snackdown! - 1.29.10

in a week where president obama delivered his first state of the union address & the world lost howard zinn, j.d. salinger & that short, slightly-creepy lady from poltergeist with the high-pitched voice, it was probably pretty hard for you to keep up with everything awesome that happened in the world of snacking. luckily, i have a brain capacity similar to that of christopher langan & the waking hours of a speed freak, so i was able to find enough brain power & time to concentrate on both snack news and presidents & celebrity deaths & whatnot. just kidding. that's not what happened. my brain's not that big. i just used google alerts & shit. anyway...happy weekend, eat!drink!snack! reader. we have to come up with a better name for you.

• do you like pancakes? how about AUTOMATIC pancakes? are you bummed that you've had trouble finding automatic pancakes anywhere on the entire north american continent? fret no longer, my friend. popcake, a company based in hong kong, announced this week that they've secured distribution of their automatic pancake machine here in north america. as a planet, "more than 20 million pancakes are consumed daily" & i assume that americans, with our love for putting butter & syrup on things, make up a large portion of that figure. just imagine what sort of damage we're going to do now that they're available automatically! (perishablenews.com)


• these days, the cast of jersey shore has essentially become the fourteenth representative from new jersey, but the nj star-ledger wants you to know that jersey's about more than orange skin, greased up fist pumping & displaying your abs. they're also about pizza & over the last six months, the star-ledger's "four-member pizza patrol drove 9,000 miles in the munchmobile, visiting 333 pizzerias and sampling 1,000 slices" to find new jersey's best pizza. all week, they're running pizza-related articles as part of a countdown to the announcement of jersey's best pizza. on a related note, i want a munchmobile. (nj star ledger)


• i'm just going to come right out & say it...five-star restaurants are wack. color me cheap, but i've never been one to swoon over the "experience" of spending hundreds of dollars on dinner. give me a couple tacos or a dolphin's worth of half-price sushi & i'm good to go. i bring this up because in 2010, fancy restaurateurs like david chang are trying to blur the lines between five-star food & regular people food by serving fried chicken. because of this, many have deemed fried chicken a food to watch in the new year. they can have their fried chicken. to be honest, i'd rather have some bacon. (seattle post-intelligencer)


• in south texas, they take their meat seriously. this past saturday, at a cafe in brownsville, the owner & a customer got into a slight brouhaha over the customer's order. the customer was all "i ordered the chicken but you gave me beef." eventually, he & the owner got into it, started tossing food at each other & the next thing you know, the owner hauls off & thwacks the customer with a plate. the moral of this story: in texas, if they serve you beef, don't start a beef. (washington post)


• if you've followed eat!drink!snack! for a while, you know that i think of snacking as an art form. the boston globe's devra first totally agrees with me in her article "a whole new world of snacking." the piece begins with the words "snacking is an art" & then she pretty much confirms everything i believe about eating. big meals are cool & all, but grabbing tasty, awesome snacks throughout your day is totally the way to go, the wave of the future. along the way, she names a bunch of places to eat in boston, places that serve things like a "bing" (china's answer to the slider), a "japanese doughnut, filled with red bean and curry" & lahmejune (armenian pizza). preach on, sister. (boston globe)