This week I found Ben & Jerry’s Goodbye Yellow Brickle Road ice cream at Grocery Outlet. This “limited edition” ice cream once again reminds us of the fact that without Ben and Jerry, Ben & Jerry’s ice cream is completely lost. Indeed, how long has it been since they’ve come up with any ice cream flavors that have been successful? By now, all they seem to do is either randomly assemble flavors or play it safe and boringly. This ice cream, as most of its predecessors, is a complete failure. It mostly tastes of mediocre chocolate ice cream, sometimes of caramel, and never of anything special. No wonder it ended up at GO, for $1.50 a pint.
I haven’t had Sarah Lee Frozen Cheesecake (original or New York) for years, but if you’ve been craving some, GO has the little ones on sale for $2. Seems like a pretty good deal.
Of greater interest to those of us planning holiday dinners and parties, GO is selling Pepperidge Farm Frozen Puff Pastry Sheets for $2 a package! These usually sell for about $6 a package. Expiration is 12/23/09 – but I’m sure they’ll be fine for Xmas dinner.
Finally, GO has Cantare Mini Baked Brie en Croute on the refrigerated cabinets, by the diary products. A package of 12 brie/cranberry pastries is $2 and one of 12 brie/cranberry and 12 brie/jalapeno is $4. They expire in 1/10. The kids and I liked the cranberry kind quite a bit – they cook in 6 minutes, so they’re a great choice for your holiday parties.
Tag: frozen food (Page 4 of 4)
It’s unlikely you’ll find anything if you look for “Hart Authentic Orange Chicken” online – at least I didn’t find anything when I looked. It seems that this frozen entree is made by Hart Food Products from Lakewood, CA. I bought it at Grocery Outlet, and I imagine they are their only distributor. Actually, given Hart’s pathetic website, it’s difficult to believe they are any sort of serious company. Which really tells you something about where Grocery Outlet sources its products. And indeed, orange chicken seems to be one of only three or four products Hart offers .
Anyway, I was in Grocery Outlet yesterday and thought I’d take a look at the frozen stuff they had, as I’ve been feeling less and less like cooking lately. This orange chicken product didn’t seem too bad – at least in comparison to the brand-name frozen food products. Yeah, it has a lot of salt, corn syrup and a myriad of preservatives, but so do all the brand name products. At least it had chicken as its main ingredient 🙂
It’s not obvious from the picture in the package, but this is really popcorn chicken – which is annoying as that means it has much more breading than you would like. It’s uncooked so you need to bake it for 20 minutes, pan fry it for 10 to 15 minutes, or deep fry it for 6 minutes. Then you mix it with the orange sauce which comes in 3 packages. You can’t microwave it.
As for the taste, it met our very low expectations. Mike found it too bland, while I thought the chicken had a subtle “off” flavor. The sauce was OK, somewhat orangy and not too sweet.
I’m unlikely to buy it again.
** UPDATE July 2012**
The owner of Hart Chicken e-mailed me a few weeks ago and told me they’d made changes to their product and to give it another try. I was reluctant, because one of the changes involved getting a different supplier of chicken pieces that produced more uniform – but smaller – pieces. I figured one of the major problems was the size of the pieces, so this wouldn’t help. But I figured I would give the product another try (though it would have been nice if he’d sent me a coupon rather than I having to buy it myself) and I was happier than the time before.
The pieces are still small (they need to be in order to be ready within a reasonably period of time, given that they are not pre-cooked), but this time I went into the meal experience thinking of it as popcorn chicken. So I wasn’t disappointed by their size.
I also used much less oil than the instructions called for, which you can do if you stir fry the chicken.
The sauce was supposed to have an improved flavor, and I think it did. It was just the right amount to coat all the chicken – though a bit more would have been welcomed for any rice or veggies you might want to throw in. I did note this time that the sauce takes on a full 10 oz of the 32 oz of the package, which is quite a lot.
Anyway, Hart Orange Chicken is still not for me, though as you can see below it has many lovers (and haters).
We just made another trip to Trader Joe’s so I figure I’ll write a few words about new products we’d bought. I’ll keep adding more items to this posting as we try them.
–Corinthians Chocolate Cream Wafers. These are very long cylinders filled with dark chocolate cream. They are very brittle and most of them seemed to have broken at least in two even before we open the can. They are good and addictive but not as good as others I’ve had. I probably shouldn’t buy them again.
–Think Thin Sugar Free Sour Citrus Slices. These are little soft candies in sour flavors. Mike bought then and didn’t like them as they weren’t very sweet, though he says they are growing on him.
–Piccolo Limone Italiano. This pre-squeezed lemon juice comes in a little plastic bottle in the shape of a lemon. Unlike other commercial lemon juice, it’s neither lemon juice from concentrate, or pure-lemon juice. Instead it’s a mixture of water, lemon juice, citric acid and lemon oil. It does need to be refrigerated after opening it. It was quite good, it had a distinctive lemon-oil flavor that I actually found quite pleasant on top of last nights milanesas. Of course, fresh lemon is better – but if you don’t have your own lemon tree it can be quite expensive.
–Kettle Corn. Though obviously not as freshly made as the kettle corn from the farmers market, it tasted quite fresh. It was very good, but much sweeter than the farmer’s market stuff. That’s not bad in itself, though a concern if you’re watching your sugar intake.
–Orange Chicken. This is a frozen product that has to be heated by baking or sauteeing (in 1/2 cup vegetable oil!). I was VERY dissapointed. The chicken was pretty tasteless without the sauce, and the sauce was too runny and not very good. It didn’t really taste much like orange and not at all like the sauces you get at Chinese restaurants. Given how much time it takes to make this dish, and how it’s not microwabable, it’s certainly not worth it. It probably wouldn’t be worth it either if it was microwabable.
–Chicken Curry. This is a frozen entree under TJ’s label. It was very disappointing, much worse than the other frozen Indian entrees that TJ sells under a different label. The “basmati rice” was long-grain and may have been basmati, but it was completely tasteless. The curry had very few pieces of chicken and the spicy sauce tasted mostly of cinnamon. It was edible but not enjoyable.
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