Category: Food Finds

We were at the Chinese bakery the other day, and along with the egg tarts and lotus seed moon cakes and the 4 GLORIOUS ENORMOUS breakfast-treat-filled bao we got a weird little golden-brown blob of New Year’s Cake. Everyone seemed to be buying some so i wanted to try it too.
I sliced a little off and it tasted kind of like paste. I didn’t get it, and complained to the tallasiandude. He suggested that I heat it up, possibly in a frying pan. That seemed reasonable enough so I put some peanut oil in the pan and fried my little slices. And holy mackerel, does that make a difference. They get all crispy and caramelized, and they go gooey and soft. Yum.
I guess I should have known, really, because I know about grilled mochi in Japanese cooking, and mochi is effectively the same thing as this weird glutinous cake. Now I know, and I can look forward to many years of yummy crispy rice-goo goodness in late January. Hurray!

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…