As noted earlier, my wife and I got back from a Caribbean cruise for our 5th anniversay last week. The cruise was phenomenal and one of the ports my wife and I stopped at was Calica, Mexico.
While on an excursion, the tour bus stopped at a tiny marketplace where we could go to the bathroom and shop. It was a cool little area with lots of little crafts to look at. What do I get excited about? Not the hand carved stone chess sets or the intricately sewn Mexican blankets. I about lost my composure when I found a snack rack filled with Mexican chips and snack foods. As the title of this article told you, I’m weird. If you’ve read this blog before, you know that I love finding differently packaged sodas and snackfoods. Just check out the Halloween article right before this. It’s a sickness, I know, but I love it. 😉
Anywho, on the aforementioned holy rack of snacky goodness, I found several flavors of Doritos and Fritos that are not found in the US. Check out the two Doritos packages below (queue heavenly music and chorus of angels).
The one on the left is pizza flavored Doritos, which did exist many years ago in the US when Pizza Hut and Doritos partnered on the flavor. It tastes like pepperoni and green pepper based pizza, but there is WAY too much flavor powder in this particular bag. It’s overwhelming. It took a bottle of black cherry soda and two waters to get the taste out of my mouth. Yikes. Hope the other one is better. The package on the right is called Incognito, which means mystery, or puzzle. You have to guess the flavor. How awesome is that? They made it a game! There are pictures of limes and red/green chili peppers on the black packaging. The flavor powder is also black. It’s kind of cool to look into this bag and see dozens of black death chips staring back at you. As for taste, they taste like limes and chili peppers, which also tastes like many salsas you’ll have in the better Mexican restaurants. But there is also a small aftertaste of curry, which is usually found in Indian cuisine. Kudos to my wife for figuring that aftertaste out. Very odd to have that in a Mexican chip, but not unwelcome. It was weird at first, but the more I got into the bag the more I loved it. Much better than expected.
While sneaking around that marketplace I also found two cool sodas. In much of the world they don’t label Diet sodas as such. They just call them Light. I found Coca Cola Light, and Pepsi Light.
I don’t know about you, but this was so exciting to me. I had actually seen Coke Light many years ago on my first trip to Mexico back in 1999. I had traveled to the East Coast of Mexico to a small restaurant in Rosalita. This was the first time that I had found Pepsi Light, though. Words can’t describe it, people.
I want to say that the Coke and Pepsi Light drinks tasted slightly different than regular Diet Coke and Pepsi, but that may be because I drank them in the land of enchiladas and not in the upper 48.
Oh well, I’ll leave you with the last two bags I found, 2 flavors of Fritos that are so totally mexican I’m suprised they didn’t come packaged with a Corona. Behold Chili & Lime Fritos (left) and Chipotle & Chorizo Fritos (right).
I haven’t tasted those 2 Fritos yet, but I will. Don’t you worry your pretty little head about it.
You know what else I found today? Hostess Apple Spice cupcakes. I thought they only sold these around Christmas time. Holy crap-in-a-hat these are divine. These things are like little apple-spice tears from heaven. Fluffs of clouds that have been lightly spiced with apples and frosting. It doesn’t get much better than this. If you can find these…GET THEM. So. F’n. Good.
Cavalcade of Awesome 