Happy Easter!

  • April 5, 2026

It’s Easter time again, and for the first time in a few years we (Kristin, Jessica and myself) coloured eggs:

I got two kits: the normal one and a ‘tie dye’ variant. We tried the tie-dye set first.

These are the six colours included. They come in small pellets which are dissolved in vinegar, and in real life look a bit less vibrant than in this photo.

The system to tie dye the egg involved a special frame in which to hold the cloth-wrapped egg while dye was added drop at a time via a dropper. It was fiddly and not easy (for kids?) and difficult to cover the entire egg. We quickly modified the technique to use paper towels without the frame. This was somewhat successful, and our tie-dyed eggs looked like this:

I think they look good. The interesting pattern on a few of them is from the paper towel.

Next we did the normal dyeing kit, which just involves placing the egg into the dye (a pellet dissolved in water and vinegar). In previous years we’d used crayons to put patterns on the eggs but the kit didn’t come with one this time so we had to be creative.

I tried to make one holiday specific! Can you guess who the character in the bottom right is supposed to be?

As usual it was fun and the eggs looked good The bottom right is what one looked like with the shell removed. You can see some of the dye went through the shell, and the brown colour is because she had roasted the eggs.

Here’s my little Easter snack which I am enjoying as I write this. I hope you have a good Easter 🙂

Italian Brainrot

  • March 29, 2026

When we were in Japan, I found these card packs in a UFO machine:

Even though they have Tung Tung Tung Sahur written on them, I had no idea what they were. To increase the mystery, we’d also seen some (terrible) figurines of these characters in other machines. I knew Adam would love these, so I spent a small fortune to ‘win’ a few packs. On the back of the packs, it says this:

Before I left Japan I also found stickers of these characters which I promptly put on postcards. Did you get one?

I scored three packs from the machine, one of which went to Adam, and now – months later – it was time to open mine. Here’s what I found inside:

Eight cards were in each pack, all featuring appalling AI art. It claims to be a game, and if you look closely you’ll see attack and defense values on each card and paper/rock/scissors on the top left. Here’s my strongest and weakest cards:

These are a cheap product sped to market to cash in on a craze that now seems dead. No one played this game, and I doubt anyone even attempted to collect the cards. It’s perplexing they even made their way to Japan, but at least one fool put money in a machine to get some. At best, they were good for a laugh.

Which is why I was amazed the other day when I found this at Walmart:

This is a different set of trading cards based on the same characters! I was astonished enough to buy a pack immediately, but the true surprise – not even mentioned on the outer packaging – was what I found inside:

These cards are plastic and transparent! And the print quality is extremely high:

The characters are as repulsive as ever, and weirdly enough even these cards include statistics (for a game?) in tiny type at the bottom, but the quality of the cards are sky-high. They even printed the backs of each image so they look interesting from each side:

These are as attractive as the ones I got in Japan are repulsive. I may even get another pack 🙂

Ramen 33: I Can Feel A Chicken Sliding Up To Me

  • March 17, 2026

Six months ago I wrote these words to end the last installment of this series: “I hope it’s not another six months until the next installment” 🙂

As it turns out I miscalculated, and in a mysterious turn of events this entry will be the biggest yet!

Myojo (460 Calories, 10g fat, 2100 mg sodium)

See those tiny pieces of dehydrated seaweed? Once reconstituted they unfolded into large sheets. This gave this entire product an unpleasant taste of seaweed, and it was chicken in name only.

Furthermore despite following the instructions to the letter, the noodles don’t seem to cook completely. It was like eating rubber bands (that tasted of the ocean) and of course this meant it was terrible. An easy 0 out of 10.

Lucky Me (250 Calories, 10 g fat, 1400 mg sodium)

I’ll keep this short: bland noodles in tasteless cloudy broth so inoffensively underflavoured you may as well not be eating anything. Lucky? Hardly! (0/10)

Cup Noodles Rich & Savory Chicken (320 Calories, 12 g fat, 1480 mg sodium)

The kings of chicken ramen return with a new product that rode the earliest waves of ‘protein’ being cool. Nissin created instant ramen, and I’ve always found their chicken to be a product I’d enjoy if I couldn’t find others (like Gefen).

But this protein variant – which contains bone broth – changes the flavour too much. It’s strong and earthy in a way I’m not a fan of, and doesn’t taste at all like chicken ramen. And I should know: I’ve tried more than 85 of them.

But I’ll concede this isn’t a bad product, and for some (like my dad who preferred beef soup) this is probably good. Not for me.

Hello Pho Wok Chicken (300 Calories, 7 g fat, 1070 mg sodium)

This is pho, which means glassy noodles, and it came with two packets of spice and one of greasy fat. I was a bit hesitant about the latter, but felt better when it quickly melted once I poured the hot water in.

As for the taste… it’s the best of today’s batch. But the noodles were slimy, and dragged the overall experience down. Had I mixed these flavour packs with a different noodle this could even have been good. I’d say it averages to 5/10.

‘Artificial Chicken Soup’ (470 Calories, 14 g fat, 2300 mg sodium)

I don’t know the brand, and it’s not written anywhere in English, but on the side is proclaims ‘A yummy soup’.

If the ‘sauce packet’ in the previous was big, this one was titanic! And it was very thick: both looking and smelling like vegemite. And it didn’t melt easily; I had to stir the noodles a lot to be sure it mixed throughout.

As it turns out I should hardly have bothered, since this had a strong taste of geosmin. This was one of the very worst ‘chicken’ ramen I’ve ever tasted, and I had to go on a quick sugar bender to reset my polluted tastebuds. Without a doubt, this one scores -10/10!

As you see I found (and tried) five new examples these past six months. Just when I think I’ve plumbed the depths of this topic it keeps delivering! How long until the next update? Who knows!?

  • Posted in Food
  • Robert