My husband picked up a package of Harry & David Pop! Cinnamon Caramel Popcorn at Grocery Outlet and finally decided to open it today. I had been avoiding it as I don’t take to like cinnamon in commercial products – it’s often fake and tastes horribly. But I tried them and they are pretty good. Not great. I won’t be scarfing them down or encouraging him to buy another package, but they weren’t bad.
First, the cinnamon flavor, which comes from “cinnamon powder,” is pretty subtle. It’s there but it’s not on your face in an offensive way. It mostly just tastes of corn syrup, the ingredient they used to create the “caramel”. And that’s a problem because it doesn’t have those toasty caramel notes you want from caramel. The popcorn is just sweet, overwhelmingly so.
Harry & David introduced their Pop! line of popcorn in 2022, but I don’t see them being sold at the Harry & David website or mainstream retailers anymore, which suggests it’s been discontinued as a brand.
Once upon a time, conitos – or as we then knew them, Havannets – were my favorite treat. These are small cone-shaped sweet with a thin cookie base, and dulce de leche coated with chocolate. If you like dulce de leche, you’ll like them.
While for decades, conitos were the exclusive province of Havanna and maybe Balcarce – the two posh brands of alfajores Argentina had -, as new brands of gourmet alfajores exploded in the 90’s, so did conitos. They are now available from a large variety of brands, at least in Argentina.
Guolis is one of the brands having a moment right now. My cousin Adriana brought me a box of them when we saw her in Washington DC. She told us they had become popular as they are overstuffed with dulce de leche.
Indeed, they are, but otherwise they didn’t seem very different to me than Havannets. I don’t think I could tell them apart in a blind taste. They were very good and I enjoyed them, but not more or less than an Havannets. I’d buy them if they were available for sale – as long as they cost the same or less than Havannets.
By the way, I buy my Argentine treats through Pampa Direct (this is a referral code that if used will give both of us a $5 off coupon).
After years of not using meal kits, I’m open to trying them again. I started with EveryPlate because it’s cheap. I’m updating my 2019 review.
EveryPlate is a budget meal kit brand launched by HelloFresh. It offers simpler meals than its parent company, without fancy ingredients.
The Food
EveryPlate now offers a choice of over 30 meals a week, including several “premium” ones that have an additional cost, a few “oven ready” meals that come in a tray ready to be put in the oven and others that can prepared ahead and cooked quickly. They include several vegetarian meals, and several meals allow you to switch to a different protein for a small additional cost.
The meals are usually uncomplicated American favorites, things such as grilled cheese sandwich with tomato sauce, burgers, baked pastas and the now-popular “bowls”. Most meals include pork, chicken or sausages – though you might be able to switch to beef for an additional cost.
Even though they have expanded their menu, I still struggled to find enough recipes that sounded like things I wanted to eat.
The ingredients, in general, are of good quality. The meats are tasty and at least as good as supermarket meats. I particularly liked the ranch steak. The produce is hit and miss. Some items are not exactly what’s mentioned in the recipe (different types of onions or peppers), some seem overripe and some under. I’ve gotten old garlic and limes. The meats are vacuum sealed and are good for a week after receiving them.
While some meal kits include all the ingredients you’ll need, save for salt, pepper and cooking oil – EveryPlate is more stingy. They require you to use (and have!) your own butter, milk, sugar, flour and ketchup, for example. As not everyone has a stocked pantry, make sure you read what each recipe calls for before ordering it.
The Shipping & Delivery
EveryPlate now delivers their boxes six days a week. My box was delivered in the morning and I got a text altering me to it.
The Packaging
The ingredients come in a cardboard box with a cushioned liner. Some of these are recyclable and other aren’t, so you need to check before you dispose of them. The meats are sandwiched at the bottom of the box between two freezer packs and the rest of the ingredients come in their own little cardboard box. I usually just transfer the whole box into the fridge, though some ingredients (like dry pasta) don’t need refrigeration.
The Plans
EveryPlate allows you get 3 to 5 meals a week for 2, 4 or 6 people each. The basic plan of 3 meals a week for 2 costs $50 ($39 for the meals and $11 for shipping), or $17 per meal / $8.50 per portion. If you order more meals, the cost per meal goes down.
You can usually find discounts online that are good for at least the first week. You can get $15 off by using this link, but there are probably better deals elsewhere.
EveryPlate’s reduced costs are achieved by offering meals with few ingredients, reducing assembly time by not separating ingredients by recipe in the box and by not including some ingredients their recipes call for (e.g. butter, milk, flour & ketchup).
The Meals
These are the Every Plate meals I made in 2025 – I didn’t take photos of the first three.
Beef Bolognese over Linguine Simple and perfectly acceptable. Also, relatively quick to make.
Molto Mozzarella Beef Burgers with Creamy Marinara & Potato Wedges I only made the burger, it was pretty good. I didn’t use the marinara sauce and instead used my own ketchup and garlic aioli.
Crispy Caesar Chicken with Roasted Carrots & Garlic Mashed Potatoes
The chicken was simple but pretty tasty. The caesar dressing helped keep it moist. I roasted the potatoes instead of mashing them and tossed them with olive oil, chopped garlic and Italian seasoning. They were quite yummy.
Creamy Tomato & Pork Sausage Linguine with Garlic Bread
This was also pretty good, but pretty heavy and I don’t think worth the calories or carbs. I added my own Parmesan to both the garlic bread and the pasta – it needed it. I cooked the garlic bread in the air fryer for 5 minutes at 350F. No need to preheat.
All in all, I was happy with them. They were relatively easy to make, quicker than other meal kits, and they were tasty. The portions were also OK – though in some cases this was because of the empty carbs (just look at the size of that garlic bread in comparison to the beef!).
I also made a meal based on an EveryPlate recipe, and might make more in the future:
I’m not a huge appetizer eater, but when I saw that Costco was carrying these butter chicken nan bites I was curious. I love nan bread, I love butter chicken, and combining the two in a bite seems to make a lot of sense.
The 25 oz package comes with 2 bags of nan bites, each with 18 pieces. They can be baked in the oven or cooked in the air fryer. I did the later, preheating it at 350F for 5 minutes, then cooking the bites for 4 minutes, tossing them and then cooking them for an additional 3 minutes. Even though I let them rest for another 3 minutes they were extremely hot when I bit into one. I’d advise to let them sit for at least 5 or 6 minutes before attempting to bite into them.
They were pretty good. They look little samosas but the shells are a little puzzling. They were crispy on the outside and rather thin, but pleasantly chewy.
The filling was tasty, though it was closer to a generic chicken curry than to butter chicken in particular. It had none of the complexity and yuminess of the latter. There was also not enough chicken. Moreover, the sauce spurts all over when you bite into them, particularly when hot. They were a bit on the oily side, however.
All in all, I don’t think I’ll buy them again but I will likely finish the package.
Update: I ate some more dipped in honey mustard dressing and they were absolutely delicious. Of course, most everything with honey mustard dressing rocks, but these went particularly well. They are still too greasy for me to buy again, but I am enjoying those I have left.
Cuisine Adventures is a brand of frozen products made by Plats du Chef, a once Canadian company now owned by a private American company.
Last year, when we went to New York City, our first gastronomic stop was at Junior’s – the famed coffeeshop that was credited with serving the best cheesecake in town. We liked it, so when I heard that Costco might be carrying their cheesecakes I directed Mike, my husband, to get one. It turned out that what they are actually carrying is a package of mini-cheesecakes, and that what he finally got for us a few days ago.
The package comes with 24 frozen cheesecakes and costs around $21. I say around because Costco actually forgot to charge us for it – and charged us for an extra of another item instead. Unlike the regular cheesecake, these ones don’t come with a cake or cookie base, they are all cheese. Indeed, the ingredient list is very simple: cream cheese, sugar, heavy cream, eggs and milk. You are supposed to keep them frozen and let thaw at room temperature for an hour before serving, but I thawed them in the fridge to no ill effect (so far).
The box comes with three flavors of cheesecakes: “original” (plain), strawberry and chocolate. The original cheesecake was pretty good, but not as good as the cheesecake we remembered from Junior’s. That one had a rustic flavor which made us think of a farmer’s cheese. This one just tasted like regular cheesecake, albeit a less sweet version. Indeed, while it was still a tad too sweet for my taste, I did appreciate that it wasn’t as sweet as most cheesecakes are. And I didn’t miss the cake base layer at all.
The strawberry cheesecakes have a swirl of strawberry sweep on top and what seems like a thin layer of strawberry syrup in the middle. The syrup tasted “real,” like what you get when you cook strawberries with sugar and then puree. It was pretty good, and gave bright, fresh hints to what is otherwise a very uniform experience, but I wish there had been more of it.
I had a similar thought with the chocolate cheesecakes. These ones had a swirl of chocolate cheesecake – rather than chocolate syrup – a bit deeper than the strawberry one. The flavor of the chocolate cheesecake was very good, but there just wasn’t enough of it to reach every bite.
In all, these are a good dessert both to serve to others and to practice portion control – particularly if you thaw one at the time.
San Leandro has a new Indian restaurant. Sort of. In reality, Kismat, an Indian restaurant that had opened near Bayfair Mall during the pandemic, has rebranded as Roti Indian Cuisine. I’m not sure whether it’s also under new ownership or management, but I can tell that it has a new chef. I personally liked Kismat’s food the couple of times I got take out from there – but my family had found the dishes too sweet. The new chef seems to be sinning in the opposite direction.
We got take out from Roti Indian Cuisine last week and overall we liked the food – it’s pretty solid. However, I didn’t enjoy it as much as that from other nearby Indian restaurants. On the other hand, it was cheaper.
I got the lamb korma ($17), my usual. It was pretty good, the lamb was tender and not too fatty and he curry was developed, but it lacked the slight sweetness I want to taste in this dish. I probably wouldn’t get it again, but wouldn’t mind eating it.
Mike got the butter chicken ($16) and this was probably the biggest disappointment. Once again, the sauce did taste developed, but it just wasn’t as compelling as butter chicken usually is. The chicken itself was fine, but the sauce was ultimately flat. We’d definitely skip this one.
Much better was the paneer tikka masala ($15). This sauce was everything the butter chicken sauce was not. Bright, intense and just yummy.
The curries come with rice, which was also disappointing. It was a low quality white rice which tasted boiled.
Fortunately, we also got nan which was much better. We shared plain nan ($2.50), onion nan ($3), garlic nan ($3) and kabuli nan ($4) and they were all pretty standard – nothing to write home about, but nothing to complain about either.
Though we were doing take out, service was an issue. The restaurant was completely empty when my husband went to pick up the food. There was a server behind the counter looking at her phone and she did not lift up her eyes once to acknowledge my husband – until, of course, he spoke to her.
In all, I don’t think we’ll be rushing back here.
Roti Indian Cuisine 15099 Hesperian Blvd Suite A San Leandro, CA (510) 460-9280
Some months ago, my cousin Adriana mentioned that she’d be visiting New York and Washington DC for her family’s annual vacation this year. Mike and I had been in New York earlier that year, but I thought that a visit to Washington DC might be warranted. I hadn’t been there since my oldest was a baby, and I enjoy spending time with Adriana a lot – she is one of the most positive people I know.
Dining out and exploring local cuisines is one of the great pleasures of traveling, but unlike New York and New Orleans, there isn’t actually a Washingtonian cuisine. People come to Washington from all over the country and the world, so there are all sorts of restaurants and I think competition and fat expense accounts do make this a foodie town, but there is nothing particularly unique about the cuisine. Thus, rather than try to hit specific cultural culinary experiences as we did in the other two cities, we just went for what was convenient and well reviewed.
We got to DC at the tail end of winter restaurant week, so for our first two meals we got to enjoy restaurants that might otherwise have been out of budget.
We had an exciting dinner at Imperfecto in Foggy Bottom And a nice brunch at Balos Estiatorio in Dupont Circle
Also in Foggy Bottom, we got take out twice from Charm Thai and had a nice Italian dinner at Matera.
There aren’t too many choices near the National Mall but we had a very tasty lunch at Sweet Home Café in the African American History and Culture Museum, a much more common place one at Ocean Terrace Café at the Natura History Museum and a funnel cake at Refreshment Kiosk @ The National Mall.
After visiting the outside of the White House, we had a wonderful lunch at The Hamilton.
Finally, we convinced Adriana to try Ethiopian food and had a great meal at Ethiopic.
We then left DC for Virginia and had lunch at Brookside Restaurant in Luray after visiting Shenandoah National Park.
We finished our trip visiting my friend Lavinia and enjoyed several great meals with her. We had wonderful Indian food at Curry Mantra in Fairfax and amazing Ethiopian, plus a cultural experience to boot, in JD Bar & Restaurant in Annandale. Finally, our last day, we started with a comforting breakfast at The Original Pancake House in Falls Church.
As great as the food was, the best part of the trip was seeing Adriana and her family, Lavinia and hers and my favorite Congressman!.
The pancake choices are endless at this Falls Church pancake house.
For our last meal in the DC area, our friend Lavinia took us to The Original Pancake House (hereafter TOPH) for breakfast. This had been a favorite breakfast spot for her family for years, though they hadn’t been back for a while. Apparently, the same was true of many people. Once a very busy spot, it was half empty that Sunday morning. In an area home to federal workers and a time when these are being decimated by the Trump administration, perhaps that’s to be expected.
TOPH is a casual, old fashioned sort of place. It’s part of a small chain with locations in Bethesda and Rockville, MD, as well. Its main attraction are the endless variations of pancakes and other breakfast goodies it offers. Choosing among so many great sounding options was very hard.
I decided on the Croissant Cinnamon Nut French Toast ($14), which consisted of two croissants, sliced in half, dipped in egg batter and grilled. I came with sliced almonds and cinnamon sugar. There was corn syrup at the table, which wasn’t bad, but obviously not nearly as good as maple syrup would have been. The French toast itself was good, but nothing special. I think I actually prefer the texture of regular bread to that of the croissant. I’m not a big breakfast eater, so one croissant was plenty for me – fortunately Mike finished the rest.
Mike ordered the Two by Two by Two ($12.5) from the Senior Menu. It came with 2 eggs, 2 slices of bacon and 2 buttermilk pancakes. He found it unexceptional but satisfying.
My daughter had the carrotcake pancakes ($13.5), which came with six regular size pancakes (I was expecting them to be smaller!) with cream cheese frosting. She felt they tasted like carrot cake and were very good.
We also had a side of hash browns ($5), which were pretty average and of the raspberry filled beignets ($4.50 for 2). My daughter had never had beignets before, and she was curious due to multiple viewings of the Princess and the Frog when she was little. She was disappointed. She found the beignets to be heavy, and compared them to a denser, unglazed jelly doughnut. I’d learned during our trip to New Orleans the previous year that I wasn’t fond of beignets either, and these didn’t change my mind.
I don’t remember what Lavinia and her son had, but I think they were satisfied. i had a cup of pretty average coffee ($4.5).
In all, I’d go back because I’d be curious to explore more of the many, many options in the menu – and the prices seemed pretty reasonable.
You won’t get a more authentic Ethiopian dining experience outside of Addis Ababa.
JD Bar & Restaurant is my friend Lavinia’s favorite Ethiopian restaurant, and it’s there where we headed for a very late lunch/very early dinner on the Saturday we were visiting her at home. We had visited a museum during the morning, had been delayed after an incident with law enforcement – it turns out the NSA does not take kindly to people photographing the surveillance equipment on their police cars -, and Mike had headed off to another museum while the rest of us sought to satisfy our hunger. We figured that at that midafternoon hour, the restaurant would be empty. Boy, were we in for a surprise.
It turns out that, for whatever reason, 3 PM on a Saturday is the preferred time for Ethiopians in Virginia to go out for a meal. JD Bar & Restaurant’s parking lot was packed when we got there – and the restaurant had nary an empty seat. Or almost. There was one table that could accommodate us, and the host quickly took us to it even as we suggested that we might do take out instead. As the only obviously non-Ethiopians in the place, he could have easily turned as away, but he was extremely accommodating. Indeed, everyone in the restaurant was very nice, though we did get some stares (friendly ones), and we got check upon by the chef and the manager in addition to our waiter. We felt welcomed.
So crowded was the restaurant that it was difficult to appreciate any decore it might have, though I think I remember some paintings of daily life on the walls. They have a small stage set up with microphones, though fortunately (given that we were seated right next to it) there wasn’t a show while we were there.
We ordered quite a bit of food, which was surprisingly affordable for the price and quantity given. I had the meat combo (~$20), which included key sega wot, alecha sega wot, menchet alecha, menchet key, and lega tibse. They were all delicious, none too spicy and while I ate until I couldn’t fit another morsel in my stomach, it probably amounted to little more than a third of the foot in the plate.
Lavinia ordered the JD Special 3 (~$60), which consisted of a HUGE platter with layers of ferrari tibs (chicken), derek tibs (beef) and kitfo topped with aybe (cheese). It was really a monumental platter, that which legends are made of and I’m sad I didn’t take a photo (I hadn’t brought my phone with me). Obviously it’s for many people to share. All the meats were very good, but the derek tibs, in particular, where out of this world. It’s a dry dish, but the pieces of beef were very tender and really nicely seasoned.
Lavinia also ordered a veggie combo ($20), but I didn’t try any of the dishes. My vegetarian ate all the kik alecha from it plus ordered another side of it ($4). She loves this dish, but feels it tastes pretty much the same at every restaurant. This was true here as well.
We had, as you can imagine, enormous amounts of food to take home. The waitress transferred each combo into a take home container, but of course, everything got mixed up there.
In all, this was a great experience and if I visit Lavinia again, I’d definitely want to go back.
We spent the last part of our trip to Washington DC visiting my friend Lavinia in the DC suburbs in Virginia. Curry Mantra is her favorite Indian restaurant in the area and that’s where we headed that Friday evening in February.
It was a bit late, and the restaurant wasn’t very busy. It’s nicely and only a bit garishly decorated with red tones. Service was good, though our waitress had problems understanding and remembering our order and we had to suggest she write it down. I’m in awe of very experienced waiters who are able to remember everything, but it’s not something that most wait staff should attempt to do.
As there were six of us for dinner, we tried a variety of dishes. I didn’t take any photos as the evening was about seeing an old friend and didn’t want to be too intrusive.
The samosas ($7) had your regular vegan potato and pea filling, but were much larger than usual. Everyone liked them quite a bit but they were on the spicy side. The chicken tikka ($18) was moist and flavorful, and I enjoyed it very much.
I ordered the lamb shashi korma ($20), and was quite pleased with the mild, sweet and fruity curry. That is, until I tried the butter chicken ($18), which was absolutely delicious. One of the best butter chickens I’ve had. Lavinia also ordered the Chicken 65 ($18), one of her favorites, but I don’t remember if I tried it or what I thought of it. I am not sure if we ordered another meat dish – but in any case, we had more than enough food to feed the five meat eaters in our party.
The vegetarian among us ordered the tadka dal ($15) and she thought it was fine, though not remarkable. She wouldn’t order it again.
I ordered a sweet lassi ($5), not on printed the menu, and while the server had some problems understanding what I wanted, I eventually got it and it was pretty good. We ordered both garlic nan ($4) and shahi nan ($4) and enjoyed both of them.
In all, if I’m ever in the area visiting Lavinia again, I’ll definitely make sure we go there.
Curry Mantra 9984 Main St Fairfax, VA (703) 218-8128
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