The Food Emporium Halloween Cupcakes

Want expensive and greasy cupcakes well head on down to your local Food Emporium. Granted the cake part is light and fluffy everything else taste fake.

The frosting is just whip cream from a can. Then they spray painted the top with what I hope is food coloring, random colors of course nothing Halloween inspired.

The worst part is they are kind of small and are $4.99 per six pack. The list of ingredients was about 75 words long so I doubt they are healthy. If they were cheaper I would recommend them.

Recommendation: Try it for yourself.

Russell Stover Dark Chocolate & Marshmallow Pumpkin

Like most guys I prefer dark chocolate and even more so I love marshmallows. This one combines the two in a somewhat disappointing way.

Russell Stover Dark Chocolate & Marshmallow Pumpkin is pumpkin shaped and has no pumpkin flavoring. The thin crisp shell is good and marshmallow is a bit more gelatin tasting than I enjoy.

At $0.49 each they are fine and do not bother thinking anything about these are healthy. Russell Stover is an underrated brand since they are often the cheapest but i enjoy the thin chocolate often used. There nut filled bars are among the best out there.

Recommendation: Try it for yourself.

Snickers Pumpkin

Snickers Pumpkin is only pumpkin shaped and contains no pumpkin flavoring. I know it was kind of disappointing but if you like Snickers this extra fat piece will satisfy.

While the package does not say it has pumpkin flavored I did assume it was since virtually everything else has been pumpkin filled these days. Opening the package you see it is a jack-o-lantern shape, not truly a pumpkin. Tasting it you final realize there is no other flavor than the usual nuts and caramel.

Mine was a bit melty so I left it overnight in the fridge and it got nice an rock solid, a balance between melty and rock hard is better. The flavor is okay it has more chocolate than a normal Snickers bar which I did not enjoy. Since I am not a big chocolate fan I would probably not buy this again unless they actually add pumpkin spices.

At less than $0.75 in most places it is a better bargain than most chocolate bars. It is mostly fat and some sugar.

Recommendation: Try it for yourself.

Halloween Oreo

It is Halloween week and here are some Halloween cookies from Oreo. They have 5 different designs but taste exactly the same as the normal white cream Oreos.

The 5 BOOrific shapes with orange creme filing make it seem like your eating something new but at the end it is just your basic Oreo.

In general I eat an Oreo by opening them up and placing half of the creme on one cookie then eating each cookie with the half creme. I think there is too much creme in a regular Oreo so double and triple stufff are just appalling to me.

Like most cookies this is mostly fat, sugar, and sodium. I can eat about two or three at a time but they are a bit heavy for me. When crisp and fresh they are great but they tend to absorb moisture and get soggy quick. I guess that is why they are good for dipping in milk but I never enjoyed that either.

Recommendation: Try it for yourself.

Santos Bakery Cuban Bread

My favorite unsliced loaf is Cuban bread. The crust is the lightly toasted and the inside is soft and layered like a biscuit. This one from the Santos Bakery is not the best I had but is still better than Italian or French bread which is chewy and hard respectively.

I thinks Santos Bakery is a Portuguese bread company and for the ideal Cuban bread you need a Cuban or at least Hispanic bakery (Hispanic being Puerto Rican, Cuban, or Dominican). Cuban bread is soft and light because lard or some type of shortening is usually added.

Ideally this is a sandwich bread that does not have any sauce. It goes bad quickly so saving it is not a good idea. At $1.39 per loaf you can make two subs that are about six inches each. The loaves are wider than normal Italian or French bread so the are very better if you use a lot of meat.

Recommendation: Try it for yourself.

Pepperidge Farm Sweet & Simple Coconut Cookies

Also known as Homestyle Coconut Cookies these are light cookies that is not overwhelmingly coconut flavored. Simple cookies are great but often are bland these Pepperidge Farms line of sweet and simple cookies are a great balance.

These are cookies so there are no nutritional facts to brag about. As long as you keep it to four cookies or less it should be fine. Granted if you have some coffee and it is a cool autumn night then you may just finish the whole bag without noticing.

Pepperridge Farms tends to be expensive for a bag of 20 or less cookies. Still they are high quality and most of there line is great. At $3.49 per bag this is a monthly treat because I want cookies by the pound not the paper cup.

Recommendation: Try it for yourself.

Suja

Suja is an organic cold-pressed juice that is cashing in on the ridiculous cleansing fad. The juice is made lemonade style meaning it is pressed and filtered and nothing else.

I was at an outdoor festival where they gave away samples for free.

Of course they used young ladies to both hand out the samples and take pictures of attractive drinkers. Sadly no one asked for my picture.

Back to the juice, I tried the flavors Fuel and Purify and both were very good. Light flavor and filtered well. Fuel contains carrot, orange, apple, pineapple, lemon, and turmeric with 140% of your Vitamin A needs. While Purify contains carrot, apple, celery, cucumber, beet, and lemon with 190% of your Vitamin A needs. There are no other nutrients that would make this a replacement meal.

Now on to the cleanse myth. They advertize this as a great juice for cleanses. The problem is that cleanses, especially 5-day ones, are useless and never work as they claim. A cleanse is temporary starvation. The body reacts in a primitive way slowing shutting down your organs, when you finally do eat after the cleanse your body rewards you with a euphoric feeling. It is your bodies way to say that you almost died and please eat more on a regular basis.

No toxins are ever removed during a cleanse since your body actual retains more during this starvation period. Not to mention that toxin build up is also a myth. When you have surgery you are urged to stop eating for immediate medical reasons and some fools thought that it was the liquid diet that helped cure them.

The 16 ounce bottle is $8.99 each and $6.99 for the bad flavors. The ridiculous price along with the nonsense use as a cleanser make this a product to avoid. The flavor is good for the ones I tasted but I see nothing special about it. There are currently some $1.50 coupons available online for this product.

Recommendation: Try it for yourself.

Cheetos Crunchy

For you corn haters it would best to turn away now. Nothing about Cheetos is found in nature. That said it is not as fake as you would think. Corn meal is shaped and baked and covered in cheese and artificial color.

These are a bit salty yet for me taste better than the regular Cheetos. Then there is the staining factor. These snacks are so powerful your finger will be stained for hours and god forbid it lands on your white shirt.

 

At $3.49 for a 9-1/2 ounce bag they are a bit expensive, here I though corn was subsidized. These cheese snacks are something you can pass up, most things that are labeled cheese flavored snacks can be passed up safely.

Recommendation: Try it for yourself.

Pirouline Chocolate Hazelnut Rolled Wafers

Rolled wafers are delicious crunchy cookies usually with some sort of creme in the middle. Cremé de Pirouline, America's only rolled wafers are all natural and Chocolate Hazelnut.

The creme versions of Pirouline wafers come in a tin and are also split into two foil packages. Even with that they tend to get soggy quick and the hazelnut smell is not the best. They are softer than I prefer and not overly sweet. Overall they are fine but not great.

At about $5.00 per tin that meant 32 wafers and 480% of you saturated fat if you eat the whole thing. The website has little information about the products but it is American made.

Recommendation: Try it for yourself.

Turback Tuscan Style Crisps: Cracked Pepper & Herb

Flavored crackers have been the best thing to come out of snack industry since flavored chips. They seem like a relatively new thing since I do not recall such varied flavors when I was kid, a long time ago. Most of the herb and spice infused chips work well while I tend to avoid the other flavors.

The Turback Tuscan Style Crisps may come in few flavors but I only saw these Cracked Pepper & Herb box. There are two foils packs on each box and contain about 36 crackers per foil. the first foil pack was a bit deflated and the crisps were less than crisp. They absorb humidity like a sponge. The second pack was better still not crisp and slightly oily they still had a good flavor. Not very peppery and subtle herbs the sea salt is also low.

Nutrition information is clear and for 12 crackers it has a fair amount of fat. Looking over the ingredients it is not a surprise that peppercorn is the last ingredient. The website is nonexistent I think the company was taken over but the new company does not show anything about these crackers or anything but one page about Turback Spices. Bought at Home Goods for $1.99 there seems to be no other place to buy them, luckily I did not fall in love with them.

Recommendation: Try it for yourself.

Market Pantry Half Dozen Large Eggs

Market Pantry is a Target brand that is usually cheaper than traditional supermarket brands. In most cases the quality is not as good. The taste and texture is not great for their prepackaged foods. So when I saw the half dozen eggs on sale I decided to go for it since I do not see how you can mess up chicken eggs.

These large eggs seem a bit small but with all those jumbo and extra jumbo sizes in supermarkets you get use to bigger eggs. Having bought fresh farm eggs before you cannot compare the two. These Target eggs are plain and flavorless but they also are clean. Nothing is worse than eggs with bloody yolks or that gunky slimy thing attached to the yolk.

For someone who does not use a lot of eggs a half dozen from Target is great and often on sale especially around Easter. Be aware these are eggs and two of them will be about 125% of your daily allotment of cholesterol if you live a 2,000 calorie life, disregard if you are an athlete. 

Recommendation: Try it for yourself.