With Covid now in the rearview mirror (except for some). the food/meal reviews are back.
I came across this “Old El Paso” Stacked Queso crunch kit at my local grocer. It was on the “closeout rack” marked down to $2. I bought it for a couple reasons. First, I was going to cook tacos and secondly, I had no shells or taco dirt (aka the spices) so I decided what the heck.
The taco kit contains, 6 soft taco shells, 6 hard taco shells, a packet of taco dirt, and a packet of nacho cheese sauce. The point of this kit is to essentially to make a hard shell taco (you must buy the meat, and fixings) and then put the nacho cheese on the soft shell and wrap it around the hard taco. The hard shells are flavored with nacho cheese dust, quite similar to the Taco Bell Doritos Nacho Cheese Loco Taco. I cooked the meat, seasoned it with the dirt, got my fixings ready, and made a few of these for myself.
Honest assessment? Not great, ok at very best. The nacho cheese sauce was a garden variety high school basketball/football game melted plastic type cheese. There were some pepper flakes in it, so it had a vest. The soft shell was fine. The taco dirt was your garden variety dirt, nothing special. The hard shell was an odd choice. The shells have a flat bottom so you can “stand and stuff them” a nice change from the old, you have to hold it and stuff it, but the flavoring was odd. I would describe this meal as eating nachos but with nacho cheese Doritos instead of tortilla chips. 2.5/5
Price point: $2 is a steal, I went back to the scene of the sale and found the item on the shelf a week later (likely this had to do with expiration dates) retailing for $6.99. Yikes. Based on $2 4.7/5. Full retail? Even a Biden voter would say this economy is causing these shells to be a rip off. Seriously? 12 taco shells, a package of taco dirt and nacho cheese for $7? That’s whack. Hell, a pound of ground beef cost me just $3.
Aftermath: This was not great. I ate the entirety of the shells. They were not large, think basically fast-food sized tacos. The meat, fixings, and shredded cheese were not an issue. The nacho cheese and hard taco chemical shell caused some issues. Let’s just say I haven’t seen a blow out that bad since Tampa Bay played the Raiders in a Super Bowl about 20 years ago. The processed cheese product and the hard shells I would definitely pass on in the future.
Johnnie Does
PS I was able to report back to my doctor that I am able to delay my colonoscopy another year because this taco kit cleaned everything out down there. If you’ve ever considered a cleansing routine and like mildly spicey food this may just be your ticket to better health.