The other day I received a really intriguing comment...
Pumpkin Spiced Twinkie-Dogs? I still had 5 Twinkies left, and a pack of hot dogs in the fridge, so I took it as a sign that I should try Caitlin J.'s suggestion for dinner when I got home from work and...
I haven't reviewed a jerky product since that uncured Srircha Bacon version from Trader Joe's in May of 2015! Over a year without jerky, can you believe it?
My eating preferences have always leaned more towards the veggie side, but even though I'm dating a vegetarian, I'm still an omnivore who LOVES chicken wings, bacon, and jerky. A while ago Aldi had these fancy flavored jerky bags in their Special Buy section and since I was craving jerky, I bought all three bags. Time to break my year-long jerky-drought with some "Artisan" Fusion Jerky!
Having a freezer meal on a work night is a necessity for my weekly survival. I always start out healthy with good food choices and making my own meals from scratch, but after a few days of getting slammed at my day-job and doing all this stuff online after-hours for my clients, various blogs and online shops...I'm on the brink of eating an entire box of banana Twinkies and telling myself it's healthy because bananas are a fruit.
I do all of my weekly grocery shopping at Aldi, and they have a decent variety of unique frozen entrees that are always changing. Every week it's something new! (Which can be a good or a bad thing. Sometimes you find something you love, but it's only available for a few days, then it disappears forever.) Aldi usually has a theme to it's weekly circular and offerings. Sometimes it's an upcoming holiday, or sporting event, or specific flavor profile (like spicy foods), but they also have this "Around the World" series where it features a bunch of products from a particular location. They've done Italy, Mexico, Germany, and even India. In case you didn't know, Aldi is a European company (more specifically German), so this is a German company, making Indian food, and selling it in America. It sounds like a bad idea, right? Guess again!
Here's another Trader Joe's chocolate bar that was good enough to revisit. Instead of a popping candy gimmick, this time we have a bar that's filled with bacon ganache! Because everything is better with bacon, right?
Something savory?! Thank the foodie gods! For the last two weeks I've reviewed nothing but sweets and I was seriously starting to burn myself out. I need to get some savory snacks queued up before I end up ruining candy for myself forever.
Normally I make home cooked meals after a long day at work, but I've been more busy than usual. Between my day job, freelancing, recording, photo and video editing, review writing and having what little social-life a hermit like me can handle, I'm completely and utterly burnt out. Tonight I'm phoning it in and we're having a freezer meal. (It's gotta be better than ordering take-out, right?)
There are always trends in food. These day's it's chia seed, quinoa, sriracha and Greek yogurt, what's next? Who knows! It really could be anything. (Maybe artichokes will make a comeback?) Anyway, right now practically every single food company out there is taking advantage of the current sriracha craze. Even though I myself am a fan of the famous Rooster sauce, I'm not obsessed enough to want it as a candy, or a flavored vodka, but jerky? Sounds good to me!
Here we go again. After my last review I hadn't planned on trying another Chunky soup for a while, but it was so cold and rainy today I thought I might as well try the other soup I had in my cabinet. It's perfect soup weather, so it'd be a shame not to. (Plus I was lazy and didn't feel like making dinner.) I bought both of these flavors at the same time, and even though I wasn't a fan of the last one, I'm going into this one with slightly higher hopes. I mean a canned pizza soup with giant dough wads? That's not my idea of a good time. When you compare canned jambalaya to that, this already looks like a winner.
I never realized how much I enjoy savory foods and snacks until I started blogging about food. The majority of the items I find and review are sweets, so when I find something savory, it's a real treat. (Kind of the opposite of what it's supposed to be, huh? First world food blogger problems.)
This item, as well as a bunch of Italian themed food products, had been offered at Aldi recently, and since I am (mostly) Italian and Hungarian (not a joke, I actually am), I thought I should check a few of them out. This prosciutto says it's German style, but we're going to lump it in with the Italian foods anyway.
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| As seen on my Instagram Account |
In 2014, several Aldi-exclusive brands released pizzas with some interesting flavors, like Chicken Club, Gyro, Tandoori, and Cuban. I had a lot of fun buying and trying them all, and while none of them were inedible, I can't say they were all enjoyable either. The Chicken club was one of the richest, cheesiest, and crispiest freezer pizzas I have ever had, the others? Well, they were fun concepts, but none worked nearly as well as the Chicken Club.
Even though I wasn't wowed by the last few Aldi pizzas I've reviewed, I still wanted to give this Beer Brat version a try. It's so different from the others, and it's only specialty take-and-bake pizza they currently offer. (Although more might be on the way soon.) Let's see if this pizza was worth the purchase.
The box for this pizza was WAY too big for my photo set up, which is meant for tiny foods, so this photo was taken with my cellphone in the Aldi freezer case.
Unlike the other Aldi pizzas I've reviewed, this one is from their Take & Bake line, so it's kept in the refrigerated section instead of the freezer, and it's packaged similarly to a take-out pizza. The rest of the pizzas in this line are 16", while this one is only 14, so it's a bit smaller than usual, and it's a bit more expensive. Even with the price tag padded a little bit, it was still cheaper than a delivery pizza of the same size with the same amount of toppings. As far as the design goes, I like the simple brown cardboard and black text, and it does a good job of looking nice while staying relatively cheap. It isn't as gorgeous as other full color pizza boxes, but it gets the job done just fine.
I removed the shrink plastic from the refrigerated pizza, preheated the oven, and baked it until the crust started the brown and the cheese bubbled. (Just like you would with any other frozen/refrigerated pizza.) When it was done, it smelled sweet, like BBQ sauce and caramelized onions. The aroma was much sweeter than I originally thought it'd be, and I couldn't detect anything beer-y about it.
I sliced it up, and took a bite. I gotta say, I can't taste any beer in this at all. Part of me is relieved, I hate beer, but that does seem like false advertizing. The box said that this was covered with a "Beer BBQ sauce," but it tastes like Kraft Honey BBQ to me. It's really sweet, a little onion-y, and tomato-y. It's not bad at all, it's just really sweet. As for the rest of the pizza, the caramelized peppers and onions added a different texture, but they were really sweet as well, and the cheese blend was pretty mild. The strongest flavoring, other than the sauce, were the thick slices of bratwurst which added a slightly spicy and meaty flavor.
It's been a long time since I've eaten Bratwurst, I think I had some during a Christmas party in 2013, so I don't really have a vivid brat-based memory to compare this to, but to me, these slices taste like a better version of the sausage crumbles that delivery pizza usually comes with. These slices were moist, meaty, and they helped to offset the sweetness just a bit. (Moist and meaty... that was awful to type.)
I don't think I would buy this pizza again, it was just too sweet for me, it needs something strong to cut through all that sweetness, maybe some spicy peppers? Then again, that's my personal preference. If you enjoy the sweet BBQ sauce based pizzas from Papa John's, you'll love this one. This was better than the last three Papa John's pizzas I've tried, but it was just too sweet for me to want to repurchase.
Papa Johns better step-up their game, you're getting beaten by a no-frills grocery store brand.
© Maria Smith http://poison-and-antidote.net
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I got some really yummy Jamaican food from a local restaurant, full review on this Oxtail and some Curry Chicken will be up later this week!
These were part of my Target chocolate haul. The packaging looked as interesting as the flavor combinations, so I grabbed two different bars to review.
I was impressed because this package design has quite a bit of detailing. It starts with the outside cardboard box with it’s bright colors, embossing, and bold text. The attention to detail doesn’t end there, because Inside that box there is this bright, neon red, cowgirl patten of wild horses, the WO logo, flowers and horseshoes. I really liked all the detailing and the patterns, but when I got to the bar itself and it was in a plain foiled plastic wrapper with a boring geometric pattern. After such bright colored and patterned packaging, it felt out of place. (Maybe add the pattern to the silver packaging so more people can see it. You only see the beautiful pattern if you rip the box open like I did.)
