So You Don't Have To

In the great quest to eat things with odd flavors and report back to you, I have consumed two items within the last couple of months. First off, there is a new Pop Tart flavor. Now, I don't go out of my way to eat Pop Tarts. I was actually looking at cereal or breakfast bars to keep in my desk drawer at work. The breakfast toaster pastries are in the same location. Colorful graphics on the box drew my eye, as it's supposed to do.

I like watermelon. I regularly buy it at the store, but, seriously, in a toaster pastry, warmed? Reddish-pink with green swirls of icing. This should be "interesting".

Visually, it looks like these were sat upon before going into the bag. I think we can figure out how Pop Tarts are made. They lay down the bottom crust. The next machine lays down the filling and another machine applies the top crust. They are squished together, probably just like your mom does to the edges of a fruit pie. Perhaps there is some cooking here to make the toaster part of this food simply a warm-up. After the sandwiching of the tart, another machine applies a layer of frosting and, if necessary, yet another machine gets to apply a squiggly something or other. The whole thing is dried and then shoved into bags, sealed and shoved into boxes. Human hands do not meet this pastry until you open the bag and move the tart to the toaster or, in the case of some of them, eat them without toasting. (I'm looking at you, plain blueberry or strawberry flavored.) I'd be interested to know exactly how many Pop Tarts can come off a conveyor per hour.

But how do these taste? I can say, unequivocally, blah. There was a watermelon sense about them, but that was completely lost in the bland flavor of the pastry itself. I was disappointed. I expected these to be weird in a "Whoa. Watermelon" sort of way and they were weird simply because they weren't watermelon. If you have young kids, these might be amusing, but don't expect any watermelon enthusiast to enjoy them.

Next on the "Oh look at that" is a new flavor from Oreos.

Honestly, I'm not going out of my way to look for things. If those things happen to cross paths with me when I'm looking for something else, well then, it's my duty to try them. Otherwise, I'm not in the cookie aisle. For the record, none of the breakfast bars I saw was remotely appealing. I have to pass through the cookie section of the store to get to oyster crackers so that's how I happened to spy these. Perhaps this isn't a "new" flavor, in that it was released this month, but it's new to me.

Peel back the top of the package and there are dark and white layers. There was a slight aroma of s'mores, but if you were blindfolded and had this under your nose when the top was opened, you'd have a moment of, "I know that smell, but I can't place it". It was the same with opening the Pop Tarts. Seriously, if you are going to incorporate some flavor we are not expecting, make it obvious when I open the package. This limp attempt at a scent doesn't entice me to want to try the cookies.

In true Oreos fashion, I had to pull them apart.

They are constructed as all Oreos are, excepting there are two layers of filling. You can, if you like, peel the filling layers apart, but it doesn't always separate easily. The fillings remove easily from the cookie so if you like to completely separate your Oreos, you can do that.

Taste. Bland with a side of bland. Oreos chocolate cookies have a good chocolate flavor. When they step out of that box and make vanilla cookies it's akin to vanilla-flavored cardboard. The cookies were mealy and crumbly and just didn't hold up to being dunked in milk, something Oreos takes great pride in trumpeting. The chocolate filling was grainy and the marshmallow filling was barely marshmallow flavored. You'd do better to toast a marshmallow and stick it on the filling. I think the cookies were supposed to be graham cracker flavor but that was nowhere in evidence. I wasn't disappointed, per se. I bought these expecting them to live down to low expectations and they certainly did. If you have access to a microwave, you can make close to campfire s'mores. Stay with that and save your dollars.

So, there you have another installment of "So You Don't Have To". I haven't bought anything strange lately. I'm changing my diet around so the Oreos and the Pop Tarts were kind of a last hurrah for awhile. But, you never know. I'm out of the bags of sugar snap pea pods I've been taking to work for lunch and eating while playing WOW. Plus, I'm out of dish soap. I have to go get more which means walking into the store. You never know what will hop off the shelf and into the cart totally unaided. I swear. I had nothing to do with the 2 boxes of Triscuits in the cart.

Beverage:  LaCroix Berry flavored seltzer

Deb