“Pork Rinds…Gakkkk!!”  I still remember the scene in “Big” with Tom Hanks. Perfect comic timing with that can of silly string.

Driving across the state of Missouri, you see a lot of strange, unappealing, offbrand snacks in service stations. (I am not prejudiced against offbrands ok. Some of my best friends are offbrands.) Anyway I was sure buying these flavored pork rinds would be another of the many mistakes. However (and this all depends on whether you would buy pork rinds in the first place) this Chili-Lime flavor of the Turkey Creek Fried Pork Skins were excellent. It took reminding myself of what I was eating in order to stop crunching. My animal instincts were in full force. ‘Twas the right amount of heat and citrus for any snack. To many, pork rinds are disgusting. And part of me is in that camp. Still, I can eat them just like I can eat bacon occasionally. I think the ingredients in this bag could definitely be a little better (based on my memory of the label). I haven’t compared this brand with others so it might be in line with the standard pork rind process.

This is the flavor for this snack. While Spitz Dill Pickle is THE flavor for sunflower seeds, from now on Chili-lime is hereby the official flavor for pork rinds. Others either cannot properly mask the gameyness or they just burn your face off. (Update: They have a Salt & Vinegar version. We may have a contender here, I’ll see if I can get some.)

A word about the packaging. My opinion, they are undermining their snack ideas with subpar packaging. The design is too obvious with the outlined pig, lime and pepper illustration on the transparent bag. Maybe they are targeting people who really love pork rinds, but as a pork rind skeptic, I almost didn’t buy these due to the cheap design. Perhaps they could experiment with an opaque light brown or white packaging, putting some thought in the typography and pointing out the uniqueness of this flavor. Also the Turkey Creek bag logo needs some help. They are paying a lot of money for the full color logo to be shown and it doesn’t work on the bag well. Maybe I will eventually develop brand affinity for them, who knows.

We went to the Hakuen Shopu (100 yen shop (dollar store)) today. We looked at a number of very useless things. The snack section there is not bad, however you will find some obvious rejects. I’m not sure if this Crisp Crunch Coffee patty thing is a reject, though given its oddity, I’d suspect it. I have to be honest, the taste and texture aren’t too bad. Coffee is a lesser used snack flavor and tasty when paired with chocolate of course. If you like Star Crunch from Little Debbie, which has near the most disgusting unreal chocolate created, this one is quite good compared. We are all used to crispy chocolate candy stuff (Nestle Crunch bar, duh) but it’s just that something about this snack doesn’t scream delectable. But it’s fun and funny and has a cocoa / coffee taste, which I usually love. I had a few good bites out of it, so I wanted to share it. I definitely had to share the real thing, as I couldn’t eat this monster alone unless I was paid to do so. I searched the web to find it, but then I got tired. Some other snacks from its company Cisco’s are available online, maybe I’ll post it when I have time. (I’m lying, I’ll never have time.) If you are dying to try a snack that I don’t genuinely drool over, just because it has chocolate and coffee in it, I suppose you’ll find the energy to look it up on your own. I recommend you pick up something more beautiful from a decent chocolate retailer instead though.

Here’s a pic of this bad boy with the 7″ diameter.

Could writing about snacks be more challenging? You look for tasty things, snacks you can share, even ones that have more wholesome ingredients, and then you find out that you can be undermined by a small detail like Acrylamide. Such is the case for several brands of potato chips that I have enjoyed in the past. Apparently, a carcinogen Acrylamide forms naturally when starchy foods are baked or fried. Which resulted in some lawsuit, settlements and eventually, some labeling requirements.

The company, Jay’s, makers of Krunchers was not named in the lawsuit but since they still are making kettled fried chips, who really knows if their chips are any safer. I figure, if you are eating chips anyway, these aren’t going to kill you any faster. Look for the Krunchers Chips in the white bag. They are 40% Less Fat, plus less salt, and the ingredients are only, potatoes, salt and oil. I thought they tasted great and seemed to have a lot going for them. I can’t say whether they are more or less a risky food, when it comes to Acrylamide. All I know is, I have no reason to eat the black bag of Krunchers, when the white bag is a little more pure, from what I can see.

You know the cereal aisle at the grocery store. Go ahead and skip all that. Because an average cereal aisle has been corrupted for years. I wish it was funny that you have to go to the health food section to get some quality cereal. It’s really not funny, just sad and pathetic. You want less processed and above all, little or no sugar. When I was growing up, I never made good cereal choices, and now that I want to, I’m having a lot trouble finding them. Because many of the choices are misleading. If you want a healthy cereal, first you need to find whole ingredients. Next you need to make sure it hasn’t been dumped over by the sugar industry. I don’t know where the blame lies. Some say that with government subsidies, the sugar industry has to find any and every food it can, and fill it up with sugary essence. Others would say that the cereal companies are simply giving the public what it wants. Solving the problem will no doubt require battles on both fronts. But you can fight your own consumer war by buying really good cereals, and writing letters saying you want less sugar. How do I know this works? Because it worked for peanut butter.

My best two choices for you in cereals are: Uncle Sam’s Cereal with Mixed Berries and Kashi Go Lean Crunch, Honey Almond Flax.

A word of warning. Start small with the Uncle Sam cereal. If you are not used to bran, it can actually cause you pain. You have to build up your “resistance.” I was hungry one morning, and had a couple bowls of it. Don’t do that. You’re stomach and bowels won’t approve. What I’ve been doing lately is getting a bowl of the Kashi, and then putting the Uncle Sam flakes on top. Sound boring? Sure it is. Then you ad some more fruit (because freeze dried fruit is not nutritious) like blueberries and strawberries. And you’ve got a real breakfast meal there. After you do that for a while, you’ll wonder what kind of idiots would buy Oreo or Reese’s cereal. I know because I used to buy those cereals, and I was an idiot for doing it.

I’ve been on a diet lately. Let me rephrase that. I’ve been depriving myself lately. Yes that feels more honest. I’m trying to lose some weight before a vacation. I need to fit into that suit that I used to fit into. So that means that snackhunting for me gets a little greener and a little less sweet. Despite my current predicament, I want to recommend a snack I’ve liked even before this diet, but has made a comeback for me because of it.

Next time you hit the grocery store, see what kind of selection they have in hummus. If you’ve never heard of hummus, I wouldn’t be surprised. Though it shows up at dinner parties, I don’t find that many people have it sitting around. It’s made from chick peas, also known as garbanzo beans. It’s a pasty dip-like concoction with a Mediterranean origin I think. The legume properties of this snack are a plus right away. You can get a lot of different flavors, one example being sun-dried tomato. Many people will put hummus out with pita chips for people to snack on at a gathering. But let me just say that you can do better. Try to find some Wasa Hearty Rye Crackers. I won’t pretend they will be easy to find at your local market. But you might get lucky. These crackers are definitely hearty and many would even say Flavor Free. But when paired with the hummus, they become the snack they always dreamed of being.

If you want to try my favorite hummus, try out Wild Garden brand. I won’t say they are better than others, because I’ve only had three kinds of hummus, however their Roasted Red Pepper hummus is delicious on the rye crackers.

Break one of the large crackers into about four pieces and just dip in the hummus and enjoy. I’ve used it as a good after-work treat recently. But any time of day you need just a few seconds and it’s a much better choice than chips or candy. I love the flavor and it has become a staple in the house for the wife and me.

Snacks disappear, it is part of life. Halloween snacks disappear more rapidly than any other snack. This is usually because they are terrible snacks that don’t even deserve to have their own bin during the Halloween season. This year I found an exception I wanted to latch onto. But it’s going to go away forever I’m sure. Typically candy / cookie combinations are failures for me. They are too sweet or by mixing the two, cancel out the fun and texture of the individual snacks. That’s fine, I won’t ever fault companies or people from trying.

This year for the brief moment that it’s available, I want to say that the lengthy named Reese’s Pieces Crunchy Chocolate Cookie were the right combinations. Reese’s did the smart thing, they kept the snack light, lighter than the normal Reese’s Pieces in fact. I bought the 9 oz bag at the grocery store and ever since I finished them I thought, man, this snack deserves much more than the thirty-day span it’s going to get. If you said, M&M’s were to disappear in lieu of this snack, I’d be fine with that. I don’t have a link for you to get these, they aren’t even advertised on the Hershey / Reese’s website, look for them in the Halloween displays at your local grocery. Maybe next October, they will bring back the snack again.

If you like popcorn at all, your world is about to be rocked. Ok, well maybe not because this popcorn is quite elusive. I can’t find it on a few pages of google. In fact, a direct search of the snack’s title yields nothing. This means that I will have to rely on my source in Japan to get the popcorn for me. We are all used to salt and butter on popcorn, but actually pepper is the magic ingredient for a delicious snack. Pepper is very cheap and as soon as a company creates the bagged version here, or even the microwave incantation of pepper popcorn, it is going to take off. I don’t mean take off like elmo dolls and XBox 360’s, I mean really take off.

The olive oil part of this conception is good because it has a lighter taste and doesn’t have that filmy artifical butter feeling left on your tongue or teeth like a lot of popcorn will. The only downside is that there isn’t enough in a bag to satisfy me for as long as I like, which for this taste means forever. Just as well because you can’t find this snack in the United States anyway, or can you?

I have found Cheez-its to have rested on their laurels of late. Sure they made the white cheddar version, but that was like nine years ago. And since then, they have made the large size for some reason, and tried those disgusting little twist versions, which couldn’t possibly be made of worse flavors. But I will compliment them and recommend one of their flavors in the new “fiesta” line. (Thank goodness they didn’t call them “extreme”) The Chile Queso is definitely worth trying out. They are almost as addictive for me as the original.

What is the flavor like? Mmm, something mexican? I can’t really describe it. Perhaps I’m too distracted by their triangle shape. Actually since this is my first entry in a while, clearly I have to brush up on my influential food-writer-jargon.