Aaaaaaaaaand we’re back. That week off was just a whole whirl of wind, friends. Thanks for staying calm while you were trapped in the Fork-less hellscape. If it helps, we got some rest, watched some dumb TV, tried to figure out how to harmonize with songs we like and, for the bazillionth time, tried to get into podcasts. We failed on that last part, but we tried. We just don’t find the musings of dudes who went to college together all that interesting. True crime is old hat; if we hear one more person say, “I love Blue Apron...” or whatever, we’re gonna flip. Of course, we write the goofiest-ass food newsletter this side of...something, so what do we know?
Not a lot.
But we do know snacks (said in our most commercial annonucery voice), which is why we kind of wanted to try something here. Feel free to drop us a line about your thoughts on the matter, but consider this us, The Fork, kicking off a new segment in our newsletter: snack recommendations. See, we like to snack. Frankly, if we could just eat snacks all day instead of meals, we would. Yes, we know we’re an adult (on paper) and can do whatever we want, but we know it’s important to eat meals for some reason. Actually, we don’t, like, KNOW that, but we’ve been part of the system for so long that we just do things the way we do things; another victim of Big Meal.
Anyway...
We wanted to kick this off now because something weirdly amazing happened. We’ll preface it by saying that the words you’re about to read are in no way paid for; we’re just speaking from the heart. Even so, a company sent us free food for the first time ever, and it was AWESOME. We didn’t even reach out to them, they came looking for us, which felt nice! Even better? We liked it.
The food in question is a new dessert product called from British company Pots & Co., which was founded by a chef we’d never heard of called Julian Dyer. Appropriately, said dessert is dubbed Pots. And once we set aside our ferocious ego growth spurred by a British company sending us food in the mail, we got down to tasting the item in question—a seasonally available pumpkin cream pie that comes in a freaking little jar (maybe that’s the pot?), but with a twist. That twist is an auxiliary container containing a sweet graham cracker crumble; so imagine, if you will, that you’ve got a little jar (or pot) of pumpkin cream into which you dump this container of sweet graham cracker bits. So good.
They come four to a package, and we tried them numerous ways: mixing in the graham, leaving the graham at the top, excluding the graham and light graham. In every case, we found our pumpkin cream Pot(s) a delightfully creamy and subtly sweet experience brimming with spiced pumpkin flavor. But this isn’t your grandma’s pumpkin spice nonsense from whatever the shit chain coffee joint you insist on frequenting. OK, Pots is obviously a company with international reach, but this is a quality product that seems a little too good for something you can pick up at the store. Not only that, the borderline small size not only defeated our sweet tooth, but didn’t fill us up to the point of misery. We felt sated but not overfull is what we’re saying. We don’t know how to be clearer about it.
Later, as we perused the literature they included about other flavors, such as lemon cheesecake, salted caramel and chocolate and chocolate fudge lava cake, we made an important decision: We are going to find every damn one of these Pots and we are going to eat them. For posterity. Because we care about our job. Because we want any sweet treats that are coming to us.
But wait, because it gets tricky here. Pots are not now, strictly speaking, available in Santa Fe. Sacre bleu! Oh, sure, you can find them at Smith’s and Costco in Albuquerque, and we even found a Smith’s in Los Alamos that carries ‘em. But we’re going to have to work together to get them to our own little town, by which I mean y’all should start contacting grocers immediately. Just kidding. Mostly. Look, here’s the point: There are, honestly, not so many super-nice little desserts to take home. We tried that Vienetta reboot, for example, and it sucked eggs. Don’t get us started on miniature Twix or whatever the shit. We’re into Pots now, we need them, and we’re recommending (see that callback to the section title? God, we’re smart) everyone tries to figure it out. Although, we’re still waiting for those millionaire Kit-Kats with, like, gold in them or whatever. So, who knows?
In summation, Pots slap, we deserve them and so do you. We’re sorry we dedicated so many words to this one thing. Actually, no we’re not. Stay tuned for more snack recommendations in the future, and feel free to send us your own fave snacks. We mean info about them, though as we said, we’re open to taking real snacks from anyplace. Like, we’ll get in a stranger’s van if there are snacks to be had.
We’ve been continuing our foreign commercials journey, and it’s just really fun. Check out this comp from Britain, which is where Pots come from.
Also
-Did you hear that one about how Albuquerque’s Los Poblanos Historic Inn & Organic Farm plans to open a biz called Farm Shop Norte up here in little ol’ Santa Fe? It’s true. According to Teya “Fork Enemy” Vitu at the Santa Fe New Mexican, the new gin tasting room and kitchen/garden/home store is aiming for a Nov. 4 opening date downtown at the corner of Marcy Street and Washington Avenue. It used to be a bank? You know that building? It used to be a gas station even way before that? You guys, do you know the place we mean?
-We recently heard tell of a food-heavy enterprise from the folks behind Los Foodies Magazine dubbed nmbiztalk.com, a vodcast (which is like a podcast but with video, and y’all know how we feel about podcasts by now) featuring interviews with local biz folk and food folk and the folk for whom those things overlap. We’ll include a link, but the site is still under construction. In the meantime, you can check out Los Foodies. We insist that we remain first in your hearts, however, even if we’re big enough to build up other food things—who never ever return the favor ever.
-Sounds like there’s a new fall menu at Terra (at the Four Seasons Resort Rancho Encantado Santa Fe, which is the busiest name for a fucking hotel we’ve ever encountered in our entire life). You can thank Chef de Cuisine Alejandro Di Bello for this one, including a $45 pork shank, a $56 bouillabaisse with prawns, trout and mussels and a $39 mushroom ravioli. Find also upcoming Dia de los Muertos cocktails, hot chocolate and more.
-The New Mexico Chile Association has named Socorro’s Speir Family Farms and Rosales Farms as the places that produce the best green and red chile in the dang state, respectively, at the recent Great New Mexico Chile Taste-Off. We don’t know who was on the judging panel, but the news release we received assured they were “esteemed.” From that same news release, we learned these farms have been chile-ing it up for generations. So cool—congrats to both farms!
-Thanks to Fork Frend James M., who sent us a little something about Yelp-dot-com’s list of 100 Taco Spots in America. If you follow this link and scroll down to No. 19., you’ll find a familiar Santa Fe biz—El Chile Toreado. It’s the kind of place folks rave about and for good reason. Congrats to the folks at Toreado for stealing our hearts, keeping our hearts, and taco-ing up our hearts. And thank to James for thinking of us, too.
-It’s old news at this point, but we weren’t here last week, and maybe you missed it, but while Yelp was busy talkin’ tacos, the nerds at Tripadvisor-dot-com named Santa Fe’s Sazón the 8th best fine dining joint in the country with Geronimo not far behind at number 15. Cool? Cool. We’d love to eat at both, but we’re saving up money to import new Pots flavors.
-Oh, dang, have you heard about Altar Spirits’ new aperitivio bitters Aradia? Sounds delish, what with its use of gentian, angelica, rhubarb root and osha root—that last one being a New Mexico thing so hard that when we heard about it we thought, “Eeee, that sounds all sick.” You can find it at Altar as well as Susan’s Fine Wines, La Casa Sena Wine Shop, the Hotel Casteneda Bottle Shop and The Cellar in Taos.
-Le Forkette supplied the SFR staff with a dozen donuts from the Glazed Grinders Donut truck the other day, and you know what? They were pretty great. Oh, they weren’t all winners (like the maple donut that was cakey instead of airy, which is weird), but we ate ‘em all like they were some kind of edible Pokémon or something, and we suggest following the biz on Facebook to see where they might pop up. In this case, they set a shingle outside the Big Jo True Value Hardware store on Siler Road. According to our sleuthing, that’s where they’ll be Friday, Oct. 14. Come Saturday, Oct. 15, they’ll be at Wicked West Harley Davidson over there by Villa Linda Mall (which is what we’ll ALWAYS call Santa Fe Place mall).
We’re keeping the Grinners ad video in this slot until someone acknowledges it. Like, if it’s two years from now and no one has said anything, this vid will still be right here.
More Tidbits
-We usually think of USA Today like...well, the paper for people who hate reading, but we have to admit this recent piece about brewing better coffee at home is pretty handy. You know how you can never quite get it to taste like at the shops? Maybe we can sidestep that crap now.
-Ruh-roh, Shaggy, looks like the Great British Bake-Off traveled to Mexico to do a bunch of racist shit while churning out what some writers are calling “the nadir of the show’s fall from grace.” In a nutshell, the long-running (maybe too long) show thought it would be a gas to throw hosts Noel Fielding and Matt Lucas into ponchos and sombreros, get them talking about how they don’t know what’s included in Mexican food and then cloak the whole thing in “We just didn’t know any better,” nonsense. Boo. Boo-urns. Muck. Filth. Slime. Rubbish. Booooo!
-As Samuel L. Jackson so famously quipped in Jurassic Park, hold onto your butts—because Eggo Nog is apparently a thing, and it’s here in time for Christmas or whatever. What’s Eggo Nog, you ask? Well, it’s like eggnog, but it’s got the booze already baked in, as it were. Thanks, Kellogg’s/Sugarlands Distilling Co.—we hate it.
-Mary Frances Knapp over at Vice-dot-com’s food-centric Munchies site would like you to know that she’s been baking with a cedar plank. Like, the plank’s all up in the mix. Y’know what? We’re down. We’d try it if we had even the first inkling of where to get a damn cedar plank.
-Thanks to Fork reader Stewart A., we’re now aware of Sweden’s Disgusting Food Museum, where visitors can taste all kinds of weird shit, like fermented shark and stinky tofu. We’re on Team Try Anything Once over here. Like, if they made whale cheese, we’d try it, just to give you an idea of what’s up.
-Lastly, in non-local food info, the dorkus-malorkuses at HuffPost have a map breakdown of America’s favorite candies, and we’re nonplussed. Seems that the entire country either eats peanut M&Ms or Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups—there is no in-between. We’re skeptical of these results, though we’ll DEMOLISH either one of those candies if given the chance. What candies are you down with? Don’t say Abba-Zabbas or we’re gonna freak out.
A Totally Scientific Breakdown of The Fork’s Correspondence
In the print edition of SFR this week, our stupid boss went to Santa Fe Bar & Grill to get a pork chop—you know, like a weirdo.
Number of Letters Received
44
*To be fair, we didn’t check for a week and think y’all could do better.
Most Helpful Tip of the Week (a barely edited letter from a reader)
They weren’t helpful tips so much as they were missives from several readers who told us they’d never once gotten plastered and sought out chimis from Allsup’s. That we’ve done so made these people furious.
*We’d respond, but we’re shit-faced and chomping a chimi just now.
Actually Helpful Tip(s)
“You guys absolutely write the best copy!! Hands down! I hope you get a whole bunch of awards!”
*Not a tip from reader Joanna H., but we really liked reading it, especially since all those other people yelled at us for rippin’ bongs and housin’ chimis.
Won over by Pots,
The Fork
