Brandon Notices

Jelly Belly regularly comes out with new flavors every now and then. Their newest flavor is Chili Mango! It is being added immediately into the Official 50 Flavors (no rookie stage!). I haven't had the chance to try it yet, but Jelly Belly describes it as "fresh mango with a sprinkling of spicy chili." Considering that Mango is one of my least favorite Jelly Belly flavors, as well as the fact that I don't really care for very spicy food, I don't expect myself to enjoy this bean very much. I'll reserve commentary until I've tried it myself, though. Jelly Belly has, however, posted a picture of the bean online. It looks to be a dirty orange color, which might be hard to tell it from some other orange beans, but it also seems to have some dark specks of color too.

Along with Chili Mango, Jelly Belly is adding four other established flavors to the Official 50 Flavors mix: Pomegranate, Sunkist Lime, Mixed Berry Smoothie, and Sour Cherry. Mixed Berry Smoothie, I recall, is very good, and very smooth, and happens to be my favorite of the Smoothie Blend mix. Sour Cherry is also pretty damn good, and it's my favorite of the Sours mix. When Pomegranate was first introduced as a rookie in 2007, I originally dismissed it as Jelly Belly jumping on the health-consciousness bandwagon, but when I tried it, I was pleased by its sweet flavor and slight tartness. (Açaí Berry, which is also based on one of the healthy fad fruits, won the recent flavor vote, and Jelly Belly will be making it a rookie flavor too before long. Sigh, I voted for Honey...) I'm unfamiliar with Sunkist Lime, since I haven't tried the Sunkist Citrus mix but I bet it has a strong, sweet flavor.

To make room in the Official 50 Flavors (Why stop at 50? Variety is the spice of life!), Jelly Belly is retiring five older flavors. Jalapeño is being hurled out, with the door slamming on its butt. Good riddance. Grape Jelly is also gone, which might sound like bad news for the grape crowd, but as long as Jelly Belly keeps making its Soda Pop Shoppe mix, Grape Crush will pass as an alternative. Peanut Butter is also being retired. This is fine by me. For some reason, it reminds me of the Bertie Bott's Ear Wax Bean. I wonder if the peanut-allergic community is celebrating this bean's retirement. Café Latte is gone too. It was hardly one of my favorite flavors, mainly because I'm not really a coffee person. For the coffee aficionados, Cappuccino is still in the mix. Lastly, Caramel Apple is gone, which isn't a huge hit, since Jelly Belly also already has Green Apple, Red Apple, Pineapple, Sour Apple, and Cold Stone Apple Pie. Uh, cross out Pineapple. But still, my Jelly Belly Carnival won't be the same with only Cotton Candy and Caramel Corn...

I am recalling some older flavors Jelly Belly experimented around with. Cinnamon Toast was the most delectable bean I'd ever had. It was sweet and sugary, and even tasted better than the real thing (trust me, I did a taste test—it wasn't a blinded test, though). C'mon, Jelly Belly, please bring this bean back!

This is from the cover of the menu at Sabor a Mèxico in Mukilteo. I'm a bit confused about when they open on the weekend. That's okay, I'll just stay home.

I found the Charlie Brown popcorn tin! It was $4.88 at the Mukilteo Rite Aid. This is awesome!



The tin has two scenes. The first is Charlie hanging the red ornament on his scraggly tree. This is moments before his Christmas is temporarily ruined.



The other side has all the kids gathered happily around the tree. This picture is very faithful to the original scene—the tree is decorated the same, and the kids are all arranged the same way

I saw this on the X-Entertainment Blog today. It's one a popcorn tin sectioned into three flavors. I like eating popcorn (especially the cheese-flavored popcorn—the caramel, not so much), and these popcorn tins are great to have around during the Christmas season. What's even better is that it has a scene from the Charlie Brown Christmas on it! I have to get one of these.

Oh my god.



I'm eating a bowl of Cheddar & Sour Cream Ruffles, and I encountered this at the bottom of the bowl. It appears to be a clump of the powder they coat the chips in.

Should I eat it? Would it be good? Would it be too much flavor for one man to handle? Could this kill me? How did it come into being? Is it a mistake, or does Frito-Lay occasionally include these as gifts?

I'm going to eat it.

There is a teensy potato chip inside. The flavor isn't nearly as strong as I imagined—I'm a bit disappointed. It tastes just like eating a handful of chips, only it nearly isn't as big. I wouldn't mind encountering more cheese clumps during the rest of my life, though.

S'mores are pretty good, aren't they? But you know what sucks when you're making them? You get the graham cracker, and then you try to break it in half, but it doesn't break perfectly along the perforation, so you're left with two uneven halves of the graham cracker. Misery.

But Nabisco has solved the problem of the ruined graham cracker halves. Squares! Essentially, they have released pre-halved graham crackers. No more wasted graham crackers!

I think Nabisco may have stumbled upon the most brilliant invention of the 21st Century.

I was reading Here Comes Garfield, the comic book adaptation of the first Garfield TV special, when I noticed something odd. In the course of the story, this scene does absolutely nothing to forward the plot, and was probably included only to allow the audience to watch Garfield indulge, but it just doesn't make sense. Please click the thumbnail to read a few pages.

Garfield smells food in the middle of the night and goes downstairs to play with it and eat it. The big question is why there is food set out on the table overnight. We can see after Garfield crawls out of his bed that Jon is asleep in his own bed. So why did Jon leave all this food out? He left out a block of Swiss cheese, some eggs, a huge bowl of potato salad, spaghetti, an entire ham, and a pan of lasagna, among other less perishable foods.

There's nothing in the story to indicate that Jon became so tired that he went to bed without cleaning up after his humongous dinner. Garfield hasn't hassled Jon since breakfast because he was out all day teasing the neighbors and lamenting that Odie got captured and taken to the pound.

It's possible that Jon left this food out for Garfield because he figured he would be hungry, not having eaten since breakfast. But I doubt that. We'll just assume that Jon is not used to having to put food away because Garfield usually eats it all anyway.

One of my favorite snacks is popcorn. I like it because it's not unhealthy if it isn't coated in greasy butter, and also because it is fun to pop. The popcorn I like to eat has trace amounts of fat, so I feel good in knowing as I eat it that it won't instantly kill me.

Of course, plain, non-buttery popcorn can get a little boring after a while, which is why I like to add popcorn seasoning. I have several flavors of seasoning.

Dean Jacob's 4 Popcorn Butters
Dean Jacob's is the company that makes all those cylindrical shakers with partitions that hold 4 or more different spices, herbs, seasonings, etc. Their popcorn butter mix is visible in the back of the picture. It has four flavors:

Butter Salt

It's not too bad. It definitely has a buttery flavor to it, and it also has a touch of tangy salt. It's not bad, but not very interesting, either. It would be horribly boring to add to buttered popcorn.

Garlic Butter

Very tasty. Adds a very gourmet-like garlicky taste to popcorn. Adding just a little bit of this can really change the taste of popcorn. Adding too much overwhelms the popcorn's flavor.

Buttery Toffee

The sweetest flavor I have. At first, I was afraid I would hate it, but I don't. I'm not too familiar with eating toffee, but I think it tastes like caramel. But I can't have too much of it, or I get sick of it.

Buttery Herbs & Jalapeno

This is by far the spiciest flavor in my collection. (Did you know that spiciness is a combination of the sensations of heat and pain?) Spicy popcorn seems kinda weird at first, but it's good, as long as you have a nice cool drink to have with it.

Kernel Season's Popcorn Seasoning
These are really tasty! Their website says they have 14 different flavors, but I've only seen 5 in stores—and of those, I've only tried 3 (because salt is boring, and I don't like caramel too much). Other flavors I'd like to try are Parmesan & Garlic, Ranch, Sour Cream & Onion, and maybe Chocolate Marshmallow. Here are the flavors I have tried:

Nacho Cheddar

This is the first flavor I tried, and it's really good! I like cheese, and I like nachos, and the transition to popcorn is very good. The bright orange color is a little disconcerting, but it has a rich, strong flavor.

Butter

Like Butter Salt listed above, this flavor is fine to have every once in a while, but it isn't anything to get too excited about.

White Cheddar

This is my absolute favorite flavor! It's cheesy and tasty, and even a little tangy. I add a little more of this than I probably should to popcorn, but it's just too tasty. I can eat an entire bag sprinkled with this flavor without getting tired of it.

Our fridge is chock full of leftover pizza, lasagna, and birthday cake. Stephanie had a birthday party Saturday night at Spiro's, which is a restaurant I had never heard of a month ago. It's an Italian food place. A week before the party, we went to the restaurant to try the food. Stephanie didn't want it to be just a "pizza party", so she thought she would try the lasagna. I was a little surprised when the server told us that the lasagna has broccoli in it; Mom told me I should try it, but I was having my first ever calzone. Awww, baby Brandon's first calzone.

Stephanie's party seemed to be fun for everybody. I really liked the Caesar salad, so I ate a lot of it. The garlic bread at Spiro's really is uninspired and not very garlicky. Mom and Stephanie ordered three pizzas and a big hundred-dollar tray of lasagna. I was right in hypothesizing that the pizza would be much more popular than the lasagna, so now we have several boxes of lasagna in our fridge. We also have pizza, but the only pizza we have leftover now is the Hawaiian pizza, which has pineapple in it, and I can't eat that. It's just too weird having the juicy fruit in the pizza. We also have lots of cake, but I don't think it's healthy to gorge on that.

Stephanie asked me to take pictures at the party, including a group shot. I set up the timer on my camera, and told it to take ten pictures. The guests at first were a little agitated, but then they started getting silly for the camera. After I got home, I used a new program created by Microsoft, Group Shot. It's pretty cool. It's designed to take care of situations when at least one person in every picture is blinking. You tell the program what portions of what picture to include in a composition. I created one good picture and one silly one. Can you tell which is which?



I could go through and reduce the red eyes, but I don't feel like it. Now that I think about it, maybe it would have been funny to have the camera do its red-eye-reducing flashes, but that would certainly have blinded everyone at the party.

I've done some other weird pictures with this Group Shot program:



Admittedly, I could easily have done this in Photoshop, but it was really easy with Group Shot.

What do you think when I show you this picture of a pair of raggedy, non-corn-fed puppet chickens?



If you thought of Foster Farms, then you would be correct. But isn't there something a little odd here? You saw a picture of two disgusting, inferior chickens, and you thought of Foster Farms? I'm sure that this isn't the image that Foster Farms wants to portray, so it's a little unfortunate that I think of Foster Farms when I see this chicken duo.

A bunch of us are eating at Azteca. The waitress serving us was very strict in reminding us of the "one per table" clause of a coupon Mom wanted to use. However, she really didn't care to listen to my reasoning that our party is sitting at what is actually THREE tables, pushed together. Only when it comes to coupons does the definition of "table" change.

Tuna Noodle Gratin. It sounds really good, doesn't it? The picture on the box makes it look very appetizing, but when I went ahead and microwaved the meal, it ended up looking like slop. The box says that there is a "creamy sauce", but I would never have guessed from the picture that there would be so much of it! I wish there were more crunchy breadcrumbs, too, but they just kinda got buried under the sauce.

I know it's usually a given that the picture on the box will look better than the actual product, but come on, isn't this a bit of a stretch here? I'm not saying the food tasted bad—it was quite delicious, actually—but it just didn't look that good.

I'm still hungry. These things never fill me up.

It started today at Bartell Drugs, where I got a bag of Wild Berry Skittles. I've had them at least once before, and I really like them. But it's kinda odd because I refuse to eat actual berries. That's right. It just so happens that strawberries, blueberries, blackberries, etc., are not my favorite foods. I won't eat them in crepes, and I am reluctant to eat a pie made out of them.

So why am I so quick to accept them in candy flavors? Wild Berry Skittles are so yummy that I eat them by the handful. Jelly Belly's Berry Blue bean is one of my favorite flavors. And when it comes to lollipops, I'm most likely to pick the raspberry one over, say, sour apple or chocolate. And yet, I hesitate to eat a single blueberry. It is interesting.

On a separate note, I think that Berry Skittles is a cool name and I will probably use it next time I can't think of what to name a character in a work of fiction.

I saw this box of butter at Safeway and it got me to think about how challenging it can be to spread butter sometimes. Especially when you've just pulled it out of the fridge and It's still very solid. I don't think I would buy Challenge Butter because regular butter is already tricky enough.

I was cooking myself a hot dog and was pulling out a bun for the hot dog when I noticed something odd. You know the tag thing that keeps the hot dog bag closed? It has the expiration date printed on it, but it says FEB29. Now wait a minute! There is no February 29 this year! Does this mean that the hot dog buns do not expire until the leap day next year?

We took a family trip to Chevy's tonight and before we ordered, Mom showed the waiter a coupon she was planning to use, but he interruped her to say, "Actually, ma'am, we're not accepting coupons tonight because of..." something unintelligible. When we asked him to repeat himself, he said that it's President's Day and it's a holiday so they aren't taking any coupons.

After he left, I was cracking up because it was a rather sorry excuse not to take a coupon. I mean, the place seemed to have just as many customers as normal. Dad said that it isn't really a holiday if you have to wait tables all night.

I stopped at a snack machine in the basement of Mary Gates Hall just a few minutes ago; I saw some of the Cheddar and Sour Cream Ruffles in the machine, but was very frustrated to see that they were positioned behind two bags of Flamin' Hot Cheetos. I am of the opinion that snack machine fillers should NOT do this to me! I don't like spicy Cheetos. I left without buying anything.

I microwaved this donut to make it warmer. It's a custard-filled, chocolate-iced donut I got from Safeway two days ago. The problem with me having heated it is that the icing has liquefied, and I can't pick up the donut without getting melted icing on my hands. And the icing is running off the side of the donut. So now I have to eat it with a fork.

My sister went to music camp today, and my mom went with her, so they aren't here. Before they left, Mom gave me a coupon for Chevy's, and told me that Dad and I could go to Chevy's for dinner. "Okay, probably." Then, a few hours later, my cousin Kevin IM'd me and said that he wanted to treat Dad and me to dinner, coincidentally at Chevy's. I told him he could use our coupon, and so we went to Chevy's tonight.

Now, this wasn't any ordinary coupon. This was a Mexican Poker coupon. The idea was that the coupon came with two tiny pictures of cards. We could take these cards to Chevy's, and compare them with three other cards posted there to make up our poker hand. Our hand determined the type of discount we would get.

The cards we had were the six of diamonds and the ace of hearts. Kevin pointed out to me before we left that we already automatically had the Ace High, so we knew we couldn't lose. Then we arrived at Chevy's and eagerly ran to the poster to see what the other three cards of the hand were. And one of the other cards was an ace! This means that everybody won at least the Ace High. But we had a Pair. That was worth $5 off!

I ordered a steak quesadilla, but they brought so many chips with so much salsa before my quesadilla arrived that I got full mostly on delicious chips and couldn't finish my quesadilla. Then, after the meal, the waiter seemed disappointed that we didn't want dessert. If they didn't fill us on chips, maybe we'd order dessert.

I guess the moral of the story is this: You can't eat both chips and dessert.

I got Mario POWER Tennis yesterday. It's awesome. I already unlocked four characters! I like Koopa Troopa. In the N64 version, I chose Paratroopa every time, but he wasn't available at first. I like Koopa Troopa's defensive power shot. It's swirly!

Guess what. I just finished an entire candy cane without it breaking! Ususally always when I eat a candy cane, it breaks. It's always so frustrating. I took care with this last candy cane to make sure it wouldn't break.

So on The Sims, last time Michelle was here, Michelle asked one of Stephanie's Sims to move in to her house. Some time after, Stephanie was upset that one of her Sims was taken from her house, so I told her to just have one of her Sims ask the other Sim to move back. And guess what she did. She asked that Sim, and another Sim from Michelle's house to move in. So great. Now all Michelle has is a teenager. The teenager can't ask anyone to move in, and nobody from Stephanie's house can ask the teenager to move in. I think Stephanie mutilated Michelle's family. I don't know what I can do to fix this.