Snack Review: Breyer’s Overload Fried Ice Cream

Okay, snackers: what’s your favorite carnival food? Are you drawn to the fleeting, airy sweetness of cotton candy? Does the gums-binding goodness of saltwater taffy call your name? Maybe you flip over funnel cakes.

I’m personally quite a fan of churros. Eggy and rich at their centers, with a perfectly warm, crisp shell rolled in sugar, cinnamon and honey, the long Mexican pastries manage to satisfy several of my cravings at once. They’re probably laden with about 700 calories apiece, but somehow I manage to forgive myself for occasional consumption. After all, they’re doused in cinnamon, and everyone knows that counteracts the negative effects of the sugar, or… something like that.

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Snack Review: Trader Joe’s Crunchy Oats and Honey Granola Bars

I have no idea why I bought these. I never, ever met a granola bar that I liked. I don’t know what I was thinking.

I might hate granola bars because I never met a granola I liked, either. But lately, I have found one exception, which is a Trader Joe’s Maple Pecan Granola with Flakes. They have the same cereal in several other flavors, but when I tried another – hated it. So there is really only one single granola on earth that I can eat.

That wouldn’t seem to bode well for these: they are not Trader Joe’s maple pecan granola bars. So when I put them in my basket, either I had lost my mind at the moment or… gained psychic powers?

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Cheapee Snack Roundup: International Cookies on Parade!

We all have guilty pleasures. Some, such as closets of Saban-canon costumes or piles of “forgotten” CDs from New Kids on the Block and Vanilla Ice, remain unknown to all but our inner children and blackmail-equipped friends and relatives. There’s another category of pseudo-guilty pleasure, though, and as much as we’d like to feign embarrassment about enjoyments which fall into the second group, we’re secretly quite proud of them.

For me, visiting dollar stores (or 99-Cent, or 98-Cent stores – tomato, tamahto) is a member of the latter interest-group. Maybe it’s due to my Jewishness, but I really can’t resist a bargain. Especially a decent-looking and utilitarian bargain on a household item that looks decidedly non bargain-priced. Usually my dirty little shopping “secret” does not extend to food. On my latest trip to Ye Olde 99-Cent Store, though, I was hungry – so I perused the snack aisle, in search of something cheap and edible.

The sight was incredible: surrounding the yawning chasm of an aisle, yards of shelf-space granted refuge to misplaced snacks of all stripes. Local snacks which had never managed to find their niche markets shared space with imports from around the globe. Every imaginable flavor was represented, with a trend toward the obscure (at least to the lion’s share of staid American palates). Benevolent spirit that I am, I decided to adopt four kinds of super-cheap cookies from less fortunate nations and give them a comfortable home in my stomach. Here are brief opinions on my new cross-cultural cookie friends:

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