Blogs : Products
Products Information about kitchen gadgets, design trends, cookware, gift ideas, bakeware, appliances, and gourmet food products.
New Finds: Maple Bitters from Vermont
Vermont-based Urban Moonshine makes maple bitters using organic botanicals. Imbibe has a nice cocktail idea on its blog for using them, courtesy of John Gertsen of Drink in Boston. We think they’d be a delicious addition to our Log Cabin cocktail recipe: apple brandy, maple liqueur, sparkling apple cider, and lemon juice.
If you want to try your hand at making your own bitters, we also have easy recipes for grapefruit, saffron-cardamom, and cherry-vanilla, among others.
Urban Moonshine Maple Bitters, $10.99
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New Finds: Irresistible Peppermint Patties
Recchiuti Confections recently sent over some samples of its holiday chocolate lineup to the CHOW office, and though the truffles were good, printing some Christmas-related crap on top of the same old dark-chocolate ganache doesn’t really seem all that new or exciting. What was new, however, was the appearance of peppermint thins. They’re bite-sized, extremely minty, and coated with dark, intense chocolate. Now Recchiuti just needs to start making them the same size as those big York Peppermint Patties.
Recchiuti Peppermint Thins, $18 for a box of 24
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New Finds: Parker's Guide to Cheap Wine
Yet another sign of the times. Hot on the heels of Michelin FINALLY reviewing moderately priced food in New York, along comes Parker’s Wine Bargains, a book from wine expert Robert Parker that covers the best wines costing less than $25. The book is organized by country and has tasting notes for more than 3,000 wines.
Parker’s Wine Bargains, $12.14
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Business Cards You Can Eat
You want a new business card, but you’re just not sure your design is memorable enough. So, instead of ordering yet another humdrum average card, why not try Meat Cards on for size?
Meat Cards are made using real beef jerky, with the information burned on to the meat with a 150-watt carbon dioxide laser.
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New Finds: The Local Foods Wheel Hits New York
The San Francisco Bay Area has had one of these great local food wheels for a while, but now there’s a new version for the New York metro area. The rotating cardboard discs tell you what’s in season throughout the year; you can move the dial based on the month to see what you can consume and still be a locavore. The team that makes the wheels—Jessica Prentice, Sarah Klein, and Maggie Gosselin—dealt with the troublesome fact that nothing grows in the dead of winter in New York in a cute way. From mid-January to mid-March, there are pictures of a root cellar. Sweet potatoes, onions, dried beans, apples and such, are in crates below jars of apple cider and pickles, hanging cured meats, and crocks of sauerkraut, and kimchee. (CHOW has instructions on how to make sauerkraut.)
I’m happy to see that the locally-made items listed as “year round” include hard cider and maple candy. Now that’s a sustainable diet I can get behind.
Local Foods Wheel, New York Metro Area, $12.95.
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Ecto Cooler: The Holy Grail of Hi-C
Growing up, there were a lot of snacks “up for grabs” at the lunch table, but Hi-C’s Ecto Cooler flavor wasn’t one of them. If someone was actually willing to give it up or had packed two just in case, it would be traded for the grade-A foods like Doritos or Ding Dongs. I once even saw a kid give up an In-N-Out burger for one. And there was a reason for that: Ecto Cooler was amazing! It was a refreshing, sugary drink, with notes of lemon and lime, not to mention the wonderful coating it left in your mouth; something that Jolly Ranchers went for but never achieved.
According to Wikipedia, the Ecto Cooler flavor first came onto the scene in 1987, as a product tie-in to the animated series, The Real Ghostbusters. Though it was only supposed to run for the length of the show, it was so successful that it continued on 10 years after the cartoon had been canceled. And when the drink did leave the shelves, Matt Caracappa, founder of the blog X-Entertainment, revealed that the drink wasn’t discontinued at all, but just renamed to Shoutin’ Orange Tangergreen. It got renamed again to Crazy Citrus Cooler, and was finally laid to rest a few years back.
There’s still seems to be a soft spot in people’s hearts for Ecto Cooler: It has a large Facebook following, there’s a cocktail inspired by it, someone even went through the trouble of buying the domain for ectocooler.com, though so far the website only features a broken YouTube video link.
So Minute Maid, here’s my plea: Since Ghostbusters the Video Game was recently released, and a new Ghostbusters film is supposedly in the works (slated to be released in 2012), the momentum is building, and the sound market advice seems plain as day: BRING BACK ECTO COOLER! You could really diversify this time, with an Ecto Energy Drink, a mixer for cocktails, you could even market an organic version, made with raw cane sugar, because many of us who lived through the heyday of Ecto Cooler are now subjugated to the pressures of eating a more “progressive” diet.
I am firing off a carefully worded letter to Minute Maid and hopefully I’ll hear back. I’ll let you guys know if anything happens.
Image source: That’s Important!
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