A 'lil HooHaa

Messing with the blogging world since 2005

breakfast

Peanut butter Pop-Tarts? OMG! Do they deliver or flop?

I’m going out of the norm here.

How so, you may ask?

Allow me to go a little Internet/text/etc. on you for a moment.

Like, OMG.

Recently, I saw a commercial about some new Pop-Tarts. I’m not usually a fan of Pop-Tarts because they are crammed full of sugar and such and I try and limit it as best I can.

Peanut butter Pop-Tarts? Can they deliver?

But, OMG!

This commercial showed a new flavor — Gone Nutty Peanut Butter.

WTF? OMG!

OK, enough of the Internet stuff. But, seriously, holy crap. If you’ve been a reader of my blog, you know I love me some peanut butter. It’s something I believe should be in its own food group.

And now Pop-Tarts have peanut butter? Wow. Soon after, though, I forgot all about it. And then it happened.

I was strolling around the aisles of the local dollar store and there they were — sitting on the shelf. They stared back at me. “Buy me!” I couldn’t resist. Even at $2.25.

Letting them sit a day is something I needed to do, though. I had to stare at the package and understand what I was about to undertake.

I would even look past the nutritional information if need be. I mean, heck, what’s 200 calories for one pastry? After all, it’s only 60 calories from fat! And those 36 grams of total carbohydrates? No worries. Only 16 grams were sugar!

You see, there aren’t many things I don’t like with peanut butter. I look the other way if it’s good.

But…

Could this finally be the one that got me?

The next day, I slowly opened the box and pulled out one of the packages of Pop-Tarts. In gold wrapping, it was as if I was Charlie from Willy Wonka and I had just brought the box home to Grandpa Joe and it’s all excitement.

You can see the correlation here, right?

Anyhoo…

So the first one I placed in the toaster and heated it up. When I grabbed it there was so much excitement.

… and anticipation.

Blech.

A golden ticket? Not so much.

And just like that, I found something with peanut butter I just don’t like. Now, don’t get me wrong, it’s not awful. But I had a hard time getting through that first pop-tart. Later, I tried the other one in the package without toasting it — not much better.

There’s just something about a pop-tart pastry with some not-so-great peanut butter inside.

It’s a shame, too. I had really looked forward to this. But I think I finally found something that peanut butter doesn’t go with. That says something, too, as peanut butter pretty much is awesome with everything.

But, in the end, my body probably thanks my taste buds for not liking them too much. I’m sure pounding down boxes of these things couldn’t have been a healthy endeavor, so it’s only two more packages that I’ll have to choke down at some point.

Yes, I will finish them. After all, $2.25 is $2.25.

Feel free to leave a comment, or e-mail P.J. at hoohaablog [at] gmail.com. Also, please “Like” HooHaa Blog on Facebook!

Remember the name — Malloy

This was the main reason to head to Philly — but other things made the trip awesome.

His name was Joe Malloy.

Ol’ Joe as I would like to think his friends call him, came into our lives this past weekend. It was only for a brief few moments, but his memory will last a lifetime.

Three of us — myself, Rod and Marc went to Philly for a baseball game. We had some other plans on this short trip, but baseball was the main thing. See, Rod had gifted me tickets to this Phillies game for Christmas. And with many points built up, we got hotels, too.

I’ll get to the other details in a moment. For now, let me talk about Joe Malloy.

‘Twas Sunday morning and we left the hotel in search of a breakfast place I had found and researched. The place had decent reviews and it had what I wanted — scrapple. See, there aren’t any joints around me where you can get scrapple, so if I am in Philly or that area, score.

Herein lies the issue — my TomTom GPS system was being quite bitchy and wouldn’t allow me to put the address in. We tried and tried, but for some reason, the road wasn’t even on there. We found a similar road, albeit without the “West,” but we thought that would work.

It didn’t.

We got to the area the GPS wanted us to be at and there’s nothing. No breakfast joint. Nothing. We started to turn around and that’s when Joe came into our lives.

Marc pulled up to Joe, who was walking down the street. The idea? Ask for some directions to this joint.

Unfortunately, Joe said he hadn’t eaten there before.

Fortunately, however, Joe did know where it was.

Score!

There’s more unfortunate, however. See, it would seem Joe knew where this place was. He then proceeded to tell us how to get there. Go back down to this road, take it for a bit until you hit the trolley tracks, then look for a BP (gas station) on the left and the trolley station on the right.

If we got there, we’d be closer.

During him telling us these actions, he asked us to make sure we were paying attention. Then he blabbed about something else. And told us we needed to make sure we understood his name.

Or the meaning of his name.

Considering he didn’t tell us the meaning of his name, how the heck were we supposed to remember it. Maybe we were supposed to ask the people at the breakfast joint? I dunno. He never told us. He just wandered off.

And then we got out of there.

We tried Joe’s directions, but we got confused. We went back to the hotel, found a way from there and eventually found this place. The breakfast, for the record, was excellent and I’d definitely eat there again.

From there, we headed to a geocache in Delaware so I could color in that state. As we started heading that way, via the GPS, something looked odd. We got to the end of the road where the breakfast place was, and what did we see? A BP and the trolley station. Turns out Joe was quite right.

Amazing.

The trip, overall, was excellent.

We saw baseball, with good seats. It’s always nice to watch a game with friends. The guy behind us was obnoxious and made sure he told everyone how this was wrong or this and that. Annoying. Just watch the game already.

This Phils lost, unfortunately. But I got to see Cole Hamels pitch at the major league level for the first time. He also homered, as did Ryan Howard and Chase Utley.

We ate at Geno’s Steaks (a separate post about this will run this week), and grabbed some tasty during other parts of the trips. We also stopped at a nice bar near our hotel, where I had the chance to sit back and enjoy a Guinness (though the bartender put it in a frosty pint… bad move).

I’ll look forward to my next trip down to Philly. It’s always a fun time to get away and catch a game or whatever else.

Feel free to leave a comment, or e-mail P.J. at hoohaablog [at] gmail.com. Also, please “Like” HooHaa Blog on Facebook!