Archive for January, 2010

Pepsi Throwback: Is It Good?

UPDATE: It’s coming back! According to this tweet from Pepsi, Pepsi Throwback — and, I assume, the Mountain Dew Throwback as well — are coming back for another 5-week run, starting August 1st 2010.

If you’ve been reading this blog a while, you might already know my obsession with sugar-sweetened sodas (like Ting). So, last summer, when I heard Pepsi was coming out with a sugar-sweetened version called Pepsi Throwback, I looked for it everywhere. I didn’t find anywhere in NYC, so when we drove to Massachusetts for a wedding, I looked in every gas station mini-mart from New Jersey to the Mass Pike. Once it became fall, I stopped looking and eventually gave up.

Then, last week, a friend posted a photo of a case of Pepsi Throwback she had just bought. According to Pepsi’s site, “[d]ue to all the Throwback tweets, Facebook fan pages, videos, blog posts, pics & pleas, Pepsi Throwback is back” — at least until February 28th.

So… is it good? The Pepsi, definitely. The formula appears to be the same as a HFCS Pepsi (e.g. pretty sweet), so if you’re fond of that, you’ll love this. I sometimes wished I was drinking Coke Throwback instead, but it’s still very good. The Mountain Dew… a bit less great. It’s either sweeter than a regular HFCS Mountain Dew, or it’s less citrus, or both. Still, the sugar really makes all the difference in the world. There’s no filmy mouth feel, no glorky (yes, I say it’s a word) feel in your throat afterward. I’m already looking around my apartment to figure out where I can stash multiple cases of this stuff for the summer.

Tags: mountain dew, no HFCS, pepsi, soda
Category Product Reviews |

Wednesday Web Roundup

New (and semi-depressing) blog Fed Up: School Lunch Project is written by a teacher who plans to eat her school’s hot lunch every day in 2010. I know we all know school lunch is crappy, but to see each lunch (like the one pictured above), one after the other, is downright grim.

And the polar opposite of that Salisbury steak? Pljeskavicas—or “Balkan burgers”—as seen in this week’s New York Times food section. I think a trip out to Astoria is in the near future for me.

Category In The News, It's a DYN-O-SITE! |

Photo Friday: Sabroso

If you closely enough, you can see it actually says RINCON SABROSO (which means something like “tasty corner”).

Tags: photography
Category NYC, Photo Friday |

Tuna Salad (Minus The Mercury)

I love tuna salad. Canned white tuna, with minced celery and pickle, some mayonnaise and maybe a few capers… if I could eat that as often as I’d like, I’d end up as mad as a hatter (or maybe just as mad as Jeremy Piven) due to the elevated levels of mercury in canned tuna.

What’s a tuna-phile to do?

Fake it.

Fake Tuna Salad

Mash 2-3 cups of chickpeas with the tines of a fork. (You could trying using a food processor but one pulse too far and you’ve got hummus instead.) This can be a little tedious but the resulting texture is more appealing. To pass the time, I recommend Pandora’s Oldies Soul station, as pictured above. Add minced celery, pickle, mayonnaise, or whatever your mom added to tuna salad when you were a kid.

Category Doing More With Less, Green is Gezellig, Recipes, Vegetarian Recipes |

Veselka, I love you; ya tebe lyublyu, Veselka.

Almost ten years ago, my not-yet-husband took me to NYC for my 26th birthday. I’ve written about this trip before, about how eating at La Caridad on the Upper West Side made me want to live in New York, but that wasn’t the only place we went on that trip that turned my head around.

The other? Veselka.

Unlike my first trip to La Caridad, I was already familiar with the Eastern European food of Veselka (thanks mostly to Brookline’s amazing Zaftigs) but while the look and feel of La Caridad is much like any other Chinese (sans Cuban) joint in America, Veselka exuded New York-ness to me. Busy, a little crowded, a little loud, slightly foreign but not enough so to be unsettling, and perhaps most importantly, the feeling that it had been there forever.

Even after more than three year of living here, I still feel the same way. I don’t go there as often as I’d like, although I do make it a point to eat their incredible Christmas borscht at least once (if not many more times) every December.

For those of you who have never been to New York (or those of you who have and now miss it), today’s New York Times has a long, lovely article about Veselka—and better still, an adaptation of its Christmas borscht recipe.

Tags: east village, why I moved here in the first place
Category NYC |