The bottle fooled me: this is just a generic apple juice
In a recent post, I raved about Amazon Grocery apple cider, which tastes very similar to the fresh apple juice from the farmer’s market. But Amazon has not had it available for a while now, so I went looking for alternatives. Safeway’s Signature Farms Apple Cider With Honey Crisp Apples came in a milk-bottle look alike, rather than in the clear plastic bottles apple juice regularly comes in, and seemed to not come from concentrate, so I thought I’d give it a try – despite the fact that it listed glycolipids as preservatives.
Well, it turns out that it tastes just like the typical commercial non-filtered apple juice. It’s not bad, I prefer it to filtered apple juice, but it does not have the deliciousness of fresh apple juice.
I love fresh apple cider. I mean, who doesn’t? Though nothing compares with the freshly-“squeezed” green apple juice I had in Syria a lifetime ago, fresh apple cider from the farmer’s market is darn good. It is also expensive. Now that the economy is on the brinks, it’s become a very occasional treat. I miss it, though. Supermarket apple juice or cider, even those that are 100% apple like Simple Apple, are just not the same (and are expensive as well). Enter Amazon.
I found Amazon apple cider when looking for unsweetened fresh grape juice, and I was attracted by the bottle – it looks just like the ones at the farmer’s market. The reviews were very positive, and it cost only $2.50 for the 1/2 gallon bottle. Plus, it’s only ingredient is apples – and it’s not made from concentrate. It might be a tad sweeter than the apple cider from the farmer’s market, but it tastes so much like it that wouldn’t be able to tell them apart on a blind taste.
The only negative thing is that I don’t know how farmers can possibly compete with prices like this.
Unfortunately, this seems to be the only natural juice that Amazon carries under its brand name. All the other ones are from concentrate.
A few weeks ago, Safeway had On the Rocks Cocktails on sale for $5 for the 375 ml (12 oz) bottle. I’m not much of a cocktail drinker – I don’t like the taste of alcohol – but I figure it was worth trying a few. I got the Cosmopolitan, the espresso martini, the Margarita and the jalapeño pineapple Margarita – the latter two for my husband.
A cosmopolitan is a simple cocktail of sweetened cranberry juice, lime juice, vodka and orange liqueur. It was the favorite cocktail of Carrie Bradshaw in Sex and the City, and that’s probably why I finally tried it some years ago. And I liked it. If you’re lucky, the sweetness masks the alcohol and makes it easy to drink.
In that sense, On the Rock’s cosmopolitan is initially successful. The alcoholic taste is pretty well masked by the sweetness and acidity in the drink. It does, however, burn a little going down the throat. That makes it feel unbalanced. Still, I’ll buy it again if I see it on sale again.
The 375ml bottles are usually $13 at Safeway and $11 at Target.
My second Shark Tank purchase was a disappointment
As I mentioned in a previous blog post, I’m totally new to Shark Tank, a TV shows where budding entrepreneurs pitch new products to potential investors. I saw the pitch for Copper Cow Coffee, a DIY Vietnamese coffee kit and I was intrigued. While I’ve seen coffee offered at many Vietnamese restaurants I’ve never actually ordered it – I’m someone who only consumes coffee for breakfast and never with a meal -, and I was curious about it. I still am. Vietnamese coffee might be great, but this make-at-home version was a bust.
Copper Cow Coffee comes in boxes with individual pouches of coffee and creamer.
The coffee is in a filter bag with paper wings. You rip off the top and then spread the wings around the sides of your cup. This probably works best with a mug, my cup was too wide and the sides kept falling off.
You then pour hot/near boiling water over the coffee pouch. This works best if you have heated your water in a kettle. I, however, have gotten out of the habit of using a kettle and didn’t remember where I’d put mine, so I heated the water in a mug in the microwave – only to realize that I would not be able to pour it into the filter. I transferred it to the a creamer and that worked well. I could have heated it in the creamer originally – but having to use two cups, even if one didn’t need to be washed afterwards, was annoying.
Brewing the coffee was a slow process. It takes a while for the beans to absorb and then let the water through, so there is only so much water you can pour into the filter at the time. As the filter was unstable in my cup, I also had to hold it with my hand.
Removing the coffee filter ended up being pretty messy, and I ended up with coffee beans everywhere. I am a very clumsy person, I will admit it.
You then open the creamer pouch and squeeze it onto the coffee and mix.
Finally, you have your cup of Vietnamese coffee. I did not enjoy it.
First, let me say that I messed up. I brew about 8 oz of coffee instead of the 4 oz that is recommended for Vietnamese coffee per se – the 8 oz instructions were for American coffee. That may be why the coffee was just so weak. I’m not someone who is in the least picky about coffee – I was an instant coffee drinker for decades, before Keurig came into my life. But this was too weak even for me. I also did not enjoy its earthiness – that’s something that I particularly dislike in coffee and while the earthy tones weren’t too strong, as the coffee was that weak, they were still there.
The creamer is just condensed milk. I have used condensed milk in my coffee before – when I run out of another creamer – and it’s not my favorite, as I tend to prefer a sweeter but darker coffee.
At Target, the box with five coffee pouches and five creamers was $12, which makes it $2.40 for a cup of coffee. Even if I had enjoyed it, it wouldn’t have been worth it. You can brew a much better cup of coffee with your Keurig and add your own condensed milk for much less.
I’ll be honest. Until this moment, I had not considered blogging about tap water. Who blogs about tap water? Who even thinks about it? The answer to the latter question, however, is easy: my husband. He is a HUGE water drinker and you could even call him a water connoisseur.
Mike likes his water pure, as free of minerals as possible. He thus is not a fan of mineral water, and as an environmentally conscious person, he’s not a fan of bottled water in general. So he pays a lot of attention to the quality of tap water. We bought our home in San Leandro because tap water here (and further north in Alameda county) comes from snow melt from the Sierra Nevada – and apparently, snow melt water is the freshest and tastiest.
While I didn’t have many expectations about New York City tap water, I didn’t really think it would be good. The only time I’d read anything about it was back in the early 2000s when a story came out about how the water in NYC was not kosher – it’s full of tiny crustaceans left there to kill mosquito larva. Around that time there were stories about how the wigs many Orthodox women wear were also not kosher as they used hair cut during pagan ceremonies, but locusts, plagues of which occasionally hit Israel, are – so all these weirds facts stuck in my mind. Imagine my surprise, then, when Mike insisted in getting tap water whenever we ate out, even at fancy New York city restaurants.
It turns out that New York city tap water is really good. It has won taste contests, something which Mike, as a water connoisseur, was aware of, and tastes clean and fresh. The water comes from reservoirs and lakes in the Hudson Valley and Catskill Mountains, and thus it’s a combination of snow melt and rain water.
According to Mike, who had plenty of opportunity to try it, NYC tap water is just as good as ours. So if you visit, make sure to try it.
We are not huge alcohol drinkers, but I do like cream liqueurs from time to time, and Baileys Irish Cream is our “default.” Irish Cream consists of Irish whiskey, cream, cacao and sometimes other flavorings. It was invented by an ad agency back in 1973, but the Irish seem to have adopted it as their own.
We usually buy Baileys when it’s on sale, or Kirkland Irish Cream, the Costco brand, if we shop at Costco. But I saw that Safeway also carried O’Connery’s Irish Cream Liqueur for just $8-9, and I figured it was worth a try. It gets fairly good reviews and is made by a well known distillery. I do most of my purchasing online, however, and despite the fact that I always ask for no substitutions, Safeway invariably substitutes unavailable products for ones that much more expensive. So unsurprisingly Safeway sent me this Black Irish Irish Cream instead of the O’Connery. At $25, it was over 3 times the price I expected to pay, but fortunately Safeway gave me a refund. I kept the bottle, however, and today I gave it a try. It tastes just like Baileys.
I don’t really know how to describe Irish cream, and there might be some minute differences that a connoisseur could tell, but to me they taste pretty much the same. The same can be said about Kirkland Irish Cream, btw. Unfortunately, both Black Irish and Baileys cost approximately the same – at least when not on sale.
Doing some digging online, I found out that the Black Irish brand is owned by singer Mariah Carey, who realized you can make far more money selling alcohol than singing. Given the very commercial origins of Irish cream, I don’t think anyone can be upset. Still, no reason to buy it or not buy it instead of Baileys – if I had to choose between the two, I’d go for whichever one is on sale.
A few nights ago, I was watching an old episode of Miss Marple, At Bertram’s Hotel to be exact, and in one scene a maid brought Miss Marple a cup of cocoa in bed. It was served in a dainty tea cup and the whole thought of drinking cocoa in bed from fine china seemed very luxurious. So I tried it the other day. It was glorious. It’s also a way of getting a sweet treat in a pretty limited amount – a tea cup doesn’t hold that much, after all.
It also reminded me of how fondly my aunt Gladys used to talk about her evenings at Bennington College in Vermont. Gladys had studied to be an English teacher at the INPLV in Buenos Aires (where the famed Argentine poet Alfonsina Storni had been one of her professors), and had received a fellowship to do post-graduate studies at Bennington. She taught Spanish there, I think, and lived in the dorms where every evening the girls would be served hot chocolate. I don’t know if they drank it from tea cups, but now I like imagining it being so. She was so extremely fond of reminiscing about her time at Bennington.
Growing up, cocoa was something that only children drunk. It was generally in cold drinks, which we called by the names of the most famous brands, Toddy and Nesquik. Or at least that’s how it was in my house. I don’t remember adults ever drinking cocoa, maybe that made the memories fonder.
I continue in my quest of finding a commercial orange juice that can rival fresh squeezed. Basically, I want something that tastes as good as Odwalla did back in the 90’s, before an e-coli crisis forced them to pasteurize their juice. I realize it’s quite hard.
At $7-$9 for a 52-oz bottle, Uncle Matt is priced as a premium supermarket brand (similar to Nature, Evolution and the former Odwalla), and it seems to achieve pretty much the same quality. It’s closer to orange juice than the cheaper brands, but not quite fresh. I still prefer the Costco brand more, but this will do in a pinch. I did find it too sweet for my taste.
This water smells exactly like lemon buttercream frosting. It’s hard to imagine how they were able to create that exact scent, but they did. As the sparkling water is not flavored, however, it does not taste like lemon buttercream frosting, but it leaves you with a weird buttery feeling in the back of your mouth. It’s pretty disconcerting.
While drinking it is an interesting experience, it’s not a particularly pleasant one. I’m slowly forcing my way through the 8-pack because I paid for it, but not because I enjoy them.
Image borrowed from La Croix
I’m ambivalent about hibiscus drinks, known as jamaica in Mexico and karkadeh in Egypt. I’m neither a fan nor a hater. But I was curious enough about this hibiscus sparkling water to give it a try. It’s somewhat better than the limoncello one, but still not my cup of tea – or sparkling water.
First, I don’t actually detect much hibiscus flavor. What I detect is a flavor similar to, albeit les pronounced than, the berry sparkling waters in the market. I completely despise those flavors, but I can bare with this one because it’s lighter. Still, I’m also only finishing the box because I don’t want them to go to waste.
I discovered this delicious drink at All Spice restaurant in San Mateo, and I was hooked. I’m a big lover of sweet lassis, and I couldn’t believe I had never had a mint one before – when it seems like such an obvious flavor combination. I wasn’t sure what the pomegranate contributed – I still don’t know – but the drink at the restaurant was so delicious I just had to try it myself.
I did as a first course for my 2017 Christmas Eve dinner – and it was a big hit. The recipe is very simple, you need:
plain yogurt (regular or Greek)
pomegranate juice
honey
dried mint
I can’t tell you the proportions as I simply combined the yogurt with the lassi until it had the right consistency and then added honey until it was sweet enough – beating with an immersion blender, but you can just put everything in a blender. I then added mint until I could taste it. I tried it with both fresh and dried mint, but dried mint works far better. The key to this lassi is to let it rest for at least half an hour before serving, as the flavors need time to combine. But make it, you won’t be disappointed.
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