Lottie Dottie

When I drink coffee, it is usually loaded with creamer and sugar, or in the form of a Frappuccino. I don’t drink black coffee. I’m not exactly sure why, but I’ve just always added creamer to my coffee. I decided to put my favorite coffee, Starbucks Blonde Roast, into my Keurig, and drink it black, with no creamer. The smell was so strong in my cup, that it was almost nauseating. There was no Vanilla creamer to calm down the smell, and I was drinking much more coffee then usual, because there was no creamer to fill the cup up more. The Blonde Roast is probably the “wimpiest” version of black coffee, but I still couldn’t stand it. Maybe the coffee was to hot, or I was just being a baby, but it almost felt as if it stung my tongue. It was very bitter, and very hot. The cold creamer usually cools down the coffee a bit. So I waited a bit, apparently I waited too long, and the coffee was now room temperature. It tasted worse cold, and the slight sting was still there. Maybe this was my tongue protesting the bitter taste. At this point, the smell was giving me a full on headache, which is quite unusual. I was convinced that my body really was protesting this. I decided to dump the cold coffee, brew another batch, and add creamer. My tongue thanked me, and I felt much better. Black and bitter coffee is not good….

 

PICTURE EXPLANATION:

One of my all-time favorite book couples, or OTP, is Alec Lightwood and Magnus Bane from the Mortal Instruments series (and recently, TV show…meh). Magnus is a very flamboyant warlock, who loves lattes and sweet coffee. Alec is a demon hunter who likes black and boring coffee. The way they drink coffee is very much like their personalities; Magnus is lively and flirty, while Alec is toned-down and shy. I can relate to Magnus, since he loves sweet flavored coffee. 

IDEA

I really want to dive deeper into Women In Refrigerators. I know it is not necessarily 100% food related, but I just LOVE this topic! I’m slowly recognizing more and more sexism in comic books, and I just want to learn more.

http://lby3.com/wir/

Sweet…but salty

I love chocolate, but after that experience with the peanut butter cups, I don’t think I could survive entirely on chocolate (though it sounds ideal). I am always open to trying chocolate in new ways, and when I saw chocolate covered pretzels at Ross, I jumped at the chance to try them. I’ve only had yogurt covered pretzels, but never chocolate ones! I bought the Godiva ones, because I LOVE Godiva chocolate, so they couldn’t be that bad. And they weren’t! They were delicious! Obviously, the initial flavour is of the deliciousness of Godiva milk chocolate, that morphs into salty goodness. They aren’t salted pretzels, but they still have a salty taste to them. I do love salty and sweet, but I tend to just alternate between pieces of chocolate and potato chips (WOW! I sound really unhealthy…), but the novelty of chocolate covered pretzels is that I don’t have to alternate. The sweet and salty are both in one small package. So I will no longer need to get up and get the potato chips off the shelf, or reach my hand into the cylindrical Pringles tube. Chocolate covered pretzels really fit into the lazy part of my personality, that flourishes on Saturdays that consist of movie watching and not much movement. Sorry, that was a bit of a tangent. The pretzels were smaller than expected, about half the size of those that come in the big containers at Costco. The package had about 20 of the little guys, and I devoured them all in under 2 minutes. Yum.

Tomatoes aren’t fruit, period.

It’s a truth universally acknowledge that tomatoes aren’t fruit. No matter how many tomato-lovers try to say it, tomatoes are vegetables not fruits. Sorry. As I said before, I love fruit, and I don’t like vegetables, so grape tomatoes are quite confusing in my mind. I’ve only ever had slices of the full/large tomatoes (whatever those are called.. normal?), and I did not like those, so I avoid any sort of raw tomato. I do, however, like spaghetti sauce and ketchup, but not full natural tomatoes. This slightly fits with Korsmeyer’s 5th category of disgusting foods : “Objects that are insufficiently removed from their natural form”. I thought that maybe I could trick my mind into liking tomatoes, so I tried grape tomatoes. Bad idea. Even drenched in ranch dressing, I didn’t like it. Grape tomatoes have an awkward sweet-but-savory flavor, and though it was very juicy, the juice didn’t do for me what fruit juice does. It is no wonder why V8 juice capitalizes on the whole “It’s a vegetable, BUT TASTES LIKE A FRUIT” thing. I could feel my face turn from “this isn’t to bad” to “WTF IS THIS” as the ranch dressing flavor turned into pure tomato. It felt as if I chewed for minutes, and this experience was lasting far too long. The skin was hard to get down, and I just had to give up and swallow it basically whole. It wasn’t fun. Fruits are delicious, and juices often make amazing drinks; thus, tomatoes are not fruit.

Wooooooooorms

I decided to take a more fun approach to Korsmeyer’s 3rd category of disgusting foods that states “Objects that are too alien from ourselves and that we recoil from when we encounter them in nature, such as spiders or snakes”.  For a little bit of backstory, when I go to the store to get candy, I always get chocolate, because I do not really like other types of candy. I also had braces or other forms of orthodontia growing up, and was never allowed to have hard or chewy candies. So, to branch out from my normal chocolate, I decided to try sour gummy worms. Now, I’ve eaten them before, but a long time ago, and I was never much of a fan. They don’t really look like worms, apart from the ridges all along them, even though the package claims “…makes it look like you’re eating a real worm!”. The initial flavor wasn’t all that sour, so the package practically lied to me…again. They were also very chewy, much to the dismay of my jaw and teeth. My teeth still hurt, even after 10 minutes. Each worm has 2 colors/flavors on it, and I found that my favorite flavor is the red king. I’m unsure if its supposed to be strawberry or cherry, but it’s red and tastes good. The sour flavor hit after the 2nd or 3rd worm, leaving an awkward sour after taste in my mouth. The “so amazingly tasty” worms, aren’t really that amazingly tasty. I ended up with a lot of half-eaten worms, because I only ate the red ends. Even 2 cups of water later, I can still taste the tangy-ness from the sour powder, and my teeth still ache. Not worth it.

Fruits and Veg

I’m a little behind on posts, so instead of posting 2 to make up, I’m combining the 2 into one (I hope that counts!) Here goes!

FRUITS: I like to refer to myself as a fruit connoisseur. I like nearly every type of fruit (except tomatoes, gross). However, I saw that my dining hall was offering apricots, and I realized that I’VE ONLY HAD DRIED APRICOTS!  I had never had a normal apricot before! I jumped at the chance to try this version of apricot, and was super excited. It…was…delicious! It tasted exactly the same as a dried apricot, obviously, but was very juicy and cold, and almost thirst quenching. The juice wasn’t sticky like with peaches, it was… almost like flavored water, texture wise that is. It was so good! Dried fruits are sometimes stringy, but the normal version of the apricot wasn’t stringy at all! Again, IT WAS DELICIOUS.

VEG: I don’t like vegetables. Well, I like carrots and corn and peas, but that is about it. I wanted to be a bit less stubborn, so I tried cooked green beans. They were good. However, they could have been cooked a bit longer. Some of the green beans were softer, which I preferred, and some of them were almost raw. They were also very bland, so some salt or other seasoning would have been nice. But! When I dipped them in some gravy that I got for my mashed potatoes, they tasted better. I would definitely consider green beans to be a good side dish, but not a snack, like I’ve seen some people eat them. They’re definitely good in a gravy, but then a lot of things are good in gravy!

PICTURE EXPLANATION:

Angus, Thongs, and Perfect Snogging is a Nickelodeon movie that was released in 2008 I believe. There is a scene where the girls go to an organic fruit and vegetable shop to check out some guys. Everytime I think of fruit and vegetables, I think of this movie (especially specifically the saying “fruits and veg”. I hear it in their british accents in my head). Yeah its weird. 

 

 

Too much, Too sweet

I decided to try the category 2 of disgusting foods. Korsmeyer states: “There are also a number of foods that are tasty in small quantities but cloy when one eats too much and reaches surfeit”.  True to my bad judgement, I decided to try this on a weeknight. I purchased a bag of mini Reese’s peanut butter cups (half off too! Thanks post Valentine’s day candy sales!). I love Reese’s peanut butter cups, and was skeptical that they could ever be disgusting to me. The first few peanut butter cups were delicious, as they always are. When I got to about 10, they were starting to lose their sweet flavor; becoming almost gritty in my mouth. There was no initial taste of chocolate, and then a blast of peanut butter. It was all peanut, all the time. I think I drank an entire water bottle during the time that I was eating the peanut butter cups, and the peanut butter taste still wouldn’t go away! I couldn’t eat more than twelve. I was beginning to feel sick, and I fully believed Korsmeyer by then. I had to give the rest of the peanut butter cups to my neighbor, because I knew that I would not be eating any more anytime soon. 

Greek Yogurt

My mother and sister are big greek yogurt fans, apparently the whole world is right now. I tried two flavors: peach cream and honey. I didn’t read the part of the container that said “fruit on bottom” so I didn’t mix it first, and I was suprised to find that the peach cream didn’t taste like peach at all! It did, however, taste sort of like cake batter ice cream. I thought “I think I’m greek yogurt’s new fan”. That was until I tried the Honey flavor. It was not good at all. It almost tasted sour! Needless to say, I couldn’t eat more than a few bites of the Honey flavor yogurt! Both flavors did have a similar texture. Greek yogurt is not as creamy and smooth as your typical Yoplait yogurt. It has a rougher texture, almost as if it wasn’t mixed for long enough. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was the correct texture for yogurt, and Yoplait was the McDonald’s of yogurts. I did feel healthier after eating the greek yogurt, as if I was the epitome of health just because I ate some yogurt, but I guess it’s a start!

Quinoa

Unfortunately, my reaction video is not loading! Today, I tried Quinoa for the first time. I heard that quinoa is a healthier alternative to rice, so I wanted to see what the big fuss was about. I am a big rice fan, so quinoa already had really big shoes to fill, and I already knew I wasn’t going to like it. Perhaps, that is why I did not like it. It did have a texture similar to rice, but the taste was very bland, almost like I wasn’t eating anything at all. I did buy it from the school dining hall, so maybe I would like actually seasoned quinoa. I don’t think I’ll be choosing quinoa over rice anytime soon, no matter how healthy it is. 

I needed this