Sure, every weekend is a beer weekend. But the official Portsmouth Beer Weekend only comes once a year. Good thing it’s a long weekend. The Portsmouth Brewery and Smuttynose Brewery have planned events around the city beginning on Wednesday, March 2, and culminating with Kate the Great Day on Monday, March 7.

A new major at The University of New Hampshire reflects the region’s agricultural landscape and the growing appetite for local, sustainable food, products and services. Becky Sideman, associate professor and coordinator for the major, said in a press release that books such as “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” and “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle,” as well as growth in farmers’ markets and other local food sources, seem to have fueled interest in sustainable agriculture. Over the past five years, enrollment in her Sustainable and Organic Food Production course has more than doubled.

A new citizens group, formed as part of the nationwide Action for Healthy Kids initiative, will bring together parents, students, educators, farmers and food service staffers to bring healthier foods into local schools. At their upcoming meeting, they’ll discuss some of the efforts that are already underway, as well as some of the challenges that exist.

Burger King

You’ve probably been asking yourself, “Aren’t chicken fries a crime against God and nature both?” The answer is yes.
Sure, crossing French Fries and chicken fingers is a marketing dream, but they taste like butt—dry, sandy, skinny butt. They taste like mediocre frozen food, with a little extra cardboard flavor.

Since chicken fries aren’t as good as chicken fingers, and chicken fingers aren’t as good as fried chicken, and fast-food fried chicken isn’t as good as actually eating a meal cooked by an actual human being, it makes you wonder—how did we get here, exactly?

Mars Snackfood US, LLC

Other than little umbrellas and palm trees stamped on some of the shells, Coconut M&M’s look and feel just like regular M&M’s—same familiar shell, same chocolate center—but they taste fabulously different. Like tiny Mounds fetuses, the Coconut M&M’s perfectly capture the joy of coconut and chocolate blended together.

Colored brown and white like coconuts and with a few green ones mixed in because.... well, you know... they’re a delicious treat that seems like more than a novelty. Touted as a limited edition, we hope they change their mind and keep making these.

Gilley’s PM Lunch

What seems outlandish at first reveals itself as brilliant through an inevitable chain of logic: the only thing better than french fries is french fries with cheese (a known fact); the only thing better than french fries with cheese is french fries with cheese and gravy—poutine! (There is a further progression, which involves adding bacon.)

Spicy gravy, melted curd cheese and hot, fresh french fries make Gilley’s poutine a formidable and fabulous food. Portsmouth may be a long way from the native poutine breeding grounds of Canada, but you wouldn’t know it from this dish, which can warm your soul on any rainy day or dark night.

Reed's, Inc.

How can you not immediately fall for a beverage that lists Szechuan Peony Root as its third ingredient? Cassia Bark, Raw Cane Sugar, Nutmeg, Oils of Lemon, Cloves, oo la la! It is, in fact, written into our charter here at the Small Foods Laboratories to consume all the Szechuan Peony Root-based snacks we can.

After the initial thrill of discovery, though, reality sets back in. China Cola is a bit flat and a bit heavy, more like a thin ginger beer than a cola. It’s not bad, but it’s not delicious either, not tremendously fun. It’s a solid, healthy cola alternative (with Szechuan Peony Root!) for those who prefer to drink their sodas from the strange springs along the road less traveled.
 

The Ceres Bakery egg wrap is the finest kind of fast food: fresh, delicious, and made from real stuff by real people. It changes from day to day, sometimes with more mushrooms, or broccoli, or red peppers, and some optional meats as well, but the heavenly simplicity of it is unwavering—eggy, cheesy goodness all wrapped up in a little breakfast football. Grab it and go long!

It may, in fact, be our ideal food.  It has no bones or gristle or other inedible parts; it’s soft, so you can eat it even if you don’t have teeth or are too lazy to eat chewy foods; it’s portable, so you can eat it as you walk; and to top it off, it has a very high cheese-to-mass ratio.
Breakfast-on-the-go, thy name is egg wrap!

(available in bulk at healthy-food stores near you)

O toasted corn! How have we lived so long and never known your delights? Salty, corny, delicious, how can we eat just one double-fistful? How can we stop at one scooper’s worth? One bin? Nay, we cannot!

Be warned, though: although toasted corn is made of all-natural ingredients like corn and salt, we can’t say for sure that it is good for you, because it is also the loudest snack we have ever encountered! We are not kidding when we say that when we chew toasted corn, we cannot hear ourselves think—seriously, we at the Small Foods Laboratory have frequently had to stop chewing our toasted corn in order to finish a thought. The detonation from each crunch goes directly into the skull and is then broadcast both up into the brain and out into the open air, causing passers-by to stop and stare, wondering, perhaps, why you would put firecrackers in your mouth.

They just don’t know what they’re missing.

Mars Snackfood U.S., Llc.

Despite bewildering packaging featuring some kind of complicated “Transformers” movie tie-in (in the picture, it looks like the M&Ms are covered in trash), Strawberried Peanut Butter M&Ms are delicious.

The math is hard to deny—peanut butter M&Ms are great, so peanut butter and jelly M&M’s are a good bet too.
They’re the jumbo-sized M&Ms, not the standard slim, so they’re beefy and satisfying. Some of the shells are speckled, which is a nice touch as well.

While they’re not going to replace the classic M&Ms, they’re not meant to, but they do offer a delightful variation on a familiar treat, and that sort of momentary diversion alone can be part of what makes for a great snack.

As American obesity rates continue to soar, the Pepsi company introduces the limited editions Pepsi and Mountain Dew Throwback. Made closely to the original recipes, they include real sugar, not the high fructose corn syrup and many –ine ending chemicals that pervade their present counterparts. (The ingredient lists on the bottles are now MUCH shorter.)

“Retro” would have been a better description, as “throwback” makes one think of something you wouldn’t want, but the drinks themselves are heart-swelling, bringing back memories of pom-poms on roller skates and feathered hair clips. The most immediate difference is less carbonation. Gone are the aggressive attack-your-nasal-cavities bubbles, replaced with a calmer, smoother syrup. The Pepsi has a warm, friendly taste, like a mud puddle in the Garden of Eden, and the Mountain Dew is clearer and nowhere near as sickly-sweet. Mmm... nostalgia.

Masterfoods USA

This is a confounding product: these new Skittles look just like regular Skittles (which always looked just like M&Ms anyway), but instead of being edible candy, they’re gum. So they look and feel like regular Skittles, which you’d chew and swallow, but whoah, hold on there! Don’t swallow these! They’ll ball up in your stomach with all the other gum you’ve accidentally swallowed in your life, and then you’ll need surgery to have the giant ball of undigested gum removed.
It would be one thing if the flavor were novel, but they just taste like fruity gum—disguised as an identical candy—whose form was copied from another candy originally.... whatever.

Frito-Lay, Inc.

You might think you’ve seen it all, but then there’s The Quest: something in a bag with the slogan “Guessing the flavor is just the beginning...”

Yes, it’s a snack with no substance at all, or at least none you’re supposed to be aware of. You’re supposed to buy it without any idea what you’re buying—heck, how do you even know it’s chips and not, say, dried pig ears?

But we are not without a sense of fun. Unfortunately, if you choose to take “The Quest” you’ll find out that they taste like lime, so it’s neither a new flavor, a mystery flavor, nor a good flavor.

Anheuser-Busch, Inc.

Chelada is an alcoholic beverage produced by Anheuser-Busch which combines Budweiser, the king of beers, with Clamato, a drink made from tomato juice and clams.

Take a minute. Read that first line again if you have to. Study the picture. It’s ok, we’ll still be here. Savor this moment—you’ll never have another like it in your lifetime. In a thousand years of satire, in a hundred thousand comedy skits, no-one could ever make this up. It’s as if we stand at a crossroads: on our left is Bizarro World, on our right is The Twilight Zone, behind us is yesterday and straight ahead is clam beer.

{moszoomthumb imgid=327 itemid=74 style_m=2}Robert's American Gourmet

If you were to stop and think for a moment about an actual pirate’s booty, you would be turned off the thought of food for good.  But in this instance, the booty in question is actually a rice and corn product made to look like popcorn. And it is a miracle for your mouth. It’s so soft and fluffy, it’s as if actual wisps of air have been captured and sprinkled with delicious cheese. It’s all organic, and it’s not actually popped corn, so there are none of those nasty kernel bits that get buried in your gums like sharks’ teeth. But beware the bottom of the bag and the cheese powder hidden in the corner like sunken treasure... if one tips the bag up to get the last bits, the full-on blast of cheesy deliciousness can induce loss of consciousness.

{moszoomthumb imgid=313 itemid=74 style_m=2}These little squares are delicious. With their minty tingle, they taste like chocolate kissed by a Christmas decoration. According to the Chimp Mints' website, the "endangered species" part of the name refers to the fact that they donate "10% of net profits to help support species, habitat and humanity." But we enjoy eating them more when we imagine they're really made out of an actual endangered species.

The Hershey Company

The Reese's Whipps is a chocolate shell over a peanut butter sheath, filled with soft nougat. It has the classic Reese's peanut butter flavor familiar to fans of their Cups and Pieces, slightly tangy and softly gritty.

Texture is one of the triumphs of the Reese's Whipps, as all its components are soft, yet the whole turns out to be chewy and satisfying, as if a nougat pillow were wrapped in a cozy peanut butter blanket, then snugly tucked in with a chocolate comforter.
The name, though, is puzzling. Unlike many new candy bars which, when unwrapped, turn out to actually be two smaller bars packaged together, the name "Reese's Whipps" is clearly plural, yet there's just one bar. It's a substantial bar and there's no shame in that, but the name makes us look around for more. We're not quite sure what a "whipps," is—especially if it doesn't involve nitrous oxide—but we know it's plural.

Four stars for flavor and texture, minus 3 points for silly marketing.

Mars, Incorporated

A mint-flavored 3 Musketeers is not a bad idea. Minty and fluffy is an uncommon combination, and 3 Musketeers is a venerable bar that hasn't seen much experimentation.

The resulting flavor is identical to a York peppermint Patty, but with a much lighter, airier texture. The chocolate skin is dark and thin, and the minty fluff is bright white.

It's a nice minty treat, but there is very little left of the 3 Musketeers in it—in a real 3 Musketeers, there's a fullness to the flavor, and an almost gamey aftertaste, both of which are satisfying in a way the mint stepchild is not. 3 Musketeers is really just a name slapped on this new, unrelated candy.

{moszoomthumb imgid=266 itemid=74 style_m=2}Mars, Incoporated

Next up in our ongoing series of exposés on radically misleading Halloween-themed candy is the Snickers Creme Pumpkin. “Pumpkin creme in a Snickers!” you exclaim. “How novel! What might that taste like?”

We don’t know, and neither will you—there is no pumpkin creme, or pumpkin flavor of any kind, in this candy. As near as we can tell, the “creme” designation is meant to refer to the gooey caramel-nut puree inside the candy, as it’s not a normal Snickers inside either; instead of peanuts and a solid bar you can bite down on, its innards are a nondescript fluid, not unlike the organless goo inside a bug.

Since it’s not a Snickers and it has no pumpkin flavor, then the one defining characteristic of the Snickers Pumpkin Creme is disappointment.

{moszoomthumb imgid=252 itemid=74 style_m=2}The Hershey Company

Halloween is, in part, a candy holiday: buckets and bags of candy, candy of all shapes and sizes and colors, some seasonal and some tried-and-true. It’s a time when we get to try new confections that we might not be familiar with simply because they ended up in our sack.

But just because we’ll try anything at Halloween, that doesn’t excuse laziness from the candy companies. A marshmallow pumpkin sounds like a grand idea, until you discover that there’s nothing remotely pumpkin about it—it’s just chocolate-covered marshmallow. They didn’t even bother to color the marshmallow orange.

True to modern marketing form, “Marsmallow Pumpkin” is just an empty name, signifying nothing at all. Feh.

{moszoomthumb imgid=237 itemid=74 style_m=2}New England Confectionery Company

Peanuts and peanut butter flavor are a staple of the candy industry, but there is one quiet giant that has stood above them for almost a century, and she has the face of a little girl: Mary Jane.

The Mary Jane isn't just peanut-flavored; rather, it tastes, feels and looks like the candy reincarnation of an actual peanut. It's peanut sized, in a pale yellow wrapper, and inside it's tan and tender and almost earthy—eat one with your eyes closed and you can feel the sun of the heartland on your face, nearly smell the hay and hear the slow rustle of grasshoppers. It makes you think about more than the generic one-note "peanut" flavor we're used to, making you contemplate the whole peanut with its soft, airy shell, its funny, quirky shape, the mix of sun-dry and nut-oily. It makes you think about what it means to be a peanut, the funny little legume that no one respects.

Vosges Haut-Chocolat

Sometimes you eat a snack that changes everything, a snack that stops you cold and makes you realize that nothing is ever going to be the same.

Satin-sheen dark milk chocolate in an elegantly thin bar, the surface of the bar smooth and unbroken, with no hint of pork. Bite down, though, and bits of delicious bacon are released, each crunch like a tiny breakfast star in a rich chocolate sky. Pinprick moments of saltiness burst across the deeper field of sweetness, burst and then fall, dissolve, fade.

Harris Dairy Farm

For an entire generation, having blue milk at breakfast has always been just an unreachable Tattooine heat dream, but no more. From nearby Dayton, Maine—not far, far away at all—comes blueberry milk!

Sweet, wonderful blueberry milk, not made by milking blueberries but rather by milking special cows that—actually, we have no idea how they make it, but it’s delicious. Remember at the bottom of a bowl of sugar cereal, the sweet, sweet milk that would collect there, infused with whatever Captain-Count-Lucky-Boo-Frostedness had leeched out of the cereal? The best part of the bowl, darn it, now in a bottle! That's what blueberry milk tastes like.

ConAgra Foods

It’s the first thing on the label, underneath the name:

Made with pork, chicken and beef. Artficially colored. Pickled in artificially colored vinegar pickle.

Make no bones about it (usually), this is a pickled sausage, and wholly unashamed of it. It’s not a meal, it may not entirely be food, and it’s a hell of a caustic snack. Really, the only reason to buy one is if you’re standing at the checkout counter and suddenly you think, “Uh, I should get something to eat with this beer.”

Idaho Candy Company, Boise, Idaho

Enjoying a bit of celebrity after having been featured on the Food Network’s “Unwrapped,” the Idaho Spud Bar is a chocolate-marshmallow creation inspired by … a potato? First manufactured in 1918, the Idaho Spud Bar is a blob of vaguely cocoa marshmallow covered with a layer of chocolate and then sprinkled with coconut, resulting in a flavor as odd as its name.

During a recent trip to Quebec, The Small Foods Index was delighted to discover hot chocolate served in a bowl! Normally wary of simple repackaging, in this case we were entirely entertained—sure,  the hot chocolate itself was from a powder, but it was in a bowl! One could spoon it up like a chocolate meal, or pick up the bowl and slurp it down like candied miso soup.

Winter is coming, and we want to see hot chocolate in a bowl served locally. Then we want to see wine in the soda machines and frogs’ legs at KFC.

Nabisco Oreo ChocoStix is another example of the brand recycling common to so many modern food-like products: here’s a new Oreo product, we’re told, even though it’s not a, you know, Oreo. So, what does that mean?

It does not mean this is an exotic new candy hybrid concocted in the secret Nabisco candy labs. It does mean this is an adequate chocolate wafer stick, covered in chocolate, with the Oreo name stamped on it by a team of soulless marketing people. It really doesn’t taste like an Oreo at all, nor does it capture any of the texture or experience of eating that beloved bicolor junkfood cookie—with the exception of that muddy feeling in your mouth after eating one, like you’re going to have to brush your teeth extra-hard to scrub out the Oreo-dirt; that, the ChocoStix re-creates well.

S&S Candies

Just when you think there's nothing new under the sun—well, it turns out you’re right. While stacking an Oreo on top of a peanut butter cup might be bold, and then stacking a chocolate chip cookie on top of another peanut butter cup might be even bolder, taking a third peanut butter cup and sprinkling it with M&Ms and packaging the whole thing as a candy bar is just an affront to the gods—and with such familiar parts, it’s hard to call it innovation, either.

Chocolate Mint Muscle Milk has the slightly chalky aftertaste common to many protein bars and protein shakes, leading us to conclude that protein does, in fact, taste chalky.

Given that the chalky taste of pureed Power Bar is expected, Muscle Milk is really quite good, and satisfying. The Chocolate Mint version gives the impression of a shake made from some sort of reconstituted Thin Mint paste—which is to say, it’s delicious!
It even comes in a manly, grab-able, chuggable 17-oz carton which makes you feel like you bought it at a special muscle store instead of the local Gas-n-Sip.

Chase Candy Co., St. Joseph, Missouri

When a simple chocolate-covered cherry isn't enough for you, you'd be lucky if you found a Cherry Mash. Made in Missouri, this cherry monster has been in production since 1918. It’s huge, maybe five or six times the size of a plain old chocolate cherry, a big, lumpy, indelicate chocolate meterorite.

Pearson’s Candy Co., St. Paul, Minnesota

We were excited about Pearson’s Milk Chocolate Vanilla Bun. Would it be shaped like a cinnamon bun? What does milk chocolate vanilla taste like? Does the manufacturer make other pastry-shaped candy bars? How did they think of such a thing?
The answer to all of these questions is “no.”

Adams & Brooks, Inc., Los Angeles, California

The Cup-O-Gold comes in a little paper skirt like a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup, but on the Cup-O-Gold it seems different ... more like a kilt. This is a big, bold snack, a satisfying adventure of a candy bar.

The thick chocolate cup is textured with almond bits and itty-bitty coconut fronds, giving it just the tiniest hint of a crunch, and the creamy center is smooth, almost Cadbury Creme Egg-smooth, like white treasure.

Annabelle Candy Company
Hayward, Ca

This is a spongy candy bar. Like trying to build a house on a marsh, building a candy bar on marshmallow shows questionable judgement. The cashews are little more than a fine particle sprinkle, and the chocolate is thin and treacherous. Really, there's nothing rocky about it.

{moszoomthumb imgid=128 itemid=74 style_m=2}The Atkinson Candy Co., Lufkin, Texas

Bright orange and covered in fuzz—what could be inside the Chick-O-Stick? What, o what could it be?!

Initial hopes that there might be chicken involved are dashed after a quick scan of the label: “Crunchy Peanut Buttter and Toasted Coconut Candy.” Mmmm ... sounds edible!

The Chick-O-Stick is sweet and crunchy and fun, and very similar in its fundamental flavor to the inside of a Butterfinger, as well as having that same mega-orange color. Our sample stick was a little hard, but to be fair it had been in the car a while.

Sitting on the shelf next to the regular Diet Coke is a bottle with a bright teal cap and a fluorescent yellow sticker that reads “New Item.” So you think to yourself, “If I’m already planning on having a Diet Coke, why not go for the one with vitamins and minerals?” The label on a 20-ounce bottle says it will give you 30-45 percent of your daily value of niacin, vitamin B6, vitamin B12, magnesium and zinc. Fantastic! It will help you fight off a cold while eating the lining of your stomach!

If you were thinking that you liked the taste of Butterfingers but  find them dauntingly heavy and dense, then Nestle Butterfinger Stixx presents a delightful alternative. Each stixx (Stix? Stik? Pokey?) is light and pleasant, containing Butterfinger-flavored "Candy Crème" injected into a wafer tube and then covered in chocolate. It tastes just like a Butterfinger, but without the experience of having the disturbing, oily orange Butterfinger flake compacted into your teeth all afternoon.

Ritz Chips are Ritz Crackers re-imagined as “chips.” While we generally frown on such brand recycling, the result is yummy.

Java Juice is weird: .5 oz. of high-strength coffee extract fluid in a slim little bag, ingredients just coffee and water. The mind reels—surely you can’t make holy coffee by drizzling black fluid into tapwater?! Surely coffee must be “brewed” in a quasi-mystical transformation!

Candy donuts?! Mama mia!

Dove’s new cookies tumble out of their layers of wasteful packaging like babushka dolls, the 15 tiny cookies sealed in 3 airy plastic tubs stacked inside an ample squarish box.

The Cool Dog—manufactured by Cool Dog, Inc., of Shirley, Mass.—is creamy, yummy, strange and fun.

In marketing, consistency is very important—so if you’re going to have a  black-cherry-French-vanilla-diet-cola called “Jazz,” then the label should accurately reflect the confusion and nausea that these words elicit. Pepsi’s “jazz” label does just that, depicting a torrent of brown effluent cascading into a foamy cesspool full of red cherries, all topped with a tacky purple ribbon swirling across the front and the double logo of “Diet Pepsi” and “Jazz” puzzlingly intermingled.

The candy industry will go to extraordinary lengths to avoid having a new idea, and Hershey’s Kissables is a great example of that—tiny Hershey’s Kisses with colorful M&M candy coatings. Cute as a button!

For 7-Eleven, the appeal of tube-shaped foods is clear—like hot dogs and sausages, tube-shaped foods can rotate endlessly on the rollers under the heat lamps, remaining ever-warm without actually cooking. The appeal to the consumer is less clear.

My mother always said, “Beware of novelty beverages packaged in tiny bottles/cans. Just because they’re expensive doesn’t mean they’re not sickening.”

Although I’ve found this to be a great rule of thumb, thank heavens it doesn’t apply to Ben & Jerry’s Chunkey Monkey Milkshake, which is delicious and refreshing, even if there are only 8 tiny ounces of it!

The Starbucks Chocolate Chocolate Cupcake is a good cupcake, rich and moist and chocolatey, mmm-mmm!

But no chain store baked good could ever live up to the promise made by that delightfully dark, curly head of chocolate shavings. Look at it! It’s so dear! Like a fuzzy Angora bunny or a soft chinchilla, this cupcake’s darling looks are a brilliant bit of marketing not really supported by what’s inside.