Get free shipping through October 31 plus
a new Bloody Mary recipe. Photo courtesy
of RicksPicksNYC.com.

Enter coupon code: octoberfree (all lower case) when you order at RicksPicksNYC.com to get the free shipping. We love all the products, but go batty for the Phat Beets (the top seller), the Green Tomato Condiment (formerly called GT 1000s, curried green tomato pickles), Windy City Wasabeans in a soy-wasabi brine, Smokra (pickled okra seasoned with smoked paprika) and … heck, we may as well list everything.

Enjoy the screaming good Bloody Mary recipe below for Halloween, which features Rick’s Picks’ Mean Beans, a spicy dilly bean (cayenne joins the traditional dill and garlic seasoning). Low in calories—just 20 per 7-bean serving—the brine is used in the Bloody Mary, and you can toss fresh string beans from the store into the remaining brine to make new pickles. As with all of Rick’s Picks, there’s no hidden sugar.

Ingredients:
– 1 ounce vodka
– 3 ounces tomato juice (see our review of the best)
– 2 dashes Worcestershire
– 1/2 teaspoon prepared horseradish
– 2 dashes Tabasco or to taste
– A dash of freshly-ground pepper
– 1 quarter lemon, squeezed
– Generous splash of Mean Beans brine (try other dilly bean or pickle brine if you don’t have Mean Beans—but it won’t be as good!)
– Mean Beans to garnish

Preparation:
1. Combine ingredients. Shake or stir.
2. Pour over ice. Garnish and serve.
3. Have extra Mean Beans on hand for demanding guests.

The bowls products use Hokkien noodles, round egg noodles of medium thickness—think fat spaghetti. (Hokkien is a Chinese dialect spoken in southern Fujian, Taiwan, and throughout Southeast Asia.) In less than two minutes, you can microwave:

• Garlic Scallion Noodle Bowl. Combining two of our favorite flavors and mild, this has broad appeal. Scallion lovers can add some fresh scallion for more kick. (Vegan)
• Korean Sweet Chili Noodle Bowl. This flavor ratchets up the heat nicely. The “sweet and spicy red chili sauce” will please many Americans who have become accustomed to lots of sugar in everything they eat. (It was pleasant, but we found ourselves looking at the package label for the sugar grams). (Vegan)

Have microwave, will feast: Annie Chun’s
Noodle Bowls provide an almost-instant Asian
food fix at home or at work. Photo by Erika
Meller | THE NIBBLE.

• Vietnamese Pho Soup Bowl is a tough one to write about. It’s advertised as a “complex and flavorful organic beef broth.” A real pho is a thing of beauty, piled high with stewed beef, noodles bean sprouts, onions, scallions, and a great complexity of spices: chile, cinnamon, star anise, ginger, black cardamom, coriander, fennel and clove, topped off with fresh lime squeezed at the table. Granted, this is the fast food version, largely broth and noodles, but the broth was so weak and indistinct we wouldn’t have known it was beef, and the only apparent seasoning seemed to be black pepper. We couldn’t help but long for the pho (a.k.a. stewed beef soup) at Talent Thai restaurant in New York City, which is a knockout dish that you want to have over and over again. (If you’re in town, you must have a bowl.) This variety is very light and mildly peppery; we would love a “complex and flavorful” re-do.
  Other flavors of Noodle Bowl include Kung Pao, Pad Thai, Peanut Sauce and Teriyaki. Soup Bowls include Chicken Noodle, Hot & Sour, Korean Kimchi, Miso, Thai Tom Yum and Udon. Suggested Retail Price is $3.49 for an 8.4-ounce bowl; $34 for a 12-pack at WorldPantry.com.

   

• See our favorite Halloween chocolates, which can be used as table settings. 

The Bacon Salt family. Photo by Hannah
Kaminsky | THE NIBBLE.

But Bacon Salt has throngs of devotées, so when two new limited edition flavors were released (Cheddar and Jalapeño), we sat down with all five varieties. There were some hits as well as misses.

• Bacon Salt: Op.cit., not bacony enough. On the other hand, we absolutely adore Baconnaise, the company’s bacon-flavored mayonnaise. It was a Top Pick of The Week recently.
• Hickory Bacon Salt: Good hickory flavor as well as nice and salty (although the whole line is “low sodium”). Our runner-up favorite.
• Peppered Bacon Salt: Very peppery. We like it as a seasoning, though it’s not exactly pepper bacon. Our third favorite.
• Cheddar Bacon Salt: No discernable Cheddar flavor.
• Jalapeño Bacon Salt: A light jalapeño burn, enjoyable without overwhelming the palate. Not exactly bacon salt, but a very nice jalapeño salt and our favorite seasoning.

• See our Salt Glossary for the scoop on sea salts, seasoned salts and salts to salivate over.
• Peruse our favorite seasonings in our Salt & Seasonings Section. (How alliterative is that?)

Dove is offering one winner several bags of bite-sized candy in its newest flavor: Peanut Butter Milk Chocolate. These melt-in-your-mouth candies have just enough smooth chocolate to encase the creamy, peanut butter middle, and each individual piece also comes with an encouraging PROMISE message inside the wrapper, urging us to feel good about ourselves or expand our horizons. We loved it (see our blog post) and are lucky that fights didn’t break out at THE NIBBLE offices over how to divide the pieces.

This week’s Gourmet Giveaway also features 5 bonus prizes of Bubble Chocolate for five additional winners. These “aerated” chocolate bars imported from Beylorus are popular in Europe, and now available in the U.S. It’s not what the name sounds like—pockets of bubbles bursting in the mouth—but it’s tasty like a crisped chocolate bar without the crisps—a very interesting technology. Available in Milk Chocolate and Dark Chocolate, both are delicious and high quality. The Dark Chocolate tastes a bit like devil’s food cake to us, and the milk was not sticky-sweet like most U.S. milks. Both flavors are bound to please.

If you love chocolate and peanut butter,
rush out for Dove Peanut Butter Milk Chocolate. Photo by Hannah Kaminsky |
THE NIBBLE.

• To enter this Gourmet Giveaway, see THE NIBBLE’s Gourmet Chocolate Section and click on the link at the bottom of the page. Enter your email address for the Gourmet Giveaway prize drawing by noon on Monday, October 26. Good luck!