When we went on our mini trip to Slade, KY we took food along.  We brought Trader Joe’s wheat tortilla wraps, mayo, Lightlife Smart deli turkey & bologna both of which we were thrilled with.  The texture & taste of the bologna  is authentic in the folds of a sandwich, Shawn felt the same about the turkey.  Last grocery trip I bought Yves’ Salami and I’m very sorry I did now.  I had a wrap yesterday with it and it tastes nothing like salami other than having a tiny spiciness to it.  I plan to just throw the rest away, it’s that bad.  It crumbled in the wrap, unlike the Lightlife slices.

Yves’ Lettuce wraps are amazing (almost exact to PF Chang’s chicken lettuce wraps), so it makes me sad the salami is so bad.

In other news, I loved fried chicken when I ate meat.  It still smells pretty good to me and I know it is only that fried batter that smells so good.  I want to find faux chicken that can be fried up to satisfy the want.

I love egg nog, but it’s so bad.  It’s thickness can be a little gross and I picture people drinking raw egg like body builders in the movies.  The calories are horrible too, depending on the brand it can have 400+ calories a cup.

We bought Vitasoy brand Holiday Nog the other day, and I have to say, it will substitute the real stuff just fine for me!  It’s sweet, and more the consitancy of soy milk than egg nog.  The calories are around 60 per 1/2 cup so I don’t feel as bad having it.  I hear they make a chocolate peppermint flavor too.  I should buy that too!

When you take a sip of soda these days you pretty much know what to expect. The gritty carbonated bubbles almost burn on the surface of your tongue and the flavor sorta washes over your taste buds with a dull, metallic flourish. There may be juice (or at least caramel flavor) inside but the gulp drops down your throat with all the excitement of licking a Post-It.

With drinks more about formulas than flavor these days it’s not hard to give up (or dramatically cut back) on the classic carbonated soda once you really look and think about what you’re drinking. But I’m stubborn and still want a flavorful drink to offset the tasteless and thirst-quenching water that I drink every day. Whole Foods has a tasty line of sodas and Hansen’s brands do the trick, but nothing tastes as amazing as these Walgreens Gourmet Sodas from the mysterious Deerfield Trading Company.

Mysterious only because I can’t find much info about them and they produce an extensive line of drinks exclusively for the nationwide drug store chain. Conspiracy theories aside, this line of surprisingly chemical-free drinks tastes incredible and are reasonably priced around $1.20 a bottle. Flavors include Vanilla Cream Soda, Juicy Orange Cream, Strawberry Cream, Black Cherry, Root Beer and Diet Root Beer, and each comes in a recyclable 16 ounce glass bottle. Tasty and plastic-free to boot! The best part of all these drinks, the one “claim to fame” that each label calls out is that there’s no High Fructose Corn Syrup inside.

Besides some food coloring and Sodium Benzoate (the questionable preservative) the ingredients list is short and simple. Most of the drinks include carbonated water, sugar, natural and artificial flavor (they don’t get any more specific here), and citric acid which gives them all about 240 calories per bottle. The diet root beer uses Sucralose to replace the sugar and calories so I won’t be trying that one.

The taste of each is exceptionally sweet with only a light bubbly carbonated feel. The Vanilla Cream Soda really hits you, the Orange Cream tastes of a creamcicle, and the Strawberry Cream is almost overpoweringly sweet. I haven’t had the Root Beer yet but the clear winner is the Black Cherry. I’ve tried for days to think of how to explain it’s sweet syrupy flavor. At first sip it’s almost like cherry cough syrup; powerfully flavored as if to mask a gross medicine taste. Then it’s like super concentrated Dr. Pepper without the carbonated bite. It’s like Walgreens was determined to show the world that high fructose corn syrup isn’t required in order to get a super sweet flavor. In the famous words of President Bush, Mission Accomplished!

Hit up your closest Walgreens (I’m sure there’s about ten of them within a mile of your home) and give these flavorful drinks a shot!

Just a fun little fact before I start; I never thought I’d use eBay as a source of information in regards to a products’ ingredients, but there it was. I can vouch for their accuracy too. I just had another box of these recently and looked at the ingredients but didn’t think to write them down before tossing the package.

Anyways, not only are they attractively colored and shaped like Chinese takeout boxes, the food cooks right inside. Minimal packaging and simple instructions mean you tear open the noodle and sauce packets, dump them back into the takeout box, close it up, and nuke it for two minutes. Then, eat.

Several flavors are available including Peanut Satay, Pad Thai, Kung Pao, and new Green Curry and Tom Yum. I’ve only had the Satay and Pad Thai so far, both of which fall somewhere between just edible and stupendous. There’s plenty of flavor but neither seemed especially delectable. It’s far and away better than a pack of chemical-filled ramen noodles and for $1.99 there’s precious little else you’re going to find that’s as easy to fix and still Vegan.

The ingredients are mostly wholesome but somehow they’ve managed to pack in an insane amount of calories. I don’t have the box with me and can’t find much info online but each box will plump you up an extra 400 - 600 calories. Filling, affordable, and healthy hardly ever coincide and in the case of these noodle boxes you’ll get plenty of filling food at a decent price. They’re definitely worth trying but if the middling flavor and the calories are a bigger factor in your food equation you may want to look elsewhere.

While the health benefits of most frozen meals aren’t up for much debate, there is one benefit that I greatly appreciated from Banquet TV dinners and Michellina’s entrees; time. My free time is cut so thin these days that it could easily be blown off the table by a passing breeze and slide right under the door, gone forever. So when we went vegetarian I was relieved to see our local Kroger’s freezer moderately stocked with SoyThing and Meat-Not-Meat in handy microwavable packages. A month later and I’ve realized that the trade off for slightly healither, meatless, and quick meals is a price I’m not always willing to pay.

Whatever form of soy protein that brands like Nate’s and Boca use may taste delicious at first bite but an hour later when the gases come gurgling back up I’m left with the second-most god-awful aftertaste I’ve ever experienced (the first being crappy fish oil burps). This is the kinda taste that not even mouthwash and a strong stick of gum can eradicate and at times it’s stuck around all day.

Thankfully it seems to be just a few products that do it and not an entire line but it makes picking out a new dish sorta like playing Russian roulette. And with fewer meatless options in my grocer’s freezer that soy burp pistol is loaded with more than a single protein bullet. Maybe one day I’ll get to the point where the benefit of more free time is outweighed by not tasting my lunch’s individual ingredients, but until then I’ll spin the cylinder and take my chances.