In a large skillet over medium heat, cook bacon (in batches if necessary) until crispy. Remove the bacon to a paper towel lined plate - leave to cool. In the same skillet - using leftover bacon grease (drain some if necessary) add the potatoes and season with salt and pepper. Once lightly browned add in peppers and onion. Cook until potatoes have browned and the peppers and onions have softened. Remove from pan and place in bowl to cool. In the same saucepan, cook sausage until browned and cooked through. Remove to a paper towel lined bowl. Finally, reduce heat to medium/low and pour beaten eggs into the skillet. Fold and stir eggs occasionally until cooked but still soft and moist. Remove from pan.
Gather cooked ingredients - having let them all cool slightly. Additionally gather flour tortillas, shredded cheese and sliced green onions (optional) and set them out on your table/workspace. To assemble the burritos, lay out a tortilla and start with a base of eggs followed by desired toppings and finish with cheese. To wrap, fold in both sides and then fold the bottom up and over all the ingredients. Roll up tightly. (If you find the tortillas are tearing, heat them up - a few at a time - for 20 seconds in the microwave before assembling). Wrap up in parchment paper and repeat with remaining tortillas and ingredients, customizing the burritos to your liking. Place the parchment-wrapped burritos in a 1 gallon freezer bag and place in the freezer to store for up to one month.
To reheat: Remove the frozen burrito from the freezer. Unwrap from parchment paper and wrap the frozen burrito up in a damp paper towel. Place on a microwave safe plate and microwave for 3 minutes. Remove from microwave and rest for one minute before unwrapping. Remove the paper towel, serve with hot sauce, salsa, or sour cream! Enjoy!
The place has a warm, minimalist aesthetic: wooden chairs, a bar, and tables perfect for enjoying the coffee prepared by Natalia Montoya, the café’s barista and fan of the Harry Potter saga.
She is the owner of Félix Felicis & Co., along with Marcelo Ferrán, Pat Hryb, and Juan Pablo Valencia. The café is located at José Antonio Cabrera 5002 (at the corner of Serrano), and will attract the attention of anyone addicted to the Potter Universe.
The Seattle coffee chain plans to enter the country that first inspired CEO Howard Schultz decades ago.
Starbucks
Starbucks announced plans on Sunday to open its first Italian coffee shop in Milan in early 2017, with hopes to open more locations throughout the country.
Starbucks will partner with Percassi Group, a Bergamo-based company that has developed other American brands like Victoria’s Secret in the country. Percassi will own and operate Starbucks’ Italian stores as a licensee of the brand.
CEO Howard Schultz said in a release the partners will bring the “Starbucks Experience” to Italy in a way that “will make you all proud.” Schultz said he has been going to Italy since 1983 and Italian coffee makers inspired his vision for the coffee house chain, which now has more than 23,000 stores around the world but not a single outlet yet in Italy.
It is not clear how much demand there will be for Starbucks coffee in Italy. The country has a well-established market and culture for espresso, posing a challenge for the giant U.S. chain.
Gin is awesome. It’s like vodka but 100x better because it actually tastes of things.
Like juniper and citrus and spices and joy.
Aldi
But because everyone loves gin, it means there’s now SO MUCH GIN. And if you want to try a new one, it can get a bit…overwhelming.
“Oooh, I want to try a new gin!”
“OK, great, we stock 100 different gin brands, which would you like?”
“Uhhh, the pretty green bottle…wait no, this one has cardamom in it and I love cardamom…wait it’s HOW much? Argh, I don’t know, surprise me!”
“Here’s your Gordon’s and tonic.”
“…Fuck.”
NBC
So we asked a bunch of bartenders and industry experts to tell us the essential gins every gin lover should try.
We talked to brand ambassadors, gin distillers, bar owners, and a lot of bartenders. Whether you’re looking to just branch out from Gordon’s, or have already hit the holy trio (Bombay Sapphire, Hendrick’s, Beefeater) and are looking for smaller, craft fare, they know the gins you need to start sipping, and why they’re worth trying.
(I have also added my own commentary as I fucking love gin, so you’re getting my two cents as well. Gin knowledge is my one life skill. Don’t ruin this for me.)
If you’re a gin drinker, you have to try Sipsmith. It played a HUGE role in the current gin renaissance. Back in the 18th century, the Gin Craze created a moral panic, and the government imposed a series of laws to halt gin production in London. These laws remained in place until Sipsmith came along in the 2000s, and got them changed – opening the gates for the first craft gin production in London since 1820.
“Making Sipsmith, I didn’t strive for a crowd pleaser. I made exactly the gin I want to drink. It’s got a creamy English wheat base spirit, soft pine, and sweet citrus of juniper, accented with citrus, dry floral, and warm spice notes. The hint of lemongrass and pepper in the finish are a bonus to me. It’s a gin lover’s gin, from a small copper still and not made as a concentrate (no spirit added after distillation).”
– Jared Brown, master distiller at Sipsmith, the Cotswolds
Notes: dry juniper, lemon tart, and orange marmalade Perfect serve: a martini
Sure, it’s a little awkward, but it’s also pretty cool!
Hi, I’m Ryan. I was in Japan recently and decided to check out one of Tokyo’s infamous maid cafés. If you’ve never heard of one before, it’s exactly what it sounds like.
The country’s largest fast food chains have been showering customers with deals after years of losing out to newer, higher-end chains. And now, in a battle for customers who remain loyal to old-school fast food, the big chains are engaged in a brutal price war.
Fast food companies have always targeted lower-income consumers. What’s different now is that these customers are expected to benefit from lower gas prices, falling unemployment, and rising minimum wages, according to research by investment bank Cowen and Company. And as low-income consumers find more money in their wallets, commodity prices are no longer shooting upward as they did in recent years.
As “forecasts for key restaurant commodities including beef, chicken, pork, dairy and wheat are in-line to below long term averages,” restaurants are particularly eager now to take advantage of the lower costs to boost traffic to stores, said Cowen’s report.
McDonald’s announced that starting Feb. 29, customers could pick two of four “iconic menu items” — a Big Mac, a 10-piece order of Chicken McNuggets, Filet-O-Fish or a Quarter Pounder with Cheese — for $5. This deal replaces the even lower-priced McPick 2 deal launched in January, in which customers could get two items — McChicken, McDouble, mozzarella sticks, or small french fries — for $2.
Meanwhile, Wendy’s has been offering a four for $4 deal. Value monger Burger King has an even cheaper five for $4 promotion, as well as an ongoing two for $5 sandwich deal, and 10 chicken nuggets for $1.49. Even Pizza Hut has a $5 “flavor menu.”
“All the major chains have jumped on the dollar pricing in an effort to maintain share against competitors,” said Darren Tristano, president at restaurant consultancy Technomic.
Dollar-menu pricing is all about the fight within the fast food business, and is unlikely to bring back significant numbers of customers lost to fast casual chains like Chipotle or Shake Shack.
“Although it likely will steal some from fast casual, these are not the quality competitive products that will shift fast casual customers to fast food,” said Tristano.
The internet retailer has signed a deal with Morrisons that will enable it to sell more food and drink in the UK than it has ever done before.
Sean Gallup
Joe Giddens / PA Archive
Amazon is to start selling hundreds of Morrisons-branded food and drink items online in a bid to establish a stronger foothold in the UK grocery market.
As part of a deal announced on Monday, Morrisons will supply Amazon with fresh and frozen food and cupboard staples – a move that signals Amazon’s intention to evolve into a serious contender for the weekly shop.
Over the “coming months”, Amazon said, it will sell Morrisons-branded items such as spaghetti, soups, fruit juices, nuts, and chocolate.
It will be the first time it has sold fresh food at scale in the UK, though it trialled the offer with selected postcodes in October, prompting rumours of a full-scale roll-out.
The Morrisons items will be sold via Amazon Pantry, which launched in the UK in November with thousands of “everyday essentials” including household goods and health and beauty items.
Retail analyst Darren Shirley said he expected the move to have “broader ripples” on the supermarkets.
“Clearly, the advance of Amazon as a participant in UK grocery is a potential challenge to the whole trade in time,” he said. “Any new entrant is, but particularly the American behemoth.”
David Potts, Morrisons CEO, said: “Today’s agreement is built on Morrisons’ unique strengths as a food maker.
"The combination of our fresh-food expertise with Amazon’s online and logistics capabilities is compelling.”
The lobby of the WeWork on San Francisco’s Market Street looks like The Truman Show, but for startups: It’s the middle of the afternoon, and people are actually playing ping pong. The jug of complimentary “fresh fruit water” is icy and glistening. Stay in the same place long enough and the same Macbook-toting twentysomething is bound to loop by again.
On a sunny day in late January, Nootrobox co-founder Michael Brandt ventured onto this soundstage for startup utopia to talk about his company’s newest product: a line of chewable coffee-flavored gummy bites called Go Cubes. They, like all of Nootrobox’s wares, are nootropics: substances designed to make you think harder, better, and faster, also known as smart drugs. (Nootropics are typically marketed as dietary supplements, which are not reviewed by the FDA, although the agency has issued warningletters. Nootrobox says it only uses ingredients that the FDA has classified as generally safe.) Brandt strode into the lobby wearing a neon baseball hat that said “THINKING CAP.” See? It’s unnerving when reality is too on the nose.
Go Cubes represent a big departure from Nootrobox’s other products, a trifecta of pills called Rise, Sprint, and Yawn, which are supposed to help you start the day alert, conquer deadlines, and ease into sleep, respectively, and come in spartan glass containers. The cubes, on the other hand, come in bright packaging that Brandt told BuzzFeed News was inspired by Winnie the Pooh’s honey pot and Keith Haring. Nootrobox raised the money for Go Cubes through an Indiegogo campaign and also has funding from Andreessen Horowitz. The geometric treats begin selling online today.
Each Go Cube contains as much caffeine as half a cup of coffee, as well as six grams of sugar. The nootropic elements are B-complex vitamins and l-theanine, an amino acid found in green tea. (L-theanine plus caffeine is a popularpairing to start with because the combination reduces jitters.)
Brandt hopes that Go Cubes will introduce consumers to the idea that “your smartness is something to be optimized,” he said. “Own the fact that when you’re going to get coffee, 80% of the time you’re doing it to enhance your work abilities somehow.” And if coffee drinkers are trying to “modulate” performance, “Wouldn’t you want something more precise than coffee?” he said. “That’s our whole hypothesis there.”
He opened up a fat jar of cubes before we made our way to a conference room, so that I could try one. It tasted sweetly dank, like the first sip of a cold brew coffee, but with a Haribo mouthfeel and no hint of bitterness. My editor later described the taste as “synthetic,” but said she loved it.
Michelle Rial / BuzzFeed News
Brandt believes that Go Cubes could be a breakthrough product. “We’re just trying to take over the world so that this is an iconic logo before anyone else can fast follow us,” he said, pointing to the Haring + Winnie design. “For every Coca-Cola, there’s a Pepsi and a bunch of others. That’s OK as long as we’re the Coca-Cola.”
Brandt was an associate product manager for YouTube, and his co-founder Geoff Woo is a former product manager at Groupon. Although Nootrobox’s line of pills is taking off, Brandt said he recognizes the limits of the company’s reach. “Ninety-nine percent of the world has never tried a nootropics in general, hasn’t heard about Nootrobox.” Chewable coffee seemed like a good gateway food. It looks approachable and it’s portable so you can take it “on a long road trip or when you’re going hiking or into outer space,” he explained, but didn’t specify the planet.
Later this week, Go Cubes will be available on Amazon Launchpad, a portal for all things startup or crowdfunded. Brandt said he got the Amazon introduction through Andreessen Horowitz, which has also invested in BuzzFeed. The most popular items on the launchpad right now include Sphero’s app-controlled BB-8 robot and FitBark, a dog activity monitor.
Nootrobox co-founder Michael Brandt at WeWork
Nitasha Tiku / BuzzFeed News
Roughly two minutes after we moved from the lobby to a conference room, I asked Brandt if it was possible to feel the effects already. I had walked into WeWork groggy, but suddenly found myself on a higher plane of mental acuity. Shit was coming together. Ideas were ~~~~connecting~~~~. Brandt and I had a sharp-angled conversation about unexplored corners of human physiology, the earliest uses of caffeine in Ethiopia, how to achieve peak cognitive performance, and Elon Musk’s theory about first principles. I felt like I was on office Molly.
Half an hour later, I started to crash. Brandt’s and my conversation grew sluggish. Overall, it felt like good part of a caffeine high, but a little higher, a little more focused, and without the dehydration. After a week or so of eating cubes, my peaks and valleys flattened somewhat, but I still felt like the cubes were effective.
My colleagues’ reactions were mixed. The same editor said the cubes “were like Adderall but less sweaty.” Another co-worker who had two cups of coffee before trying the Go Cube said: “OK, very suddenly, I’m jacked,” adding, “I kind of think I may need to go for a run.” One writer said she had been “depending on them to get over the 1pm lunch slump” and may be addicted. “WHAT SORCERY IS IN THOSE WEIRD CUBES ON THE TABLE. I’M SO AWAKE AFTER BEING SO TIRED,” said one of the journalism lab fellows, while another called the gummy bites sugar bombs of evil.
Go Cubes capitalize on a few shifting trends among tech workers, as well as widespread changes in workplace culture and health. That may sound highfalutin’ for a sugar-coated pick-me-up. But marketing and pedigree mean something in tech — otherwise columnists for top newspapers wouldn’t keepreviewing Soylent, earnestly asking each time if a venture-backed beverage could “replace” or “end” food.
Among Silicon Valley locals, the idea of smart coffee plays into the idealization of the hacker lifestyle and the drive to self-optimize — both of which tie into the industry’s insistence that personal fulfillment comes from work, rather than out-of-office pursuits. In terms of more mainstream phenomenons, Go Cubes fits thematically into Americans working longer hours and the growing anxiety around productivity, whether that’s keeping up with the pace of news and technology, or just one’s inbox. Oh, and our coffee addiction.
“Humans are the next platform,” Brandt explained. “Five or six years ago if someone was measuring their footsteps, they were a crazy person, right? That wasn’t a normal thing. But now your aunt or your cousin can have a Fitbit and they don’t consider themselves a biohacker, they just have an Apple Watch.” Brandt sees an increasing interest in treating ourselves like machines. “We want better insight into how our body is performing and we want better ability to affect it,” he said. “We want to be able to pull the levers.”
Dan Schwartzbaum
Venture capitalists and founders sometimes make analogies to computing in order to justify funding low-tech small businesses — perhaps because tech startups command higher valuations than, say, a power bar company.
People in the nootropics or quantified self “movement” use the word “stack” to describe their regimen of pills. Bodybuilders use supplement stacks, but in software, a stack is a set of applications or subsystems needed to build platforms or websites. (Rumor has it that Facebook prefers to hire “full-stack” engineers.) Nootrobox sells all three pills together in a package called the Full Stack.
Another way to align your company with Silicon Valley is by having the same heroes. Brandt told me Nootrobox has modeled its approach after what Elon Musk calls “first principles” — in other words, stripping something down to the basics so you can be truly innovative. When it comes to coffee, Brandt said, that means: “What do people want? What actually works? What are the intended effects?”
The on-the-nose vibe around Nootrobox comes from the prevalence of all these startup tropes: for example, the tech industry’s infatuation with new entrants over experience and expertise. “We’re both pretty young, we’re 27, so for better or for worse, I think mainly for better, we don’t have huge decades of experience in supplements,” said Brandt. Consumers have found Nootrobox “refreshing,” he said, compared with the supplements industry, where companies tout proprietary blends that turn out to contain “whatever happens to be on deck.”
Then again, if channeling Elon Musk is what it takes to get to chewable coffee, more power to them. Whether Go Cubes goes mainstream or only lasts a month, it made me more aware of how mindless it is to reach for a cup of coffee when I just want to feel smarter.
Dan Schwartzbaum
Nootrobox rejected 200 other ideas — including selling Sprint as an energy shot and making a chewable version in fruit flavors — before arriving at the obvious conclusion of chewable coffee: “Coffee connotes a performance aspect that lemon just doesn’t,” said Brandt. He and Woo made a down payment for R&D with a factory in Los Angeles that does “truckloads a day of jellybeans, gummy multi-vites, and things like that,” Brandt said. They opted to coat the cubes in a fine layer of sugar so they don’t stick together, he said, spinning the jar around.
To make Go Cubes more mainstream, Nootrobox also changed the tone of its advertising. The commercial for the gummy bites is loud, friendly, and “super hammed up,“ whereas the commercial for the pills (above) was designed to talk to “our tribe,” Brandt told me. “There’s something really fascinating when you look at a computer programmer or a really elite day trader — someone that’s really good at the work they do, that busts their butt, that puts in super long hours, like a Ph.D. in a science lab — and when you look at a person like that through the lens of how you would look at a professional athlete.” These elite workers are achieving the same marvelous levels of proficiency “as your Super Bowl athletes, but they’re doing it in Node.js and they work at some startup,” he said, referring to a popular tool for JavaScript developers.
Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk may be international idols, but the universal need for validation persists.
The Nootrobox team “likes to think” that they’re good at brain sports too, said Brandt. “No one has really talked to nerds like they’re Nike athletes, right? But I would like to be talked to like that.”
1L (34 oz.) limemade (lemonade can also work in a pinch)
2 cups (16 oz.) orange juice
3-quart baking dish (or similar container)
This recipe is super simple!
Combine the tequila, limeade (or lemonade), and orange juice in your dish, give it a stir, and then pop it in the freezer for at least five hours. Once it’s frozen into a solid, you’re ready to serve.
Take it out of the freezer and, using a spoon, scrape along the surface to pull up beautiful shards of frozen margarita (the motion is somewhere between scooping up ice cream and scraping off a car windshield in winter).
Feel free to play around with the ratio on this — it’ll work with a bit less tequila and more juice, or a bit more tequila and less juice (whatever kind of party you’re looking for). Salted rim totally optional. Enjoy!
Instructions:
1. Season chicken thighs with salt and pepper.
2. Melt 2 Tbsp. butter in a large oven-proof skillet over medium high heat. Add chicken, skin-side down, and sear both sides until golden brown. Drain excess fat and set aside.
3. Melt 1 Tbsp. butter in the skillet. Add garlic. stir until fragrant, then add chicken broth, heavy cream, sun-dried tomatoes, dried oregano, dried thyme, fresh basil and reduce heat to low. Return chicken to the skillet.
4. Bake at 400˚F / 200˚ C for 25 minutes.
5. Serve immediately.
Buckle up, Canada. Taco Bell is releasing tiny, adorable slider versions of the cult favourite, Crunchwraps. But this time, they have Jalapeño Cheetos inside of them!
And they will only be available in Canada. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Sarah Aspler / BuzzFeed Canada
The sliders come in three flavours: Beefy Cheddar, Supreme, and Spicy Chicken. The BuzzFeed Canada staff had a chance to try them first and here’s what we thought:
Sarah Aspler / BuzzFeed Canada
On the Beefy Cheddar:
What’s in it? Seasoned ground beef, nacho cheese sauce, shredded cheddar cheese, and Jalapeño Cheetos.
Sarah Aspler / BuzzFeed Canada
Ishmael: This ended up being my favourite. It was a nice balance between the meat and cheese, with an occasional bit of crunch from the Cheetos that wasn’t too overwhelming. Just a nice surprise every couple mouthfuls.
1. In a medium bowl, mix eggs, milk, cream, vanilla extract, cinnamon, and sugar.
2. Cut each cinnamon roll into eight pieces, and stuff inside a greased muffin tin. Pour batter in each tin about ¾ of the way. If you pour too much, the tin will overflow in the oven.
3. Cover the tin and refrigerate for at least 2 hours, letting the cinnamon roll absorb the mixture.
4. Bake at 350˚F / 175˚C for 35 minutes.
5. Remove the muffin from the tin, top with icing and serve warm.
