Wednesday, July 4, 2012

Mango Sriracha Wings and Mango Peach Salsa


Recently a friend of mine has been in Costco and I asked him to buy me some stuff from there. One of the items that I got from there was a 5-pound bag of Mango Sriracha Glazed Chicken wings. Initially I asked for  Buffalo BBQ wings, since I know that they are always shelved right next to Honey BBQ wings ,but was told that there are none Buffalo wings. The person then told me that there is Mango wings, while failed to mention "Sriracha". I agreed to Mango wings instead of Buffalo, and thought how odd it would be for Costco to run out of Buffalo wings, since I know that their stock is pretty solid. I also thought about the oddness of Mango wings, and how could it pass the test kitchen. When I got the product into my hands, it made perfect sense: Mango Sriracha. I gotta say that I am not a big fan of the Sriracha sauce, I bought the bottle once, tried it; did not liked it, and it just stood in my fridge for over a year before I threw it out. The thought of Mango Sriracha glaze has intrigued me; spicy with somewhat sweet taste: a promising summer variation for wings.


Basicaly there are 5 pounds of wings, that are US inspected, and should be kept frozen for obvious reasons. The price for this bag was $13.99, or almost $2.80 for a pound, which is not that bad, since the local food mart charges up to $3.29 for a pound of raw wings.



The back of the packaging. I just noted the recommendation to use the wings with mango salsa, an item that I also got from Costco.



Frozen wings. They are decent-sized wings that are comparable to pizza parlor appetizer wings, not that tiny like the 7-Eleven sells them.



Microwaved wings, cooked for 4 minutes and 30 seconds. The glazing has splattered allover the microwave interior.



Close-up wings.



Inside of the drumette. These wings are pretty good, and I like to think of them as a variation from the average Buffalo Wings. They are spicy but also sweet, which is great. The only thing that I did not liked about these wings is that the drumettes had this kind of unfresh taste when I cooked the wings for under 4 minutes. When I cooked them for 4.5 minutes, this taste was almost all gone. This mystery taste was not present in the mid sections of the wings. I rate these wings 4.3/5.0. Value rating is 4.0/5.0.



The second product from Costco is the Mango Peach Salsa. Every time that I am in Costco or someone goes there and buys stuff for me, I buy this salsa. Once I ate almost whole jar of this stuff and had to go to bathroom like 8 times per day for the next 3 days, and poop out tiny bits of mangos, so I am careful with this stuff now. The price for Mango Peach Salsa was $5.29 or about $1.77 per pound, which is pretty good considering that Tostinos and Pace salsa is now under 16-ounces and cost anywhere from $3.19 to $3.49 per pound. I rate this salsa 4.5/5.0, it could have been 5.0 if the green herbs were not there. Value rating is 5.0/5.0.


Close-up salsa. The only thing that I was not too fond of was the green herb bits, I am not a fan of green herbs in general. The salsa also compliments Pringles potato chips very well in 2 chips per salsa scoop combination.



Wings and salsa, just like the back of the wings packaging recommends.



Empty canisters are also useful for storage of all kinds of stuff. I personally use one to store Comet cleaning powder, instead of those pesky cans that it comes packed in.

Tuesday, July 3, 2012

More Coupon Stuff


Burger King just had a special promo: the original chicken sandwich for $1.09 (in my area). This promo is already expired, but 2 days ago I was able to get my hands on this sandwich. To tell the truth, I am not a big fan of chicken sandwiches, but I don't mind eating them from time-to-time. Most of the chicken sandwiches that I get come from McDonald's, because for some reason they appear frequently as a $1.00 item at the Brooklyn locations.



Before I will go into BK chicken sandwich, I would like to tell you about the McDonald's free smoothie. I think that this was the last day to get the free mango smoothie, the one that I had talked about in the previous post. The line or several of them in this place, made me wait around 12 or so minutes and I counted 7 other customers who had all kinds of coupons from the promotional booklet. One person said "a dollar is a dollar", another woman said "I'm a big girl" while referring to her 2-for-1 Big Mac meal coupon to the cashier. When my turn in line came up, cashier informed me that they ran out of mango smoothies and she offered to me Strawberry Banana Real Fruit Smoothie, an offer which I accepted with delight.



Real fruit smoothie turned out to be really pleasant. It has well-balanced taste of strawberry and bananas as well as silky-smooth consistence. Quality compared to mango smoothie was much better, and both smoothie are from 2 different categories. Real Fruit Smoothies are premium smoothies because they use real fruit and hence cost more. I give this smoothie 4.5/5.0 because I really like it and will definitely buy it in the future.



With this coupon I set my mind on the Lemon Lemonade.



The print ad looked very promising with the smoothie-like consistency of the drink.



But the actual drink turned out to be a dissapointment; liquidy instead of viscous. Add to that the sourish taste, like it was made from the lemon seed. For this I had to pay $1.00, which I regret now.



Sandwich comes in a paper wrap, but I would prefer it in a cardboard box since it could get squashed in my bag. There are some graphics of ingredients on the wrapping, but not all of them apply to this sandwich, so I don't know the point of them.



Nothing fancy, just a patty, bun, measly leaf of lettuce and some white sauce. I could not tell if it was mayo or not. This BK chicken sandwich was okay, but not as good as one from McDonald's, because there the chicken patty is crispy from the outside and a bit juicy from the inside. BK's chicken patty was considerably dry, without a sign of juicyness, and the miniscule amount of sauce and lettuce did little to improve the dryness. I rate this Original Chicken Sandwich at 3.0/5.0.



The total for the Lemon Lemonade and Original Chicken Sandwich came out to $2.22: an okay snack for the price.

Saturday, June 30, 2012

Those Magical Coupons - Волшебные Купоны


This Thursday the weekly circulars came in to my building. I check them every Thursday for useful coupons, and this time there were bunch of them; from McDonald's and Burger King. Most of the time the coupons that I get in the circular are useless to me, this is because those coupons are for the items that are either not available in my area or for the things that do not apply to me; like pet food, medical products and other crap.



So this is the current McDonald's promotional coupon booklet. I was able to get 5 of these booklets, before I went back to building's hall to get some more circulars, only to find out that the super has disposed of them all.


Inside the booklet are all these coupons.


These coupons are for drinks, but they all kind of follow an order, so you can't use them whenever you want to. Current one is the leftmost, the yellow one. Next week the Cherry Berry Chiller starts.


Burger Kings also had it's coupon sheet, and this is how it looks like. Only real free item here is Soft Serve Cone.


This is the 1st coupons that I planned to use. 2 sandwiches for the price of 1 is a decent deal.


So I went to this place.


And got 2 of these Tendergrill sandwiches: one was Texas and other was Carolina.


The total came out to $5.19 ($2.60 per sandwich), which is pretty decent for such a hearty eat of 2 sandwiches.


Each sandwich comes in a such box, pretty standard but I had no idea which sandwich was in it.


This bun is different from the burger bun, it is more firmer, sweeter and I think that the eggs were added in the dough.


This sandwich is the Carolina Tendergrill. What I liked about it was the white cheese (not sure which one, maybe most likely Swiss cheese), bacon, quality sweet onion and the sauce. The sauce was decent and complimented the rest ingredients pretty well, but other than this, the sauce was nothing special; just tangy. The chicken breast was okay with seared-in glaze on the outside, which goes well with the rest of the ingredients, but by itself (just the chicken breast) it would be too dry; sauce, onions and tomatoes do a good job by mixing together in the mouth to create the "Carolina taste" (whatever that suppose to mean). Overall this is a solid 4.0/5.0 sandwich that I enjoyed eating, and $2.60 coupon-factored price is pretty decent value.


Next stop was this McDonald's "Express" that was about 3 block away from the Burger King.


Here I got this small mango smoothie, by using the leftmost magenta coupon. In McDonald's they have this special blender machine with touchscreen, where the McPerson has to press on the kind of drink and the size of it, and the machine does the rest within 15 seconds or so period. First it squirts out from the side the yellow liquid into the blending pitcher, and then the thicker yellow liquid drops from the top of the pitcher, and the concoction blends together. I think that the 2nd yellow liquid already had ice it. It was difficult to see the process from the angle at which I was looking at the machine. The smoothie itself was pretty good for McDonald's; certainly not Jamba Juice quality, but for McD's prices it was very satisfying, especially when I paid nothing for it. I drank it in the train, and the small cup lasted around 10 minutes. I rate this mango smoothie 4.0 out of 5.0. Decent value for a small size cup.


This is pretty much how McBlender looks like.


This second sandwich is the Texas Tendergrill. I ate it in the Bryant Park, and it was over 1 hours since I bought it, so it was not that fresh and juicy. Instead of bacon, sauce and white cheese, you get the jalapeno peppers, lettuce and standard burger cheese (yellow American). Not only was this sandwich dry but it was also spicy, and I had no beverages on hand so I consumed around 70% of it and threw out the rest. Maybe if it was hot off the grill it would've been better, but in my circumstance, I was not too much please with it; dry meat with spicy peppers, topped-off with cold and stale buns. My verdict 2.0/5.0.


They also had some kind of performance event in the park, for which I did not care much.


But this crowd seemed to be digging it.


Lots of chain QSR spots in the city peddle all kinds of smoothies and blends. This Mrs. Fields joint has the following lineup to choose from.


Nearby 2 Bros. Pizza spot has $0.75 pizza slices: the cheapest in NYC. $75.00 gets you 100 slices.


Another Mrs. Fields spot (34th Street) has this promotion combo of pretzel dog and somekind of chilled lemonade or something along the line.

Friday, June 29, 2012

Russian Sandwiches


Sometimes I like to make these Russian sandwiches from breakfast or as a evening grub. They are simple to make and they taste pretty good. To make them you need pre-cut Russian bread, that is usually sold in the Russian store. Some people like to put butter on the bread but I use mayonnaise. The meat is also usually bought at the Russian store and they have all kinds of price levels of the meats: from $3.49/lb. to over $12.00/lb. In the end I top the sandwiches with tomato wedges and cucumber slices. I don't like cucumbers with the skin so I peel it off. In the photo you can see the platter with all kinds of meats. Turkey bacon is pretty good with these sandwiches.

Thursday, June 28, 2012

Totino's Hamburger Party Pizza: Пати Пицца от Тотинос



I am pretty sure that most people heard about this Totino's pizza, their ads have been rolling on the TV sets since long time ago. The last Totino's ad that I remember seeing before I got rid of my TV set was with bunch of loud kids screaming TOTINO'S! Now that's a fucking annoying ad, because all of the sudden they would yell out TOTINO'S! But the most frustrating part was that nowhere in the Brooklyn's marts and food stores this Totino's pizza was sold at. The only Totinos items that you can find within Brooklyn food marts are those pizza bites, I think they come in 3 flavors: standard/regular/sauce-n'-cheese, pepperoni and 3-cheese blend or combo. For years I wanted to try this mysterious pizza and a year or so ago I found it at the PathMark over at Atlantic Center where that black rapper and the Russian tycoon are building the b-ball stadium. The price was over $3.00 for a standard pie, so I passed-up on buying the Totino's pizza. Recently I've been at the Jack's 99c store and found that they had Totino's Hamburger pizza for $1.29, so I bought one to give it a try.



On the box it says that its America's #1 pizza, so I had to give it a try and see what's all the fuss is about.


The back of the box is pretty average: you got the nutrition facts on the left, prep instructions on top and pizza-loving kid on the bottom.


This is what you get inside the box


The dough is very similar to Jeno's pizza dough. It even tastes pretty much the same.


Raw pizza.


Cooked pizza.


Close-up pizza.

The pizza tasted pretty good, but nothing overly special. Totino's is pretty much a better version of Jeno's in my point of view: same dough/crust, more cheese and hamburger bits did really taste like hamburger (chopped-up McDonald's hamburger patties). Well worth the $1.29 price, but I would not pay more than $1.50 for it.


You also get these Box Top$ miles that support your local school or something like that. I really don't know much about them other that you don't get anything for them, that they expire and that you local school get all the benefits of Box Top$. I guess that soccer moms that do housekeeping and shopping all day, clip them out and process them to their favorite school.


Like this bastard won some Box Top$ and said that its like winning the lotto. No its not, because winning the lotto is getting rich, and here you get zilch.


I also did these pseudo-memes with the Totino's theme in Russian, because I was writting the blog in Russian at that time when I bought the pizza. This one says: Totino's!!! The Dreams Come True!


This one says: Totino's!!! Fo' Shizzle My Nizzle!


This one says: Totino's!!! Impossible is Possible!

 
And this last one says: Totino's!!! And You're The Winner!


And to top this one off, here is the ad clip with those loud bastards.

Переходим На Английски

Мне довольно неудобно писать этот блог по русски, так что я буду теперь писать по английски. Начал я этот блог как часть домашнего задания для русского класса в колледже. Класс закончился так что по русски я уже писать не обязан, so here we go: from now on all my posts will be in English. It was too damn annoying writing in Russian since I had to use the http://www.apronus.com/internet/ruskey.htm on-screen Russian keyboard, and had to click on every Russian letter online with mouse to compose every word, which I did not liked a bit, but had to do due to course requirements. I had a couple of post ideas that I have in mind, on which I am working on. So stay tuned to my blog.