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Hormel Beef Roast and Bob Evans Loaded Mashed Potatoes reviews

November 12, 2026 / / 0 Comments

Hormel offers several “ready to heat” meat dishes, which occasionally go on sale at Safeway for $5 (from $13 regular price.) I shared this Beef Roast au Jus and Savory Sauce and the mashed potatoes reviewed below with my husband and it made a satisfying lunch for two.

The meat comes in a vacuum sealed tray and you only need to microwave it for about 3 1/2 minutes to heat it up. The large chunks of meat very much taste like pot roast, but they are incredibly dry. Imagine the driest beef you’ve ever had, and this is drier. Indeed, as I wrote about this I had to go and get a glass of water from recalling the mouth (and throat!) fill of this meat. The sauce had an OK, generic pot roast sauce flavor but it couldn’t return to the beef moisture that wasn’t there. I can only imagine they’re using the cheapest leanest cut to make this.

Hormel is an American public corporation.

I served the beef with Bob Evans Loaded Mashed Potatoes ($3.50 from $6.50 regular price). These were quite good. They tasted very much like freshly made mashed potatoes, and the added cheese and bacon enhanced the flavor without overwhelming them. Of course, even on sale that’s a lot of money for mashed potatoes, but they do save a lot of time.

I’ll definitely buy these again when they’re on sale. I would say the package serves 3 adults and maybe 4, if 2 of them are children.

Bob Evans farms are owned by Post, an American public corporation.

Basically Mini Waffle Cones review

November 12, 2026 / / 0 Comments

Basically Mini Waffle Cones are, as the name indicates, tiny waffle cones filled with a tiny Belgian milk chocolate. The 4 oz package was $2 at Grocery Outlet.

These should really be better tasting that they are. The waffles are pretty good, though not flavorful enough on their own. The chocolate is mid, but not bad. Together they are just blah – not really worth the calories.

They are made in Turkey by GoBrands, a company which seems unsure of what it wants to actually be and that has a history of labor and privacy violations.

Other snack reviews.

Milkita Bites Review

November 12, 2026 / / 0 Comments

Milkita bites are little candies in the style of Skittles or M&Ms. They have a condensed milk based filling, in chocolate, strawberry and honeydew flavors, and a candy coating. They are surprisingly unremarkable.

The flavor of the fillings is pretty tame, and doesn’t come threw. The honeydew flavored ones are a bit surprising, just because you don’t expect that flavor in this type of candy, but otherwise neither offensive nor delicious. It’s just there. The strawberry and chocolate flavors sort of work together, but the other combinations really don’t, so this is for those who like eating one candy at a time.

I wouldn’t guy it again.

Milkita Bites are made in Indonesia by Indonesian based Unifam

Other snack reviews.

7 Days Soft Baked Croissant review

November 12, 2026 / / 0 Comments

Just say no

My husband has a standing order to buy me weird snacks when he goes to Grocery Outlet, our neighborhood food liquidator. One of his latest finds was this 7 Days Soft Baked Croissant with strawberry & vanilla filling. These are also available on Amazon, for those who don’t have access to an actual grocery store.

I’ve had packaged pastries of this kind before – mostly in hotel breakfasts in the Middle East – so I had an idea of what I was in for. This croissant met those expectations. The croissant had that inelastic, stalish texture that I’ve come to associate with packaged pastries. It’s not hard per se, but you actually have to work at tearing a piece off with your teeth. It is fairly dry and not particularly pleasant tasting. Microwaving it for a few seconds did help make it more edible.

The vanilla filling, however, melted in the microwave into a liquid that splat all over when I bit into it. It was not pleasant. Flavor wise, however, it was OK.

The croissants are made by Snackworks, which is owned by Mondelez International. Previously a part of Kraft foods, Mondelez has been accused of serious human rights violations, including the use of slave child labor in its cocoa supplies and in continuing to do business in Russia through their war with Ukraine.

Needless to say, I wouldn’t buy them again.

Impossible Burger Patties review

November 10, 2026 / / 0 Comments

Great deal at Costco

The vegan food craze may be over, but I’m still left with a vegetarian daughter. In general, she prefers the taste and flavor of Impossible burgers to those of more natural black bean or veggie burgers. We now know that impossible patties are full of fat of chemicals and are not at all healthy, but that’s precisely what makes them so good for people who choose vegetarianism for ethical rather than health reasons.

Costco occasionally sells these 10-packs of patties for about $16. This makes them a great dea;. You keep them in the freezer and cook them from frozen, about 5 minutes per side on a hot skillet. The patties are thick and a quick meal.

Signature Select Ultra Thin crust Margherita Pizza review

November 10, 2026 / / 0 Comments

Why? Just why?

After my good luck with California Pizza Kitchen’s version of thin crust Margherita Pizza, I thought I’d give the Safeway version a try. The differences were amazing. It’s really hard to understand how two products that have basically the same ingredients can differ so much.

The Signature Margherita pizza cooked faster than the suggested time, and the crust was think, super crispy and closer to a cracker than a pizza. The sauce was non-existent, providing no hint of flavor if it was actually there. The rest of the ingredients were tasteless, either together or in the aggregate. The basil provided the occasional shot of bitterness, but even that was fleeting. Basically, it tasted like nothing.

The pizza, which should serve two (particularly if you add a salad) was $6 on sale from $7 regular price.

Other pizza reviews

Bigfoot Bowls Thai Style Bowl with Coconut Curry Chicken review

November 10, 2026 / / 0 Comments

Where’s the chicken?

Bigfoot Bowls seem to be a new product for Safeway. They were advertised in their last flyer, but their website still doesn’t have pictures of the bowls. So I ordered blindly. They have several flavors, but I went with the Thai Style Bowl with Coconut Curry Chicken.


The bowls should be thought of as rice bowls with a tiny bit of chicken used as seasoning (though they also offer one vegetarian and one beef bowl). There is so little chicken that you cannot include chicken in most bites. The bowl did come with an orange ginger sauce to pour over the whole thing, but there wasn’t enough sauce to reach all the rice and red peppers.

The bites from this bowl which included the chicken were quite tasty, the curry was quite nice and the sauce was flavorful. But those that didn’t include it were boring. As I suspect the other bowls have the same problem with the chicken-to-rice ratio, I wouldn’t order them again.

Bigfoot Bowls is owned by New Jersey based family company F&S Fresh Foods

InnovAsian Crispy Butter Chicken review

November 10, 2026 / / 0 Comments

Better than expected

InnovAsian offers several frozen Chinese-restaurant inspired meals. I guess they figured their name was broad enough to branch out to other cuisines, so they’ve now added a few Indian entrees. They are mostly chicken-based.

They were on sale last Friday ($5 from $9 regular price), and while i was pretty apprehensive after my horrible experience with P.F. Chang’s chicken dishes, and my general disappointment with commercial Indian dishes, I gave the Crispy Butter Chicken one a try. It was better than expected.

You can either microwave or air fry the chicken in this meal, but the former is quicker and simpler so I went with it. The result was chicken that had the texture of chicken. The butter sauce it came with was frozen in a solid block, and it took about 10 minutes of soaking in warm water before it was flexible enough to add it to the chicken and finish heating them up together. Thus the whole process takes longer than you would otherwise expect. It serves one person by itself or two if you add side dishes – InnovAsian tends to skimp on the actual protein and make up the weight with lavish amounts of sauce.

The results were fine. As I mentioned, the chicken had the right texture and the sauce, while still having that element of acidity that all commercial Indian curries seem to have, was not completely unlike a butter sauce – and it was tasty. I ended up actually eating every last drop. So, as far as commercial frozen Indian entrees go, I’d recommend this one.

InnovAsian is owned by Japanese owned Nichirei Foods.

Del Real Chipotle Honey Chicken review

November 10, 2026 / / 0 Comments

Pleasantly Surprised

Del Real meals were on sale last Friday for just $5 (out of ~$12 regular price) so I got the Chipotle Honey Chicken one. My husband has it last night and I ate the leftovers. It was great.

The meal consists of grilled chicken thighs cut into bite size pieces with a light sauce. It’s just the meat – no sides included. If you only eat the chicken it will just feed one a generous meal, but you can extend it to feed two by adding sides.

I was very surprised at just how this dish was. The chicken actually had the texture of grilled chicken and the sauce was quite nice, with only a hint of honey and spice, some smokiness and just an overall good taste.

This is the second hit I have in ready-to-heat meals from Del Real and next time they go on sale, I’ll buy and try the rest.

Belgian Boys Pumpkin Spiced Pancakes review

November 9, 2026 / / 0 Comments

Come October every year, pumpkin spice season starts in the US. Pumpkin pies have been the traditional Thanksgiving dessert since the 18th century, and a couple of decades ago Starbucks had the brilliant either to create a pumpkin spiced latter – a drink that both offered the taste and mouthfeel of pumpkin pie. Since then, pumpkin spiced flavored everything fills our markets in the fall, and every year there are more products to try.

One of my daughters loves pumpkin spiced foodstuff (though only in October and November), and she got these Belgian Boys Pumpkin Spiced pancakes at Grocery Outlet ($3) last week. They are microwavable and super fast to prepare. She served them with lots of maple syrup and I stole a pancake to review. They were really good.

The silver-dollar sized pancakes are not flat, but rather puffed on both sides. The texture is more cakey than a traditional pancake, but still very light. They have a nice, light flavor on their own, which is really elevated by the maple syrup. It’s really more a dessert han a breakfast item.

Belgian Boys is privately owned.

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