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.
