'The Daily Bakery' cookies from Iceland, £1.25 impulse buy at the tills. Don't bother, they're absolute shit. The dough is more like a crumbly sponge cake in taste and texture, like an overcooked Mrs Molly's birthday cake, and there're barely any chocolate chips.

The best cookies I know of are Sainsbury's, particularly raspberry & white chocolate, but even they have a strange oily residue that lingers on your mouth.

>>16140
>The best cookies I know of are Sainsbury's, particularly raspberry & white chocolate

Are they still causing cunt-offs (>>/job/9779)?

These taste like microchips.

Devil's Kitchen is a spin-off from Forest Green Rovers football club. Their mushroom burgers are alright, especially with a a few toppings, but aren't anything to write home about by themselves.

>>16084
Update: There's no way this hits with the equivalent of a cup of coffee. When I drink it I get the twitches, become very alert and have trouble sleeping even hours later - this feels quite a bit stronger than any energy drink I've had. You'll also want to sit down on the loo the next evening because they're clearly loading this with indigestible sweetener. I'd wondered why I looked bloated today.

Good stuff for emergencies I guess.

I finally used the meat mincer I bought. It's awful, but I think that was to be expected. I think this image-search result from Temu is probably the same as the one I have.

Firstly, the clamp on the bottom doesn't extend far enough to actually clamp onto my counter. So you have to just hold it with both hands, then find a third hand somewhere to crank the handle, plus a fourth hand to push the meat in. Even with all that, it still barely works.

The meat I used was a "small beef roasting joint" from Asda, so maybe I used inferior meat. But if you have top-of-the-range meat with literally zero fat or gristle in it, surely it would be a waste to try to grind it into mince? So the machine should take into account that you might be grinding only okay meat.

Various reviews I've seen said this machine doesn't work at all. Those people are just cowardly pussies. With a couple of hours of effort and a willingness to make an enormous mess, plus a begrudging willingness to throw out some of the gristle and pull the rest apart with your hands because the mincer can't grind it, you really will get some mince out of this, exactly as planned. Except: mincing the meat also squeezes all the blood out of it and all over your counter, and hands, and clothes. This might seem fine, but once I finally had my burger that I wanted to make, it was the driest thing I have ever eaten. So I would only recommend a meat mincer to someone like me who is a terrible cook anyway, and doesn't mind eating manky shit.

Nevertheless, my overall plan came off relatively successfully: I really did buy a slab of meat, grind it into mince, make the mince into a burger with chillies and garlic in it, then also bake my own burger bun from scratch, and even make homemade chips too. I am motherfucking MasterChef here. My buns were fantastic, although they were enormous and nothing like the same size or shape as the burgers that went in them. This was another error on my part that I bet no recipe would have warned me about, had I been enough of a bitch to read one instead of just solo-ing the whole experience.

Furthermore, the chips went a bit weird. This is probably another of those things that everyone knows about cooking except me, but if you cook the potatoes the night before and put them in water in the fridge overnight, don't put salt in the water or your chips will inexplicably turn black and bruised and look horrible. And the salty water doesn't really improve the flavour all that much.

I could have gone out with my friends on Friday night, but I refused because I was staying home grinding 500g of meat into two burgers. God knows what fun I missed. But at least I managed to have a fairly mediocre adventure with an exceptionally mediocre burger, two days in a row. So that was something I can point to if anyone asks what I did with my weekend.

Oh, and lastly: good luck cleaning once of these mincers if you decide to buy one for yourself. You have no chance. It's just not feasible.

>>16158
>top-of-the-range meat with literally zero fat or gristle in it
Top of the range meat has lots of fat. Burger meat should be at least 15% else it'll fall apart and be horrible and dry. Well done for trying though.

>>16158
Great laugh reading, 9/10. Only improvement would be a photograph of the aftermath.

>>16158

You're supposed to put your meat, and the grinder, in the freezer first for a few hours, it makes everything work a lot better.

>>16160
Flattery will get you everywhere. Or did you want a photo of my guro-adjacent kitchen? I'm afraid I didn't take one of that.

These are very nice. If you have a vegetarian coming over for Christmas dinner I'd recommend getting these in.

>>16162
I'll be honest mate that burger meat looks like paste. Didn't realise you'd replied.
Did you eat deeply bruised potato chips?

There's a global marketing campaign for these at the moment and it led me to buying a pack as an impulse purchase.

They're absolutely rank.

>>16165
The shape reminded me of when you used to go to the Morrisons deli counter or get your feet measured in Clarks and had to wait your turn.

They tasted absolutely shite.

>>16165
I bought some from Budgen's on saturday. I found them most tolerable. I'd assumed they were just some shite corner shop brand.

Telemea is a Romanian cheese that's similar to feta but made with cow's milk instead. I think I prefer it.

I had it with Isle of Wight tomatoes. Fuck me, I didn't realise tomatoes could taste that good.

>>16168
Really good tomatoes are really good. The first time you have one you realise how short-changed you've been the rest of your life.

I don't really see the point of these. It's nowhere near as good as cooking pasta yourself and it doesn't provide that delightful feeling of living in squalor that you'd get with, say, a Pot Noodle or Mug Shot pasta. Who the fuck wants watery pesto?

Tasteless.

I'm reviewing my own chow mein: very good!

>>16171
I wouldn't usually be judgemental about food like this, but who needs their katsu curry to be reassuredly mild? It's not exactly vindaloo.

Anyone go into those Polish shops? I want to start buying dry sausage but the foreign language can be intimidating.
Anything in particular I should look for?
Do you suppose it'd be very expensive what with import costs?

All I can find at Tesco are soft sausages and pepperami.

>>16173
Mysliwska. And any of the dozen flavours of kabanosy.
But the best thing they have in these shops - besides the beer - are the pastries. I like the ones with custard and biscuit. Oh and go on a morning, they might have fresh kaiser rolls.

I wouldn't expect it to be too expensive.

>>16174
The thin kabanosi are good, I steer clear from the fatter ones because I once bit into one and the pockets of fat exploded in my mouth and it was a sensory nightmare.

These Hungry Head microwave meals are 2 for £1 in Heron Foods. They're normally £2.50 - £3.50 each at Tesco. The Singapore Laksa ramen was horrible, the Singapore noodles are okay, the Mee Goreng noodles were good, and this mac and cheese is good in the same way Mexican food from Chiquito or Taco Bell is good ie low quality spicy cheesy sludge. I wouldn't pay much more than 50p a pack though.

>>16175
Forgot pic. It has kind of cunty branding with the descriptions, very Innocent smoothie.

These are very nice to drink in cold water during the heat. One bag will lightly flavour a litre of water, without the usual bite of cordials and squashes.
You can even drop a teabag in if you need that hit.

I feel like Higiddy pies are getting worse.

They have discovered my weakness. I am utterly done for.

Tonight I had Papa John's for the first time in 5 years and I now remember why nobody goes there. It's just not very good and while I know it's hardly health food the calorie to tasty/portion is absurd.

I'd say it's like if I made a pizza but farted into the dough.

>>16183
You can also get them by the block now.

>>16184

I think Papa John's in general is actually good, but they are franchised and seem to have poorer control over the franchisee's standards than most similar businesses. That is to say if a PJ's owner wants to cut corners they'll get away with it and your pizza will be shit, but if they actually do what they're supposed to it'll be probably better than most american style takeaway pizza.

Growers Harvest Trail Mix - it's the only available trail mix in my local tesco, but it's good. I'm gonna eat a lot of this and in 6 months they'll trial premium brands, which I'll check out too. There's about 5 different items, including those soft orange cube things I think are papaya. About £1.15 for 300g, goes in any cerial or just a mouth to munch - infact you could drop it in baked goods; bread, cake.
The nuts and berries might go okay with a tomato sauce. Even the coconut if you're going curry.
I did try them with seseme noodles though and it's shit.

I have been repeatedly tricked by Sainsbury's taste THE DIFFERENCE (as stylised) cookies. If it's not a staple, regular variety just don't bother. They stopped making the granola slices, the twats - easily the best value item in the tray!

>Blueberry & lemon cheesecake cookies with white chocolate and 'blueberries' that taste suspiciously like raisins.
Nah mate it's just a concoction from of the last of your barrel shipment. Price 'em down a bit as novelty, the quality just isn't there.

Dorset Red cheese tastes like bacon Wheat Crunchies.

This is extremely expensive stuff at almost twice the price of even big brand competitors but it not only tastes much better but is usually around a third of the calories and you use about half the weight in powder to prepare it. I'm not joking on the latter - 11g to the competitors 23g.

I got angry this week at the price so I went and bought myself some milky way hot chocolate and it tastes like cardboard. This is a luxury product worth spending more on.

>>16191
I remember the day that those granola slices were no more, I wept in the aisle with bitter frustration.

This was my first time having a Dubai chocolate product. It was underwhelming. It was pretty much pistachio ice cream with a bit of chocolate sauce, with the only interesting feature being the knafeh pastry.

The knafeh pastry tendrils gave the whole thing a horrible mouth feel, like eating ice cream laced with dead worms. It was £3.99, compared to the Dubai chocolate sold at Tesco which is £8 (with Clubcard, otherwise £10), so I'm glad I paid a relatively small amount to try the viral TikTok trend.

>>16197

I know there's often no real explanation for it, but I wish I could understand why the chocolate went viral in the first place. There's absolutely nothing about it that appeals to the british palate, we don't typically like pistachio, or big thick creamy fillings in chocolate, or the odd crunch-not-crunch of knafeh.

Plus it looks like baby poo.

>>16198

It's just visually interesting in a way that works well for the TikTok algorithm - someone breaks open a chocolate bar, it's full of green stuff, the viewer waits to see what the green stuff is, which the algorithm interprets as a positive signal of interest. Some proportion of the population will queue up to buy literally anything they've seen on TikTok, and some larger proportion will buy whatever it is that all those people are queueing up for. The whole fad will be over by Christmas, but at least we temporarily boosted GDP by 0.001%.

These are £1 for a multipack of six and I'd rate them as being slightly nicer than a packet of Walkers.

>>16200
The design is absolutely terrible, did they underpay a 15 year old to do this?

>>16201

Here's a picture of the artist they hired.

This stuff is poison.

Considering I picked this up less than a quid, this was surprisingly decent. Usually this sort of thing is overpowered by cumin or has a weird metallic taste, but the sauce for this was pleasant enough.

This is some seriously good cheese.

Trying orange wine for the first time. This stuff, at least this particular bottle, is awesome - it has some of the lightness, delicateness, and crispness of white wine with some of the robustness or 'meatiness' you have with a red. I'm not a wine connoisseur and I just buy cheap dry whites and reds to get drunk - two or three bottles of wine will usually do me for a big night; it's a better and more panther-like buzz compared to drinking the equivalent amount of beer, which tends to make me feel sluggish. A cheap sauvignon blanc will initally be light and refreshing but will get too acidic, reducing its drinkability. A cheap cabernet sauvignon can initially be good but there's this almost metallic quality that starts rearing its head and leaving too much of an aftertaste by the second bottle - obviously you wanna get more drunk so you'll keep drinking anyway, but you become conscious of it being 'heavy' to drink. This orange wine bridges the gap and is very, very drinkable.

I really have to do some proper wine tasting to determine what I like beyond dry=good, sweet=bad.

Not as nice as Mutti.

>>16212
Orange "wine" mate it's just orange juice and alcohol. You're drinking screwdrivers from a fancy bottle.

>>16214

There are no oranges involved, plebm8.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange_wine

>>16215

Oh sorry, white Ribena and ethanol. Very classy.

I don't think chopped hazelnuts work very well with chocolate. You get a much better texture and taste when they're unchopped.

This might be my new favourite frozen pizza.