Snacks From the Land of Woes: Part III (Gluttony)

When we last left you, things were still going relatively well. There was a chilly wind in the pit of our stomachs, warning us not to go on into the jaws of Cerberus that certainly awaited us. But, being intrepid explorers in search of gastronomic redemption, we pressed on, and before we knew it we found ourselves plummeting into the...

THIRD CIRCLE OF HELL: PRESERVED MANGOES WITH CHILI

We should have stopped while we were ahead.



The box was so sweet and tender, all glassy and heart-shaped, all full of ponies and rainbows and fruits and shit. We should have known better. Evil works in treacherous ways to lure us into a horrible fate. In Dante's Inferno, the Third Circle is landmarked by a steady torrential rain of slimy vomit, a substance which bears more than a passing resemblance to the colour of the red chili-flecked mangoes. I guess we should have picked up on that.



But it wasn't until Alukh withdrew her fingers from her lips that we understood the full extent of the horror.



But wheresoever she goes in this journey, so must I. God damn it.



Our third round left us tingling, numb, and a little choked up. But though we were bloodied, we were not yet unbowed. The worst was still a ways off. At our next level of descent, we would come to an impasse of dissenting opinions, when we encountered the wicked and wily ways of the SEA CRUNCH SALT-AND-VINEGAR PRAWN SNACKS.

Snacks From the Land of Woes: Part II (Lust)

SECOND CIRCLE OF HELL: LOBSTER CRACKERS

After having conquered the jackfruit chips, we were quickly out of meatless or predictable delights and it was time to move on to the fish-like substances. The lobster crackers seemed as good a place to start as any, so we dimmed the lights and burned some incense and got down to the business of seeing if classic aphrodisiac food still works in flavoured-cracker-snack form.



I suppose if that whole middle-school myth about green M&Ms holds any truth, there might be something to the aspect of the green lobster, but no matter how you slice it, what we found in the bag next totally killed our mood.



What the hell?



That's always what you want to find in your food, isn't it? A bag of poison moisture-repellant mothballs that says "do not eat"? Oh don't be silly, of course it is!

Not that it was going to deter us or anything. Poison doesn't make it taste bad, does it? Whatever doesn't kill us makes us stronger.



They say graham crackers were invented to stave off lust through the power of repetitive chewing motion and mild blandness. Perhaps lobster crackers are the anti-Lobster Tail? I guess in that case, at least if we died from the mothballs, we wouldn't go to hell...



Hot damn, not bad! I mean, certainly not eyebrow-raising, but not horendous either. But... again? Twice in a row? How could we possibly be so lucky?! It was a relative cake walk, this whole taste-testing thing. Under these circumstances, we rushed ravenously at the third item of our list. If only we'd known that we were rushing into the Preserved Mangoes with Chili..... of DOOM.

Snacks from the Land of Woes: Part I (Limbo)

Welcome back, my friends, to a Hell that never ends. It's one you may remember from, well, the last post down, in which I sampled the despairs and delights of the Jones Soda 2005 Holiday Pack. In the last installment, I offered a sip of soda #5 (Pumpkin Pie) to my co-worker Chi, who in return offered the comment that this soda was nothing special and that the Asian markets his family shops at carry weirder things than my sodas the whole year 'round. He may as well have thrown down a red carpet to the front entrance of Lucky Seafood the second he said that, because I immediately knew what had to be done. However, it couldn't be done without my intrepid home-for-the-holidays co-pilot: the fabulous Alukh Suicide. (Whom you may or may not know from Suicide Girls.) On December 29th, I worked an eight-hour day; Ally, in the meantime, went shopping.



She was going back to Oregon soon, which meant that we didn't have a lot of time to spend on this. No, this had to be done in a single crazy whirlwind night. Armed with nothing but our stalwart spirits and a bottle of Kirin Ichiban, we gritted our teeth and prepared for battle with snack food straight from the most sadistic tentacles of the Far East. We shall refer to each endeavour in a manner not unlike that Dante's Inferno. Let's start with purgatory, shall we?

FIRST CIRCLE OF SNACK FOOD HELL: NIKI CRISPY CRUNCHY JACKFRUIT CHIPS

Yeah okay, I'll admit we started out easy. Chips are chips. Even if you have no idea what the hell kind of chips they are.



Decaying onions but with all the taste of a light banana smoothie! Appetizing, eh? EH?



Alukh went first. It was only fair. She didn't drink the turkey soda.



They were bland, yeah, but as the night wore on we came to look back on the jackfruit chips as a fond memory of benign and benevolent mercy.



All right! The first tick on the scoreboard reads -- Team Vomit: 0, Team DictionaryGirl: 1! We were off to a relatively excellent start. Join us next time, as we descend into the Second Circle of Snack Food Hell: Lobster Crackers. Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.