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Tag: Costco

Costco vs Instacart Prices

December 31, 2025 / / 0 Comments

I’m a menu planner and comparison shopper. I do a lot of my grocery shopping online, but for the rest, I send my husband to the grocery store with a list. While some stores have the same prices online and in-store (or don’t have in-store prices at all, as is the case with Amazon groceries), some charge more if you order online. This is particularly true for those that use Instacart to deliver their groceries. And that is true for Costco.

I’ve decided to make this page to record the difference in prices between items as listed for same day delivery on the Costco website, and the prices at my local warehouse. This is for my own reference, but it might help others as well.

  • Beef chuck roast, $1/lb more
  • Pistachio nuts, $2.15 more
  • Blackberries, 44cents more
  • Kirkland sparking water, multipack, $2.50 more
  • Pepsi multipack, $3.33 more
  • Frozen goat cheese & honey pizza, $2 more
  • Frozen ham & cheese croissants, $1.75 more
  • Belgian waffles (on sale), $1 more

Nutty Fruity Dubai Chocolate Bars Review

December 7, 2025 / / 0 Comments

Good but sweet – but isn’t everything?

I’ve been late to the Dubai chocolate craze. Indeed, my first encounter with Dubai chocolates didn’t come until last week, when my husband gave me one of the Nutty Fruitty Dubai chocolate bars he had bought at Costco ($17 at Costco).

The bag came with 15 individually packaged square chocolates, approximately 1 1/2″ x 1 1/2″). The chocolates basically consist of pistachio butter in a milk chocolate coating. They are pretty good, quite tasty but I found them too sweet. As I’ve found pretty much every confectionary I’ve tasted in the last few weeks “too sweet,” I have to conclude that’s a me problem.

My husband liked them as well, but he was a little annoyed at the fact that they are not really chocolate, the chocolate covering is there as a wrapper, rather than to contribute much to the flavor. I’m not sure if that’s true with other Dubai chocolates, I’ll probably give another one a try at some point.

Cuisine Adventures Butter Chicken Naan Bites Review

March 4, 2025 / / 0 Comments

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.

Junior’s Mini Cheesecakes – Review

March 4, 2025 / / 0 Comments

A nice treat

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.

Costco Chicken & Bacon Sandwich Review

October 10, 2024 / / 1 Comment

The worst. Absolute worst.

Costco has introduced a new item to its food course offerings, the chicken & bacon sandwich ($7), and my husband had the brilliant idea to get one for me. For himself, he got a tried and true hotdog. It was awful. So awful that I threatened to divorce him over the slight.

The sandwich comes in thick, dense, dry and just overwhelming ciabatta. Ciabatta can be good if it’s bakery fresh, but this was just a huge mess and close to inedible. The problem, however, were the actual ingredients. My husband foolishly thought that it would contain some of the same rotisserie chicken Costco uses for its chicken salad. Alas, it did not. It has “oven roasted chicken breast” by which they mean thin processed chicken slices, with that same super-salty and chemical flavor of processed turkey. I personally hate it.

I did like the bacon jam, but it couldn’t stand to the horrible flavor of the chicken. I took one bite of the whole thing and told Mike he’d been scammed.

Black Irish Irish Cream: Taste Just Like Baileys

September 30, 2022 / / 0 Comments

We are not huge alcohol drinkers, but I do like cream liqueurs from time to time, and Baileys Irish Cream is our “default.” Irish Cream consists of Irish whiskey, cream, cacao and sometimes other flavorings. It was invented by an ad agency back in 1973, but the Irish seem to have adopted it as their own.

We usually buy Baileys when it’s on sale, or Kirkland Irish Cream, the Costco brand, if we shop at Costco. But I saw that Safeway also carried O’Connery’s Irish Cream Liqueur for just $8-9, and I figured it was worth a try. It gets fairly good reviews and is made by a well known distillery. I do most of my purchasing online, however, and despite the fact that I always ask for no substitutions, Safeway invariably substitutes unavailable products for ones that much more expensive. So unsurprisingly Safeway sent me this Black Irish Irish Cream instead of the O’Connery. At $25, it was over 3 times the price I expected to pay, but fortunately Safeway gave me a refund. I kept the bottle, however, and today I gave it a try. It tastes just like Baileys.

I don’t really know how to describe Irish cream, and there might be some minute differences that a connoisseur could tell, but to me they taste pretty much the same. The same can be said about Kirkland Irish Cream, btw. Unfortunately, both Black Irish and Baileys cost approximately the same – at least when not on sale.


Doing some digging online, I found out that the Black Irish brand is owned by singer Mariah Carey, who realized you can make far more money selling alcohol than singing. Given the very commercial origins of Irish cream, I don’t think anyone can be upset. Still, no reason to buy it or not buy it instead of Baileys – if I had to choose between the two, I’d go for whichever one is on sale.

Kirkland Signature Chicken Street Tacos Review

May 10, 2022 / / 0 Comments

Surprisingly tasty dinner is not the best deal in town

In the last couple of years, I’ve tried a few of Costco’s ready-to-heat meals and I have generally been pleased enough with them. I don’t remember exactly what tempted me to get this particular kit, but it got fairly good reviews online, it wasn’t as carb-heavy as Costco’s pastas and I probably had no other plans for dinner that night. In all, I was fairly happy with it but I found it to be overpriced at the $19 instacart price, so unless I’m actually at Costco and it’s significantly cheaper, I don’t think I’d get it again.

The kit consists of moderately spiced cooked chicken, shredded cabbage, shredded Mexican cheese, a quartered lime, pots of salsa and cilantro lime crema and 12 small flour tortillas. The chicken had a pretty good flavor and it was fairly moist. To warm it up I simply heated up some oil on a skillet and cooked it, stirring often, for a few minutes. It didn’t dry out but it did acquire a nice charred flavor on some parts. The salsa was pretty standard and also a tad spicy – I would have preferred pico de gallo myself, but then again, I often do. The cilantro lime crema was OK, but I also would have preferred plain old sour cream and chopped fresh cilantro. Now, I understand the difficulty of including cilantro in a kit like this, but the crema was really not a good substitute. Finally, I did miss the kit not including guacamole.

Altogether, the ingredients put together on a tortilla made very tasty tacos. Perhaps not as good as those from my corner’s Mexican restaurant, but still tastier than I had expected.

The main problem with the kit is that it’s just not very large. I’d say it feed 2 hungry people or 3 if you use up all the cabbage and tortillas. Now, that’s not bad for $19, but not great either, in particular when compared to the just-cooked and ready-to-eat fiesta packs from El Torito – which cost twice as much but give you more than twice the food, plus which you don’t need to heat up.

Canelés de Bordeaux – French Canelés Review

November 11, 2020 / / 0 Comments

Canelés are a specialty of the Bordeaux region of France. These small pastries are made from eggs, milk, flour, butter, sugar and rum in special molds that make them look like a tall mini bundt cake (but they don’t have a hole in the middle). I first came across them almost two decades ago when I started researching Bordelaise cuisine. For years, I considered making them until finally giving up on the idea – buying a mold for something I’d only make once seemed too wasteful. Still, my curiosity about them stayed.

Then a week ago, I found that Costco was selling these “Made in France” canelés. They were quite expensive, almost $10 for a package of 16 (each weighing a bit over 1 oz), but I had to see what they were like. Unfortunately, they weren’t very good.

The pastries are pretty dense, though I liked their airy, somewhat chewy consistency. They didn’t have much flavor, however. The rum masked whatever else was there, without really adding that much. And while I enjoyed the consistency, they were a bit too dry. All in all, I wouldn’t get them again. Now, if I ever find myself in Bordeaux, I might give a bakery-baked one a try.

Costco Has the Worst Burger EVER

July 25, 2019 / / 1 Comment
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My husband went to Costco the other day and I asked him to get me a BBQ brisket sandwich for lunch. Unfortunately, our local Costco in San Leandro (at least) no longer carries them. Instead, they have added a burger to their menu and my husband figured he’d get me that instead. Bad, bad move.

He said he had an inkling that the burger wouldn’t be good when he saw the patties coming out of the steamer. And he was right. This has to be the worst burger I have ever eaten, bar none. And I’ve eaten many bad burgers in my time.

The meat (and I’m assuming it’s meat) was so incredibly dry, that I have to believe it’s mostly filling. It also tasted just like the burgers they used to serve in middle school when I was a kid – not a good memory. Except these were drier.

The patties are enormous, which in this case it’s just not a good thing. It only means you have more unappetizing food to get through.

I didn’t want to waste food, so I ate through almost half of it until I decided that I just couldn’t do this to myself. The dog ate the rest. She, at least, did not complain.

But you are warned: stay away from these burgers.

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