Archer Farms Cinnamon Churro Coffee

I think the first time I ever had a churro was while I was living in California, during a trip to Disneyland with friends. One churro cost something like $10, but I didn't even care. I was amazed. How could something so delicious have eluded me for so many years? I don't think I'd even heard the word "churro" until I was in my mid-twenties.

Scrumptious.

I started buying churros and mini churros from El Pollo Loco, Jack in the Box, street vendors, and anyplace else I found them. My wife, Sonia, loves churros too. They were a staple in her Southern California diet long before I ever came into the picture.

And since she's a churro expert, AND she loves coffee...for the first time ever on this blog, I'm going to let her do most of the reviewing, and I'll defer to her for the product's final score.

She liked it overall. She thought it tasted more like just plain cinnamon than an actual churro, but she admitted that there were hints of something churro-esque. It didn't require any more or less sugar than her normal cuppa, but she did make sure to use brown sugar for a more authentic churro-y taste. As you can see from the photo, she brewed the coffee in a French press and was pleased with the results.

Overall, it's a pleasant flavor, but there's quite a ways to go until it's unmistakably churro-tastic.

Sonia gives this product 7 out of 10 stars.

Simply Balanced Chicken Tortilla Soup

I always assumed tortilla soup would, you know, have tortillas in it. But what do I know?

Instead, it's a red broth with black beans, corn, and little hunks of chicken. Not bad. The broth is mildly spicy, and the corn and beans are nothing to complain about...although, I wouldn't have minded if there were a lot more of them. 

The soup is pretty soupy...you know, brothy, that is. It's mostly just liquid—not nearly as chunky as the picture on the box would have you believe. That alone wasn't the product's biggest weakness, as the liquid part of the soup was pretty decent and flavorful.

The chicken chunks were all near-perfect cubes, and were abnormally dark, even for dark meat chicken. They were a deep brown—such a gloomy color that I think if I hadn't known any better, I would have assumed they were little pieces of low-grade beef. Fortunately, they didn't taste nearly as bad as they looked. But once again, the soup could have used a good bit more of them.

I definitely think this melange would have benefited from little tortilla bits—either the kind that come in a little plastic bag that you add yourself or the kind that are soft to begin with and don't mind swimming around in salty soup for some indeterminate amount of time on Target's shelves. This soup was crying out for carbs but did not deliver in that department.

So I added some carbs myself in the form of good old-fashioned saltine crackers. They certainly helped, but not quite enough.

It was $2.29 for the box at the Target where we discovered it—I believe somewhere in coastal Georgia, probably near Savannah, as our recent adventures have taken us through The Jewel of the South. It's just a little pricier than your average can of soup, but the box is one ounce bigger, too. But in the end, this product just wasn't enough bang for the buck to be a repeat purchase.

I'll give the soup 6 out of 10 stars.