Support the Troops!

Spring is around the corner and that means it's Girl Scout cookie time! For the next few magical weeks I'll gorge myself on Samoas, Thin Mints and several others. I don't know any Girl Scouts personally so I don't preorder the cookies. I rely on sleuthing around to find some troop selling them in front of a store. Publix on the weekend is usually a good bet. In an emergency I cheat and go the local Girl Scout HQ on 8th ave and load up.

I'm glad that you can't just walk into Wal-Mart and buy them off the shelf. The challenge of finding them and their seasonal availability is a big part of what gets me pumped about the experience. It doesn't hurt that they are crack in cookie form. Samoas are my favorite. So rich with the carmel, toasted coconut and chocolate stripes. Next is the miracle that are Thin Mints.

The cookie money goes to fund girl scout activities obviously. I've always wondered how the Boy Scouts function without a similarly successful fund raiser. After some research I discovered that Boy Scouts sell popcorn. Popcorn? Are you kidding me? Now I realize that parents will buy whatever kids are forced to sell, but why hamstring these kids with a terrible product? The fact that I didn't even know they sold popcorn in the first place speaks volumes about the success of this program. When I was a cub scout I made my money in a much more sensible fashion. I went to a store that carried scout accessories, bought a bunch of merit badges and sold them to the rest of the troop so they wouldn't have to complete a bunch of tiresome activities like tying knots. Of course that resulted in me being expelled from the Cub Scouts and today I wouldn't last 5 minutes alone in the wilderness, but that's a story for another time.

The point is these Girl Scouts know what they're doing. They might not be able to give you back correct change without their parents help but it doesn't matter because they still have the game on lock. They're only like 8 years old but they see that crazed, strung out look in my eyes and realize that I'm a cookie fiend and they're my pusher.

Edy's makes awesome Girl Scout cookie flavored tie-in ice creams. I combine the Samoa and Thin Mint flavored ice cream in a bowl. Then I break up a handful Trefoils (the short bread GS cookies) and mix them in as well.

In my lifelong quest to concoct the ultimate cereal I crumbled several flavors of GS cookies and in a bowl and added milk. It was hardly a disaster, but the cookie bits either absorbed zero milk or become ultra soggy to the point of disintegration. So back to the drawing board on that.

Ok, so it's a couple weeks later since a started this blog entry. The GS cookie sales are winding down. I've eaten roughly 14 boxes. Someone from the headquarters is supposed to hook me up with any troops that have left over cookies. After that it will be over for another year. I know what your saying, just get Keebler Grasshopper Mint cookies or print off the Samoa recipe online. First off Grasshoppers are ok but they aren't in Thin Mints league. Secondly, bake my own Samoa cookies? We both know that's a recipe for disaster.

Until next time!

I Like My Sugar With Coffee and Cream

I always thought I hated coffee. I used to choke some down while studying at Cafe Expresso trying to be cool a million years ago, but I wasn't fooling anybody. The truth was I hadn't experienced coffee in my preferred environment of rich sugarfied frozen grandness, the Frappe.

A few years ago I was working crazy hours out of town. Fourteen hours a day some days, I worked for over a year without a day off. Like The Boss, I had debts no honest man could pay. Anyway, in an attempt to pull it off I began frequenting these roadside drive through coffee barns with ridiculous names like Deja Brew. Names that made you want to walk in and slap the proprietor. There is this one place in Lake City called Elliano's owned by some religious group called the End Timers or the Time Shifters or something. Crazy as loons, but they made a mean Frappe. I like my Frappes like I like my women, full-bodied, earthy and complex, with a hint of insouciance.

That brings us to Coffee Culture on 13th st. The problem with their Frappe is that when I'm down to the last 1/3 the cup is mostly ice. A key to a winning coffee milkshake is an even ice to liquid ratio throughout the drinking experience. Coffee Culture's offering also contains a deceptively high amount of caffeine. Forty-five minutes later I'm hopping around like a ferret of amphetamines. This stuff actually gives me chest pains on a semi-regular basis. At work I have to be careful not to fly off the handle. They need to make a comedown Valium Frappe with a cough syrup chaser.

Next up in my comparative frozen coffee study was my old friend Dunkin Doughnuts. Let me lay down a couple of ground rules. All of my orders at various coffee shops must contain whipped cream and be mocha flavored. I may chose additional flavorings or stuff blended in. Anyway, back to Dunkin. They actually call their product a Coolata. It has a deeply synthetic taste. It is also the least creamy, most watery offering I've come across. Definitely not my first choice but ok in a pinch, especially if I'm in a life expectancy shortening mood and top off the order with a few Triple Chocolate Doughnuts.

Next door on Archer road is Starbucks. While their Frappucino is reasonably good I always marvel that they seem to employ three times as many people to serve coffee as Walgreens allows me to handle people's prescription needs. You've probably had a different experience, but I'm impressed with the staff's relentless cheerfulness at 7AM and their adherence to the workflow and script corporate Starbuck's has them maintain. As an experiment I'd like to hire these young people to work in my pharmacy for a month and see if it changed them. Maybe they could bring along their coffee machine and offer people Adderall expresso lattes.



So let's go back to examine what I think makes a Frappe great. First, I keep saying Frappe which I believe is technically incorrect from a European perspective. Basically they are coffee milkshakes. A lot of places in the U.S. call them Frappes. At Starbucks they are Frappucinos. At Dunkin they are Coolattas. Dairy Queen has a MooLatte. Everyone feels the need to put their little twist on the name.

Anyway a key ingredient is actually the size of ice. It must be very small, very hard particles of ice. If the ice is too slushy or too big you are left with major ice issues at the end of the drink. Do you really want to start your day at 8AM with major ice issues? Of course not. Ice that is the right size travels through the straw in a steady manner, and the drinker experiences a consistent texture throughout. Again, do you want to be left at the end sadly holding what amounts to a cup of ice yearning for more?

As mentioned, the Frappe must have whipped cream. This is not optional. It is also preferable that chocolate syrup is drizzled on top. Drizzle is a great word. Aside from being in the punch line to a Snoop Dogg joke it suggests a lazy opulence that is often missing from junk food in the fast food milieu.

Some places have variations in the main flavor. This is a coffee milkshake, stick with a mocha base. Sure you can get pumpkin truffle flambe, just realize you have taken an off ramp from coffee milkshake land.

Finally the Frappe is sweet, sure. Maybe even sickly sweet to some. But peel away that veneer and there is a seductive underbelly of darker and more tantalizing flavors. This is where you request additional flavoring to be added. It takes a special kind of alchemy to pull off the delicate balance. Starbucks seemed to have just the ticket for a while with the raspberry flavoring but I haven't been feeling it the last couple of times.



So I woke up early one morning and biked over to McDonalds before work to experience their McCafe Mocha. I was pretty hyped about this. There's been a buzz on the street about McDonald's coffee. It's consistency was more syrupy than most. It appears to be an intriguing amalgam of chemicals. There was no residual ice, but no tiny ice bits either. I got a weird sick to my stomach light headed jolt from it. Of course this was my fourth day in a row of having a Frappe for breakfast so maybe my mind was in the early stages of a caffeine, sugar and synthetic chemicals breakdown.

The next afternoon was my day off. I happened to be at Books a Million and on an impulse I walked over to their Joe Muggs coffee counter and bought a Candy Blast Frappe with Oreo. I must admit it had an impressive name. The server asked if I wanted extra chocolate. My motto in this scenario is if anyone asks if I want extra anything my answer is invariably hell yes. Anyway, it was better than I expected. Not very mocha-like even with the coffee base, but it had a nice pick me up. Good consistency. Not too watery, not too syrupy. Even tiny bits of ice.


My final tasting was the following morning at the Ben and Jerry's Caffeine Bar on Archer Rd. Ben and Jerry always struck me as being more stoned than hyped up on stimulants, but this place was mucho fun. They had board games, pajama parties, straight up ice cream and deserts. They cater to students who probably go there while partying on weekends to see if they can get their blood sugar level higher than their blood alcohol level. When I walked in to Ben and Jerry's I was hit with a rich sugar smell that can only be likened to that of Krispy Kreme or maybe the Publix Bakery when they're pumping out the good stuff. So I am saddened to report it's Mochachillo was rather pedestrian. It seemed like it was going to be awesome, mixing chocolate ice cream with coffee. The added cherry flavoring was lost in the mix. After a week of Frappes, it really had to distinguish itself. It wilted under the pressure, but I'm going back to B&J's. The place has tons of potential. Next time I'll try the Buzzachillo which is coffee ice cream with coffee, maybe hazel nut flavoring for kicks. They also have the Mt Everest of sundaes called the Vermonster, a 20 scoop behemoth that looks like it would scare straight even the most hardened junk food devotee.

Later at work that day I completely crashed. I was reduced to wandering around in a zombie like stupor. I slept about 14 hours that night.

So I'll probably have to scale back a bit because I am trying to eat healthier. I honestly don't know why because a few weeks ago I tried to cut way down on my junk food and my body thanked me by getting really sick for the first time well over a year. Virginia and I are going to start a garden. No, I will not be growing all sugar cane. Maybe I'll grow corn and start marketing a product called "Even Higher Fructose Corn Syrup." Hmm, that actually does sound awesome.

Steady Diet of Nothing

About five years ago I was pulling into the Krispy Kreme parking lot. Some old ladies in a Cadillac opened their car doors just as I was gliding into the adjacent space. Insanely, the car door scrapped over the top of my hood, lifting part of their car off the ground. Of course they were upset and called the cops. It turns out they had just gone to church and were driving up from Ocala to Gainesville just for Krispy Kreme. In between the screaming, hand waving and neck rolling it was apparent that these people took their doughnuts very seriously and maybe I should too.

As much as I'd like to embark on a "Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" quest for the perfect doughnut, the truth is my favorite doughnut is whatever one I happen to be eating at the moment.

While I'm eating a Krispy Kreme glazed hot out of the oven it's a near religious experience. So airy and hot, the sugarfied goo practically dissolves in my mouth. I read somewhere that the fat that Krispy uses has a lower melting point than normal doughnuts. I'd wager that this makes them a virtual health food in the doughnut world since they won't solidify into artery clogging plaque. Be sure to remind me of that during my heart attack.

I love the "Hot Doughnuts Now" sign that lights up periodically at KK.

That would make a great protest chant:

-"What do we want?"
-"Hot doughnuts!"
-"When do we want 'em?"
-"Now!!"

There is a Dunkin' Donuts by my work. On mornings that I have a premonition that the day is going to be particularly terrible I bike over to get some. Dunkin' is pretty much the polar opposite of Krispy Kreme. Dunkin' has lots of frilly distractions like egg croissants, muffins and bags of ground coffee.

KK mainly just sells doughnuts and coffee. They have an advertisement for something called a fruit chiller but the promotional effort is so half-hearted that I doubt it really even exists.

Anyway, Dunkin' has a thicker, relatively less sweet 'donut'. Their slogan is "America Runs On Dunkin'. While this has a sad honesty to it, it is somewhat disingenuous in the literal sense. The 8 car deep drive thru illustrates that most of their customers are committed to moving as little as possible.

The other day I rolled into Dunkin' to get their flagship doughnut, the Triple Chocolate. A masterpiece. A problem with some of DD's chocolate topped doughnuts is that the chocolate does not adhere well to the dough. It comes off in a gooey mess, rendering your hands looking like what can only be described as "shit fingers". This can lead to awkwardness at work. Anyway the genius of the Triple Chocolate is that the chocolate topping is imprisoned in a delicious chocolate chip cage-like exterior.

So I'm getting my doughnut. Right behind me enter these firefighter jerk offs that I've seen there before. They are singing along mockingly to the muzak ("Use Somebody"-Kings of Leon"). Usually I'm a friend of the muzak inclined, but there was this quasi scumbag undercurrent going on. Sure enough, I went outside and they had disengaged one of the brakes on my bike. I could have skidded out into Archer Rd and been run over. Ha, Ha hilarious. I'm sure if I had ever regained control of my limbs it would have been a real thigh slapper.

But my point is this would never happen at Krispy Kreme. Sure people hang out in the parking lot late at night and solicit sex and sell drugs but that's immaterial. There is an overriding brother and sisterhood of the doughnut that precludes any douchebaggery. Which brings me to KK's Chocolate topped Kreme filled doughnut. This has a white filling that is so astronomically sweet and rich that the cashier should give you a complimentary insulin injection.

Recovering from the Kreme filled doughnut

This morning I went to the Northwood Bakery on north 34th St for the first time. The doughnuts were right on. It's the kind of place where you can walk in after a few times and just say you want your usual. Building up a "the usual" rapport with a local eatery is a key part of my dining pleasure.

One last thing, when I was about 20 my mom made a Olde English style Christmas dinner . It was not the regular turkey and stuffing type stuff and I couldn't really eat much of it. Now I had been starving myself all day in anticipation so now I was crazy hungry. I didn't want to admit to my mom that I didn't like the dinner because she went to a lot of trouble and I didn't want to hurt her feelings. So I snuck out and got in my car and drove around looking for food. The only place open was this doughnut shop on 39th Ave. I ate a dozen doughnuts in about 8 minutes. It was incredible. There was powdered sugar all over my face. Jelly goo on my lips. I washed the whole thing down with a giant glass of cold milk. Later when I got home my mom and uncle were upset because among other things I was driving around with a suspended license. It was worth it though, those doughnuts were pretty much the best I ever tasted.

Three Cereals and the Truth

It started out simply enough. I was at Publix and I decided on a whim to buy every chocolate sweetened cereal available. Cereal is kind of like churches, banks and heavy metal magazines from the 80's. There seems to be way more of them than necessary and the variety of what they have to offer is inherently limited.

I picked up Cocoa Puffs, Cocoa Pebbles, Chocolate Lucky Charms, etc until my basket was overflowing. I had to order Count Chocula online along with Frankenberry and Boo Berry as part of a monster cereal 3 pack special. The thing with Count Chocula is it is extremely similar to Chocolate Lucky Charms. It's kind of like having a devil whispering in one ear and an angel in the other- except they are both telling you to eat sugar saturated cereal. The Count Chocula I got in the mail had a weird after taste, but it was kind of like a bad smell that you don't notice after a couple of minutes. Don't get me started on the existential dilemma of a food mascot who can't enjoy his own cereal for breakfast because he's asleep in his coffin.

Cheerios has all these remixes of its basic product including a chocolate version. Sad to say it is kind of boring. It's like they couldn't commit to complete tooth rotting sugar crazed mayhem so the taste is leashed to the basic bland Cheerio template. Which could make it useful as a gateway cereal to the stronger stuff. You can't just go from eating Total to Cookie Crisp in one day. You'll lose your mind and probably wake up at a bus station dressed in a chicken suit.

That brings me to the indie cereal I found in the health food section called Chocolate Delight by the preposterously named company Back to Nature. But I'll be a monkey's uncle if it actually wasn't pretty good, even without milk. Just some crunchy, sweetened granola with chocolate chunks thrown in. One important criteria for judging cereal is can you eat it without milk. A lot of the air puffed cereals don't go down so well sans milk. Cookie Crisp in particular is a disaster. You think hey little cookies, no problem right? Dead wrong, it's a taste nightmare and your tongue will never forgive you.

You know how they market cereals to tie in with the release of a blockbuster movie, like Spiderman? I started wondering if it would be cool to do the same thing with bands and albums but I couldn't think of any good examples. Maybe a Lil Wayne cereal called "Weezies" that had milk activated cough syrup could have been big a few years ago.

Regular Cocoa puffs in milk are kind of weak, but I ate a Cocoa Puffs cereal bar for dinner the other night that was great. The cereal bar had a much better sugar to density ratio. Factor in the marshmellowy milk like center and it's like throwing yourself a ticker tape parade. Cereal bars are cool but they tend to give me a steady barrage of low level gas. Given that I eat them at work I'm pretty much walking a tight rope my whole shift.