Bigger Bigger Bigger please. That’s my thinking on this very portable, very challenging plastic encased cold treat. So you get these in pairs, you rip them apart. The top section is scored and pops right off. You want to drink/eat this frozen shake right away but you can’t because it’s stone hard. About 4 minutes after you’ve left it sitting next to you, taunting your desires, you can finally squeeze out the goodness. I have tried and simply cannot describe eating this without disgusting descriptions ruining your experience. But it’s real good and I wish it were a larger single treat rather than a pair of extremely annoying ones.  The plastic container is terrible. You’ll pop out your eyes trying to get to the last part. Hard to get at everything, and terrible to discard. Still it’s fun and novel and very much tastes like a chocolate shake. Love the taste, hate the packaging. Yum.

If you are a fan of Japanese restaurants, you have seen or eaten Edamame for sure. If you drive through parts of Missouri or Kansas, you’ve also seen fields of soybeans. Americans don’t eat soybeans right out of the pods much. We mostly ingest them in secret ingredients. Edamame are also a common beer snack. These soybean pod crackers mimic real edamame in size and shape but are just a baked cracker with a texture similar to Pepperidge Farm Goldfish crackers. The edamame crackers do in fact taste a little like salted edamame, more than I expected. Mostly they are just a nice snack that replaces chips or pretzels quite well. Since I can’t translate the company name at the moment, I’ll leave that for later. Likely you won’t find them any time soon in the U.S anyway. However you can get lucky sometimes with these types of snacks as California distributors will help bring them into Asian supermarkets, which as you must know, are great places to get snacks.

Oh cool, pretzel waves. Seems like a good idea. A wave is like an oceans way of saying “Hello, hope you like salt up your nose.”
If I were to drag you across Mexico and leave you for dead in the desert, you might be thinking that the experience was a little like the last time you bit into a Rold Gold Garlic Pretzel Wave. No amount of added water will ever balance them to make them edible.  I actually think that these bring a choking risk with them because they are so dry. The garlic coating was no help. The flavor was boring and I couldn’t get over the dryness.

But I think it was a good try. Crack open one of these in your hands and it creates a new layer of atmosphere where no life can exist. You have been warned. Don’t fret Rold Gold/Frito Lay, I still love your snacks, but I must ‘wave’ goodbye to this particular one forever.

Did you ever see the movie Disturbia, where Shia Lebeouf is under house arrest, and while spying on neighbors fill part of his time by creating a twinkie pyramid.  Yeah I thought that was dumb too.  And THEN I saw this.

The snack stadium

And of course it made Disturbia look not only dumb, but lazy. When I was young, I recall going to various homes for Holiday parties and inevitably somebody would have made a Christmas cookie house of gingerbread or some kind of setup that, to my horror, looked delicious but would never see the inside of my stomach, as it would be just for show and would eventually go to waste.  I’ve grown up now, the shock is a lot less now that I have begun to appreciate architecture a little more.

I’ve got a few new snack items for review on the way, so if you are one of the three people who follow this blog, don’t give up on me yet.

Reader’s Digest online published a good article on tea’s health benefits. Several teas are covered. I find tea to be undesirable most of the time, but the more I read, the more I realize how much I need a habit.

Check out this article on the value in the anti-oxidants in tea.

This will be brief and I’m not posting a picture because you can use your imagination to create a silver wrapper with the logo on it or just find it somewhere else.  I bought this candy bar, the 3 Musketeers Dark Chocolate Mint last night when I was forced to hang out at JoAnn’s Fabrics with the Ms.

It was a good light experience and I recommend this bar if you like to impulse buy at the counter.  The mint is just right. Where often mint is a little overwhelming in cheap candy. Yeah I’m talking to you York Patty. The dark chocolate is just right. It’s a winning formula.

I give it an A.  And I’ll even give JoAnn’s a B for carrying the bar and also for having a pretty cool American made toolset for jewelry-makers.

I’ve been wanting to show some of the superior aspects of vending machines in Japan for some time. It’s disappointing about the lack of variety and technology in vending in the United States. Certainly not all vending machines in Japan are bursting with innovation and flavor, but thankfully they are different and should give us ideas of what is possible. Vending Craze in Japan via Dark Roasted Blend.

Scientific American has an article on “The Science of Snacks: Thinking Makes you Hungry.”  It makes me want to say ‘duh’, but I suppose given that when there is a passage of time and assuming that my brain is nearly always thinking, that there’s  either a correlation of thinking and being hungry or there’s not.

FTA:

A study in the journal Psychosomatic Medicine contends that intellectual work—that’s right, I’m calling writing this stuff, ya know, intellectual—induces a big increase in caloric intake.

What a great idea over at this AOL food site. Can you identify candy bars by looking at their cross section? Check it out here.

I have written about pepper popcorn before. Because when I first had it, I said “what the hell, why isn’t this available in Microwave form in my grocery store?” And finally we have it just four years later. It would be great if I somehow influenced this. So Jolly Time had the “kernels” to create this microwave version before everyone else. I think so anyway. And I am very happy with the result. My first few bags weren’t as tasty as the specialty pepper flavor from Japan I had, but whatever, it’s going to work. I’ve bought a couple more boxes, if that tells you anything. This snack burns my lips, but you don’t care about that probably. What you care about is that this is popcorn and it’s a new flavor and there’s really not much else to be said. Wait there is one more thing. The packages I have bought have been marked with “No Diacetyl” which is one of the chemicals that gives the buttery aroma to popcorn, but has been found to cause a permanent bronchial disease in popcorn factory workers. I’m glad this is getting phased out. Snacks should be made to improve people’s lives, not hurt them.