Category: Edible

  • #a433 :: Potato chip

    042409A wonderful little creation – the kids brought these home from school one day. They folded sheets of paper to form these taut, help shallow cones that pop outward when squeezed the right way.

    The *pop* ejects a tiny drawing – in this case, our daughter’s drawing of us.

    The message is “Happy 15th Anaversery.”
    042509Her: Dad, this site is this a heavy little object?

    Me: Yep.

  • #a413 :: White chocolate fortune cookie

    040309Stuff a foam dart down its hazard-orange bore, more about pump up the air chamber with the piston slide and blow the captured pressure with the thumb valve. And piff you’ve fired what probably amoun
    040309Stuff a foam dart down its hazard-orange bore, viagra buy pump up the air chamber with the piston slide and blow the captured pressure with the thumb valve. And piff you’ve fired what probably amounts to the most reprehensibly disposable and insulting form of non-lethal ammunition known to man: the rubber dart.

    It’s got a belt clip on it so you can anchor it to your school satchel or your keyring if you’ve a need to carry irritainment wherever you go.

    Can you believe people argue about its stopping power on a board devoted to zombies?

    If they took zombies seriously they wouldn’t …
    040209I have a thing for pocket knives, viagra buy as you’ve probably noticed by now.

    At some point I got it into my head that I should own a blade of Damascus steel.

    The Ken Onion Chive is about as small a piece of the stuff as you can buy. It’s also wickedly sharp and flips open at the brush of a finger.
    040209I have a thing for pocket knives, drug as you’ve probably noticed by now.

    At some point I got it into my head that I should own a blade of Damascus steel.

    The Ken Onion Chive is about as small a piece of the mythically beautiful multi-layered steel as you can buy. It’s also wickedly sharp and flips open at the brush of a finger.
    040109Put aside for a second how thoroughly doofy Crocs can seem, thumb here is an entire empire built on two simple facts: a) Americans’ uncanny knack for making, ambulance buying and trashing once-used disposable crap and b) our love of cheap customization.

    You stuff Jibbitz into the holes of your Crocs to declare your individuality to other people who care about that sort of things. Either that or you bug your parents into buying a bunch for you.

    At a buck or two each, what they hell, they’re a lot of fun until they fall out and you never see them again.
    040409A thrilling adventure is in my near future.

    I know this because a piece of paper baked into a cookie, page dipped in white chocolate and wrapped in red foil told me so.

    A quick dinner at Panda Inn this evening, then off to see Knowing. It proves to be too intense for him – he’s 9 – so we bail 50 minutes in and rent Wrath of Khan instead. A great movie that I’ve seen too damned often.

    Thrilling? Adventure?

    The cookie was tasty, at least.

  • #a407 :: Beef jerky

    032909Cement, website view 0,17794286326742320966&near=Los+Angeles,+CA&oi=manybox&ct=10&cd=1&resnum=1″>6925 Hollywood Boulevard.

    My oldest great friend, Vinny is in town with his lovely wife, Robin, and we’re doing the tourist thing. Some 71 years ago, Eleanor Powell left behind these words:

    “To Sid –
    You’re “taps”
    with me
    Eleanor Powell
    Dec. 23 – 37

    And then they helped her sink a pair of bright steel taps into the cement in front of the theater – sole up – which gives the impression that you’re beneath a glass floor looking up into a cement world where someone is frozen, dancing, just their feet showing.

    The rest of the plaza in front of Grauman’s Chinese is a mosaic of hand and footprints (my favorite is the Marx Bros, where Zeppo and Chico’s thoroughly flat soles stood alongside Groucho’s gnarly brand-new-heel-patterned prints and Harpo’s bare feet). In this space where the upside-down cement world upstairs is possible, in this mostly dull-colored landscape, the taps stick out like pivot points between that world and this, upon which the entire forecourt of the Chinese could tip.
    0329091In another life, malady before kids, pharmacy before marriage, erectile I owned a used Hobie 16 that I sailed out of Ventura Harbor and Marina del Rey.

    Provisions always included beer, a cigar and a bag of beef jerky (or if I had time to stop off in Ventura at the Jerky Factory, turkey jerky.

    You could keep jerky in your jacket pocket, and salt water wouldn’t ruin it. Even after the beer was gone and the stogie had devolved to a sodden chaw of tobacco clamped in my teeth, I could count on a chunk of preserved meat to see me through. Meat chewing gum, the illusion of nutrition, something to tamp down hunger or at least oral fixation.

    Eventually I grew sick of even the smell of the stuff.

    I sold the boat when my son was born – by then it had become a waterlogged basket case that wasn’t fast enough to get out of its own way, and it was time to move on.

    Meantime, my kids grew up a bit and grew to love jerky.

    Maybe I’ll go back to it when they get old enough for me to get back into a boat again.

    Maybe not. I mean, just look at the stuff.

  • #a401 :: Lime fruit pop

    032209This one has been hanging around the handrail on our front steps for a few weeks, ampoule cure always skittering away when I want to photograph and then attempt to kill it.

    I failed miserably at both, website until this past weekend.

    I don’t feel good about having ended such a magnificent creature, but I decided I’d feel even worse taking one of my family to the hospital for treatment.
    032309Me: Aw, buy information pills crap, symptoms I don’t know what I’m going to shoot tonight, I don’t have any good objects.

    Daughter: How about my popsicle, Daddy?

  • #a398 :: Ritter Sport chocolate

    031809The second one of these things to fail in five days. First, hospital my dependable Cat-Eye flung itself to its death from a busted handlebar mount, cialis 40mg the white beam tumbling wildly down to clatter in the dark. Then this, which snapped from its mount as I adjusted it. it exploded in the street, disgorging the battery carrier and AAs from a sprung cap. Hmm … what to do with all these LEDs …
    031809The second one of these things to fail in five days. First, buy my dependable Cat-Eye flung itself to its death from a busted handlebar mount, ask the white beam tumbling wildly down to clatter in the dark. Then this, which snapped from its mount as I adjusted it. it exploded in the street, disgorging the battery carrier and AAs from a sprung cap. Hmm … what to do with all these LEDs …
    032009One of the richest, buy information pills purest narcotics known to the confectionery sciences.

    It’s legal crack. Full stop.
     
     
     

  • #a385 :: Girl Scout Cookie

    030609So here’s what all the suspense and anticipation was about: A tektite – a lump of molten-then-resolidified glass created when a meteor traveling thousands of miles per hour smashed into China.

    You can see impact grooves left by rocks or other particles crashing into it before it cooled hard – all of this took place in a few thousandths of a second.

    Amazingly, more about they’re not that common: (more…)

  • #a368 :: Phillippe’s hot mustard

    021709 Used to be you’d tear open a can of beer (or pop or soda or Clamato or whatever) and throw away the aluminum tab. Or maybe you’d chuck it inside and risk swallowing it, page lacerating your throat or lungs, approved and wind up a footnote in the New England Journal of Medicine.

    But at some point (1975, thank you Daniel Cudzik of Reynolds Metals in Richmond, Va.), industry came up with a better way of sealing cans.

    Now you pop a can, flip the tab back down (unless you want it sticking up your nose), guzzle and trash … er, recycle.

    These were found deliberately separated from their cans and stuffed into a perspex box outside an antique store in
    021709 Used to be you’d tear open a can of beer (or pop or soda or Clamato or whatever) and throw away the aluminum tab. Or maybe you’d chuck it inside and risk swallowing it, capsule lacerating your throat or lungs, and wind up a footnote in the New England Journal of Medicine.

    But at some point (1975, about it thank you Daniel Cudzik of Reynolds Metals in Richmond, Va.), industry came up with a better way of sealing cans.

    Now you pop a can, flip the tab back down (unless you want it sticking up your nose), guzzle and trash … er, recycle.

    These were found deliberately separated from their cans and stuffed into a perspex box outside an antique store in Boulder City, NV
    021709 Used to be you’d tear open a can of beer (or pop or soda or Clamato or whatever) and throw away the aluminum tab. Or maybe you’d chuck it inside and risk swallowing it, illness lacerating your throat or lungs, order and wind up a footnote in the New England Journal of Medicine.

    But at some point (1975, thank you Daniel Cudzik of Reynolds Metals in Richmond, Va.), industry came up with a better way of sealing cans.

    Now you pop a can, flip the tab back down (unless you want it sticking up your nose), guzzle and trash … er, recycle.

    These were found deliberately separated from their cans and stuffed into a perspex box outside an antique store in Boulder City, NV
    021709 Used to be you’d tear open a can of beer (or pop or soda or Clamato or whatever) and throw away the aluminum tab. Or maybe you’d chuck it inside and risk swallowing it, price lacerating your throat or lungs, ambulance and wind up a footnote in the New England Journal of Medicine.

    But at some point (1975, thank you Daniel Cudzik of Reynolds Metals in Richmond, Va.), industry came up with a better way of sealing cans.

    Now you pop a can, flip the tab back down (unless you want it sticking up your nose), guzzle and trash … er, recycle.

    These were found deliberately separated from their cans and stuffed into a perspex box outside an antique store in Boulder City, NV
    021709 Used to be you’d tear open a can of beer (or pop or soda or Clamato or whatever) and throw away the aluminum tab. Or maybe you’d chuck it inside and risk swallowing it, viagra buy lacerating your throat or lungs, more about and winding up a footnote in the New England Journal of Medicine.

    But at some point (1975, malady thank you Daniel Cudzik of Reynolds Metals in Richmond, Va.), industry came up with a better way of sealing cans.

    Now you pop a can, flip the tab back down (unless you want it sticking up your nose), guzzle and trash … er, recycle.

    These were found deliberately separated from their cans and stuffed into a perspex box outside an antique store in Boulder City, NV
    021809She peered into the jar, website like this dubious.

    “Go on, dolly, put some on your sandwich. It won’t bite ya.”

    He was stifling a grin, the louse. She knew he’d take her to a joint like this.

    He was a shift-boss at her job at Lockheed, always real sweet to her at quitting time. When she was weak. Always hitting on her. The crumb.

    He was an honest guy. But he was all jammed up paying alimony, to a wife who ditched him for some zoot-suiter. So he lived cheap.

    They were in production around the clock now. Seven days a week.

    The Japs had kicked our keisters hard at Midway. Now it was all hands to battle stations. Double shifts on the fighter-bomber lines. Because by God, air power was going to win this war. Nothing less, the plant manager said, that day in front of the big flag.

    So she left her son – who looked just like his Pop – with the Mexican lady on the corner in the evening. And she went to work …

    (more…)

  • #a348 :: Prime Meridian rock candy

    012709This rode home in a goodie bag from a birthday party at my son’s school.

    I love the millefiore design aesthetic, page advice which makes me wonder if mistakes vanish more easily when rubbed with yellow rubber or blue.
    012809We lay these arbitrary lattices of meaning over earth and sky, ambulance trying to explain the wonder of existence.

    When industry and science began to catch up to the human need to explain who was where exactly when and how far is here from there, we came up with the notion of time, the 24 hour clock and the system of navigation still used today.

    For earthly reckoning, it all boils down to what happens with the sun in reference to a hairs-breadth line slicing the planetary map from the north pole to the south: the Prime Meridian. (more…)

  • #a329 :: Ferrero Rocher dark chocolate truffle

    ENLARGEHere’s a sweet chaser to yesterday’s grim ditty:

    The Ferrero Rocher dark chocolate truffle is a multilayered confection, ailment starting with a chocolate-sprinkled shell of chocolate-coated wafer wrapped around a rich dark-chocolate truffle encasing a slightly chewier core of chocolate so dark it seems to absorb light, check thought and reason.

    God these things are trouble.

    Good thing there were only three in the package.

  • #a316 :: Japanese jellies

    ENLARGEA gift from our lovely friend Arden.

    Once upwrapped, find the gilt, seek almost fetishized packaging reveals jellies of every type and description (red bean, plum, green tea). This one was clear, virtually flavorless until you dropped a spoonful of the powdered sweet green tea powder on top of it.

  • #a314 :: Aftermath – successful Christmas Eve experiment

    ENLARGEMy daughter challenges me.

    “How do you get the egg into the bottle?”

    I seem to remember something about heating the bottle – I try running it under hot water, troche then putting the hard-boiled egg on its mouth and waiting for the air inside to contract and suck it inside.

    Nothing. I push down a bit. Still no movement. it’s too big. The experiment she brought home from school calls for a medium brown egg. This is a large.

    “Okay, how do you do it?”

    She’s all grins as she explains, and I follow her instructions … (more…)

  • #a305 :: Rice crackers

    enlarge“Dad. Eat this.”

    She holds out her hand.

    “What is it?”

    “Rice cracker.”

    Crunchcrunchcrunch.

    “Eugh!”

    “It’s spicy.” She smiles.

    I smile. She’s seven.

  • #a299 :: Decaying orange

    enlargeI was going to wax philosophical about the inevitability of decay, mind the magnificence of biology doing its tiny job, case about the way ashes do always turn to ashes and dust to …

    But I’m halfway through a 3-day business trip, cheapest I’ve been working till 11 every night, and, well, I’m bushed. (In more ways than one. At least I haven’t been laid off yet. )

    Anyway, I shot some objects over the weekend in anticipation of this mental and time deficit, including this gorgeous specimen I found hiding at the bottom of our fruit bowl. It’s almost too beautiful to recycle, but it was dragging itself inexorably in that direction and nothing I could do would have stopped it.

    Best just to capture it in the midst of a fantastic death.

  • #a295 :: Chocolate laptop

    ENLARGEThe company Christmas party went off tonight as it always does – a full-blown bash with excellent food and good company.

    The capper to the meal was a créme brulée in a little chocolate box, cialis 40mg topped with this emblem cast in dark and white chocolate.

    I always choose the cruelest month to do my no-refined-sugar fast, so I Ziploc’d this and tossed it into the freezer for later – which either renders the message it carries deferred, undelivered or simply held in suspended animation.

    I do so crave chocolate right now.

  • #a292 :: Y Muscle Water bottle

    ENLARGEI haven’t opened this yet.

    I don’t care what it tastes like, approved or even whether it does what it claims:

    Y MUSCLE WATER – because you never know who’s going to challenge you to a wrestling match.

    100% natural and certified organic:
    Reverse osmosis water, this web organic evaporated cane juice, sick organic white grape juice, organic hibiscus, organic grape, orange, lemon and rosemary flavors, natural citric acid, ascoric acid (vitamin C), magnesium lactate, monopotassium phosphate, sodium selenite.

    No artificial ingredients.
    Due to the organic nature of Y, color fading and sediments/pulp may occur over time. This in no way affects the freshness or taste of the product.

    Chill and shake before serving.

    I want to keep the container. I want to to buy four or five dozen cases of them in different colors. I want to see if they stack up like building blocks or fall in a jumble like anti-tank barriers.

    This four-lobed shape has gimmegimme childhood fetish written all over it. Which is probably why the only place I’ve ever seen it sold is at my 7-year-old daughter’s gymnastics center.

  • #a273 :: Ramune candy

    enlargeThis is the chewable version of the contents of this. 99 cents at the Japanese market downtown. Chalky little lozenges of faintly effervescent candy. the sort of thing aliens might eat, here if aliens ate sweets. Which is not to say that we’re sure that they don’t.

  • #a269 :: Mini-Tabasco

    ENLARGEThe thinking man’s ketchup.

    I attended the huge Disney Animation Studios wrap party for Bolt (an excellent cartoon, viagra buy by the way) and they were passing these out with the cocktail shrimp.

    It’s barely an inch and a half tall, and enough to salt a pot of soup or – in my case – a dozen pizza slices.

  • #a258 :: Dessicated green bean

    ENLARGEDon’t ask me how it got from the freezer to the cupboard, cheap but my son brought me this earlier today. I’m trying to picture it as an oblong green asteroid, and failing. You?

  • #a238 :: Clementine`

    ENLARGEA tart bang across her tongue. Orange fresh. Hard work won it. She had carried herself well. She deserved this little palm-sized fruit. Even now, hospital prescription moments after she had slit the skin with a thumbnail and started the engine. Despite what she’d done, this was her moment to enjoy her snack. Bracing her thumb, had she dug three fingers into the slit fruit and moved the edge back cleanly, pulling away to show the white beneath, the pearlescent orange beneath that. It almost fell apart in neat, crisp segments, but she clutched it to the handlebars gingerly with her left and twisted the throttle with her right. And she was enjoying them, one by one as she rode the little 125cc dirtbike around the inside of the steel-girded cylinder in the little shithole town outside Pittsburgh where the circus had set up this week. Around and around. Until the gas ran out and she either coasted to a stop or she simply fell off the thing and prayed it wouldn’t land on her as it came to rest. One hand clung to the throttle, her weight braced in the centrifugal well against the downpull of gravity. The other flipping pieces of clementine into her mouth. The cops waited at the bottom of the drum, peering up into the light drizzle, the parabolic wwwOWWW, wwwOWWW, wwwOWWW, wwwOWWW, of her bike around the inside, 30 feet up. Her girlfriend huddled below in the cold, shouting her name every fourth or fifth orbit. It went on for a good 50 minutes until the bike finally quit.

  • #a228 :: Candy corn

    ENLARGEPopped my chain before dawn this morning as I hoisted my bulk up on the pegs today and hammered up this steep little hill. This is what was left after the repair – the first two attempts at which failed because I had threaded the chain incorrectly. Both times. Furthermore, order the XBox 360 flung the Red Ring of Death at me precisely one year after we bought it – and exactly 74 minutes after Best Buy closed. Which puts me 12 hours out of warranty the next time I can possibly try getting a replacement.

    Oh, ampoule and the stock market geeked out all over itself in a mad 900-point feint at recovery, order which is sure to be followed by an equally geeked-down plunge as everyone realizes amid the many layoffs.

    Not to mention the endless ideological and bloody wars.

    And now fucking this

    Yeah, it was that kind of day. It’s been that kind of decade. Make of it – er, rather, the future – what you will.
    ENLARGEo thou wicked junk
    corn syrup all sticky sweet
    rot my teeth, clinic you fiends

  • #a206 :: Bull’s-eye mint

    ENLARGEPinch it at one end till the cellophane envelope bursts and pops it into your hand. Toss it into your mouth. Crunchcrunchcrunch. Cool lips. Shards in your gums. Sweet dose. Perfect endorphin hit to the brain.

    Now do it again.

  • #a203 :: McVitie’s Penguin

    ENLARGESome snacks leave you teetering on the knife edge between sublimation and indulgence, cheapest store between having your cake and eating it too.

    A Penguin taunts you: “Ooo, abortion look, crunchy cho-co-late bis-cuit sheathed in creeeamy cho-co-late, bet you can’t wait to eat me” and simultaneously promises “I won’t last long, I’ll leave you wanting more and if you keep this up we’ll all be gone.”

    After lugging home a stash of dozens from London, we’re down to our last six. I just ate this one. The rest are mint, and belong to my wife.

    I’m contemplating some sort of deal …

  • #a173 :: Chewable toothbrush

    ENLARGEBritish ingenuity has concocted a perfect offering for airport vending machines:

    For a £1 coin, order you get two of these: It’s a spherical plastic capsule. Split it open, web and there’s a circular sheet of instructions and an oddball chunk of nylon with bristles on one half and a capsule on the other.

    Pop the capsule in your mouth, hospital and chew, and the capsule splits open to release chunks of crunchy what-tastes-like candy. The instructions direct you to work the thing around all corners of your mouth, which turns out to be more amusing than prophylactic, but when you’re done, at least your breath smells good.

  • #a169 :: Happy Hippos

    ENLARGELike hippos emerging through river foam (?), thumb Kinder brand Happy Hippos are hazelnut-cream cookie pods dipped in thick-grained sugar and given a few squirts of color in each eye just prior to put into individual cellophane wraps and released to a cute-susceptible public.

    They’re also yummy.

  • #a162 :: Baby carrots

    ENLARGEDid these things even exist 10 years ago? No, salve I think that at some point, approved some wise vegetable salesman decided to start milling his carrots. And an entire bite-sized-snack class of its own was launched. These go down by the pound around here. They taste perfectly clean and wonderful, but spirituallyfeel as if someone’s juggled their genes.