It's the most wonderful time of the year
The holiday season almost inevitably means new soda varieties, and this year got kicked off in pretty fine style with Sierra Mist Cranberry Splash, immediately one of the better forays into the "cram a flavor that seems reasonable into an existing soda and see what happens" school of thought that has dominated beverage production for the past five years or so.
This is not to say that Cranberry Splash is perfect, of course. Most fruit-flavored sodas and candies succeed not because they taste so much like their respective fruits but because they
don't; fruit, while good in most cases, just doesn't tend to have that outrageous, popping flavor that manufacturers of sugary treats are looking for. Consider flavors like grape (hugely exaggerated), banana (nothing like bananas usually, not that that's bad), or watermelon (seems to have been created completely out of whole cloth).
The result of this method is that there are some fruit flavors that just don't translate. Either they're too close to the original, or the original is such that anything that falls too far from the tree isn't going to be even slightly recognizable. The cranberry in Cranberry Splash is kind of like that. It's certainly recognizable as cranberry - and you can see why they had to keep it close, because if you moved any farther it could be any one of several berries easily - but that's sort of the problem. Cranberries, on their own, don't really have a ton of flavor; they're just sort of tart and that's it. They get a distinct taste about them when heavily sugared, but it really only works in juice and sauce form; while I liked the cranberry blends that Jolly Rancher produced for a while, their inability to succeed in the national market suggests that not many others did (and anyway those usually tasted more like the flavor with which the cranberries were mixing in any given candy).
What I'm saying here is that the cranberry flavor, while certainly not bad, gets tiresome after a while. It reminds me a bit of Pepsi Holiday Spice, or rather the experience of drinking it - you first think "Well that's not bad," then "I'm glad someone made this because I don't know that I would have thought of it," and finally, after finishing the bottle, "Dear Lord, I can't believe I just drank that whole thing. I feel sick." Maybe I've just lost my ability to kill a 20-ouncer in five minutes, as though that were somehow a bad thing.
I'm also not entirely convinced that lemon-lime was the best medium into which to introduce cranberry; Canada Dry makes a seasonal cranberry ginger ale which seems more reasonable, and which I may have to try and find soon for comparison's sake. At least no one made the mistake of going diet on us (there may
be a diet variety, but there isn't
only a diet variety); I remember thinking during the
Jones Holiday Soda fiasco last year that I would drink a cranberry soda marketed year-round as long as it had sugar and not Splenda. This is close to that, but the hints of lemon-lime lurking in the background didn't help the eventual queasiness and I'm no longer convinced that cranberry as a flavor can hold up its own soda, though the fault may lie as much or more with Sierra Mist's iteration of the flavor as with the actual fruit itself.
Ultimately I'd recommend Sierra Mist Cranberry Splash as a change of pace, but I'd be careful not to drink too much of it in one sitting. Three stars out of five, if I were rating this like a movie. Which apparently I am.
I am definitely not loving it
There's a Simpsons episode from 2003 featuring the "Ribwich," a Krusty Burger sandwich that is an obvious parody of the McRib. Portrayed as made of questionable meat and possessing a mystifying popularity, the Ribwich ends up getting discontinued because the animal from which it was made went extinct. That should tell you something about the perception of the McRib, and yet there must be a following because McDonald's keeps on bringing it back. And making a really big deal about it, too.
Perhaps I should have known better, but I'll be darned if the pictures don't make the McRib look reasonably good. At least, the first picture did, the one on the drive-thru menu. As I pulled up to the window, however, there was a second, smaller picture of the McRib, and it looked oddly discolored, like it was smothered in porridge instead of barbecue sauce. Suddenly, I felt put off, but it was too late.
The biggest problem with the McRib is also the most obvious one - what meat is that? I assume it's either beef or pork, but there's nothing distinctive about it except for a surprisingly unpleasant texture. There's virtually no animal that we commonly consume that I wouldn't believe
might be the primary ingredient in the McRib, though, up to and including pheasant. All I know is that I ran into small, unpleasantly hard bits every few bites.
The McRib comes with nothing more than onions, pickles, and barbecue sauce, which usually puts me in condiment heaven, but I ended up having to pick off the pickles (hamburger dills are not my favorite and were simply too overwhelming, flavor-wise), and the barbecue sauce was unable to completely mask the mystery meat's lackluster flavor. Only the onions really provided what I was hoping to get from the sandwich, but onions aren't everything, even for me.
Ultimately, I couldn't even finish the thing, and moved on to my Filet-o-Fish with 10-15% of the McRib still sitting there. I mean, it just really isn't good. I've got a suspicion that McDonald's is fully aware of this, and that's why they only sell it for part of the year - absence makes the heart (or in this case, the stomach, I guess) grow fonder, after all. Still, I'd have thought more people might have caught on by now. Seriously, gross.
*Now* what?
Some of my other blog adventures ("blogventures," if you will) haven't quite panned out. In particular, "Movies That Will Suck" didn't have the staying power for which I'd hoped. Partly this is because I haven't been as aggressively into movies lately, and partly it's because there really is something of a shortage of terrible upcoming movies about which there are worthwhile jokes to be made.
I'm hoping that "The Frugal Gourmand" will be different. I've always found it interesting that "gourmand" has two different definitions that, within the set of "people who eat," are virtual opposites - one is "a lover of good food," and the other is "a glutton," someone who eats to excess and with little discrimination. So the most pretentious food critic is a gourmand, but so is a 400-pound guy killing his seventh bag of Cheetos on the Barcalounger? How does that even make sense?
Fortunately, there are ways in which I epitomize both definitions of the term. I do enjoy truly great food, to the point that I believe it
is worth spending a hundred bucks on a two-person dinner sometimes. That said, I don't exactly have the money to eat like that all the time. And I'm also something of an experimental eater when it comes to snacks and fast food. New product? Sure, I'll try it. I'm part food critic and part frat boy, though certainly not pegged to either extreme in any way.
So what can you expect if you're one of the three people who ever reads this? I'll probably compress any candy and pop reviews that I do into this blog (though I'll probably still archive the pop reviews at
BigFlax later), along with various other food and restaurant commentary. One thing you won't find much, if any, of is reviews of ridiculous haute-couture places (like, say, Alinea). That's not what being a frugal gourmand is all about.
