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)

nosh nook #187 - tuesday, december 1, 2009

IHOP celebrates the magic of the season with new holiday hotcakes (link)
11.30.09 - cnn money - via press release

it's december, people! you know what that means? that's right! it's that time of year again, the month or so where corporations & retailers all around the world band together & beat you over the head with holiday spirit until you start bleeding from your eyes, ears & wallet! are you ready? are you ready for holiday-themed foods & songs & promos & TV specials & fa la la la la la la la la? get excited, people! you'd better get excited or else jesus santa will be totally disappointed in you & won't bring you any everlasting life presents & you'll burn in hell cry like a baby. seriously...nobody wants that. especially the corporations & retailers. they have end-of-year numbers to hit & if they don't, news sources will ramble on about it for WEEKS...or at least until the next major celebrity screw up surfaces.

IHOP's on board with the holidays. yesterday, cnn money picked up a press release issued by IHOP that announces the addition of "mouth-watering new holiday hotcakes" to their menu for a limited time (until jan 3rd). IHOP seems to use the adjective "mouth-watering" a little excessively, but these mofoin' holiday hotcakes sound friggin de-lish, so i'm going to let it slide. they come in four flavors which for some reason they used the word "pancakes" instead of the word "hotcakes" in the names of. we're talking gingerbread pancakes, eggnog pancakes, pecan pie pancakes & pumpkin pancakes. pumpkin pancakes?!!! i love pumpkin. they start at $4.99, a perfect price point for my cheap ass. to be honest, i didn't even know there was an IHOP in brooklyn, but there are apparently two--one downtown near the fulton mall & another way the hell out in bergen beach. both of those locations scare me though, so i'll probably wait til i make it home to NH for the holidays before trying them...less chance of getting stabbed, ya know?

the hotcakes are all part of a holiday promo that also includes the "sammy and marcus off the mantel tour 2009," a contest that has two nutcrackers--a clever irishman & a witty new yorker--as its spokesmen. according to the press release, we'll enjoy their playful banter. i visited their youtube page & i'll say that they're like a less-exciting, less-funny, less-grumpy version of staler & waldorf. enjoyable? meh. anyway, the jist of the contest is that you visit the "off the mantel tour 2009" website, print out pictures of sammy & marcus, and photograph them doing the most "creative, unique and entertaining" holiday-themed things you can think of in the coolest locations you can think of. then you submit those photos to the site & every week until the end of the year, IHOP picks the ten best ones & gives out $50 gift cards for each.

i am so going to get one of those gift cards. i already have the BEST IDEA EVER. now i just need to get into the knicks locker room after they get destroyed by the heat on christmas day. if MSG's security is anything like the knicks' defense, that shouldn't be a problem. JK! i'm not going to sneak into the knicks locker room. i'm going to take a festive picture of them with my penis. there's no way IHOP could reject that, right? i mean, they might as well just mail me the gift card now.