Taco Bell

In the years to follow, I’ve watched and wondered in silent amazement at the knack that Taco Bell has for continuously making new creations out of the same basic seven ingredients, and each time it tastes different somehow. How the hell do they do that?

As an underpaid working professional with no money in my 20s, I ate Taco Bell a lot. For five bucks, you could grab food for a couple of days and forget, for one brief moment, how bad you were getting screwed by the man.

My not-so-inner fast food junkie eventually branched out from the traditional tacos and burritos, first with the Mexican Pizza – two crisp shells packed with ground beef (is it really?) and beans, topped with pizza sauce and multiple cheeses, please hold the tomatoes. I discovered that 20something me could easily pack away two of those bad boys, and potentially a soft taco or two if I really wanted to kill my will to do anything for the rest of the day.

The Chalupa. Ah yes, one of the early times that I had that feeling that perhaps I might be leading myself towards eventual clogged arteries by the time I was 30. Because those shells can’t possibly be healthy, can they? They taste too damn good. Grab yourself a Nacho Cheese Chalupa, and you too might feel the feelings of pain and remorse after combining ground beef (still questioning this), nacho cheese sauce, and the previously mentioned potentially unhealthy chalupa shell.

The Crunch Wrap Supreme. This combines my love of the Mexican Pizza with my love of the Double Decker Taco Supreme into one unhealthy package that I nicknamed the “Taco Bell frisbee” because of the circular shape of this item, combined with the fact that I was really, really bored on the day that I first ordered this. I apparently fixed that boredom by naming my food. Mark this down as one of my early cries for help. (P.S. – these really suck as a leftover.)

And then the brilliance ended at Taco Bell HQ. Someone decided that it would be a good idea to inject potatoes into the list of magical ingredients for potential Taco Bell goodness. Now, while I can eat tubs and tubs of the standard Fiesta Potatoes from Taco Bell, I’ve discovered that they seem to taint every Taco Bell creation that incorporates them with the previously mentioned ground, um, beef, beans, or any other substance. Seriously, who looks at beans, beef, potatoes, eight packets of Fire Sauce, and says yum?

Taco Bell does, that’s who.

But now they’ve gone too far.

I was sitting at home watching the always brilliant Rescue Me on my DVR, fast-forwarding through commercials, when I saw it: The word “Bacon” was plastered on my television, and miles and miles of bacon-loaded pictorial goodness splashed across my screen, forcing me to dive for the remote and rewind to believe what I had just seen.

Bacon Cheesy Potato Burrito.

Four words that should have made me say no. No way. No chance in hell.

Instead, I got in my car and drove two blocks over to the nearest Taco Bell location.

I placed an order for two of these potential gifts from God at $2.99 per burrito. That’s value in this time of alleged recession and financial struggle. Not. Thanks a lot, Taco Bell.

Upon arriving home, I sat down at the table and unwrapped the first burrito.

Here’s what they want you to believe that it looks like:

In reality, it actually looks closer to this:

No matter how carefully you unwrap one of these suckers, the visual fraud is very quickly unmasked.

On a side note, who are these people that get paid to set up the fast food glamour shot with every precious ingredient in its proper place, and do they get paid big bucks? More importantly, are they all obsessive-compulsives?

Now, let’s eat!

I had a quick debate on whether I should add my customary hot sauce, or experience it for the first time sans sauce, potentially as intended by the Taco Bell culinary craftsmen. “Screw ‘em, bring on the hot sauce,” was my quick assessment of the situation.

Digging in, I quickly wolfed down the first burrito. Tasting lots of ground beef (fine, I’ll call it beef with only minor snickering,) nacho cheese sauce, potatoes, etc. But I get to the end of burrito uno, and my first thought is that I didn’t taste a lot of bacon in this so-called “Bacon Cheesy Potato Burrito.” Based on the name alone, this burrito should be bursting with bacon-loaded flavor, taste, and texture. Worse, as you would expect, they’ve gone the cheap route and provided bacon in the form of bits that may or may not even be real bacon.

I’m tasting potatoes and remembering how much I previously hated the inclusion of potatoes with previous Taco Bell burrito experiences. What the hell am I doing? I’m left with the complicated decision: Do I forge onward and eat the remaining Bacon Cheesy Potato Burrito, part of my almost $6 two-burrito Taco Bell investment?

Who the hell spends $6 on two items at Taco Bell anyway? This asshole. That’s who.

I ended up eating about three quarters of the burrito before deciding to pitch the remaining portion. Interestingly enough, they seem to have taken all of the bacon bits that were missing from the first burrito and dumped them into the second burrito. In theory, this should make things better, but the whole experience feels beyond bland by the time I’m done eating.

Normally when I finish Taco Bell, I’ve got a feeling of satisfaction mixed with the feeling that I’ve done something horrible to my body. I don’t have that feeling of satisfaction here – instead, I just wish that I’d eaten something else.

Nutritionally, how does this bad boy stack up? Well, let’s take a look at the official full-disclosure rundown from Taco Bell’s site.

680 calories: While some of you are gasping at that number, some of my favorite things that are really bad for me are way over the 1,000 calorie mark.

70 milligrams of cholesterol: I kind of want to forget that I just read this, so that I can lie to my heart surgeon in 15 years.

57 grams of carbs: I’m assuming that that’s bad for most of you that are on whatever fad diet it is that you’re on. As the furthest thing from a “health nut,” I have no idea. I have learned from Popdose mainman Jeff Giles during recent conversations on Twitter that lasers don’t belong anywhere near your eyes. That really has no practical application here. Let’s move on.

36 total grams of fat: Cool! So when I am feeling regretful about that weight gain, I can pin a lot of that Vandross-esque fluctuation on the Bacon Cheesy Potato Burrito, right where it belongs.

31 grams of protein: Here’s the good news folks: Forget everything you read previously, this sucker is loaded with protein, and it’s good for you. So instead of chugging that Slim-Fast shake for your next meal, you can have one of these instead. Okay, I’m probably wrong about this point.

Here’s the bottom line: Fiesta potatoes are a horrible ingredient for any recipe idea at Taco Bell. Unless it’s a pure unadulterated side of fiesta potatoes with the standard sour cream, cheese sauce, etc., just say “pass.” Any other decision will leave you with deep feelings of regret, sorrow, and shame.

Bacon Cheesy Potato Burrito, I wanted to be friends with you, I really did. But unfortunately, I have to give you the big thumbs down. All that you had to do was just seduce me gently with a little bit of real bacon, and I’m talkin’ strips of bacon here. But that didn’t happen, did it?

So, where do we go from here?

My suggested trip to the promised land of Taco Bell happiness includes the following: two chili-cheese burritos, two cheese roll-ups, four soft tacos, and lots of hot sauce. I recommend the signature Taco Bell “Fire” variety.

Now, the hole in your stomach lining after you consume all of that hot sauce for an extended period of time? That’s going to cost you extra.

If you’ve ever tried to make a Boston cream pie, you know they’re also a pain in the ass to put together. I looked up a random recipe at AllRecipes, and counted over 20 ingredients and seven steps; unless you’ve got an afternoon to kill, or are specifically seeking out a dessert so labor-intensive that you earn it by making it, you’re liable to seek out something simpler.

For instance, a Boston cream pie you make in your toaster.

Ah, yes, the Toaster Strudel. For kids of my generation, who thought Cookie Crisp was the apex of the dessert-as-breakfast food subgenre, Toaster Strudels represented a new frontier. Of course, Toaster Strudels aren’t really strudels at all — they’re more like flakier, even less nutritious Pop-Tarts — but only the most annoying 10-year-old on the planet cares about stuff like that. The bottom line is that Toaster Strudels are stupidly delicious, even if you don’t squirt the pack of crack-laced icing that Pillsbury thoughtfully includes for each Strudel.

So who better to turn the Boston cream pie from pain-in-the-ass dessert into damn-near-instant breakfast treat? Nobody, that’s who. Those d-bags at Yoplait think they’re all clever because they started making yogurt that tastes vaguely like strawberry shortcake? Ha! Here’s some Doughboy foot in your ass!

Well, okay, so maybe Boston Cream Pie Toaster Strudels don’t really taste anything like a Boston cream pie. Or look like one:

Not that I really expected these things to live up to their billing. I mean, I ate Strawberry Cream Cheese Toaster Strudels for years, and they don’t taste like strawberry or cream cheese; if Pillsbury can’t get two relatively simple ingredients right, I see no reason to believe they’d be able to distill something messy and complicated. Really, I’m not sure I’d give Pillsbury credit for getting much of anything right — anything, that is, besides taking false advertising to delicious new heights.

What do Boston Cream Pie Toaster Strudels taste like? I don’t know. A little like chocolate, I guess, with a touch of something else, and a delicate bouquet of flaky pastry-like substance. It is not, strictly speaking, very good, and yet I have somehow eaten an entire box in less than the time it would have taken for me to make my own actual Boston cream pie — which means that Pillsbury has somehow simultaneously engineered a terrible defeat for real flavor and honest food and scored a victory for my breakfast. Much like a toaster-derived Boston cream pie, this should not be possible — and yet it clearly is. Bravo, Pillsbury. Bravo!

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go brush my teeth over and over again.

Suck it.

Do you see what I have here? You do? Let me spell it out for you anyway: I have a box of Triple Chocolate M&M’s Premiums Chocolate Candies. Yes, that’s right — Premiums. As in, better than those crappy regular M&M’s sitting in that bowl on your desk right now.

How do I know they’re better? Easy: They cost $10 a pound. Yeah, you heard me, nuns at St. Agatha’s who predicted I’d be sweeping streets for a living by now — I’m sitting here wolfing down a box of obscenely decadent chocolate, the likes of which your sorry asses have never tasted. Yes! Premiums! Me! Can you believe it?

You’re feigning disinterest, but I can see through your pathetic attempts to choke down all that jealousy. I bet I know what that jealousy tastes like, too: the waxy, downmarket chocolate in your stupid regular M&M’s. Do you want to know what’s in my fancy Triple Chocolate M&M’s Premiums? No? Fuck you, I’m going to tell you anyway: One layer of dark chocolate, one layer of white chocolate, and a delectable milk chocolate center. All in one overpriced candy! How do they do it? I don’t know. All I know is that I’m living the Premium lifestyle, and you aren’t.

I repeat: Suck it.

Some people may try and tell you that M&M’s Premiums aren’t really worth the extra money, or that they are not, in fact, all that “Premium” at all. These people are dirty liars. Do you really think MARS Snackfood US, LLC would charge extra for chocolate that tastes suspiciously like the shit they put in the M&M’s they make for poor people? You do? Ha! You don’t even understand capitalism, do you? Of course you don’t. If you did, you might have an economics degree, and you’d be able to live the Premium lifestyle, instead of having to gag on poverty-flavored M&M’s. Too bad for you!

I know what you’re wondering: How did I, someone who barely had a 2.0 grade point average in high school, make it past the velvet rope and into the Premium party? Especially you, Mom and Dad — you must really be pissed that all those lectures about not being able to get anywhere in life if I didn’t do my homework ended up being the load of total crap I always knew they were. And you know what? I’d give you the answer to your question, except I’m chewing on a handful of scrumptious Triple Chocolate M&M’s Premiums Chocolate Candies, and I’ve got too much class to talk with my mouth full.

No, I will not share with you. Don’t even think about touching my M&M’s, either. These ones are so Premium, they don’t even have a hard candy shell. They will, in fact, melt in your hand. So hands off!

In closing, I would like to add that the Premium fun doesn’t even end with Triple Chocolate. No, we’ve got other varieties to choose from — namely Mint Chocolate, Mocha, Raspberry Almond, and Chocolate Almond. Don’t they sound fan-fucking-tastic? You bet they do. Unfortunately, the prices of annoyingly non-Premium foods like milk and bread keep going up, and I wasn’t able to convince my stupid wife and kids to go along with the “Seven Nights of Ramen” menu I proposed, so I haven’t gotten around to sampling those other varieties yet. But I will. You can count on it — once you start living the Premium lifestyle, you never go back. Even if it means siphoning your neighbor’s gasoline once in awhile.

Those were good times, weren’t they?

Not good enough for Mars Incorporated, apparently, because awhile back, the company started rolling out new Skittles varieties all willy-nilly. I believe the tropical flavors came first, followed by Wild Berry, Smoothie Mix, the so-disgusting-they’re-awesome Sour Skittles, and — if the candy’s Wikipedia page is to be believed — all kinds of strange and terrible spinoffs, like Skittles Mints, Liquorice Skittles, and, dear God, Double Sour Skittles.

You’d think they were all done, right? No more fruit frontiers to explore? Every pot of gold at the end of every rainbow plundered? You’d think that, all right, but you aren’t an evil genius in the employ of a dark and powerful candy empire. Behold, bitches! Chocolate Mix Skittles have arrived!

Looking at this bag, two immediate reactions seem appropriate:

1. What, is chocolate a fucking fruit now?
2. (As spoken by my wife when I came home with these) Chocolate Skittles? Aren’t those M&M’s?

Not to spoil anything for you, but the answers to both questions are a loud and hearty “no.”

So here’s the deal with Skittles’ Chocolate Mix. Each bag gives you five flavors: S’mores, Chocolate Caramel, Chocolate Pudding, Brownie Batter, and — inexplicably — Vanilla. There are problems with this, and they aren’t the ones you might think. Observe the following:

The picture doesn’t totally do the bag’s contents justice, but as you might have noticed, it’s roughly 85% Brownie Batter. Also, what you totally can’t see in the picture is that Skittles Chocolate Mix is gross.

Now, this isn’t exactly objective reporting, because I probably haven’t had a single Skittle in almost 10 years. No matter how few I eat, I always come away from the bag feeling like it was too many. Aside from a brief fascination with the aforementioned Sour Skittles (it ended badly), my intestines have been a Skittles-free zone for a very long time. But before you go saying this post has a liberal anti-Skittles bias and demanding a new writer, let me share an important piece of information with you, which is: Skittles Chocolate Mix share neither taste nor consistency with regular Skittles. They’re like a totally new, totally terrible candy.

The first problem with Chocolate Mix Skittles is one of consistency. Chewing on one of these things is like munching on naugahyde or stale beef jerky — they make Necco Wafers seem like marshmallows. Not cool. Oh, and here’s the worst part: All that work pays off with a flavor that can best be described as revoltingly sweet. I mean, chocolate is pretty much an afterthought as far as Chocolate Mix Skittles are concerned — it’s sugar first, ask questions later — or better yet, more sugar later. I’m pretty sure all the chocolate is contained in the hard candy shell, and the innards are pure cane sugar. I would have tried to take a cross-section shot, but I didn’t dare bite these with anything that wasn’t a molar, and I was afraid that taking a knife to one would have ended in a broken window.

The bottom line: Eat these at your own peril. You can eat mine, actually — I’ve still got most of my bag sitting right here. If nobody wants it, I’ll just pour the contents into an old sock and use it as a weapon in case anyone ever breaks into my house.

When I saw that our beloved leader, Mr. Giles, had revived this feature, my heart leapt with joy. “At last!” I thought. “A legitimate excuse for eating and drinking really weird shit!”

Of course, weird is relative…I mean, I’m a religious viewer of “Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern,” but I wouldn’t touch 95% of the stuff that guy indulges in…but let’s just say that I’m a sucker for unique flavors and strange culinary concepts within the mainstream. That’s why I regularly scour my local Big Lots, Dollar Tree, and Ollie’s locations to see what product lines have been abandoned for lack of interest (or, more likely, for lack of acting tasting even remotely good) and can be had for really cheap. And by happy coincidence, I was in Big Lots only yesterday, where curiosity forced me to purchase a 4-pack of Java Pop, a “coffee soda” produced in Woodstock, VT.

Despite my curiosity, I admit that I still had a certain amount of trepidation. I mean, I’m a coffee fiend, but when it comes to attempts to blend it with other beverages, I haven’t found much love in my heart for the results. Despite Drew Carey’s best efforts, the concept of blending coffee and beer has — based on my purchases of two different attempts at such a product — failed miserably. And by “miserably,” I mean they were fucking disgusting, as bitter as all get-out and impossible for me to even finish…and when it comes to beer, that’s really saying something.

Still, coffee soda…? Could there be something of merit here? Time to find out.

The first thing that catches my eyes is that the bottle is emblazoned with the announcement that this is both USDA Organic and Fair-Trade Certified. Neither claim will have any effect on how the product tastes, but I feel good about the political correctness of the beverage, and that’s something, anyway. Another bonus: at first sniff, it smells more like hazelnut than coffee, which seems like it could be a good thing in this case.

No point in belaboring the inevitable, might as well just take a chug.

First swig: Huh. It’s not half-bad. It’s not something I’d necessarily use to replace a steaming hot cup o’ joe, but it’s sure a heck of a lot more successful than coffee-flavored beer. I’m not sure what process was used to make it, but as someone with absolutely no scientific background, I like to imagine that it just involves brewing hazelnut coffee with carbonated water. (That’d work, right?)

Second swig: Uh-oh. It’s like the coffee taste and the hazelnut taste are splitting off into different camps, and the coffee is winning. I’m probably just imagining it, but I swear I can actually taste the grounds. This is not a good thing.

Third swig: I’m finding myself progressively less pleased with the taste. Perhaps this chocolate chip cookie, which is conveniently at arm’s length, will help the situation some. Coffee + cookies = delicious, right?

Fourth swig: Abort Project Cookie! For God’s sake, ABORT PROJECT COOKIE!

Fifth swig: There’s still a lingering blend of chocolate / hazelnut / indescribable awfulness in my mouth. Somehow, I suspect that the Java Pop is not going to rally back from this…and I’m pretty sure we can’t blame this entirely on the cookie.

Sixth swig: Actually, it’s bouncing back better than I expected. It has actually returned to being halfway decent again. I did not forsee this occurring.

Seventh / Final swig: Well, it’s over. I’m not rushing back to have another one anytime soon, but I’m not saying the remaining three bottles won’t get polished off at some juncture. After all, my stash of Steven Seagal’s Lightning Bolt energy drink isn’t going to last forever.

Those of you who weren’t loyal Jefitoblog readers may not remember this series — Lord knows I’ve let it lie dormant long enough — but it was a long-running (if totally transparently ripped from Steve at The Sneeze) tradition at the old site. I’ve meant to resume it since Popdose started, but just somehow never…got around to it.

(Apologies to Jason, who I railroaded into eating carbonated yogurt last fall, under the pretense that it would be used for Popdose’s inaugural Gross-Off post — although the pictures from our ordeal remain, my sense memories of the crap we ate do not.)

So, here’s the deal with the Great Gross-Off: Because I have a demented weakness for “limited edition” foodstuffs — particularly those that seem ridiculous or just plain wrong — and also have a wife who frowns on me wasting money and/or stomach lining on said foodstuffs, I have devised an elaborate scheme under which I am able to claim that I’m only buying all this junk food for “research,” or “work,” or whatever I can blurt out with a straight face. I purchase the junk food. I eat the junk food. I regret eating the junk food. I attempt to put my regret into words.

Gross-Off.

Now that we’ve established the ground rules for our little game, please allow me to introduce you to the magical little wonderbar that got this series up and running again. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Limited Edition Indiana Jones Snickers Adventure Bar!

Because really, honest to God, what tastes more like adventure than diabetes-triggering levels of high fructose corn syrup?

As soon as I saw the Limited Edition Indiana Jones Snickers Adventure Bar in the store, I knew I had to have it. Equal parts intriguing and stupid, it is the perfect Gross-Off food. You may have seen this in your local supermarket already — and chances are, you assumed it was a regular old Snickers, with Harrison Ford’s mug pasted on the wrapper. No way, Beavis — the folks at Snickers have gone all out for the fourth Indiana Jones blockbuster (opening tomorrow!). Dig it:

See? You get the “rich chocolate” and “crunchy nuts” you expect from a Snickers bar, but they’re not done — they throw in A CLIFFHANGER KICK OF EXOTIC SPICE AND A HINT OF SWEET COCONUT FLAVOR.

Those Snickers people, man. They just give and give and give.

Now, understandably, I was more than a little skeptical about the wrapper’s claims. For one thing, where I live, “exotic spice” can mean anything from tarragon to kosher salt; it’s just the kind of stupidly ambiguous gobbledygook that food conglomerates love to slap on packaging. And for another, coconut in Snickers? Eww, sign me up.

Anyway, I started off by chopping my Limited Edition Indiana Jones Snickers Adventure Bar in half, to see if I could observe any visual evidence of exotic spices and/or sweet coconut flavor. Behold:

Looks just like a regular Snickers bar, doesn’t it? Those sneaky bitches.

Here’s the thing, though: I’m not sure about “exotic spices,” but the damn thing actually does have an identifiably coco-nutty undertone. It’s subtle, but if you pay attention, you can just catch it wafting around underneath the waxy chocolate buildup, nut remnants, caramel, and sickly sweet off-white caulking. It tastes like adventure — maybe not of the swashbuckling Mayan temple variety, but you’d definitely want something like this on hand if you were planning a daring search for the remote control, or escaping from fat camp. And if the suits at Paramount know their heads from their asses, you’ll be munching on one of these — and washing it down with some Adventure Coke — when you inevitably attend a screening of Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull. Cue the John Williams score!

(Bet you were looking for an mp3 of the Indiana Jones theme song here, weren’t you? Psych! I don’t have it.)

I’m talking about Cap’n Crunch Polar Crunch, with “New Cool Berry Flavor.”

I think if you stop and give it a moment’s consideration, you’ll agree with me that it’s a little disconcerting that “CHANGES COLORS!” is a selling point for any kind of food in this country. I mean, yeah, I want my meat to change color when I grill it, but cereal? Cereal isn’t supposed to change colors. I’m very proud of all our food-industry voodoo magicians and the wonderful/scary things they’ve been able to do with flavors and shelf lives, et cetera, but once we get into the whole changing-colors thing, maybe it’s time to direct our efforts toward nobler goals, no?

Especially when the food in question starts off this color. In nature, hues this bright signify deadly poison:

As it turns out, there’s no voodoo involved in these color-changing berries, just a whole lot of plain old Crunch Berries dumped in blue powder. Just ask the milk:

It wasn’t like we needed further proof that the Cap’n is a deceitful, money-grubbing pirate bastard, but I think these latest crappleberries are beyond the pale. “New Cool Berry Flavor,” as it turns out, refers to the frighteningly durable coat of decidedly uncool-tasting slime that coats your tongue if you’re dumb enough to eat a bowl of this shit.

In fact, you know what this powder looks like? The chalk you rub onto the end of a pool cue. No, I’m serious. Check it out:

Just remember: I ate an entire bowl of those.

I am not a cranky 100-year-old man who constantly complains that things aren’t the way they were in the good old days. Really, I’m not.

But sometimes I feel like I am. For instance, I tend to get pretty riled up about trends that don’t bother anyone else I know. Like this whole “portable versions of existing food” movement.

It all started with “gogurt,” portable yogurt, which actually makes a fair amount of sense. I mean, I’ll admit that there are times when carrying a spoon with which to eat your yogurt is prohibitively inconvenient — say, when playing beach volleyball, or riding a motorcycle. Gogurt would come in pretty handy if hunger struck when a person was doing either of those things.

But, you know, for the most part, here’s how I feel about gogurt and every other goddamn “on-the-go lifestyle” food: If you don’t have enough time in your day to sit down and eat yogurt with a utensil like a human being, you need to slow your ass down. Buy a personal planner or something.

Shit.

And now this. Go-Tarts?

I’m sorry, I was under the impression that Pop-Tarts were already pretty well-suited to “go” eating. Ask any college student in America — all you need is seventy-five cents for a pair of foil-wrapped -Tarts from the nearest vending machine, and your walk from one class to the next becomes a meal. Sure, they taste better toasted, but eating a raw Pop-Tart never hurt anybody.

Or maybe it has. I’m not sure what those Kellogg pricks are trying to tell us here; the implication seems to be that regular Pop-Tarts should not be eaten raw. Either that, or that they think their customers are the dumbest people in the world. I’d put all my chips on the latter, if it wasn’t for the little message on the side of the Go-Tarts box that says they “SHOULD NOT BE WARMED OR HEATED IN A TOASTER.”

I’m not sure what would happen if a person warmed or heated one of these things. I’m not willing to find out.

They certainly look pretty much like regular old Pop-Tarts:

Battle-scarred veterans of the “portable versions of existing food” movement will recognize in the above photo the utilization of the “less is more” technique frequently employed by foodmakers; i.e. the Go-Tart or bag of Gripz you just bought contains less than a comparable bag of the parent brand, and it cost you more to buy it.

Perhaps they’re banking on all of us being too “busy” and “on the go” to notice this stuff. I notice, though, and if there’s a God in heaven, the chintzy fuckers responsible for this madness will have plenty to answer for in the great beyond.

Still, though. These Go-Tarts are sort of delicious.

Now, if you’re like me, you could want waffles bad — real, real bad, even — yet still not be able to muster the motivation to mix the ingredients, get the waffle iron down from the shelf, and griddle up a big ol’ mess that you’re just going to have to clean up anyway.

I mean, maybe you don’t even own a waffle iron. Plenty of people don’t. There’s no shame in that.

I guess the next logical step would be to toast up some frozen waffles, but really — frozen waffles? Ugh. No food develops freezer burn faster than a box of waffles. They’ve got a window of, like, six days before they get all puckered and gross. And even in that window, they aren’t very good. Even when I was a kid and shouldn’t have known any better, I knew that frozen waffles were for dogs and poor people.

So what’s a lazy, waffle-jonesing breakfast eater to do?

It’s NEW! Eggo Cereal Maple Syrup Naturally & Artificially Flavored!!!

(It’s a crunchy waffle-shaped cereal, just in case you were wondering.)

Again. Homemade waffles: Delicious. Remember how Mom used to make ‘em? All fluffy and buttery, beckoning to you from the plate in a stack of delicious breakfast-y goodness?

Eggo Cereal Maple Syrup Naturally & Artificially Flavored waffles? Not so much.

You know what’s worse than the way these shriveled little unwaffles look? The fact that there is, in fact, not a drop of fucking maple anywhere in the box:

How do I describe the taste? I choked down the last of my bowl about an hour ago — even chased it with some yogurt — and Eggo Cereal Maple Syrup Naturally & Artificially Flavored is still ringing in my tastebuds, yet I’m not sure how to put it into words. I mean…crappy? Very bad? Quite gross? Yes. But there’s something else. A certain je ne sais please God no more. The flavor is sort of vaguely waffle-like, yet also completely not. It’s kind of like looking at an old family Christmas portrait and noticing that your mom’s nipple is showing — just familiar enough to provoke warm, happy feelings, yet absolutely, awfully wrong.

I guess the bottom line is this: Yes, making waffles is a pain in the neck. But it beats eating this stuff.

It was here that I first experienced the power of the habanero.

I’d never been much of a spicy-food guy to that point, but for some reason, that day found me craving the absolute hottest food that Bonz had to offer. The next-to-spiciest stuff wasn’t good enough, friends; neither, matter of fact, was the spiciest. No, here’s what we did: We ordered two pounds of wings coated in jalapeño and habanero dipping sauce on the side.

Oh my God, people, you haven’t lived until you’ve been to Bonz Smokeouse Bar & Grill in Morristown, Vermont. I’ve been to Italy, I’ve been to Paris, I’ve been to Belgium…but the most transcendent dining experience of my entire life, without a doubt, took place that afternoon. We laughed as the habanero tears rolled down our faces (or was that just sweat escaping from our eye sockets? I don’t know); we desperately fanned our open mouths; we breathlessly begged for milk.

I will go back there someday.

In the meantime, believe me when I say that — no matter what the ingredients say — no actual habaneros were harmed in the making of these stupid new chips:

If I were a Spanish-speaking American, I would be royally pissed off with all this pandering. Really. You’ve gotta read the back of the bag, which promises that when you take these home, you will “experience that MASSIVE Doritos® brand crunch as it IGNITES a nuclear explosion of habanero, jalapeño, and chipotle peppers in your mouth!” — and then repeats the same crap in Spanish.

Como se dice “soooooooooo lame”?