Can You Steal a Horse With Ice Cream?

You can lead a horse to water but can you steal one with an ice cream cone? I decided to find out. Now you can learn the answer without having to be horse-adjacent yourself. Just click on the video!

M&M New Flavor Voting

The M&M turns 75 this year. Yep, it was three quarters of a century ago that Old Man Mars kind of ripped off the idea for encasing chocolate in a hard candy shell after he saw soldiers eating British Smarties during the Spanish Civil War. (Let’s just call it an “homage” and move on.)

My favorites, the Peanut M&Ms, were added to the line up in 1954 so this 75^th anniversary retro 1960s-style packaging I got today is accurate.

Except for the blue M&Ms inside, that is. Those didn’t come along until 1995 when customer voting replaced the old tan M&M with a new bright blue kind. (Don’t blame me, I voted for purple.)

For year number 75 (and, obviously, for advertising purposes) M&Ms is doing another vote. This time they’re looking for a new nut flavor. For a limited time, you can find all three choices in stores: Chili Nut, Honey Nut and Coffee Nut.  Let's take a quick look at each variety. 

Chili Nut

When it comes to sauces I like a little spice with my sweet so I expected to love these but they just left me cold. Not much extra taste at all – in fact, the nut actually seemed to get in the way of the chocolate – and, on top of that, the chili nut burn was mostly just a slight back-of-the-throat irritation. “Not as good and slightly irritating” probably isn't the advertising slogan they're looking for. Chili Nut does not get my vote.

Coffee Nut

If you like coffee the Coffee Nut kind are pretty good. I don’t like coffee so, no. No thank you.

Honey Nut

These are sweet and earthy and remind me of pancakes with chocolate chips. Oh yeah, Honey Nut M&Ms get my vote for sure. 

All voting is being conducted on Facebook, by-the-way (where I’m pretty sure real voting will take place any year now. ) Click the link if you want to cast your ballot: https://www.facebook.com/mms/app/1016130751780697

And remember, if you don’t vote, you can’t complain.

Here’s a bonus, advanced technique. Mix the Honey Nut and the Coffee Nut kinds together for Coffee and Pancakes M&Ms. 

But you have to do it before 11:59 pm on June 17^th. That’s when voting ends and all but the winner will be gone from stores. Well, the winner and the Chili Nut kind. I can’t imagine those disappointing bastards will sell out any time soon.

National Donut Day!

Today is “National Donut Day”. I’m not sure who invents all these dumb fake holidays and gets them sort of semi-officially recognized but they deserve a dumb, fake, semi-officially recognized holiday of their own for coming up with this one. That’s because, unlike National Itch Day or National Impersonate Authority Day (both of which are also today so get your scratching finger warmed up and your police officer costume out (and also your bail money because that’s illegal)), National Donut Day can get you a free donut. Seriously. Several shops are offering them but the only one I’m going to mention by name is Krispy Kreme. That’s because here in Los Angeles, the Land of a Bajillion Donuts, Krispy Kreme is the only one who won’t screw you over with the chocolate iced cream filleds.

Seriously, Los Angeles. Why can’t I reliably get a chocolate iced cream filled donut out here? All I ever find is chocolate iced custard filled. And the worst part is that the two look exactly alike from the outside. You never know you’ve been had until you’ve already bitten into it and your mouth is filled with slimy, snot-colored, gross custard rather than fluffy, bright white, delicious cream. And asking the person behind the counter doesn’t always help because, for some reason, people here don’t seem to know the difference. The terminology is off. Maybe it’s because the custard filled is sometimes called “Boston Cream” or “Bavarian Cream”. I don’t know but there should be a law. Those damned things must be clearly labeled! We’ve got a big election coming up in November. I need to know where the candidates stand on this issue. You want my vote, you've got to tackle the important stuff.

Anyway, Krispy Kreme is the only place in Los Angeles that I’ve been able to reliably find a real cream filled donut so they get my endorsement on this most magical day of the year. Find one near you and ask for your freebie. Just stay away from the cream filled. Those are mine. 

By-the-way, notice how I didn't make a single hack dress-up-as-a-cop-eat-a-donut-joke even though I could have tied those two dumb fake holidays together? You're very welcome.

The Drinking of the Green

Today I'm celebrating St. Patrick's Day the only way a junk food junky knows how…with a Shamrock Shake and a Fillet-O-Fish. I love ethnic food!

The Only Kind of Vegetables You Ever Really Need

For a someone with a junk food jones, the arrival of spring is heralded not by the blooming of flowers and the budding of trees but by an explosion of fresh, new, colorful life somewhere else: The grocery store candy isle. Yep, it’s that magical time of year when the Easter candy is in bloom. Take this from the Lindt company, for example:

At no other point in the year are you going to get chocolate carrots!

Carrot shaped and foil wrapped, the Lindt Chocolate Carrots are a solid mix of milk chocolate and hazelnut. It’s the taste combo that has made Nutella so popular lately and Ferrero Rocher a Christmas holiday seasonal favorite.

Also, you kind of pull each carrot from the box like you pull carrots from the ground and they come on little sticks so you can eat them without the chocolate melting all over your hands. Nice touches.

Okay, the bottom line is that if you’re craving  the chocolate/hazelnut taste, stick with the other guys. I mean, Lindt’s Chocolate Carrots are okay but you’re going to find better candy snacks out there. On the other hand, if you’re looking for something fun for your kid’s Easter basket you could do a whole lot worse. Chocolate carrots are just kind of cool. They’re like chocolate bunny food!

Wait, chocolate carrots and chocolate bunnies are both made of chocolate so is feeding chocolate carrots to a chocolate bunny actually forced cannibalism? I guess Easter candy shopping isn’t all fun and games. Sometimes you have to grapple with the tough questions.

Valentine's Day!

Ever since that time back in the Middle Ages when a guy named Saint Valentine figured out that he could trick women into pressuring their significant others (or dudes who wanted to have a significant encounter with them) into buying more stuff from Valentine’s Ye Olde Combination Florist Jewelry Greeting Card Candy Shoppe, we’ve celebrated February 14^th by shelling out big piles of cash for tons of heart-shaped crap. I don’t care about the flowers, the cards, or the over-priced gemstones but you know I love me some special seasonal junk food. Here’s the stuff I dug into this year. Rest assured that what I lacked in variety I more than made up for in volume.

Russell Stover probably rakes in most of its money this time of year and I certainly contributed my share to their bottom line by eating a pile of Russell Stover Hearts.

Biting through the milk chocolate shell into either strawberry, chocolate truffle or marshmallow filling always makes me thankful for holiday over-commercialization.

I’ve sung the praises of special holiday Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups in these pages many times in the past so I won’t go into a lot of detail about why Old Man Reese makes the top candy out there but I will say that his Valentine’s stuff is the best of the best. This season I consumed all three sizes of Reese’s Valentine Hearts.

The small ones have a prettier shape (which apparently matters to some people), thicker chocolate and less peanut butter.

 I liked them a lot but I prefer the middle size (which I found two to a King Size pack):

They might be a little uglier... 

… but the peanut butter-to-chocolate ratio is much better for me.

And then there’s this big boy, the best of the best:

The King Hell Giant Reese’s Heart (at least that’s what I call it) is probably my favorite single candy item of all time. Saint Valentine should be worshiped for giving us this chunk of chocolate-peanut butter heaven-on-earth. All hail Saint Valentine!

And, finally, the weirdest grab for my seasonal dollar that I saw all year was this:

Jack Links Beef Jerky in a fur-ringed heart-shaped box. Despite the fact that fur on a box of meat snacks kind of grossed me out a little – not to mention that I generally don’t like to eat food that sheds on my sweatshirt when I handle it – 

-- I couldn’t wait to open this thing up and behold the glory inside. I imagined a Whitman’s Sampler-style layout: Many varieties of jerky in their own little compartments just waiting for me to dig in and try each one. Then I popped the top and found this:

Yep. They just put a regular old bag of jerky into a fancy box and charged more. If that isn’t true to the original Valentine’s Day spirit, I don’t know what is.

February 14^th might be the second best candy holiday of the year. The first best is today, February 15^th. All the same candy but now its on sale! Let’s go shopping!

BONUS HISTORICAL FACT: Cupid became an official part of the holiday in 1588 when a demented, winged baby archer went on a rampage, shooting arrows into the hearts of random passers-by. This was known as the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre. And now you know. Who needs school when you've got Junk Food Jones?