oh hey there internet. how's your june been going? mine's been aight. thanks for asking. i decided to take a few weeks off from blogging & while i was away, in addition to doing a lot of thinking, two fridays ago i celebrated the third anniversary of my first ever blog post here on eat!drink!snack! i suppose it was a joyous moment. in the blog's first year, i was a snacking maniac, pumping out snack-related news & diatribes at least once or twice a day. a bunch of my friends & family wrote a dozen sweet guest posts. i was psyched. the second year brought our first ever pumpktoberfest & the continuation of snacking news with a column that lasted until the spring--the snackdown!--but by the end of the year, i started to burn out a bit from updating the blog on the daily all by myself. my third year was the one where i finally hit the wall & between that & some kinks in my personal life, i haven't been all that productive, posting something here about once a week if that. i know. it's ridiculously lame of me.

in the beginning, eat!drink!snack! was created as a way to make myself write more & for a while, that's what happened. i spent a LOT of my free time in my apartment sitting in front of a computer writing. while it was satisfying for a while, i eventually decided i didn't want to spend as much time sitting on my ass, even if it was in the interest of snack journalism. i felt tied down by the self-imposed rigid structure of my blog posts. four to five paragraphs on a topic. two paragraphs on a snack. two paragraphs on a drink. belch. repeat. i felt like there weren't enough people reading. it all started to get to me & eventually, it led to me updating once a week. so yeah, it's been a rough past year for the blog & i. we haven't been spending as much time together. hell, i didn't even announce our third anniversary on twitter...& it's ok. let me tell you, willy shakespeare isn't always correct with that "absence makes the heart grow fonder" junk, if you know what i mean.

don't get me wrong. it wasn't just hatred & boredom in the world of eat!drink!snack! over the past year. the blog & i have had some good times. pumpktoberfest officially became an annual tradition. i started a weekend relationship with the saturday brooklyn flea in ft greene with my "flea at laff" column. i added more photos to my posts. i embarked on my "fifty states project," where i've vowed to give a nod to every state in the u.s. i've expanded my use of twitter to help get out my thoughts on snacking & such. i started writing a nacho snacks guest column called "a queso the munchies" for nachos NY. i've done the occasional food/drink column on fucked in park slope. since i've been unemployed for half of the past year, i've taken to occasionally introducing myself as a writer & that feels good. now i just need to write more.

...so as i enter my fourth year of blogging, here's what's going to go down: i'm still going to bring y'all the insightful columns that you've come to know & love, but in the very near future, i'll be bringing back my TOTALLY HARD-HITTING snack news coverage & adding more food photography to the mix...and, as i did in my last post back on memorial day, every once in a while i'm going to attempt to throw off the structural shackles i've increasingly created for myself & go all free form with my posts. i may even try expanding my coverage to food in general. who knows? year four was the year that i had mostly-undisclosed big plans for eat!drink!snack! & i still plan on going big in some way or another over the next twelve months. after all, i still love snacking & drinking like sexytime. it just might not happen in the way i'd intended to. that's ok though...as long as it's still a meaningful year that's cool with me.

...& if you're one of my regular readers, someone who continues to visit the site despite my lack of updates, someone who i only see a few times a year but each time we see each other you ask me "how's the blog going?" and tell me how much you enjoy it, chocolate chip kudos to you sir or madam, whichever the case may be. your reward will be my undying gratitude & what hopefully amounts to a good read. also, i once saw on a billboard that your reward will be in heaven...y'know, if you believe in that stuff...so there's that.

snack: stonewall kitchen spiced sweet potato sticks
drink: rogue somer orange honey ale

when i celebrated the blog's third anniversary, i did so in my former hometown of windham, NH, where i was visiting the family for my 18-year-old brother's high school graduation. to be more specific, i celebrated in style by kicking back on the couch in my childhood living room & watching the big screen TV with a snack-drink pairing that i picked up at lucia's bodega, a wine/beer/cigar/cheese/gourmet food shop in town that opened up back at the beginning of may. these days, i only visit windham a few times a year, but i'm pretty sure it's the only store of its kind in the entire town. for my snack, i opted for a package of stonewall kitchen spiced sweet potato sticks, a snack that's one of a few types of gourmet potato sticks made by stonewall kitchen, a york, maine-based company. they also make a ton of other stuff, from jams & sauces to pancake mixes & prepared goods like lobster mac & cheese and parisian macaroons. it's all for sale on their site & it all looks amazeballs.

as for the spiced sweet potato sticks, after finishing an entire 4.3 oz bag of them, i'm still not certain whether i like them or not. the sticks themselves have the consistency of your average, everyday breadstick & a slight sweet potato flavor that's weaker than i expected but not in a way that's bad or anything. they're lightly seasoned with red & white pepper, sea salt, brown sugar and cinnamon, a flavor combo that, while faint, does complement the sweet potato flavor nicely. i enjoyed them but personally, they fall into some weird "not a chip, cracker or nut" snack limbo that sort of makes me uncomfortable, so i'm fairly certain i wouldn't seek them out again. don't let that discourage you though.

i paired the sweet potato sticks with a 22 oz bottle of rogue somer orange honey ale that also came from lucia's. through the years, i've drank a number of rogue's beers but i've never come across this "somer orange honey ale," a beer that the rogue website says is "dedicated to the rogues who are about to discover that they are rogues and change how they see the world." um, ok oregon hippies. whatever. everyone knows you can't "discover" that you're a rogue. that's like "discovering" that you're a ninja. CAN'T HAPPEN. you're either born a rogue or you're not...or maybe that's a pirate. i forget now. anyway, as for the bottle, my now-high-school-graduate brother noted that, "the girl on the front looks like something out of that video from the 80's." he was of course speaking of "take on me" by a-ha. i assume that the only reason he knows about the video is because family guy parodied it.

as the bottle notes, the somer orange honey ale is brewed with twelve ingredients: rogue micro barley farm dare & risk malts, crystal & rogue micro hopyard revolution hops, wheat, oats, honey, chamomile, sweet orange peel, coriander, free range coastal water & pacman yeast. you might think that all those ingredients would add up to a complex flavor, but it didn't seem all that complex to me. i mean, the honey & citrus notes were flavorful & as a wheat beer it was definitely better than a blue moon or a hoegaarden, but it wasn't anything all that spectacular. i suppose it's a better-than-average summer beer, so if you see one, give it a try. maybe in doing so, you'll discover that you're a rogue or a pirate or something.