Friendly's Ice Cream

Spotted this while in the grocery store today. What marketing genius thought it a good idea to name an ice cream flavor "Fudge Tracks?" Did they find inspiration while sorting underwear for the laundry?

Mac's Chicharrones

I'd never seen Mac's fired pork skins before, so when they appeared in a local store lately, I couldn't resist picking up a couple of bags. I really like chicharrones, but the quality of them is kind of uneven between brands, so when I see a new label I try to check it out.

Mac's Snacks Inc., based in Arlington Texas, has been in business since 1932, so it should come as no surprise that their pigskins are among the best I've ever had.

The store carried four varieties: Original, Salt & Vinegar, Spicy Hot, and Barbecue. I bought Original and Salt & Vinegar.

The Original variety is everything a chicharrone should be: light and airy, deliciously crunchy, not a bit greasy, with a fresh pork taste that is almost bacony. They're seasoned with just the right hint of salt to enhance the flavor. They're an amazing, premium product.

But the Salt & Vinegar chicharrones were even better. In fact, they are quite possibly the best fried pork skin I have ever tasted in my life. Like the Original variety, they are kissed with a touch of salt. But Mac's also uses a touch of additional seasoning that includes vinegar, onion powder, and garlic powder. The result is incredible: they're irresistable. It's as if they've been coated with pure deliciousness.

Mac's Snacks webpage is here. They don't seem to be a very big company, so the website is pretty barebones, but check them out for the hell of it anyway.

Country Of Origin Labels

Thanks to the 2002 Farm Bill, the USDA requires Country Of Origin Labeling (COOL) on food. But when our grocery store clerks suck at geography, how effective is this program going to be?

Fishy Delights 9: Kalles Smoked Roe Spread

The Swedish Food Market at IKEA always has a few surprises lurking within. On a recent trip, I picked up two varieties of Kalles Kaviar (a smoked fish roe spread.) In Sweden, it's one of the most popular snacks/sandwich spreads on the market and it's available straight, with cream cheese, with dill, and a "light" version. IKEA carried English-language-labeled product in two of the flavors: straight Creamed Smoked Roe, and Striped (cream cheese accompanies the roe but is not blended with it, so the product comes from the tube in an attractive pink-and-white-striped extrusion.) I sampled each variety on plain saltine crackers.

Creamed Smoked Roe - soft pinky brown, flecked with little bits of herbs and seasoning. Aggressively fishy flavor, just as you'd expect from a poduct made with roe, but with a richer tone I couldn't quite identify and very sweet. Checking the label, I found that tomatoes and sugar are both important ingredients. Not bad as a snack spread, but the sweetness kind of put me off a little. I think this would be great served on toasted rye rounds with sliced stuffed Manzanilla olives and egg salad, or as a stuffing for salty green olives where the tart/bitter flavors of the olive could balance the sweetness in the spread.

Striped Smoked Roe - Packed with soft cream cheese alongside the roe, this spread is much lighter than the straight roe, with a distinctive salmony-orange color and a milder, more delicate taste. The gentler flavor makes it more suitable for a general snack spread or sandwich filler. Still, the smoked roe itself is heavily laced with tomato and sugar, and I found it to be just as disconcertingly sweet as the other.

Overall, I don't regret buying either of the Kalles spreads, but I don't anticipate them becoming the next breakout product that joins the mainstream American market.

Some trivia about the spread:

• In Sweden, the product is known as Kalles Kaviar.
• It's made by Abba Seafood AB, which was originally established in 1838. The famous Swedish pop band requested (and was granted) permission from the company to share the name in 1974.
• Kalle is the name of the blonde boy depicted on the tubes. He is the son of the managing director of the company in 1954, the year Kalles Kaviar was first introduced.
  

The Banana Timeline

Bananas for Tomorrow.

Bananas for Today.

Bananas for Yesterday.

Who Goes To IKEA To Eat?

IKEA is well known for their well-designed, affordable home furnishings (many of which need to be assembled by the consumer.) But their stores also have small cafeteria-style restaurants where you can take a break and buy some lunch or a snack after winding through the cavernous showroom and marketplace.

On a recent Saturday, we took a drive to the IKEA store in New Haven, Connecticut. Although the purpose of the visit was to pick up a few small necessities for the house and to check out kitchen cabinet design for an eventual remodeling, we happened to be there at lunchtime, so we stopped at the cafe.

The cafeteria is just about the only part of the building with windows, and the combination of light colors, bright metallics, and simple furniture design gives it a bright, airy, relaxing atmosphere that adds to the "refreshment factor." The selection is limited - I think there were five or six main selections along with a single soup choice and a variety of desserts - but that's to be expected at a retail store's lunch counter.

Although the store was busy the day we were there, the cafe was relatively quiet. One of the service islands was closed and there was only a single cashier. But the help was quick, efficient, and polite and lines were short and fast-moving as customers made their selections and brought the cafeteria trays to the register for payment.

Selections included Atlantic Salmon with dill, Swedish Meatballs, and fried chicken fingers; my wife and daughter both opted for the Swedish Meatballs and I decided to have the Garden Vegetable Soup with a dinner roll and butter.

The Swedish Meatball platter was pretty much as expected - about a dozen small and quite delicious Swedish meatballs, nice balance of meat and filler, pleasantly seasoned. They were topped with a light brown gravy that most certainly from a packet and which had a distinctive soy-like flavor to it (quite like Maggi sauce bottled for the American market.) Sides included roughly mashed red potatoes (creamy and delicious with chunks of unmashed potatoes and potato skins mixed throughout) and lingonberry preserves (sweet and tart, loaded with whole berries, quite a bit like cranberry sauce.) For dessert, the ladies also selected a wonderful apple cake: a two-inch-deep graham cracker crumb crust filled with big chunks of stewed apples, topped with a buttercrumb crust and vanilla custard sauce. It was much more like a deep-dish pie or apple tart than a "cake."

The Garden Vegetable Soup was also very pleasant, although once again it was obviously an "envelope" soup; the broth had the distinctive flavor of reconstituted soup mixes, and the potatoes had been quite obviously dehydrated. But it had been enriched with frozen lima beans and corn, as well as slices of fresh zucchini and yellow summer squash. The weather outside was cold and rainy, and the hot soup was particularly welcome.

The dinner roll was nothing special, pretty standard stuff.

That bottle of Kristian Regale was interesting, though. It was a lightly sparkling lingonberry/apple drink, light and quenching, with a delicious tart taste that once again reminded me of cranberries. Interestingly enough, the bottle said it was a product of Spain.

Extremely reasonably priced, lunch for the three of us, including drinks, came to about $20.

Dave's Taco Bell'd Wing Sauce

It doesn't matter what you might think about the food at Taco Bell, their Fire "Border Sauce" is pretty respectable medium-level hot sauce. It's full-bodied and flavorful, with a good but not overpowering kick.

Chances are, if you go to Taco Bell now and then, you've got a few packets of this stuff kicking around. Did you know it's a valued ingredient in an excellent Buffalo-style wing sauce?

Dave's Taco Bell'd Wing Sauce

4 tablespoons butter
12 packets of Taco Bell Fire Sauce
1 bottle (6 ounces) Louisiana Hot Sauce
4 tablespoons brown sugar

Melt butter in a saucepan over medium heat until foamy; add Fire Sauce and Louisiana Hot Sauce. Stir in brown sugar and simmer, stirring frequently, until sauce thickens a bit and coats a spoon dipped into the pan.

Tip cooked wings into the pan, stir and toss to coat them well, and serve.

Makes enough to coat a little more than 2 dozen wings.

Garlic Man

I found Garlic Man here on a cellophane package of garlic imported from China. It was pretty good garlic, I admit, but not as good as the stuff grown closer to home (which doesn't have as far to travel.)

US-grown garlic needs a cool mascot like Garlic Man, though.

Hot Tub Chickens

I wish I had taken this picture, but it's ganked from here.

Beer + Clamato = WTF

I was at the package store, buying vodka for Jello Shots, and they had these "Cheladas" on the counter by the cash register. I guess they were hoping for someone to pick them up on an impulse buy. I asked the guy at the register about them, and he just laughed. "I put them there hoping someone would want them out of curiosity," he said, "They taste really bad. Plus everyone sees Clamato on the label and they're like 'Man that shit's nasty.'"

Rumor has it that "Cheladas" are popular with Latinos, but we have a pretty sizeable Hispanic population around here and none of my Latino friends has ever tasted a Bud Chelada. I wonder who the hell ever thought that this would be such a popular product that it had to be produced commercially. There are two main things wrong with it:

• Budweiser (and Bud Light) are not, despite all the money they pour into marketing, "premium" beers. They're lowest-common-denominator suds which, by virtue of brand identity, are able to command a slightly higher price for quality and taste that is not all that much better than Pabst Blue Ribbon.
• Clamato is, all by itself, fairly disgusting. Originally made by Mott's, it was once upon a time a decent drink - tomato juice, clam broth, a touch of seaoning - that made a killer Bloody Mary (called a "Clammy Mary" around here, or a "Caesar" in Canada, eh.) But those days are gone forever. Mott's was bought out by Cadbury-Schweppes in 1982, and now Clamato is made with tomato juice, "clam powder," and high-fructose corn syrup. It's not the same drink, and it doesn't taste the same.

The actual Budweiser Chelata Experience far exceeded my horrific expectations. For starters, the color is a bloody-phlegm pinky/amber. Kind of translucent, with tiny suspended reddish particulate (Bud says the can should be gently spun between your palms before opening to mix the sediment with the beverage.) There's no head. In fact, there's very little carbonation; it's a lot like soda pop that's been left in an open cup overnight. I have to admit that the smell is a little enticing: a bit briny, a bit tomatoey, a bit yeasty. So I took a sip.

Big mistake. The mouthfeel is thin and watery. The flavor is vomitous: reminiscent of rotted tomatoes in a salt flat at low tide. Gah. Horrid. I'd almost be willing to eat a bite of dogshit just to get the flavor of Chelada out of my mouth.

'Man that shit's nasty.' Yes, that sums it up quite tidily, I'd say.