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By: Taco Bell
Suggested Retail Price: $1.99
If I want fried chicken or a hamburger, I’m more likely to get the real thing rather than resort to chains like KFC and McDonald’s. But somewhat to my chagrin, I actually enjoy the food at Taco Bell. The menu doesn’t closely resemble any real food south of the border … or north of the border for that matter. The fast-food chain has created its own distinct style of cooking—bland, often baby-food soft, and sinisterly homogeneous—that can only be described as tasting like Taco Bell. Even the packets of hot sauce lack anything but a unidimensional, generic sense of heat. Yet sometimes you just want bland, warm, and mushy, like a bowl of Cream of Wheat first thing in the morning.
If you appreciate the chain’s approach, get ready to love the new Cheesy Beefy Melt. Though not immediately clear from the name, it’s a burrito. It’s stuffed (or maybe “stuft,” as Taco Bell copywriters have described past items) with allegedly seasoned rice, ground beef, off-white/off-yellow taffylike cheese, and a touch of sour cream. Unlike the chain’s grilled quesadillas, which are wrapped in tortillas that boast a more robust texture and actual browning, the Melt’s steamed “tortilla” wrapper is white, velvety, and easily masticated. It’s a lot like a Kleenex.
The Cheesy Beefy Melt offers even less challenge and textural dimension than the chain’s other burritos. There are no cold or crunchy bits of lettuce, no morsels of chewy chicken chunks. If normal Taco Bell food is good for when you’ve got a garden-variety hangover, the Cheesy Beefy Melt is the Extra Strength Excedrin, to be consumed on days when you just can’t handle … anything.
Moreover, Taco Bell’s Cheesy Beefy Melt marketing campaign co-opts the classic Modern English hit “I Melt With You.” Not since “Crumbelievable” was coined by EMF to shill for Kraft Crumbles has our youth been strip-mined with such mercenary enthusiasm. The anger that we feel reminds us that we are alive.
By: Quaker
Suggested Retail Price: $4.39 per box
Oatmeal seems to be just about the last commercial food item that needs rehabilitation and whole-foods sexification. It’s already generally acknowledged as a healthy way to start one’s day: a wiser choice than toaster pastries, sweet cereals, or McGriddles. But that didn’t stop Quaker from rolling out a premium multigrain instant hot cereal called Simple Harvest.
Simply put, this is flavored instant oatmeal for adults. Instead of Apples & Cinnamon, you get Apples with Cinnamon. Instead of Maple & Brown Sugar, you get Maple Brown Sugar with Pecans. In order to play up the “wholesome” theme, the website has an entire section celebrating the product’s sustainability, as well as a very detailed farmers’ market locator (in case you are just getting into the farmers’ market thing).
Regardless of the skillfully orchestrated hype, the cereals are actually quite delicious. Both varieties I sampled (Vanilla, Almond and Honey; Maple Brown Sugar with Pecans) generated a distinct and delicate aroma the moment they came into contact with hot water; the flavors were mildly sweet, but mostly tasted of their promised components. As a fan of smooth, creamy hot cereals, I was mildly irked by the crunchiness of the pecans in particular (the almonds were more retiring), but neither nut was particularly large: The pecan bits were an eighth of an inch or so, and the almond slices were exceedingly thin.
Best of all, it was incredibly appealing to eat something described as vanilla-, almond-, and honey-flavored multigrain cereal, and have it contain the following ingredients: whole-grain rolled oats, whole-grain rolled wheat, rolled barley, whole-grain rolled rye, sugar, almonds, whole flax seed, oat flour, natural flavors, salt, molasses.
And that’s it.
Oh yea, and they were on sale at my local Albertsons for $2 a box!
Just had a bowl of the Maple Simple Harvest, really enjoyed it! I put in a handful of berries before popping it in the microwave, very nice.
I just bought a couple of boxes of the Simple Harvest cereals, tempted by this good review, a sale at the supermarket, and a high-value coupon from the Sunday newspaper. I agree with toodie jane that for home cooking I would rather make my own, but packets of microwaveable cereal are useful to keep in the office for cold winter mornings when I want a hot breakfast.
Unlike the Supertaster, I...+READ
I just bought a couple of boxes of the Simple Harvest cereals, tempted by this good review, a sale at the supermarket, and a high-value coupon from the Sunday newspaper. I agree with toodie jane that for home cooking I would rather make my own, but packets of microwaveable cereal are useful to keep in the office for cold winter mornings when I want a hot breakfast.
Unlike the Supertaster, I prefer hot cereal with texture, and I love the crunchy bits of pecans. To answer Miss Clare's question (from way back in October) - this is actually the first instant hot cereal I've tried that has a really good, toothsome grain texture. I really like this!-COLLAPSE
I love the new Simple Harvest, I found it today at the grocery store and brought it home to have for breakfast. I am like most oatmeal eaters and enjoy oatmeal only with loads of brown sugar and butter. But this was very good. and I did not add a thing. I agree with SuperTaster's opinion.
i grew up in Tucson, still live there, and despise TB for the same reason I hate Pizza Hut- they cheapen and bastardize a delicious food with the cheese-stuffed crusts and tortillas slapped with a layer of gross refied beans and another tortilla on top of that before you even GET to the filing so you're getting a huge gutbomb instead of any real flavor. . Maybe if I was someplace where there was...+READ
i grew up in Tucson, still live there, and despise TB for the same reason I hate Pizza Hut- they cheapen and bastardize a delicious food with the cheese-stuffed crusts and tortillas slapped with a layer of gross refied beans and another tortilla on top of that before you even GET to the filing so you're getting a huge gutbomb instead of any real flavor. . Maybe if I was someplace where there was no good Sonoran-style Mexican food and it had been a while- a long while- I might try Taco Bell, but I'd probably go for the stuffed crust pizza first, as long as it didn't have twelve different kinds of meat and other stuff on it.-COLLAPSE
My husband loves the cheesy, beefy melt. I agree with you on the babyfood soft consistency. If we go, I get the tacos or nachos so i can at least CHEW something.
For oatmeal, I just mix 1 T cinnamon, 1/3 c golden raisins, 1/2 c sliced almonds into the contents of an oatmeal box, at a fraction of the cost of the pre-measured (how is all that extra packaging 'green'?)envelopes.
The commercial is really gross... who wants to see people with cheese hanging out of their mouths? However, just the other day I had a couple of crunchy tacos... I can't resist them. I'm pretty sure that when I was in middle school, we put a penny in the hot sauce and it cleaned it.
A couple years ago Taco Bell came out with the double decker taco. The most ingenious way of eating a crispy taco in your car of all time. I salute the inventor of the double decker!
Taco Bell is my guy's favourite comfort food, but as much as he's tried to get me to like it, I just don't get it.
The TB commercial for the cheesy excrescence, with the strings of cheese hanging out of peoples' mouths, should be used as negative reinforcement for dieters. Whenever I see it I lose any appetite I might have at the moment.
The problem I have with most instant oatmeals is the texture. The oats dissolve into gluey, pasty, stringy, chewy mush. It looks--and forgive the description--like a little bowl of snot. So how's the texture of the Simple Harvest oatmeal?
As for Taco Bell, I admit a certain fondness for the Taco Bell taco salad, and the Cheesy Gordita Crunch, which might be the most brilliantly stupidly...+READ
The problem I have with most instant oatmeals is the texture. The oats dissolve into gluey, pasty, stringy, chewy mush. It looks--and forgive the description--like a little bowl of snot. So how's the texture of the Simple Harvest oatmeal?
As for Taco Bell, I admit a certain fondness for the Taco Bell taco salad, and the Cheesy Gordita Crunch, which might be the most brilliantly stupidly delicious fake Mexican foodstuff of the last decade.-COLLAPSE
Jack In The Box used "I Melt With You" eight or ten years ago to advertise some new melt sandwich. That song suffers more from the association, I think, than "Unbelievable"....
God... I'm not sure how you do it. Just looking at that picture of Taco Bell inspires my stomach to do somersaults. I'll admit that there's nothing wrong with the taste per se and on some level, it's even enjoyable, but am I the only one whose digestive system stages a mutiny at the thought of actually eating it?