Munchies!!!

I like to try new (or new to me) snack foods and candy on occasion. And by ‘on occasion’, I mean, ‘all the time’. I try not to try new snack foods and candy all the time, but…well, I do my fair share of sampling such wonders.

Examples? Here are three!

:: Lucky Butter Coconut Cookies!

These are nice. Not great, but nice. They have neither a strong coconut nor a strong butter flavor, but enough of each to be detectable. The cookies are thin and crispy, but not so thin as to completely crumble when you bite them. The individual cookies are nicely big–about two inches by one inch rectangular–and the upper side has a nice buttery sheen and a pretty yellow color throughout. They’re quite good with coffee. If you’re looking for a pleasantly mild kind of cookie, these are definitely that. And the package is really cheap: I got one pack for under two bucks.

:: Jimmie Stix!

One major reason I love going to Vidler’s in East Aurora (which is an old-school five-and-dime store) is its selection of obscure candy. If you’re looking to venture beyond the familiar realm of Snickers and Reese’s cups, this is the store for you. Vidler’s is a constant supplier of my favorite candy bar of all time, the Boyer Peanut Butter Smoothie (a peanut butter cup with a butterscotch shell). Here I have another confection by Boyer, the “Jimmie Stick”, or “Stix” in plural. They’re literally what the package says: two pretzel sticks covered in peanut butter and then covered in chocolate.

I liked this thing a lot. It reminds me of the “Take 5” Bar, without the caramel. The peanut butter and chocolate go well together, obviously, but the pretzel interior gives the whole proceedings a very pleasing crunch, and the pretzel’s saltiness elevates the proceedings. I really liked this and will definitely buy more next time I’m in Vidler’s.

:: And finally, Utz “Sweet Corn” Potato Chips.

This summer the fine folks at Utz, who make a lot of fine salty snacks, came out with a line of “Grilling Classics” chips. There are three flavors: Cheeseburger (which are actually really good with a hint of yellow mustard), Grilled Hot Dog (which are really disappointing and taste mostly of char), and now these. If the Cheeseburger chips are the good ones in this line, and the Hot Dog ones are the bad chips in this line, then these are the “Meh”. They’re not horrible. The chips have a definite taste of corn that has been applied somehow, but it’s also an artificial taste of corn, and it literally tastes artificial. Sometimes you can add a non-traditional chip flavor to a chip and result in something that’s kind of tasty (like the Cheeseburger ones), but other times you end up with something akin to cognitive dissonance as your tongue screams to your brain, “This should not taste like this. ERROR. ERROR.” I think we can call that “culinary dissonance”, right?

Anyway, like I said, the flavor of these chips isn’t unpleasant. They’re not bad at all. But I was not able to get used to them. The last two chips in the bowl tasted every bit as wrong to me as the first two, and that’s a problem. I’ll finish the bag, but these won’t be on my list of Munchie Paths To Trod Again.

So, who out there has tried something new in the Munchie world of late?

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