The Tiresias of salt & vinegar potato snacks: Pik-Nik Sea Salt & Vinegar Shoestring Potatoes

My final trek to the supermarket of 2024 produced this candidate for a salt & vinegar review.

These shoestring potatoes were in the snack aisle though I would have expected them to be elsewhere such as in the soup aisle. I mean, Funyuns live with potato chips and Doritos while fried onions should be posted near soups because you need them to top the casserole/hot dish you're making with a base of a creamy condensed soup. Similarly, I primarily think of shoestring potatoes as a crunchy casserole/hot dish topping as opposed to a standalone snack.

But I am wrong. Fried onions are in the canned vegetable aisle. Well, onions are a vegetable and fried ones do come in a can. Still, I'd expect shoestring potatoes to be right next to those onions just waiting for a chance to crown a casserole/hot dish.

See! These things are throwing my whole snack taxonomy off.

Furthermore, they blur the distinction I've been making in my reviews between potato chips and all other salt & vinegar foods. These are cut potatoes and not formed & shaped potato mush things. It's just that they're roughly the size of matchsticks and not chips that result from slicing. Do I give them the "full" treatment or relegate them to an addendum?

As best I can find, the term "shoestring potato" dates back to 1906 when it appeared in a novel called You Should Worry Says John Henry by George V. Hobart. The line reads "The next course was French fried potatoes with some shoestring potatoes on the side, and I began to get nervous."

I was surprised to find that the Pik-Nik Foods company seems to make shoestring potatoes and nothing else. That's quite a niche market but they seem to be doing fine.

Now, onto their Sea Salt & Vinegar flavor.

These bits of spud were a nice yellow color and golden brown at their tips. They smelled strongly of oil with some potato.

They had a really nice potato taste that came across as being more earthy than sweet. I didn't taste what I think of as a heightened level of saltiness while the vinegar was medium. I've definitely had salt & vinegar snacks with less vinegar tang and my tongue was able to successfully resist going numb from Pik-Nik's acetic acid assault.

All in all, these were very tasty, even if not as potent in the vinegar department as I'd like. I ate mine straight but would like to investigate their casserole/hot dish topping potential.

You got ginger in my lemongrass! You got lemongrass in my ginger!

Next in my drink-thru of the NessAlla menu is a kombucha that has a Southeast Asian tinge to it: Lemongrass Ginger. As someone with a severe addiction to tom yum soup, I wondered how it was that I didn't taste this one first.

The tea was a hazy yellow and the first thing I smelled was that acetic acid tang. There was also sweetness and a lovely citrus-floral mix of lemongrass and ginger.

I think this stuff had a heavier mouthfeel than its appearance betrayed and this mismatch did something to the kombucha tasting part of my brain which made the sweetness came across as being stronger than it likely was in reality. It just had a sweet tea thing going on for me with some tang and that wonderful lemongrass-ginger duo tasting good. These flavors just complement one another so well. They both have citrus and floral elements but the lemongrass leans floral while ginger adds a pepper-like spiciness.

I expected it to be drier on the finish but my tongue never got that wave of tannins and, instead, got a low dose.

This stuff is tasty, though I'd prefer a bit less sugar. By no means as cloying as the drink of the South, it leans in that direction, though only just. The lemongrass and ginger were delicious but overshadowed, at times, by the sweetness.

An unruly and unforgettable sonic explosion

I discovered Avalanche Kaito just a few days ago and am just a hair's breadth from buying their latest album. From their Bandcamp page:

A Burkinabe urban griot (vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Kaito Winse) meets a Brussels noise post-punk duo (Drummer/dataist Benjamin Chaval and guitarist Nico Gitto). It's a completely new alloy and a huge opportunity to deconstruct both traditional and futurist knowledge. An unruly and unforgettable sonic explosion created by the intersection of wayward travellers.

Happy New Year

Happy New Year to all who use the Gregorian calendar!

I went out for a walk at Acewood Park on this grey, dreary start to 2025. A few flakes were coming down but only a few. We need snow!

It was rather quiet except for the din of Highway 51. I saw only a single squirrel and a handful of birds. With no open water, the mallards and geese were off gallivanting elsewhere.