Lewis Carroll Had the Right Idea

We still don’t know what Lewis Carroll had in mind when he wrote the immortal lines but they fit our theme perfectly:

One, two! One, two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack

There is no doubt that he wasn’t talking about snacking while pokering but when we play online or with our pals we love to eat!  The two and only problems with eating is that it might make a mess and it might distract us from the decisions at hand.

In a friendly game with friends, we can assign napkins, take a break to eat, or simply make sure we don’t get greasy remains all over the cards.  Making a mess is less of a problem for online poker players but we still want to snack on something that will not distract us but which we will enjoy muchly.

So read on for our not-so-usual list of recommended snacks.  You won't find potato chips or popcorn here - noooo, that's way too ordinary for us!

Frozen Dried Dates 

Many date connoisseurs feel that the Medjul dates are the best dates in the world.  You might need to look in a specialty store to find them.  These are very large, extra juicy dates which are also very dense and not runny.  They are absolutely delicious straight out of the freezer.  As such they are the perfect poker snack food.

During the yearly month of Ramadan when devout Moslems fast from sunup to sundown, many restaurants open for the meal that will break the fast.  Their customers begin to fill the restaurant about 30 minutes before the fast ends and wait to hear the siren that ends the fast every day.

The question is what do the waiters in these restaurants do to break their fast as they also have to work serving the full restaurant?  The answer is that they eat three Medjul dates!  Yummy, sweet, filled with energy for an evening's work.

Speaking about Frozen…

We recommend frozen chocolate bars.  If you cut the bars into very small pieces and take them up with a fork, there will be no melted chocolate residue on fingers, lips, cards, pants, or anywhere.

Home Baked Bread or Crackers

Home baking means that you can make the crackers with very little to no oil and you can make the bread very dense.  Oil leaves greasy remains.  Dense bread is good for use as a dipping tool.  The very act of baking these delectables at home is also a great way to get ready for the game!

Homemade Dry Roasted Chips

It is possible to turn almost any food into dry roasted chips.  The key is to have a good recipe and the highest quality of food you want to roast.  Then you need the patience to do it right.  Homemade corn chips are a delicacy!

There are a few foods that roast very well but not necessarily for poker night with the buds.  Eggplant is one such food - sticky, gooey, messy!

Speaking of Eggplants…

No matter how you spell it, Baba Ganoush is a very big no-no for poker night.  Thick hummus is a lot better despite Phoebe’s unfortunate encounter with it!  Any thick spread or dip is excellent.

Speaking of Chickpeas…

Hummus is okay as a dip if it is sufficiently thick.  Many people like dry roasted chickpeas.  You simply roast them until they are a bit crunchy.  You can add a little coarse salt in the roasting but no oil.

Speaking about No Oil but Pesto

Pesto is a perfect cracker food even though it uses copious amounts of the highest quality of olive oil.  The key is to use a little extra parmesan cheese.  The cheese holds the oil in place and combined with the basil and pine nuts, pesto makes for an amazing cracker platter condiment.

Homemade Cookies

The discipline you develop cooking at home will translate into patience at the poker table.  Again, when you are playing low stakes poker with friends, you naturally think less about bluffing and about the esoterica of poker.  When you play online, you think about these aspects of the game on every hand.

When you play online you need a lot of patience because good hands are not very common.  Developing the patience to prepare meals and snacks at home is the perfect method for developing the same sort of patience for poker.

There is no end to the type of cookies you can bake.  One poker blogger loves to bake oatmeal cookies.  He has experimented with oatmeal cookies that had twice, three times, or even four times the amount of oats called for in the recipe.

Peanut butter cookies are another great no mess cookie.  How about coconut cookies?  For live games, any cookie with powdered sugar on top is a big no-no as are chocolate chip cookies.  No matter how much you might love powdered sugar and chocolate chips, there are an endless number of other less messy cookies around!

Baby Pickles

These are the super tiny pickles you can pick up in most supermarkets.  Be sure to take them out of the jar before eating or serving them.  They leave a slight residue on fingers but this residue is easily removed with a napkin.

Green Beans

What?  We mean here any vegetable that can be heated to palatable level or served raw.  Green beans are excellent finger food.  Just leave out the oil; they don’t need any.

Sushi

What? The best sushi is the kind you make at home!  Imagine there’s no sushi restaurants; It isn’t hard to do.  Homemade sushi is a finger food that won’t make a mess.

Finger Fruits

Cherries are okay if you have napkins handy.  Seedless grapes are better.  Mango is a delicious fruit that you should never eat while playing poker, working on a puzzle, reading a library book, watching television in bed, at a wedding, at a church social, oh, you know the thing!

Stay with fruits that don’t drip.

Smoothies and Fruit Shakes

These are excellent snack foods for taste, sweetness, and they are extremely anti-mess friendly!  Make them thin enough to drink with a straw but not so thin that they drink away like juice.

And in the End…

The last two are variations on a theme: sucking candy and jelly beans.  Sucking candies come in individual wrappers for no mess consumption while eating jelly beans might require a napkin.

The true bottom line is that you really want to snack while you play.  This is a world apart from drinking alcohol while you play.  Alcohol should wait until later.  Poker is too good a game to ruin by playing while tipsy. 

We encourage everyone to stay alert with a modicum of snacking.  Here we presented a few ideas for how to get the most out of snacking while pokering or how to get the most out of pokering while snacking!

PLAY NOW!