Flavor Boulevard

If you’re a student, you know the significance of frozen pizza. It comes only second to instant noodles, i.e., packaged ramen, and on some days I might even argue that it’s better than instant noodles in terms of efficiency. There are three sections that I always check when I go to the groceries: the noodles, the ice cream, and the frozen pizza. Yesterday when I first learned of Annie’s, I went to their website and found out that Berkeley Bowl carries their product, so I’ll be looking for it, but if you’re in Houston and got some time to kill this weekend, why not beat me to a slice of “the first-ever-certified organic rising crust frozen pizza”?

Annie’s will hold their “Slice of Happiness” tour during lunch hours at four Whole Food locations from this Friday to next Monday: 4004 Bellaire Blvd – Friday, March 23 (11 am – 2 pm), 11145 Westheimer Road – Saturday, March 24 (10 am – 1 pm), 701 Waugh Drive – Sunday, March 25 (10 am – 1 pm), and 2955 Kirby Drive – Monday, March 26 (11 am – 2 pm).

The tour will feature their recent February-launched pizzas in four flavors.

The most interesting thing of the tour, though, is the Truck Farm, an herb garden in the bed of a pickup truck. Finally, a good use of the space that’s hardly ever used but consumes a lot of energy. It actually seems quite feasible to implement in every household if the garden could be set on a removable platform, so you can leave it in your garage for a day in case you actually need the truck bed to move furniture or your garden hose.

Anyway, that got me thinking about the food truck trend in my neck of the wood, Houston. This May 12-13 will see the second annual Haute Wheels. From the list of participating trucks, it appears to have, as expected, a fair amount of mixing between Asian and Southern cooking, with lotsa meat (of course, that’s how Houston rolls), but pretty much everything is comfort food. Nothing too out there. I wouldn’t expect vanilla ice cream topped with mealworm. But that’s actually good: food trucks weren’t created to carry crazy foods or culinary inventions, they were meant for specific comfort food mastered by vendors to satiate the common people’s palate. They shouldn’t be strange. They just have to taste excellent.