The Frugal Gourmand

Peanut butter and 'belly

2008-01-18T22:45:00.000-06:00

I decided to try Fresh Choice today, which is a "healthier" place in the building. A large chili there costs about the same as a large soup at Ponte Fresco - which is to say, more than I'd usually want to pay for soup, and I doubt I'll feel a need to do it again, but the comparison was interesting. Fresh Choice's beef chili is distinctly different from Ponte Fresco's - for one thing, it's spicy (I needed to mop up the top of my head after eating it), but it also takes a bit of a different approach to the production. The broth is much thinner but the ground beef is more pervasive, so you don't really notice. There wasn't too much going on in the way of other ingredients; just a minor amount of beans, peppers and onions for variety. The flavor wasn't as strong, though; though I do sometimes enjoy spicy foods, I never really like when spice is used in lieu of flavor. (The chicken vindaloo at Peacock in Vernon Hills is possibly the spiciest thing I've ever eaten, aside from Sean Horan's Couran Cove stir-fry, but it's great because there's also a lot of other flavor hiding under the burn.) That's not totally the case here, but the taste isn't really full-bodied. It could certainly be better. I don't know if that's due to it being more healthful, but that's not my fault. Still cost me six bucks.

Fresh Choice Spicy Beef Chili: 7/10

Potbelly's "Big Jack's PB+J" is kind of a ripoff because it costs as much as any other Potbelly sandwich ($4.19 plus tax), despite a conspicuous lack of meat. I made the slight mistake of taking mine home on the bus before eating it, so by the time I got to it the peanut butter had largely melted up and my first bite resulted in a sizable puddle on the butcher paper. It was fairly tasty, though the peanut butter overwhelms the grape jelly, and a warm peanut butter sandwich isn't a bad idea. But a peanut butter sandwich is something I can make myself in two minutes, so it's hardly worth the expense.

Potbelly Big Jack's PB+J: 6.5/10

Chili today and hot tamale

2008-01-17T20:48:00.000-06:00

When I first got to Burrito Beach today, with the intention of getting a chicken quesadilla, I had the distinct feeling I was being ripped off - the Beach charges the same amount for a quesadilla as it does for a burrito, and a burrito seems like a lot more food. But actually, once you factor in the side of rice (or chips, but I got rice), about the only thing the quesadilla is lacking is beans. So it's not really that big a deal, though when I'm eating out twice I'd rather not be spending $4.99 plus tax on one of the trips. In the future I'll probably try to bring a peanut butter sandwich or something from home so I only have to go with one small meal out a day; I tried bringing full lunches from home for a while, but it took too much time to make turkey sandwiches in the morning and I just couldn't make them the night before. A simple peanut butter sandwich, especially if I eschew jelly, would keep much better overnight.

I'm rambling a bit. At any rate, the quesadilla was pretty good. I used to get quesadillas at Taco Bell in college, but there's not much comparison - the chicken is better and Taco Bell never had peppers and onions like the quesadilla I got, which add some nice flavor. I might have liked the cheddar to be a little sharper, but otherwise I have minimal complaint.

Burrito Beach Cheddar Chicken Quesadilla: 7/10

Because I liked it, and so I could get a review down, I went back to Ponte Fresco for the chili I'd had a few days back. I got a little cheddar cheese on it, and they actually put the cheese on and then topped it off, resulting in a nice cheddar payload at the center of the cup pretty much all the way down to the bottom. The chili itself was as good as I remembered - lots of beef and kidney beans, plus a tangy broth with the right thickness. It's really not spicy at all, but if you want that in your chili, you can request red pepper flakes on top, since all the toppings are no extra charge. At any rate, I like it quite a bit. It's still on the expensive side, but that's just the occupational hazard of eating at Ponte Fresco.

Ponte Fresco Chili: 8.5/10

Quizno's Flatbread Sa... don't make me say it

2008-01-16T20:22:00.000-06:00

Day One of the "experiment" was today, January 16. For the roughly lunch-time meal (some might call it "lunch"), I went over to Quizno's to check out the new small flatbread sandwiches they have. And yes, I refuse to call these things by their official name because I hate it. The cutesy-poo mispronunciation is bad enough - then you cut the word in half and end it with the even cutesier "ee" sound? God. No. Awful.

The sandwiches themselves are not awful, however. There are six varieties including the two new lower-calorie ones, though only the original four were on sale at this particular Quizno's. Either way, they were only two bucks each, which isn't a bad deal - it's comparable to the McDonald's Snacker, except better (albeit a bit more expensive as well). I don't really dig on bacon or the many Italian sandwich meats, so I went with the Bistro Steak Melt and the Sonoma Turkey. Two of the flatbreads wasn't bad for a light lunch (okay, a "light" 620 calories, but that's not too bad for the larger of two mid-day mealettes). The Bistro Steak Melt definitely takes the cake between the two; the peppercorn sauce added a nice amount of flavor without being overwhelming, and the warm steak-and-mozzarella combination at the center was good. The flatbread is also a nice delivery system; the pieces I had were warm and chewy, and they held the sandwich's contents well.

The turkey wasn't quite as good; it was fine, but between the pepper jack cheese and chipotle mayo, I found the spice-to-flavor ratio to be a bit on the high side. There wasn't much to taste but turkey and hotness, and that's passable but undistinguished to me. Again, however, the flatbread worked well. My only other complaint was the tomato pieces sprinkled across the top of both sandwiches (along with lettuce, which was fine), but that's just because I didn't know it was coming. I'm sure I could ask for them to be left off in the future, and anyway they were thankfully easy to pick off.

Bistro Steak Melt: 8.5/10
Sonoma Turkey: 5/10

At 3-ish, I went to Ponte Fresco, which for a while a number of months ago (just after it opened) I frequented to such a degree that several of the staff knew my name. Ponte Fresco's problem is it's on the expensive side - their basic products are salads where you pick all your toppings and they chop and mix them for you, but they charge by the topping, which means you can get to eight bucks pretty quick, a bit on the high side for just a salad - and the soup is no exception, as a small costs $3.45 pre-tax. The upside is that it's good soup. I had a nice, rich beef chili there the other day, and today I went for the spicy chicken enchilada. A solid, creamy broth is filled with chunks of chicken and various vegetables (red peppers, black beans, corn - wow, is any of those technically a vegetable? Whatever), and you even get free tortilla strips sprinkled on top. Ponte Fresco doesn't have nutritional info on their website yet - this is their first mainland US store after years in Puerto Rico - so I can only guess at the actual health value (or lack thereof), though I'm guessing that the creamy base rules out low-fat. (Still, how bad can a "small" anything really be for you? At least there's that.) But it's quite tasty - it lives up to the spicy name (the top of my head beaded up with sweat) and there is no skimping on the ingredients within. Yeah, it's too expensive, but it's a lot closer to getting what you pay for than you would at most places.

Spicy Chicken Enchilada Soup: 8/10

A new beginning

2008-01-16T14:06:00.000-06:00

I'm taking a bit of a risk here. You've probably noticed - assuming you've even checked this blog in the last six months - that I don't update the Frugal Gourmand very much. There are a number of reasons for that, none really worth delving into. However, I've come to think that a little rebranding may perhaps be in order. I have no idea whether this idea is going to work at all - it may be unworkable, or tedious, or unworkably tedious. But I think it's worth a shot.

The proposal is this: I eat out a lot. Mostly at lunch, at work. You'd think this would be a gold mine for this blog, but it really hasn't been. Well, that's all about to change, if this works.

As some of you may know, I've been having issues lately with heartburn. One thing I need to do is lose weight, but another thing that's helpful is eating smaller meals/portions. As you may also know, I do have a history of eating a lot, and while I can't eat like I used to, I still have a habit of cramming down more than is necessary at a lot of meals, and eating at odd hours, which doesn't help things. So I'm making an effort to eat smaller meals and just do so a couple more times a day - say, food at 9, 12, 3 and 7 or something like that. The 12 and 3 in particular are times where I might have cause to wander to one of the many establishments around here for one or both of those "meal"-times.

So is this going somewhere? Yes. I'm going to be doing (relatively) quick takes of my daily eating experiences in this space, when I purchase food from a dining establishment. I'll be trying some new things, re-experiencing some old things, and surely repeating myself sometimes, though I won't have much to add in times like that. I figure this will also act as a check of sorts - there are definitely people reading this who will give me crap for eating too much garbage, so it sort of behooves me to try and keep on a somewhat healthier track. At any rate, I think this could be interesting, and I believe it was Rudnik who once commented on the main blog that it was "fun" to have me describe new dining experiences. That's probably a little strong for this experiment, but hey, you never know.

Culinary globetrotting, part one

2007-08-14T13:08:00.000-05:00

Sabri Nehari sits on the 2500 block of Devon Avenue, surrounded by Indian restaurants, and from the street it certainly looks just like any of its neighbors. A cursory look at the menu reveals familiar Indian favorites - pakora, samosas, naan bread, biryani dishes, chicken tikka. And then a word catches your eye, and then the same word, and the same word again, and you realize that the menu is full of reasons why this isn't a typical Indian restaurant - why, in fact, it isn't an Indian restaurant at all.

The word? "Beef."

Sabri Nehari is a Pakistani restaurant, and despite many similarities to Indian cuisine, Pakistani food does have its differences, not least the one enabled by its hailing from a nation that is 97% Muslim. (81% of Indians - and plainly all but 100% of their restaurant-owner expatriates - are Hindus, to whom, of course, the cow is sacred and not to appear on the menu.) Certainly this is not the only difference; in fact, neither Alma nor I ordered a beef dish.

I opted for Frontier Chicken, a dish said to owe some of its culinary heritage to the Afghan traditions (Pakistan's western border with Afghanistan apparently gives the dish its name), while Alma ordered Lahori Chicken, which comes in the style of Lahore, Pakistan's second-largest city (on its eastern side, near the Indian border). While the ancillary items - naan, chutney, samosas - were all recognizable, both dishes differed from what you might find in an Indian restaurant, certainly not a bad thing given our attempt at having a culinary adventure. The Frontier Chicken was almost stew-like, a mélange of chicken, onions, peppers, and other vegetables, topped off with cilantro. I like cilantro all right but frequently find it to overwhelm dishes in which it features prominently; in this case, however, it was a fine compliment to the subtle spiciness of the chicken. The Lahori Chicken was similar to chicken pakora with a bit of added cumin kick to it; it was tasty, if perhaps not as "different" as we might have been able to achieve. The generous portions of samosas and naan were a welcome addition to the meal.

I might like to try Pakistani food again to give a shot to a few other things; the restaurant is named after its signature beef dish, which suggests good things given the place's popularity (an online search turns up reviews discussing the "hour-long waits" at the eatery's old location, which was ravaged by fire in late 2006), and I didn't even peek at the dessert menu, so full were we after the main course. At less than $30 pre-tip for two entrees, an appetizer, bread and rice, it's hard to argue with the prices either.

Pepsi to the Max

2007-06-25T13:38:00.000-05:00

Pepsi recently introduced a new diet cola, Diet Pepsi Max (the official website is here, although it looks pretty obnoxious). The target market, I guess, is people who want more caffeine than normal colas/diet colas provide, but aren't willing to endure the sugar of Mountain Dew or regular energy drinks to get it. Diet Pepsi Max contains 69 mg of caffeine per 12 fl oz can. Compare that to 34 in Coke, 38 in Pepsi, and even only 55 in Mountain Dew. It's still short of Jolt Cola's 71.2, but Jolt doesn't have a diet alternative that I'm aware of and is pretty hard to find these days. Coffee still has significantly more caffeine (about 276 mg in 12 ounces), but as far as pop goes, Diet Pepsi Max has pretty much made itself the king. (Vault has slightly more caffeine, and there is a zero-calorie version, but I imagine some people just prefer cola to the Dew-like citrusy variants.)

Diet Pepsi Max also contains some panax ginseng extract, which gives it a slightly different flavor than most colas. In my experience, ginseng actually adds quite a bit to cola, and in fact, the herby flavor added by the ginseng does a lot to cancel out the mineral taste of the aspartame. (It's certainly not gone altogether, but since I drink a fair amount of Diet Coke at work, I've gotten used to it.) Overall, Diet Pepsi Max is probably one of the best-tasting diet sodas ever produced. The high caffeine content is a bonus (if you like that sort of thing), but I feel like this product would do fairly well even without it (though I'll grant that without the caffeine boost, it probably wouldn't exist).

Historically I haven't cared for Pepsi as much as Coke, but I probably prefer many of Pepsi's ancillary products to their Coke alternatives - Dew to Vault, Mug to Barq's (not that I love Mug, but I've come to find Barq's overpoweringly undrinkable on its own), Gatorade to Powerade, Aquafina to Dasani. (Coke wins with Sprite over Sierra Mist, however.) This is looking like another winner for Pepsi at the fringes of the cola wars, even if the main battle will continue to elude them.

Rating as soda: 6/10
Rating as diet: 9.5/10

Summertime and the Pepsi is nasty

2007-05-07T00:13:00.000-05:00

It continually amazes me how companies can put out pop that just doesn't taste good. I know these people test-market, right? Yet we still wind up with stuff like, well, Pepsi Summer Mix. This flavor is new enough that I can't find a link to a page for it, but wander into a grocery store and I'm sure you'll find some. It's intended as a limited edition, and the sooner it's gone the better. This is supposed to be Pepsi with tropical fruit flavors - as usual, no actual fruits are stated on the label. Whatever esters they were able to scrounge up remind me mostly of pineapple, maybe with some mango thrown in - whatever it is, the taste is unmistakeably fake, and frankly just makes me kind of ill. I got through maybe four sips before I had to stop, which is pretty bad. This may be the least drinkable spinoff flavor I've ever had - unless you count 7Up Plus - and coming from the company who made Pepsi Blue, that's a pretty hideous misstep. The flavor is so overpowering that you can't even taste the cola, and then it's not even good? Big, big problem. Avoid this stuff at all costs.

Two Doritos enter, one leaves

2007-04-03T12:19:00.000-05:00

Doritos is running a new promotion where they created two new flavors, and the public will choose which flavor is better. The flavors in question are Smokin' Cheddar BBQ and Wild White Nacho. Because I'm a sucker for new products, not to mention objective taste comparisons, I decided to give them a try. My personal preference is for Smokin' Cheddar BBQ - the overpowering flavor in it is the smoky barbecue, but there are hints of cheddar lurking in the background, and the barbecue has a sweet hit to it that makes it more palatable than if it were just very smoky (along the lines of a lot of mesquite-flavored products, say). The Wild White Nacho, while absolutely fine, is more undistinguished - in a way it's just very similar to an ur-Dorito, tasting like Nacho Cheesier but not quite as flavorful (even though I think white cheddar cheese tends to taste pretty much exactly the same as orange cheddar cheese, chip manufacturers always seem to make white cheddar into a wimpier version of the same flavor, Smartfood being the possible exception to this).

The most amusing part of the whole affair, however, is the animation on the Doritos homepage - if you make your way to the "Fight for the Flavor" arena in Doritosville there, you can see a rather hilarious animation of animated bags of chips doing pre-fight exercises. Wild White Nacho is jumping rope while Smokin' Cheddar BBQ does sit-ups; this cracks me up. You can also go to a site where you use bags of chips to compete in ultimate fighting contests against other players, but that part just makes me sad.

Bretzel logic

2007-02-08T20:30:00.000-06:00

There's a new place open in the Illinois Center, Hannah's Bretzel, which bills itself as the first organic quick service restaurant in Chicago. Even though the menu seemed a little limited (how many different ways can you combine two meats and three cheeses?), I decided to check it out.

My selection was Black Forest ham and Swiss gruyere on bretzel baguette, with whole-grain mustard and cucumber. Seemed like a decent bet, but in fact it turned out to be one of the saltiest things I'd ever eaten. (In retrospect, salty meat + salty cheese + salty bread + salty condiment probably wasn't the wisest choice, but how was I supposed to know?) I daresay it was almost inedibly salty, though I managed to get it down. It may have been the saltiness of the ham that really dominated things; though I caught occasional salt off the bread, the gruyere taste that poked through was pretty good.

Really, the crucial problem with Hannah's Bretzel is its very attitude; it's set up to be a haute couture-type of establishment. For example, I can't call the guy who made my sandwich anything but a chef - he was wearing a white coat with his name on it. You're making sandwiches! I guess if Subway is going to call its workers "sandwich artists" then it's kind of academic, but still. Seemed like a very European attitude, which would be fine if they weren't charging European prices. One sandwich - and granted, it's surprisingly large, although this may be partly a reflection of how long it took to eat on account of all the salt - ran me $8.26 with tax, and it wasn't the most expensive option by a long shot. God forbid you order the salmon - you're paying nearly ten bucks after tax for a single sandwich. It almost makes Quizno's look reasonably priced.

When you get right down to it, isn't this kind of why our country is so fat? I don't have any nutrition facts for Hannah's Bretzel, and just because they call themselves organic doesn't mean it's the single healthiest thing you can eat, but let's just say that it's in the top couple spots among Illinois Center fare for healthfulness. Compare it on price, though. Among other options I regularly choose, it's not just the most expensive, it's easily the most expensive. I can get a comparable amount of food at Burrito Beach for about five bucks. At Potbelly, four. Heck, at McDonald's I could probably get about the same amount of food for $2.50. Even Cosi, where I might spend seven bucks on a single sandwich, almost seems inexpensive by comparison, and with the right sandwich choice probably no less good for you.

It's like Jim Gaffigan says: "I can get this salad for 12 bucks, or these eight hamburgers for a nickel. Sorry, salad!" Even if I had loved my sandwich, and even if it were the best thing for me, there's no way I could afford to eat it every day. People are getting fatter because the worst food is inevitably the cheapest. It's also why lower-income groups are among the least healthy individuals in the country (well, it's the starting reason, although less access to quality health care is a big part of it too).

I don't mean to go all political on you here. This is really just a restaurant review, after all. And I feel sort of bad railing against a place that gave me a free cup of soup. But places like Hannah's Bretzel, no matter how purely motivated, aren't really solving any problems with their high-priced organic foods; they're just allowing yuppies to sleep better at night. The people who most need organic QSRs can't afford to eat here (although they probably wouldn't anyway, which is an entirely different issue). All that and the sandwiches contain enough salt to give Lot's wife hypertension. So long as you can live without eating organic food every day, it's probably fine to go ahead and give this one a pass.

Head games

2007-01-10T21:56:00.000-06:00

I stopped by a candy store in the neighborhood tonight, and I saw that they had not two or three but four varieties of the Ferrara Pan "Head" candies - Lemonheads, Cherryheads, Grapeheads, and Appleheads, the last of which was completely new to me. (The guy working the counter said he'd never seen them before he started working there, either.) Being the dork that I am, I picked up one of each - the better to review you with, my dears.

Lemonheads: Lemonheads are, to the best of my knowledge, the original product in the line. And if they're not, let's just say they are, since they're easily the most ubiquitous and it just makes sense. The thing I like about Lemonheads is that they're nice and tart without ever being overpoweringly sour (even Captain Sour here has his limits, especially now that my teeth are starting to rebel against my youthful indiscretions). The little ones aren't quite as good as the big ones - with the big ones, you can really bite through the sugary crust, husk the candy, and then chew up the crust before sucking on and then crunching up the harder inner core, which all together makes for a pretty great candy experience. You don't really get that with the little ones because their size makes husking a virtual impossibility, and the crust is too thin to allow easy peeling and access to the candy within (without just crunching down the whole thing, of course). But they're still tasty, and the shell tends to be just thick enough to make them softer across the board.

Cherryheads: Naturally, Cherryheads are not as tart as Lemonheads, but they have a little kick to them. Part of the difference is that Lemonheads use real lemon juice. Cherryheads tout their "real fruit juice," but the juice in question is apple, and the cherry flavor is added. It's more robust than real cherry taste so it's hard to really complain, but it's not quite the same. Cherryheads seem a little harder and/or crunchier than their Lemon counterparts.

Grapeheads: Similar story to Cherryheads - they seem harder than Lemonheads (as I wrote this I got a nice soft shell, but it was more the exception than the rule), and the "real fruit juice" is apple again. The grape flavor is strong but quite obviously characterized by its artificiality. Fortunately, I like the fake-grape flavor conceived for grape candy (though I think only watermelon tends to bear less resemblance to the original fruit).

Appleheads: The moment of truth. It's rare to find something where it seems such a cinch that I'll like it and yet I've never heard of it before. Here goes...

...meh. Maybe there's a reason the apple flavor isn't used more often in candy. I love apple juice and apple cider, but despite being made with real apple juice, the Appleheads just seem underwhelming. The flavor is acceptably apple-like but doesn't really jump out; I suppose there's something refreshing about an understated candy, but after the other three Heads it just seems out of place. After a while they almost start to taste like lime, as though someone poured the wrong green mixture into the Appleheads vat. They're not bad or anything, but I won't bother stocking up.

Final rankings:
1. Lemonheads
2. Grapeheads
3. Cherryheads
4. Appleheads

Angel at my table

2006-12-06T00:04:00.000-06:00

If there's one food item in the history of creation that I would not have looked at and thought, "You know, that could really use a layer of frosting," it would have to be angel food cake. We're talking something that, already, is basically all sugar. The product wizards at Dolly Madison, however, clearly disagreed, as there exists the "Mini Frosty Angel Cake," which is just a rectangular slab of angel food cake covered in a huge mane of pink frosting.

The angel food cake was probably a little better than expected - considering that we're talking about something that costs less than a buck, there was the chance that the angel food would suck. I like angel food cake a lot, so this was a concern, but it wasn't a big deal. Was it a little more styrofoamy than the angel food cake you might get at the grocery store? Sure. But it was fine.

The frosting, I probably don't even have to tell you, was complete overkill. For starters, there was too much of it. Not only did it cover the whole cake but it was a pretty thick layer. Angel food cake has its own distinctive taste and sweetness; they make it what it is. But these were near-totally obliterated by the onslaught of frosting. Pink frosting, don't forget.

All in all, though, the experience wasn't terrible. Considering the size of the cake and the amount I paid for it, I felt surprisingly little like dying after I'd eaten it. This can probably be attributed to the relatively low fat content (though of course the sugar content is off the charts). I don't know if I'd get it again, but the Mini Frosty Angel Cake was definitely not a total loss.

It's the most wonderful time of the year

2006-11-22T19:46:00.000-06:00

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

2006-11-11T14:53:00.000-06:00

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?

2006-11-11T14:23:00.000-06:00

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.