Overall
Cost: 6/10 [1.20$]
Taste: 7/10
Me after 5 days of school: it is SO nice to have enough time to cook rice and tomato (~15 minutes). Maybe that's impacting my rating here, but these are great. Lots of colors in mine (all shades reds, orange, purple, yellow) and somewhat diverse sizes, too. No wrinkles or mold, tastes like a good little tomato, container is very full. Actually local, too. Huzzah, etc.
Overall
Cost: 5/10
Taste: 7/10
Alas, can't drink wine when I really need wine the most (out of the house for 16 hours a day). This juice will have to do. Actually, I bought it for a recipe (pumpkin apple bread), and because the store was completely out of Martinelli's apple juice (which is funny because it implies to me that the undergrads were going ham on Martinelli's apple juice. Is it a mixer? Are their parents just fancy??). Anyway, we like a Simply juice, even if it's just "gently pasteurized". What do you mean by that, COCA COLA COMPANY?
The point is, it tastes good. And it can't be too gentle because it didn't make me itchy. Very sweet, good apply flavor, way better than non-refrigerated non-Martinelli's apple juice. And it's almost the harvest season, so it feels appropriate. What's that? It's gonna be 90+ and sunny all next week? Haha... oh :(
Overall
Cost: 5/10
Taste: 7/10
Believe it or not, I really am trying to cool it with the jelly (belly jelly) beans. They no longer have "peanut free" on their products and they're clearly transitioning away from caring about allergies, therefore I don't want to support them with my extensive candy budget (and also, am a little scared). But it takes me a really long time to transition away from things, OK? In the meantime, we can celebrate this hot hot fall day with the new "fireside" collection. Ooh, aah. It's a pretty good mix of flavors for me:
Cappuccino: My true love, coffee. Not really a fall drink, but who cares, eh? Some of them have a bologna aftertaste, however. 7
Sizzling Cinnamon: Very good. Is there cinnamon coffee? If there were, I daresay it also isn't fall-coded (unless paired with pumpkin, which thank god they didn't). 8
Toasted Marshmallow: It tastes like marshmallow. Again, feels more winter than fall, but maybe this was meant for those buyers in the frozen north. 7
Red Apple: It tastes like red apple. Good job, this is actually a fall flavor! 6
Buttered Popcorn: You know it, you hate it... there's gotta be one dud to make the others better. Popcorn is also not fall themed. Jelly Belly, you dorks. 5
Overall
Cost: 5/10 [3$]
Taste: 7/10
Whew! I'm glad I tried the cheddar ones first, because these are hot/spicy and therefore make my mouth mad numb. But it's just pepper! (I think!). The texture is the same as cheddar, but the taste is quite different. Like a nice pepper jack cheese, kind of. A good bite, and not too "sweet" (thank goodness; that sounds gross). Maybe they're just all broken (or the others were melded), but they also seem to be half the size of the cheddar ones. Again, I must reiterate that these are not chips: they are spicy tomato/pepper/cheese-flavored crackers. Tasty but a little scary.
Overall
Cost: 5/10 [4.50$]
Taste: 7/10
Yo..... these really are sour. I don't know if I like it, but shoutout to my mouth for enduring the exercise. Something new, at least, and a strong sensation that doesn't overlap with the "am I dying?" vibes of spicy food. So I guess I like it?? There are four flavors, and they don't overlap with the normie starbursts (except strawberry):
Sour Watermelon: The least sour, which made me question if watermelon is already sour (I don't think it is). A pretty straightforward watermelon candy flavor, like chewy sour jolly rancher. Not my favorite flavor, but not bad. 6
Sour Green Apple: It's sour, it's green, and it's apple. No lies detected! Tastes pretty good, like those caramel apple tootsie pops (the green ones, not the brown ones). 7
Sour Blue Raspberry: Tastes blue. A very unique flavor. There's a guy on a podcast I listen to whose mouth literally waters whenever someone says "pickle", and maybe now I get it because eating this thing makes me drooly. But I don't really dream of salivation, even if it's good for my teeth. Tastes like a blue gusher, maybe. All gush, no rush. 6.
Sour Strawberry: This one is weird because there's a regular strawberry starburst, too. So it's like they took that and fucked it up with some sort of sour chemical injection. Disturbing! Also, it hurts my teeth. I might have hit the (dental) limit of sour candy. It tastes good if you can eliminate all memory of non-sour Starburst, and as a zen meditation expert level 1000, I can do so. The wrapper is a Lisa Frank neon pink. 7.
Overall
Cost: 5/10
Taste: 7/10
Move over, Wine & Food Pairing, it's time for Spindrift Soda and Elgar's Cello Concerto in E Minor Pairing. Almost as elegant and emotionally evocative!! I didn't think I'd like this because I don't really like grape soda, and I definitely don't like grape juice, but somehow this is the best of all worlds. (Or maybe I just miss wine). It's concord grape, so it's fully in that jam space, but it's also got a little apple juice to sweeten the deal, and it's in a can so that's fun. It has a flavor but isn't too sweet. It's a cute purple can. Orchestral music is in my top 3 genres. So, what's not to like really.
Overall
Cost: 5/10 [1.50$ish, which is absurd]
Taste: 7/10
Hell yeah. That cookie looks good. I don't think I've had a non-packaged cookie since the last time I had roommates!! Living with other nut free humans was really peak cookie time. I love a cookie. Maybe I should get on the apps in pursuit of cookie cohabitation. Anyway, a good omen for the granola.
Granola was not as good as cookie picture. But, it tastes like I am 1000% about to die. Extremely, like, burnt sweet flavor, which is how PB tastes in my mind. I have never eaten it so this might be wrong, but it is the smell of danger and I can sniff it out miles away. I know other PB allergy-havers feel the same spidey sense. Anyway, I'm NOT about to die, at least not from this, because it is explicitly nut free (which is why I bought it). So, settle down, brain. Once we get past that, there is a strong coconut flavor (which makes sense because there's coconut oil in). Tastes more like a nice Chewy bar than a cookie, but I don't mind a nice Chewy bar. (How do you know what a Chewy bar tastes like, Kati? When I was a teen, Giant (Landover) made a nut free knockoff, and it was glorious.)) One user error is that the chocolate was completely melted so things were a little bit of a goopy mess when I opened this. Still tastes fine but I put the bag in the fridge for future summer granola grazing.
Overall
Cost: 5/10
Taste: 7/10
This is a very salty pretzel. But on the flipside, it's a cracker. Hehe. I love a gimmick. It's like those 2-color Oreos but for savory snackers. They're definitely more cracker than pretzel (which is the tastier option). Something disappointing about these, though, is that the picture on the box made me think they'd be big, like a Pepperidge Farm cracker, but they are actually very small, probably half the size of the box pic. They're also pretty thin, so I really doubt they'd hold up to dipping. But they taste good all on their own: very salty pretzel side, very buttery cracker side. A serving is 5, which is like... hm... but I guess that's for the dippers. Would be good for school snackin'.
Overall
Cost: 5/10
Taste: 7/10
Sorry vegetarians, the lacto-ovo life was killing me. The only reason I'm living the lacto-ovo life in the first place (apart from cost and fatigue, I guess) is that my grocery store has been out of non-store-brand chicken breasts for several months now. I was starting to think Perdue went out of business. But, they didn't, because they recently started stocking "Chicken Thighs". I love chicken thighs. As you can see, they have skin on, but I wasn't sure if they had bones in (they do) and there was absolutely no indication of this on the package. I should have used pragmatics to conclude that if it didn't say boneless, it must be boned (bone-in?), but grocery labelling is honestly worse at pragmatics than me, so IDK. A bone-in chicken thigh is a little bit like duck. It's fatty and delicious. (I just released that 2 of my favorite (live) birds are also 2 of my favorite meats, which is kind of weird, but that's #farmlife for you I guess). I cold roasted these with shallot and carrot and now I'm living the good life for the rest of the week. When I was a kid, we never had any bone-in or skin-on meat because of diet culture (or, charitably, health culture), and so I only had it on vacation, which is probably why it is so decadent to me now. I don't even eat the skin! But I could!! It's the little things.
Overall
Cost: 5/10 [10.50$, but that's 4-8 meals, so, worth it]
Taste: 7/10
I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with DiGiorno: they taste bad, but I'm not allergic to them (possibly they are the ONLY fullsize frozen pizza not to contain legumes at this point) and my grocery often has them on sale for 5$. So, here we are, off to sample another crust varietal. Wood-fired. How were the other ones fired? We may never know. This is about 1200 calos, aka 4 servings (or perhaps 2 servings if you're feeling peckish). It actually looked pretty, and fit perfectly on my large plates. Was hard to cut, because the texture of the crust was, hmm. Firm. Not fluffy or puffy like many frozen pizzas. But actually, I liked it. The crust tasted like hard flour, like a pizza at a bad non-pizza restaurant when you ill-advisedly order the pizza. And that's much better than usual DiGiorno. The roni was the same as ever (not my scene), the red peppers were most prominent of the peppers, which is funner than green, and the snausage was your classic Pizza Hut style snausage. (Full disclosure, it did make me a lil anxious-itchy but I think that's just fatty salty meat + tomato sauce and not a secret unlisted allergen). The sauce seemed less weirdly sweet than usual. I was pleasantly surprised by the whole endeavor. Good job, Digiorno. Maybe someday we can progress to a like/love relationship.
Overall
Cost: 6/10 [5$]
Taste: 7/10
Look at that lil Pikachop. My entire pokemon knowledge comes from cultural osmosis, linguistics papers, and Sonic video game crossovers, so that is to say, I'm not really the target audience for this branding. But I had a Target gift card to use up (I think the Target boycott is basically indefinite at this point) and thus I bought all the Target exclusive snacks I could find with it, which turned out to be mostly Pokemon branded for some reason. Much to my brand-curious disappointment, this is actually just a regular pop tart flavor (though I hadn't tried it before), only they changed the name from "confetti cupcake" to "vanilla cupcake" and put some pokemen on the box. (I think there was this Pikachop, a Charmando, an Ivysaur, a Squirtle implement, and one other little monster). Is Pikachu vanilla-coded? I guess he (they? she?) kinda is.
ANYWAY, this is actually a pretty good pop tart flavor, which I don't say often. It tastes like very sweet store brand cake. Is that a good tasting food? Well, depends if you're comparing to other pop tarts (yes) or other foods (no). The sprinkles are extremely unevenly distributed, but they are fun too. The main con (apart from the dietary content) is that there is a still a weird kinda metallic/chemical aftertaste. Not crazy strong, and it might be the sprinkles, but it prevents me from fully thinking "yes, I like this." Still it stands out among PopTart because the inside and outside blend together very well, almost like the Toaster Donut I tried yesterday. Kati, what is your diet right now?? (For those dieticians in the audience, there are a lot more new flavors of packaged junk than there are new brands of veg and egg to review, OK?? Doesn't mean I'm not eating veg and egg! Mind your business!)
Overall
Cost: 6/10
Taste: 7/10?
What a beautiful world we live in. I hope there's no glass in these. Supposedly there are two other flavors of "toaster donut", sprinkle and frosted, but those ones don't have any filling and the reviews for them are really bad. So that's probably why this was the only version at my store.
I was really bracing myself for some toaster horrors, but weirdly, these are pretty good. They aren't especially donutty, but the frosting is just regular chocolate frosting and the pastry is better than the toaster strudel pastry - I think it's different, but maybe it's just that it's not enmeshing nasty fruit goo. Anyway, it's less flaky/oily and more "funnel cake". To be fair, it is enmeshing some mildly gross weirdly-fruity bright yellow custard, but I don't really even like custard (see: Boston Cream Donut, dunkin version, and Boston Cream Donut Dunkin Version yogurt) so maybe custard fans would be all about it. It's very yellow though. Anyway, there's just a little of it compared to the amount of Strudel fruit goo, and therefore less gross, even though the whole shebang is definitely donut-level sweet. If I could eat donuts every day, I probably would, so I like it. Unfortunately, although I technically could eat this every day, it's not at that level. But I'd try the other flavors!
Overall
Cost: 5/10
Taste: 7/10
I ended up with this due to the confluence of many things: (1) the recent pom-apple heavy shirley temple spindrift (2) dunkin's summer line of limeades (3) thinking about how when I was a kid juice came from frozen cans and yet the limeade was extremely good.
Luckily, this is all that I hoped it would be. It is extremely sweet (like, full day of sugar sweet) but such is the nature of bottled drink. It tastes like lime and like cherry, and that's because (other than sugar) those are the only ingredients. Truth in advertising! Add a bunch of ice and you've got the perfect summer drink. My ancestors would love this :')
Overall
Cost: 6/10 [2.50]
Taste: 7/10
On balance, I'm glad I live alone right now (for both allergy and noise reasons), but there are a few major downsides, and one of those is burrata. This is a set of 4 "mini" balls (each being a 2 serving 2-ouncer, so not actually that mini at all), and as the packaging warns you, you better eat it within one (1) day or you will suffer the most horrible agony. One of these is great on pesto pasta, or with olive oil and tomatoes, or whatever you have going along those lines. Two is a little much, but maybe doable if that's all you're eating that day. That leaves 2 burrataballs that solo-you simply cannot eat or you will suffer intense agony, either from overeating fatty cheese (a lesson I've learned a few too many times) or eating very smelly expired milk product (a lesson I only needed to learn once). You can't freeze it, either. The only choice is to waste food or to never buy it. Or, I guess, to have friends??
Anyway, as I said, it's very good. Mozz outside, wet mozz-goo inside. Good temperature contrast to hot food. Fun. Makes me think of Alyssa always getting burrata at trivia and me being jealous and also scared because it came with walnuts. And it is for those reasons that I made the sad choice to buy it... just this once.
Overall
Cost: 5/10
Taste: 7/10
I really need to get my herb planting situation sorted. Buying fresh herbs is like one of the dumbest wastes of money in my tightly-controlled life (cofe and snacks don't count because those aren't wastes ty), and yet!! There's always something more urgent to do (like write this blog post? Hmm). Basil's one of the worst culprits because I go through a ton of it (more now that the only cheeses I eat are fresh) and, as this exemplar showed, it only lasts 1 day (IF THAT) when you buy it from the store and live in the fiery pits of hell. Anyway, I sprayed it with hourly cold water and it survived just enough to produce the 1.5c of basil I needed for my nut-free pesto, which was fresh and delicious. And the company is at least local to me, so I guess it could be worse. We did it, basil!
Overall
Cost: 5/10 [3.50, fair but demoralizing]
Taste: 7/10
Didn't I review this already!? Well, no. I did review *a* 20-flavor Jelly Belly mix, but since buying the company in 2023, Ferrara has embarked on a brand refresh, changing everything you thought you knew about Jelly Bean. (Hopefully not the nut free thing, although they have a meek mill allergy FAQ and already took the "made in a peanut free facility" text off the packaging, which is a horrible sign >:().
On the plus side, check out this silly line from the PR machine:
I do have that desire. Although IDK if I'd call jelly beans gummies.
Whatever, anyway, this is a NEW mix of 20 flavors, and the upside is that it no longer has licorice. So I can eat them all without even looking (although I probably should look just in case a rogue bean gets in there, which has happened before). It has a lot of loser flavors, but as always, some winners too. Here is my current ranking from best to worst, which is liable to change with the weather:
Tops
Sizzling Cinnamon - I must be in a mood for it!
Lemon
Juicy Pear
Orange Sherbet
Cotton Candy/Tutti Frutti - Not only are these indistinguishable from Bubble Gum, they are indistinguishable from eachother!
Grape Soda
Mid
Wild Blackberry - This one is so dark I would never risk eating it if licorice were in the mix. Tastes like jam.
Vanilla Bean
Berry Blue
Tangerine
Watermelon
Strawberry Jam
Toasted Marshmallow
Blueberry
Very cherry
Pink Grapefruit
Bad because they taste like allergens or peach rings, depending
Buttered Popcorn
Top Banana
Sweet Peach
Overall
Cost: 5/10 [4$... getting pricy]
Taste: 7/10
Ooh, now my store has a mild version of this sauce in addition to the medium! I'm usually a medium-preferrer, but I had to try all the options of course. This tastes very similar to the medium one, as it happens, but is a little less spicy. Shocking! Actually, I might switch to mild due to the limitations of my physical form, so it's nice that this is an option. The decaf of red sauce.
Overall
Cost: 6/10
Taste: 7/10
Something very good (and certainly better than wines and poptarts) is Toast. I had this bread before in its thin-sliced guise, and I liked it, but more of a good thing is perhaps even better (or I got a fresher loaf). This is the canonical size and shape of bread, it has a good heft, it's got a good stat profile, and it's nut/seed/legume-free. Hooray!
Overall
Cost: 5/10
Taste: 7/10
Never was a cornflake ziti girl, even though all the Italian-Americans in my life (and there are have been many) were extremely into baked ziti. But in a lasagna, ziti is actually so good. Or maybe I'm still soaking up the San Giorgio energy. Whatever it is, these are a top-tier pasta. They weren't as thick as I expected, and the al dente time of 10 minutes was actually accurate. Praise be!
Overall
Cost: 6/10 [1.50ish]
Taste: 7/10
