Sorry to blog on about food stuff, but Reese’s Inside Out Peanut Butter Cups are nasty.  I got a variety pack last time I was at Target, and this is by far my least favorite.  They’ve taken some perfectly good chocolate and an extra sweet peanut butter (which is plenty good candy, by the way), and swapped them out for a waxy, gritty peanut butter outside, and a chalky, bitter chocolate filling.  (White chocolate, on the other hand, is a pleasant variation on the theme.)

I realized today that I’ve been eating them to get to the bottom of the bag, and that’s no reason to take in 100 calories and five fat grams.  So as soon as everyone’s gone today, I’m going to make a spontaneous gift to someone’s candy bowl: the gift of substandard candy.

I bet I’m the first among us to eat the Chipotle Salad.  It’s not bad.

Basically, if you’re familiar with the burrito bowl, this is basically the same thing, except no rice, and there’s lettuce and a new salad dressing.  So if that’s your thing, go for it.  I was concerned that it would be exactly like a burrito bowl, and that the bowl would have to go to the end of the line first (since that’s where the lettuce is), but there’s a new bucket of big salad sized romaine pieces at the front of the line, so it’s basically what you’re thinking it would be.

I wasn’t asked about beans, but with chicken, black beans are fine.  (Less messy on a salad, too, I suppose.)  When we got to salsas, they were treating me like someone who had never been to Chipotle before, so I got mild and moved onto sour cream and cheese.

"It doesn’t come with sour cream, but I can put that on there for you."

So basically it fucking comes with it.  Jesus.

You’re more or less trading out your rice for the new Chipotle Honey Vinaigrette, which is super tasty (although it might have been mixed with the sour cream, which would help almost anything).  It didn’t seem like too much lunch, but it was $7.06 with a small drink, which seems like they might have jacked their prices when they tweaked the menu to add the salad.  I’ll have more to report later, I suppose.

One more food note: Wendy’s new Fix N’ Mix Frosty is awesome.  For slightly more than the price of a small Frosty, they throw in a packet of broken Butterfingers, Oreos, or M&Ms.  It’s a little post-lunch project.

Since I do whatever Matt tells me to do, I got a 12-pack of Coca-Cola Zero.

It tastes an awful lot like regular Coca-Cola, and it has no Splenda whatsoever.  The first one I had was frozen, but the second was tasty. 

There’s some bloggy hullabaloo about how this new product comes hot on the heels of diet Coke with Splenda, and how they’re intentionally shooting themselves in the foot, and they’ll never sell anything, etc. etc.  I don’t really care that much.  Both products will probably be off store shelves sooner than Atkins pasta sauce, so try it and save some in the basement.

Must everything have a great new taste? 

First off, I’m glad I can find Pepsi ONE in stores again.  I think it’s tastier than Diet Coke or Diet Pepsi, or at least it used to be.

But it’s getting kind of predictable now: if something has a Great New Taste, that means they’re using Splenda, and Splenda Tastes Weird.  It’s not a deal breaker, and I suppose I’ll still buy it, but to people like me, who grew up drinking diet soda, and don’t think that aspartame (which was accused, twenty years ago, of being slightly metallic and less sweet than sugar) tastes bad, Splenda has a sort of plasticky, over-the-top sweetness that can put me off my morning caffeine hit.

I will note that it hasn’t put me off Slim-Fast, which has put Splenda in its new Optima shakes, claiming that the new stuff has 50% less sugar than the old stuff.  That’s all well and good, I suppose, except they don’t even sell the old stuff anymore, so it’s not so much an offer as a mandatory adoption down the product line.

They add caffeine to Sunkist Orange.  Did you know?  I had assumed that it was a caffeine-free beverage, but I just read the label.  I’d been using that as an evening soda of choice, but I guess I should quit.

If you already knew this, then here’s another beverage warning: there’s a V8 can (full) by the vending machine in my office that says "V8 EXPIRED JULY 2004.  I WANT MY MONEY BACK."  Yow.

We had dinner at Figlio for Christie’s birthday.  It was pretty great, although I gave up on my less-red-meat plan when I kept getting distracted by the steak options.  Steak is great, don’t let anyone tell you different.

Anyway, I had a new beer there.  I think it was called Blue Moon Harvest Wheat, but I’m not finding that mentioned online at all, so I could be wrong.  It was very good: very light (although cloudy, like a homebrew) and crisp (although sweet, like… well, a homebrew).  Christie remarked that it didn’t have very much beer flavor, but it was there, just… better.  She kept calling it fruity because it came with an orange slice. 

Searching online, I found out that Blue Moon is a wholly owned subsidiary of Coors, which is sort of disappointing.  On the other hand, that means I might not have much trouble finding it at the liquor store.