Adventures from the International Grocery: Junk Food

We love one particular international grocery store in Indianapolis SO MUCH that when we go, we have to establish a category of purchases for ourselves. Like, "Today we'll only buy frozen food," or "today we'll stick to pasta." If we don't I've discovered, much to my budgetary regret, that we will come home with just a ridiculous amount of frozen food and pasta and fruit and other stuff that we can't identify so that it's just... no. I cannot spend another entire month eating only food that I can't identify on account of I blew an entire month's food budget on that food.

On this latest trip to Saraga, the kids and I focused on junk food. I mean, of COURSE! We didn't, alas, purchase every single potato chip bag and candy packet and box of cookies that we saw, but just one or two selections from every region, just enough to get a good cross-section of international junk food.

Well, we did get some fruit, too. I mean, of COURSE! We got our favorite, dragonfruit, and also a Korean melon (I only know this because I take a cell phone pic of the label of whatever fruit we buy--otherwise, it gets real hard REAL fast to identify it!):


But anyway... back to the junk food!

The deal is that we taste all of our purchases as a family, admiring the packaging and giving our opinions on the flavors and textures of the food and in general just making a really big deal of it. I am an especially huge fan of the packaging, and I save most of it, for what I do not know.

Seriously, though, check out these packages!

Potato Master Chef, amiright?!? The flavor of these chips was "cream and paprika," and they were tasty--the cream was supposed to be more like cream cheese, I think, and you couldn't so much taste the paprika.

And then there's Yokitos:

I was all about the picture of the alligator nomming on a giant ear of corn! Although these chips were different shapes, they both tasted pretty much the same to us--kind of like cheese puffs.

Churritos, now... I can seriously mow down some Churritos!

They're kind of like pretzels without the brown outside--maybe more like mini crunchy breadsticks? The kids liked them okay, and Matt didn't get to try them at all, because I loved them so much that I finished off the bag before he got home. And I didn't even care. He doesn't love spicy food, anyway.

And now to the sweets! Along with my usual buy of Jaffa cakes (yum!), we tried a couple of different kinds of wafer cookies (a mango kind, and an espresso kind) that were NOT winners, and these guys:

The kids are big fans of DiamondMineCart on YouTube, and along with his Minecraft videos, he also posts a lot in the genre of what I refer to as "Cute Boy Eating Japanese Candy." It's not always Japanese, of course, but for some reason those videos of him taste-testing foreign junk food, reacting on camera to what he's eating, etc., are really popular with my girls. 

And so I goaded my girls into making their own video:

I'm sure they'll forgive me one day!

Okay, now this last thing that we bought, this last thing is game-changing. Life-changing. I will never look at bread the same way again.

Here we go: SPRINKLES THAT GO ON YOUR BREAD!!!!!!!!!!!!!1!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

We ate them one morning on this homemade Hawaiian sweet bread (the last baked thing that you may see from me forever, because our oven died this week and I kind of don't want to replace it) with peanut butter, although I have since learned that you're actually supposed to use unsalted butter instead. Even with that extra punch of protein instead of fat, though?

It. Was. AMAZING!!!

If you don't believe me, then just look at this kid's face as she chews her first bite:

Yep, we like it real well.

Next time we go to Saraga, then, we now have on our list not just mochi ice cream and frozen stuffed naan and Jaffa cakes, but Churritos and Isleri and SPRINKLES THAT GO ON YOUR BREAD!

Oh, and next visit's focus? It may just be all the Ramen. There's a lot of different types of Ramen in the world, My Friends.