Herr's Pizza Flavored Potato Chips

This video was a long time in the making and I'm really happy with it. My parents, the two other crazy people you'll hear in this recording, are the ones who got me into tasting stuff. They always have new snack products around the kitchen to try and we always experiment when we go out to eat or to events. Both of them are great with words and fantastic at storytelling, so I thought they'd make excellent potato chip testers. This slideshow proves that I am correct, again!

                                                                                                 

Last Night the Music Killed My Taste Test

This evening, Dante and I stopped at Mendocino Farms for dinner before I dropped him off at work for the graveyard shift. They have really interesting and delicious sandwiches there, if you've never gone, I highly recommend ordering a familiar sounding sandwich because more than likely, there will be some ingredient that gives you a little pleasant kick in the tongue, as has been my experience. And their spicy dijon potato salad is truly divine.

Mendocino Farms also has baskets full of chip varieties you just don't find too many other places if at all. Well, Dante and I got our sanwiches, sides and chips and sat down to enjoy them. We were going to start by recording a chip tasting of the Sour Cream N Chive and Barbeque flavors of Route 11 Potato Chips, but almost right before we started, this mind-scrambling music started playing overhead and it totally threw me off my chip-tasting-game. My crazy response to the music influenced Dante and there we have the perfect storm of bad taste tests. It is funny nonetheless. Enjoy.

Oh, the music festival I refer to is the Moogfest, and if you go to the Live In Concert from All Songs Considered site, you will see some Moogfest concerts available so you can experience them for yourself. That's just not my kind of music.

Beer & Pizza in Jingletown: An Audio Tasting

Watch/listen to this, another audio tasting, done with my friend, Aram, while we were in Jingletown, an arts district in the Bay Area, for its biannual artwalk.

The beer you see in the slide show that we refer to as Steelhead, isn't one of the Steelhead Fine Ales, but made by a former Steelhead brewmaster named Larry Lesterud. So we should have probably called it Lesterud's Suds, at least that is what I'm going to call it from now on! Lesterud is also a fantastic photographer. That's how we came to meet him. While perusing the galleries and workspaces that were participating in the artwalk, I found an awesome print of some graffiti that spelled out my name (Crazy serendipity!). I bought it and we got to talking with the photographer. I asked him for a card or something and he gave me one of his old brewmaster business cards, which got Aram to asking questions. Turns out he brewed a special beer just for the occasion and well, we just couldn't keep ourselves from trying it.

The pizza you see in the pictures is from Fist of Flour Pizza Company. Owned and operation by a really awesome master of pizzas named James Whitehead. Other artwalk goers, Aram and I stood around and talked with him and his assistant in front of his mobile wood-fired pizza oven for a while. The pizza, by the way was Freakin' Delicious. I had 3 slices of veggie and 1 slice of Margherita. All the slices as you might be able to tell from the slide show, were a quarter size of the whole pie. Whitehead uses a distinct sauce that set all other toppings off beautifully. It was the perfect combination of spicy, sweet and tangy tomato. The veggie had arugula and some type of mushroom on it from what I could tell. And the crust was like a soft cracker, a bit lavash-like,  charred at the edges. It wasn't like any thin crust I've tried, but I'm no pizza expert.

I would highly recommend attending the Jingletown Artwalk, if not to experience great original works, but to at least sample Lesterud's Suds and grab a slice.