I know this because pretty much every science fiction show or movie seems to include some depiction of people eating weird-looking food in block form. Well, the future is now! Or perhaps I exist in some weird time-eddy, because I frequently eat blocks of food in the form of protein and energy bars. I’m not the sort who manages to have a nice, sit-down breakfast most mornings, so the portability of bars is ideal. Also, as a lapband patient, I not only have to eat small meals, but I have to optimize for protein, which is made more challenging by the fact that I am a vegetarian. Usually I look for bars containing at least 15g of protein, though I will often buy bars with less to use as a between-meal snack or an après-workout booster. Sometimes I’ll buy new and interesting products just to see if they’re worth adding to my personal protein arsenal.

One new product I tried recently was Ruth’s Hemp Power cranberry almond bar. I know, it sounds unbearably earthy-crunchy. However, even though this one is low on protein at 4g, it’s very tasty and worth a try if you like protein and energy bars for breakfast or snacks. It’s sweetened with honey and rice syrup, great for those eschewing refined sugar or corn syrup, and the flavor of the honey shines through. The oats and flax seed provide 2g of fiber. Raisins provide some iron, and the hempseed provides omega-3 and omega-6, plus gamma linolenic acid (GLA), making it a good vegetarian source of essential fatty acids.

I was surprised by how much I liked the Hemp Power bar, frankly. There are a lot of earthy-hippie bars that are all-natural, sure, but taste and feel like cardboard and twigs. I’d buy this one again. Waiting in the wings is a Ruth’s Very Berry Flax Power bar, which I’ll review when I get a chance to eat it.

Ruth’s makes a whole line of hemp and flax food products, and they are GMO-free and mostly organic, plus they are dairy-free, and most of them are also gluten-free. And on top of it all, Ruth’s is a Canadian company…when you buy from them, you support the economy of Stephanie’s homeland!

http://ruthshempfoods.com/

Stephanie has graciously invited me to join her in food blogging. I like writing about food. I like eating food. I fancy myself a bit of a foodie. However, I do have a few issues:

• I’m a longtime ovo-lacto vegetarian.
• I’m a lapband patient, and therefore can only eat small meals.
• I’m picky.

So, in case there are people out there who might find writing about these topics interesting, I’ll be posting from time to time.

I was introduced to the ‘Wings Over Xxxxx’ chain on a road trip in August, and I found their sauces to be wildly differing in quality; the Honey Lime sauce, for example, was quite good on its own, but on the chicken itself, it disappeared, and I needed to ask for more to dip into. The hot sauces seem ok, though they ramp up quickly in heat, so there’s not really a noticeable difference between their ‘Cruisin’ Altitiude’ (the second least-hot sauce) and the ‘Jet Fuel’ (their second-most hot sauce). There is at least one flavour in-between them, so there ought to be more of a difference.

I have a major thing for wings, real wings, big, plump wings with lots of sauce (ah, Wheat Sheaf, I miss you and your half price wing Mondays). I have not yet found the place in Camberville to satisfy me.

The sandwich I got the other night was tasty enough, a lot of meat, though it was a sandard and didn’t stand out from the pack of ‘buffalo chicken sandwiches’ available. The onion rings might have been tasty… if they hadn’t been cold, because they showed up over an hour after ordered. I know, I know, if you’re doing delivery, you need to stagger things; not everyone is going to get everything piping hot. But an insulated bag or something would have helped, or cooking them closer to the delivery time. When I called them, an hour after ordering, to find out what was going on, I was told that the guy had left to do the delivery 15 minutes earlier (it was another 15 before he showed up). So that’s at least half an hour of sitting out on the back seat of a car there, and I don’t know when they were actually prepared (when I ordered them? right before he left? no idea). It makes it hard to say more than, ‘well, they might have been good an hour ago.’ They had promise, that was sadly unfulfilled.

Wings over Somerville
519 Somerville Ave.
Somerville, MA 02143
Phone: 617-666-WING (9464)
Seven days a week (11 am - 12 am) - In and Pickup closes at 11 pm

Order online or just check the menu. 

When I was a kid, Wednesdays were taco night. My dad has always had problems with anything at all spicy, and so though everyone else in the family loved tacos, he couldn’t eat them or we’d have a serious case of Old El Paso’s Revenge that night. Fortunately, dad worked late on Wednesdays so he could have Friday afternoon off, and Wednesday became the night the spice must flow.

Those tacos of my suburban youth were right off the shelf happiness; though I am not particularly fond of taco kits these days, in the early 80s they were actually pretty hard to find. When mom found them on the shelf of the grocery store, she usually bought serveral, because she couldn’t be sure that there’d be more next time. If only her daughter had started cooking earlier.

This week, I finally perfected a recipe that I’ve been poking at for a little while; tacos for one. This recipe makes 5 smallish tacos, which I assure you, is one serving for me, which is the important thing here.

I actually cheated when I made this at 4am this morning; I just mixed everything but the sour cream and tortillas in a bowl and filled the tortillas that I had spread with sour cream from the bowl of tasty glop. It was 5 tacos worth of chicken and a little extra meat-missing mix (about 1/3 a cup) that I ate off of tortilla chips because it was too tasty not to.

I was at a geekish party last week, and people were hanging around the Table of Frozen Drink Mixing, discussing blenders in the usual sort of geek dick-sizing fashion. Much admiration was expressed for the Blendtec, star of Will It Blend?, a website that collects hundreds of 30-45s videos showing that the BlendTec will blend…well, everything. So far. Favourites: glowsticks, spam (in the can) and the video camera. Ok, not the video camera per se, but the video where they try and return the video camera that they blended (”I tripped, and it fell into a blender…”).