Review: Specially Selected Luxury Belgian Cookie gift box

It's Mother's Day and Aldi has you slackers covered. Nothing says "I stopped at the grocery store on the way here" than a gift item from Aldi, and nothing says "Happy Mother's Day" like "I stopped at the grocery store on the way here." Mildly underwhelm your mom by gifting her these cookies that clearly reveal that you forgot it was Mother's Day this weekend. I also saw that Aldi has other gifts for the strongest woman you know, including soap and lotion sets and a chapstick sampler.

Now I don't mean to imply that the cookies themselves are underwhelming. Listen to these descriptions: "Smooth vanilla cream on a thin crispy biscuit, enrobed in white chocolate and roasted cocoa beans." "A crunchy biscuit filled with salted caramel, enrobed in milk chocolate and decorated with dark chocolate stripes." 

possibly find another word for "enrobed," though, it's really doing a lot

Whoever writes copy for Specially Selected is a hero. Straightforward but poetic, truly the Hemingway of cookie boxes. None of the embarrassing talk of an "indulgent sensory experience" like you might find on a Russell Stover sampler, no foils that open to reveal a message exhorting you to "laugh every day like it's your last" or some bizarre drippy instruction. Luxury Belgian Cookie Gift Box knows it doesn't know you like that, it doesn't know your life. It understands you want to know exactly what kind of sugar experience you can expect and nothing more. It understands you're probably not even buying this for your mom; you need neither the humiliation of a box of cookies goading you to "indulge your senses" nor the dubious descriptions of flavors. You're an adult. You know what ganache is, probably. Luxury Belgian Cookie Gift Box is like the best kind of sales associate at a Williams-Sonoma: she knows you don't know what half this stuff is, but she's going to leave you alone so you don't embarrass yourself in front of her. 

These cookies were great and worth however much I spent on them (I think like $3.99?). The vanilla ones are stand-outs. All the cookies were crispy and tasty, and if you haven't bought chocolate from Aldi before, it's truly excellent. 

The best part about buying this at Mother's Day is that, even if the Aldi cashier had time to process what you're buying, which they don't, it's not like when you buy yourself a box of chocolates and throw in a romantic card pretending like you're going to give it as a gift to someone who loves you. Oldest trick in the book! Everyone has a mom, potentially one they still interact with. The cashier isn't going to size you up like, "Look at this dummy trying to trick everyone into thinking she has a MOM." So, go ahead. Keep the cookies for yourself and just post either a picture showing off what a hottie your mom used to be, which is not weird or a red flag at all, or a photo of the both of you where your mom looks passably dumpy but YOU look hot, which is also not a huge red flag. (Is there any more succinct way to gauge what kind of relationship a person has with their mom than this?) Your mom can buy her own cookies. The real Mother's Day gift is raising someone who won't post the dumpy photo.

Review: cranberry Wensleydale Christmas cheese and French macarons

Surprise! Not only do I have two new reviews for you, they are *timely* reviews, as in, you can still buy these items at the store! (Pretty sure.)

So a few months ago my girlfriend and I took on a little side job of helping cater a pre-wedding dinner. It was in the suburbs, but the older suburbs where people have house that look like this:

Mid-century house: for when you only want a LITTLE natural light

Rich people are wild, man! They have the freakiest taste, I swear. They also tend to be concerned with things I find strange, and strangely unconcerned about things I find VERY important. Like cheese.

The dinner was catered by a taco place, but a hipster taco place so they served stuff like spicy cauliflower in Sazón. What I am trying to relate is that the tacos were merely okay, nothing to write home about. But the cheese these people had out. They had cheddar. They had bleu. They had brie. They had a creamy, tangy one that had fruit in it. These cheeses surely all cost more per pound than I could make selling my most vital organs. But they weren't just expensive, they were also delicious. 

But when clean-up came, and we were packing food away, what did these people care about? The small-batch, hand-crafted ice cream in precious flavors like sage cough drop and crushed pearl? The juicy, plump fruits reserved for the fanciest suburban supermarkets? The "gourmet" popcorn someone had picked up, as an expensive afterthought? The cheese?

No. You, dear reader, already KNOW what they picked. The taco stuff. You would have thought these tacos were hand-made by Mexican grandmas artisans using non-GMO corn and humanely-blindfolded cage-free cauliflowers. But the cheese and stuff? They might as well have been like, "Hohoho! Silly peasant. My dog eats better cheese than that!"

Classic rich person

Well, friends, thanks to Aldi NO LONGER will fancy cheese be the domain of the wealthy. Aldi has had fancy cheese for a while (in particular, I am partial to the one that has three different Spanish cheeses in it--it bears a cryptic warning to not eat the rind but I always do, and I look forward to the day when I find out what weird health problem I have because of that choice), but for Christmas they are stepping it up. 

well, here's part of it because honestly I didn't think I was ever gonna write a blog entry again

This cranberry Wensleydale (??) cheese is so fancy it doesn't even tell you how to access it through the wax. ALDI IS NOT PLAYING WITH YOU GUYS. 

It has cranberries and nuts inside, like you are a fancy lil bird! The cheese itself is pleasantly tangy, but a bit dry and crumbly. 

Do you want a fancy dessert, too? May I suggest macarons, that status symbol of knowing urbanites? Buying macarons tells people that you have been to college and will happily regale them with stories from your study-abroad time in Barcelona. Buying macarons means that you have enough social capital to stand in front of people at concerts and things and turn your head a lot, thereby whipping all the people behind you in the face with your good-smelling hair. Buying macarons means you go to yoga and call everyone "babe." Now you can have all those things without actually spending $400 on cookies.

These have three nature flavors (lemon, raspberry, pistachio) and three, uh, human flavors (salted caramel, chocolate, vanilla). 

bae, wig snatched, yas queen

They are all quite good with the slight exception of the chocolate one. They do not have a very almond-y flavor, as I have noticed with other macarons (yerp. College graduate right here) but the texture is really satisfying. 

Now. Go forth and post these on your Instagram! Make sure you do one where you whimsically put them up in front of your eyes like, "Tee-hee, these macarons are my eyeballs!" No one will be any the wiser that these are from a grocery store with no music or bags. Probably.

Review: Little Salad Bar Mexican Style Quartet

This is practically unheard of for this blog, but I am posting a timely update. Meaning: you can actually purchase this item I am about to review.

Little Salad Bar is Aldi's line of...salad bar items. I was going to say "condiments" but they're really not. Um, okay, Little Salad Bar is Aldi's line of wet and/or semi-liquid snack products. Hummus, salsa, guacamole, chicken dips, etc. The thing about these snack products is that you can't eat them by themselves. This is a little bit annoying at Aldi, because there is an obvious one-way flow to the store. The aisles are made so that you are just siphoned through and spit out at the cash registers. The store closest to me now is one in which the deli/semi-liquid snack products are all the way at the end of that maze, and of course I never pick up tortilla chips or any kind of dip delivery-system food beforehand, which means that I then have to reeeeally decide whether I want this kind of gross-looking superfluous food product and then fight my way against the flow of Aldi zombies. But it's simply not a socially- or comestably*-acceptable option to eat dips, etc. without them, just like how everyone is merely tolerating tacos as a vehicle to get sour cream into their bodies (I think).

(*At first I was going to write "culinarily" and I even googled "adverb culinary" and a website told me, "Here's the word you're looking for: 'Culinarily'" but that's actually not a word. And actually neither is "comestibly" and anyway, dips are still edible without chips, even if they're not that appealing, but "comestible" lends itself better to drive-by adverb-making.)

I was at the grocery store tonight, actually, and I saw this couple trying to decide whether to buy this Mexican Style Quartet dip and I wish I had business cards to hand out to tell people that they no longer have to just take a chance on weird Aldi stuff: that's what I am here for.

their lawyer made them put in that "style" modifier

Aldi put these "festive dips" (that's helpfully in a corner in case you weren't sure what kind of Mexican quartet this is) out right around Independence Day, which I would like to think is a little jab at American politics, but which is probably just a case of us exploiting other nations for party purposes, like "St. Patrick's Day" and "study abroad programs."

There's four flavors in here: fajita, black bean, chipotle, and guacamole. It's not actual guacamole, I don't think, just a dip flavored like guacamole, but I can't be sure because there wasn't actually a label on this. I guess Aldi is realistically thinking that if you're eating this it's either because you're shitfaced outside at a barbecue or you're hate-eating to punish yourself for a minor social faux-pas committed several weeks ago, and whatever the case, you are not here to get some nutritional facts dropped on you.

At first I was going to say these are lit but they're mostly just fine once the novelty kind of wears off. Fajita dip was lit, yes, and the black bean one was also pretty good. The chipotle one was more liquid, and with a chip it wasn't much better. Like if you ran out of solid food and all you could find in your house was saltine crackers and a bunch of condiments, and you made yourself a "sandwich" out of that. 

also, when you take off the cover, a voice says "mix them all together"

And at $5.99, this is definitely in the top 3 most expensive things I've ever bought at Aldi. You can buy rainboots at Aldi that cost less than this, I'm pretty sure. I'm on the fence about this. If you're recovering from a Fourth of July party where you drank way, way too much because you didn't know anyone there (what is it about Fourth of July that can bring total strangers together? In my 26 years of celebrating this holiday, over half of my memories are of being with people I didn't know and never saw again, in places I never had been and have never been back to. I feel like a therapy client with false memories. Please let me know if your July 4th experiences have been similar), this could be a good friend to you. Plus it does double-duty for that off-putting thing you said yesterday to a total stranger who now probably finds your presence uncomfortable. Spend 20 minutes replaying that conversation over these festive dips.

Review: Priano Chicken Parmesan Ravioli

When I first moved out of my parents' house, I was pretty confident in my cooking skills, for reasons that weren't necessarily grounded in "reality," and were more likely grounded in things like "being 18" and "weed-smoking."

One thing I made consistently was ravioli with sauce and broccoli. That was about the pinnacle of my culinary skills at that point. If I was really feeling fancy, I might sub an artichoke for the broccoli. Later on, I learned that many people consider ravioli to be a "garbage food." My ex one time even refused to buy it when he saw a very large man in front of us also buying ravioli.

And, as a result of no longer being a teen and figuring out how to make actually tasty food, I really don't buy ravioli anymore. (That ex, now that I'm thinking of it, was 5 years older, so maybe he just had already crossed the threshold into Ravioli Is Garbage land, an experience which I think is the adult equivalent of The Day Your Imagination Died as a child. Aside: Do you remember that vividly? For me, I was 12, playing with Barbies and not really getting into it, like my brain was just turned off. And then it dawned on me: my imagination was dead. It was now time to experience Discovering You Have Musical Tastes That Are Not Your Parents' and For Some Reason Wanting to Bite Lindsay Lohan's Thighs).

I had tried meal prepping this week, which is a totally genius idea in that you save a lot of time, but also it maybe makes you feel kind of like a serial killer because you're eating the same. thing. for 5 or 6 days straight. And also? Being forced to cook a meal every night and make a lunch for the day after is maybe the only thing that is keeping me from relapsing into a mood disorder?

So I went to Aldi last night looking for an easy diversion, and found this Chicken Parmesan Ravioli.

they're also a good source of fiber? which means 10-19% DV of fiber

I'm not sure why I was expecting a photo of the inside but I was. It's not like on regular ravioli packaging they show you the inside, but since it's a special kind I thought it would be nice to know. Also thought the cream sauce was a very weird choice since chicken parm usually has red sauce on it, but I guess sometimes you just want to eat a giant white blob of a meal.

First thing you gotta know about these is that they are not regular ravioli shape. They are shaped like little rising suns, which was fitting as I was eating these for breakfast this morning, since last night I actually opted out of dinner in favor of a very lit Friday night of drinking a bunch of mango La Croix and going to sleep.

Wake and...make some ravioli, baby

B's classmate was over and he excitedly told me he had bought these a few weeks ago. I pressed him for some comments but he just had this to say:

"I was expecting them to be really cheesy because of the picture but they were just like normal pasta. So I had to put on a bunch of parmesan cheese on top. "

Not like, a rave review. Or even an informative review.

These were not bad. They actually tasted like chicken parm. Well, first they taste like normal ravioli and then they taste like breading or mozzarella sticks or something. I added some tomato sauce and turmeric-infused turkey meatballs (told you I food prepped) but in fact they're better plain, and I'm sure that has nothing to do with the fact that I have eaten turkey meatballs and tomato sauce for lunch and sometimes dinner every day this week. Seriously, are you people insane? How can you do that to yourself? Is this actually a trick, where you're so tired of eating the same two meals again and again that you just don't have the will to eat anymore?

Here's the inside for you curious ones:

Definitely not winning any photography prizes anytime soon, also

Again, not really sure what I was expecting. But sometimes you just want to know.

These are solid, if you need some emergency dinner food or if you just want to relive a small portion of some of the worst years of your life, not counting the food prepping bits.

Review: Clancy's S'mores Snack Balls

Totally unforgivable that I have been gone this long, I know, the 4 of you out there waiting for my #hottakes on baffling Aldi products are probably suffering. I actually wrote a post about macarons and never edited it! But right now I need some community, because I've made a huge Aldi mistake.

Clancy's is the Aldi snack food brand. Potato chips, tortilla chips, cheese puffs, pretzels of all kinds. The packaging features a windmill and I guess that plus the name "Clancy" is maybe supposed to remind you of the cuisine delights of the Midwest? 

a family of cows died for this

Normally, Clancy's holds up pretty well. Despite their avuncular branding, they're also pretty willing to get creative; the dill pickle-flavored chips are a delight when you want the calories of chips but the weirdest part of a pickle.

Today in my post-work Aldi frenzy, I passed these S'mores "snack balls" (told you it was avuncular) thinking "gross", then doubled back when my curiosity got the better of me. 

I stared at them long and hard, but I suppose it was neither long enough nor hard enough for these balls, because I missed a critical point:

CRUNCHY CORN SNACK. Balls, to be specific. Puffs, you might say...

LIKE CHEESE PUFFS.

This is probably just conditioning, as these aren't really even salty, but every bite tastes like cheese puffs that were tragically mixed with chocolate in a Christmas tin or something. I think it was the description on the back of the bag that mislead me, because really, all the signs were there: "crunchy corn snack," photos of the snack in question.

I was hoping for more of a buckeye situation

I suppose even the description should have given me a hint, but they OBVIOUSLY WERE TRYING TO SNEAK THIS PAST EVERYONE so that they would have to bring this miscarriage of a snack home before revealing its true nature.

There truly is no God

The best thing about these is the smell. When I was 8, I had to get my tonsils out. The anesthesiologist let me pick the scent of my anesthesia, and I picked a delicious-smelling marshmallow. I liked that scent so much that the doctor put a little on some gauze and put it in a ziplock so that I could smell it when I got home.

Except general anesthesia, when you wake up from it, makes you vomit. You vomit when you first wake up and then you realize just how much your raw, newly-stitched up throat feels. That makes you vomit some more. After you stop vomiting, you eat some popsicles...which you also throw up in short time. 

I was discharged that afternoon and my mom ordered a chicken sandwich whose amazing odor filled the car, so in revenge I promptly puked all over her Volvo. When I got home, I settled into bed, my little baggie of heavenly marshmallow gauze tucked beside me. Upon waking up, I decided to relive the moment they put me under, holding the bag up to my nose. At which point I immediately threw up.

I spent a few days after I recovered bringing the gauze with me to school, so I could smell it when I needed comfort (shit was rough back then). Except every time I opened that baggie up, my stomach churned. Resignedly, I tucked the baggie away in a drawer and the next time I found it, the scent had dissipated.

These corn balls smell like that anesthesia gauze. And just like that anesthesia gauze, you too, will want to throw up every time you open this bag. You'll think it's a good idea, maybe even a little funny. But you'll just be left with a destroyed car, and nowhere to put these except the trash.

EDIT: Several wonderful readers have written to say that they loved these. Please see my latest entry (2/11/2018) for an update, because these are on the shelves confusing people right now, baby!

Review: Mama Cozzi's Gyro Pizza

I have to give a lot of thanks to my roommate, who tips me off to a lot of crazy Aldi food that I normally wouldn't even know about. It's not that we ever talk about what was at the store. She buys it, eats it, and then I, seeing boxes in the recycling, go out and get the exact same foods and take pictures of them at night and dress in her clothes when she's not there.

So when I saw "gyro pizza" in the bin, I went out the next day and got it.

Mama Cozzi's coming through again

Since this is obviously the elephant in the room, let's first talk about the "jye-roe" vs. "year-roe" debate that is currently raging and dividing this country, tragically, and needlessly. I grew up firmly in the "year-roe" pronunciation camp. Like, I swear my mom was proud to pass this wisdom down to me, after a day of sullen shopping for "ONLY BLACK CLOTHES!!", in the Holyoke Mall food court. When I check on Google Maps, it tells me that the mall was only about 35 minutes from my house, but when I was 13 it seemed like (or my mom told me it was) 90 minutes. So, basically, Greece. Thus, I felt a sense of righteousness (as I think most people in the "year-roe" camp do) saying it the "proper" way.

But when I moved to Philly and started in the time-honored tradition of ordering from food carts over the din of traffic, food cart motors, yelling South Philly guys, construction, and pigeons fighting for hot dogs, I realized something. Saying "jye-roe" is just more practical. It's hard for preoccupied foreigners to hear "year-roe" over all that city noise. And so I started to say "jye-roe," or, more in keeping with my personality, just started ordering falafel. Now I do a weird thing where I order a "jye-roe" really quietly and when I am inevitably asked for clarification I say defensively, "Or 'year-roe,' whatever!"

I basically had to get this pizza when I saw this guy's anticipatory pizza face:

What's going on here, exactly? He's sailing back to Ithaca, thinking of the last time he had a gyro pizza? He realized that he left the oven on? He just came back from the dead? He's suddenly realized that democracy means letting ill-informed people elect leaders?

At first, I thought this pizza was just okay. And then I thought it was pretty okay, and then sort of got logarithmic, where every day thereafter it decreased by a factor of 10.

As good as it's going to get

I didn't grow up with thin crust pizza and don't really like it, except for when I make pizza myself. Also, this pizza has olives on it which 1) don't belong on a gyro and 2) are gross. That's right, I find olives gross. I have to be strong about this, because lots of people will try to shame you about not liking olives. It's not like I haven't tried! About once or twice a year I eat an olive thinking, "Maybe this time I'll like olives. Palates change!" But it never works. I'm now 25. I've adjusted to brie (tastes like aromatic glue), beer (tastes like bread soda), rye bread (tastes like strongly-flavored birdseed), etc. I'm never going to like olives.

What else do people get food-shamed about? I tend to shame people about mushrooms. I don't really get how you could not like things that taste like dirt in the air. People also like to shame people about whiskey. But whiskey is gross, I don't care what anyone says. It tastes like someone soaked a dresser in rubbing alcohol. I get shamed about not liking guacamole. The reaction is on the same level as if I casually admitted to killing someone's entire family. "WHAT?!" they explode. "YOU DON'T LIKE GUAC?! SOMEONE SHOULD NOT LIKE GUAC TO YOU IN JAIL!" And if you're a woman who doesn't like beer, good-bye. You might as well say to guys and aggressive females, "Please don't respect me anymore." It's not fair, but that's the way the world is. We all know what it's like to get food-shamed, but we love to do it to other people.

Also, this pizza falls prey to what I associate with people who love sriracha: if it's not that good, make it spicy. The hot peppers are the best thing on this pizza.

Apparently my roommate agreed with me, as she had also bought a Cuban pizza, and she went back and bought at least two more. Not that I know that by going through the recycling bin.

Passport to Europe

Do you guys remember that show Passport to Europe with Samantha Brown? What a hottie. I mean, what a great show. As a kid, I used to sit, enthralled, for hours watching back-to-back episodes of that show on the Travel Channel. For those of you who are unfamiliar, this show featured Samantha (her Wikipedia page describes her as "bubbly and upbeat"; personally, I found her to be distantly pleasant, like a girl who politely turns you down when you misinterpret her friendliness) traveling to various European countries and walking around, having lil adventures with sweet locals, brunching, and explaining the decor of hotels. This show was my jam, y'all! It was like a version of House Hunters for countries, and it was impossible to hate-watch. It made me feel like: yeah! If this mild-mannered single woman can travel around by herself/with a camera crew and have just-adventurous-enough adventures, so could I.

Pouring one out for the TC for giving me hope for a future that hasn't quite materialized for me yet.

That kid lives on inside me, so I'm always a little soft when I see European stuff in Aldi.

This Aldi run with B. turned into a veritable tour of Western Europe, one that Samantha Brown could be proud of, if I were like, her daughter, which is definitely something I've never fantasized about or even thought about until just right now.

First up, some "Bavarian bratwurst" fresh outta GER. This was B's idea because I don't typically go for sausages, especially not light-colored ones. I don't know why, they just remind me of corpses or something. 

And the package has them as browning up a little bit but you know they don't do that. So there you are, eating a white sausage with white sauerkraut on a white hot dog bun and probably drinking a glass of old skim milk because if you're eating that meal you probably have an empty fridge except for that milk you know you need to use up before it goes bad. But you're at your dad's house so you just fantasize that you're in Germany and after dinner you're going to go walk some mountains and not just try to follow Jimmy's pregnant cat into the woods to figure out what she does.

We also got some Frank's (haha, get it) sauerkraut despite B's protestations about potassium benzoate, which inevitably reminded me of the Simpsons frogurt episode:

Being that it was a store-bought brand (from Ohio, also, not from the motherland), the sauerkraut was a little too sour, and the sausages also had a slightly sour taste, and it was just too sour. Again, if you must buy sausages from Aldi I recommend some darker ones. 

Evil white meal

But not to worry, because we had some Dooch Kooch strudels for dessert. They had two kinds, apple and "Fruits of the Forest" and we obviously went with the latter. THESE TOO also start off as a pure white and they definitely don't get all toasty and brown like that, but I did take them out too early and began eating them before B found me and suggested in her reasonable way that maybe we should heat them up some more. I don't have any pictures probably because they were so damn tasty, but beware: one strudel is 6 servings, which is a cruel joke. They have to know that people are going to eat a whole strudel and then look at the nutrition facts (which may be putting too much faith in the public, but).

But one of the main reasons we made this trip was because B was thirsty, and so we ended up with some sparkling lemonade from a brand called "Journey to...France." The key word in here is "sparkling," which I don't think B. or I noticed, because if we had, we might not have opened it in the bag-loading counter area in front of a long line of customers (that might be placing too much faith in us, though). Only to have it explode everywhere, while the dead-eyed Aldi cashiers did not react in ANY way. I helped myself to some paper towels and we quickly re-located to drink lemonade in the parking lot. I happened to know that the cashiers keep paper towels by the cash register because of a yogurt-dropping episode I had had a day previously, which elicited the same non-reaction as this lemonade incident. I had to practically beg to wipe up the floor, you guys. I felt weirdly humiliated, not by my clumsiness, but by the cashiers' total indifference to like, 2 pounds of yogurt being all over the floor. These people should work in a trendy consignment shop for the shame they inspired in me. Why was I being such normie basketcase and having a reaction to this?

Which brings me to another point: people's bad opinions of Aldi. When I was searching the internet to see if another blog like this already existed, I found a ton of mommy blogs talking about "Oh, I'm not poor but I shop at Aldi, I know, RIGHT?!" or some version of "I'd never stepped foot into an Aldi because I assumed it was where poor people shop at and even though my wife and kids and I had $80,000 worth of credit card debt, we weren't poor." Before moving to Pittsburgh I was unclear on what Aldi really was, but I have two near me because I'm lucky now. But my friends here had lots to say. My first date with B. is vivid in my mind. I see her clearly, laughing with my friends as they made fun of Aldi. "I mean, it's fine but it all fell off the back of a truck, right? I don't buy meat there."

My friend F., who made a visit to Florida recently and described her inaugural Aldi visit as "depressing." "I hadn't remembered/realized that everything is in packing boxes on the shelf. It seems like a deliberately aggressive way of making you realize you must be saving money. 'LOOK, WE DIDN'T EVEN UNPACK." Even I will agree that Aldi can be a stressful experience, though in the world of city grocery stores, Aldi can be blissfully deserted, leaving you to at least wander, infuriated at being unable to find anything, in relative peace. (My first visit to a Wegman's in Ithaca, NY recently has left me with residual panic attacks.)

Besides, other people have somewhat more forgiving opinions of Aldi. My friend in Philly wants to know "How they got all that nice cheese for so cheap?" My other friend G. is of the mind that "Aldi is the indie label of grocery stores." As if they're saying,  "Go find a normal grocery store to shop at, lame-o. One where they still care about things like wet floors and lawsuits."