Licorice Shootout: Black Jack Taffy

Trust me when I say that looks can be deceiving–this here is some pretty good candy.  Each piece looks pretty unpalatable, something between discarded fish parts after cleaning a mess of bream and some bit of a growth that the surgeon snipped off one of your internal organs.  See for yourself:

Black Jack Taffy--not so black, huh?

In the middle of each piece you’ll see a bit of licoricey black, but the preponderance of each piece is sort of a sallow yellow color topped with a streak of sanguine goop.  It looks kind of like a debeaked chicken head.  Yum!

The taste redeems this confection–initially sweetness predominates, but as you consume the licorice flavor grows stronger until at the end you pretty much taste licorice albeit a sweet strain.  The flavoring is artificial, but there’s some good chemicals in here.

Sonny Boy said, “They taste kind of weird at first, but their aftertaste tastes really good.  They’re good, aren’t they?”

Baby Girl gave a silent thumbs up of approval, probably thankful that these were not Snaps.

The taffy is smooth and soft, none of that out-of-date crap from down in Morehead City that you had to gnaw on for a bit until it softened up. Of course, back in the day before my palate became so refined, I’d blow through a bag of that taffy like a bob-tailed Manx in an Electrolux showroom.  Whatever that means.  I’m thinking it’s pretty fast.

"Holy Doody! Is that an Electrolux?! Or is that Meryl Streep singing?!1"

Note:  even after eating a piece of Black Jack Taffy (which is a pretty strong flavored goody) I could still get that incensey taste from the Snaps that I had eaten earlier.  I noted that it was “like that subtly unpleasant taste of illness you get when you are falling ill.”

 

Licorice Shootout: Snaps Classic Chewy Candy

Snaps your teeths.

Next up in the Licorice Shootout are Snaps Classic Chewy Candy, a confection that is at this point bringing up the rear in terms of licoricey goodness.  Here at Chez Lima, afficianados of all things licorice (thus far), this entry recieved enthusastic thumbs down. Here are the principal reasons:

Texture:  well, not really chewy.  All of us have had to grind away with serious lifelike grinding molar action to get the Snaps into anything other than their original form, a form that bears uncanny resemblance to the plastic insulation on the outside of wire.

Upon partaking, young Sonny Boy quipped, “I wouldn’t really call them chewy candy.  More like ‘impossible to chew into pieces candy.’”  Baby Girl opined, “I can’t even eat them.”  Mind you, she got some pretty effective teeths as she’s still at the age where many of her teeth are very small and pointy.  It must be that she lacks the massive hyena-like jaw strength required to eat these things.  In my Mr. Fancy sommeliery comments on the back of an envelope, I observed that a Snap “doesn’t chew so much as break into rubber shards.”  I also noted that eating the candy makes my mouth feel like it is full of “foamy dye.”

Have you ever seen those blown-out tire retreads beside the interstate?  If you haven’t, it may be because they’ve already been collected and sent to the Snaps Candy Factory.

Taste:  Some tasters have called the taste of the pink ones “soapy,” but I think they taste like incense smells, and what’s worse, the taste offers up some faint aromatic quality, so subsequent exhalations invoke the badness once again.  The incense I’m alluding to might be sandalwood or some other head-shoppy variation of hippie scent.  I’m not talking licorice incense here.

Final Damning Evidence:  The kids and I got my wife to try some as she was absent at our first tasting.  We all cackled with impish glee at her displeasure.  Later on I duped her into trying one of the soapy/incensey pink ones, and she spat it right into the trash can!

Having eaten one, Baby Girl voluntarily threw her other one into the trash as well.  My kids consider dessert as one of the greatest possible things ever, a vice that ranks right up there with putting underpants on their heads, watching television commercials, or drinking beer through straws.  Well, actually, not the beer one, but dessert is a very important part of their culinary existences.  And Baby Girl chucked it right into the trash.

One observation that might give Snaps some redemption in the big old Licorice hierarchy:  I’ll bet that you could get some serious velocity and knockdown power by shooting Snaps out of a Wrist Rocket.  And maybe, just maybe, because they are hollow in the middle, they might make an unsettling whistling noise as they flew by, fast as a bullet!

Fare thee well, gentle Snaps.  We shan’t see you again.

 

Licorice Shootout: Black Licorice Dollars

For my birthday, my dear Bubby sent me down a big old sack of 25 different kinds of candies that are either black licorice or have some black licorice component to them. Over the last week or so I’ve been opening a new kind every two or three days and sampling it. I’ve shared with my dear children and beloved wife. Basically, we’re going crazy with the licorice here. As I sample new licorice candies, I will apprise you of their licoricey worthiness. Mind you, I am not being paid to endorse any particular kind of candy. Also mind you, if you want to pay me to write whatever you want me to write about whatever candy, I will gladly oblige you provided that the income eases any pangs I might feel about sacrificing my journalistic integrity.  You will have to pony up an ox-cart full of hundred dollar bills if you expect me to write anything even remotely positive about those godawful wax bottles that have the horrible syrup in them.

Also mind you again, I have googled around a bit, and the folks over at Brian Pipa’s candyaddict.com site have the bases covered as far as candy reviews go, so you might head on over there and check it out. Incidentally, you might just see the pictures I am using here over there as well which makes sense because well, they were over there first. I figure that everything balances out because I’d imagine that my mention here will send two or three visitors over there to check things out. Win-win.

Licorice Dollars

Licorice Dollars. Not legal tender.

The first box I opened and sampled was the theater size box of Licorice Dollars, an artificially flavored confection produced by the Farley’s & Sathers Candy Company out of Round Lake, MN.  The front of the box says “Heide Quality Candies Since 1869,” but that’s only a front for the Minnesota folks. As soon as I am through here I am going to call Jesse Ventura on the red phone to straighten those lutefisk eaters out.  And yes, I realize that Ventura is no longer the governor of the “Summer of ‘99 Timber Blowdown State,” but with his gigantic arms, he still wields considerable clout amongst the pasty political types.

The Black Licorice Dollars are a good candy; the licorice flavor tastes pretty good.  The texture right out of the box has a certain stiffness to it–try to start chomping away and you’ll probably pull out your fillings, but let a dollar warm up in your mouth for a bit and the candy becomes more palatable.

Sonny Boy and Baby Girl did not complain about the stiff texture of the Licorice Dollars; instead, they ate them greedily (running into the dining room at dessert time POST HASTE) and then spending the next twenty minutes gouging the dollar remnants off of their little teeth with their fingers.

Ms. AlphaLima has eaten a few dollars and hasn’t really shown her figurative hand as to her preferences.

I like them pretty good.  Were I in a theater, I would not pay $3.50 for a box of them, but they are good.

Here’s an interesting historical note to conclude: if Heide Quality Candies started producing Black Licorice Dollars at their startup in 1869, they would have named the candy after a denomination of currency that was actually worth $2.50 when weighed against the consumer price index.  At least that’s what this genealogy site says.  The page also notes that before 1861 barter figured heavily into American economics.  I surmise that in 1869 the barter economy was still alive and well; from this I conclude that the Heide Co. might have, in a fit of patriotic duty, named their candy the “dollar” to stimlulate interest in the new-fangled currency.  That and the fact that naming their product “the licorice equivalent of seven chickens or one-sixteenth of a steer freshly slaughtered” would have killed their sales.

Another historical aside:  the Transcontinental Railroad was completed in ‘69; many of the workers chose to be paid in licorice dollars.

History can be interesting, can’t it?

You know who else just enjoyed the heck out of Black Licorice Dollars?  Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, that’s who.

 

A darkness has settled over our house…

in a weird kind of way. For some reason, the utility company fixed the streetlight that stands right across the street from our house, and now our yard has that Gulag-y daytime-in-the-nighttime brightness at night again. While it was out, we could see constellations, we could admire the night sky, we could have a dark house in the night after we’d all gone to bed, but now? Now we can read right out there in the front yard day or night. The Luddite in me chafes.

 

So I seen me that Mamma Mia! And all I got to say is, “Holy Doody!”

On a whim I picked up Mamma Mia! at the old video store a night or so ago as the lovely Ms. AlphaLima is a big-time ABBA fan from way back in her middle school days.

We watched it last night.

About five minutes in, right around the scene where the young girls (Sophie and her pals) are reunited on the pier, do you want to know what really went through my head? This is the truth, right here:

“This is one of the nine levels of hell.”

Same deal with the older wimmins’ reunion (Donna and her pals). Ugh. I had to bite my tongue to keep from guffawing right out loud.

As the movie rolled on, my impressions changed some, and here’s why: I figured out that the plot is much like a Shakespearean comedy. It’s complex but simple to grasp, the age-old conflict between the generations is there, it’s all resolved in the end through some credulity-straining events. I believe that Shakespeare has a slight edge in dialogue-writing skillz, however. I also like ABBA, and the music is integrated nicely into the story. There’s a few of those “Uh-oh. I feel a song coming on” moments, but for the most part the music serves as a vehicle to advance the story and flesh out the characters. I also did not realize that Meryl Streep has such a strong singing voice. Yeah, I know there’s probably some Hollywood Trickery in there, but I am equally confident that she is talented. Pierce Brosnan? Not so much.

Check out the scene where she’s headed up to the ridiculously remote church for the wedding (and yeah, I realize there’s probably a real church like that, but its presence does not decrease in the least the impracticality of it–maybe there’s a chairlift up the other side, out of camera range) and she belts out “The Winner Takes It All.” The whole time I’m wondering if she’s going to get blown off the cliff, and she still elicited in me some degree of empathy. The lyrics of the song made sense there, too. In retrospect the scene also makes sense from the Pierce Brosnan character angle as he has loved her all these years, and here she is going through a tough time (and looking GREAT doing it, even with the red scarf all tangled about her. What is this, Ran?). Rock on, Meryl Streep.

On a slightly different note, Freud would have had a field day with the old Mamma Mia! as pretty much every scene features Streep wrangling some phallic object in some way or another–power drill, wine bottle, caulking gun, fifteen different varieties of fake microphone.

Not the greatest movie ever, but I enjoyed watching it (though I feel now as if some of my joy stemmed from the fact that my dear wife was so wholly immersed in that wondrous thing). It was the feel good hit of the Sunday.

 

There’s a fine line between fun and not fun…

This afternoon while Sonny Boy and I were processing firewood at one of my coworker’s houses, Baby Girl and Ms. AlphaLima were cleaning house.  They made it as far as the bathrooms, and Baby Girl was waving the toilet brush too close to Ms. AlphaLima’s face.

Ms. AlphaLima:  “Take the toilet brush away from my face.  It is dangerously close, and I don’t want to get any germs.

Baby Girl:  “One person’s fun is another person’s nightmare.”

 

Barnes & Noble Literacy Explosion!

Once a semester, we take the freshmen enrolled in English classes to Barnes & Noble to select a book for the library to purchase. Before the trip, the kids research our catalog, do some online research at the B&N site, and print out the page that features the book they’d like the library to have.

This is genius as far as I can tell. First, the library gets to purchase books each year, and the B&N trips allow readers to make those choices that are typically left to us. If the kids choose the books they want to read, the appeal of the collection is greater than, say, a collection created by “old dudes” like me. The scope of their choices is wide– challenging literary works, manga, nonfiction, teen girl books, things I don’t really have any interest in (the Halo books, the Resident Evil books, the aforementioned teen girl books, etc.). The kids’ choosing also makes my job easier, for my selecting books for purchase usually entails research, finding reviews, comparing the prospective texts against our current holdings, and spending quite a bit of time online. I like the process, but I recently spent the better part of a day choosing nonfiction books that will cost less than $2000, and I have $12,500 in hard-earned grant money to spend. So I’ll be at it a while.

The trips also serve as good PR for the library–the kids like getting out of the school for a period, they sense that we are interested in their reading choices, and the books they buy generally create a buzz around school because shrill young freshmen tend to shriek about every little thing. Our books included, which is fine by me, as long as the shrieking remains at some considerable distance from me.

The trips also afford me the chance to sit over at the Barnes & Noble and drink frothy caffeinated beverages on occasion, to wave at Baby Girl as I walk from library to bus when she’s out on the playground, and to see kids being happy about books. They also go nuts for the caffeinated beverages, the costly snacks, and whatnot.

Today a student came up to me and wanted help finding Seymour Simon’s Big Cats, so I headed over to the cool little B&N computer search deal (that would, by the way, Mr. Barnes and also Mr. Noble, be much more useful if the content featured reviews of the texts instead of merely featuring availability and location). I asked the kid if he was interested in big cats, and he said, “Yeah. You know, if I get rich, I want to own one [italics mine].” I was searching away, and I replied, “Own one? That might be kind of dangerous.” And he said, “No. I want to get a small one, like a puma or something.”

Sounds like a plan.

 

Sometimes life is hard…

Friday afternoon we all came home frazzled as usual from a long week of work and school. Screeching from the little people ensued, and Ms. AlphaLima (in her maternal brilliance) figured that a small snack would keep the little people happy until supper. She offered the two kids half of a leftover biscuit each, and they accepted.

Baby Girl: “I want a biscuit!”

Ms. AlphaLima, putting said biscuit into the microwave: “Okay. It will be ready in twenty seconds.”

Baby Girl: “I CAN’T WAIT TWENTY SECONDS!!!”

 

I can certainly fix at least one economy…

There’s no gasoline to be had in these mountains, so the wife and I have been riding to work together to save said gas. One of the best parts of this is our spending more time with our cherubim, Sonny Boy and Baby Girl. Such little darlings they are–screeching and flinging and whatnot.

Anyhow, Sonny’s after-school program rewards good behavior with Y bucks (not a legal tender, mind you), and we arrived today just in time to see him redeem three of his Y bucks for a small plastic cellphone. He’s pretty stoked about that, mainly because if you push a little button when the phone is closed it springs open with some violence.

In the five dollar Y buck bin, there were some five car sets of Hot Wheels cars, and the Y matron told me that each car cost five Y bucks. On the way home I thought it would be an awesome after-school program occurrence if Sonny stockpiled his Y bucks for week after week after week until he could procure in one amazing purchase the entire five car pack of Hot Wheels cars.

I got to thinking about the logistics of this. First, the plan would require considerable self control by a seven-year-old tempted each week by bins of fabulous swag–plastic cell phones, plastic dinosaurs, crap like that. And, the plan would require a steady income of Y bucks, something that mystifies Sonny Boy as he cannot really determine what exactly earns him a Y buck. He knows he gets Y bucks for “being nice,” but the degree of niceness, the presence of an observing after-school official, the fact that by that point in the day he’s often worn to a frazzle, all of these things combined to stupify me as well. I didn’t even know how they kept track of Y bucks for each week.

Ms. AlphaLima told me that they kept a chart on the wall of the gym. “What do they write them down with?” I asked. She replied, “Marker. They keep track with a marker.”

The gym is almost always empty when I come to pick Sonny Boy up. I have a marker. I can probably through very little research figure out where the Y buck chart is. Get my drift?

There’s no national, state, or local law as far as I know about adding marks to the Y buck chart. I don’t think that the Y czars would be able to keep track of all Y buck credits each week without noticing one or two extra that somehow appeared there. And the purchase would be the thing of legend. If they caught me, I could blame it on Congress and then the feds could bail me out.

You are correct if you are thinking that this is a foolproof plan.

Ms. AlphaLima did not approve of my wily machinations. To which I replied with some vehemence, “Daggone, Yo!”

All of this serves to underscore that time-honored adage penned long ago (unless I am mistaken) by the venerable Benjamin Franklin:

“Behind every successful man there is a woman, struggling as she might to keep him from becoming even more successfuller.”

 

It takes dynamite to get me out of bed…

Actually, I’ve been neglecting the old blog here lately for whatever the reason.

And the reason I write right now is that I have read a book that I’d like to recommend:

Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.

The book details nine year old Oskar Schell’s quest to discover the lock that fits the key he found in a vase in his late father’s room. One sidenote: his father died in the World Trade Center tragedy. Sidenote deux: Oskar lives in New York, and according to his calculations, there are many, many locks out there.

I never finished Foer’s first book, Everything is Illuminated, even though it features a dog named Sammy Davis Jr., Jr. Mr. Foer, if you are reading this because you googled up AlphaLima, no hard feelings, huh? I sometimes get cases of Book ADD. I have about eight unfinished books on my bedside table right now. Do you think I’ll ever finish Ghost Dogs of the South? Or Nick Hornby’s Slam? Or Where There’s Smoke, There’s Flavor? Or even Open Ground, Seamus Heaney’s collected poems? Who knows?

In his second novel, Foer will break your heart without remotely making it seem like he is writing to break your heart. He will make you laugh–Oskar is a funny kid at times. And, for me, here’s the most impressive part of the book: huge events occur in the plot, and you know that they had to be that way when you read them but you never saw the plot event coming until it appeared right there on the page. Speaking of pages, you should get the print copy of the book because the text has illustrations and interesting layouts and the like that, on casual flip-through, seem gimmicky but, when viewed in the context of the novel, are absolutely powerful and necessary.

A coworker of mine took my recommendation (for once. Many times my coworkers walk away from me muttering “Jackass” under their breath), but she purchased the book on CD so she missed out on the pictures. She said there were times where she thought she was going to have to pull off the road because the story brought tears to her eyes. She has since purchased the print version and is rereading it.

In his cleverness and vulnerability, Oskar is worldly enough to want to use profanity but conscientious and naive to the point that he is “not allowed” to curse. His workaround? To use words and phrases that sound like the profanity he is tempted to utter.

Buy this book. I don’t recommend books much, but this is the best book I’ve read in a while. And well, if you don’t like it, you can do as young Oskar suggests to the limo driver on the way to the cemetery where they are about to inter his late father’s coffin (but not his late father):

“Succotash my Balzac, dipshiitake.”