Category Archives: Things I Eat

Two years ago, I wrote a very special post. It was so special, it was the equivalent of an after-school special bottled up in Internet blog form with Linda Ellerbee and McGruff the Crime Dog as co-hosts. Two years ago, you see, I had decided to review freeze pops. Like, ALL of the freeze pops. I went mad and filled my freezer with one hundred and eighty two of them. It came to about twenty-nine different flavors total, and I tried each one. Which means I ate twenty-nine pops in about an hour. And then I died and came back to life. True story.

You can find the original post here: Freeze Pops, Reviewed.

Freeze Pops Reviewed was one of my most popular posts at the time and continues still to receive lots of hits. Privately though, a couple of family members and friends had pulled me aside to ask if I had really eaten twenty-nine of them. Primarily it was my mother, who was somewhat concerned about my mental state. I confessed I didn’t really eat all twenty-nine of them. I had only sampled a little bit of each of them. Really.

Or maybe I lied, well aware that the next step would have been an intervention. WHAT. YOU GUYS THINK I HAVE SOME SORT OF PROBLEM? A FREEZE POP PROBLEM?

Rest assure, I can handle my freeze pops.

That was my freezer two years ago. As you can see, we had six cases of freeze pops, one bag of frozen peas, and four bottles of booze. I can explain this. Really.

We were at a crossroads in life. The wife/then-girlfriend and I had just moved out of the city and out of our various roommate situations. We were out of school once-and-for-all, each finished with our Master’s programs—mine in writing, hers in social work. We had just moved in together, into a tiny horrible apartment where the people above us were constantly dragging weighted bags of sand across the floor at all hours. There’s really no other rational explanation for what the hell they were doing.

Oh god, this apartment. It was the kind of place where the bathroom was a step back in time—and not a cute pink-tiled vintagey step, but more like the kind of step where you fear getting a foot infection. I could go on to describe the peeling paint, the broken blinds, and the weird smell in the hallway, but I’ll keep it simple with just one more word. Dump. The place was a dump.

Worst of all, there was no dishwasher. Up to that point, the girlfriend and I had survived many testing moments in the course of our relationship—you know, the regular stuff, petty arguments and those road trips where you want to kill each other—and yet, washing each other’s dishes by hand is the real test of true love.

And that’s sort of the short version of how we ended up with one hundred and eighty two freeze pops, one bag of peas, and four bottles of booze. We felt like vagabonds, but there was also something fun about this, and we knew it then, and maybe that’s why we were happy.

This is my freezer in 2012.

A lot has happened in two years. We bought a house. The wife got a new job. I got a new car. I went on a diet. I lost ten pounds. We decorated our house for Christmas. We decorated it for Halloween. We raked the leaves that fell from all our trees. We grew grass in our yard in May. It died in July. Our basement flooded. We pulled up the carpet. Using a wet-vac is kind of fun. We got married. We practiced dancing in our living room for our first dance. I don’t know if I was any good, but my dad came up to me afterwards and said I had passed the audition. We went to Disney World. We bought a grill. And patio furniture. And outdoor plates, which are the same as indoor plates, except with more color.

And somewhere in that time I ate one hundred and sixty-four freeze pops. There are just eighteen left of the original one hundred and eighty-two. Yes, they moved with us. Like, why wouldn’t they? It was never a question. Well, maybe it was a question with my wife, but if it was, she was smart not to ask it. Otter pops is family, yo.

All I have to say is life is what happens to you while you’re busy eating freeze pops. But enough reminiscing. I think it’s time to review some more for the summer. Last time, I reviewed each of twenty-nine flavors across six different varieties. Now I’ve got four more varieties to add to our canon of reviews. I should do this every year until eventually The Surfing Pizza becomes the go-to source for freeze pops. Like I always say, if you’re going to be the go-to source for something in life, it might as well be that. Even though I’ve never said that.

First up: Tropical Fla-Vor-Ice

They’re a beach getaway in frozen corn syrup form.

Berry Punch – Berry Punch is the same exact blue flavor that comes in the standard pack. The standard blue flavor in the standard pack is also called Berry Punch, so at least it’s not like they tried to fool us by renaming it.

However that’s what they did with Summer Punch.

Summer Punch – This is the standard red Strawberry flavor renamed as Summer Punch, making it no more tropical and no less lame.

Tropical Punch – This is the same as the pink flavor in the standard box, which is also known there as Tropical Punch. So far, the Tropical Variety of Fla-Vor-Ice is no different than the regular box. It’s a beach getaway where it rains everyday.

Banana – Except, okay, this is it: fake banana flavor in all its glory. This is the holy grail of fake banana flavor I’ve been searching for. Fake banana is one my favorite things IN LIFE.

Citrus Punch – Here’s an odd one. This tastes like a fake margarita flavor. It has a bit of a bite to it, like a bitter and salty lime.

Pineapple – Really tastes like a pineapple.

Overall box grade: C- It’s lame that they couldn’t be bothered to make three new flavors at the ominous-sounding JelSert factory, which I imagine has huge smokestacks and gargoyle statues. However, the fake banana and quirky margarita flavors redeem the box enough for me to give it a passing grade.

Next, the Fla-Vor-Ice Fudge Pops.

I can’t decide if these are new or not. Have they been around? Have they been gone and now back? I certainly remember something like these from my childhood, but I could just be remembering the chocolate Yoohoo versions of these. Either way, these are GREAT. They purport to be made with real Hershey’s and they taste like it, too. You won’t find a “mockolate” flavor here. Instead, they taste like a rich, frozen chocolate syrup. They don’t seem to freeze fully, so you don’t get a frozen hard bar of chocolate tundra, but instead a malleable and soft squeeze.

Overall box grade: A+ Summer idea time: I’m totally going to live wild this weekend and mix up one of these with the banana flavor above and add some rum.

Wyler’s Italian Ice

At first I thought Wyler’s was some charming old-timey brand. I mean, look at that font. How could that not be some seventy-five year old company that was founded by adorable old people who brought over the secret family recipe over from the Old World?

But instead, it’s made by the evil JelSert castle, the same company that makes Fla-Vor-Ice, meaning they’re pretty much the exact same thing. In fact, JelSert markets its same freeze pops under multiple brands, including Frootee Ice, Mr. Freeze, Pop Ice, and Kool Ice. The JelSert company is kind of creepy that way. Does this brand of sneaky marketing work? Do some kids grow up with an allegiance to the terribly generic snowman on the Mr. Freeze box? Is there a God? Is someone at the JelSert company laughing their ass off at me right now for reviewing what is pretty much the same freeze pop over and over?

And no matter how many times they print the word “authentic” all over the wrappers and box, these are not at all like Italian Ices. They’ve got some strange effect going on that keeps them freezing fully like an ice bar, but it’s not quite slushy. It’s more sludgey. I looked at the ingredients on the back and these things have about ten more unpronounceable chemicals over the regular Fla-Vor-Ice bars. They taste chemically, too.

Orange Creme: – It’s decent. It tastes like an orange creamsicle made by robots.

Raspberry – Throat burning chemical red dye flavor.

Kiwi Watermelon – Green syrup flavor with a hint of watermelon. Oddly enough, this whole Wyler’s thing seems to be marketed to adults with “refined” tastes, but the irony is that this is truly the stuff kids crave. Green syrup is like child rocket fuel for crabwalking sideways across their bedroom walls while strung out on the green shit.

Lemon – This is the Pine-sol flavor of the bunch. Ick.

Overall box grade: F Weird fake marketing, weird chemicals, weird slushy syrup.

Soda Pops

I’ve seen these every year, but this is the first time I’m trying them.

Orange Crush: Tastes like any orange flavor you’d find in any old box.

Dr. Pepper: Wow – this one is a revelation. I hate Dr. Pepper in soda form, but I’m somewhat surprised to love it in freeze pop form. It doesn’t have any sort of carbonation feel about it, but it nevertheless mimics the soda pretty well. This is unmistakably Dr. Pepper. It’s a pleasing concoction of candied cherry and cola in frozen form. Check this box out if you dig Dr. Pepper.

7Up: After the revelation of the Dr. Pepper flavor, I’m disappointed to say this one is just a rather basic lemon lime flavor, only without the green dye. The clearness itself is refreshing though.

A&W Root Beer: I had the opposite effect of the Dr. Pepper. While it tastes just like root beer and I love root beer, I didn’t love this. Root Beer’s flavor is really in that satisfying barksy spiciness, and here it’s just replicated in syrup form.

Overall Box Grade: B- Nothing is bad here and the novelty of the soda flavors adds some spark.

And that’s what I’ve got. See you again in 2013 for another look inside my freezer, the latest in freeze pops, and life.

Today is the day your life changed profoundly because today is the day you found out Kite Brownies exist. Kite Brownies are quite possibly the most exciting innovation in snack cake production in the last twenty-five years. Even the cashier at the grocery store took pause at the box of Kite Brownies travelling down the conveyor belt. And grocery store cashiers are the most jaded, grizzled people anywhere. They’ve seen it all. Nothing fazes those people, not even those weird cans of Vienna sausages.

But Kite Brownies, now that’s something. It looks like Little Debbie has been feverishly baking again, this time combining the delicious flavor of kites and brownies into a new snack cake. Little Debbie, you’re my hero.

“You know she doesn’t really exist, right?” the wife says.

And what, is she going to tell me that Betty Crocker and Mrs. Freshley also aren’t real?

“I won’t believe it,” I say.

Snack cakes can be scary stuff. There’s the brittle, salty frosting and the machine-perfect stripes. There’s those freaky cream-injected holes on the bottoms, like the baked-over scars of puncture wounds. Thousands of snack cakes prodded and injected by machines, two hundred and fifty Twinkies made every second. Not baked, but rather, created. Snack cakes symbolize all that is unnatural in food processing. They aren’t made with things like butter, milk and eggs. They’re made with chemicals swirling in industrial vats, transformed into plastery, sugary goo and pumped into cake molds.

Seriously, that shit freaks me out. I find Little Debbie’s beaming face and pigtails comforting. I find her old-timey straw hat reassuring. I want to believe she’s somewhere in a kitchen baking up a storm. So I’m choosing to believe Little Debbie is real, because the alternative is far more unsettling. Which is also how I feel about God and heaven. And now that I’ve connected those dots between my feelings on God and snack cakes, I have reached the end of my self-examination and existential thought. I’m done. I’ve written every word there is.

But then I saw that Kite Brownies exist. I must continue writing and exploring.

A lush spring has begun to unfold. Everything has come out early—the flowers, the bees, the neighborhood children who ride their bikes perpetually in our court, circling like a pool of piranhas. And now the brownie embodiment of spring itself has hit the stores. They soar freely beyond the grasp of winter’s frigid claws in a sudden burst of freedom and warmth and new beginning. George Harrison tried when he wrote, “here comes the sun,” but he didn’t get close.

They’re like the free-spirited cousin of Cosmic Brownies without the acid edge. They’re the idealistic child of the stuffy, old-and-in-the-way fudge brownies with nuts. Bob Dylan tried when he wrote, “the order is rapidly fading,” but he didn’t get close.

Kite Brownies get it.

The Kite Brownies are small but hefty. They’re individually-wrapped and pack two hundred calories per kite. They also contain nine grams of fat, sixteen grams of sugar, one hundred and twenty milligrams of sodium, and absolutely zero nutritional value. Unless you count that less-than-one gram of fiber, which I’m totally counting. Hey, there’s even like four percent iron in here. This thing is basically turning into a vegetable before my very eyes.

The green frosting and yellow striping is inviting and attractive, but has no flavor on its own. Still, it provides a satisfying waxy texture. The shape is perfect for biting into. The long narrowed corner of the kite is nice to bite off. If you’re an “ears-first” biter, you know what I mean. The brownie itself is really fudgey, which is impressive since “cocoa” is the last ingredient listed on the box. The way they make things taste chocolate without actually using chocolate is one of science’s most enduring mysteries.

Here’s a side profile of the brownie:

I want to know more about that darker stripe in the middle of the Kite Brownie, but like God and Little Debbie, some things aren’t meant for us to know.

I like the Kite Brownies. I’m a big fan of seasonal snack cakes. When I was a kid, the season changes ruled my life, when it mattered how close to was to summer or Christmas. Before I was tall enough to see the calendar on the wall, I watched the seasons change by the products offered at the grocery store. Christmas-tree-shaped cakes meant it was almost here and the baseball-shaped ones meant school was almost out.

Snack cakes, remember, remember. Back when you were a kid and didn’t mind the chemical aftertaste. Back before boutique cupcakes were all the rage. When you didn’t have such discerning tastes. When all cake was inherently good. And yet it’s still true: all cake is good. Open your heart and let the Kite Brownies in.

Here we are, a few days before Thanksgiving, a holiday we have apparently forgotten exists in our death march toward Christmas. I remember when we used to make fun of the people and stores that put their Christmas stuff up before Thanksgiving. Now we barely shudder when it’s up during back to school.

But I haven’t forgotten you, Thanksgiving. I love your carbs. I love your football. I love your pies. I love your hips. What? Oh wait, that’s something else.

At its heart, Thanksgiving is about a feast taken to a higher art form. The dining room table is the canvas—the succulent bird an anchor at center, cranberry like rubies on the right, mashed potatoes like lush mountains on the left. Perfection of the art has eluded and even maddened many artists. Birds have been burnt. Cranberry sauce has been barfed. Pizzas have been ordered in sworn secrecy.

To pregame Thanksgiving, I decided to make my own feast. Third grade lunch style. I’d re-create an actual elementary school cafeteria lunch, only without hairnets and punk-ass third graders. That’s the age when they get really mean. Really mean.

Up through the 1950s, most American children went home for lunch, with only the lowest of income students provided meals at the schools. School lunches were made in house. Communities sponsored the programs. But by the 1980s, populations and school lunches had outgrown budgets. For the first time, schools turned to outside vendors to provide meals and additional income. Pizza and soft drink companies led the way.

That’s where my generation steps in. We’re Reagan administration babies. We’re immune to rampant, unchecked commercialism and cost-savings greed. In fact, we have a misplaced and unique nostalgia for all of it, even school lunches. We have fond memories of gristly chicken chunks and round plops of taco meat shaped like scoops of ice cream. These were lab-created and politicized foods from a time when Congress tried to list ketchup as a vegetable.

Of those foods, there is one that sticks out most in my mind. Fiestada.

A Fiestada is a Mexican pizza specifically created for school lunch programs. Some of us may remember it fondly; some of us may remember it as cardboard with a pile of vomit on top. It is actually a trademarked entity created by the Schwan Food Company.

For those of us who have been craving a Fiestada since third grade, there has always been the option of buying them directly from the distributor—in cases of ninety six. And believe me, if you look this up on the Internet, there are people out there doing it. The rest of us have our sanity—or don’t have the extra ice chest to store ninety-six shitty Mexican pizzas. One or the other.

But to call it simply a mexican pizza would be wrong. The Fiestada contains multitudes. It contains mysteries—the strange hexagonal shape, the gloomy orange color, even the word itself: a bizarre conglomeration of the words “fiesta” and “tostada.”

My friend Beckner decided to go all DIY and invent his own secret Fiestada recipe, which in a world-exclusive, I’m going to share on the blog. He helped to plan last November’s McRib-Together.

Somehow or another, we decided we were going to re-create a legit school lunch with Fiestada as the main course. But because feasts are an art form, me and Beckner became obsessive about taking this thing to the next level. We’d use sporks. Where the heck do you buy sporks? Hell, we’d rob a Taco Bell for ‘em. We’d eat it on Styrofoam trays. There would be canned peaches! And not only would we have tater tots, but we’d have undercooked, mushy tater tots. Like, we’d put that shit hastily in the oven before it was fully pre-heated. The keyword is haste. We weren’t just preparing a school cafeteria lunch; we were preparing it with the unique flavor of public school lunch lady indignation.

Afterwards, we’d wash it all down with chocolate milk and Good Humor Bars! Oh yeah, and then somehow we got the idea to make Ecto-Cooler on top of it all.

Hi-C Ecto-Cooler was a product tie-in with the cartoon series The Real Ghostbusters back in 1987. Remember that thing I said about misplaced nostalgia and rampant commercialism? Yeah, we’re obsessed with even this, the ghosts of discontinued juice boxes.

It was going be a lot. The wife works late on Thursdays, a ten hour day. We usually have Thursdays marked as “fun dinner night” on the calendar, which means I’m in charge, and by fun, it means we go out to eat. Or I make frozen mozzarella sticks and dump bag salad in a bowl. Fun dinner! Mozzarella sticks are really FUN and completely cancel out the utter sadness of bag salad.

But I had to prepare her for this. I decided it would be best to deliver the news with the impassiveness of a doctor, nothing negative, nothing positive—just cold, clinical, normalcy.

“Beckner’s coming over tomorrow night and we’re making Fiestada.”

“What is that?”

“You know, the mexican pizza that exists only in school cafeterias.”

“We didn’t have that at my school,” she said, skeptically.

“We’ve having tater tots with it,” I said.

Her face was blank as a sheet.

“And we’re eating it with SPORKS!” I added, desperately.

“What the hell is a Fiestada, again?”

Now it’s time to unveil the secret recipe:

First, buy the plainest, cheapest, sketchiest ingredients. Shop at Food Lion, if you must. You’ll need pizza crust, salsa, cheddar cheese, and ground beef.

Here’s my full disclosure: many of you already know I’m a vegetarian. So we substituted with the Morningstar Farms soy version of “ground beef.” You’re totally free to call party foul on me. A true Fiestada experience involves chewing on fatty, gritty, oily meat. This Thanksgiving, I’d like to acknowledge that many cows have died for Fiestadas. Consider it my version of pardoning the Thanksgiving Turkey.

First, there’s the crust. You want something thin that doesn’t have much flavor on its own. The Fiestada’s flavors are all about the gloppy toppings—not the crust. Next, spread the salsa across the crust like pizza sauce. Thin, generic salsa works best. The key is to buy not just the cheapest salsa in the store, but the cheapest salsa IN LIFE. Then cook up the dead cow or soy product. Season it with taco seasoning. Generously cover an entire pizza crust. Then dump a whole bag of yellow cheese on that. Seriously, the whole bag. It’ll be liberating! Finally, according to Beckner, the secret is to dice up Roma tomatoes and pile them on top.

Throw it in the oven for 10-15 minutes, until the cheese is melted and the crust is beginning to brown. Meanwhile, you got to start hastily thinking about the tater tots. Rip open the bag, dump ‘em on the pan, and don’t even bother to spread them out evenly!

Most important step – SALT THE LIVING HELL OUT OF THEM.

While our Fiestada and tater tots were cooking, it was time to whip up a batch of Ecto-Cooler.

Even after The Real Ghostbusters cartoon went off the air in 1991, Ecto-Cooler was so enduringly popular that Hi-C continued to make it through 2001. Eventually, it was renamed Shoutin’ Orange Tangergreen and Slimer was replaced on the packaging by a similar-looking blob of green lips. In the mid-2000s, it was re-branded again as Crazy Citrus Cooler, up until it was finally put to bed altogether and discontinued in 2007.

A few weeks ago, a recipe for Ecto-Cooler began circulating online on the geek websites, and rumors had that it was for real, tasting exactly like the original.

The recipe is for a gallon:

1 Packet Kool Aid/Flavor Aid Orange
1 Packet Kool Aid/Flavor Aid Tangerine
3/4 Cup Orange Juice (No Pulp)
3/4 Cup Tangerine Juice
1/3 scoop Countrytime Lemonade (Reg or Pink)
1 1/2 Cups Sugar
Green food coloring for color
Add water

We substituted Tang for Tangerine Kool-Aid because, well, good luck finding that shit. And for that matter, good luck finding a gallon-sized pitcher. We had to use a half-gallon pitcher and therefore do math. This is where it began to get murky.

Somewhere in that concoction is Ecto-Cooler. It’s absolutely in there. But my math was off. There was an overpowering lemonade slant on it. (UPDATE: After letting it sit in the fridge overnight, it tastes significantly better and like the Ecto-Cooler I remember! Serve CHILLED.)

Note the visible particles of sugar just floating and sparkling in the mixture. I wouldn’t give this to children. It would make them crabwalk horizontally across walls. You’d be better off letting them drink battery acid.

You’ll see the one glass in the photo is not as full as the others—that’s the point at which my wife screamed, “I REALLY DON’T NEED THAT MUCH!”

Finally, it was time to slice the Fiestada, plate the peaches, and hastily serve up a spatula full of limp tater tots:

Thanksgiving, Third Grade Lunch Style. It really did feel like we were eating real school cafeteria food, too. The flaccid Fiestada, the gelled tater tots, the peaches. It was salty and heavy, and began to mix in our stomachs on top of the glass of BRIGHT GREEN sugar water we had just chugged. It was a nostalgic feeling of discomfort, one sporkful at a time. Damn you, idiot spell check, sporkful is a word. It is.

And Christ, there was still dessert:

For authenticity, I insisted we must eat the ice cream bars and chocolate milk immediately after our meal. After all, in the cafeteria, you only get thirty minutes to consume everything. So we did. Ice cream and milk on top of it all. Our nostalgic discomfort shifted to utter disgust. No wonder we begged our parents to buy us Lunchables.

Still, re-creating a school lunch is something I’ve always wanted to try. Food as art. I liked my colors, the neon green and cheddary orange. I liked my textures, the thickness of the milk, the chewiness of the tater tots. Art must inspire strong feelings, and if those feelings are milky and phlegmy, so be it.

This Thanksgiving, may you experience art, whether you’re cooking a masterpiece trying to live up to great artists and grandmothers before you, or whether you’re just admiring a damn pretty pumpkin pie. It’s a feast. It’s a holiday. It’s a drag. It’s a lot of work. It’s just another day. It’s a party. And it’s a damn shame if your football team loses.