What I'm nomming

 Time for another snack review.

Whisps Parmesan cheese crisps
These are delicious and crispy  and light, almost melt in your mouth.

La Mere Poulard French Sables
These  are very simple  buttery cookies,  but so perfect.  I like them with ice cream. They are  similar to shortbread but crispier.

Smashmallow root beer float flavor marshmallows
They really do taste like root beer. It would be interesting to try them toasted.

Cheetos Sweetos  caramel puffs
I love salted caramel  anything, but these were just listed as caramel puffs, not as salted caramel, so I was not sure if they would be good. I was worried they might just taste like super sweet kids breakfast  cereal. But they are nice and  salty,  almost equal parts sweet and salty like kettle corn,  so they are really delicious and  perfect for snacking.

Mike's harder blood orange 
I'm including this not as a favorite, but as an anti-fave.    Luckily I just bought one can at 7-11 to drink at the beach.  I  like  every other blood orange soda I have tasted, it's one of my favorite flavors,  and I like Mike's hard lemonade, so I thought for sure I would like this. But it was a huge disappointment.  It is TERRIBLE. It tastes like you mixed artificial cherry flavor cough medicine with artificial orange flavor cough medicine. So freakin nasty. I drank like 3 sips and threw the rest away.

What I'm nomming

These are some snacks I actually bought a couple weeks ago and enjoyed,.
 Right now I am  on a no  grocery shopping challenge, which is not to save money or anything, I am just trying to use up what I've already got in my pantry. I don't know if anyone else does this, but I tend to  do a thing where I   buy things to try them, and they are okay but not my favorite, so  instead of finishing them, I just go  buy something else. And it ends up with a lot of stuff that just kind of  accumulates and gets ignored. It's not bad enough to throw away, it's not really 'bad' at all, just not my favorite.  So right now I am only shopping for perishables like milk and eggs, but when it comes to  shelf-stable   pantry items like cereal, chips, cookies, dry pasta,  nuts,  granola bars, etc, I am not buying  anything like that until I really empty out my pantry. And like, if I want chips and there are no chips, I will make popcorn. If I want cookies and there are no cookies, I bake some (using up some nuts and chocolate in the process).
So I've been doing that for a couple of weeks but here are some things I bought before I started this challenge.

Icelandic Provisions Skyr- peach and cloudberry  flavor
This is like a thick yogurt but has more protein than normal yogurt. it's really good.  I  had a Finnish friend who  used to always rave about cloudberries, which are a  rare type of berry from Scandinavia.

Cadbury Wispa cookies
These are  shortbread cookies covered in chocolate, but they also have a filling layer of  fluffy chocolate similar to an Aero bar.

 Cherry Limeade Peeps
These are a nice sour cherry flavored peep with a coating  of lime candy coating on the bottom.  I LOVE lime flavored things and it is not a very common flavor, so these are my favorite of the limited edition 'dipped' Peeps.  I once wrote a letter of complaint to Starburst when they replace lime starburst with strawberry, in the 80s. They wrote back and told me lime was the least popular flavor.

 Lays Poppables in white cheddar flavor
These are new, they taste similar to  Pringles, they are made with potato flour and remind me of like a giant chex cereal piece.Sort of a mesh pillow  shape. It's  very light and  crunchy, because each one is filled with air. but that also means that even a big bag of them doesn't have that many servings. You can easily eat the whole bag if you aren't careful.

 

Slow vs quick

In the middle ages, there used to be a form of torture and execution  where they would lay a person down, and then place a large board on top of them, like a door. They would start piling rocks on top of the board.
They were not large rocks, and any one of them alone wouldn't have really done much  to hurt the person. Especially with the board distributing the pressure over the whole body.
But there were a lot of these small rocks, and they kept piling up. Eventually it would kill a person but it was very slow. And very painful.
I can imagine , at some point the person would wish for one large  boulder to  squish them quickly, rather than the pile of hundreds of small rocks.

 This form of torture is like life. Sometimes, if you only see one little pebble   piled on someone, you might not understand the person's reaction, because you don't know how many rocks came before it.  We never know how many rocks each person has already  squashing them down.
And  if you can ever lift a pebble off of someone, you might think it's so small it would never make a difference. But all those  pebbles add up.

What I'm making

I found this large candlestick thingy on the curb last week.  A neighbor had a pile of random items out with a FREE sign, and this looked interesting, like it had  some potential.

 I did not like the paint job, it was a weird mix of antique gold and a  strange  silvery bluish color.
I added a flat wooden piece to the top so that it could hold a large candle, and then I painted the whole thing in a  faux iron look.

This was a 2 step process. First I painted the whole thing in flat black spray paint.
Then I gave it a light misting of dark bronze metallic spray paint. The  mist technique is spraying very lightly, from   far away, and just a quick few passes. You don't want  full coverage, you want the base color to show through.

This detail shows the textured, wrought iron  effect you can get with a light mist of bronze metallic over a dark matte base.

What I am nomming

Recent favorites snack foods

Wild California twice baked Fruit n' Nut crisps. These are so crunchy that it's easy to eat the whole bag in a sitting. They are also   great with a soft cheese.

Kettle Chips New York Cheddar flavor.
 My all time favorite potato chip was the  Cheddar Beer flavor from Kettle Chips, but it was a limited edition flavor. This New York Cheddar is the closest to it, although it is still missing that subtle malty sweetness of the beer. The large bags of this are hard to find in grocery stores, I  mostly see the small bags at deli counters and stuff, so I just ordered 6 bags from Amazon.  That sounds like a lot but damn they are so good it might not be enough.

Haagen-Dazs Bourbon Pecan Praline Ice Cream
You can really taste the bourbon in this. So good. It's limited edition so as usual when I find something I love,  they stop making it and  I can never get it again. WHYYYYYY?

 


Jules Destrooper Almond Thins -  Super thin and crispy, these cookies are the perfect partner to ice cream.

TCHO Organic Milk Chocolate, Toffee + Sea Salt - This  is a local brand,  made in Berkeley. They have a lot of interesting flavors. Most of their flavors are dark chocolate, this is one of the few that are milk chocolate.

What I'm making- furniture.

 Last week on garbage pick up day, I found this little   wrought iron table on the curb. It was dirty and rusty and the glass top was missing. It had probably been used outdoors, so   the rain had caused some damage.
But I liked the shape and thought it could be a good project.

I used a wire brush to clean off the rust and  sanded the rusty spots to get them as smooth as possible, but they  didn't get perfectly  smooth.
Then I  primed the whole piece with a white stain blocking primer spray paint. Then I went to go get some  spray paint for the finish coat. I had planned to maybe do an off white paint with clear acrylic top. I went  first to TAP Plastics to look at their remnant pieces of acrylic. I found a piece big enough  but it was a smoked glass color. So that changed my whole  plan for the paint color- now I was looking for a  paint that would go well with the smoked acrylic. OI  hoped to find something in a dark pewter metallic- darker than silver, but still cool toned. I did not find anything like that at Orchard Supply Hardware,  but they did have a cool  hammered look spray paint in dark bronze.  I figured the hammered look would help camouflage the uneven texture from the rusty spots.
 Here is the finished table, I really like how the dark bronze goes with the smoke color top. You can click the photo to zoom in.

Easter treats reviews

I picked up some Easter goodies. Some of them are new things I've never seen before.

1. Oreos with Peeps marshmallow filling- These are limited edition, the oreo cookie is the golden color vanilla cookie and the filling is bright pink. I generally prefer oreos with the chocolate cookie (and various flavors of filling), but I gave these a try. They are okay but they really just taste like vanilla cookie with vanilla filling, which is not very interesting to me.

2. Cadbury mini eggs  chocolate crunch and creme flavor.  These are your typical cookies & cream flavor with white chocolate and chocolate cookie crispy bits. They are okay but i think not as good as the  original  cadbury mini eggs.

 3. Peeps Filled Delights triple chocolate- These are a new thing, I have never seen  filled peeps before.  The peeps themselves are chocolate flavored,  then they have a fudgy cream filling, and the  bottom of the peep is dipped in chocolate. They are actually pretty decent.

4. Peeps Filled Delight vanilla caramel brownie flavor- The peep is white (vanilla), the filling is caramel, and  it's dipped in chocolate. I  don't really know where the brownie  is supposed to come in, but again they are pretty good.