Dueling reviews?
2 minute read
March 13, 2021, 8:25 PM
A few weeks ago, Elyse bought some ice cream from H Mart, which is a chain of international grocery stores. One was cheese-flavored, and the other was corn and cheese-flavored. Both of those are flavors that you don’t typically see in regular grocery stores. Elyse had planned to review them on YouTube, and she did so in a live video on Friday night:
Continue reading…Categories: Elyse, Food and drink
Vegetable smoothies?
4 minute read
July 1, 2020, 5:20 PM
For a while now, Elyse and I had been coming up with ways to use up certain food items in the house that we were not going through. It stems from the way that my eating has changed ever since I had the sleeve surgery back in December. Ever since then, I can’t eat a regular-sized meal anymore, and haven’t eaten off of a regular-sized plate in a very long time. If I’m eating off of a plate, it’s one of the small plates, but more commonly, I eat out of a six-ounce ramekin, or out of a mug. That works for me for the most part, but with such limited capacity, I end up getting my protein in, but I haven’t been as good about vegetables. Typically, for vegetables, I try to throw some in when I make eggs, and then I also get it in when I make that vegan chili that I like. But I want to say that just that is probably insufficient, and so the thought came up about how to (A) get more vegetables in, and (B) use up several large bags of broccoli and California mix that have been sitting in my basement freezer ever since before the surgery.
So Elyse and I thought about making smoothies with what we have around the house. The idea seemed reasonable enough. I have a Ninja blender, and there was food that needed a purpose. The idea was to put it in and grind it up. The bag of vegetables that was on the top in the freezer was the broccoli:
Categories: Food and drink, Weight loss
“Crisp bacon strips, sliced French bread, hot cheesy sauce, on a plate full of macaroni!”
4 minute read
December 25, 2017, 10:14 AM
For the last several years, I’ve made it something of a tradition of watching the Today’s Special episodes “Christmas Part 1” and “Christmas Part 2” on or around Christmas Eve. It only makes sense to me. Most Christmas specials are awful, but Today’s Special‘s two Christmas episodes are outside of that mold, taking the same care with Christmas that they do when discussing the night or feelings. The end result is a timeless story that still leaves me feeling warm and fuzzy inside after all these years.
This year, I decided to take a minor element from those episodes and bring it into real life. Across the two episodes, they sing their own variation of “The Twelve Days of Christmas” using food. It starts out early when Sam sings, “On the first day of Christmas, my true love gave to me a plate full of macaroni!” Then Muffy later adds, “Hot cheesy sauce on my plate full of macaroni!” Near the end of the second episode, it takes its full form:
On the fourth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me crisp bacon strips, sliced French bread, hot cheesy sauce, on a plate full of macaroni!
So on Friday evening, I went to the grocery store after work and bought this:
Pasta, generic Velveeta, bread, and bacon.
Categories: Christmas, Food and drink, Today's Special
I definitely didn’t expect to go to New York City on Wednesday…
7 minute read
August 25, 2017, 12:30 PM
Wednesday, August 23 had been planned as a road trip day for quite some time. Elyse turned 21 two days prior, and this was my birthday present to her, going on a trip up to Asbury Park, New Jersey to visit the Silverball Museum, a pinball arcade on the boardwalk. We previously visited this facility in May. Then the plan was to go up to Menlo Park Mall in Edison to go to Rainforest Cafe, where we were having dinner, and I was buying Elyse a drink. The day that we ended up having was a lot of fun, but definitely more expansive than I had originally planned.
We left the house around 11:00, with Asbury Park as our destination. We made a quick stop at Maryland House, and then a White Castle in Howell Township:
Categories: Asbury Park, Birthdays, Companies, Elyse, Food and drink, New York City, New York Subway, Roads, Video games
That rare case when a company gets a reformulation right…
3 minute read
August 13, 2017, 1:55 PM
Some of you may have heard about how Coca-Cola Zero (aka “Coke Zero”) is being replaced by Coca-Cola Zero Sugar. I heard it and I was a bit concerned about this. After all, we saw how bad Diet Pepsi with sucralose was. I was especially concerned with this after Pepsi, in response to their own reformulation, then rereleased the old version in parallel to the new one, and it’s very hard to find. I liked Coke Zero, and I hoped that Coke Zero Sugar would not be the same disaster that the new version of Diet Pepsi was two years ago.
First of all, for those of you who are not familiar: Coke Zero is (was?) a diet version of regular Coke. Diet Coke is a completely different flavor, and has little relation to the original Coke, other than the name. I was pleased when Coke Zero was released in 2005, and discovered that it was a diet version of regular Coke. I just plain don’t like Diet Coke, but Coke Zero was good. I could drink that.
I was tipped off to Coke Zero Sugar’s arrival by a friend who found it at a local Safeway, so I swung by:
Side-by-side comparison of old vs. new. Note the additional red on the new version.
Categories: Food and drink
Taste testing some novelty sodas…
4 minute read
June 4, 2017, 2:30 PM
This past Thursday, Elyse and I finished up a round of taste tests on a bunch of novelty sodas that we bought at Rocket Fizz in Richmond back in March. Recall from the second Journal entry about our Richmond trip:
Categories: Food and drink, Richmond
Soda, toys, and a Kroger like no other…
5 minute read
April 6, 2017, 2:07 PM
So, as promised, here’s the rest of the trip to Richmond that Elyse and I made.
After leaving the Science Museum, we headed over to Carytown. Elyse wanted me to see Rocket Fizz, which is where she got some bottles of “Stalinade”, a strawberry-flavored soda that, as I said on Instagram at the time, was “Communism in a glass. Definitely tastes the way that I would expect communism to taste: red.” They have a very large selection of unique sodas, and some with novelty flavors, and some with novelty names. I ended up buying a six-pack of novelty flavors. Here was the take:
Categories: Companies, Elyse, Food and drink, Richmond
I have been to Pennsylvania a lot lately…
14 minute read
August 27, 2016, 6:27 AM
In the span of two weeks, Elyse and I went to Pennsylvania three different times. We went to Hanover on the 8th, Harrisburg on the 11th, and then Harrisburg again on the 18th. Two of the trips were to scout out some potential sites for photography, as well as get something out of our system from the earlier bus trip, and then one was to bring the bus back for my friend.
The first trip was to Hanover. This was one of those “seeing America” kind of trips, about catching a shot of whatever we found interesting, as well as scouting locations for further attention with our SLR cameras when the weather was more accommodating (it was hot and humid out – yuck). Elyse met me at my house, and then we left for Hanover via Westminster. On the way up to Westminster, we both knew about a certain street off of Georgia Avenue in Carroll County near Eldersburg and Sykesville (yes, I refer to Route 97 as “Georgia Avenue” all the way up to Gettysburg), and had to get a photo of it with Elyse. Check it out:
Categories: Amtrak, Companies, Driving, Elyse, Food and drink, Friends, Hanover, Harrisburg, National politics, Pennsylvania, Railroads, School buses, West Virginia, Westminster
A good year for soda nostalgia, but…
3 minute read
August 19, 2016, 10:38 PM
2016 has been a good year for those nostalgic for the nineties. First Coca-Cola brought out this:
Categories: Food and drink
Getting a “big boy” camera…
6 minute read
January 20, 2016, 1:44 PM
Last Thursday was a lot of fun. I got together with Elyse, with the intent of getting some sample material to evaluate for the future purchase of a new camera. This new camera will be a digital SLR, as I am quite confident that I have outgrown the “prosumer” level of camera that I have operated on since Big Mavica in 2002. I discovered that in 2014 when I photographed Brighton Dam and Triadelphia Reservoir with a borrowed Nikon Coolpix P510. The photos with that camera came out well enough, but other than a few extra pixels because of the higher resolution on that camera, I didn’t get any better features than my existing camera.
But first, after Elyse and I got together, we had lunch at Jimmy John’s. I had a sandwich, and Elyse just had one of the day-old rolls that they sell:
Categories: Cameras, Elyse, Food and drink, Maryland, Retail
A lesson on where not to store soda…
3 minute read
January 14, 2016, 1:26 AM
…and apparently, the place where not to store soda is the refrigerator. Seriously.
I put a bottle of diet root beer in the back of the refrigerator, and apparently it was too close to the vent where the cold air came out. The contents of the bottle froze, and the additional pressure found a way out through a small weak point near the top of the bottle. That created this overnight:
Categories: Food and drink, House
Cranberry sauce. From a can.
3 minute read
November 26, 2015, 10:09 PM
First of all, I hope that everyone had a happy Thanksgiving. I certainly did. Since I have Wednesdays and Thursdays off for the current pick at work, Thanksgiving worked out perfectly, so I went down to Stuarts Draft on Wednesday and came back Thursday. Not bad.
That said, one of the things that we had with our Thanksgiving dinner was cranberry sauce. My opinion on cranberry sauce is that if it doesn’t look like the can it came out of, it’s not cranberry sauce. Last year, I posted this photo to Instagram, and captioned it thusly:
“This is that weird kind of cranberry sauce that doesn’t look like the can it came out of.”
Categories: Family, Food and drink, Stuarts Draft, Thanksgiving
I think they just took the “uh-huh” out of Diet Pepsi…
5 minute read
August 20, 2015, 6:25 PM
You may recall that I made a Journal entry back in April regarding some blown blood vessels in my eyes. Turns out that my body will no longer allow me to have coffee, after I discovered that no matter whether it was commercially brewed, brewed at home, cheap coffee, or expensive coffee, I would be awake with an upset stomach. And it was very sudden, too. One day, I could drink as much coffee as I wanted, and then the next, it was verboten. Ultimately, I had to give up coffee completely, which some of my former coworkers might be quite surprised to hear. Surprisingly, it wasn’t the caffeine that was causing the problems, but something else in the coffee that was causing me problems. Therefore, I ended up replacing coffee with diet soda in order to get my caffeine. After initially bouncing between different diet sodas for a while, I eventually became a regular Diet Pepsi drinker. It seemed to work for me, and it tasted pretty good.
Then they started fooling around with the sweetener.
You may have heard the news a few months ago that Pepsi was planning to discontinue the use of aspartame in Diet Pepsi, and replace it with sucralose. For those not familiar with the generic names, aspartame has been marketed under the names NutraSweet and Equal, and sucralose has been marketed as Splenda. Then this past Tuesday, I was at the grocery store, and spotted this:
Categories: Food and drink
I never thought that could happen…
4 minute read
April 5, 2015, 3:20 AM
Among things that I never thought could happen, I never thought that throwing up could cause blood vessels in your eyes to break. But take a look at this.
This is what my eyes looked like on Friday night:
Categories: Food and drink, Personal health
Best birthday cake ever…
2 minute read
August 28, 2014, 11:46 AM
My friend Elyse recently celebrated a birthday, and, as a fellow fire alarm enthusiast, she got what I consider to be the greatest cake ever. She sent me pictures of it. Take a look:
Categories: Birthdays, Elyse, Fire alarms, Food and drink