Posts Tagged ‘Bachelor Chow’

Oscar Mayer Snack Combos

No Comments » Written on March 23rd, 2011 by
Categories: Food
Tags: , , ,

Purchased at: Grocery Outlet (Seattle – Madrona)
Price: 33 cents

Ben’s Take: Munching on Ritz Bitz and Oscar Mayer generic meat sticks reminded me of the Mediocrity Principle philosophy.  The Mediocrity Principle is based on the scientific notion that the universe is really big. Really big and full of stuff. Then it takes the thought that the Earth and the stuff that lives on it, are based on some pretty basic and fairly common things. Carbon, silicon, hydrogen, iron, oxygen, even a little uranium here and there. It’s all kind of the same stuff that’s all over the place in every galaxy that’s ever had a super nova. I mean, this stuff is all over the interstellar medium.

So you take all of this stuff and all of that space and add an awful lot of time and you shake it up pop it in the oven and out comes life. Maybe it’s intelligent life. Life intelligent enough to come up with Shake and Bake. That’d be pretty cool, huh? Well, the brainologist who came up with the Mediocrity Principle say that not only is that not really that cool, but everyone is doing it. Now, not only is everyone doing it, but the whole Universe is doing it, and they’ve been doing it for a really long time.  So what does that mean for us? Why, that means that neither you nor I are particularly special. As this philosophy would have us believe. We’ve been done before.

Now, I don’t know if someone else has done a combination pack of Ritz Bitz cracker sandwiches and mediocre meat, but I can tell you that it’s not special. At all. I mean they’re both two fairly unremarkable products. Buttery crackers with shelf-stable cheese and oily shelf-stable meat. Nothing special there. There’s also nothing particularly special about pairing meat with crackers with cheese. Heck, throw in a little juice box of boxed wine, and you’d have an all-American take on a French classic.

There’s really not much to say about this product combination. The oily meat stick is salty yet flavorless. The Ritz Bitz Cracker Sandwiches taste just like Ritz Bitz Cracker Sandwiches with their buttery hydrogenated goodness and mediocre cheese-like middle. If you’ve ever wanted a pathetic, yet shelf stable party snack then you won’t need to look much further than Oscar Mayer’s Snack Combos. They’re about as underwhelming as snack products come, and I’ve consumed some rather dull meat and cheese products. I mean. It’s an Oscar Mayer meat stick and a Ritz Bitz Cracker Sandwich. It’s so boring, you’ll find space philosophy interesting.

Marisa’s Take: Oscar Mayer’s Snack Combos (not to be confused with Combos Snacks, a snack which everyone seems to love to hate) are one of the newest additions to the processed meat producer’s line-up. Along with its other preserved Oscar Mayer patrons  like shelf-stable Fully Cooked Ready-to-Serve Bacon and infamous “instant children’s meals” Lunchables, this is a product that you can ensure will stay unspoiled indefinitely. (Note: We bought and consumed this product several weeks ago, so please disregard the “Use By” date. We usually disregard them anyway.)

As I do for most of our other products, I try to research each product a bit before I write (college memories come flooding back). I shot an e-mail to Kraft, Oscar Mayer’s parent company about locating a specific product page for their Snack Combos. A charming rep by the name of “Maximillian Popielarski” let me know that unfortunately there was not one at this time, but that I should add their site to my favorites and keep checking back for future updates. I know I’ve reached the low point of my life when I’ve bookmarked Oscar Mayer’s website and fervently monitoring it for new additions. Currently, it seems the only place I can find any info are scores of coupon/mommy blogs advertising a $1/2 coupon for these, so I’m gonna put the MSRP at around 75 cents – $1.00. For the record, we paid 33 cents.

This product is really nothing new. It’s just a repackaging for convenience (plus it’s bothering me that the labels on the front aren’t corresponding to the correct compartments). Thankfully, if it’s too difficult for you to buy a box of Cheese Ritz Bits and some low quality sausage bites, Oscar Mayer combines a small amount of each into the perfect snack. It’s 390 calories – sadly, less than a Pepperoni Pizza Lunchables (meant for children). When you think about it, this product is a sad, unhealthier adult equivalent of Oscar Mayer’s Lunchables. If your diet already consists of salty, processed, non-refrigerated food products, then by all means, go nuts. Or should I say crackers?

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Food | No Comments »

Hostess Fruit Pies

17 comments Written on March 14th, 2011 by
Categories: Food
Tags: , , ,

Product: Hostess Fruit Pies (Cherry Flavored)
Price: $1.00

Marisa’s Take: In honor of Pi Day, we decided at the last minute to pick up a suitable product for the occasion (literally bought it yesterday morning). You’ve probably seen these babies gracing supermarket checkout stands, aging gracefully like fine wines. With enticing flavors like apple, cherry, pineapple, lemon, blackberry, strawberry, French apple (ooh la la!), Hostess Fruit Pies have served as after school snacks for generations of fat children and will probably continue to for years to come, despite all the anti-HFCS sentiment (High Fructose Corn Syrup, which the majority of this product seems to consist of) and Michelle Obama campaigns.

If you thought pastry snacks like Pop Tarts and Toaster Strudels were bad, think again. Hostess Fruit Pies are 480 calories a pop (for reference, two Pop Tarts are 400 calories, even the indulgent flavors like “Hot Fudge Sundae”). Considering the nutritional value of this fruit pie, I was a bit disappointed that one pie cost one dollar (and that was the sale price).  I would expect something more like 50 cents. I decided to go with cherry since it’s a classic flavor, though not as American as Apple Pie. If anything, it’s painful to call this thing a “pie”; this ain’t no dessert baked by your dear old Grandma and cooling on the windowsill.

You’re sorely mistaken if you think the inclusion of the word “fruit” in this product makes it anywhere near healthy. The fruit in this product only consists of a bright red goo inside; no actual cherries in sight, besides on the packaging. I do have to give props for the Hostess website for attempting to make these sound slightly appealing with phrases like “heat them up and let the fruit filled aroma fill the house” and “serve them a la mode”. I hereby nominate a Hostess Fruit Pie with a scoop of vanilla ice cream hastily slapped on top as the most depressing dessert ever. The site also mentions that “a trip to the snack cake aisle can be like visiting a country fruit stand”, that is, if your local fruit stand consists of jars of red, yellow and purple goo.

Truth be told, I didn’t even eat any of this pie, since I remember the sugary gooey taste from my childhood. Ben took off a piece of the frosted crust and ate it, then threw the rest away citing, “I don’t want anyone else to eat the rest of this” with a somber look on his face.

I’d link to a site where you could buy these online, but they’re available at pretty much any supermarket, convenience store or gas station.

Ben’s Take: Back when I was a geeky overweight middle schooler with a bowl haircut, I was totally into these hand pie things. My parents wouldn’t buy them for me, but I would ride my bike to the local grocery with portly geek friend Matt to get some Jones Soda and fruit pies. No wonder I was a porker (I’m still a bit of a porker but you wouldn’t know based on my new profile photo!).

You know, after reading the ingredients on these things, and actually paying attention to the NUTRITIONAL FACTS, I wouldn’t feed these to my hypothetical children. I wouldn’t even feed these to my neighbor’s children. I mean, holy butts. It has 80-90 more calories than an Eggo Real Fruit Pizza. Twice the sugar. TWICE the sugar of the Real Fruit Pizza! I can’t believe I didn’t turn into a freaking diabetic. It’s not like I was drinking diet soda with these. I’m going to guess that it was the whole bicycle ride that kept me from being a 250 lbs 13-year-old kid. I would have been on Maury and gone to fat kid boot camp.

Upon revisiting these unholy hyper-sweetened abominations, I found the sugar glaze on the crust alone to be unbearably sweet and I had to spit out the bite that included the filling. I’m going to be an old curmudgeon about this and say, how the heck did I eat these AND drink a flippin’ full sugar soda? That’s a hyper-mega-sugar-sweetness-overload. These things are terrible. TERRIBLE. And this is coming from a guy who LOVES Twinkies.

Unless you’re into horrible foods or have a compulsive disorder that forces you to purchase products that contain more sugar per serving than years you have lived, avoid this. It’s just so bad for you. Now where did I put those Twinkies?

Other Hostess Fruit Pie Reviews ‘Round the Net:
Snack Girl
Serious Eats

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Food | 17 Comments »

Oh Boy! Oberto Steak & Cheese Stick

3 comments Written on March 11th, 2011 by
Categories: Food
Tags: , , , ,

EATING LIKE ALPHA.

Purchased at: Grocery Outlet (Seattle – Madrona)
Price: 50 cents

Ben’s Take: How does an “alpha” eat? Well, I’m not actually sure how an alpha would eat, but if the alpha were a dog, I’d bet it’d eat this. Dogs will eat anything. Not that a dog’s culinary choices are any fault of Oh Boy! Oberto. Well, deciding that a meat stick should be infused with cheese flavoring might be their fault, but that has nothing to do with alpha dogs’ eating habits.

Enough about dogs and their food choices; what the heck is with American food companies and their obsession with infusing anything and everything with cheese? I mean I can see this, as a sort of logical extension of the vending machine cheddar and sausage packs, well not really. You don’t eat both of them at the same time. Do you? Am I missing out on a vending machine culinary secret? Do I need to try this at a later date?  I just don’t get it.

The Oh Boy! Oberto Steak and Cheese stick would have been my first foray into this curious marriage of a shelf stable meat with cheese. Well it would have been if I could taste the cheese. Really I know it’s in there, I can see the yellow chunks mixed in with the meat, and the second ingredient is cheese. Unfortunately my taste buds just told me that the Steak and Cheese stick is just a generic meat stick. No cheese. No cheese flavoring. Nothing. Just boring old meat (never though I’d call meat boring).

Perhaps I’m just not cut out for this stickcheesemeat fusion. Maybe I’m just not sophisticated enough for the finer vending machine confections. I guess I should stick to fine tinned sardines and variations of pancake and sausage sandwiches.

Marisa’s Take: Brand choices for preserved and processed meat sticks around here seem to be somewhat limited. Off the top of my head, I can think of local Seattle favorite Oh Boy! Oberto, Slim Jim, Jack Links and maybe some gas station varieties you’d never admit to eating while coherent or sober. It gets even more crazy when you bring in a product like cheese, which in my mind is a food that is always meant to be refrigerated. And people, this here isn’t just a regular beef stick. This is steak, it’s like a freakin’ vacuum-packed filet mignon for fifty cents.

Oh Boy! Oberto’s newest campaign uses the slogan “Eat Like An Alpha” but if your diet consists primarily of MSG meat sticks, you probably won’t be leading the pack (maybe in your World of Warcraft raid). This coming from a person who’s probably eaten a metric ton of beef jerky and spent collective days in front of a computer with glazed over eyes and my trusty headset microphone.

Beef jerky sticks usually come in two standard forms: your garden-variety cylindrical sausage-style Slim Jims and flattened ‘n’ forms meat strips, which is which this is. I really couldn’t taste any cheese flavor in this, artificial or otherwise. Perhaps Oberto should take heed of other beef sticks that also come partnered with its own separate preserved cheese stick. However, I prefer to take my beef straight-up. Feel free to make any innuendos from that folks, it’s on me.

Apparently Oberto also makes another variety that kicks it up a notch and jumps on the bacon bandwagon with their “Cheddar Bacon Steak & Cheese” stick. I think I’ll pass on that one, if not for the probable overload of “smoke flavoring”.

Buy some Oberto Steak & Cheese Sticks on Amazon.com!

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Food | 3 Comments »

« Older Entries