Japanese Snack Review: Every Burger

Over the holidays I took my annual pilgrimage to the Mitsuwa marketplace in Edgewater, New Jersey. Now, I don’t want to hear from you West Coasters, taunting me about how you live right near one of these or some other equally large Japanese market. For me this is a big deal.

The biggest snacking news there was that one of the stands had black sesame soft ice cream. While you can now get a few ice cream products in that flavor that are made in this country - I’ve got one in my freezer that I’ll review for you as soon as I forget the soft ice cream, because the comparison wouldn’t be fair - I’ve only had it in soft ice cream in Japan. And somehow it’s just so much better that way than in any other ice cream type. So delicious that I did not know whether to jump up and down, or cry; I seriously considered moving to New Jersey instead of both of those, but unfortunately that is not a realistic option.

As for things I could buy and take home in a bag rather than my stomach, the market disappointed me by a lack of Crunky, and I remembered my vow not to buy any other Japanese chocolate snacks. But these Every Burger things - OK, there is some chocolate in them, but that is clearly not the point. The point is that they look like little tiny hamburgers.

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Snack Review: Bissli Snacks Falafel Flavor

Most years, it’s just Christmas that’s almost a disaster because I leave my shopping till the last minute. But this year, I thought I’d managed to ruin Hanukkah too: Recently I saw that this season, Jones Soda’s holiday soda flavors include - be still my heart - jelly doughnut! But tragically, if you click on that link you will see the three saddest words on the Internet: OUT OF STOCK.

You might wonder what this has to do with this little bag of falafel flavored, cracker-stick sorts of things. It’s not because they are made in Israel, although that is indeed a country that celebrates Hanukkah.

No, it’s that these crackers made me feel better about not getting the soda. It’s because they reminded me: Certain tastes are supposed to go with certain textures.

I expected this snack to be, you know, kind of reminiscent of falafel, kind of suggestive of falafel, something like a relative, or a good friend, of the falafel family.

But instead, it tasted, uncannily, exactly like falafel. You’d think this would be a big success, right? But it was actually kind of disorienting. Falafel are supposed to be round, and fried on the outside, and soft and grainy-textured on the inside. Not little crunchy sticks. It’s weird to be eating a little cracker-stick and tasting basically a sandwich.

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Snack Review: QB’s Ice Cream Treats and Trader Joe’s Organic Brown Rice Marshmallow Treats

A properly made Rice Krispie treat is one of the great achievements of American culture. And all you need to do to get one is follow the incredibly simple recipe on the box, which includes only three crucial ingredients and no baking. The technology behind it – turning rice into things that snap, crackle and pop, to say nothing of the mystery that is marshmallows – is no doubt awesome. But in the kitchen, there’s nothing simpler.

And if you have any sense, you’re totally content when you eat one. You don’t say to yourself, “hmm, if only this had brown rice in it” or “hey, how about some ice cream at the same time?”

But not everyone has your good sense, so, we have these two products.

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Snack Review: Trader Joe’s Mexican Hot Cocoa Cookies

So, I had just embarked on a new Healthy Eating Plan which was going to be based on ensuring that the number of cookie packages bought per week was less than the total number of trips to the gym in the same week. Then I made the mistake of doing this week’s grocery shopping at Trader Joe’s.

Trader Joe’s seems to have an insane number of new sweets for the holiday season. I bought three boxes of cookies for a week in which, having spent part of it sick in bed, I believe there were zero trips to the gym. Arithmetic is not my strong suit, but I am pretty sure I blew the plan.

My excuse for two of the packages of cookies was that I was bringing them to a party, and never mind that said party often has so much dessert at it that even a nice box of cookies might end up never getting opened and therefore going home with the bringer. The excuse for this, the third package, was that I just couldn’t help it. They are chocolate, and seasonal, and who could resist this text on the package:

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Snack Review: Fage Yogurt

As you may recall from previous installments of Linda vs Yogurt, my life-long horror of fruit-flavored yogurt was temporarily banished by Rachel’s Wickedly Delicious Yogurt, but then a tragic relapse was caused by Trader Joe’s Black Cherry Yogurt.

So when I saw that this Fage yogurt came in honey flavor, this seemed like a good thing: a new flavor I could try that was nothing like fruit. It’s better not to think too hard about honey, which is basically insect vomit, but on the bright side, that is definitely not a kind of fruit, right?

The package says that this is “Greek strained yogurt.” I assume they mean that the excess moisture is drained off, as you can do with normal yogurt if you put it in a strainer lined with cheesecloth. Which is not exactly what I would call ’strained’ even though a strainer is involved, but I can’t discuss this further at this point because now I’m having that thing happen where you know how you write a word too many times and it stops losing its meaning? Strain strain strain. Is that really English? We’ll just have to move on.

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