Colt's Bolts
Nashville Airport, $1.99
On the one hand, a Colt's Bolt is a dressed-up Reese's Peanut Butter Cup; on the other, it's a country song wrapped in foil.
On the label of each confection is a 1980's glamor shot of blonde in a red power suit, company owner Mackenzie Colt. A teenage wife and mother with talent and ambition, Colt was a regular at open mic nights at the Ramada Inn lounge near her St. Louis home, where she was discovered by Buck Owens. After touring as Owens' protege, she moved to Nashville for a six-season stint as a scantily-clad "Hee Haw Honey."
When she aged out of her Hee Haw role, Colt had a Plan C waiting in the wings: a lifelong passion for baking and confectionery. In 1984 she began to combine chocolate, peanut butter, and roasted almonds into candy cups she called Colt's Bolts. At first she mixed all of the ingredients in her own Cuisinart and wrapped the finished cups in the foil left over from chocolate bars she melted down for her coating. All that had to change after Colt's Bolts won the Fancy Food Show's Outstanding Confection Award and a Japanese distributor ordered 60,000 pieces.
Russian Mini Chocolate Bars
Mom's European Food & Deli, $6.99/lb
Soap Lake is a tiny town in central Washington built around a lake long famed for the healing properties of its foamy waters and slimy mud. Modern environmental factors have put a dent in those powers--and in the number of tourists visiting the town's spas and resorts. From the car I saw two going-out-of-business sales, several vacant storefronts, and the empty lot where town boosters had once planned to erect the world's largest lava lamp.
There was no one else in sight when I parked by the public swimming area just a block from downtown, rolled up my pants, and waded into the shallow, slightly effervescent water. There was no one in sight as I stood ankle-deep in mud, creamy and insubstantial as Cool Whip, and wondered what it would be like to live here.
I was starting to get a little spooked when a stroll down main street finally filled in a few of the blanks. As I passed a strikingly well-stocked yarn store, there was a flurry of activity; car after car pulled up and a dozen chatty women got out carrying snacks and projects for the weekly "stitch and bitch."
At the other end of the street, I found Mom's European Deli, a strikingly well-stocked emporium of foods from Russia and the Baltic region--deli staples like meat, cheese, and specialty breads, but also row upon row of sweet snacks. The dozens of individually wrapped hard candies, caramels, and nutty little dark chocolate bars (like Clumsy Bear, Nut Cluster, Kara Kym, above) are sold pick-and-mix style by the pound, as is sesame and sunflower halva, cut to order from huge marbled blocks. There are also sweet drinks, boxed cookies, and bags of confections like zephir, a pastel hybrid of marshmallow and divinity. The cold case is stocked with fresh cakes from Russian bakeries on the east coast, carried back by long-haul truck drivers returning from a New York run.
The beach may no longer be bustling, but an unexpected bounty of beautiful yarn and Russian treats prove that there's still life, creativity, community, and celebration behind Soap Lake's hard-luck facade.
Mom's European Food & Deli
331 Main Ave E
Soap Lake WA
509/246-1121
Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams
3-scoop cup, $5.50
On at least a hundred occasions I've filled a Baskin-Robbins' cup with one of the clashing-est combinations possible: one scoop of peanut-butter-chocolate AND one of daquiri ice. And never has a B-R server paused and gently suggested to me that perhaps the flavors I'd requested might not pair very well together. I had to go to Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams for that.
I first had Jeni's several years ago at the original location in the Columbus, Ohio covered market and quickly decided that a second serving would justify a return trip to Ohio. Since then the business has boomed and you can now find Jeni's outlets sprinkled around the Southeast.
The lines are long and slow, but even so the servers patiently encourage careful decision making and thorough sampling. Before coming in I'd read the profiles of all of the current flavors online and made a plan, but I still sampled almost everything--you know, just to be sure.
My first choice was Yazoo Sue with rosemary bar nuts: "Built from the ground up with a creamy, rich, and mellow cherry wood-smoked porter (by Nashville's Yazoo Brewing Company) and fistfuls of savory 'bar nuts'—peanuts, pecans, and almonds dusted with rosemary, brown sugar, and cayenne." Second, Black Coffee: "We steep Batdorf & Bronson's single-estate coffee right in the cream (rather than in water). Our process yields coffee ice cream that tastes as delicious as a cup of intensely flavorful coffee smells."
Last, I shoehorned in the flavor that my concerned server suggested might not play well with the others, Cherry Lambic Sorbet: "If your memory says, 'Skip it because it’s gonna taste like artificial, super-sweet cherry flavoring,' don’t trust your memory. In fact, our Cherry Lambic sorbet won the Gallo Family Vineyards award in 2008. We used the money we won from this award to begin direct-sourcing vanilla beans and pure vanilla extract from Ndali Estate in Uganda."
When I wouldn't budge, we came up with a compromise: my server used waffle cookies to craft a dam between the creamy flavors and the tart one.
Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams
1892 Eastland Avenue
Nashville TN
615/262-8611
