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Monday, May 28, 2012

A little bit of this and that

Greetings Earthlings! I have returned briefly to planet earth to bring you some food tidbits.  I've been busy doing heavy snack research for you, as well as enjoying some delicious camping food fit for a king this weekend. Life is crazy, the cooking continues with some interesting dishes which I keep meaning to write about.
Here are the highlights starting with this weekend......


I went up to Phoenicia New York to camp with some co-workers etc. Right in the town we stopped on the adorable little main street for ice and I insisted we check out the ice cream shop. Good choice because they had Carrot Cake Ice cream, which I have never ever seen before. Mostly they had Hershey's flavors but this one seemed homemade. Let me tell you, this might be the best ice cream I've ever tasted. It literally tastes like carrot cake in ice cream form. It has all the delicious spices and it tastes like cream cheese frosting. This might be a strange way to describe food, but it pretty much tastes like how I imagine all those pumpkin spice or 'fall' scented candles would taste ( minus the wax of course). So it's a super big thumbs up on this one. Now if I only knew where to find some closer.
Next fabulous food item from this weekend, aside from all the awesome meat and veggies cooked over the fire, was P's invention of bacon pancakes. Essentially you add precooked bacon into the pancakes while they are cooking. It's a way to warm up the bacon and it's also delicious! It's a time saver too because you know you were going to dip your bacon in syrup anyway!
Moving on to snack foods, I've been finding lots of yummy snacks at  Stop and Shop lately, particularly in the hoity-toity area with all the health foods and organic stuff- not that I claim that any of this is good for you.
Snack one- the ultimate chocolate bar. Never heard of this company, but they have a very vintage look and I'm a sucker for cherries in my chocolate so I decided to give it a try. The company is Chocolate XOXOX. So far the bar pictured above, and the plain dark chocolate is the only one I've seen or tasted but it is truly fabulous. I have gotten everyone in my department hooked as well. The chocolate is deep and rich and I definitely appreciate the cherry/ almond version, although the plain is great as well. If you can find this stuff, pick it up immediately. Be warned though, you might never go back to any other chocolate.
Next interesting snack was freeze dried peaches. I had to try them since it was only 99 cents for a little pack. I can't remember at all what the company was called, but it really tasted like a peach formed in your mouth out of an ugly white chip. A few of my coworkers tried them but were freaked out by the texture, but I thought they were a decent snack. I wouldn't want to eat it all the time, but I might try out the pineapple ones once too.
Snack Three, dried edamame. Edamame are soy beans, if you don't know, and they apparently can be eaten dry roasted. I started out with the wasabi flavored ones by Seapoint Farms and then tested the plain salted ones. Wasabi is definitely better, because they come up with a nice kick every other bite, but the salted ones are nice too. It's a good snack, and pretty healthy as well. Thumbs up!
And last but not least, a few weeks ago I was inspired to buy a salmon kabob to cook on my tiny little George Foremen grill. I also decided it was time to cook some meat again and I made up a few awesome marinade. I made one marinade out of chili paste, oil, rosemary and another with balsamic and orange and oil. Both came out very tasty.

 Salmon pre-cooking and post-cooking...


And the chicken...



And that's all for tonight folks. Hope you enjoyed your  super speedy tour through my cooking highlights.