It takes some effort to make a good stir-fry. The vegetables should be cooked just until they’re crisp, and the meat or seafood should be tender. And if you want to make it an interesting stir-fry, the ingredients should be of varying colors and textures.

It’s for those reasons that snow peas are one of my least favorite stir-fry ingredients. I usually have them in stir-fries at restaurants and I’ll eat them if they’re in the dish, but I’ve always found snow peas limp and boring.

So would I like their taste any better if they came in a chip-like form?

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I’m going to assume that some, maybe a lot of you, are unfamilar with the taste of tamarind. The tamarind pods of a large, tropical tree are used as a flavoring in such things as drinks, soups, and candy, lending them a sweet/sour/tart taste.

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One of the best things I like about summer, besides the long days of sunshine, is the seasonal fruits like lychees.

These fresh ones have a unique flavor, sort of like grapes but not really, although their fleshy textures are pretty similar.

You can eat fresh lychees the same way as fresh longans, by peeling the skin and chewing around the seed. Although lychees are usually less expensive than longans, I prefer them because I think they’re juicier and have a better level of sweetness. (You may be wondering why I don’t have photos of peeled lychees. Well, the ones I took made the lychees—flesh and seeds—look gross and other sorts of wrong; I blame my developing photography skills. The lychee isn’t a gross fruit, and I didn’t want to convey that it is.)

Anyway, like longans, lychees also come in canned versions.

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Having this Web site has reacquainted me with many childhood favorites, like this Bin-Bin Rice Cracker. I remember that it used to cost 69 cents then, and now it’s 89 cents. I won’t Go There by telling you how many years ago that was; I’ve got to keep some things to myself.

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I’ve had a Ziploc bag of this Preserved Sweet & Sour Mango With Chilli—minus two pieces—in my refrigerator for a week now. And you know what that means. I didn’t like this snack. I found its taste too briny, so much so that I couldn’t concentrate on any other existing flavors like the sweet and sour. I think this is one of those items that’s better in theory than execution. One good thing I have to say about it, though, is that it’s crunchy like a pickle. The end.