TheSnackHound

Thanks for the post from Al Mills

Ever since my husband and I signed up for Directv through http://www.cannonsatellite.com/ we have gotten totally into Top Chef. The new season is in Texas, and since we live in San Antonio it’s really fun to watch. Most of the beginning of the season was filmed here, so it’s really cool to see a lot of familiar places on TV. I also love to cook, so it’s cool to watch all the chefs and learn a thing or two.

Since we’ve started watching I’ve been thinking abut taking some cooking classes so I can improve my skills. I guess I’m a good cook for an amateur, but I’d love to make beautiful meals for my family. I don’t think there is anything better than having people over and feeding them delicious and beautiful food. I’ve learned to make a few really amazing meals, but I’d love to take it to the next level and get really good knife skills. If I could only do things faster, it would be much easier. Sometimes I get tripped up in the simplest things like chopping vegetables.

Sometime in the 90s, I was wandering around a health fair. There were all sorts of elaborate booths – from booths offering vision screenings to massage therapists doing chair massage. One booth was plastered with worded placards and in the center was a woman on an elevated platform, with a tiny tray of small cups in front of her hawking Noni Juice. For only $45.00 a bottle, you could achieve optimum health. It tasted okay, and I imagine that if your diet consisted of potato chips and deep fried bacon, it would create a miraculous result in your health.

Every few years, another juice form an exotic fruit is introduced, sold through multi level marketing and is not available in stores. The last one I remember was Acai, and supposedly there was a special patented form. The folks who sold it at $40 a bottle swore that the Acai juice in stores was a watered down, low grade version. But now you can even find Noni at the health food store.

The latest juice product is Nopalea (pronounced No-pah lay’uh), and its put out by Trivita . The fruit is harvested from the Nopal cactus plant that has survived the harrowing weather of the dessert. Adherents claim that it reduces inflammation and rids the body of toxins. Antioxidants found in various fruits do just that. But, does it do more than readily available antioxidant juices and supplements?  The jury is out. Everyone wants a magic cure. While Nopalea doesn’t cure, most consumers wish a single dietary change to make a miraculous difference, whether than the miraculous difference coming from an overall balanced diet free of saturated fats.

On the other hand, drinking a high antioxidant juice and replacing soft drinks or “junk juice” drinks with it may have individuals noticing enough of a difference to inspire them to make other changes necessary in their diet.

If you have tried superfruit juices like Nopalea, write in and let me know what you think.

(* = By the way, this site, nor any of its friends, affiliates, or advertisers, including The SnackHound, Foodbuzz, Mrs. Butterworth, the good people of Hershey, Pennsylvania, Frankenstein, my nextdoor neighbor Tiffany, Dr. Watson, nor PayPerPost are affiliated in any way with Trivita)

Here’s wishing you and yours had the very merriest of National Cupcake Days. For those of you who did not partake in any way, I have saved you one of your very own, above. The featured cupcake comes to us from Maggie Moo’s, where they were giving away a free cupcake today between 4:00 and 7:00 PM. Just scrawl that with permanent marker for the next December 15th on your calendar.

The cake featured very little cake, topped with cake batter ice cream and green whipped cream frosting which left a healthy glow on the teeth and fingers. I am still scrubbing the tip of my finger to get it out. It was absolutely marvelous and it brought back all the feelings of an indulgent toddler with cherry, or in this case, Ecto-Cooler KoolAid all over their lips.

So..if you feel cheated that you didn’t hear about NCD, make yourself a batch of cupcakes and hide or eat an odd number of them. This way, people will think these are just leftovers from the actual day.

This post brought to you by Swifto. All opinions are 100% mine.

Attention on all Four Legged Snack Hounds:

Has the human left the room?

I’ll give you a minute to check. Good.

Dear Snack Hounds:

If you are currently living in New York City or you are visiting New York City now or through the holidays, don’t always rely on those dogmoms and dogdads. They are going to be extra busy and might get caught up in holiday traffic. You surely will be crossing your legs. They might even spend hours some afternoon doing crazy things like drinking colored liquids at something they call “brunch,” or flapping their lips and then sticking greasy pizza in it. That will surely mess up with your afternoon potty break.

Help is on the way. You can type, right? Well, my dog can.

Go check out the nice folks at Swifto. They have a dog walking service that will bring a qualified, experienced and insured dog walker right to your door. A one hour lead time (or more) is needed.

• Online payment is accepted. No embarrassing moment of you delivering cash in your mouth.
• $20 covers walk and tip.
• For $5 extra, bring a friend! Yes, that new baby pup they just rescued IS your friend, you just don’t know it yet.
• For $10 extra, double the fun. You’ll receive a whole ONE our walk.

Whoops…here comes a person! Click on the sidebar of this site somewhere and bring up another article.  We have to keep this secret amongst ourselves, don’t we?

At Carrabba’s, as well as at some upscale local eateries, an exposed kitchen is all part of the dinner theater. On one particular visit to one such place, a friend of mine was really paranoid. Every soup or salad or bread stick she ate, she inspected for phantom hairs. The ice cube had a hair on it, the salad had hair in it.

I looked up at my Death by Chocolate cake. “That’s a potato straw.” Then, after a few bites: “That is a caper.”  “That is a chopped strand of endive lettuce.” “That’s a hair. No. Just kidding.”

Some of the visible kitchen staff were wearing uniforms or company T-shirts and had their hair pulled back, some did not. Even so, pony tails flew through the air as cooks and waitstaff whirled around the kitchen and the ordering window.

The only hats I could find that encapsulate hairdos completely without looking like a cheap hair net was at Blue Sky Scrubs. They are usually known for making medical scrubs for men and women (http://www.blueskyscrubs.com/categories/Scrubs/Scrubs-for-Women/)but their head coverings are not industry-specific. I could see the Poppy scrubs hat being worn by pastry chefs. They come in a multitude of patterns, including camouflage, and also many solids.

Every DIY show from 1999-2008 seemed to encourage the use of a repurposed bedroom dresser for use as a kitchen island or for a bathroom vanity. Usually, they were small for a single sink and distressed or painted white in the spirit of “shabby chic” goodness. The trend was over, or so I thought. The latest look in antique bathroom vanities is “Hey, I stole the base of Grandma’s valuable 19th century china cabinet and ‘upcycled’ it.”

Later, you give the relatives smelling salts, or wave chocolate mousse cake under their nose to revive them. You deftly reveal the receipt proving it only looks like the coveted heirloom. Then everyone is down for the count when they review the itemized bill.

(Photo via Uberhumor, funny photos, images & pictures)

I was a simple child. I sat in front of the pantry cupboard hoarding the pudding boxes. They were just perfect to stack and create architectural creations to spin on a lazy susan or to barricade the Bisquick in the far reaches of the cupboard next to the sink. They were no good empty, as they lacked the proper heft to stand upright, especially if the random SPAM can played the role of swing captain after mom swiped my instant chocolate or lime.

I ignored paper towel and toilet paper rolls wholesale, but my kindergarten through second grade teachers always scrawled them on their “most wanted” list for milk jug piggy banks and family tree photo holders. Apparently, the prodigy forever captured on the Uberhumor site was not exposing themselves to box packaging adhesives as I was, and diverted their energy in a more creative way. The site does have many viral images, mostly humorous ones, but I was expecting to see potty humor, not potty (paper roll) art. If you are hunting for it, check out the December 6th entries. Be forewarned: Not all of the site is family friendly.

The photos are not attributed, so there is no way to ask the artist, or extreme fidgeter, what their inspiration was. I can imagine them carefully placing the cutouts with tweezers, not unlike the “ship in a bottle” enthusiasts of yore. So, mysterious toilet paper roll genius, I owe you a cookie. It’s only a virtual one. Your anonymity has its price.

A friend of mine is relocating to Canada and is having a difficult time wading through the real estate market to find Calgary apartments for rent. She couldn’t just hop over the bridge to Windsor, but she decided that she needs to practically be in  Alaska, or at least just north of Montana, instead. Guess she won’t be getting any chocolate mousse cakes in the mail. They’d be mush by the time they traveled over 2,000 miles. Maybe I’ll rent a motor home and bake it on the way.

She wants to rent first, and then spend about a year before she looks to buy. She actually found more luck with RentCalgary.com over Craigslist and some of the data-feed real estate sites for some reason. It has a mix of private landlords, property managers and real estate agents advertising. The site is not slathered with ads or irrelevant articles, and is pretty much bare bones straight forward listings.

When I relocated across the country years ago, I grabbed an out of state edition of the local paper at Barnes & Noble, but of course not all of the listings are there nowadays. It was frustrated to go through the ads and find half were already rented. On the other hand, it was a little less ADD, because there is no YouTube in the local paper. I wish her luck on sticking to the task.