Epic Portions

Author: admin

  • Epic Product Reviews: Multigrain Pringles

    Before I begin my review of Multigrain Pringles, I would like to acknowledge that we have spoken about Pringles quite often here at EP.  There is precedent for this; for example, Ernest Hemmingway once wrote a little known novel called A Farewell to Pringles.  And did you know that the original title of Tolstoy’s War and Peace was War, Peace, and Pringles?  So now that you are up to date on the noble literary tradition of writing about Pringles, let us explore the new Multigrain version of this mouthwatering muse.

    Multigrain Pringles…you are better off puting tennis balls in the can and sharing with your Golden Retriever.

    Alliteration aside, I feel I need to begin my review by saying that Multigrain Pringles ARE NOT mouthwatering.  Once every couple months I get a Pringles craving.  When I buy a can, it is usually gone within two days after my wife and son discover it.  So while shopping at Kroger last week, I noticed the addition of Multigrain Pringles to the lineup, and since they were on sale for quite a bargain price I took a chance.  Did I expect them to achieve the deliciousity of Original Pringles, or my favorite, Cheesy Pringles?  No, but I honestly did expect them to be pretty good.  They fell short of even that low expectation.

    Maybe it is the fact that they taste so unlike what I expect in a Pringle.  Maybe it is the fact that they are so dramatically inferior to the world’s number one multigrain chip, Sunchips.  But the greatest evidence of their poor taste is the fact that half the can is still in my cupboard after one week.   They aren’t awful, but the only thing I could say after eating one was…why?  What is the point?  Does anyone seek out Pringles when hoping looking for a healthy snack?

    You call them, MISTER Sunchips!

    I know why Pringles unleashed this culinary disgrace on the market.  Everything is going Multigrain.  Multigrain is the new fat free.  So, we as consumers now have to wade through a new layer of crap when shopping.  Here is a tip:  If a product you know and love is advertising themselves as Multigrain after having a perfectly acceptable product for many years, it is a marketing scam.  Why not try to wring a few extra bucks out of obese America.  We’re all so worried about our weight that we are desperate for anything, even Multigrain Pringles.

    I still don’t know why Pringles felt the need to do this.  Yes, yes, I understand marketing and grabbing a slice of the latest fad.  But Pringles already makes fat free diarrhea chips with Olestra.  Notice how they latched on to that fad as well.  Does Frito-Lay even make their disgusting WOW brand chips anymore?

    Wow! Now with 33% more abdominal cramping!

    So what can I say…avoid Multigrain Pringles.  I did try Original and not the cheesy flavor but I can’t possibly see how fake cheese powder can dramatically improve this product.  Spend an extra buck or two and buy Cheddar Sunchips.  Now if you will excuse me, I am going to return to the latest tome I am reading:  John Steinbeck’s classic, The Pringles of Wrath.

  • Soccer Ball Birfday Cake!

    My friend Jamie loves soccer – I mean, really loves soccer – so there was hardly any other choice for his birthday a few weeks ago than a 3-D soccer cake.

    It ended up as an ice-cream-filled chocolate cake with two kind of icing, and since that’s a little much even for me, I had some MUCH-appreciated help on this one from Jamie’s girlfriend Julia. This was really more about the idea than the recipe, so we went with some tried and true favorites:

    First, I baked Martha’s Ultimate Chocolate Cake, only instead of using a normal old traditional cake pan I made it in a 5.5qt stainless steel bowl. And I baked it… well, for awhile. One hour and forty-five minutes awhile. Seriously, just leave it in there and just keep checking it. It’s going to take forever.

    Once it’s done, you need to cool it down.  Having taken nearly two hours to bake, it’s gonna take a long time to cool. I stuck it in the freezer; it didn’t actually help that much.  But, in my case, Julia was over so we used this time to make some tasty cream cheese frosting.  If you need a refresher on that, it’s pretty much the easiest thing ever: beat together a package of cream cheese and a stick of unsalted butter until fluffy, then add powdered sugar to taste.

    Also, soccer balls are black and white by nature, so we needed to make some black frosting.  Since Jamie’s favorite flavor of ice cream is mint chocolate chip, we made mint chocolate frosting and colored it black, but any dark-colored frosting would work. Definitely start with something already dark, though; we used an entire little pot of black Wilton’s dye and it still looked a little grey, so I can’t imagine the food coloring you would need to turn white icing really black. Ugh.  I unabashedly stole borrowed the frosting recipe from this Southern Living Mint Chocolate Frosting recipe, except I used a lot more of the mint-chocolate morsels and I certainly did not use a microwave instead of a double-boiler, thank you very much.

    Now: the fun part.  Once you have two kinds of yummy frosting made, you need to hollow out the inside of your cake-bowl.  Turn the cake upside down, so that the flat part is on the bottom, and use a sharp bread knife to hollow out the center.  Save the bits you are taking out, becuase you will need them to make a cake cap on top of the ice cream.  Once you have it hollowed out – to your taste of course, maybe you want a thick layer of cake, maybe you only want a little – fill the inside with ice cream.  We took the easy route here and bought mint chocolate chip ice cream… if you have an ice cream maker and you want to add another hour of cooking onto your day, then go for it! (Homemade ice cream is inevitably better, but honestly – we filled a cake with it and then covered it with two kinds of frosting.  You couldn’t really tell.)

    Once your cake is filled with ice cream, use the cake bits you hollowed out (and plenty of your imagination) to fashion a top to it that makes it round enough to pass for a ball. Slather it in cream cheese icing, all over, and stick it in the freezer for ten minutes or so to firm up before you continue to decorate.  Once it’s nice and solid, put your black icing into a piping bag and draw the pentagons. If you are really artistic and smart you might be able to wing this; we had a med student and a graphic design student in the kitchen and we needed to make a mold. We made a little pentagon out of tin-foil, and carved the pentagons into the cream cheese icing, then piped the black icing over and into the shapes.  Connect them with thin lines of icing, and you have your soccer ball!

    The last finishing touch here was the grass – we just colored some of the cream cheese icing green, and piped it around the base of the cake, then used wooden skewers and a fork to pull it up around the cake so it looked like blades of grass.

    Voila! Yummm…

  • Chad Henne Can Cook

    Call me a homer but I’ve always been a fan of former University of Michigan and current Miami Dolphins Quarterback Chad Henne.  And now, I’m a bigger fan.  My man can cook.  I may be several months behind the times but back in February while on Rachael Ray’s pointless talk show he outcooked Carolina Panthers LB Jon Beason and New York Giants OT Kareem McKenzie.  The fact that it happened on Rachael Ray’s show would explain why I am so late to hear about this culinary triumph.   

    Henne at the Big House. You know, before Rich Rod ruined it.

    His winning dish of grilled steak, asparagus, and potatoes would be highly approproiate for Memorial Day.   It looks pretty basic (also, that steak looks like it could be bloodier) but also pretty tasty.  Word is he threw a plate to Adrian Arrington but he dropped it.

    Chad Henne's winning dish.

    Too bad there wasn’t a cook-off against Troy Smith instead of getting drubbed by Ohio State every year.  Oh well.  Next for Chad, to take on Coolio in a celebrity cook-off.  Or to quit football to host a game show.