My husband brought an order of chicken strips ($7) from Costco and I can’t say I’m impressed. I’m not a huge fan of chicken strips in the first place, but I do get them from Safeway when they’re on sale for $5 (which happens every couple of Fridays). These ones were thicker, denser, saltier and tasted like frozen fried chicken. On the other hand, my husband found them tender and liked that the strips aren’t seasoned (with something other than salt). They come with a sauce which seems like a mixture of BBQ sauce and honey mustard. I preferred honey mustard dressing.
Tag: reviews (Page 1 of 39)
A few days ago I made Buitoni Italian Sausage Ravioli with pasta sauce for lunch. The refrigerated ravioli are huge, the type that you need to cut in two to fit into your mouth. The filling has visible chunks of Italian sausage mixed with cheeses and breadcrumbs. It definitely tastes like Italian sausage, and you can easily just eat these ravioli with only added butter or olive oil – they are pretty dry, so they need a source of moisture. They did OK with the tomato-based pasta sauce I used, but this mostly covered the flavor of the sausage so it was unnecessary.
The regular package is 10 oz, and will feed two if you add a salad or you are not very hungry. It was $7 at Safeway, but I got it in a BOGO deal.
Buitoni in America is owned by MA private company Tuscan Brands, in Europe, by Nestlé.
Prego, along with Ragú, are two of the oldest supermarket pasta sauces. They are also the cheapest – created at a time when economy and convenience were the most important factors for shoppers. As inflation brings hunger to America, we are right back where we started.
Prego sauces are made with tomato paste, rather than with whole or diced tomatoes as the more expensive brands. If you watch food tasters out there, Prego ranks at the bottom. It may be familiarity, but I actually like these cheaper pasta brands, as I find them more flavorful and complex – they need to make up with spices what they can’t accomplish with fresh ingredients.
Prego Creamy Tomato Garlic is part of a new line of Prego sauces which combine tomato sauce with cream. I think they are founded on the success of vodka sauce which became a thing a decade or two ago. I thought it was very good. On the ravioli, it was a tad too acidic and but it was very tasty, but I also used it to make my regular meat sauce and it was absolutely delicious in it. My husband actually remarked at how good it was, and we ended up eating up the whole sauce from the pot before we even boiled the pasta.
The sauce was $2 at Safeway (from $4.50 regular). Prego is made by Campbell’s,
Hormel offers several “ready to heat” meat dishes, which occasionally go on sale at Safeway for $5 (from $13 regular price.) I shared this Beef Roast au Jus and Savory Sauce and the mashed potatoes reviewed below with my husband and it made a satisfying lunch for two.
The meat comes in a vacuum sealed tray and you only need to microwave it for about 3 1/2 minutes to heat it up. The large chunks of meat very much taste like pot roast, but they are incredibly dry. Imagine the driest beef you’ve ever had, and this is drier. Indeed, as I wrote about this I had to go and get a glass of water from recalling the mouth (and throat!) fill of this meat. The sauce had an OK, generic pot roast sauce flavor but it couldn’t return to the beef moisture that wasn’t there. I can only imagine they’re using the cheapest leanest cut to make this.
Hormel is an American public corporation.
I served the beef with Bob Evans Loaded Mashed Potatoes ($3.50 from $6.50 regular price). These were quite good. They tasted very much like freshly made mashed potatoes, and the added cheese and bacon enhanced the flavor without overwhelming them. Of course, even on sale that’s a lot of money for mashed potatoes, but they do save a lot of time.
I’ll definitely buy these again when they’re on sale. I would say the package serves 3 adults and maybe 4, if 2 of them are children.
Bob Evans farms are owned by Post, an American public corporation.
Basically Mini Waffle Cones are, as the name indicates, tiny waffle cones filled with a tiny Belgian milk chocolate. The 4 oz package was $2 at Grocery Outlet.
These should really be better tasting that they are. The waffles are pretty good, though not flavorful enough on their own. The chocolate is mid, but not bad. Together they are just blah – not really worth the calories.
They are made in Turkey by GoBrands, a company which seems unsure of what it wants to actually be and that has a history of labor and privacy violations.
Other snack reviews.
Milkita bites are little candies in the style of Skittles or M&Ms. They have a condensed milk based filling, in chocolate, strawberry and honeydew flavors, and a candy coating. They are surprisingly unremarkable.
The flavor of the fillings is pretty tame, and doesn’t come threw. The honeydew flavored ones are a bit surprising, just because you don’t expect that flavor in this type of candy, but otherwise neither offensive nor delicious. It’s just there. The strawberry and chocolate flavors sort of work together, but the other combinations really don’t, so this is for those who like eating one candy at a time.
I wouldn’t guy it again.
Milkita Bites are made in Indonesia by Indonesian based Unifam
Other snack reviews.
Just say no
My husband has a standing order to buy me weird snacks when he goes to Grocery Outlet, our neighborhood food liquidator. One of his latest finds was this 7 Days Soft Baked Croissant with strawberry & vanilla filling. These are also available on Amazon, for those who don’t have access to an actual grocery store.
I’ve had packaged pastries of this kind before – mostly in hotel breakfasts in the Middle East – so I had an idea of what I was in for. This croissant met those expectations. The croissant had that inelastic, stalish texture that I’ve come to associate with packaged pastries. It’s not hard per se, but you actually have to work at tearing a piece off with your teeth. It is fairly dry and not particularly pleasant tasting. Microwaving it for a few seconds did help make it more edible.
The vanilla filling, however, melted in the microwave into a liquid that splat all over when I bit into it. It was not pleasant. Flavor wise, however, it was OK.
The croissants are made by Snackworks, which is owned by Mondelez International. Previously a part of Kraft foods, Mondelez has been accused of serious human rights violations, including the use of slave child labor in its cocoa supplies and in continuing to do business in Russia through their war with Ukraine.
Needless to say, I wouldn’t buy them again.
Great deal at Costco
The vegan food craze may be over, but I’m still left with a vegetarian daughter. In general, she prefers the taste and flavor of Impossible burgers to those of more natural black bean or veggie burgers. We now know that impossible patties are full of fat of chemicals and are not at all healthy, but that’s precisely what makes them so good for people who choose vegetarianism for ethical rather than health reasons.
Costco occasionally sells these 10-packs of patties for about $16. This makes them a great dea;. You keep them in the freezer and cook them from frozen, about 5 minutes per side on a hot skillet. The patties are thick and a quick meal.
Why? Just why?
After my good luck with California Pizza Kitchen’s version of thin crust Margherita Pizza, I thought I’d give the Safeway version a try. The differences were amazing. It’s really hard to understand how two products that have basically the same ingredients can differ so much.
The Signature Margherita pizza cooked faster than the suggested time, and the crust was think, super crispy and closer to a cracker than a pizza. The sauce was non-existent, providing no hint of flavor if it was actually there. The rest of the ingredients were tasteless, either together or in the aggregate. The basil provided the occasional shot of bitterness, but even that was fleeting. Basically, it tasted like nothing.
The pizza, which should serve two (particularly if you add a salad) was $6 on sale from $7 regular price.
Other pizza reviews
Where’s the chicken?
Bigfoot Bowls seem to be a new product for Safeway. They were advertised in their last flyer, but their website still doesn’t have pictures of the bowls. So I ordered blindly. They have several flavors, but I went with the Thai Style Bowl with Coconut Curry Chicken.
The bowls should be thought of as rice bowls with a tiny bit of chicken used as seasoning (though they also offer one vegetarian and one beef bowl). There is so little chicken that you cannot include chicken in most bites. The bowl did come with an orange ginger sauce to pour over the whole thing, but there wasn’t enough sauce to reach all the rice and red peppers.
The bites from this bowl which included the chicken were quite tasty, the curry was quite nice and the sauce was flavorful. But those that didn’t include it were boring. As I suspect the other bowls have the same problem with the chicken-to-rice ratio, I wouldn’t order them again.
Bigfoot Bowls is owned by New Jersey based family company F&S Fresh Foods
Better than expected
InnovAsian offers several frozen Chinese-restaurant inspired meals. I guess they figured their name was broad enough to branch out to other cuisines, so they’ve now added a few Indian entrees. They are mostly chicken-based.
They were on sale last Friday ($5 from $9 regular price), and while i was pretty apprehensive after my horrible experience with P.F. Chang’s chicken dishes, and my general disappointment with commercial Indian dishes, I gave the Crispy Butter Chicken one a try. It was better than expected.
You can either microwave or air fry the chicken in this meal, but the former is quicker and simpler so I went with it. The result was chicken that had the texture of chicken. The butter sauce it came with was frozen in a solid block, and it took about 10 minutes of soaking in warm water before it was flexible enough to add it to the chicken and finish heating them up together. Thus the whole process takes longer than you would otherwise expect. It serves one person by itself or two if you add side dishes – InnovAsian tends to skimp on the actual protein and make up the weight with lavish amounts of sauce.
The results were fine. As I mentioned, the chicken had the right texture and the sauce, while still having that element of acidity that all commercial Indian curries seem to have, was not completely unlike a butter sauce – and it was tasty. I ended up actually eating every last drop. So, as far as commercial frozen Indian entrees go, I’d recommend this one.
InnovAsian is owned by Japanese owned Nichirei Foods.
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