What a Jerk

Caribbean Food Truck

The evening for the October Food Truck Friday in Rock Hill was just about as good as you could ask for.  The weather was clear and cool, 64 degrees or 18 for the Celsius crowd.  The attire varied from shorts and t-shirt like myself to people wearing honest to God coats and beanies, not jackets mind you but full on coats.  To each their own but I thought it was great.

As per usual I grabbed a beverage, in this case a NoDa Brewing Premium Roasted Breakfast Coffee stout.  It was smooth and like a lot of breakfast blends a hint of coffee flavor.  I walked the area enjoying the weather and band looking for something that called to me.  I thought about the vegan burrito food truck because this is about trying new things but these folks always get started late so I passed them by without a tear.

After strolling and perusing I chose to go with Marlie Q’s caribbean food truck.  They had some decent looking options and while the stewed ox tail was tempting the jerk chicken with some beans & rice sounded like the way to go.

I’ll say up front the sign clearly said this was spicy and they were not lying.  It had a great jerked spice flavor and it was.  The rice and beans were scalp tingling, nose running, brow sweat producing hot as well.  One thing though was you could taste the pepper flavor and not just the heat so it was well done.  The chicken breast was good sized and cooked tender enough it came off the bone easily.

As this was not a meal that lent itself mobile dining I shared a table with a couple dining on something from another truck.  I didn’t pay much attention until the lady said, “Wow you left me a lot of mac & cheese” and the guy said “that’s because I’m a great boyfriend”.  I chuckled and they both took notice and the guy said, “I have to get points where I can since I’m usually called an a-hole” and the lady straight faced said “It’s true”.  We all laughed and I finished up before they wanted to be friends.

I swung by the beverage tent and since everyone else was doing it I got a Dogfish Head Punkin Ale to enjoy while I listened to the band.  Pumpkin ales I’ve tried in the past have been hit or miss and often cloying with the amount of pumpkin spice.  This one did it well.  There was enough pumpkin and pumpkin spice to make you reminiscent for that last slice of pumpkin pie you had rather than hitting you in the face with the pie.

The band was quite good, Chunky Daddy played a varied set list that included, rock, soul, country and ranged from 70s to more recent stuff like Wagon Wheel.  I also saw a guy who I think was unintentionally cosplaying David Tennant’s Dr Who.  Dude looked just like him from clothes to haircut to glasses.

Overall it was a good second to the last FTF of the year and the fountain was looking great in the evening light.

 

OMB

Germany

OMB could stand for Oh My! Beer or October Means Beer or Olde Mecklenburg Brewery  In this case it’s the last one.  Since it is October and the temperatures finally started acting like it’s Fall it felt like a weekend for some German food.

Although I’ve had some of their beer before I’d never been to the restaurant at the brewery.  I checked out the menu online to make sure they had German food on the menu and not just bar food. They did so off I went.

It was a relatively short jaunt up the interstate to find Olde Meck which happened to be within sight of a cider company I visited a while back.  OMB is really more of a complex of buildings and a huge biergarten.  The restaurant is large also with a bar area and at least two seating areas I saw.  One has regular tables and the other has several rows of tables butted up to one another making long community tables.  Outside there is a covered area with picnic style tables and the biergarten which has row upon row of picnic tables to accommodate at least a couple of hundred people.

I got there fairly early and they had the seat yourself sign out and it was easy to do since I was the only person inside.  I’d have opted for the biergarten had the sun been out.  Anyway the service inside was good and I had a menu and beer list in just a minute.  Since it was an option I got a flight of 4 different beers to go with the meal.  For the meal I selected the Teller plate that included two sausages, a roll and two sides.  From the options I went with a regular bratwurst and Nuremburger brats plus sauerkraut and potato salad.

The flight came first and included a handy key in case I couldn’t have picked out the beers on my own.  I started with the Captain Jack, a pilsner that was a perfect option for Bud drinkers.  The food arrived and I had the Mecktoberfest and the Copper with my meal.  The Mecktoberfest tasted a lot like a full bodied version of the pilsner which made it better in my opinion.  The Copper is reddish in color like the name suggests and has a hoppier flavor but not like the overdone IPAs.

Looking at the plate it occurred to me I probably could have used a little color on the plate but what was done was done.  The wursts were good quality sausages, the mustard was a good slightly coarse vinegary style, the sauerkraut was plain tangy kraut served warm.  The potato salad was good but not great and served cold.  I think it would have been better served warm.  The bread was warm though and a bit dense and chewy.  Nice meal that paired well with the beer.

I finished up with the Fat Boy Porter (don’t make the obvious joke, you’re better than that).  It was my favorite of the four having a bolder taste, slightly sweet with a hint of caramel and the higher alcohol content was noticeable.  Nice desert.

Based on the number of seats OMB must be popular at times and certainly has capacity to host large events and the food and beer were worth the drive.  One note for the true German beer aficionados OMB adheres to Reinheitsgebot so they have a few different types of beer but the ingredients are the limited to the 4 approved.

If you didn’t check out the Tell Me More the last time I posted for Germany check it out for a little extra content.

 

 

Thailand Yum

Siamese Snacks

The September Yum snack box was Thailand themed and continued the streak of fun boxes loaded with interesting and unusual snacks.

 

I’ll continue highlighting my favorite and number two as well as the worst and most unusual but I’m also going to mention a couple of the others that just need to be touched on because they were both weird and weirdly good.

So the favorite was the first one I tried from the box.

Coconut Snack Bites sounded like a can’t go wrong and that big package looked like it was going to be a two session snacking event.  Alas it was a case of excess packaging but the contents were delicious.  They were little round golden brown crispy treats with a nice toasted coconut flavor. Real shredded coconut that was not too sweet so you got the natural coconut taste.  The package says crispy and yummy and I concur.

My number two was the Coconut Cream-O Choco Plus.

This was a five pack of two cookie sleeves so they were easy to parcel out and enjoy several times.  The cookies had chocolate and coconut flavored caramel. The cookie part tasted like a regular butter cookie that had a well in the center lined with a very thin layer of caramel with coconut flavoring at the bottom and topped with chocolate. The chocolate was soft, the caramel was a bit chewy and the cookie was crumbly. All working in harmony to provide an enjoyable snack.

The worst snack was the only snack I haven’t finished from any box to date.

Big Roll Grilled Seaweed roll Tom Yum Goong flavor.  This was the second snack I tried from the box and thank goodness it was not indicative of the rest of the box.  I’m not a seaweed hater but the mascot looks like Eric Cartman so maybe that should have been a hint.  Man was this not good.  It was a thin, fragile seaweed roll that was flaky and on first taste had a strong salty sea / fishy taste and then I forgot about that as the hot and sour flavor came to the fore.  The hot and sour wasn’t bad but trying to get by that fishy salty nastiness wasn’t worth it with a box of other choices.  One of which was the most unusual.

Sticky rice with coconut cream and mango.  Living up to the name it was very moist and sticky.  Unusual but quite tasty.  At first the coconut and mango were both mild flavors but definitely present.  Then as I got into it there turned out to be a very ripe piece of mango in the center of the sticky rice.  The look, feel and texture could easily be off-putting but it was a tasty little snack once you got past all that.

Two others I liked that were just odd enough I wanted to share them as well.

The Juzi-C gummy strip was a spicy pineapple fruit roll up type of snack.  The strip itself was thin, flat and coated with a light dusting of sugar crystals.  A bite of the stretchy treat got you a sweet pineapple taste that resolved into an eye opening spicy sweet treat.  It wasn’t too hot when balanced by the sugar but it was definitely not something you have every day.

The other was a savory snack.  Jack ‘n Jill sausage and sweet chili potato rings.  This snack was on my radar to be in the weird column because it had a hot dog on the package and it was unusual. They were wee little crunchy rings.  After I opened the package the first thing to hit me was the smell.  They smelled like hot dogs so the package was no lie and as I was eating them the immediate impression was the same but a microsecond after they hit your tongue the sweet chili flavor takes over. Not bad but staying in the weird column.

I signed up for a 6 month subscription and this was box 5 and unless box number 6 totally tanks I’m definitely going to let the auto renew go through.  If you’re interested in securing a box or more for yourself use the link below and you’ll get $5 off and so will I on my future purchases.

Universal Yums referral link