#191 - three is the magic number.

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.

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#100 - happy anniversary!

this monday was my parents' thirty-fifth wedding anniversary, meaning that in just over five months, i'll be turning thirty-five. they've stuck it out even though they haven't always had the most normal relationship, but i congratulate them. they seem to be trying hard at making this growing old & retiring thing work. if they had never met back in the early seventies, some marty mcfly shit would happen & you wouldn't get the chance to read this right now & that'd be a tragedy on the level of the great boston molasses disaster of 1919. holy molasses! that's tragic!

yesterday marked the one-year anniversary of eat!drink!snack! [insert fanfare here]. when i first launched the blog last june, i was just hoping it'd be a way to get me to write more. after yesterday's second meditation was posted, i'd written my 100th "meditation" column since the blog's launch. those pieces have definitely evolved over time. of the two columns i've added, the weekday "nosh nook" snack news item/journalism critique has got me in the habit of being informed about what's going on in the food industry and i've been consistently delighted by the weekly "snack away!" guest columnists, some of whom i didn't even know had writing skillz.

my top five fave topics from the last years' columns are, in no particular order:

• snack away! #5 - deez nutz. - guest blogger wilky wilk almost had to cancel on me at the last minute, but he came through with a reminder of his verbal hijinx. i urge him to bring back clownbaby.com (his old blog site) or some new incarnation ASAP.
• #52 - bcs bs. - doing a live rundown of a sporting event was one of those experiments i wanted to give a whirl. now that i've done it, i'm ready to live-blog the 2012 election. i'm looking in your direction, cnn.
  
• #74 - 1974. - in honor of my birth year, i looked into the events of 1974 & soon discovered that there was a lot of violent stuff happening...i guess that's any year though. plus, i was reminded how much yoo-hoo sucks.
• nosh nook #50 - friday, may 22, 2009 - thanks to the folks at jack's links, i now know that MATADOR is the most extreme meat stick on the market. radical teens crave it for snack consumption.
• nosh nook #12 - tuesday, march 31, 2009 - the headline said it all..."prostitute paid with chicken snacks." sad story. hilariously-phrased.

over the next year, i have a ton of random ideas for the site, both columnwise & otherwise, some of which will actually pan out & you'll notice over the coming months. esperanto month? maybe. insect thursdays? possibly. an off-off-broadway musical? if you're lucky. the world is my oyster or dumpling or something! so yeah, seriously folks who drop by...thanks for reading.

#100 - happy anniversary!
snack: joyva jell ring
drink: naked gold machine juice smoothie



with the anniversary & whatnot, i was totally jellin' late last night, so i decided to treat myself to a three-pack of joyva jell rings. they're a simple candy--chocolate covered raspberry jelly rings. they're made by the joyva corp, a local company who crafts their magical jell rings right here in scenic bushwick, brooklyn. i guess that makes me some sort of locavore or something.

biting into these things was a much more pleasant experience than i'd anticipated. the jell's not all that weird & it's a little firmer than i expected, which is somewhat of a plus. i definitely wouldn't want some watery smuckersesque nonsense squirting out all over the place with every bite i take. well played, joyva. i'm a fan of fruit & chocolate pairings and since the raspberry is currently vying for the top spot on my fictional "best fruits to pair with chocolate" list, i really dug the jell rings.

since i'm currently addicted to smoothies but still too lazy to make my own, i'm pairing the jell rings with a naked gold machine juice smoothie. naked's become my go-to smoothie & i generally stick with the "machines." in terms of how often i get the different kinds, it's the first time i've tried the gold machine, but the green machine's my current favorite at the moment, followed by blue, with red holding down third place. i usually struggle with justifying the price, which ranges between $3-$5 depending on where you are in the city, but in the end, i never complain, as without fail, naked smoothies have been giving me energy & bringing me back to reality on a regular basis recently.

the gold machine is made up of one golden kiwi (which sounds like an indy jones quest item), one banana, two apples, a hint of passion fruit & pineapple & a bunch of vitamins & healthy stuff. it's a little sweet, even for me, but regardless, i have to put it on the same level of tastiness as the blue machine. it's going to be tough to knock off the green machine though.  as weird as it looks, i can't get enough of it.  it's like the smoothie equivalent of ben stiller.