FoodNerd!

tasty little two-bite morsels my parents found at Dae Han market, filled with lotus seed paste and a walnut.

Feeling slightly capricious at the Trader Joe’s earlier this week, I perused the packaged dips on offer, and found that most of them were full of chemicals and other sketchy crap. One, though, was not: Cilantro & Chive Yogurt Dip.
Now I know perfectly well that the tallasiandude won’t go near this one, loathing cilantro as he does, but it sounded pretty good to me, and low in fat too. There’s only 300 calories in the entire tub.
I just tried it tonight and it turns out to be all I’d hoped it would be. Kind of like (be still my half-jewish heart) chive cream cheese, only a little tangier and more like dip. Lovely on carrot sticks. Probably decent on potato chips too. Yum yum.

they had dark chocolate and dark chocolate almond zonePerfect bars at the Costco, so i bought some (with a bargain coupon, wooo). turns out they are choco-rific, very pleasingly dark and chocolaty, thereby scratching that itch while also sating the hunger quickly so you can get through an inconveniently-timed client conference call.

WTF: $8.95 for a bottle of OLIVE BRINE? Hello, people, the whole point of a dirty martini is that you already have a jar of olives in brine in hand, and you’re trying to get more of it into your glass. You should not ever need to buy foofy “cocktail” brine from a specialty purveyor. Ever.
DUH.

went out to Eastern Standard last night (more on that when i have time to post photos) and before dinner we had a Whiskey Smash cocktail.
The cocktail menu at ES is deliberately obfuscatory, and there is no way to know wtf each intriguingly named item actually might be, unless it’s a classic like a Sidecar. However, I did eventually manage to determine, by talking to our heavily accented waitress, that a Whiskey Smash involved bourbon, lemon, simple syrup and mint, which seemed like just the ticket on a warm early-summer evening.
And it was.
Arrived in a lowball over piles of shaved ice. Tasted rather like a citrus julep. Quite refreshing, and not quite as diabolically alcoholic.

I was at the mall with my mother, and was overcome by hunger at one point — and of course my mother has random bargain-store snacks with her at almost all times. So i got a taste of a packet of “O’Coco’s” chocolate crisps, which really should be awful, but in fact are deeply chocolaty, shatteringly crunchy, and quite good indeed.
And they’re organic and low in calories. Wacky.
Apparently the secret is that they use cocoa powder, which makes the chocolate flavor dark and intense. And I am a pushover for anything crunchy and crispy. And if i can jack up two pleasure centers at once for 90 calories, all the better.

Last time I was at Trader Joe’s, I saw they had several products made with sprouted brown rice. I’d recently been reading that sprouted grains are much more nutritious than unsprouted, which I guess makes botanical sense. And one of these products was just too preposterous to pass up:
shelf-stable prepared ready-to-eat sprouted brown rice in a plastic bowl with sesame-seaweed sprinkles.
I mean really. That is possibly the yuppiest, health-nut-on-the-go, 21st century food you could ever dream up. So I bought it, for the sheer entertainment value.
And I’ll be damned if it wasn’t absolutely delicious. Nutty and chewy, with that distinctly japanese taste of nori and sesame and salt.
I’m unlikely to buy this much, because of all the packaging it entails, but I will certainly be much more likely to buy some regular uncooked sprouted brown rice, cook it, and whip up some seaweed-sesame-salt furikake of my own to mix into it. Yums.

OK, this product is just weird. Freeze dried green beans, somehow processed with canola oil, dextrin & salt to become a crunchy snack. I get it — a salty crunchy snack with a low glycemic index and lots of fiber. But i tried a few just now, from the box that I got from my parents for Christmas, and they’re just somehow *wrong*.
They do taste identifiably, if faintly, like green beans, which is nice, but with a faintly unpleasant sweet taste, and a few hard bits mixed in with the crunch, like when you get Corn Nuts that are a little over-cooked and you think you’re going to break your teeth. (I don’t eat Corn Nuts anymore either, so maybe I have a thing.) I had to put the lid back on the box and stop after like 4 beans, and i still have a little icky feeling on my tongue which i might have to drown with a few Utz Cheez Balls.

I just finished off the box of Trader Joe’s Sea Salt Dark Chocolate Caramels, and felt moved to blog.
These are great. More please!
Actually, i do agree with the assessment on the site i linked to above — they are not perfect, i have had better caramels — but damn, I sure do like caramel + dark chocolate + big crunchy hunks of salt. Short of a trip back to LA’s Little Flower Candy Company, which sold me the best freaking salt caramels I’ve ever eaten, this massmarket treat will most certainly do.
i just hope they don’t sell them only during the winter holidays…

Let’s just get this out of the way up front: li hing mui is really a borderline revolting food.
I had heard so much about it, how people crave it, how it is the most awesomest flavor since chocolate. And I was hell-bent to try some once I got to Hawaii.
I started out with a passionfruit margarita with li hing mui powder sprinkled in and coated onto the rim with the salt. This was absolutely delightful, and only jet lag and monstrous fatigue kept me from ordering about 5 in a row. For starters, passionfruit + tequila + salt = most perfect cocktail foodnerd can imagine. And the li hing mui gave it a little smoky-tangy kick. I licked the whole rim clean, and loved the whole thiing.
So i had high hopes for the little packets of li hing mui plums, and other things like ginger and mango with li hing flavoring, that I kept scooping up at Longs and at the supermarkets, etc. as gifts for friends back home. Then i figured maybe i better try the damn things before I got too carried away, so I had a little bite of a plum in the airport on the way from Kauai to the Big Island. EEEEW! YUK! I ingested maybe a microgram-sized bite, and it was awful, completely overwhelming, and fake tasting. (I noticed after this that absolutely every single li hing mui product involves aspartame, which i am still befuddled by.)
I scaled it back after that. But i did have a packet of seedless li hing mui plums for spleen and littlelee, and we busted those out a few nights ago. These were slightly less horrible than the seeded ones, but still, spleen made the most appalling faces and ran for the kitchen to spit it out. Littlelee and I could find some pleasure in it, but still that one plum we’d nibbled at got chucked into the trash. I had some li hing ginger for my mom, who loves all ginger things, and she thought it was pretty bad.
So what gives? Why does a tiny bit of the powder do fantastical things for my cocktail, but yet the smallest bites of the dried-fruit forms make even the hardest-core foodnerds run gagging? Are we just Yankee lame-asses? WTF with the aspartame?
I have a packet of the powder, and I will be doing some cocktail experiments as the opportunity arises. But those fruits are all getting the boot, sadly.