer, said, "going against my innate inclinations against mayonaisey salad sandwiches proved fruitful," adding that his "egg salad sandwich was delightful, a soft and simple lunch treat."
Although Echo Park hosts a number of outposts famous for New York-style and Chicago-style pizza, many of them don’t deliver and those that do couldn’t cut it with straight cheese pizza. In the end, we can recommend both La Pizza Loca and Pizza Buona, but none of us feel stoked on them.
Although all testing was conducted using plain cheese pizzas, we didn’t want to leave it to chance so we also whipped up some designer toppings to throw on our extra slices: Truffled black olive tapanade, Sage salt shitakes, Garlic tomato salad, “Meat” lovers trio. In terms of cost and authenticity, we firmly believe in the method of delivery-meets-cooking we call “Toppas.” All those recipes, which will post soon over at Hot Knives, can be made in less than 23 minutes, so you’re sure beat even the best delivery boy.]]>