nosh nook #117 - tuesday, august 25, 2009

it's an energy drink? no, it's beef jerky (link)
08.24.09 - denver business journal - by mark harden

ever wonder how history's great inventions came about? penicillin? somebody left a sandwich out on the counter too long. the ronco rotisserie? somebody left ron popiel out in the garage too long...& there you have it. just like that, we were blessed with two of history's great inventions & they came into being completely by chance. the snack world's no stranger to great inventions & we've now been graced with the greatest invention since sliced bread--"perky jerky"--the result of crossbreeding a bag of jerky with an energy drink. what took science so long?!

perky jerky was created through the same "oops/wait a second..." method that brought us penicillin. as the denver business journal & the perky jerky website describe, it all started "after a long, hard night of energy-drink-cocktail-fueled libation" at a ski lodge, when somebody spilled an energy drink into a bag of jerky. the next morn, when they woke up, somebody was all "i don't care if ronnie spilled his red bull into the bag of jerky last night. i'm friggin starving."...& they went for it...& they liked it...& it was through that process that perky jerky & the performance enhancing meat snack co (PEMS for short) were born.

it turned out that after soaking in energy drink overnight, the jerky actually became more tender & to top it off, the skiers "realized they'd been given an extra boost" from the energy drink. after three years of development, the jerky was finally ready for market. it wasn't easy though. they couldn't just keep getting drunk around the ski lodge & hope for the best. brian levin, the force behind PEMS, explains it this way--"creating an energizing meat snack was only half the battle. i refused to compromise on both the taste and the effect, so it took several years of trial and error to find the perfect combination of flavor and kick." sounds great, brian!...& when it's finally available in stores, i might just try some. i'm always looking for a little extra kick from my meat snacks.

nosh nook #116 - monday, august 24, 2009

in south, it’s sweet, deep-fried (link)
08.23.09 - atlanta journal-constitution - by tammy joyner

i've visited hotlanta a few times in my life. my knowledge is limited to buckhead, little five points, sono & a few other neighborhoods, but from what i can tell, it's basically the awesomest example of urban sprawl known to man (outside of los angeles). if you're walking somewhere, you might get a look like you have two heads, but the people seemed friendly enough. the disco bowling was discoey enough. if there's one thing it definitely has, it's its fair share of tasty cuisine. of course there's southern cooking, but there's also the varied world cuisine that you can expect to find in a city with a half-million people.

the atlanta journal constitution's tammy joyner describes atlanta as "the silicon valley of all things glazed, scattered, covered, smothered and deep fried." i'm not sure what "scattered" means as far as cooking goes, but ok. it's something southern no doubt. basically, "quick, high-calorie food" is part of the southern culture & as wilbert jones, president of healthy concepts (some consulting firm in chicago) notes, "snack food manufacturing in the south is a multibillion-dollar business and it continues to grow." even with the economic downturn, "a southerner's sweet tooth is recession-proof." so yeah. southerners love snack foods.

on top of that, atlanta's not only home to the coca-cola headquarters, but it's also home to the headquarters for arby's, chick-fil-a & waffle house. as far as the rest of the south goes, joyner mentions a bunch of other southern snack food manufacturers & restaurant chains outside of georgia to make the case that the south's huge on on-the-go snack foods, but other than krispy kreme, i haven't heard of any of them. blenheim ginger ale in s.c.? lance snacks in n.c.? sonny's real pit bar in fl? must be a southern thing. it's ok though. anyway, i believe her & it doesn't make much of a difference if it's a southern thing or a georgia thing, because from what i gather, atlanta is the south anyhow.

the musical fruit: movement #7.

the musical fruit: movement #7.
song: "bowl of oranges," bright eyes
fruit: mineola orange



i used to really like bright eyes. like a lot. during the first few years after i first moved to nyc back in 2001, i must have gone to at least a half dozen bright eyes shows. i even drove over an hour to cat's cradle in carrboro, nc to see bright eyes whilst on a business trip. i've always been super intrigued by artists who, while still in their teens, have accomplished more artistically than i have in my entire lifetime & conor oberst, the mastermind behind bright eyes, definitely fit that description. by the time he was 21, he'd already put out three albums & an EP under the name bright eyes, two of which (letting off the happiness & fevers & mirrors) i had in heavy rotation for a good two years after discovering him. they were organic sounding albums clearly written by a teenager but filled with oberst's quivering voice spouting forth detailed stories of angst & heartbreak & self-reflection.

then in 2002, when i was at the height of my obsession, the fourth full length, lifted or the story is in the soil, keep your ear to the ground came out & became the first bright eyes album to get serious national attention, with late night tv appearances & whatnot...their "breakthrough" album if you will. it features some of my favorite all time lyrics, lines like "abc, nbc, cbs, bullshit. they give us fact or fiction? i guess an even split" that tiptoe between profound & pretentious. still today, i can put the album on, get sucked in & not realize it until i find myself coming out the other end seventy-three minutes later. about a third of the way in, there's "bowl of oranges," a piano-tinged song that acts as a short, slightly happy buffer between the beginning of the album & the epic "don't know when but a day is gonna come." it delves in familiar territory for a bright eyes song, telling a vague story about being alone through lyrics like "and we'll keep working on the problem we know we'll never solve of love's uneven remainders, our lives are fractions of a whole." totally deep, man.

in honor of the song, i'm having myself a lil bit of citrus today with a mineola orange i picked up at the produce market a couple blocks from my apartment. it's a tiny place (with tiny aisles) that's run by an old korean couple. the dude seems to be perpetually sitting outside arranging the produce. the lady loves me & every time i go in, as she's ringing up my haul, she makes sure to comment on how little i'm paying for the amount of produce i'm getting. she's all "red pepper, green pepper, yellow pepper, snow peas, onions, portobello, shitake...you're eating good tonight, huh?" then i tell her that i have marinated tofu at home to go with all of it & i totally blow her mind. she points out my total on the register & we smile at each other. it's our semiweekly bonding moment. yay neighborhood businesses.

as for the mineola, it's a cross between a grapefruit & a tangerine, similar to a tangelo. according to the wikipedia, the mineola was released in 1931 by the USDA horticultural research station. my fruit was created in a lab! go frankenfruit! as is characteristic of the mineola, it didn't have any seeds in it, but it did have a couple unidentifiable, random lil nubbins hiding out inside of it. as the picture above shows, it also has that characteristic nipple on the top of it. as far as nipples go, it's one of the least exciting nipples i've come across in recent times. on the upside, it's definitely juicier than your typical orange. when i was cutting it up into slices, i ended up with juice flowing off of the cutting board like blood from a freshly shivved prisoner out in the yard. don't worry. i didn't lose any of that juice. since there was nobody around, i lapped & slurped that juice up like some sort of vitamin-c loving dog. mmm...saved citrus cutting board juice.

#120 - mad? these men are CAH-RAY-ZEE!

yeah, i know. everybody & their mother has already written about last sunday's third season premiere of amc's mad men, but i want to write about it too, damnit. after all, it's one of my favorite tv shows & it's been almost ten months since season two came to a close, so i've been jonesing. overall, almost three million people tuned in to the premiere, a 33% increase over the season two premiere, so i wasn't alone. the buzz has totally built. luckily, i've waited almost a week since it aired to get around to writing it, so i'm assuming that i'll be the "final word" on it.

when we last visited the mad men at the end of last season, things had fallen into a serious state of unrest. on a global scale, the cuban missle crisis & the possibility of a nuclear holocaust loomed over american society. the fate of sterling cooper was in question, as they were on the brink of a merger with a british firm (putnam, powell & lowe), leaving things all topsy-turvy for many of the main characters. don draper had been kicked out of his own house and his marriage was in shambles because of his constant cheating & overall attitude towards betty, but in the final scene of the season, she'd revealed to him that she's pregnant.

...& it's under those circumstances that we begin season three. the episode opens with don dreaming about the circumstances surrounding his birth (to a prostitute who dies after giving birth to him) as he warms milk on the stove. he brings the milk upstairs to betty & other than seeing that she's still pregnant, we're not entirely sure where we are on the timeline. we know that he's back living at home & that the sterling/putnam merger's gone through, but not much more. this vagueness is one of the keys to how mad men creator matthew weiner weaves his storytelling magic. much of the time, the characters feel & act like they're in control, but the truth is that they never seem to know the whole story & as such, there's always something waiting to derail them. as the season starts, we get this same feeling.

the premiere seemed to set up a lot of the storylines for season three. don & betty will soon have their third child, but don is still cheating on betty, doing so with a stewardess while on a business trip in baltimore. on that same trip, sal (who we've always assumed was gay but it's never been confirmed) starts getting hot & heavy with a hotel bellboy until they're interrupted by a fire alarm that clears out the hotel. while climbing down the fire escape in the evacuation, unbeknownst to sal, don spies the bellboy in his undershirt in sal's room. at the agency, they fire burt peterson (the head of accounts) & pete thinks that he's been named the new head but soon learns that they've actually replaced burt with a two-man team made up of him & ken cosgrove. there's also tension between joan & john hooker, the new male british secretary who's the "right-hand man" to lane pryce (the new CFO).

overall, it was a slow start to the season, but i'm not worried, as weiner's laid the foundations & in previous seasons, things didn't really take off until a few episodes in anyhow. we're someplace around the beginning of 1963 & since actual historical events have always had some effect on the storyline, there's a lot looming on the horizon. the feminine mystique & the beatles' first album (please please me) are coming out soon. the civil rights movement continues to boil over in the south & martin luther king will soon deliver his "i have a dream" speech. most importantly, JFK will soon be assassinated, an event that changed things for a lot of people. i can't wait to see what effect those things have on the folks at sterling-cooper.

#120 - mad? these men are CAH-RAY-ZEE!
snack: mr krispers barbecue baked rice krisps
drink: lagunitas the hairy eyeball ale



you know who's a mad man? mr krisper. by looking at him, you might think that he's quite the charmer, given his bowler & bow tie & coy smile, but make no mistake about it--that dude's CAH-RAY-ZEE. i was watching TMZ the other day & saw him coming out of the club with his posse & a girl on both arms & within the span of sixty seconds, he had mooned the paparazzi, kicked a stray puppy, jumped up on the hood of a car & puked onto the pavement below before speeding away in his escalade. it was some serious andy dick type shizz, but not as naked & effeminate & pathetic.

despite his craziness, there's one thing that mr krisper can do & that's make a tasty crisp. since he's as mad as a march hare, he spells "crisps" with a "k." he's just that wacky. like the front of the bag says, his mr krispers barbecue baked rice krisps have a "great whole multigrain taste." great? sure, why not? i definitely consumed them at a fairly rapid pace. they're the size of poker chips & made of brown rice, giving them a nice firmness somewhere between a chip & a cracker. in general, my feelings toward barbecue chips are mixed. if they're overwhelmingly flavorful (i'm thinking mesquite here), they need to stay as far away from my mouth as possible, but if they've got a simple barbecue taste that's not too overpowering, i'll invite them in like an old friend. fortunately, mr krisper's krisps fall into the latter category.

if you don't believe that, then you'd better believe that i'm going to give you the hairy eyeball. it won't be my lagunitas the hairy eyeball ale though, because i've already drank it. plus, if i was giving away an eyeball, i'd probably have to give it to mr krisper, because even though he's nuts & possibly dangerous, it looks like he's having some trouble with his left eye & could use the help. this particular hairy eyeball is lagunitas' 2009 new years release, a brown ale with a copper color & a caramel/brown sugar taste. from what i could tell, there wasn't a lick (lock?) of hair or a wink of eyeball in it, but that's just fine with me. that stuff probably would've interfered with the flavor.

the slogan on the front of the bottle--"here's lookin' atcha'!"--sounds like something don draper would come up with. i can see the tv spot now. there's a man. he's out having drinks with a few of his buddies. from across the room, he catches a glimpse of a sultry, red-haired woman alone smoking a cigarette at the end of the bar. she notices him. they exchange a few knowing glances. he calls the bartender over & whispers something to him. the bartender nods back at him, grabs something from the cooler behind the bar, makes his way down to the woman & places a beer in front of her. it's a lagunitas the hairy eyeball ale. she looks across at the man. he winks at her. she smiles & looks at the label, which reads "here's lookin' atcha'!" then they make whoopie. end scene...& we go back to watching an engrossing episode of the beverly hillbillies or the jetsons or something.

nosh nook #115 - friday, august 21, 2009

three best ways to start a food truck business (link)
08.20.09 - wall street journal - by raymund flandez

as i mentioned a few months back, food trucks have recently become all the rage in nyc. from the cupcake truck to the schnitzel truck to the fancy burger truck, the number of gourmet food trucks peppering our streets just keeps growing. the phenomena's not unique to nyc though. food trucks have also sprung up in l.a., austin, d.c. and a handful of cities throughout the country. maybe you're thinking "i want to get me a truck & peddle stuff on a stick to the good citizens of my city, but have no idea how to go about it. i wish there was some sort of helpful guide to steer me in the right direction." keep looking. you aren't going to find it in the wall street journal.

the wall street journal's raymund flandez has put together a smashingly low-level & ultimately useless summary of the craze & how other hopeful entrepreneurs can get on board. he's even named it "the three best ways to start a food truck business" even though it's clearly a rundown of the top three things that you should do when starting a food truck business & not the three best ways to start one. his handy tips are supposedly handy for both "restaurateurs seeking an extra boost in sales" and "entrepreneurs looking to sell food without paying rent." i beg to differ.

...so if you're looking to start a food truck business, the first thing you need to do is "buy a used truck for cheap." yep. it's true...can't start a food truck business without a food truck. once you've done that, you need to "find a good location to sell your food." also true. if you're trying to sell your food outside of an abandoned building, you might have trouble attracting customers. if you set up shop out front of a mcdonalds, they'll probably call the cops. with your truck & location set up, you should "use social-networking technology" to keep customers up-to-date with what's going on with your truck, including your location. flandez suggests using "twitter, facebook and blogs." he doesn't mention myspace though, even though both it & the journal are part of the newscorp family. it makes sense though, since myspace is so five years ago...sorry bout that $580 million you paid for it, rupert.