Some Ice Cream Place

Somewhere between Ithaca NY and Geneva NY is this ice cream store that sells wine ice cream. As I am not of age, I didn't try any. However, they also have lots of other ice cream. I bought a "small" mint chip ice cream whose scoop ended up being larger than my fist. It was also only $2.60. I'm not sure whether they make all these normal ice cream flavors on-site though, because I saw a Hershey Ice Cream sign, and the mint ice cream tasted pretty normal.

The lady at the resgister seemed a bit irked and impatient but that might've been because there were 13 of us causing a ruckus and/or paying with card (which required signature).

I am unable to recall the name of the place and I can't find it on Yelp or Google Maps. It was somewhere between Geneva and Ithaca and I think it was a sky-blue cottage off the "highway".

Mint Premium Foods - Tarrytown NY

Sometimes, I feel that in my entire life, I've been eating well. This day was not one of those times. The Culinary Institute of America and Mint had, in a mere 8 hours, made me think that I've just been a plebeian in the world of cuisine, or even just American restaurant culture. Maybe I get delighted too easily by simple food eaten while sitting on the stairs, and maybe I just don't go to enough swanky places where there is live jazz music playing and a guy sauntering around offering at least 20 types of cheese on a giant platter. So I think, "Hmh, maybe I'm not actually cultured."

But then I remember that I can cook and if I tried, I could remake whatever I'm eating here, minus the classy atmopshere.

Giant cutlery and rooster sculptures are themes of this trip. Assorted rooster sculptures were displayed at Bocuse, while Pepsi - wait, I signed a confidentiality agreement with them, so I guess I can't say. :(

The green chunk is pesto cheese. Now I must buy pesto cheese! It was perfect. While we waited for our food to arrive (our group had personalized menus!), we snacked on bread, cheese, and square-rimmed bowls of olives. I tried an olive and immediately rekindled my dislike for them (it was way too salty).

I got the chipotle chicken and avocado wrap with salad and fries. I had no appetite, but I ate everything anyway because I don't like wasting food (especially good food that took a lot of energy and time to produce). The wrap was not spicy at all, though there was this orange sauce. The chicken was in some sort of casing, making it sort of like sliced chicken sausage, except that the chicken was not mushy or a slurry; it had actual chicken texture (although it was a bit more elastic than usual). There was a lot of stuff in the whole wheat wrap too, which kept falling out. The salad with vinaigrette(?) was a bit too salty. The fries smelled like fries I had when I was a kid, and they were tasty (but aren't all fries?).

Our table was made out of a slab of wood that had been sliced vertically from a tree and varnished. Hence, the table was not actually rectangular. I thought it was neat.

Artisserie Chocolate Cafe Chocolate Mint Truffle Tea

Tea? Yep.
Mint? Yep.
Chocolate? No. Not at all.

:( Kind of a disappointment.

Jammin' Through the Sieve.

See what I did there?

I put jam through a sieve today.

(terrible pun.)

Because our berry plants don't have any berries this year (perhaps due to the fact that we neglect them), I couldn't complete my yearly berry-jam-making ritual. Okay, not ritual, but tradition. It's only been a two-year tradition, though. Since there are no berries, I decided to make grape jam. Actually, to be more specific and gourmet-sounding, I made organic garden-fresh-but-from-the-wild-part-of-the-garden spherical green grape jam with a hint of mint and lime.

The problem with grape jam is that it looks a bit like pickle juice and I lack the machinery to separate the seeds from the jam/pulp. Therefore, I now have four jars of chunky, perfect textured jam-with-seeds and one jar of thin sifted-jam-without-seeds.

I also realised that I ought to measure everything using metric units because it just makes so much more sense. I did grow up with metric, but I only started cooking a lot when I moved to the U.S., so cooking measurements for me have been the whole cups-tbps-tsp thing instead of grams. Grams are better though, especially since I do have a food scale.

Ingredients for about 1.5 L of jam (5 jars)

12 cups/1560 g green grapes that are spherical and extremely sour (from the grape plant outside)

3 cups/540 g granulated sugar (or more. This one was on the sour side because I like sour jam)

7 mint candies

A few shakes of mint flakes

A spoonful of maltose (just because my mum happened to have some from cooking something; completely optional)

Some lime zest (pectin, optional)

Ingredients for a 300 ml jar of jam

310 g green grapes

110 g granulated sugar, or more, to taste

2 mint candies

Some mint flakes

Some lime zest

Method

1. The night before, stick everything in a pot. I didn't do this, but the osmosis should help reduce cooking time the next day.

2. Turn heat on high and stir. Don't be afraid of scorching any grapes.

3. 20 minutes later, there should be liquid at the bottom of the pot and the grapes should still be sort of hard, but some will be mushy. Keep stirring and wait for the water to boil. The grapes will turn from bright green to... olive-coloured.

4. Turn heat onto medium-low and let it simmer for about 2 hours, stirring every 10 minutes or so. All the grapes should be mushy now! The jam will look ugly. You can check the gooeyness of the jam by dropping some jam onto a plate, letting it cool, and seeing if it is the consistency you want. You can also adjust the sweetness at any point in the 2 hours.

5. If you really want to, sift jam into jar. I tried to do this for the first jar, but it didn't work because I don't have a sieve that everything except the seeds flow through. I also wanted the grape skins (basically, everything except for the seeds). I suppose this is the negative side of making grape jam with non-GMO grapes.

6. Wait for jar of jam to cool, then stick it in the fridge. I know you're supposed to do stuff with the jars with the water bath in order to sterilise the jars, but since we're sticking the jam in a fridge and consuming the jams (yeah... all 5 jars...) within a few months, I don't think that this is necessary. In addition, there is a lot of acid in this specific batch of jam. The grapes were really sour.

So now I know why you don't see green grape jam at the grocery store. It doesn't look that appetising. Seriously, though, this jam is way better than the store-bought flavourless and textureless jam!!

Dolmades

We have a grape plant in the backyard near the garage, and there are a lot of leaves on it during the summer, obviously. I happened to be browsing recipes online (yet again), and I came across the idea of dolmades - stuffed grape leaves. Food trucks around Philadelphia seem to serve these a lot, too. I figured I should make some dolma/dolmades because I have free grape leaves!!! None of those preserved leaves in a jar! These are fresh, smell grapey, and taste a bit sour/fibrous/grapey. I wonder why I never thought about making these before, or making zong[4]zi[3] (粽子) with grape leaves...

Since there are many variations of dolma (the Egyptian one interests me more just because I like Egypt, I guess), and I don't have any relatives who make dolmades from some family heirloom recipe, I know this isn't "authentic". Plus, I've never eaten stuffed grape leaves before, so I don't really know what I'm supposed to be comparing my version to. According to Wikipedia, possible ingredients include rice, pine nuts, cow, eggplant, raisins, and parsley/dill/mint. I sort of just used what we had at home. I also wasn't sure what online recipe would be good, but I ended up loosely following this one. By "loosely", I mean the way the rice stay in the grape leaves - quite loosely. Hah.

Ingredients for about... 38 dolmades (There are fewer than 38 pictured above because the rice either leaked out of the grape leaves for the bottom-of-the-stack dolmades)

Most ingredients are optional. Add what you want.

A. Flavouring

4 sprigs of fresh dill

A few leaves of fresh basil

Parsley flakes

Mint flakes

Liberal amount of coriander powder

Pinches of salt and pepper

75% of a lemon's juice

B. ~4 cups of Stuffing

2.5 cups white rice

0.5 cups Arborio rice (actually, whatever rice you want; 3 cups rice total)

0.75 cups pine nuts (boiled pine nuts are delicious!!!!)

A few tbsp chopped dried fruit

30% of a medium-sized onion

1.25 cups of ground turkey (for the rest of the family.)

1 cup of artichokes in oil

C. Misc

40+ grape leaves, and some to line the saucepan

25% of a lemon (possibly unnecessary)

0.25 cups of oil (possibly unnecessary)

A lot of water

Method

1. Mix all ingredients except turkey in Group A and B together in a big bowl. If you like turkey, you can put it in now, but if you're cooking for a vegetarian (a.k.a. me), you should add the turkey after using half the stuffing.

2. Put one tablespoon of stuffing onto a grape leaf.

3. Roll

4. Put into saucepan along circumference.

5. Stick in 25% of the lemon (possibly unnecessary) and however much oil you want, and also pour in a lot of water until all dolmades are covered.

6. Put a ceramic plate on top of the dolmades to weigh them down, cover pan, and boil water on high heat.

7. Simmer on LOW for about an hour.

Whoo!!!

Note: Unfortunately, the bottom layer of dolmades ended up quite overcooked, while the top two/three layers ended up perfectly chewy and gooey. To avoid having the grape leaves break and the rice and pine nuts floating around (well, the rice sinks, but the pine nuts float in the water/oil mixture since they're less dense due to the high fat content), I will use a smaller saucepan next time and just make two batches of two-layers instead of one batch of four-layers. This will:

1. Use less than half the amount of oil/water I used today

2. Require less heat energy because I will be reusing the water/oil, which would already be about 97 degrees C instead of 25 degrees C

3. Cook all the dolmades evenly.

4. Possibly require less than 1 hr of simmering.

Yummy!!

Sweet Tooth

For being in a really busy and popular neighbourhood, Sweet Tooth was remarkably empty. *sarcasm: Was it because it was a Saturday? At 1pm?* Isn't that the time when EVERYONE is swarming around stores? I passed by Jim's cheesesteaks, and the line literally went around the corner of the block.

So, why was Sweet Tooth empty?

I mean, look at all this candy, waiting to be bought!

However, the pricing threw me off a little. $2.54 (I think) for 0.25lb. That's about $10 for a pound of candy, compared to $4.99 at Sweet As Fudge Candy Shoppe, and I don't even want to compare the price of candy to the price of vegetables (much lower).

The bright side is that everything in the plastic containers is $2.54. This is great if you want to

1. Sample candy.

2. Buy candy that is priced at a higher value than $10/lb. For example, Jelly Belly beans definitely cost less than $10/lb, but mint malt balls may cost more.

Just this much candy amounted to about $3 (or more? I don't remember).

1. Orange cream coconut slice: very hard, a tad creamy and tangy, very sweet. Pretty good.

2. Neapolitan coconut slice: there was no difference in each flavour, which upset me :( because I expected a chocolate coconut part, a vanilla part, and a strawberry part. It tasted uniform, and was the same as the orange cream coconut slice, except not creamy. Not great.

3. Mango chili Jelly Belly bean: surprisingly spicy! Not much mango flavour, although a bit citrusy. Meh.

4. Weird bunny and carrot (pink and green): These tasted really really off. They had the texture of candy corn, but had the flavour of burnt or curdled caramel (?) or marshmallow. It was not delectable at all (in my opinion)!!

5. Mini pastel mints with the white 100s and 1000s ("100s and 1000s" is the name I've known: These aren't merely "sprinkles".)... they... were waxy and minty. Creamy and minty. I'm not really sure I'm acclimated to the taste.

6. Sour candy bacon: Okay, these aren't the real name for the sour candy strip, but I loved it. That is all.

Since I had to eat all my chocolate before it melted in the sun, I only bought two malt balls and some "moose" chocolate clusters, which tasted like a much more unrefined version of Nestle's Crunch candy. The malt balls were merely okay; the mint and latte flavours were not pronounced at all. I still miss Maltesers very much.

You can see the half-melted moose chocolate clusters in the bottom left corner of the above image.

I also got some Jordan Almonds because they were 1/2 off. Jordan Almonds are just almonds that are covered in a hard (yes, hard) candy shell that tastes like 100% sugar... no flavourings. It's super crunchy, and I guess I'm indifferent to them.

Since I've sampled all I want, I don't think I'm going back here. The price is a deterrence, it's kinda far, and although the selection is phenomenal, I don't really see why I would come here to buy my favourite candies that are available at any grocery store.

Sweet Tooth, 630 S 4th St.

Penn "Chocolate" Festival

"Next semester, I will be more involved in social groups at school."

That's what I said last semester when I realised that I was pretty much in two clubs.

Then I realised that if I joined another two, I'd have no time to do my homework, study, go to the lab, run, and eat food.

This is in addition to the fact that I'm already managing my time better than I was last semester.

So, I didn't join any extra clubs, but I do get emails from the Penn Gastronomy Club (which I should officially join, actually). Recently, I got an email about the Penn Chocolate Festival, and there were going to be "some of the city's best chocolatiers" and free samples present!

At the Hall of Flags in Houston Hall, the Penn Chocolate Festival took flight. Breezy. Short. Among the tumbleweed. It was too timid to be anything like other food events (e.g. Campus "Free" For All), which was good because it meant that each member of the audience had extremely personalised attention from the vendors, which included just two chocolatiers (Really).

Despite obtaining a lot of information from the vendors, I didn't get many samples, which was a bit of a let-down considering the blatant advertising in the email. Then again, the email claimed that there were going to be many chocolate vendors, which wasn't the case.

The sweet, thick and creamy tea (which didn't taste much like tea) with mini tapioca balls in the above image came from Boba Brothers. I loved the fact that the tapioca balls are tiny! (~2mm in diameter; it makes them drinkable via a standard straw, and it is quite a twist). Actually, I wonder how bubble tea would be like with various sized tapioca balls in the tea...

Although the liquid was super sweet, clean/not artificially-flavoured-ish, there was no "chocolate" in it at all.

My second stop was John&Kira's chocolate. The fact that they use local ingredients and have beautiful packaging and are a home business (I talked to Kira) means that their prices are jacked up, of course. For $6.50, I can get Chipotle, instead of a bar of chocolate. However, John&Kira's also have everything that Chipotle, and Godiva, and Lindt don't have; they own the company, they can allow me to make my own flavour, and they use ingredients from around here. The mint in the mint chocolate came from University City's Urban Garden! I have no idea where that is, but it's within a 3 mile radius, probably. According to the brochure, the honey comes from Millerton PA, while the berries come from Meadow Gap PA. I'm not sure why they're advertising that the coffee whiskey comes from Mexico or that the bergamot comes from Sri-Lanka, because those aren't "local", but perhaps the overall message is that these ingredients come from known sources, and we're supposed associate that with fair labour or something.

My first impression was that the ladybugs and the bees were super shiny. They were as shiny as marbles, although more pearlescent. Apparently, there is a really high cocoa butter content in them, since the're some sort of caramel (bees) or ganache (ladybug).

Kira gave me a pretty big sample of dark mint chocolate to taste. The mint was definitely true mint; it isn't the sweet stuff that I'm accustomed to in commercial mint ice cream or mint chocolate; it was legitimate mint-right-off-the-plant. Although I do like the peppermint/conventional mint better, this one was light and delicious too. The chocolate part was... normal, I would say.

I then went to the table promoting Sazon restaurant. The guy who was at the table was a real businessman; he talked non-stop about how his chocolate was real, untempered, pure, made straight from crushed beans from Venezuela (the "original/pure/clean/unadulterated" location of cacao, apparently). He explaining his experimentation with making truffles in his kitchen, and he talked about testing all his truffles on his friends. At one point, he gave someone in the audience a whole truffle. He didn't give any truffles to me though, even though I talked to him for a good 10 minutes about his truffles and cocoa. He walked me through the truffles; coconut ones, jalapeno ones, rum infused ones, berry-filled - "I don't care about rule of 3 flavours - you know, of chocolate, and two others. I just dump them all in together and you can taste them all!", he proclaimed. He pointed out that the ones in the middle compartment were vegan, and the coconut covered ones on the right were raw and made with a ton of coconut butter. "Nothing goes above 105 degrees. I just use a blender and a thermometer; my raw vegan friend is really anal about this," he boasts. Then, he listed the ingredients in these vegan truffles, and I kinda blanked out until him mentioned the word honey.

Honey. From bees.

I'm not vegan, but vegans do not eat honey.

Naturally, I responded, "Hey wait! Vegans don't eat honey!"

The guy (I'm sorry I do not know his name but on the website, he's the Chocolate Alchemist) looked at me in this really exasperated way (and perhaps with a hint of scorn - he's not a vegetarian or vegan), and said "Well, it's just some honey; we don't know if agave is a good idea because it might have corn syrup or other things added, and honey is pure. And, our honey is local. Besides, you know that there are different definitions of vegan and a lot of vegans eat honey."

He didn't say those exact words, but that was his position on the issue. Call me biased, amnesiatic, or downright silly, but if there is honey in those truffles, those truffles are NOT vegan. His (sorta pompous) attitude, coupled with the fact that he selectively gave out truffles for sampling, meant that I didn't have a good impression of his business. I know he's allowed to boast about his truffles and his super-awesome hot chocolate since they do taste delicious (the hot chocolates did, at least), but I felt like he was stepping the line by sticking honey in a "vegan" treat.

So, the hot chocolates were amazing. I tried the Clasico and the Cuaimia. The Clasico was thick hot chocolate that had no watery taste at all; it was literally like drinking flavourful, textured, melted chocolate. The Cuaimia had a hint of chili (although not too much; I think I would prefer more) and was less chocolatey. Neither had sugar, yet they were so flavourful that sugar wasn't needed to counteract the bitter taste of the ground cocoa (not that it tasted that bitter, in comparison to cocoa powder).

Another local vendor was the Kitchen at Penn. They gave out banana pudding, brownie, and and a plastic cup. No spoon. The food tasted ordinary, but I suppose that's the point, because the Kitchen at Penn is supposed to emulate homemade food for college students missing home.

Although the next few pictures depict vacuous, gilded and bland cupcakes, I'm still posting them because they are indeed prettily decorated. Buttercream Cupcakes (a cupcake truck, not to be confused with Call Me Cupcake, another cupcake truck) offers sundry cupcakes, including the best-seller, red velvet.

I tried 1/4 of a chocolate cupcake with peanut butter icing and purple sugar. The peanut butter icing tasted legitimately like peanut butter smothered in cream and sugar. The cake was kinda dry actually.

So wait a minute, two legit chocolatiers out of 5, at a "chocolate" festival?

Kiwi Froyo

Kiwi.

Previously called "Sprinkles". The most popular flavours in Philly include vanilla, chocolate, original tart, and cookies and cream. Seasonal flavors turn up every few months.

Owned by Ryan and Matt Mealy, Kiwi is a frozen yoghurt (okay, for this post I will spell it "yogurt") store located on 36th and Chestnut, and I signed up for a Preceptorial lead by them. A preceptorial is basically a 2+ hour class that isn't going to be graded, and I suppose Penn gives them out because it's a way for students to learn things that aren't part of their majors/requirements. For instance, I signed up for a Thought Experiments Preceptorial, which is... well, philosophy, right? There was also one called Wine Tasting, and I got accepted into it but I'm not 21 yet so I can't actually go, legally.

I thought that this Kiwi Preceptorial would be interesting because it would open my eyes up more to the commercial/production aspect of food companies. I also hoped that there'd be a tour of the actual store, including what ingredients are used and how flavours are created. This wasn't the case though; the Preceptorial focused mainly on business. Ryan and Matt are businesspeople. They love food, sure, and they love frozen yogurt, but they are fully focused on the -open-more-stores- & -promote-Kiwi- & -sell-more-. They grew up in a family-business household, they have business degrees, and they decided to open up a frozen yogurt store because frozen yogurt was a business-grabber, with it being touted as "healthy" and all. If, for some reason, the frozen yogurt business dies down (although I highly doubt it, with more and more people believing that frozen yogurt is healthier than ice cream), they claimed that they are ready to pursue a different fad, including non-food ventures.

See, if I was going to open a bakery/patisserie, it'd be because I like food and I love baking and I want to cut out the stigma that pepper, vinegar, and chili "are too weird to put into sweet cookies/cake". So, this Preceptorial showed me why businesses expand and why Aramack and Campbell (and all the other places I applied to for internships) want Management and Marketing degrees. Thanks. Biology (and Chemistry, even though I really don't want to admit that) gets thrown out of the window. Actually, I take that back. I did ask Ryan whether they created their own froyo from scratch, and she said that they currently didn't. "However," she said with a grin, "my husband, who is a scientist, will be working on it at some point, although he doesn't know it yet."

Which goes to show that I should marry a Whartonite. Haha. I think that I prefer Engineers.

The Kiwi story, as I said, starts off from a family business; Ryan and Matt had a bunch of experience helping out in the family furniture company. They claim that each company needs to offer something "new", and to stay within that niche, in order to get recognition. The "new" thing for their furniture company had been that they offered same-day delivery, and the "new" thing for Kiwi is that the frozen yogurt is self-serve. I had never gone to Kiwi before, so, yes, I agree that this is indeed new. Unlike Flurt or any ice cream stores, Kiwi gives you a container and 14 flavours from 14(?) machines to choose from (16 in other Kiwi stores; only Philly has 14 flavours. I think that this is due to the fact that there is not enough wall space to stick in more machines here). For 49c / ounce, you can fill out however much of frozen yogurt you want; you just pull down the lever and let the frozen yogurt flow. Then, you can add toppings/fruit, and you weigh the bowl and its contents, and pay. I suppose this is great because it

1. Offers customers customizable sizes.

2. Offers customers every single flavour in one sitting.

3. Offers customers the ability to have 90% toppings and 10% froyo, if they really wanted to.

4. Means that employees don't have to be trained to make the perfectly pretty froyo. When I was at Carvel, I had to make sure that the ice cream on the cone looked pretty. If it looked wonky, customers would appear a bit upset, and I'd look unprofessional.

5. Means that only 1 container needs to be ordered. There's no such thing as a "small", a "medium", a "large", an "extra large", or a "kiddie cup".

6. Is "new".

Initially, Ryan and Matt were going to Franchise, but they decided that they should just open their own store, and they were going to call it "Wondercream", which has various connotations, one of them being inappropriate and another of them meaning "fat" (if you think about the word "cream", you will instantly think of "fat". Yes, you will, because the Media said so). Technically, they're still registered under the name Wondercream, although the name Kiwi is "fresher" seems to make customers like it more.

Back to the story. Ryan and Matt opened a store in June 2009 in Cherry Hill, NJ, and it was a really tough time up to that point because literally no realtors wanted to rent to a new company. Apparently, that's how it is in the business world; you're of zero value until you stick a dent in your market. (This is where I think the story got confusing, because Ryan said that they had started searching for location, equipment, interior design etc. in "December 2008" and that "after 16-17 months, we finally opened", which would imply that they started in December 2007. Nevertheless, the point is that they took a while to plan everything.) They ended up signing four leases before even opening the first store, and because nearly no-one turned up on their opening day, they had this huge "Grand Opening" and gave out unlimited free ice cream to everyone at their Cherry Hill Mall place. Both these events demonstrate how confident they are; apparently, they gave away 15000 oz of frozen yogurt to ~2000 people. Matt laughed about how it was a huge business risk, but that summer, they averaged 700-800 people per day.

This was a different story in Philly though; when Kiwi opened here in September 2009, the unlimited free froyo idea made people line up and just TAKE AND TAKE and be CRAZY! It's pretty interesting to see both Ryan and Matt laugh at all these events, which one could consider to be "failures" or "setbacks"; again, they're really confident people. They "want to dominate", they say.

So, here is the advertising component of Kiwi from Ryan and Matt. I'm typing it down because it's true, although I'm not sure how much more likely I am to buy froyo from them when I would rather buy bread since I like bread more:

1. Customers are greeted every. Single. Time. //I guess I'm indifferent to this part, unless I get discounts or something if I become a loyal member.

2. 30 toppings. //Thanks for the choices, but I'm not paying 49c for an ounce of marshmallows or an ounce of sprinkles. I'm paying 49c for an ounce of frozen yogurt.

3. Clean. //Whoot!

4. Fruit delivery 3 days a week! Fruit is also freshly cut!//See comment 2

5. Short shelf life of everything; no HFCS, no preservatives. //Whoot!

6. Good place to go for lunch. //But is there a nutrition label somewhere? See, I would pick a sandwich over this because I know that I will get enough protein and iron from eating whole wheat bread. For froyo, how much sugar did you add?

After the preceptorial, we all went to Kiwi to get some froyo. Everyone got 25% off, and I got $5 off because I was one of the lucky 25 people out of the 40 or so people who signed up at the right time. $5 gives ~10 oz of yogurt, and since I actually didn't bring any money with me (hey, with a prepaid meal plan, what else would I be using money for?), it was really useful having a few sets of scales sitting there so I could measure my yogurt content. I ended up with 8.7 oz of various flavours, but not all of them. The restaurant environment was pretty cheerful, but that may have been because of the swarm of people in there from the Preceptorial.

I tried original tart, peanut butter, green tea, chocolate, strawberry, mint, cheesecake, mango, and I want to say pomegranate but I'm not even sure that flavour exists. I just know there's another flavour buried underneath the ones in the pictures. The peanut butter flavour actually tasted like peanut butter, which is a change from "peanut butter flavoured" items such as Clif bars or cookies etc. The green tea flavour was light and poofy, as was the original tart flavour. Actually, all the flavours tasted very light (but NOT BLAND) and watery/icy. Another word I would use to describe Kiwi froyo is "fragile" because it melts mad fast.

Yes, I'll go again next semester, when I don't have a meal plan. I'll do a proper flavour review because I was too preoccupied talking to someone new (who I guess I will never see again, unfortunately) who I had met at the Preceptorial.

[THR]ICE CREEEEAAAAAM!

In an attempt to make its environment more swanky, 1920 Commons has decided to refurnish and update its locations of foods. The fruit bar has moved to where the nacho bar used to be. The nacho bar and soup have moved to where the fruit bar used to be. They're both displayed rather prettily, and they look less cluttered.

The bread section has switched with the dessert section; now, the dessert has a black-table backdrop rather than a white-table blackdrop, which I suppose more elegant too.

They've also stocked Original flavoured ["Original" has been a flavour for a long time] soymilk rather than Vanilla [read: sugar] flavoured soymilk.

The ice-cream bar now has to share space with the waffle maker [which used to be next to the soup, because it, of course, was completely logical to put a waffle maker next to the chowder...], but I think this makes college kids squeal with happiness. In addition, there is now caramel syrup, marmalade [labelled "pineapple"], strawberry jam, chocolate syrup, SHREDDED COCONUT, and walnuts in syrup stacked in sticky containers near the ice cream.

This change took me quite by surprise.

I ate at Hill today and there was no noticeable change there...so why did Commons decide to ka-boom and polish everything?

It did seem to make people happy, especially the ice cream area.

That was Tuesday night. Yesterday night and tonight at dinner, Commons had moved stuff around again; the dessert, nacho, fruit and soup had all switched places. Commons also has delicious pre-packaged breadsticks from NJ, even though they claim to be "Real Italian" or something...

I think they're trying to test out where the best placement is for... themselves [i.e. best places to put food without having a huge mess to clean up from us students dropping stuff]? For us [so that we walk more and use more Calories]? It's true that changes make people more interested and more likely to lurk longer/more frequently. That's why companies always make new flavours of stuff, and restaurants always have different "FEATURED!" or "SPECIAL!!" items.

At the beginning of my first semester here [what?! Second semester already!?!?], I figured, hey, if I eat ice cream using a cone, I will "save" a bowl and a spoon. That means that energy will be saved, because dishwashers won't have to use energy to clean the bowl and spoon, and chemically cleaned water won't have to be pumped and used and re-cleaned.

However, my logic was pretty bad because the cone itself took a TON OF WATER AND ENERGY to make, not to mention package and transport! Think about it.

The cone: grow flour and other ingredients on a field from a seed to plant. Pick plants, process them, cook/shape them.

The packaging [in a giant cardboard box, with plastic wrapping, perhaps]: grow trees, cut trees, process trees, shape card, fold/glue/staple card.

Transportation from factory to dining hall: more energy.

Now, if we used a ceramic bowl and metal spoon [not disposable!], the energy to create the spoon and ceramic bowl would be invested evidently [synthesising, packaging, transporting], but once it is in the dining hall, every use only uses, say, 1L of water and a bit of dish soap. It is much less than the energy used to synthesise a wafer cone.

However, a paper/plastic [and, please NO, styrofoam] disposable container would be the same as using a wafer cone, although I think that the wafer cone would be more energy efficient because the wafer cone is digested, leaving no trace of garbage.

The digested cone is excreted as heat, water, and in poop, perhaps, and consumed by bacteria and someone cycled back into the soil or water.

So, I suppose the way to conserve the most energy in this circumstance would be

1. Consume less of everything and stop wasting stuff!

2. Use a reusable bowl and spoon.

3. If there are no reusable utensils, use the wafer cone.

4. As the last resort, use disposable utensils [oh how I dislike them!]

Ice Cream and Pie.

Five years ago, when I saw no error or consequences in organic foods, my science teacher did the unthinkable. He created a science project in which one group would argue for ORGANIC food, and one group would argue for GM food. I was in the group for GM food, and I was utterly speechless. My narrow mind believed that there was NO SUCH THING as a negative side to organic farming. It was like telling me that I didn't exist. I'm not sure what I said in the debate [probably something with a lot of eye rolling], but I remember that one of my group members said "Well...GM food makes food taste good. Like, carrots actually taste like CARROTS".

This is something I thought of today when I got back from the Eco-Reps meeting. What defines the taste of food? I'm currently eating tempeh. I think a piece of tempeh tastes like tempeh [I'm still relatively new to eating it], but how would I describe it to TJ? TJ tried tempeh for the first time today, and I was trying to get her to eat it. I said that "it tastes kinda fishy... and nutty..." but tempeh does NOT taste fishy or nutty. Today, the tempeh in my sandwich tastes like cattle slices. But that may be because I associate mustard with cattle slices. I mean, the first time I tried tempeh, it tasted like fish, but that maybe have been due to the sauce [tomato? I don't think I've ever had tomato sauce with fish before, though...].

Last Friday I ate a lot of ice cream and pie. This only happens when I eat meals with people [which is why, perhaps, I should start being a hermit]. I'd never had egg nog ice cream before [actually, I've never had egg nog. I've had egg nog soymilk, though], so I asked what it tasted like. "It tastes like egg nog", TJ replied.

So, if egg nog ice cream tastes like egg nog, why is there such thing as egg nog ice cream? Egg nog is some gelatinous type custard, right? So is ice cream... except colder. So, I guess the question is also about texture, and not just about taste.

However, someone decided to come along and say that people don't enjoy food as much if they eat it in the dark. I personally disagree, but I personally think/obsess over food more than the "general population".

Anyway, I think I started digressing.

If carrots do taste better after modification [after all, GM corn is sweeter and juicier], then what is the negative side? A loss of nutrients, perhaps, but evolutionarily speaking, haven't we evolved so that we can get our nutrients through foods? Why would we pick bland carrots over flavourful carrots? We wouldn't. But, the bland carrots are the ones that have more nutrients...according to various sources that tell me that organic farming is healthier for both myself and the environment. I suppose a counter-argument would be that humans like to eat sweet stuff because of the calories which we needed, way back when people ate once every few days instead of once every few hours. But what about texture? One can't generalise on that; we like moist, soft apple pie filling, but we dislike squishy peaches and overripe bananas [which, by the way, are also very. Very. Sweet.]... but they have similar macronutrient profiles [SUGAR SUGAR SUGAR!!!]

So, my Goldfish cracker obsession for the past two weeks still hasn't receded.