Junk Food of the Gods, Part 2!
I’m back with the second edition of Junk Food of the Gods, featuring more salty trash. Most of these things will only be around for a couple of months, so if they interest you, do not delay. You can be healthy later. Ice cream named after dinosaurs needs your attention now.
Jurassic Smash Blizzard!
To celebrate Jurassic World, Dairy Queen has blessed us with the Jurassic Smash Blizzard, which blends ice cream with peanut butter cookies and chocolate chip cookie dough. Good luck finding a foodstuff with a more horrible nutritional profile. The only way this could be worse is if the cup was forged from foie gras.
Course, nobody buys a head-sized cup of ice cream expecting health food, and this Blizzard is seriously delicious. (Also, since the ingredients do not in any way correlate with dinosaurs, Dairy Queen was nice enough to stuff them inside official Jurassic World cups.)
I’ve always been a sucker for these here-and-gone promotions. Crossing state lines to find a Dairy Queen was a modest price for my newfound ability to say, “Oh yeah, I had a Jurassic Smash Blizzard. I ATE that.” It ain’t worth much now, but give it five years.
Doritos Roulette!
Bags of otherwise plainish Doritos are made noteworthy with the scattered inclusion of very spicy chips. Frito-Lay claims that there’s one in every handful, which seems accurate enough.
They’re called Doritos Roulette, but only because Doritos Russian Roulette would’ve pissed people off. (Clearly, that’s the “game” these chips were meant to evoke.)
The spicy chips have serious, lasting heat. In effect, once you’ve eaten one of them, the whole exercise is pointless. The heat burns for a long while, and the non-spicy chips offer no reprieve. Don’t buy these expecting peaks and valleys, because it doesn’t really work like that.
Still, I liked them. Probably not enough to ever buy another bag, but as a lark, they were worth a try. Really got my endorphins going, too. My tongue felt like shit, but the rest of me was so happy.
Sea Salt Caramel Zingers!
Salted caramel is one of this summer’s biggest flavor gimmicks. It’s sort of like how pumpkin spice ruled over the last Halloween season. Now we’ve graduated to briny sugar!
Hostess’s Sea Salt Caramel Zingers represent this movement at its peak. I’ve never been particularly fond of Zingers (except fake Ecto Cooler versions), but they did a nice job of making these look fancy. And warty.
The salt flavor isn’t overpowering, but it is pronounced. I didn’t know what to expect from “salty chocolate,” but it works okay enough. If you tongue the cakes before biting them, pervert, you might confuse these Zingers with Lipton noodle soup.
(If they sound good to you, you’ll be happy to learn that Hostess also makes Sea Salt Caramel Cupcakes. I chose the other kind, because if I was going to go on a supermarket checkout line carrying a box of Hostess snacks and absolutely nothing else, the shame would’ve been present even if I didn’t pick the one called “Zingers.”)
Lemon Oreo Cookies!
I got these for the sake of being an Oreo completist, but the truth was that I had little interest in them. After this year’s string of bizarre Oreo flavors, “Lemon” sounded positively banal, and not at all like something that would get me a bunch of Instagram likes. (And yes, I’m aware that these aren’t new, but this was the first time I saw them at our Target.)
You might think of the fruit when you read “lemon,” but these taste much closer to lemon meringue, or maybe a lemon water ice. Nabisco’s perfected the art of Oreo subtlety, always avoiding too-intense flavors to make things that don’t sound like they’ll work, but do.
Wendy’s Strawberry Fields Chicken Salad!
Dunno if I can get away with calling this “junk food,” but if you wanna argue semantics over a Friday night post about chocolate and potato chips, great. Clearly I have nothing better to do.
I have a strange passion for Wendy’s seasonal salads; this was documented during Dino Drac’s earliest days. Their Strawberry Fields Chicken Salad might be the best one yet, or at least the most eye-pleasing.
Mixing strawberries with blue cheese with chicken with bacon, this salad hits a point where you can hardly see any lettuce. If it is a salad, it’s a fruit salad, or more accurately a fruit salad mixed with the entrails of a pita. Guess we can’t blame Wendy’s for not describing it that way, though I’d gladly fund the production of a nationwide commercial wherein they do.
The ingredients seemed fresh, and the medley of colors made me wanna play Super Mario Bros. 2. Can’t ask for more than that from a salad.
Thanks for reading about junk food. May you be charmed with a racing metabolism.
PS: If you missed the news, Dino Drac’s June Funpack is available now, and it’s a strong contender for the best one yet. These are selling faster than usual, and supplies are limited, so don’t wait long if you want in!
