Awesome Xmas Junk Food!
A post like this needs no introduction. You know what you’re in for. But I still feel compelled to write one. That wretched header image will seem excessive without a small army of paragraphs beneath it.
So, I’ll use this space to share my feelings about pomegranates. In summary: I love them. I love them, but I do agree that they’re messy. Like, I can’t eat one without looking like I murdered someone afterwards. Every shirt and book I own is stained with pomegranate juice.
The real kind, mind you. The kind you can only get by trying to eat a thousand-seeded pomegranate in the same way you would an orange. I’m not talking about that boring “POM” juice. If you want those antioxidants at their full intensity, you gotta buy the real, whole fruit.
Some grocers sell pomegranate seeds separately, in little plastic containers. Don’t buy them that way. You need to pluck them from the fruit yourself. It may be messy, but it’s also fun. Besides, buying pomegranate seeds separately is soooo disproportionately more expensive than buying pure pomegranates. You’d swear they were extracting the seeds with crazy advanced super robots that each cost 500 million dollars.
Archer Farms Red & Green Tortilla Chips: I don’t know if “Archer Farms” is an exclusively-at-Target thing, but it might be. Either way, I’m surprised nobody’s been on my case to write about these. One look at them will turn anyone into a Christmas loyalist.
Don’t judge them by their plain packaging. It’s what’s inside that counts. A miracle masquerading as a snack:
That isn’t trick photography. The tortilla chips really are that red and that green. They taste no better than white tortilla chips, but eating them is like finally satisfying that common childhood curiosity about the effects of swallowing an entire strand of Christmas lights. If the holidays had a pill that made the season everything it is, and that pill was later converted into tortilla chips… I don’t know where I was going with that. Drugs.
Had I friends and a clean apartment, these would be served at the gala. Most definitely. Yes.
Crazy Christmas Peeps: In my earlier years as an idiot blogger, I was obsessed with breaking the news about new types of Peeps. Then I just stopped, cold turkey. I’m not sure why. Maybe I just couldn’t keep up. For a while there, eighteen Peep spinoffs seemed to turn up every week.
I picked a good year to pay attention again, though. These are very special gourmet Peeps, and they take the holiday theatrics to levels that set world records. Sold in trios, they’re sophisticated Peeps for sophisticated people. More importantly, all of their asses have been dipped in milk chocolate.
I don’t know who invented the word “exquisite,” but I’m sure his ghost is standing behind me right now, soundlessly screaming about how stuff like this is the exact reason he did it. This could explain why my nipples are hard.
The yellow ones are Sugar Cookie Peeps. They’re okay. The big stars, though, are those snowy Candy Cane Peeps, speckled with crunchy red bits. They smell exactly like Mallomars, and if you’ve ever wondered what a peppermint Mallomar might taste like, find one of these birds and eat it.
Oddly, all of my Candy Cane Peeps have hilariously misplaced eyes, to the point where each marshmallow shape more closely evokes a long-faced woman with a bouffant. Whatever. A sparkly red-and-white Peep still trumps any other kind, even with its eyes in all the wrong places.
Candy Cane Oreo Cookies: I’ve been sitting on these for weeks, hoping I could locate the rumored GINGERBREAD Oreos and tackle ’em both together. Sadly, I’ve not been able to find those, and now it’s gotten to the point where I need to either write about the Candy Cane Oreos or accept that I never will.
I’m fairly certain that they’re new for 2012. The closest we came before were Peppermint Oreos, and those were nowhere near the production that these are. Take a look:
The candy cane creme is a two-color affair, but pay special attention to the tiny red sprinkles in the white portions. They are CRUNCHY. You know this is a big selling point, because Nabisco went through the trouble of pointing out that they’re crunchy, right on the package.
It’s a bit like eating an Oreo mixed with a candy cane mixed with a stick of Cinnaburst, but in a way that’s more cohesive than it sounds. The Gingerbread Oreos might be this year’s headline-grabber, but with all sincerity, I like the idea of these better.
God damn it. You can totally see two cat hairs hovering around the bottom cookie. Now my Super Stack Candy Cane Oreo Sandwich will never go viral.
