#141 - where you been?

if you're a obsessive loyal occasional eat!drink!snack! reader, you may have noticed that over the last ten days, the blog portion of eat!drink!snack! has gone somewhat dormant. i'd like to say that it's because of something sweet like me being kidnapped by somali pirates or because i'm recovering from a boob job, but it's neither of those things. instead, as the holidays came on, i amazingly broke from my winter "sitting on my ass" routine & actually found myself out & about & doing things, so my time was a bit limited.

also, i decided that since the designated calendar-based demarcation was upon us, it was time for me to shake things up a bit at the blog, so for the past ten days, rather than writing, i've been brainstorming redesign ideas for the blog, culminating with a power meeting last night at my awesomely talented designer bro's greenpoint apartment. it's safe to say that there are a lot of intriguing things in store for eat!drink!snack!, stuff that'll make you go "wow. this is the best website ever made ever. screw fark." i'm planning on rolling out the first changes this month & don't want to give too much away yet, but here are a few things i've been kickin around:

the epic hunt - in this new column, i start off by going to wal-mart or a gun show or something & getting myself a nice automatic weapon, something designed for shooting tasty animals with bullets. then i take said weaponry out into the parks & streets of nyc & hunt down the fauna of the five boroughs. when i find them, i blast them with my gun, put them in a bag & take them home on the subway to sample. then i report the results to you. ever wondered what a pigeon tastes like? shut up. yeah you have. how's prospect park goose with duck sauce sound? if you said "mouth watering," you're correct. in the epic hunt, you'll find out secondhand what one of those black squirrels taste like. really...it'll be epic.

EXTREME challenge! - loosely based on fear factor & japanese game shows & their repackaged american brethren & morgan spurlock & that guy on the discovery channel who drinks his own piss, in the EXTREME challenge! i will subject myself to EXTREME conditions in the interest of snack science. we're talking challenges like the "fast & fast" where i first go without food for days & then follow it up by eating as many snickers as humanly possible in a ten minute time frame. we're talking challenges like "wait...what's in this brownie?," where i infuse different brownies with different TOTALLY ILLEGAL DRUGS & try to guess which one i've tried. if those challenges don't seem EXTREME enough for you, check out this challenge..."fugu follies." in the follies, i'll have a fifth-tier celebrity guest appearance by someone from worst cooks in america. they'll come by my place, we'll have a few beers & then they'll cut up a POISONOUSLY DEADLY pufferfish for me to try out. look ma, no hands!

snack snatch - i may have to talk to the eat!drink!snack! lawyers first about this one, but the basic idea is similar to that of the EXTREME challenge! in that it's definitely EXTREME. the jist of it is that i go into bodegas all around the city, act like i'm going to buy a can of soup or something & then totally snatch a snack & bolt out the door with it. then i report the results back to you. in the interest of the inevitable sprinting that will follow my exit from the bodega, this may require me to quit smoking, but i feel like when i'm soaring down 5th ave & cutting down union st with the wind in my hair before ducking into the subway & hiding behind a trash barrel to wait for the train, it'll all be worth it for that entemann's marshmallow iced devil's food cake.

with ideas like those, i'm really looking forward to the upcoming year. anyway, all you eat!drink!snack! followers should feel free to chime in in the comments about what you'd like to see more of, what you'd like to see less of...all that junk. perhaps you feel that there should be a section entirely devoted to photos of me eating snacks whilst wearing nothing but different hats from the 20s & 30s. no idea is too awful/awesome. let me know! maybe you'll be the lucky one whose idea gets stolen!

#141 - where you been?
snack: new york pizza pirate's booty
drink: sprecher root beer



after i returned home from the brainstorming session at my brother's place, i cracked open a bag of new york pizza pirate's booty that i'd scooped up a few days earlier during my drunken new year's revelry. when i first laid eyes on the bag, it blew my friggin mind. i mean, i'm used to seeing bag after bag of aged white cheddar pirate's booty & the occasional bag of veggie or bermuda onion flavor, but when i saw these i was all "new york pizza? that's unpossible." if i hadn't picked up a bag, it would've been a major travesty, such a travesty that i'd have to seriously consider taking my self-awarded "supereminent snacker of 2009" trophy down off the mantel...just kidding. i don't have a mantel.

if you're familiar with pirate's booty, the new york pizza kind has that same odd shape & texture that's unique to pirate's booty. it's not quite a piece of popcorn & it's not quite a cheese puff. it's somewhere in between & like snowflakes, no two pieces of pirate's booty are shaped alike. as for the "new york pizza" thing, let's start with the "pizza" portion of that. they definitely have a good amount of orangish-red flavoring on them & i suppose i'd have to say that they taste slightly tomatolike, but after about half the bag i was still waiting for that one piece where i said to myself "ah. pizza." as to the "new york" portion of that, i'm absolutely clueless as to how the flavor they've come up with represents pizza specific to nyc. regardless, the flavor's pretty good & they're definitely worth trying out, especially if you've never tried a slice of new york pizza. if that's the case, you wouldn't even know the difference.

i decided to pair the pizza booty with a bottle of sprecher root beer that i picked up at natural garden on my way home from the bro's place. i've been on a serious craft root beer kick lately (i walked a total of thirty blocks at around midnight the other night just to get a bottle of root beer), so when i mentioned my recent obsession to the bro, he suggested that i check out the bountiful selection at natural garden. it's safe to say they have a solid soda selection, so it was a tough decision, but i ultimately decided to go with the sprecher for one reason...it's fire-brewed! it's like all the fun of a stroh's without the crappy american beer taste! there's also that playful devil crow on the label, but he looks like the rambunctious type who'd spill something on the carpet at your dinner party, so i could take him or leave him.

the root beer's just one of a line of gourmet beers & sodas made by sprecher, a company out of glendale, wisconsin, a city just north of milwaukee. after a few weeks of searching out craft root beers, i took one look at the bottle, with its promise of fire-brewing & its mention of a #1 rating from the ny times & just assumed that i was dealing with a quality, non-HFCS beverage. i was only right about the first part of that. it turns out that the second ingredient is HFCS, which was rather disappointing after weeks of root beers made with cane sugar. i decided to press on anyhow & i'm happy to report that other than the HFCS, it's a perfect root beer. just like last month's maine root root beer, when you pour it into a glass, it settles with a nice head to it. it's made with vanilla, "pure wisconsin honey" & quillaia/yucca extract, so the flavor's top notch. if it wasn't for that pesky HFCS, i'd go with the ny times & declare this my #1 root beer. instead, they end up in the same category as barq's...& that bites.