#168 - you've been iced, bro!

i consider myself lucky. to this day i've remained friends with a number of people who i first met in high school & even prior to that. this past friday, bri, my first ever friend from kindergarten, got married down in savannah, georgia & while i wasn't able to make it down south for the wedding, about a month back, i was able to make it up to boston for a weekend of bachelor party activities with him & a dozen or so of our friends. it's the second bachelor party i've had the opportunity to attend this summer & though the first one was a blast, bri's definitely took first prize.

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nosh nook #177 - tuesday, november 17, 2009

does boston have room for more ice cream? (link)
11.16.09 - wbur - by monica brady-myerov

it's official. today marks thirty-five death-free years of life for me & as such, i'm making my way up the east coast via motorcoach for a celebratory evening of food & drinks & dirty projectors with friends in boston. it should be a radical way to pay tribute to my quickly approaching middle age. the best part? it's supposed to be below thirty degrees tonight. the temperature's going to be less than my age. how chilling!

it's obviously perfect ice cream weather, but how about fresh, custom made ice cream from a machine? can i get that? unless i want to trespass on the northeastern campus, i can't get it today, but as wbur reports, next month moobella, a taunton-based company who has developed an "ice cream shop on wheels," will be turning on 100 of their machines "in cafeterias, museums and food courts around new england." they already have one of their machines on the northeastern campus & according to one student "it's a really cool machine."

sure it 's a cool machine (what machine isn't cool?) that creates ice cream for you while you wait, but what sort of effect will it have on the overall ice cream experience? wbur spoke with lynda utterback, from the national ice cream retailers association & she's cool with it, since people aren't going to decide to "take the family to a machine" instead of hitting up mom & pop ice cream joints. plus, as she notes, "there's always room for more ice cream." you said it, ms utterback.

snack away! #9 - newton's law of figs.

yep, it’s true--there's a recession going on out there, and like pretty much everybody else, i got canned. the good news for me is i was able to land a new gig within a few weeks thanks to an esoteric computer chip programming skill (the details of which are far too boring for a snack blog).

it was when i was between jobs, wandering the streets of boston (and maybe i had consumed a few cold ones) that i talked to shawn about guest snack blogging. i had a lot of time of my hands and had just thoroughly enjoyed reading about todd’s spotted dick (soon to be followed by wilk’s hot nuts) and i wanted in on the action.

fast forward a week and i was working at the new job and all of a sudden i didn’t have much time to think about interesting things to write about. brain was busy digesting new corporate secrets, trying to find where my printouts were being sent to and coping with having to use a shared bathroom instead of the solo units we had the luxury of at the old place.

furthermore, i realized i don’t really even eat snacks. i mean, an apple and a glass of water at 3pm in the afternoon is pretty wild for this guy. what i am basically telling you is this here blog had a pretty good chance of never happening, but as luck would have it, i forgot to grab my apple on the way out this morning and so i wandered down to the cafeteria and bought a little snacky snack.

snack away! #9 - newton's law of figs.
guest blogger: chris leduc, newton, mass

snack: fig newtons
drink: starbucks tazo zen tea (with a little squirt o’ honey)



when’s the last time you had a fig newton? for me it was a least 15 years ago. i remember wondering as a kid what the frig a newton was. why on earth would a cookie be named after the metric system unit for force? what? your kids don’t use the metric system? well fast forward those 15 years and now i live in the city of newton, a rather pleasant if not slightly boring boston suburb which is actually a collection of approximately 13 individual villages rather than one central downtown area. i say approximately because these villages have no official borders and it is hard to even get an official list of what they all are...so i did what any reasonable person would do and went straight for the best places to get indisputable facts: wikipedia...and it was while perusing the wikipedia page about newton that i stumbled upon an answer to that 15 year old question: the fig newton is named so because it was invented right here.

...so it was a no brainer that i grabbed the fig newtons when i saw them in the vending machine today. i paired them with a hot cup of tazo zen tea (with a little squirt o’ honey) from the pseudo-starbucks in the lobby. one thing i noticed right away is that these things are messy. the cake outer part crumbled all over the place and i had quite the mess. biting into the newton, you get a very sugary blast of fig. anyway, i assume it's fig because that’s what it says on the package and i’ve never had a fig in its natural state.

overall, i’d say it was pretty gross and i think i am all set with the fig newton for another 15 years. the aforementioned grossness didn’t stop me from wolfing down both newtons and 200 calories later, i was wishing i had selected a cold beverage to cleanse the cake residue in my mouth. the tazo tea had cooled enough by this point and i found it very refreshing and generally zen-like as advertised.

i don’t regret getting the newtons, as it was a nice trip down memory lane, but the next time i get a little hungry at work, i think i’ll go with a bag of chips.

chris leduc is a jumbo who does something with computers & has been responsible for approximately 17,000 funny moments over his 33+ years. he will sing "cracklin' rosie" for you at the drop of a hat. one time, he saved money, bought car.

nosh nook #44 - thursday, may 14, 2009

list calories, and diners will at least look (link)
05.13.09 - boston globe - by stephen smith

we new yorkers have always been trendsetters. last year, led by the genius of folks like nanny-mayor mike bloomberg, we forced restaurants with more than fifteen nationwide locations to list their foods' calorie counts on their menus, allowing restaurant-goers to assess the damage before deciding what to eat. now, after a few other locales (philly, seattle) have jumped on board with this idea, massachusetts has decided to join the party.

as steven smith reports, posting calories has had some effect on peoples' purchasing decisions. "surveys by the new york city department of health suggest that the calorie counts at least make people think a bit more about what they put in their stomachs." i've always been a bit skeptical of the idea that chain restaurants should be forced to post calorie counts. on one hand, i'm all for keeping businesses honest, but on the other hand, i'm not sure it's the answer to our health & dietary problems. if consumers can't figure out that a mcdonalds big mac has a lot of calories by now, they probably shouldn't be eating it. although MA is the exception, with their state-mandated health care, i find it perversely humorous that governments in general fight so hard for regulations such as this, but not to get people health care.

since this article came out yesterday, the mass public health council has voted to adopt the regulations, meaning that starting in november 2010, any restaurant with over twenty locations will have to start posting calories. all the thousands of other restaurants in the city don't have to worry about it though, so unless you're someone who eats at mcdonalds every single day, you're not going to know how many calories you're taking in at all times. if you are eating fast food every day, then you have an issue that's larger than restaurants posting calories on a menu board.

#17 - head.

on wednesday, i made my way up to the boston area on the megabus with ryall to meet up with m.j. & my bro for the radiohead concert at the venue formerly formerly known as great woods. my trip began in the prospect ave stop on the r train, where after a few minutes, the train entered the station. as i waited for the train to stop & the doors to open, i looked at the torn advertisement behind me, which had the following message scrawled across the bottom of it:

i snapped a quick pic & got on the train. it's safe to say that as the lead singer of belle & sebastian (the band that acted as the jumping-off point for pretty much everything i've listened to since 2001), i'm not sure if i could ever let go of stuart murdoch, no matter how twee he is. regardless of this person's personal struggle with stuart murdoch, musically speaking, i took my random path-crossing with this particular message to be a positive start to radiohead day. usually the subway ads feature no more than crudely drawn penises on them.

the megabus busride was fine overall, other than the non-functioning wifi. the southwest airlines-influenced bus driver even quipped, "there's wifi on board. sometimes it works." they played two dvds during the five-hour drive--benji: off the leash! & shark bait (the reef), which is a budget attempt to cash in on the success of finding nemo. it appears that somebody else has the upper hand in the wifi-inclusive bus service market at this point, megabus...or should i say, megabutt?

radiohead was friggin' amazing, as was expected. as i have probably expressed to everyone & their mother at this point, i can not believe how lovely & clean they sound in a big open amphitheatre. i was in the absolute back of the lawn & it still sounded wondrous. my personal fave...jigsaw falling into place. my personal victory...we were the very last people they sold beer to in our section. they literally gave us our beers & shut the gates to the stand, making lots of people behind us quite sad.

#17 - head.

snack: flaming hot flavored munchies
drink: pomegranate blueberry mash

after the concert, an hour or so in the parking lot & an hour or so drive back to my brother's place in j.p., we went to pretty much the only thing open in the neighborhood after 1pm...7-11, where i, of course, spent in the area of $10 on snacks alone. clearly a smart allocation of my funds.

for this particular night, i decided i needed to eat from a bag of flaming hot flavored munchies. it was after 1pm. i had just been at 7-11. munchies were clearly the right snack for that moment. each munchies flavor features rold gold pretzels, sun chips, cheetos & doritos, with the last three ingredients changing depending on the overall snack mix flavor. you would be correct in assuming that this particular flavor features the flaming hot versions of the sun chips, cheetos & doritos. as my brother informed me, they used to have a kids' version with doritos, cheetos, popcorn, m&ms and captain crunch. if you ask me, that is one hell of a snack & should probably only be available for adults due to its high awesomeness content.

...& seriously, people. pomegranate is not going to save civilization. it is just a fruit. i defer to bevnet for or a link for the pomegranate blueberry mash, as boylan bottling apparently doesn't care enough about this product to have a web page for it. in fact, they care so little about this product that they appear to have even spelled "pomegranate" incorrectly on the label..."pommegranate" ain't correct, mr & mrs boylan. look it up.