Category: Foodstuffs

Is this the world we created?

I took this picture at some point last year, and I don’t think I ever got around to actually putting it into a blog post. Time doesn’t really dull the pain of knowing that I live in a world where not only do Fruit Ninja plush toys exists, but said toys cost twelve bucks (after taxes).

Twelve bucks. For a plush fruit. That (presumably) splits in half.

It’s not quite stupid enough that I need to call for another divine flood or muse about why suicide booths don’t exist yet, but man, Fruit Ninja toys. I guess that good ideas really were an exhaustible resource.

Oh lately it’s so quiet

I learned the hard way this morning, that my body will no longer tolerate me eating like a young man. Back in the day, I used to pack away as much of whatever I wanted, and all would be good. I might get full after a while, but hey, full is good.

Last night, I ate two polish sausage hot dogs, half a thing of fries, a few peanut butter cookies, and a big ol’ root beer. This sounds like a standard meal for me, and I figured it would be as much. But this morning I woke up with the absolute worst feeling in the pit of my stomach. Also I was still burping out the smell of hot dogs. It was a horrible, disgusting morning.

I look back now, and shudder to think of the disaster I averted by opting to not get that third hot dog.

All this to say… there’s not a lot going on. Who would have thought that my entire schtick was buying silly crap and then writing about it? Turns out that I don’t actually do anything interesting, I just used to make the “most” of my disposable income. I’m sitting here, racking my brain for something I’m interested enough to write about at length, but I’m at a total loss. So stories about hot dog burps are the best you’re gonna get right now.

I suppose I could start playing Fallout: New Vegas and regale you with tall tales about my further adventures in post-apocalyptic America, but there are just so many other games I’d rather be playing right now (and honestly I think I’d rather go back to Skyrim before starting New Vegas). Also, I feel like I’m falling back into the habit of only writing about video games, and I really want to pull back away from that. Yes, video games are pretty much all I do, but I’d sure like to be able to at least pretend for a while that I have other interests.

A Decorate-Your-Own-Cookie Halloween

Halloween is fast approaching (tomorrow!) and I’ve done a terrible job of trying to post Halloween-themed things on here. And also doing Halloween-themed things in real life. Wife and I have been watching as many horror movies as possible, but that’s about it. We didn’t even bother to dig out the ‘Ween decorations.

I did buy these cookies a while back though, and they are undoubtedly the most Halloweeny thing that I’ve done this season. So good on me for that, I guess.

Somehow, I managed to keep them hidden (on the kitchen table) from Wifey until last weekend, when I deemed it appropriate to bring them out and get into the Halloween cookie spirit. She was pretty damn stoked, and that was pretty much the point. Both of us get unusually excited about anything that comes with a tube of icing packed in, and these cookies had three packs of icing each, so it was basically Christmas in October up in here.

If you’ve never seen a product like this, they’re naked cookies that come with a few packs of coloured icing and some sprinkles, so that you can work your own artistic magic on the cookie. These were pretty cheap, and came with two cookies each. They were a steal if I’v ever seen one.

Of course, being cheap, there had to be some sort of catch. That catch is that the chocolate pumpkin-shaped cookies were fused together. Trying to separate them ended with a big mess, and both cookies were broken in the process. It’s hard to tell exactly what’s going on with the cookie in that photo, but a lot of the top cookie’s backside remained stuck to the bottom cookie. I wasn’t pleased. The ghosts came apart nicely though.

I tried to “glue” my pumpkin cookie back together using some of the black icing. It didn’t work out too well, but it held together long enough to get photos, and I suppose that’s the best I could have asked for.

We then proceeded to bust out the icing and decorate our cookies. I cut the holes in my icing packets too big, and it didn’t squirt out very well, so my pumpkin looks like complete garbage. After that mess I decided to just go with a simple design for the ghost. I’m a terrible craftsman, so I’m going to blame my tools; the icing did not want to stick to the cookies at all, but it sure as Hell wanted to stick all over my fingers.

Wifey’s came out looking fairly nice though. Her Barney-coloured pumpkin is a cute little mess, and I really like the eyes on her ghost. They stare into your soul like no cookie has before.

It should be noted that I had a ton of icing left, so I slathered it all over my ghost once I was done with pictures. Also, the bag of sprinkles that come with these things has enough sprinkles to liberally cover four to five cookies, so there were orange and black sprinkles everywhere by the time I was done. Like, look up at my pumpkin there, and imagine him with at least three times as many sprinkles. You just can’t waste all that perfectly good sugar, right?

And that’s about that. I quite enjoyed devouring the ghost cookie, but the pumpkin cookie was that gross off-chocolate flavour you get with cheap cookies. It wasn’t very good at all.

A Ninja Turtles Halloween

I wish I could get into Halloween more, I really do. It’s my second-favourite holiay and my first-favourite season, so why don’t I go more crazy over it? Money, mostly. It’s hard to buy up all the mummy-themed candy and pumpkin-shaped decorations when you’re living paycheque to paycheque. But I can still justify spending a few bucks here and there on some cool stuff.

To that end, when the Halloween season begins, I like to make trips down to the square and check out the Shopper’s Drug Mart to see what they’ve got. It’s a bit of a gamble, as the popular stuff it usually marked up like crazy at Shopper’s, but if you’re shopping outside the box you’re fairly likely to find something cool for a decent price.

Like this bag of Ninja Turtles candy, for example. Two dollas for this bag. That is not only decent, but a pretty great price in my book. Plus I bought it mostly because I wanted to take pictures of it, so that’s one more box checked off on the “candy for trick-or-treaters” list*.

The price made me happy, but what made me sad is that this is the only Ninja Turtles candy I’ve seen so far this season. Granted, I haven’t been watching like a hawk, but this is the kind of thing that should stand out to me. I was expecting a little more TMNT love on Halloween, as Nick’s Ninja Turtles have their faces plastered on damn near everything, so why put on the brakes for Halloween candy?

The bag unsurprisingly contained exactly what it claimed: suckers and candy lumps. “Soft center pops” is kind of a weird way to put it, don’t you think? Truthfully, I don’t, but I was trying to come up with something more interesting for this paragraph than complaining about how blurry that picture came out.

The “candy chews” are about as boring as you’d expect. They’re just that regual old block of coloured sugar with a tiny tire track down the middle. But this time, wrapped in Ninja Turtles! Yes, that’s enough to get me excited about these candies. What can I say? I’m easy.

It’s notable that despite their cheaply-mass-producedness, these sugar lumps are not bad. They aren’t a candy I’d actively seek out, but they’re edible. So when I find one in a surprise bag a dozen years down the line, and when it crumbles to dust as soon as I open the wrapper, I will know that at one point, these candies were pretty decent. And that will be my light in the darkness. Or something.

The suckers are less good, but then again, I have a tendency to hold suckers to a higher standard. The truth of the matter is that I’m poor because my wife and I spend an exorbitant amount of money on gourmet lollipops. That’s also the reason that I have a hard time getting behind cheap little suckers like this, even though they really aren’t bad.

I do really like that picture though. It looks like the suckers are all wearing little capes.

I guess If I have to have any sort of final thought, it’s that I’m pretty disappointed in the candy chews. But of the candy types in the bag come in three different wrappers, but there are only two colours of chew to the three colours of suckers. Also the suckers are all different flavours and both chews taste the same. Tsk tsk.

*Yes, I ate all the candy I opened and fondled. The rest is for trick-or-treaters.

Chocolate boos

There isn’t nearly enough Halloween going on here, so have this: a fun picture of spooky chocolate bars. Also pictured: 7-11’s most demanding slogan.

Really, outside of the punny names, they’re nothing special. Even then it’s a 50/50 split. Kit Kat didn’t change at all, it just has a picture of a cat on it. And Scaries doesn’t sound enough like Smarties to constitue as even somewhat clever. Coffin Crisp and scAero are pretty damn great though. I wish they were called that all year long.

I didn’t actually buy any of these, hence the picture taken in 7-11. I don’t really care for Nestle chocolate bars, and I think the only one that’s changed at all are Scaries, which are coloured orange and brown insted of rainbow.

Seriously, how great is scAero? There are very few words that allow you to put a capital letter in the middle of them, and that’s something I really respect. And no, products with a lowercase “i” or “e” tacked on the front of their names do not count.

On Pop-Tarts and sock puppets

I was going to start this post with an “if you’ve been reading this blog for a while” intro, but I feel like I do that a lot. Maybe even too much? Or maybe I don’t and just think that I do? I have no idea!

Anyway, there’s no doubt in my mind that as a person who has spend much of his life being perceived by others as “creative,” I am not nearly creative enough. Oh sure, now and then a spark will ignite and I’ll pop out something that shows a little thought, but mostly I just coast on doing the same thing that the people I see as inspirations do, but with my own half-assed twist.

I thought my Pop-Tarts Review videos were pretty creative, even if there are a dearth of people with the same idea on YouTube. The whole project started because I just needed an outlet for my silliness (God help you if you take those videos seriously), because I find it hard to express directly to other people. I don’t even really like talking to people about the Pop-Tarts videos, because it makes me feel embarassed and weird.

Of course, as time dragged on, I got kind of bored with the whole idea, and felt like it needed a shot in the arm. That’s when I developed Sockstopher.

 
Sockstopher is… not the grand slam I was hoping he’d be. Oh, people like him alright, and that was always the goal, but his video is one of the less popular in the series, as far as the view counter goes. Whether this is because I’m a bad puppeteer or because people are just getting tired of the whole Pop-Tarts Review schtick, I don’t know.

I really like Sockstopher though. I think he’s a fun character to have around, and I’ve been desperately trying to find a way to work him into more stuff. I just haven’t been able to find a good fit for him yet. I do have one plan for him, but it requires a box of Pop-Tarts that I don’t have.

On the whole, the production side of the Pop-Tarts Review series has come to a stall because I have run out of flavours and so far the few people who have claimed that they’d bring me some when they take a trip down to the States have flaked. I’m not offended or anything because I’m asking for handouts here, but I’d be eternally grateful if someone actually followed through.

I do have a few more episodes that just need to be uploaded, if you’re into that sort of thing. Problem is, my internet speed has been unfairly chopped down to a fraction of what it once was, and those 5ish-minute videos now take like two hours each to upload. It’s pretty ridiculous. Hooray for capitalism!

Something about momentum

Last weekend was delicious Thanksgiving long weekend for us Canadians, but the awesome dinners I got three days in a row are actually the least incredible things that happened over the weekend.

Not to downplay those dinners, of course. Many people worked hard to prepare them, and I appreciate all that effort. In fact, you might even say that I give them my thanks for stuffing me so full that I literally rolled out of bed on Tuesday morning.

The big news, as you might be aware, was that Pokémon X and Y launched on Saturday. I was so damn excited about them, in fact, that my youngest brother and I decided to attend the midnight launch at our local used games store. Wifey tagged along for the ride too, but I was not able to convince her to start her own journey with Pokémon. Some day…

We figured it’d be a pretty low-key thing, because I guess neither of us know many Pokémon players in the city. Also, like I said, it’s a little local place. But the turnout was pretty amazing! I’d say that there were at least 60 or 70 people there. Which is low-key compared to the official Nintendo launch event in Toronto, but still way more than we’d expected. There wasn’t much more to the evening than waiting in line for half an hour and then merrily skipping out of the store with games in hand, but it was still a pretty fun experience.

And so that’s what I did all weekend when I wasn’t out Thanksgiving binging.

Except for Monday night, which was just wonderful enough to outshine a new Pokémon game as the best part of my long weekend. Yes, you read that right. And that totally awesome thing was the opportunity to go see Joe Satriani.

I first heard that he would be playing here back in the summer, but there was no way that I could justify dropping enough cash for tickets. I so desperately wanted to go, as I’ve been a Satch fan since the very first time I heard “Surfing With the Alien” and he was easily on my top 5 list of concerts to see. (The rest: Matt Good again, Tom Petty, Tonight Alive, and Go Radio)

A miracle happened though, and my in-laws bought me tickets for my birthday. It was way more than they should have spent, but it is quite possibly the best birthday gift I’ve ever received. At the very least it’s neck-and-neck with Life and an NES.

It doesn’t really need saying, but the concert was fantastic. I didn’t recognise a lot of the songs because I don’t have the new record (Unstoppable Momentum), but maybe that’s even better, as I got to experience a bunch of material for the first time live. “Satch Boogie” and “Surfing With the Alien” were in the set, and that’s all I could really ask for. And the encore… oh, the encore. Let’s just say that even my wedding day may not have been as emotional a day as the day I was actually in the damn crowd for “Crowd Chant.”

I don’t go to very many concerts, but the ones I go to are so damn good. And now that that’s all said, I have to get back to work. And by “work”, I mean “Pokémon.” Because I totally don’t type these things out at work.

4 Crazy Chip Flavours!

I guess it’s a Canadian thing, so if you’re a foreign reader you may not have heard of it, but Lay’s currently has a contest running. It is, unsurprisingly, a contest to create a new flavour of chips for them to produce. At current, we’re about a month away from the end of the contest, and the four finalist flavours have been in stores for a while now. Since July, I guess?

Fact of the matter is that since I shun any social media that doesn’t involve me and I don’t spend any time in the chips aisle anymore, I didn’t notice these new flavours until a couple weeks ago. I just happened to randomly stumble upon one of them while out with the wife getting faux Slurpees. I used to be really crazy about trying each and every new potato chip flavour, and since that compulsion still exists deep inside of me, I went absolutely nuts just seeing the first one sitting there by its lonesome.

Now after all that embellishment, try to imagine how I felt when I looked at the back of the bag and saw that there were three more new flavours to hunt down. Suffice to say, I needed a change of pants. It’s not often that I get to enjoy the thrill of the junk food hunt like I used to, and knowing that those flavours were out there somewhere made me feel like my life had a real purpose  At the very least, it took me back to a time when hunting down article fodder was half the fun.

So I guess you’re all writhing in your seat there, wondering which of the new flavours I found first. You don’t care for the anecdotes; you just want the cold, hard, facts. Well tough. The anecdotes are important to my process and to the total word count. They’re never going to go away, so you might as well just learn to enjoy them.

Continue reading 4 Crazy Chip Flavours!

Pop-Time (S’mores)

So as it turns out, my Pop-Tarts review videos are pretty popular! Not like, a million views popular, but a bunch of them have gotten over 100 views, and that’s more than I expect anything I put on YouTube to accomplish. I mean sure, a bunch of that can be web-bots, but a bunch of actual blood-and-guts people who I know are fans and have let me know that they eagerly await every new entry, so good for me. I have all the happys.

This is coming at the perfect time too, because I’ve been slipping into the Why-Do-I-Even-Bothers a lot lately re: producing web content, and getting first-hand praise for a thing I create really makes it all worth it. Hell, if even only one person told me that they dig the Pop-Tarts vids, I’d be delighted to no end. Now I just need to find an audience for this blog crap and my LP videos and I’m set. Unfortunately, interest in one of my ventures does not seem to spill over into the others. Oh well!

Anyway, to celebrate, here’s the most popular episode Ryan’s Pop-Tarts Review to date, embedded right in the page for your not-leaving-this-tab pleasure!

Oh, and if you like ’em too, follow me on Twitter (@TheRyanDS) to make sure you catch each episode ASAP.