Yesterday, TK, Webmaster Mike, and I all went to the Beau’s Brewery Oktoberfest celebration in the pouring rain, where we drank copious amounts of beer and listened to polka music. While the festival itself wasn’t really anything to write home about, it did afford us a few opportunities to try out new and interesting flavour-boundary-breaking experiences, which we dubbed “The Oktoberfest Double-downs”. The first one we tried consisted of pulled pork and sauerkraut sandwiched between two pieces of pork schnitzel.

This may have been due to the beer in large part, but it was actually pretty tasty. Not something that I would eat in its entirety, but lip-smackingly good after a few brews. I’ve never tried an official-issue KFC double-down, but I’m guessing that if you got a few beers in the belly of a double-down fan, they’d find lots to enjoy in this disgusting-yet-delicious food concoction. We also tried it with a spicy red deer sausage and sauerkraut in between two schnitzels, with similarly tasty results.

As I said before: it was delicious and disgusting. I remember loving it when I tried it, but just watching these videos makes me want to hurl.

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Thinking Outside the Flavour Box returns with the thrilling conclusion of Gill and the Brothers Nitro sampling the bizarre eats available at the T&T Supermarket! When we last saw our heroes, they had just finished consuming a jelly-filled soft drink, and were gearing up to try a bag of garlic-flavoured crispy chicken skin chips – a snack that Gill has been eagerly anticipating. But will the chicken skin chips live up to their potential? Read on to find out!

I was pretty excited about trying these chicken skin chips after spotting a similar product from a different brand way back when I made my trip to the Divisoria ethnic food store. The anticipation was killing me as we opened the bag and I pulled out the first lumpy piece of poultry.

They were…sub-par.

Vince: I ate one of these whole chips, and that’s probably the only one I will ever eat. They’re not terrible, they don’t make me sick to my stomach or anything, but they’re just not very good. They’re not even crispy – the grease just makes them moist and chewy, but not in a good way.

Chicken: These are the most upsetting things we’ve eaten so far because they showed the most potential, but they just suck.

Schnapps: I agree. Extremely disappointing, it just tastes like chicken fat.

Gill: Tastes like dried, day-old KFC chicken skin. Way too greasy, not very flavourful, bland, you can’t even taste the garlic.

Chicken: Chicken skin goes best with salt. This stuff isn’t salty at all.

It was unfortunate, to say the least. We decided to move on to something that at least showed promise in the flavour department: tamarind confit treats.

Gill: Isn’t a tamarin a kind of monkey?

Vince: Dude, if I find out after the fact that these are monkey chunks, I’m going to be so happy.

As it turns out, tamarins really are small, squirrel-sized monkeys, which makes the fact that these are simultaneously labelled as “Preserved Tamarind” (tamarinds being a kind of Indian date) and “Tamarin Confit” (presumably meaning monkey bits that have been soaked in something) a bit unnerving. Though not quite as unnerving as the fact that they look like sugared monkey balls.

Thankfully (or maybe not), they turned out to be the preserved Indian dates, rolled in sugar, salt and chili powder. Those are literally the only ingredients: tamarind, sugar, salt, chili. As far as snacks go, you could do worse.

Vince: A bit like a dried apricot rolled in sugar, salt and chili spice. Tough, but chewable. I don’t mind it. I’ll finish this one right now.

Chicken: Too spicy for no reason. It sucks.

Schnapps: It’s fine. Sugary and spicy, but not offensive.

Gill: The tamarind is tangy, which doesn’t clash with the chili flavour. The one thing I find the most offputting is the texture – you have to bite down really hard to chew on them. Other than that, not bad.

Between the spiciness of the tamarind and the greasiness of the chicken skin chips, we were all starting to feel thirsty again. Time to crack open the second beverage that we had purchased: the pennywort drink!

None of us had ever even heard of pennywort before, and beyond that picture of green leaves on the front of the can, the manufacturers of the drink weren’t giving us any clues. What’s even more alarming is that, according to Wikipedia, pennywort can refer to any number of completely different plants from around the world! So we really were flying blind on this one. I’m betting, though, that the drink was made from Asiatic Pennywort.

Pouring the drink out into glasses did nothing to ease our trepidation, as the more we poured out, the browner the drink appeared.

Schnapps wound up with the brownest glass, so he drank first. Here’s our assessment:

It really did taste like green tea and dirt. Green tea on the way down, with a dirty, dirty aftertaste. Pouring out the dregs into the sink revealed that the drink contained, as Vince put it, “pockets of brownness.” I can’t imagine drinking this for any reason short of being completely parched after a long crawl through the desert.

We were down to the last two snacks, and we decided to leave the most daunting one for last, which meant that next up was the “Kuai Kuai Peacock Snack”.

A closer inspection of the bag revealed that Peacock was the name of the manufacturer of this snack, which was a bit disappointing as we were all hoping that it would turn out to be chunks of peacock. With the “peacock” part of the snack name out of the equation, we were left with nothing to indicate what was in the bag besides what appeared to be an Asian motocross racer, Max from Where the Wild Things Are and the words “non-fried.” We opened the bag to find…

…Asian goldfish crackers! They’re not cheesy, and they’re made out of rice, but they’re definitely goldfish-style crackers.

Vince: Vaguely fishy taste to it, got a good crunch. It’s fine. It has a little bit of a finish like the seaweed wrap on sushi.

Schnapps: Crunchy, fishy. Not bad.

Gill: It has the texture of corn pops and the flavour of soy sauce.

It was nowhere near the most exciting thing we had tasted. But that left the title for weirdest treat open for the spiced squid jerky.

This bag of Jane-Jane brand “hot” shredded squid made me nervous. I like squid just fine in Asian cuisine, but the presentation here made me pretty wary. The smell didn’t help any, either.

Schnapps: It smells like fish mixed with a freshly painted wall. It has a real fresh paint smell to it.

Chicken: I think it smells like an unclean woman.

Vince: I’m with Chicken on this one. It smells like an unclean woman.

Gill: I think it’s a combination of both: it smells like an unclean woman who’s just been painting.

The taste was less interesting. It was chewy and fishy, vaguely spicy and ultimately exactly what I thought it would taste like. But the awful odour it emitted was difficult to ignore, and made the stuff almost inedible.

Vince: You only get the spice at the very end. It’s really, really chewy and fishy. It’s just bad, not revolting.

Chicken: Better than expected.

Schnapps: No way! I expected it to be hot and it totally wasn’t.

Gill: Not hot in the slightest. Exactly how I expected dried squid jerky to taste.

And so concluded our taste-testing. After all the stuff that assaulted our taste buds, the Brothers Nitro and I quickly got our hands on good, old-fashioned pizza and beer and promptly washed all remnants of awfulness out of our mouths. I probably wouldn’t buy any of the foods or drinks we tasted again, but if I had to pick one, it’d be the fishy peacock snack or the okonomiyaki chips. I could eat a whole bag of either without suffering any stomach-churning effects.

I can solidly say, though, that this will not be the last time we go to T&T. There’s just too much weird food there to ignore, and you can bet that in the near future, Thinking Outside the Flavour Box will return with another bag of strangeness from T&T.

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Upon hearing of my quest to broaden my flavour horizons by sampling strange foods from other cultures, Vince Nitro immediately informed me that there was an enormous Asian supermarket near his place where he had seen all manner of unusual foodstuffs. Enlisting the help of Vince’s brothers Schnapps and Chicken for our experiment, the Brothers Nitro and I stepped through the sliding glass doors and into a world of flavour unlike any other. Little did we know what awaited us…

Literally the first thing we saw right as we stepped through the doors was a cooler unit full of “Vietnamese Black Glutinous Dessert” packages. I must have been so floored by the bizarre idea of something black and glutinous as a dessert that I forgot to take photos of anything we were planning on sampling, and instead just snapped shots of things I found disgusting or full of innuendo. Like pork rectums.

As delicious as marinated pig anuses sound, this was miles outside of our comfort zones, or, as Vince Nitro put it: “I’m not inclined to eat a pork rectum just for the lulz.” I really do wish I had taken more photos of the interior of the supermarket, because it was pretty incredible. There were giant bins of big, spiky durians (more on them later), and even a lady selling what looked like steaming alien pods wrapped in twine. But it’s hard to concentrate when you’re surrounded by stuff like “Cream Horns”…

And “A Dong Sausages”…

We filled our basket with an assortment of oddities and headed back to Castle Nitro for the taste testing. Our list of goodies consisted of one large durian fruit, a bag of okonomiyaki-flavoured potato chips, pickled pepper leather, a lemon-jelly fizzy drink, chilied and sugared tamarind candies, garlic flavoured crispy chicken skin chips (yes, I got them), a pennywort beverage, something called “Kuai Kuai Peacock Snack”, and shredded, spicy squid jerky. We decided to start with the durian.

These things were all over the place at T&T. I saw at least a half a dozen large bins full of them, and honestly, it didn’t seem like anyone at the supermarket knew what to make of them. As we carted ours around, a middle-aged woman stopped us and asked “How do you eat that?” to which Vince responded “We’re gonna take an axe to it.” She seemed satisfied with his answer and left, presumably to get one for herself. This picture doesn’t do justice to the size of the durian, either – ours was a bit bigger than a rugby ball. It must have weighed about eight pounds, and the thorns on it were sharp enough to make Vince bleed.

Because of its spiny hide, cutting the durian open was a challenge – one solved with a pair of oven mitts.

As we sliced open the durian, it began to ooze white, custard-like fluid. Cracking it open revealed weird, cream-filled pods with bits of something like a cross between a banana and a pineapple inside. It also smelled pretty strange. We dug in.

Schnapps: Very good first impression, but I’ve gotta say, it tastes like caramel and onions at the end.

Vince: The trick is to keep eating it so that you never reach that onion place.

Schnapps: I don’t regret trying it once, but I’d probably never try it again.

Gill: It’s like a pineapple fucked a banana in an onion patch.

Chicken: It’s for beating people only.

It should be noted that over the course of the next half hour or so of us sampling the other foods we bought, the durian would occasionally fart some onion-y, stinky gas, best decribed in this Richard Sterling quote from the Wikipedia entry on durians:

Its odor is best described as pig-shit, turpentine and onions, garnished with a gym sock. It can be smelled from yards away. Despite its great local popularity, the raw fruit is forbidden from some establishments such as hotels, subways and airports, including public transportation in Southeast Asia.

No wonder it was on sale! Before we get to the next food item, I can’t resist posting this picture from Wikipedia.

Next on the list was the bag of okonomiyaki flavoured potato chips. We had no idea what an okonomiyaki was when we purchased the bag, but from the picture on the front, it appears to be a kind of spaghetti-pancake dish doused in soy sauce.

Vince: These chips combine the flavours of ketchup chips and roast chicken flavoured chips. I find it hard to believe that’s what this spaghetti pancake thing tastes like.

It’s true: they tasted almost exactly like the roast chicken and ketchup chip flavours combined, with maybe a hint of soy sauce. According to Wikipedia, okonomiyaki really is a savoury pancake dish often served with soy sauce, so I guess this package wasn’t misleading in the slightest. Though I am a bit confused by the ingredients listed as “egg fish” and “sauce powder”.

Now we get to the first real gamble: the pickled pepper leather. We selected this food product specifically because it looked really gross. Could it actually be tasty?

Chicken: This is going to be the worst one.

Vince: I bet it’s going to be salty and rubbery.

Schnapps: I call sweet. It’s going to be sweet.

Gill: Nah, I’m with Chicken. It’s going to be revolting.

It was. None of us could keep down a whole piece.

Vince: It tastes like soft leather boiled in the brine made by washing used gym underwear.

Chicken: I was right. It was the worst thing ever.

Schnapps: I’m going to puke just smelling this.

Gill: It tastes like someone flattened a whole lot of hardboiled eggs, soaked them in pickled pepper brine and then left them to dry in the sun.

But in spite of how awful it tasted, Schnapps took one for the team and tried to eat a stack of five pieces.

After that ordeal, we were all in need of something to wash the terrible flavour out of our mouths, so we chose to sample the fizzy lemon-jelly drink that we bought, the official brand name of which is unknown because there was barely any English writing on the can.

I say barely any English writing, because the back of the can did display the following warning:

Not recommended for elderly people or children under five years old. Please keep it refrigerated, otherwise the jelly may burst out if fiercely shaken.

Needless to say, that warning made us all a little uneasy. Pouring it out revealed that the beverage wasn’t so much a “jelly drink” as it was a “drink with phlegm in it”.

The jelly was way too watery to qualify as actual jelly, and it had exactly the same consistency as phlegm. The drink itself tasted just like Sprite, and it would have been fine if I didn’t immediately picture someone horking loogies into passing cans at the factory whenever I took a sip. Sadly, this drink was ruined by its own gimmick. Too bad.

Vince: The jelly is a bit offputting.

Chicken: I like slurping jello.

Schnapps: It’s really slimy, but not bad.

Gill: I’m not a fan. If this was just a normal fizzy drink, I’d chug it, but the jelly just grosses me out.

We were only halfway through our pile of goodies, and there were more strange foods to try! Keep watching TBR for part 2!

Pork rinds may not seem like too adventurous a flavour experience to some of you readers, but I’ve been wondering about these things since I was a kid and yet have always found myself just a little too grossed out by them to give them a shot. According to the new Thinking Outside the Flavour Box rules that I just made up now, though, this meant that I had to seek out some puffed pork rinds, eat them, and review them for your entertainment. Of course, since I needed something to wash down the pieces of fried pig skin, I opted for a bottle of St. Peter’s English Ale – as beer and pork rinds is about as rednecky a snack as you’ll ever find.

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Before I dive into my pork-flavoured adventure, I should note that my curiousity surrounding pork rinds steam entirely from an exchange between Donatello and Michelangelo in the first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie.

I should also note that I’m only now realizing that I tasted a snack called Baconettes in my last TOtFB article. Weird. I must be subconsciously drawn to bacon-flavoured foods. Well, maybe not subconsciously. At least these ones are made with legitimate pig. Check out the ingredients!

That’s right: the only ingredients making up these things are pork rinds, lard and salt. According to Wikipedia, pork rinds are nothing more than fried pieces of pork skin, in this case puffed up and dried. The snack is related to a Nova Scotian treat that I ate once upon a time called scrunchions, which are basically pork fat croutons. I remember loving scrunchions when I tried them, so I hope the Frito Lay version is at least palatable. One more peek at the bag before I inspect the rinds themselves.

“A crunchy, fun snack with a hint of smokey bacon flavour that Canadians love.” The slogan in unclear as to whether Canadians love the smokey bacon flavour, or pork rinds in general. I’m also a bit skeptical as to how much “fun” these pork rinds will turn out to be. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I love my crunchy, bacon-y snack foods, but I can’t even remember the last time I described any of them as “fun”. But hey, I’m a Canadian who loves smokey bacon flavour. There’s some promise here.

The average pork rind is about ten centimetres long and weighs maybe a gram. They’re light and full of air, and they definitely have a bacon-y smell to them. Not offensive, but not fresh-smelling either. I’d better get my beer prepped for when I bite into this thing. The beer of choice is St. Peter’s English Ale, which I’ve never tried and was purchased entirely because of the shape of the bottle.

From the St. Peter’s Brewery website: The brewery at St. Peter’s is housed in listed former agricultural buildings which were last used in the late Sixties. They then became derelict but offered a superb site both for a working brewery and a visitors’ attraction. Today, the brewery produces ‘real ale’, Over 90% of this is bottled, the remainder being for cask beer with over half of our bottle volume is exported. Our capacity is now 15,000 barrels per annum (83,000 pints per week). Our oval Bottle is a 500ml copy of one from Gibbstown, near Philadelphia which dates from c. 1770. It was produced for Thomas Gerrard, an innkeeper with a tidewater inn on the Delaware River.

Hey, that’s pretty cool! I wonder if it will taste any good. Time to dig in!

The pork rinds don’t really taste like much beyond salt with a hint of old bacon. They pop on your tongue as they absorb moisture, and the result is very much like eating a large spoonful of dried Rice Krispies while sniffing a piece of week-old jerky that was left on the kitchen counter out of the bag. The pork rinds also leave a greasy, unpleasant coating behind in your mouth, which definitely necessitates a swig of beer.

The ale has a bit too much barley for my tastes, but it’s a perfectly serviceable beer. The flavour completely overpowers the pork rinds, though, and since I wasn’t wild about the pork rind flavour to begin with, I think I’ll probably stick to potato chips when it comes to picking out a snack food in a crinkly plastic bag next time I’m at the corner store. St. Peter’s English Ale will never be my favourite beer in the world, and if I buy it again it will probably just be for the bottle, same as the first time. Still, you can’t go wrong with it, and I would never dissuade anybody from trying it out. Pork rinds, on the other hand, I’d probably advise against in favour of tastier treats.

After writing a review of the strange beverage known as Marley’s Mellow Mood, I’ve found myself increasingly intrigued by the bizarre items that take up space on grocery and corner store shelves. I’ve often passed by a strange food product while hunting for Kettle Dutch Carmelized Onion and Smoked Gouda flavoured chips that has made me pause, occasionally picking whatever it is up to get a better look at it, and ponder what it tastes like. You know you’ve done it too. I guarantee, at some point in your life, you’ve noticed a weird food item at the grocery store and thought to yourself “Who even buys this stuff?”
I’ve therefore taken it upon myself to begin an exploration of these weird foods. Those non-brand-name, often funny smelling snacks that you’ve always wondered about will be documented and even consumed by Yours Truly, in an effort to…I dunno, find true happiness or some nonsense like that. So yesterday, I grabbed the long, wrinkly purple thing that can usually be found in my pants and set off for the local ethnic food shop. Yes, I made a penis joke about a ten dollar bill. But how could I not? It says “dix” right on it!

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The Divisoria Market was my destination for my first round of mind-expanding flavour exploration. Caitlyn suggested that it would be a good place to start, and she was totally right. The storefront that Divisoria occupies has been home to no fewer than three other businesses in the past five years. See that “Victoria’s Salon & Spa” sign? That’s not for the business next door – that’s a leftover from the last place housed by the building where Divisoria now resides. The front windows are full to the brim with strange Filipino and “Oriental Ethnic” foods, which of course means that the inside is a treasure trove of oddities.

Being that I’m a moron, I cunningly cropped out the two front window products I liked the most, but you can still see them in the top right and bottom right corners of the photo: BluSkies crackers (I pronounce it “bluskies”) and Cup Keyk cupcakes.

The inside of the store was as cluttered as the front windows would lead you to believe. I swear, at least half of all the stock was on the floor. The place also reeked of fish.

I wanted to select a nice mix of stuff that I thought might taste good and stuff that I thought would taste horrible. While the strawberry pudding was a strange kind of scented bathroom candle pastel pink, I felt pretty certain that it would taste about the way I expected. Likewise for the garlic flavour crispy chicken skin chips…but I’m definitely coming back for those, because they sound awesome.

Here’s what I ended up choosing (clockwise from the top centre): Gina brand guyabano nectar, Chin Chin honey flavour grass jelly drink, Annie’s Hany milk chocolate with peanut butter, Eng BeeTin Hopiakundol frozen Winter Melon Cake and Marty’s Baconette Strips.

If I had to predict the order from best to worst of the flavours of these assorted snacks and drinks, it would be something like this: Hany chocolate, Baconette Strips, Gina guyabano nectar, Hopiakundol winter melon cake, Chin Chin grass jelly drink. But frankly, I’m not betting on anything tasting good beyond the chocolate. So let’s start with that one, since it will likely be the most boring.

The chocolates are individually wrapped in miniature bars about the size of your standard Halloween candy bar. They have a distinctly grainy look to them, and the colour is a light milk chocolate brown, the colour of cheap chocolate usually received during Easter.

The taste is fine, though. The grainy look is because the peanut butter and chocolate have actually been mixed together to form sort of drier, chocolatey peanut butter bars. They crumble pleasantly in your mouth and are a perfectly passable snack. These are more for peanut butter fans than for chocolate fans, though. On to the Baconette Strips!

The packaging on this one bore some pretty awesome copy. Not only does the front of the bag declare in big letters that the “bacon-flavored snack” is “no-meat goodness”, but the back reveals some rather interesting ingredients.

The “Nature-Identical Bacon Flavor” is a bit worrying, as is the presence of Red dye no. 40, but the real red-flag, alarm-sounding ingredient is TBHQ, which was “added to retard rancidity”. I’m sorry, but if the word “retard” turns up in the ingredients of my snack, I tend to get a little scared. Let’s take a look at one of these things.

Okay, that’s basically what the bag advertizes. As the bacon flavour is simulated, the chip has a sort of dog treat bacony aroma to it. The chips themselves aren’t particularly remarkable, though. As Webmaster Mike put it: “They have the texture of Ringolos and the flavour of Hickory Sticks”. In other words, they’ve vaguely bacony corn-chippy things. Not bad, but there are better chips out there. Time for a beverage, I think.

I had no idea what a guyabano was when I bought this, which is the only reason this one is a gamble in my eyes. Most fruit nectars that come in these slim cans with blue labels are tasty, so it’s really just the mystery fruit that makes this one anything but ordinary.

The colour is a bit milky, but nectar is thick, so I guess that’s cool. Let’s have a taste.

…

It’s nice. Kind of a pineapple/banana/pear mix of flavours. Now to see just what a guyabano is anyway.

…

Oh. It’s just a soursop. I’ve had these things before, ages ago. They’re in the same family as the pawpaw, and they’re not flavourful enough for me to want to seek them out on a regular basis, but they’re also enjoyable enough that I won’t turn one down if it’s offered to me. One of those kinds of foods. Alright, time to get really weird as I try…the FROZEN WINTER MELON CAKE!

Before I open this, let me list off some key ingredients: mung beans, winter melon, sesame seeds, and onion. Waitminute. ONION? What is onion doing in what is essentially an ice cream bar? I can overlook the potential weirdness of the inclusion of mung beans (I’ve eaten and enjoyed Asian mung bean ice cream before), but adding onions is a step too far. Warning bells are going off in my head as I open this package…

Well those aren’t what I expected. Here I thought this would be some kind of ice cream sandwich thing, but instead I get four small cakes coated in sesame seeds faintly smelling of onions. I’m too chicken to bite into one of these blindly, so I’m going to cut it in half to take a look at what’s under all those sesame seeds.

Looks like custard all the way through, but the flavour is absolutely awful. The ingredients list gives a surprisingly accurate description of what you’re getting into with Hopiakundol, because the dessert really does taste like melon-flavoured bean paste, rolled in sesame seeds, and chased with a big stinky whiff of tear-inducing onion vapour. I don’t know how anyone could stomach these. I couldn’t even get through half of one, they’re so gross. But probably nowhere near as gross as my final item.

I have no idea what to expect out of a honey flavoured grass jelly drink. This is so far outside my comfort zone that I have no point of reference to help me determine what the taste of grass jelly might be. Judging by the picture of a glass of black sludge on the front of the can, though, it’s probably not going to be pleasant. I’m hoping it will be something like the tapioca pearls you can get in bubble tea. But somehow, I doubt I will get my wish.

Ugh. Look at how the little jelly bits clog up the can. The liquid portion of this beverage is the colour of black coffee and it smells like iced tea. The flavour is that of iced tea with honey added to the point of sickly sweetness, but the overall murky puddle colour and random squishy bits make it a somewhat stomach-turning experience to sample. Yuck. Avoid at all costs.

And so ends my first expedition into the realm of weird foods. I can’t say as I came away with any surprisingly tasty finds that I would gladly purchase again, but if I had to pick one, I’d say go for the chocolate. Chocolate’s always a safe bet. I’m still very perplexed at the inclusion of onion in those Winter Melon Cakes. If the onion had only been left off, I might have been able to enjoy a whole cake instead of choking down half of one and then running for the bathroom. Here’s hoping my next trip to Divisoria yields something really cool. I’m looking at you, garlic flavour crispy chicken skin chips.

It was noon and the fridge was empty, so I wandered over to the local Hartman’s with the goal of picking up a Bombay chicken salad and a beverage to call my lunch. What I found…was something most unusual. A strange drink called Marley’s Mellow Mood was on sale, and as the bottle proudly declared that it would “reduce stress and relieve tension” under a picture of Bob Marley laughing and looking altogether too happy, I simply could not resist purchasing a bottle. Let’s examine this stuff a little closer, shall we?

My photos aren’t exactly high definition, so here’s what it says on the front of the bottle:

All Natural Relaxation
MARLEY’S MELLOW MOOD

Green Tea with Honey
Relieves Stress & Reduces Tension
473mL

So it’s basically the opposite of an energy drink. The anti-caffeine/guarana beverage. There’s no way this stuff doesn’t contain cannabis.

The label on the back is covered in medical and nutritional facts. Here they are with commentary by Yours Truly.

Recommended Use Or Purpose (I love how the stoners who brewed this couldn’t make up their mind as to the wording): Marley’s Mellow Mood is formulated with an all natural proprietary relaxation blend, which may help promote relaxation (double use of ‘relaxation’…must get a thesaurus) and reduce anxiety, while maintaining alertness. (I hope that the ‘alertness’ isn’t also known as ‘paranoia’)

Recommended Dose: Drink 1 473mL bottle a day as needed. Do not consume more than 4 bottles per day. (Oh no! He’s become…TOO MELLOW! I wonder if you turn into the Fonz if you become too mellow…) Do not exceed the recommended dose. (Waitaminute, why didn’t they just say “Do not drink more than 1 bottle per day”? I’m starting to wonder how safe this stuff is. It’s also pretty strange that they don’t recommend drinking more than one of these a day. Kinda cuts down the potential for sales, doesn’t it?)

Non-Medicinal Ingredients: Filtered water, sugar, citric acid decaffeinated green tea, natural green tea flavour, natural honey flavour.

It’s that valerian that’s going to make me all mellow. In case you’ve never heard of it, valerian is a sedative herb that’s often used to treat insomnia. I’ve never used it, but I hear it gives you weird dreams. I’ve also heard that Passionflower has similar effects.
According to the Marley’s Mellow Mood official website, the hops promotes relaxation and inhibits adrenaline, the chamomile flower reduces anxiety, the lemon balm enhances mood, alertness and calm, and the melatonin relaxes muscles. Makes me wonder how this stuff is going to taste. It’s the same yellow-y green colour as normal iced green tea…

…and it tastes exactly the same, too. This honestly tastes no different than Nestea brand green iced tea. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to sit around and mellow out for a bit to see what this mystery potion does to me.

15 Minutes Later: I feel a tiny bit buzzed, maybe a slight disconnection from my body. It’s the same kind of feeling I get after I take penicillin when I’m sick – like a very minor kind of loopiness. Of course, this could just be psychosomatic. Or a symptom of Bombay chicken salad that’s gone off.

45 Minutes Later: Well, I fell asleep shortly after I wrote that last paragraph. I just slumped back in my chair and dozed off almost instantly. Maintains alertness my foot! This thing knocked me out pretty thoroughly. There’s drool on my shoulder.

The bottle bears the following warning:

Caution: Do not operate heavy machinery after taking Marley’s Mellow Mood relaxation drink. Not recommended for children. Do not take if you are pregnant or breastfeeding. Do not consume with alcohol. Melatonin: consult a healthcare practitioner prior to use if you have a hormonal disorder, diabetes, liver or kidney disease, cerebral palsy, seizure disorders or if you suffer from migraines or depression and/or hypertension or if you are using blood pressure or sedative medication.

Holy shit! Maybe I should have read that first. Reading that completely undid all the mellowness! Let that be a lesson to you kids: always read the label!

Marley’s Mellow Mood is a very unusual drink. It tastes fine, and the slumber I sank into after consuming it wasn’t unpleasant at all; since the bottle promises some degree of alertness, I can’t help but wonder if my dozing off was a sign that the product is defective, and thus the reason the drink was on sale. I doubt I could function if I drank one of these every day.

So, to wrap it up, I wouldn’t recommend Marley’s Mellow Mood for any occasion besides getting some shut-eye. If you’re having trouble sleeping, it will probably help you out, and I could definitely see myself drinking one and passing out on the couch in front of the TV on a lazy afternoon. Beyond that, I like to think I’m mellow enough that I don’t need Bob Marley’s Mystery Juice to calm me down.

I hath returned with a new extreme sandwich! This one had a lot more planning put into it – I decided to make it for a specific event, and I got a friend with much greater cooking experience than I to help me with it. To start with, it was…a day or two after St. Patrick’s Day. Some friends were throwing a sort of belated St. Patrick’s Day party which was officially named “The Green Party”. I had considered making some of my Great White Machetes, but someone pointed out that it would be more appropriate to supply something green. As such, I seized the opportunity to create a new extreme sandwich, this time with the following requirements – something green, something with potato, and an Irish alcohol.

I also decided to go about making these sandwiches with the help of a friend who lived nearby and was also attending the party, Nina Paciocco, who actually studied cooking and works as a pastry chef, which is significantly more experience than I can claim to have in the field of culinary arts. And, for the record, she did pretty much all the work – at the party, people would ask me if I made it. Every time I said yes, Nina would suddenly be there to hear it before I could explain her assistance, and every time I said that she did all the work…well, she wasn’t there, but if she HAD been I would’ve seemed like less of a douchebag! Anyways, apart from doing all the work while I came up with whatever recipe alterations came to mind, she also provided the crucial element of the spinach spread which we used on the bread for this particular sandwich.

So for the key ingredients, we needed something green – that one was easy for me, because I love jalapeños. Funny thing is, we didn’t even need the jalapeños, because the spinach in Nina’s spinach spread would’ve covered the green requirement anyways. But again, I love me some jalapeños. For the potato part, I considered a number of things before Nina suggested potato bread, which also gave us a direction to go in for the actual ends of the sandwich. Then out of all the Irish alcohol options I chose Guinness, because I figured it would be the simplest to cook with and would give us a wide array of options.

With those elements figured out, we just had to figure out the rest of the ingredients – most importantly, the meat! We quickly decided that the best thing to do with the Guinness would be to stir fry strip beef in it, along with some jalapeño and garlic. And of course, we added bacon! The spinach spread was actually prepared beforehand because we were using leftovers, but when we got to the actual cooking process, we did the beef stir fry while at the same time cooking the bacon in the oven. Once that was done, we cut the potato bread into a whole bunch of sandwiches, applied the spinach spread, added diced jalapeño to the sandwiches directly, and then added the bacon and beef – simple as that!

For the spinach spread, here’s the recipe Nina sent me:

1. Preheat oven to 425F
2. Heat 2 tbs olive oil with 1 med. onion and 2-3 cloves of garlic (both diced)
3. Add 2lbs spinch and cook down (should wilt completely)
4. Add 1 can artichoke hearts (drain and chopped)
5. Tranfer to a colander and let some of the excess liquid drain out
6. Meanwhile, melt 6 oz cream cheese into 1/2 cup milk with 3 dashes of worcester sauce and 3 dashes of hot sauce (more if you’re not serving it to pussies)
7. Add the spinich mix back in and 1/4 cup mozzarella (shredded) and salt and pepper
8. Transfer to a shallow baking dish and put 1/2 cup more mozzarella on top
9. Bake till golden and bubbly (about 20-30 min)

And to summarize…

• Potato bread (however much you need, really)
• Spinach spread on the top end.
• Strip beef, stir fried with one diced jalapeño, garlic, and Guinness. (This part smells fucking awesome.)
• BACON!
• One diced jalapeño added directly to the sandwich.

I guess the way to do it is make the spinach spread first, cook the bacon in the oven while you stir fry the beef, cut the bread, apply the spread, dice the jalapeño and apply it, and then apply the MEAT! Enjoy your Irish Fire Axe!

I had been asked to come to Wendy’s for 10AM. I wasn’t entirely sure as to why… I knew it had something to do with the application I had put in several months ago, but I wasn’t sure if I was looking at an interview, training, or what. This was kind of a trivial thing for me – I already have a job. On the other hand, said job gives me about one shift per month, so the idea of getting one wherein I actually made some money was kind of appealing. The other questionable aspect of working at Wendy’s was that, having worked at KFC for three years, I wasn’t exactly excited to work in fast food again. All this aside, I decided what the hell, and set out for whatever this meeting would be about.

But I had an additional objective in mind! After the thing at Wendy’s, I would stop by the nearest grocery store and assemble the ingredients required to make CANDIED BACON! I had already tasted the magnificent treat before, but I don’t have much of a history as far as cooking goes, so this would be my first time actually MAKING the delicacy. I went and picked up a can of real maple syrup (by far the most expensive thing on the list), a bag of brown sugar (to be honest, I might have already had this somewhere in my house, but I wasn’t going to take that chance), and a pack of bacon.

When I got home, I put the bacon in the oven, mixed the brown sugar and maple syrup, took the bacon out, glazed the bacon with the sweet brown sauce, put the bacon back in, and after repeating the last three steps until I was out of sauce. I let the bacon cook for another 10 minutes before finally turning off the oven and laying my strips of candied bacon out on a plate so I could snack on them throughout the next little while.

Once I was down to two strips, though, I found that I wasn’t quite satisfied. I guess I was, at that point, craving a bit more of a meal – preferably one that I could get these last two strips of bacon involved in. I decided the best method for this would be to make a sandwich, so I discussed ideas for said sandwich with Gill. The first step I came up with was to wrap the candied bacon in 3 slices of lunchmeat style ham and then shred cheddar cheese over it, which would be melted all together. I also decided to add a crumble of crushed up Cool Ranch Doritos to the cheese, making it all melt into a kind of crunchy nacho topping atop pig wrapped in candy wrapped in pig. For the ends of the sandwich, naturally some kind of spread was in order. Gill and I had initially decided on peanut butter, but I later discovered that the peanut butter was missing, which is actually pretty unusual. Regardless, I went through the various condiments in my kitchen and finally decided (clearing the idea with Gill first) to use a spread of cream cheese. I am so glad I did this, because it was amazing.

Next time I make this, I’m gonna to make 2 changes. Namely, I will be putting it on a bagel (lightly toasted) instead of bread, and I will be adding Fireball Whiskey to the sauce with which I candy the bacon.

>So to summarize, here is the makeup of the sandwich which I dubbed “The Great White Machete” (it’s pretty white). I’m including an alcoholic and non-alcoholic variation.

• 2 Slices of White Bread OR 1 White Bagel (Lightly Toasted)
• Cream Cheese Spread on Both Ends
• Candied Bacon (Bacon glazed with a mix of maple syrup and brown sugar) ALCOHOLIC VERSION: Add Fireball Whiskey to Bacon glaze
• 3 Slices of Lunchmeat Style Sliced Ham, Wrapped Around the Candied Bacon
• Cheddar Cheese Shredded on top of the Ham Wraps
• Cool Ranch Doritos Crumble Mixed With the Shredded Cheese

Put the candied bacon wrapped in ham on a plate, shred the cheese onto it, crush the doritos over it, and then put the plate in the microwave and nuke it for 33 seconds. Spread the cream cheese on the bread or bagel, then take everything on the plate and put it between the two ends of the sandwich. Enjoy your Great White Machete!

Today is August 16th, 2010, and exactly 33 years ago, Elvis Presley was found dead on his bathroom floor in Memphis. The supposed cause of his death was due to drugs, but after today, I know what killed the King of Rock and Roll.

In honour of the dead singer, I made a lunch out of one of his famous fried peanut butter, bacon and banana sandwiches.

I used too much bacon.

It was awful and delicious all at the same time. I’d recommend it to anyone. Happy Elvis Death Day!