March 16, 2005

Frito-Lay Munchies

Muchies
We keep a junk food stocked kitchen here at Six Apart. We owe the food stocking to our office manager, Maile, who, as a mother, knows all the sort of foods that we should but orders the food she knows we will eat. That's why the grapes go sour and mold while the peanut butter cups are gone within a half of a day.

Sidenote: She did buy the most gorgeous box of fruit from The Fruit Guys and as of this moment only a moldy kumquat and two grapefruits remain.

Anyway, I wandered into the kitchen after a Costco delivery to find three huge cardboard boxes stacked on a table. The boxes didn't have any indication of their contents and were all still sealed -- I questioned whether I should even open them. As I thought about this, I pictured numerous Six Aparters looking at the boxes and not feeling at liberty to just open some box in the kitchen.

So, of course, I just found a knife and tore into the first box. To my dismay, inside the box were packages of some sort of cheese-like chip snack called "Munchies." I'm not a huge fan of cheese snacks (I absolutely detest Goldfish) so I tossed the box to the side and tried the next box.

More Munchies.

Disgusted, I gave up and went back to my desk.

Later that day, at Foo Bar, I kiddingly ripped into Maile for buying such a disgusting snack.

Since most of the people at Foo Bar hadn't even seen the chips, I ran to the kitchen to bring in the evidence. It was then that I opened a bag of Munchies to show everyone the horridness up close.

But then I realized that inside Munchies was a fucking treasure cove of junk food.

Munchies are basically pretzels, Cheetos, Doritos and Sun Chips. All in one bag.

The picture on the bag is so utterly disgusting and yellow. And to make matters worse, the branding of the "contents" looks like a "from the makers of..." sort of labeling.

It turns out that these things are so addictive and so good -- and so deceptive. Most everyone I talk to say that they thought they looked disgusting but now have to watch their intake. We bond about the goodness as relative to the packaging and how bad of a job Frito Lay did with the marketing/color scheme.

Yeah, so they are targeted to stoners. And, they are horribly bad to consume.

But, they make me so happy.

In doing some online research about Munchies, I found this great review:

Frito-Lay scores a big hit with this mix of snacks. I figured that they just mixed Cheetos, Rold Gold pretzels, miniaturized Doritos and Sun Chips into a bag without much of a real plan, so I wasn't expecting a whole lot. But this combination of flavors really worked. There's plenty of cheese on the Doritos and Cheetos, but it's very well balanced by the smoothness of the pretzels and the different taste of the Sun Chips. These were very popular around the chip bowl. Good stuff.

I love that there is a site that reviews chips.

By the way, I know I could have just found a picture of the Munchies package online, but I just had to scan it in manually. It just shows what effort I'd go through to evangelize this treat.

December 04, 2003

Tempura Dinner

It's great to see Furukawa-san, the CEO of Nifty using their newly launched (it launched on December 2) Cocolog service powered by TypePad to keep his own weblog - it's a testament to his belief in weblogs and TypePad and should be an inspiration for large companies who get involved in the weblogging space.

It was especially great to see this post appear on his own weblog yesterday because it reminded me that I wanted to write about the tempura dinner that we experienced while in Tokyo.

Imagine a two hour tempura meal that doesn't weigh you down or make you cringe at the sight of battered anything. The restaurant, which will remain nameless since I never caught it, was the polar opposite of probably most every place I have ever eaten tempura in the United States. The batter was light, the oil was fresh, the selection varied from fish spine tempura (like a potato chip) to the freshest shrimp ever. I'm no Jeffrey Steingarten so I fear that my review of the evening doesn't illustrate what a fine meal we had.

Oh, and it was the first time that I ever had warm sake; I must say it was certainly a eye-opening experience. Regardless, it was a dinner I will not soon forget.

Below are a couple pictures from the night.

Continue reading "Tempura Dinner" »

October 01, 2003

Dinner at Tabla

As I mentioned in this post about our trip to New York, we had a great dinner at Tabla, an Indian fusion restaurant recommended to us by Alaina. Tabla has a more casual counterpart, Bread Bar at Tabla, on the first level of the restaurant.

The dinner was expensive -- the most we've ever spent for one meal. We justified it because it was our birthday celebratory meal and because we were in New York. Let me just say that nothing makes one feel more like a pampered, over-privileged member of society than spending a good chunk of a rent payment on one dinner. Despite my initial urgings not to splurge, the seven various wine offerings helped me stomach the cost. Unfortunately, this same wine caused me to call most of my family members to let them know how much I loved them. To which my mother responded: "Oh, you're a happy drunk!"

About the dinner: It was our first experience with a Chef's tasting menu so the idea that each course was to be a surprise was quite exciting. As we received the cutlery and wine for the next course, we tried to guess what we were about to receive. Since I had asked our waiter for no "rabbit, duck, veal or lamb" (cute animals, basically), we were treated to a host of fish dishes. My favorite courses from the tasting menu were the Rice Flaked black sea bass, Seared Australian King Prawn and scallop and Rhubarb sorbet with Gewurztraminer soup.

For those interested in the Chef's Market Menu that was prepared for us, I've posted it below.

Continue reading "Dinner at Tabla" »

July 06, 2003

Rewards

I'm terrible at estimating how long it will take to finish a task. So, yesterday, when we were putting the finishing touches on this version of the beta, I told Ben that I was going to reward myself with a donut when we released. He asked when I thought we'd be finished and I said "2:00 pm." In actuality, that was about 20 hours off.

So we've started a new beta and I'm ready for my donut.

It's not just any donut, though. It's this one.

You're probably thinking that this is a pretty sad reward for such a large task. We just have different priorities.