Thinking about some magical food moments from my past I can't help but immediately gravitate towards the splenderferious invention that graced America's freezers in 1982 (by my best educated guesstimates), the Pudding Pop.  Sure, there are other frozen treats that I love, Screwballs, Otter Pops, and Slurpees, but sucking on a pudding pop was like having a symphony in your mouth and it always played the theme to Star Wars.  Seriously though, there was something magical about the smooth, velvety texture of a good pudding pop that other treats (Fudgsicles and ice cream bars) just couldn't match.

Growing up there was only one pop in my household's freezer, the Bill Cosby endorsed Jell-O Brand Pudding Pops from General Foods.  Introduced in 1982, these frozen treats were originally available in three flavors, Chocolate, Vanilla and Banana.  Personally I was a vanilla man, though I have a vague recollection of eating a banana pop or two.  One of my favorite food related sense memories is of the thin coating of ice that would envelop the pudding pops.  It was always fun to see if you could loosen it in an entire sheet and slide it off the pop.   This ice coating also made for a great makeshift wall between the bottom of the pop and the stick so that the pudding wouldn't melt directly onto your hand if you decided to savor the experience.

Though Jell-O was the only brand in my house, there were others available, in particular Swiss Miss, which had a much more robust variety of flavors…

I've had a tougher time trying to nail down the date that these Swiss Miss Pudding Bars were introduced, but I'm betting it was in and around 1982 as well based on this television commercial.  The ad above is from 1984 and features no less than eight different varieties including chocolate, vanilla, chocolate covered chocolate & vanilla, chocolate chip, fudge swirl, and chocolate toffee covered chocolate & vanilla.  There were also sugar-free varieties (mentioned on the back of this box in Jason Liebig’s collection.)  On a side note, I really dig the older style Swiss Miss mascot design because she was a claymation style puppet.  Drinking Swiss Miss hot chocolate back in the day was like sipping on a Rankin/Bass Christmas special, and ever since they switched to a more realistic rendering it's just never been the same (even if it is only in my mind.)

I think it's interesting that the print ads for Jell-O Pudding Pops strayed away from using spokesman Bill Cosby, and instead focused on the guilt-free aspect of the frozen treat.  As this above ad from 1984 showcases, the pops only had 90 calories and apparently were just as good as eating an apple or a banana.  Insane nutrition claims aside, I do have to admit that, that is one heck of an attractive calorie count.  It brings to mind the other Jell-O frozen treat introduced in the 80s (1981 according to the Jell-O website timeline which suspiciously doesn't even mention pudding pops, but I'm betting it was also in 1982 alongside the pudding pops), the Jell-O Gelatin Pops as seen in this 1985 ad…

These fruit pops were only 35 calories and were a much slower melting bar because of the added gelatin.  According to the above ad, General Foods also produced chocolate covered Jell-O Pudding Pops, though I don’t remember ever seeing those for the life of me.

Unfortunately, sometime in the early 90s Jell-O Pudding Pops seemed to disappear from our grocer's freezers.  My guess is that after the line-up of General Foods brands were merged in with the Kraft family of products in the mid 90s (as Phillip Morris owned both by that time), their frozen treats were dropped as Kraft didn't really have a market share in the sweet end of the freezer section.  As far as the Swiss Miss bars go, your guess is as good as mine.  It wasn't the last time we'd see Jell-O Pudding Pops though.  They made a small comeback in the early 2000s under both the Jell-O and Popsicle brands, but they weren't the same product.  Offered in a slimmer Fudgsicle-like stick, the flavors and consistency just weren’t the same.  There's also a Jell-O branded pudding pop maker for kids, though I'm guessing it's not much different than sticking a pudding cup in the freezer.

Today there are still some brands of frozen pudding pops though, mainly Kemps and Blue Bunny, but this summer Coldstone Creamery is also presenting a variation on the Pudding Pop with Jell-O branded pudding ice-cream.  It's not the same, but it's as close as we're going to get.

Here are some Jell-O Pudding & Gelatin Pop commercials to take you back to the 80s for a few minutes: 1982, 1983, 1984, 1984, 1985, & 1986.  I wonder if Bill Cosby misses these pudding pops as much as I do?

Something that I don't talk about a lot here at Branded are some of the insane food products that were big back in the 80s, so today I thought I'd remedy that the best way I know how, by talking about pork.  In the 80s I learned two things about pork.  One, it was The Other White Meat.  Two, there were no limits to the ways that companies like Swift and Hormel would twist processed pig to sculpt it into fascinating new products.  And my mom made sure that we tried them all, or at least I thought so before doing a little digging…

If I had to pick one pork related sin, it would probably be screwing up bacon.  Yeah, I know it's beyond cliché to obsess over bacon in this geeky internet age, and honestly I tend to roll my eyes whenever I see someone extolling the virtues of bacon infused chocolate, bacon vodka, or Baconnaise.  But I am a red-blooded American, and I can't ignore the beauty of a nice pure crispy piece of savory, salty pork belly.  I wasn't always so discerning in tastes though, and neither was my mother, which is why throughout the 80s our fridge was always stocked with a package of Sizzlean…

If bacon is the ultimate cut of pork (though Anthony Bourdain and his crispy cheek fetish would probably beg to differ), then the ultimate in processed pork must assuredly be Sizzlean (sorry Spam.)  Touting itself as a healthier (50% less fat) and meatier slice of pork, Sizzlean was truly an ingenious, if not blasphemous product.  I loved it.  Looking back on it now, it seems like it has more in common with jerky than straight up pork, as it was sort of tough when fried up and had a very similar consistency.  My main complaint as a kid was the product's tendency to contain odd, tough bubbles of fat in the meat which I'm sure was a by-product of the meat processing.  Though they're not quite Beggin' Strips, Sizzlean was for all intents and purposes fake bacon, or if you will, Fakon, and I sure do miss it. Also, I have to hand it to the product designers on Sizzlean, mixing sizzle and lean in the name was perfect advertising work.  Here are a couple of commercials for this wonder product by Swift.

Next up is a product I was lucky enough to never have tried back in the day, Hormel canned sausage…

For some reason my mother had an aversion to most canned and jarred meat products, so I never had the opportunity to taste delicacies such as Spam, Underwood's Deviled Ham, Libby's corned beef, dried beef, or these incredibly interesting (to me of course) canned sausages or breakfast ham slices.  I did however grow up on a steady diet of smoked oysters and the occasional can of Vienna Sausages, so go I wasn't completely deprived of weird canned meats.  Out of curiosity, to all the cooks out there, is sausage-shrinkage truly a hurdle that needs jumping?  Also, the tag line that "…only Hormel seals sausage patties in an airtight can to protect their delicious country fresh flavor…" is a little telling.  There's probably a good reason that no one else was attempting this and why these are no longer available.  Canned ham & cheese anyone?

Next up is another amazing product from the meaty, master minds at Hormel, the Frank 'N' Stuff hotdogs!

Okay, who remembers burning the ever-living hell out of their mouths when biting into these insane lava-like chili-filled monstrosities?!?  Granted, filling a hotdog with things like cheese and chili sounds like a good idea, and sometimes it can work (Oscar Meyer Cheesedogs anyone?)  But the Frank 'N' Stuff hot dogs were a lawsuit waiting to happen.  Besides, the best way to know when a hot dog is done cooking is when the skin splits a little, and in the dreadful case of these dogs, that means chili seepage.  Now I don't know about you, but the words chili seepage and appetizing do not appear together normally in the English language.  They're like opposite poles on a magnet, no matter how much you try and stick them together, it just won't work.  Alright, even though I do have vivid memories of burning the crap out of my tongue on one of these, I do remember them tasting just fine, but you have to admit that going with a Frankenstein theme was totally relevant (what with the hot dog's proclivity to turn on its master and all.)

This also reminds me that I need to take this opportunity to point to my favorite Flickr account in the whole wide world, the collection of one Jason Liebig.  I've never come across someone so dedicated to sharing nostalgic memories of ephemera, in particular for foodstuffs of days gone by.  I'm constantly amazed and happily shocked at the stuff that he finds and shares.  It's literally a gold mine of memories.  So if you get a chance, please click on the crazy Hormel Bacon Bits Spin-Off collection below and prepare to get lost in nostalgia.

By the by, how did my mom miss these further Bits products when I was a kid!  We were strong supporters of the Hormel Bacon Bits and Bacon Pieces jars, and yet I never knew of the existence of Pepperoni, Ham, and Cheddar Cheese Flavored Bits.  Oh what will the geniuses at Hormel think up next?!?

Though I don't partake in them all that often, I have to say that I've been fascinated with fast food restaurants ever since I was a kid.   I think my interest stems from the fact that my parents hardly ever took me out to them (with the exception of Long John Silvers that is), so when ever I did find myself standing under the golden arches (as a fer instance) it was exciting.  Add to this the allure of meals constructed specifically for kids, and the tantalizingness (should be a word) was pretty darn high.  In the last few years the heated competition between the various franchises has led to some interesting and weird menu items, as well as some odd market strategies.  In fact in the last month the whole recession frenzy has seemed to kick this into high gear.

This past February while the wife and I were in Florida on vacation we stumbled into a local Steak 'n Shake at a particularly opportune time as that location's manager was giving his entire crew a dressing down/pep talk for the coming year.  Actually the whole experience of having this crew meeting right next to our table was just as awkward as it was exciting to overhear some insider SnS secrets.   Between coming down on the employees for wearing slightly off-white dress shirts and crooked bow ties, the manager shared some interesting facts that I never really thought about, foremost of which was that Steak 'n Shake was going to debut a new fried fish sandwich during Lent to try and draw in the Friday-meat-fasting religious sect.  I suppose it makes perfect sense, but I never thought of a fast food chain debating the merits of arranging their menu according to religious convictions in order to squeeze out a little more profit.  In the same breath the manager also remarked on how this was going to be a banner time for the franchise as it was a anniversary year and that there were going to be a ton of coupons for months to come.  I have to wonder if there will be fish sandwich coupons, and if so are they going to be geared towards a Friday redemption?

Also discussed during the meeting were other new menu items and the one that I thought was kind of weird were mini-steakburgers.   From the way the manager described them, the mini-steakburgers were going to be the equivalent of White Castle or Krystal burgers, only fried with hand formed patties (instead of steamed & pre-formed.)  Talking it over later that morning with my wife I had to wonder why the chain decided to take a shot at a couple of franchises that didn't really seem to be competitors, but we came to the conclusion that it was probably not so much that as it was a way for them to horn in on the whole $1 menu craze that's been reshaping the overall menus at most fast food places in the last decade.   In fact I remember when Steak 'n Shakes first started popping up in our area back in '93-'94, and the one complaint that I kept hearing was how expensive they were compared to other burger joints.

Of course in a weird coincidence (or is it?) on the way home from vacation, we stopped at a Burger King in north Florida and low and behold the hot new menu item were the new BK Burger Shots!  More mini burgers (and mini breakfast sandwiches to boot) from another chain that didn't seem to need to compete with Krystal and White Castle, and one that has been doing the $1 menu thing for awhile.  What is it about small food right now that is so attractive to fast food chains?  I was mentioning the Burger Shots to a friend the other day and he seemed to remember Burger King having a similar promotion back in the 80s that he was obsessed with.  Basically he loved getting small food as a kid just for the novelty of it.



I have to wonder how long it's going to be before McDonald's gets into the mini hamburger business?  I thought they already had as I decided to swing by my local house-that-Ronald-built, and saw that the double cheeseburger had been replaced on the dollar menu by the mysterious McDouble.  I was surprised to see the regular double cheeseburger back on the regular menu for $0.19 more, so I hit the internets to investigate.  Turns out the McDouble is practically the same burger, only with one slice of American cheese instead of two (according to mcchronicles.blogspot.com.)  Again, I have to wonder what the strategy is in a case like this.  How does offering the same burger twice on the menu, one being a square of cheese heavier granted, score you more profit?  I suppose a million McDoubles = a million slices of cheese saved.  What does a cubic mile of fast food grade processed American cheese go for these days?


VS.


Also, I hesitate to link to the McDonald's site as it's loud and obnoxious, but I'm intrigued by the weird cartoon skits on the dollar menu portion of the website.  Is that H. Jon Benjamin doing voice work for them?

I've been trying to think how other fast food joints have tried to finagle the public into picking up their weird new menu items, and I came up with the following list of stuff that I think has been strange:

The half pound meat and potato burrito at Taco Bell (for some reason potatoes stuffed into tacos and burritos just repulses me…)


The square breakfast biscuits at Wendy's…


Speaking of breakfast, the all-in-one combo cups at Krystal seem pretty gross…


The Arby's Roastburgers (which are just roast beef sandwiches with lettuce & tomato, and slathered with a miscellaneous "roasted burger" sauce…)


…and the new Popeye's value menu items, including a red beans and rice wrap, or the deluxe loaded chicken wrap (read red beans and rice with a chicken strip.)


Any other weird Fast Food menu items mystify you guys?

One of the things that I always look forward to on vacations out of town is tracking down new and interesting foodstuffs.  Whether it's some local flavors that are new to me (as a fer'instance scoring some Cincinnati chili and Chicago-style deep dish pizza recently), or something that's even more exciting to my pop culture obsessed mind, new brand name product offerings (in particular new soda and snack flavors.)  As I've mentioned on the site before we tend to visit Florida an awful lot and I am convinced that the Orlando area is a test market for some of the larger snack, soda, and candy companies.  We always tend to find new stuff there, and it's always months (if ever) until we see this stuff filter up to Georgia.

This past trip was no exception even though pickins were sort of slim.  Besides finding some single bottles of the all-in-one A&W brand Root Beer Floats (which are only available in hideously expensive 4-packs here), the big score this time were a couple bags of very odd flavored Combos snack crackers.  Now I say very odd, but only one of them was really weird, so I'll start with the more normal Cheeseburger variety…



Now I grew up with some weird flavored snacks all my life, as there always seemed to be Snyder's brand chips in our area.  Snyder's was the brand that had flavors like Steak & Onion, Meatball Pizza, and the almost normal Dill Pickle, so I'm familiar with the idea of savory beef-flavored snacks.  The complexity of intermingled flavors that companies are trying to achieve with Cheeseburger these days though is a little more out of the ordinary.  I first saw this last year when Doritos held their first mystery guess-the-flavor contest.  The above bag of Combos has this zany flavor intermixed with the cheese filling and it tastes almost exactly like last year's Doritos did.  The problem I see with this odd Cheeseburger flavor is that the food scientists aren't shooting for any one common cheeseburger flavor (like a creamy beef to simulate the burger and cheese), but practically every possible flavor you might have on a fully loaded burger.  There are the obvious hints of cheese (as the filling is cheese-based, well at least a close approximation of a cheese-like substance) and a more subtle beefiness, but there are also strong hints of pickle, ketchup, and mustard, which end up skewing the overall taste towards a very tart place.  All in all, it's not as much weird, as it seems to be a misfire, and would be better labeled as "Cheeseburger Condiment Flavored". 

The second new Combos flavor on the other hand (Bacon, Egg, & Cheese) is just downright evil in both concept and it’s all too accurate flavors…



First off let me just say that snack crackers/chips should never, EVER, be egg flavored.  There is a certain spoilability to the thought of eggs, though maybe it's just me.  I've always been of the mind that eggs should be eaten fast (unless hard boiled, and even then it's certainly not a tempting idea for a snack chip flavor), and in small quantities, as they tend to get cold and sort of sickening the longer you leave them out.  It probably doesn't help that bacon flavoring has always been something you'd typically find in either soup mixes or dog biscuits, and it just seems a little weird in chips (though I think Pringles has managed to pull it off in the past.)

Personally, as they Combos are almost as bad for you as eating a Bacon, Egg, and Cheese biscuit, I would much rather just go ahead and eat one that a very disturbingly close flavored approximation of one in snack cracker form.  I wonder if Jones soda will ever come out with a set of breakfast flavored sodas?  If so, I hope they contact the food scientists working feverishly at the Combos Company because they certainly nailed the flavor…

Do you like spicy food? Have you ever found yourself standing in the grocery store trying to decide what to buy, but were perplexed by your choices because there were no spicy versions of the products you wanted to buy? If so, than Frito Lay is going out of their way to make sure that this problem doesn't affect you when you're on the brink of making that all too important Cheetos purchase this summer. They actually already offer most of their snack products in their patented Flamin' Hot variety, which honestly is pretty hot (and this is coming from a guy who adds hot sauce to already spicy chili mind you.)

But this summer they are offering two addition levels of heat to their Cheetos line of products to make sure that every pallet can be satisfied. When I was down in Florida visiting the family over July 4th weekend I noticed that the 7-Elevens around us were all carrying new Cheddar Jalapeno flavored Cheetos. Being a big fan of Jalapeno flavored products and cheetahs wearing cowboy hats, I picked up a bag.

I actually liked them quite a bit though they were very tame on the heat level; mostly they just had a zing of Jalapeno flavor. What do you call an individual cheeto? It's surely not a chip. I guess it's a fried corn puff. Well I didn't bother talking a picture of the actual fried corn puffs because they weren't all that interesting, and only had a few speckles of green that were more or less hard to see.

Well, when I went into a gas station the other day I was bombarded by yet another new display of Cheetos, in yet another level of heat, XXtra Flamin' Hot. They were advertised as being twice as hot as normal the Flamin' Hot variety, which actually kind of scared me a bit considering I don't typically enjoy the normal hot ones seeing as they are more heat than flavor. Though I love seriously spicy food, it's not specifically for the heat, but for the flavor that tends to come with hot foods. I guess I like the way peppers taste, and if you are more or less extracting the capsicum from them to add heat to other things it doesn't interest me as much.

Well, taste buds be damned, I figured as long as they were claiming monumental levels of heat in their new Cheetos, it would have to be my duty to take them to task and perform my own little taste test. I poured out the contents of the two bags of Flamin' Hot Cheetos side by side to first compare the "redness" of the fried corn puffs…

I then poured myself a glass of water and dove into each stack separately to try and see if my mouth and brain could handle the torture of such insane heat. In the end, I'm convinced that this is one of the stupidest promotions ever as I couldn't tell the difference in the Cheetos as all. The XXtra hot variety looked and tasted exactly like the original with absolutely no discernable difference in the level of heat. In fact, they both seemed tamer than I was expecting, I guess considering that I was preparing myself for all sorts of "oh my god my mouth is so hot" dancing, compounded by burn blisters, and the eventual development of tongue ulcers. I barely needed to drink any water afterwards.

I guess if nothing else Frito Lay gets points for at least trying to provide too much choice, which is always favorable over no choice any day.

When I was scanning the Madballs sticker sheet this past weekend it reminded me of a Bonkers candy ad that came out around the time I started collecting comics. That led me to digging through some of the scanned comic ads I've acquired and as I was searching for the Madballs ad (or at least what I thought was a Madballs ad) I thought it would be cool to cobble together all of the Bonkers candy ads I had on hand. I'm not sure how many ads there were over the years, but I found 6 that represent a nice three year period in the 80s.

For those not familiar with Bonkers candy, it was a Starburst-like fruit chew made by Nabisco under their Life Savers subsidiary in the 80s and 90s. The candy was packaged similarly to Starburst as well, individually wrapped in a long sleeve, but instead of coming in a mix of flavors, each sleeve had only one. They were a little bit softer than Starburst and were shaped more like a chunk of gum (think Hubba Bubba or Bubble Yum) and were made up of two sections, an outer layer and a more intensely flavorful inner layer, both usually of the same flavor variety. It originally came in three flavors, Grape, Orange, and Strawberry, but would eventually be available in a few others, as we'll see below. The product's tag line was that it was the candy that would "Bonk You Out!" The oldest ad I could find in my collection was from 1984 and it looks like it was introducing the initial product line.


The cool thing about this ad is that it looks like it was drawn by Jack Davis (he of EC comics and MAD Magazine fame.) Davis did a bunch of advertising artwork throughout his career for but I still find it kind of weird and interesting to see someone's art who I am familiar with in comics on mass produced products advertising like this. It'd be like seeing Todd McFarlane doing a Capt'n Crunch ad or something (I bet those Soggies would have been pretty damn cool.)

I was way into Bonkers during my elementary school days. There was a 7-Eleven at the opening to our subdivision (which was about a mile from my house) and I'd always ride my bike up there after school and on the weekends to play arcade games, drink Slurpees, and to load up on pocketfuls of Jolly Rancher sticks, Nerds, Runts, and Bonkers. I'm sure watermelon was my favorite flavor, but I know I had my fare share of the three original flavors as well.


This second ad is from 1985 and is more of an order form for a bike bag premium. By this point they'd certainly come up with their advertising campaign idea of having giant fruit falling down on whoever eats the candy (which made for some fun commercials in the 80s.) This ad also looks vaguely like a piece of Jack Davis artwork, thought I'm wondering if it wasn't bastardized by someone else. The kid just looks too happy and it lacks that sketchy hand that Jack has. Maybe someone at the ad firm finished a doodle of his or something.

With this next ad from 1985 introducing the new watermelon flavor (which was the big new candy flavor that was sweeping the nation in the second half of the 80s) the art, though retaining a certain Jack Davis quality seems to be diverting even farther from his style. I'm not positive but I'd have to believe that at this point the in-house Nabisco art guys were talking over.


With the new watermelon flavor Bonkers took a deviation from the normal candy design and went with two colors to more accurately mimic the watermelon eating experience (though as my Mom always told me, eat the rinds and you'll get the runs.) When I was reading through other blogs that had Bonkers candy posts there were a couple of people who seemed to remember a version of the candy that was yellow and red (which they figured was probably Strawberry Banana) so I'd have to think that if there was such a variety (which I think there was) than it probably came after Watermelon was introduced. Of course there were also a few brands of bubble gum that were experimenting with double flavor combos at this time and if I remember correctly they were also shaped like Bonkers (or vice versa) so we all might be remembering that as well.


1985 would also introduce another Bonkers promotion, but this time instead of a silly bike bag, this time you could earn a kickass freaking robot watch (Kronoform watch to be exact.) God did I love these robot watches to hell and back. I must have had at least three of 'em in various colors (one of which I think was even Transformers branded.) These watches were the perfect camouflage for bringing toys to school and they were proven to be 92% less likely to be confiscated by the teacher. I learned a powerful lesson in the 1st grade when I brought a bunch of my Empire Strikes Back figures to school one day and went home minus a Bespin Luke, an Ugnaut, and my Hoth Leia. Even if the teacher did catch you with one of these watches, it's not like they were going to take your watch away. How would you know when to wait out front to get picked up or when 15 minutes had passed during recess with out a watch? Hell, kids are stupid, if you tell them they have five minutes to take a potty break and you confiscate their watch they'll probably sit on the can all day thinking only four minutes passed, I know I would.)


In 1986 there was an interesting if not somewhat disgusting (well to me at least) development in the Bonkers camp, Chocolate Bonkers. I am seriously not a big fan of chocolate flavored things. I mean, if you want to eat chocolate, eat chocolate. The worst is chocolate bubble gum, which just seems like a nightmare made real for my chewing displeasure.  Chewy chocolate should be copyrighted by Tootsie Rolls andyway which is about as far in that direction as I'm willing to go, and even then only for a roll or two.

This all brings us to the reason I started this post, which is the 1986-1987 Bonkers Ugly Balls promotion which coincided with the Madballs craze and had a lot of people like me confused figuring they were one and the same.


Matt over at X-Entertainment did a nice write up on the whole situation, and he even has a bunch of the related commercials for eyeball melting viewing pleasure. Captain Clueless always weirded me out because for such a clueless guy he sure did look like he could pummel the ever-living crap out of me. And the blonde hair always seemed weird too, with the red gloves and stuff, he looks like a weird amalgamation of the Hulk, Fabio and DC's the Creeper.

I thought I'd take a minute today to do a quick review of an awesome new restaurant just down the street from me here in Duluth, Georgia, Taste of Chicago. Well the sign out front actually says Taste of Chicago Wings, but I think even though they serve hot wings that part of the sign is a hold over from the last place that occupied the space (which indecently had awesome hot wings but was mysteriously shut down one day.)


Taste of Chicago opened up a couple weeks ago and I stopped in for lunch because they had a huge hot dog sign in the window and I was just really in the mood for one. When I got up to the window it occurred to me that this place was more of a hot dog vendor than a wing place as there were dozens of Vienna Beef signs littering the counters and walls. I was completely unfamiliar with the term Chicago Dog, didn't even realize the city was known for anything beside their wind and deep dish pizza, but according to a poster on the wall I was in for something special.

I've never really been a big fan of putting all that much on a hot dog, I'm pretty much just a mustard kind of guy, though I have had a decent slaw dog or two here in Georgia. So the idea of getting one of these insane looking Chicago dogs worried me a bit, but I'm always up for a challenge and if that's what they're known for then I was going to try one (I mean why order breaded shrimp at a fancy seafood place when you can get something better, ya know.)

So I bellied up to the counter and decided on one Chicago Dog with the works ("drug through the garden" as I would soon know it) and a Maxwell Street Polish also with the works. When I got back to work and opened up the container I saw a daunting task ahead of me, but I dug in and soon was in love with these hot dogs.


Besides the million and one poster and laminated flyers advertising the entirety of the Vienna Beef product line, the place is pretty unassuming. The owners are proud of their little place; you can tell by the way they've posted their perfect score on the restaurant cleanliness and health form right in the front window. They also have it listed on the menu that they happily served Chicago for 16 years before relocating to Georgia. There aren't many places to sit and I couldn't imagine eating in, though I have seen people do it in the last two weeks, but what do you really need out of a hot dog place anyways right? The menu is also pretty basic, but once again we aren't talking fancy schmancy dining here, it's a hot dog place. Pretty much your choices are two or three variations on either the classic Vienna Beef dog or polish sausage, an Italian Beef sandwich, a surprising variety of fried fish (trout, whiting, tilapia, and catfish), and a few side items like fries, onion rings, slaw, and pizza puffs, not to mention your basic in hot wings.

Carrie and I decided to hit it last night for dinner (she hadn't been yet), so we got a bunch of food and brought it home...


I decided I was going to try the fried trout and she went with a Chicago Style dog and a Maxwell Street Polish. I assume the older couple working were also the owners as they're the only ones I've seen in the place, and the guy was doing both the cooking and taking orders when we arrived. He was nice and when he brought out the food he mentioned that there would probably be a few bones in the trout, as he had to de-bone it himself 'cause the supplier wanted too much for the de-boned stuff. Glad I got the warning because I hate bones in fish, but going in wary helped to not get one stuck in my throat. The fish was excellent, some of the better fried fish I've had in our area. It was crumb style breading and done to perfection. The fries were also good, crispy and hot as they're cooked to order. It was also served with a bun and a side of slaw.


The Polish sausage was also good, though not all that different from the regular hot dog in terms of taste. I'm used to sausages being s little plumper, but it wasn't bad. With the works it had mustard, sauteed onions and a couple sport peppers (pickled Serrano peppers.) It's served on a steamed poppy seed hot dog bun. Like I said, it was good, but nothing special, so I suppose I've been spoiled on German sausages.


The best thing by far though and more or less what this place is known for is it's Chicago Style hot dogs. So what is a Chicago Style Hot dog you ask? Well it's an all beef wiener on a steamed poppy seed bun with more condiments than you can shake a stick at. First comes the regular yellow mustard, followed by chopped raw onion, and greenest (practically neon) sweet relish I've ever seen, a dill pickle spear, tomato wedges, 2 sport peppers, and the coupe de grace, a sprinkling of celery salt. Now, don't get me wrong, though a lot of Chicagonians will protest that this is the only way to eat a hot dog, I won't say that this is for everybody. If you're not a fan of sweet, sour, salty, and spicy thrown in together with more consistencies that you can manage all at once than this isn't the style of hot dog for you. If there was ever a time to use the silly phrase: "There's a party in my mouth and everyone's invited", than this is it. These hot dogs are crunchy (onions, pickle, peppers), wet, meaty, soft, gritty (poppy seeds), sweet, savory, spicy, sour, and salty all at the same time, and if the dog is dressed correctly, in every bite.


I did a little research into Chicago Style Dogs after I got hooked on them and I found this awesome website that has pretty much everything you'd ever want to know on the subject called Hot Dog Chicago Style.com. I'm going to try and prepare these at home this weekend, and so far the only two things I'm having a hard time getting my hands on are pickled Serrano peppers and that weird neon relish, and even though I'm not about to break down and do this yet, you can find these online direct from Vienna Beef here.

Taste of Chicago has been pretty much packed and the phone was ringing off the hook at lunch time, so I hope the place does well, because if it doesn't I'd hate to have to try and buy that relish on the internet. I never pictured myself as the type of guy to buy relish over the internet, I mean that's crazy right?

Here is another stunning nostalgia food review, and this week it's guaranteed to make you queasy 'cause folks, the pictures are not tummy tempting.  Growing up we hardly ever ate out or went to fast food places.  My mom was great about cooking the family dinner most every night and the nights when she didn't quite feel like cooking we still had something that was remotely "cooked" at home (like those weird old Land-o-Lakes Turkey loafs with gravy, pot pies, or every once in awhile Swanson TV Dinners.)  No one in the family was eating them because we were under the impression that they are culinary delights (though the desserts sometimes were), but like most people we ate them because of the ease and novelty of eating a pre-made, compartmentalized, well-balanced, frozen dinner.

Very early on I developed a taste for the Salisbury steak variety.  There was just something awesome about all the brown gravy and the mashed potatoes; it was like eating a hamburger without the bun, and breaking the rules was fun.  I also learned very early on that I could only eat Swanson brand Salisbury steak, as every other brand I tried just didn't cut the mustard (they tended to be gritty or way too soft.)  Very quickly I also graduated to the Hungry Man variety because those came with desserts, and since that was another thing my family wasn't big on, it was mighty welcome in my frozen dinner.

So in honor of Movie Night and because I found two Salisbury steak Hungry Man dinners on clearance at Target, it was time to chow down on some seriously frozen grub.  Our adventure starts in the artic cold of my apartment freezer...

Though the dinners were on clearance they had a year to go before expiring, so I had no fear of serious freezer burn or anything.  These were two freshly frozen dinners.  If there's one thing I regret about this new habit of documenting these dinners it's that I always manage to get swept up in the moment and I forget to take all the pictures I had planned on.  This night, I forgot to get a picture of the dinners in their frozen state, which normally wouldn't be that big of a deal, but both of the dinners had dollops of mashed potato frozen into the brownies and it was pretty gross  (but during cooking they mysteriously disintegrated or managed to jump back into the mashed potato cubicle because they were no where to be found.)

We now join our dinners as they've just emerged from the oven to perfect doneness.

Here's a close-up of just how disgusting a freshly cooked Swanson Hungry Man dinner can look.  I say disgusting because there is a strange brown juice that's accumulated on the film above the green beans and carrots, not to mention the static cling of the film against the Salisbury steak itself.

Once the plastic film is removed the dinner's appeal doesn’t improve all that much.  Though I loved it as a kid, the image of these two "steaks" swimming in a pool of greasy gravy is kind of gross.  But damn if it didn't smell good, like just coming home after a long trip.  So there is hope yet.

Now my friend decided to take the one at a time approach to tackling this dinner of hungry men, while I just dug in willy nilly.  There's no right way to eat a Swanson Hungry Man dinner.  I'm glad to report that the dinner is exactly the same as I remember it tasting as a kid.  The meat is perfectly ground so that the consistency is meaty but not gritty or tough, and the gravy is heavenly if not very obviously greasy, though it is abundant which is a testimony to the Hungry Man branding.  There's enough gravy to go around here folks, and pretty much every inch of this dinner could be covered if that's what you wanted.

I didn't let myself get too crazy with it, but I did make sure to spread it around on the potatoes which, though exactly as I remember them, were a little tasteless.  I'm a big fan of instant potatoes because of their alluring silky texture, but TV dinner potatoes have a lot of pitfalls that keep them from being good.  They are almost always overdone and then they sort of get gummy and crusty at the same time, which is both weird and disturbing.  I think frozen food scientists need to develop a solution that goes a little farther than cutting the plastic away from them before cooking.  How about a perforated plastic bubble that keeps enough moisture in while letting enough out so that they aren't soupy?

I decided to be a good boy this time, and for once I ate my desert last.  When I was a kid that was always the first thing to go, mainly because Swanson's used to have various cobblers in with their meals and they were best piping hot.  Since this variety now comes with a brownie I felt that I could hold off on my indulgence and save it for last.  You'll also notice that I left most of my veggies uneaten.  This is another common trait I have while eating frozen dinners.  Typically I can't stand most cooked veggies unless they are part of something like soup or a casserole and in particular I do not like my carrots cooked.  I tried to choke down most of the green beans, but there's only so much a man can do, you know?  Surprisingly the brownie was pretty darn good.  It wasn't overdone like most the frozen desserts tend to be and it was pretty brownie-like in consistency (as opposed to cake-like.)

All in all, the dinner was pretty darn good and every bit the comfort food I remember it to be, though to be honest it isn't good food by any stretch of the imagination.  It was just as good as it was designed to be though and that's good enough for me.  I was also surprised at how not full we were.  Both of us figured one Hungry Man would be quite enough to fill us.  Well after the first movie we watched we were sort of wishing we'd gone for seconds.  On the other hand the Hungry Man XXL variety scares the jebus out of us.  Those things have enough sodium and fat to last a week and they are just too indulgent.  Maybe they need to develop a Hungry Man XL that's somewhere in between where you can truly feel full without upping your chance of heart disease by 300%...

Three posts in one day!?! What the hell is the world coming to? Boredom at work, that’s what. I should probably pace myself with these articles and reviews, but what the heck, that’ll just make me work that much harder when I run out of stuff to wax nostalgic about right?

So last week for Movie Night, my friend Kevin and I decided to go hog wild crazy on some Domino’s Pizza. I personally didn’t grow up on the stuff, but Kevin did so we called ‘em up, ordered enough food to choke Galactus and went to town (you know to pick it up because we weren’t about to tip a delivery guy if we could easily pick it up ourselves right?)

First off, I don’t think I’ve ever picked up a delivery style pizza. There’s something very claustrophobic about those little storefronts where you just order and wait, and besides, you can see them making your pizza, and you really don’t want to see the people who’re making your pizza, trust me on this.




I suppose by picking up the pizza ourselves and not having it delivered right from the oven and carried to our doorstep in a thermally insulated bag we in fact didn’t “Avoid the Noid.â€? Of course since those commercials are about 20 years old, I guess there is no such thing as the Noid anymore, well except when Adam West isn’t beating him up. I mean I’m sure delivery pizza technology has progressed so far into the future that there is no such thing as … um … what the hell did the Noid represent again?


We ended up going with two large pizzas, one hand-tossed sausage and one thin crust pepperoni, and a butt-load of Cheesy bread and Cinna-Stix.






We also decided to jam on some Sunkist Orange soda in a can which was a childhood favorite of both of us. My parents never used to by anything other than Coke and Canada Dry ginger-ale so when ever I got soda elsewhere I always opted for fruity flavors. Sunkist has always been the orange soda of choice because it’s a lot creamier and not as tart as other brands.

Since I never really had Domino’s this was less about nostalgia and more about trying something relatively new. My first impressions were ‘eh. First off, the thin crust pepperoni was dusted with misc. Italian spices, which I’ve seen a lot and tends to point to one thing, that the crust and base of the pizza is so bland it needs cover. This was pretty much exactly the case. The hand-tossed sausage was better but a bit too much on the bread-y side for me. I like my crust thin-ish like NY style pizza, and anything else is just focasia bread with toppings.


Probably the best part of the meal was the Cheesy bread and Cinna-Stix. The Cheesy bread is exactly as stated and I would be hella surprised if Domino’s found a way to screw up bread with cheese melted on it. The Cinna-Stix were awesome though if I ate more than two I’d surely go into a sugar coma. Dear god they were sweet. Between the sugar cinnamon dusting and the super sweet frosting dipping sauce, I was about to die, but I managed to squeeze two sticks down.


I’ve noticed that in these recent years I can’t hold my pizza. There was a time when I could almost eat an entire pizza myself, but nowadays I’m surprised if I can get through three slices. I will say that it wasn’t horrible pizza. In fact it is exactly what it should be, lower end quality pizza at a reasonable price delivered (unless you’re cheapskates like us.)

Part the last, my round up of 80's nostalgia candy, or at least what I have nostalgia for.

13). Runts. I admit it; I am one of those people. You know, one of those people who buy Runts specifically for one flavor of Runt. I am a banana man, not THE Bananaman that used to bookend episodes of Danger Mouse and Count Duckula, but the dude that would buy a box of Runts, eat only the banana, flirt with eating the strawberry and Cherry and then would toss the orange and lime away. I even remember back in the day, when this was uncommon, my Dad took me to a flea market and there was this awesome booth set up with Mexican sodas on tap and a bunch of candy by the pound. Well one of the bags was pure banana Runts. I didn't get it because I wasn't supposed to have that much candy at once, but it was like the grail that I kept looking for since. Nowadays you can find just banana pretty regularly in vending machines and stuff.

Unfortunately for my friend Kevin who will be sharing these with me and who loves citrus flavored candy, Wonka changed the Lime Runts to Watermelon, so it won't quite be a perfect trip down Runts lane.


14). Sugar mf-ing Daddies! Yeah, so I only had one Sugar Daddy as a kid and it was the hardest thing to eat ever. It was just so big and immune to the saliva in my mouth. I want to remember it taking like three weeks to eat it, but I'm sure it only took an hour. My mom was a lot fonder of Sugar Babies so we had those around a lot more. I found these mini Sugar Daddies and figured they'd be perfect for movie night. Turns out that the formula has changed because these went super quick.


15). Orange Tic Tacs! Are they a candy or are they a mint? I'll lean towards candy as a pack of Orange Tic Tacs lasted about 55 seconds in my hands. These things were addictive too. I remember in high school, my friend Jeremy had found this mega box of individually wrapped Tic Tacs and I was so jealous. I'm glad they still make these. They even have Lemon, Lime and a Citrus combo now.


16). Warheads! I don't think I was introduced to these until high school, but I think I was only in the 9th grade, so that's close enough for nostalgia's sake. For some strange reason Sour became the flavor du jour in the early 90's and it's had the staying power only rivaled by Cherry flavored products. In fact now it's sometimes hard to find non-sour versions of candy products I know and love like the squeeze lollipops and most gums. Warheads were the penultimate sour candy. You can scream about Crybaby's all you want, they weren't nearly as volatile as Warheads were and they had the art down to a science. On the back of the candy wrapper it gave the timeline of just how long the candy would be mega-sour, it was like 20 seconds, and then you'd get to the plain candy center. Like habanero peppers, these are a good way to test someone's limit to extreme culinary delights.


17). Freaking huge Unicorn Pops! First off, I don't have a neat posed picture for this because no Legos outside of the life size Darth Vader at the Lego store can heft one of these pops. I first saw these at Disney World as a kid, along with the gargantuan regular circle lollipops and craved them throughout my childhood to no avail. I never got to eat a lollipop that was longer than my head. But I'm an adult now and damn it, I'll eat one if I want to. I bought two, one for me and one for Kevin (I don't think I'm the kind of comfortable that I can suck a lollipop with a friend...) and we chowed down on them while we watched The Last Unicorn and Water Ship Down. I must say that I was very disappointed. If I could pick one hard candy flavor to never ever have again in my entire life it would be tutti frutti, which is Satan's gift to fruit flavors. It's sort of cherry sort of any-fruit and it's just plain nasty to me, and I'll tell you, makes eating a foot-long lollipop mighty difficult. At least I finally got one and now if I ever go back to Disney I will only feel pity for the kid stuck eating one instead of green eyed jealousy.




18). My last candy entry isn't technically a candy, but I was deprived of it as a kid because my parents saw it as one, Kool-Aid! The only powdered drink I was allowed to have was Tang, because you know, the astronauts drank it and we did live near Cape Canaveral. I so wanted Kool-Aid and would covet it at friend's houses every time it was served. There just seemed to be so many flavor combinations and possibilities, not to mention the violent wall crushing commercials that would air ten millions times as I sat to watch cartoons every Saturday and weekday afternoon. I sort of OD'ed on the stuff when I first moved out from home, but have picked up a taste for it again recently. I'll tell you what, my friend Kevin makes a mean pitcher of Kool-Aid too.


The one candy that I wasn't able to track down because it's no longer being made is Bonkers. I used to love Bonkers because it was like gum that you were allowed to swallow and I just remember it having the perfect commercial taffy consistency. It was also the first candy to do the flavor within a flavor, where there would be like strawberry wrapped in a banana covering. It was also the only fruity candy that also came in a chocolate variety (outside of fruity Tootsie Roll varieties that you used to only be able to find around Halloween.)

The other small thing I've done with this candy-consuming feast is to bring in another candy nostalgia memory, selling candy at school. One of my last great childhood candy memories was selling Atomic Fireballs in middle school. I was pretty industrious and got together with two other kids to form a candy selling alliance. We only sold Atomic Fireballs because they had the best markup since you could by them by the pound and they were individually wrapped. We'd sell 'em for a quarter a piece and then at the end of the week the three of us would pool the money and split it evenly. The one thing I always wanted to do was to branch out and sell all kinds of stuff. I saw this one high school kid do it once and he used a tackle box to show his wares. I was smitten with that idea.

Well because I'm frickin' 29 and I'm not in college and it would just be creepy to show up at a local middle school, I can't very well sell candy. But I can go out and buy a tackle box to store all this candy until it's time to eat it, and that's exactly what I did (well sort of, I bought a toolbox since the tackle boxes at the local target were all shaped like fish and I though that was kind of lame.) I keep all of the gums on the top removable shelf...
 

...and all of the other stuff piled underneath.


So thus ends my big 'ol list of nostalgia candy. I hope I don't get cavities 'casue of this.

So lets get right the hell into Part 2 of my reliving Nostalgia Candy list.

7). Gobstoppers! Like I said before, I am very much into “hard� candy, be it the Brach’s Butterscotch candies, or the more tart chalky candies like Gobstoppers and candy necklaces. I think I really dug on these as a kid because a box would last me two weeks as I didn’t try and eat them as much as let them dissolve in my mouth. Later in middle school I made the switch to Atomic Fireballs, which are basically the same thing just larger and hotter.


8). Heads candy! I didn’t really get into these as a kid as the 7-11 by me didn’t have them, but sometime in middle school I went though a heads eating phase. I’m sort of bummed that the entire line of candies is now all Head related in name. I miss the weird racial names like Cherry Clan and Injun Grape, not because I’m racist or anything, but it’s just another connection to the past that’s gone. Not pictured, but I also have some orange and grape heads as well.


9). Nerds! I definitely ate my share of Nerds as a kid. I think this was one of the first gimmicky candies I got into heavily. Not only did you get two flavors per box, but they were also separated with neat little pull-tabs for easy consumption. This was also the closest thing to rock candy I was allowed to have. I clearly remember sucking on a mouthful one day until the colored candy coating came off and I was left with a mouthful of sugar, pure sugar. I actually find these kind of sickening now, though I adore the little lumpy Nerd character branding. Unfortunately, in order to get a better flavor variety I had to dispense with the classic two sided box and get the mini boxes.


10). Much like their cousin candy Nerds, I present Pixie Sticks. These are basically pure sugar in a paper tube with a little bit of tart flavoring. The only time I ever had these was on Halloween because they were in virtually every giant mega candy assortment bag along with Smarties, Tootsie Rolls, and Dum Dum lollipops. These are probably the only candy on my list that my parents might also have nostalgia for.


11). And now Pop Rocks! I don’t remember when I first had Pop Rocks, but I do remember that I never ate them originally. I think the first three or four packets when straight into the toilet just so I could hear them crackle and pop and jump out of the water. Though as candy goes, these are probably more entertaining them good, I will say that the company that developed them came through with flying colors on the whole fizzy thing, as anyone who has even been let down by the pathetic fizzy-ness of Bottle Caps can attest. Not that Bottle Caps are bad, just that their gimmick is pretty lame.


12). If I had to pick one candy only to eat for the rest of my life it would probably be Reese’s Pieces. They probably have the best balance of sweet and salty, with just enough crunch and creaminess. Of course, my memories of the candy are completely entwined with a little kids movie known as E.-freaking-T. Man, Reese’s sure as hell won the magical product placement lottery that year. Not since the Baby Ruth shined in the pool scene in Caddyshack has a candy so entered the public consciousness like that. In fact I’d be willing to bet that half of every kids Halloween haul that year was Reese’s Pieces.


Stay tuned for the final segment in the Nostalgia Candy list, where I show you how I can waste $12 bucks on a fun way to lug all this candy around.

So I’ve mentioned the ongoing Movie Night I hold with my friend on this blog a few times, and hopefully by now you know that I’m pretty obsessed with nostalgia. Well recently we’ve put together a list of flicks to see that are nostalgia related so that we can get our fill while we’re in the mood. Besides it’s going on 20 years since we’ve seen a lot of the flicks on our list and that’s sort of a good anniversary number.

Well along with watching the flicks, we also go out to eat. Well once again, in honor of nostalgia we’ve been trying to hit a bunch of places we ate at a lot when we were kids, Like Red Lobster, Long John Silvers and Pizza Hut. Part of this is also munching on candy that we were hugely (or only semi-huge in Kevin’s case) into as kids.

I was super bored at work and wanted to chronicle the vast amount of candy we’d soon be consuming so I did a mini photo shoot over the course of a few days, starring the candy and my Lego Mecha collection. So without further ado, I present 80’s Nostalgia Candy:

1). First up we have Big League Chew. Now I didn’t subsist on this or anything, but I remember it being pretty darn cool back in the day. Shredded bubble gum that was supposed to be like chewing tobacco, but without all the nasty brown dip juice and spitting. Hell, actually now that I think about it, any candy product that was modeled after tobacco products was pretty freaking cool in the 80’s including candy and bubble gum cigarettes. At the time of the photo I could only find the original bubble gum flavor and cotton candy, both of which I can’t stand. When we finally had it (in conjunction with watching Bad News Bears and Animalympics), I had managed to find Sour Apple which was a little better.


2). Next up we have Blow Pops. I had my fare share of these in high school when they started making them in more crazy flavors like Blue Raspberry. I never really liked the gum inside, it’s way too sugary for my taste, but I’m a sucker (har har) for hard candy. We haven’t gotten to these yet, mostly because I’m not sure what to pair them up with.


3). This is a sampling of the rest of the Bubble Gum on we’re going to get to. Included are Bubble Tape, Hubba Bubba, Bubble Yum, Bubblicious, and Bazooka. I didn’t think they even made Hubba Bubba anymore. I wasn’t huge into gum as a kid, mostly because my Mom & Dad had this antique looking bubble gum machine that we kept full most of the time and I sort of overdosed on gum. I do prefer chunks of gum, if only because it seems easier to blow bubbles than with sticks. Unfortunately, flavor-wise, this was the best assortment we could get. We both really wanted Orange and Cherry Cola flavored, but we couldn’t find any companies that made them anymore. We settled for Grape, Watermelon, Blueberry and Strawberry in most of the brands, and well Original for Bazooka, because I think that’s the only flavor they make (though I want to say they have a strawberry or grape too, I’m not sure.) Not pictured is Fruitstripe Gum, in both Chewing Gum and Bubble Gum flavor varieties.


4). Pictured below is a buttload of chewy taffy-like candy including Now and Laters, Airheads, and Starburst. Now I’m not sure when Airheads came about, I don’t remember seeing them until I was about high school age, though I think they were big in middle school, but I decided to throw them in for fun’s sake. Now, Now and Laters, those were one of my favorite candies growing up. They sort of start out like hard candy and then soften as you eat them into a more taffy-like consistency and they came in a bunch of flavors not to mention Banana which was my favorite candy flavor as a kid. Banana sort of gets the shit end of the stick when it comes to candy flavors, mostly because it’s almost impossible to replicate in the lab. Not that many candy flavors actually taste like the fruit they’re masquerading as, but they all sort of have their own unique flavor that’s roughly fruit like. Banana on the other hand is very chemical and is an acquired taste. Then we have Starburst, which was always good, but a little too mainstream for me. I was more into the candy that you could only get in gas stations, and Starburst was pretty damn common.


5). Now we move on to Chunky Bars. Though I’m not a big fan of chocolate, I adore Chunky bars because they have raisins. I love raisins in candy bars, and it’s pretty rare. I was convinced that Nestle had quit making them, as all the websites and actual stores I went into didn’t have them. Then one fateful day last spring I walked into this no-name Food Mart (it was literally called Food Mart) and there they were. I checked the expiration date to make sure and yup they were fresh. I was freaking ecstatic.


6). Last we have Fun Dip. I love me some Fun Dip, but not because of the dip. I can’t describe it but the flavor of Lik-Em-Aid sticks is beyond heavenly to me. It’s a little tart, and a little vanilla and it’s all-good. I never dip, I just eat the sticks.

So a couple weeks ago, my friend Kevin, my fiancee Carrie and I went out on the town to eat, but since we had nostalgia in mind, we far from did it up right and opted for a trip to Pizza Hut. We decided to "dine in" as that's what we did most as kids before the hellstorm that is Pizza Delivery really gathered much steam.

I brought along my trusty digital camera to document the trip back into memory (man that's hokey.) I took a bunch of pictures of us stuffing our faces in a less than fine dining establishment and here is my review.



First off, part of what prompted the decision to eat at Pizza Hut was that we still have a dine-in version right down the street from us. From what I gather most large chain pizza places are pretty much carryout and delivery only now and the mom and pop joints are few and far between where I live. I was hoping that the inside of this Pizza Hut looked like it did when we were kids, and I think it pretty much does.




We knew we wanted Personal Pan Pizzas, because that's again, what we had as kids, but we weren't sure how big those were and if it was going to be enough to fill out hearty appetites, so we opted for some appetizers. We ended up over compensating and ordered way too much, two orders of fried cheese sticks and two orders of cheesy breadsticks ontop of each of us getting our own Personal Pan Pizza. A crazy amount of food by anyone's standards.



The first thing I'd like to say about dining in at Pizza Hut was that we won the lottery in terms of fast food waitresses. Ours was awesome, nice and didn't bat an eye while I took pictures and acted all the fool. She was also super attentive, though we were like one of two parties there, so there probably wasn't much else to do.

The second thing I'd like to state for the record is that going into this meal I was going to be a hard sell. See I hate Pizza Hut. I just don't think they make good pizza and I had my fare share of it growing up. I'm just not a fan of thick bread-y pizza and I hate the way the bottom of the crust is like this grease sponge that's all orange and disgusting.

Well the appetizers were awesome, and freaking filling I might add, which went a long way to putting me in a better "accepting the pizza" mood for the rest of the meal.


It also didn't hurt that they had Wild Cherry Pepsi on tap, which is the first time I've ever seen this. I typically can only find it in the 20oz variety in gas stations here, so that was cool.


Our pizzas arrived sans pans, which bummed me out a little, but I was honestly just glad they still had that variety of pizza at all. I decided on a basic Pepperoni Lovers, while Carrie opted for a Veggie sampler, and Kevin decided to go for the Supreme.




I must say that I was really impressed with the quality of the food. I didn't go gaga over the pizza as the thick crust is still not my personal favorite, but it was piping hot and pretty darn good for what I remember it being like. It probably helps a lot that we ate in, because I suspect that if it were allowed to cool down, like say in a trip from the pizza joint to your house or apartment, it wouldn't be nearly as good. The Personal Pizzas turned out to be smaller than we remembered, but just the right size for what we wanted.

I was surprised that we had so much food leftover, but my gut was about to burst and I think everyone else was the same.


The topper of the evening? This particular Pizza Hut had an original (I'm assuming, it looked about 20 years old) Galaga arcade machine. So I popped a couple quarters in and actually ended up playing far longer than I expected, making our little party wait for me to be killed. The only thing that would have made this evening perfect would have been if they had one of the sit down table Pac-Man arcade games that I remember them having as a kid.


All in all I'd have to say this was one fine dining experience, and if you haven't eaten at a Pizza Hut in ages, I suggest dining in, it makes a world of difference.

So today is my 29th Birthday and the fiancee and I decided to celebrate it up right by taking the celebration to Chuckie Cheese. With out trusty camera in tow and being in a particular wacky mood we hit that place like a thunderstorm. Or at least an ill tempered wind...




Though we don't drink much, it's nice to know that the fine folks at CC recognize the importance of liquor in taking the edge off of sixty thousand screaming shoeless kids running around asking strangers for quarters. I still can't believe that you can get a beer at Chuckie Cheese and not Disney World proper. When is frozen Walt going to learn...



The inside looks pretty much as I remember it as a kid as far as the game floor and the seating is concerned. The only thing different (outside of the lack of a stage full of animatronic animals rocking out to Beach Boys melodies) is the decor which is a lot more, well, colorful and Andy Warhol-esque...




The one thing that I was disappointed in (once again outside of a non-existent Rock-Afire Explosion band) was the food. Pizza is a pretty basic food stuff and pretty hard to get wrong. Well, actually, let me say that another way. Even bad pizza is usually alright pizza, I mean how hard is it to slap tomato sauce on some dough and then sprinkle some toppings on? This pizza was bad pizza, and I know from bad pizza. I spent years after I moved out from home, subsisting on the bottom of the barrel in bad frozen (usually store brand) pizza, and even that sometimes had its merits. What exactly was wrong with it? Well the dough was gritty, the tomato sauce was barely there, and the toppings were still cold. We opted for the veggie pizza since the fiancee is a vegetarian, and well, this was just bad pizza. The topper? This was a $20 pizza (not including drinks or tokens.) For $20, I expect just a little bit of quality, even if all it amounts to is cooking it thoroughly.


Carrie was a trooper and forced four very expensive slices down...


...while I did my best to make a dent in the rest, going so far as scraping off cheese and the edible raw veggie toppings. I spent $20 on that pizza and I would be damned if it didn't at least look like I tried to eat it.


Well at least there were the games right? I mean who goes to Chuckie Cheese for quality food? So we loaded up our pockets with $20 worth of tokens and went to town on the arcade floor.


Now typically I make a beeline for the Skee Ball machines and just plant myself there. Earlier, while we were eating though I noticed that they were getting a lot of attention and in particular, attention from parents that had no problem with their kids getting up on top of the machines and depositing the balls into the 100,000 holes. Well that sort of soured me on Skee Ball for the evening, though I did have to laugh as apparently Chuckie Cheese has tried to solve this problem by adding a tilt function to the machines so no tickets will be awarded.


I ended up throwing all my tokens at machines I typically never play which are the "skill" (I write that with the utmost sarcasm) machines that are only good for tickets. This on in particular was a pretty freaky customer. Though I've seen machines like this before (it's basically Operation in Carny form) I've never seen one that looked so sinister and just plain evil (not since that weirdly bearded wish machine in Big.)


It might just be me, but this Fantasia knock off Chuckie looked downright creepy to me.


The big surprise of the night though came from the sweet animatronic Chuckie Cheese on the stage in front of the main dining hall. Though he was no Rock-Afire Explosion, he was a pretty sweet customer that perpetually waved and scanned the room. I don't think he said anything or took part in the stage show (which was just a bunch of really bad cartoon on a jumbo-tron tv.)



I knew the evening was a success when Carrie opted to crawl up into the kiddie-tunnel-play-thing attached to the ceiling. I did make sure it could support her before I practically begged her to go up.


It was a pretty fun birthday and it did bring back a lot of memories...


So what did $20 worth of tokens nab up ticket-wise? About 450 tickets, which was just enough to "buy" the junk that you see above. One plastic spider (staple of all ticket buying venues), two pages of crappy sports themed Chuckie stickers, and a Superman bookmark and super-mini hardback journal. Sigh...


We did buy a whole heck of a lot of "Sketch" portraits from a booth that only cost one token, and honestly they are some of the best pictures of us as a couple we own, so I guess there's that...

Here is my review of Long John Silvers, an eating establishment that my family frequented in the 80's.

So here we are at the wonderfully bright and clean...okay the downtrodden, depressing and dingy downtown Lawrenceville Long John Silvers, the only one within comfortable driving distance.


Upon entering this fine establishment you are immediately herded toward the counter of ultimate batter-dipped decision delight. Choose your heart attack from either 5 combo meals, 4 dinners, 6 baskets, or for the truly brave, 2 different sizes of family meals.


After placing your order and receiving your drinks, you must now sit yourself in one of two areas of fine dining and comfort. Unfortunately there was only one area open and it was squalid, containing the same furniture that the place was most likely opened with in the 70's.




As you wait for the server to bring your meal of fat and fish you can cast a gaze around the establishment at their many pieces of fine ambience and art, including two paintings so sun faded that they are just light blue now.


Just as you are about to burst with anticipation a 16 year-old counter jockey with a stare that can only mean he's contemplating suicide will bring out your meal. I opted for the #10, the Seafood Feast with fish, chicken, shrimp, and sides of slaw, French fries, and hush puppies.


My beautiful fiancee (seriously no sarcasm in that statement) opted for a two piece fish basket and a side of the New Veggie Bites (which are actually just jalapeño poppers.)


I tackled the single chicken plank first. Now I don't know how they do it, but the fried batter covering was piping hot while the chicken inside was merely lukewarm. It was a little dry too, so I ended up drowning it in tartar sauce just to take the edge off. Plus I love freaking LJS tartar sauce.


Next came the shrimp, not bad but how do you screw up batter fried shrimp, and the fish. Now I grew up on this fish and once upon a time in Florida is was the best fish ever. Now it's revealed its true self to me. It's just unidentified flakey triangular white fish and it's just not that good. Without the golden, salty, batter exterior I simply wouldn't take the time to eat it. No sauce needed though, as it's moist as all get out.


Next I started tackling the sides, or as the above picture will show me lying, I was mixing it up as I went, but for the sake of this review I waited for the sides. The slaw was first and it was pretty damn good slaw-wise. I'll be honest, I'm not a big slaw fan, it's milky and cabbage-y and I just don't bend that way mostly, but I did grow up on LJS and I developed a taste for theirs and it's just the exact same as I remembered it. The fries sucked monkey balls though. They are the worst fries ever, all plain and not salty and sort of stale. The hush puppies though were fan-freaking-tastic as LJS hush puppies tend to always be. Just enough batter goodness without too much onion.


By this time Carrie was getting a tummy ache, but like the trooper she is she powered through her meal to the almost bitter end. Her assessment of the Veggie Bites was that they were good, but not as good as store bought jalapeño bites simply because instead of one solid piece of pepper LJS decided to dice theirs which sort of made it, well, not as good. What made me laugh was the sign for the Bites promotion that proclaimed "Eat Your Veggies!" when in fact they are mostly batter and cheese, and let's be honest, jalapeños aren't really veggies in the healthy sense of the word.


Having each made our way through most of the meal (Carrie stopped per her tummy ache and I stopped shoveling in slaw when I got a mouthful of hidden slaw-soggy French fry) we made out way to the best part of any LJS meal and something I was totally obsessed with as a kid, the crumbs. I apologize for the picture quality, apparently it's impossible to get a clear light reading or distance reading off of LJS crumbs, and they will always turn out blurry as all four pictures that I took did. When I was a kid I would always order a free basket of "extra crumbs" which the server never batted an eye at, so apparently I wasn't the only one begging for what amounts to LJS scrapings.


with our meal finished and our tummy's either full or sick we sat and contemplated life...

 
...and then we contemplated the freaking bill. $15.76 for that! Man, this should be like McDonalds prices. We should be able to walk out of a LJS only $8 lighter than when we walked in, but $16!?! There was a family of 6 eating a table away from us that must have spent upwards of $50 at LJS, and that is crazy. Also, not to pick on that family, but the grandmother was hooked up to an oxygen tank, with full on wires tubes and everything, and she was chowing down on batter-fried greasy fish and that's just wrong.


Though the family of 6 before us gave this a healthy tug, needless to say we did not ring the bell of ultimate happiness.


It's sad to say, but I believe between the price, the attack of the ninja-like soggy French fry, and tummy aches abounding, this is probably my last visit to Long John Silvers for the foreseeable future. I didn't eat there all the time as a kid, but we did eat it often enough that when I moved to Georgia and I couldn't find one I was sad and craved it for years to come. But maybe some things need to be relegated to that black hole of memory that is nostalgia.


That isn't to say you can't leave with one of these though...

So I decided since my friend Kevin and I are on this huge nostalgia trip and as part of that we're hitting places we ate at a lot as kids, I'd do a few restaurant (if you can call 'em that) reviews.  First up is what ended up probably being my last trip to Long John Silvers ever.  Come back for the excitement this weekend, when Flickr will let me upload the rest of the earth shattering pictures of my dining experience.  Come back for the fish.  Come back for the addictive beer battered everything.  Come back for the Tar Tar Sauce.  Man just come back.

While I'm working on my Capri-Sun article/whatever, I thought I'd share a quick memory of another food item I remember from my childhood, Charles Chips.  Before I had my first bag of microwave popcorn, before I had my first Cool Ranch Dorittos, before Cheetos and all those other fried salty snacks, I remember Charles Chips.

Now you can still get them in most grocery stores, but it's just not the same, because when I remember getting them, they came in cans and were delivered right to our door, like milk used to be in my parent's childhood, and ice was in my grand parents'.  Of course my memory would be for a fattening salty fried snack, not something healthy, but that's all part of the branding of the 80's.

I don't remember if a Charles Chip was any better than a Lays or a Golden Flake, but have to hope it was considering it couldn't have cheap to have it delivered to the house.  My friend Kevin and I are going to attempt to relive our potato chip memories by picking up some for an upcoming movie night.  Hell I might even pop for ordering some off the website, to try and relive the whole delivery part of the nostalgia, though getting a tin from UPS in a no doubt heavily damaged box that probably only contains bags of the chips, that I could buy in the store, stuck in the tin just isn't quite the same.

So yestarday I decided to once again to go super nuts in the kitchen and whip up another batch of Puerco Pibil (aka Cochinita Pibil), the amazing (I think) pork dish that Robert Rodriguez educated the world with on the DVD for Once Upon a Time in Mexico.

Where ever you stand on the film itself (some love it, some hate it) the dish that Agent Sands eats in every dive he goes to in Mexico is one that I have completely fallen for.  I think one of the main draws for me is that it's a new Mexican flavor to me.  I'm so used to the more normal fare, salsas, verde salsas, creamy cheeses, corn tortillas, enchiladas, guacamoles, even moles, that I just want something new.  This dish from the Yucatan delivers in spades.  It's citrus-y, spicy, and earthy (the annatto is all of the above), not to mention tender (much much more tender than even the best pulled pork.) 

Best of all it's a very "from scratch" sort of recipe, so preparing it is very satisfying in terms of cooking something a little more difficult, but at the same time once you've done it, it becomes very simple.  This is the sixth time I've made it and by far this was the best batch.  I'm getting very comfortable with modifying recipes to make them turn out how I think they should be, something that I refused to do when I first started really cooking.

Anyway, here is the recipe as Robert Rodriguez give it on the DVD (which I've also added to the Cochinita Pibil wiki page):

Hardware: Blender, 8"x12" baking pan (at least), coffee grinder (dedicated to spice grinding), decent sized cutting board (we're dealing with 5lbs of pork here), Knife, tin foil for baking, large ziploc bag (for marinating), hand citrus juicer, rubber gloves (optional.)

Software: 5lbs of Pork Butt (bone out is easier to handle), 1/2 cup white vinegar, 1/2 cup orange juice, the juice of five lemons, 8 cloves of garlic, 2 habanero peppers seeded and roughly chopped, 2 TBS salt, 5 TBS annatto seeds (typically found in mexican spice section), 8 whole allspice berries, 1 TBS black peppercorns, 2 tsp cumin, 1/2 tsp whole cloves, 1 shot of tequilla, and about 1/2-1 lb of banana leaves (probably the hardest ingredient to find.)

When cutting the habaneros you should probably use rubber gloves.  The juice and oils from the peppers will stay on your exposed skin for up to three days if you're not careful and it will tingle and burn the entire time.  Also if you don;t use gloves and then touch your face you will be sorry, as the oils, even the smallest amount will stay for days, so be careful not to touch your eyes or pick your nose or anything.

Cut the pork butt into 2 inch squares, doing best to cut away the heavier veins of fat and sinew.

In the coffee grinder combine the annatto, black pepper, cumin, allspice, and cloves and grind to a medium powder.

In a blender add the lemon juice, orange juice, vinegar, garlic, habanero peppers, ground spices, salt and one shot of tequilla.  Blend until garlic and peppers break down.

Stick the meat into the ziploc bag and pour over the marinade.  Let sit in fridge for at least one hour, turning once.  You can marinate the meat overnight (the citrus will have begun to cook the meat and it will have changed to white, this is normal.)

Pre-heat the oven to 325 degrees (fahrenheit).  Line the baking pan with banana leaves and then pour the meat and marinade ontop.  Cover the mixture with remaining banana leaves and then cover the pan tightly with tin foil so that no steam can escape during cooking.  Bake the meat for 4 hours.  Serve over white rice.  Makes 6-8 servings.

Now I've found that there are a few modifications that can make this dish turn out better on a regular basis.  The first couple times I made it, the dish varied, ususally in the tenderness department.  When I made it for my parents in Florida it burnt.  Basically I've found that if you drop the temperature down to between 300 and 325 (it will rise and fall during cooking, but will always be at least 300) and only cook the meat for 3-3 1/2 hours it always comes out tender and perfectly done.  Because different ovens very in temperature and then all ovens fluctuate while cooking, I've found that if you set the oven to 325 it'll often go as high as 350 during cooking.  Mix that with a 4 hour cook time and the probabbility of drying out the meat doubles. 

I've also found the the citrus flavor to be a little richer if you substitute two of the lemons worth of juice for the juice of three limes.

I'll be honest the first time you make this dish it'll seem excessive, the long cook time, the list of ingredients, etc.  But after you've made it a couple times it really is easy to prepare and if you start early enough you can do other things while it's cooking.  Also the more you make it the more you get out of the spices you bought to make it since you probably won't be using them for much else.

I'm also experimenting with using this marinade on fish.  We tried doing it with catfish fillets for Carrie (who's a lacto-ovo and fish vegetarian).  It didn't turn out that great, mostly because I had to improvise on the cooking time.  We wrapped the meat in banana leaves and used a good bit of the marinade, and the fish (at 400 degrees for 15 minutes) just wasn't done enough.  Typically 10 minutes at 400 would cook any fish, but because of teh extra layers of banana leaves and extra liquid I think it might need to cook a lot longer.  Next time we're going to try it for 25 minutes and see how it goes.