BEFORE we get into how bad this will undoubtedly be, one thing has been bugging me for ages  —  why is it called the $5 Buck Box? Isn’t that the same as calling it the Five Dollar Dollar Box? And it isn’t $5, it’s $5.44 with tax. Bastards! And the drink machine was broken so I had to have fruit punch. Come on, Taco Bell, it’s tough enough being white without being bereft of a large Pepsi. Anyway, enough of my problems and let’s see how many different ways Taco Bell can serve up the same five ingredients…

Here’s what you get in the […]

I SAW this advertised on telly last night and knew immediately that I had to try one and, thanks to Mapquest, I picked up my first Cheesy Bacon Bowl at the KFC on Glendale Avenue this afternoon. Much like Gregg’s chilli cupcakes, the photo isn’t quite what you get, especially if you’ve seen the ads for this thing:

How do they stay so thin when shovelling 700 calories down their faces?

“Come on, you fat bastard,” I hear you cry. “What was it like?” To which my responses would be, “piss off” and “salty”. But, amazingly, not too salty, and not as salty […]

GREGGS is a wonderful place. Their steak bakes are unsurpassed, their chicken and mango bloomer is great and their Cornish pasties wipe the floor with Ginsters because they don’t have a quarter-inch gap between the pastry and the filling. So when I saw their Hallowe’en-themed Chilli Devil Cup Cakes at the store in Ross I decided to give them a go. Here they are on the Greggs website:

The cakes are chocolate with lime and chilli icing and sprinkled with chocolate curls. They look tasty, don’t they? Here’s what I got from the shop:

I don’t know if it’s official Greggs policy for their […]

EV HAS warned me on several occasions not to buy food from a 7-Eleven. Pre-packaged stuff like chocolate and Coke is OK but apparently their own-brand sandwiches, burritos and taquitos are to be avoided. To give you some idea of how crappy they can be, I bought a gallon of milk at the local 7-Eleven last month only to open it the next day and discover it was rancid. But when I saw the $1 sausage biscuit I had to try one two. After all, it’s fresh to go!

Here they are in their “natural” pre-microwave state. They’re not frozen and are pretty […]

WHEN my colleague Raul put a pic of these things on his Facebook page, I knew I had to get some. Sour candies, like peanut butter & chocolate, grape, blueberry, and Del Taco, seem to be a very American thing. Raul left a jar of them on my desk and now I’m about to see exactly how “hazardous” they are.

The sweets are individually wrapped and you get a lot more in a packet than I thought. They come in five flavours: watermelon, blue raspberry, black cherry, lemon and apple. There’s a chart on the back of the (plastic) tin asking how long you […]

AMERICANS and peanut butter go together like, oh, I don’t know, Mom and apple pie, rednecks and NASCAR, or Republicans and rampant hypocrisy. It’s everywhere  —  in chocolate, brownies*, sandwiches, frozen yoghurt, cupcakes, even barbecue sauce. You can’t escape this shit; it’s amazing there isn’t a drink based on it. Oh, wait…

Now, I’m notorious in the office for going off on one whenever someone brings in chocolate and it turns out to have peanut butter in it.  But then I thought: I’ve only ever eaten one of these things and that was in 2005, so have the other six years spent in the […]

WHEN you’ve just shovelled one of Denny’s Moons Over My Hammys and several cups of coffee down your face, what’s the perfect dessert? How about a vanilla ice-cream and maple syup sundae topped with crumbled bacon?

I’ve demonstrated my love for bacon before, although that little experiment with the pinnacle of porcine of products ended in gallons of mouthwash and a desire never to repeat it. So it was with some trepidation that, when the server asked if we wanted dessert, I thought about getting one only to be beaten by Ev’s cry of, “He’d like one of the bacon ice-creams!”

This cardiac-inducing […]

PEANUT BUTTER AND JELLY sandwiches were a staple when I was growing up. I don’t mean I ever ate them, they just seemed to be everywhere  —  in books, on telly, in comics, in films. Not in British books, telly, comics and films, though; we has proper sarnies like salt ‘n’ vinegar crisps, tomato sauce, cucumber, salad cream, and Marmite. It seemed to me that America must run on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches as there were references to them everywhere, and it didn’t help that in Britain, jelly is the stuff that comes in cubes, dissolves in warm water and is used […]

FOCUS!!!

I PICKED these up in Ralph’s a few months back and only remembered about them when trying to make room in the fridge for all the delicious Hecho en México, real-sugar-laden Pepsi I bought in Stater Brothers’ the other day. The Dry Soda Company makes a big deal about their drinks containing only all-natural ingredients and that’s obvious from the back of the bottles: all that goes into these is water, sugar, natural extracts and phosphoric acid. That’s pretty good in this day and age of HFCS and palm oil but does beg the question: what exactly does cucumber […]

I AM a colossal wimp when it comes to spicy food. Anything above the level of Coleman’s English mustard leaves me in agony. I can barely manage the little yellow peppers you get at Subway. But after seeing non-stop ads for the BK Stuffed Steakhouse, I knew it would make an easy update I would have to give it a go.

The big difference with the Stuffed Steakhouse is that the jalopeños and cheese are inside the burger, not merely slathered on top, a breakthrough in technology that surely means a cure for cancer and/or the Kardashians must just be around the corner. […]