Food Ho, High on Life

Gentle Readers, I attach proof that I am indeed a Food Ho. That's me, aged five, dressed as a witch for Halloween. Why? Because witches are scary and frighten people into giving them more candy than say a princess would. (In truth, it's the other way around. But I digress.)

I am home sick today with a sprained back. This is Day Three of drugs and bed rest prior to a trip to the hospital to meet up with Dr. Q and his magic fingers. The drugs make me veer between nausea and a ravenous state in which I am willing to devour just about anything, including the item below.

These are--and NO, I am NOT KIDDING--"butter flavored" Chips Ahoy cookies. They were foul. I recall from my childhood that each Chip Ahoy is supposed to contain something like 17 chips minimum but these contained roughly five chips each and had a pissy chemical "butter" taste that was akin to the smell of microwave popcorn, extra greasy. Ugh. I paid 4.5 RMB for 9 tiny cookies that left a distinctly unpleasant aftertaste, not that they tasted that good going down. Thank God for the next item, a cheap Beijing standard known as the Bitter Coffee ice cream. I paid a whopping 2.5 kuai for this--about a quarter--for a standard popsicle size frozen dairy treat. There's a very, very thin layer of something on the outside that is almost chocolate, and the inside is a semi-sweet coffee ice cream. It's a bit grainy, and not as heavily coffee flavored as in the past, but it's pretty ok. It's actually less grainy than before, so there seems to be some trade-off involved: tastes great, less filling, perhaps.

Let's say you want a delicious quick and creamy treat--throw this with a splash of milk and a dash of Kahlua into your Magic Bullet (the blender, not the sex toy) and whirl it into an adult beverage.

At some point I nodded off due to a combination of Valium and Buffy Season 7, and when I awoke I was hungry enough to try this last one. It's corn-flavored ice cream which is actually shaped to resemble  an ear of corn. The texture is  creamy--almost as creamy as "real" ice cream and it has a thick sweet creamed corn taste which I found nauseating (down to the last bite, I might add.) The outer part is a thin sweet waffle cone which is imprinted cleverly to resemble an ear of corn. Since "corn" is a big flavor here--there's corn flavored milk, corn flavored yogurt, corn-flavored breath mints (yeech) it's not too surprising that in terms of texture, corn flavored ice cream is the creamiest, free of annoying chucks of ice crystal, well worth the quarter if corn--known to my nerdy friends as the "see you later food," a fact they proclaim loudly without stopping anytime I serve them anything with corn in it -- is your favorite taste sensation.Having overdosed on these "treats" as well as quite possibly the Valium, I am craving wholesome food in the form of potato chips. Whoops, that will have to be another post because it's damned hard to find plain ol' potato chips here--they're all flavored with Lime (not bad) or Green Tea or Italian Red Meat and what I want is this: someone to bring me food, no matter what it is, and to keep the dogs off me while I chow down. Staying after and walking those two little doggy bastards so I can stay in my pajamas for another twelve hours would be a bonus.