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.

Archer Farms Jingle Blend

I wasn't paying much attention when I reviewed the Rudolph's Mix. Like this indulgent trail mix, it contains actual name-brand M&M's. And I couldn't even tell that they were the real thing. I just assumed they were a store-brand ripoff like the "milk chocolate buttons" found in other grocery store candy items.

Most of the ingredients in this mix are so big that you'll only want to eat one at a time, so there's not much mixing and matching here. You're only tasting one element in any given bite. But that's fine by me, since each ingredient stands alone just fine.

Like the Rudolph's Mix, this trail mix comes in a very small container. And I mean, like, that picture of the product on the side there...that's the entire contents of the package—only two nonpareils in the whole shebang. It's barely more than a single handful. There's a larger jar available too, for about ten bucks. But in both cases, I only purchased the small box.

Also worthy of note—in just the couple of weeks since the Rudolph's Mix review, the price on the smaller containers has fallen from $2.99 per box to $1.66 per box. Maybe they weren't selling as quickly as Target had hoped.

They're both pretty tasty. I feel like this one is just a tad more wholesome since there are more nuts and raisins, rather than just sweet bready things and chocolate—however, there is plenty of chocolate here as well. There's both milk and white chocolate covered elements, although a fair number of the nuts are completely naked, save for a dusting of salt.

In the end, it's a decent little pick-me-up snack, but there's nothing particularly Christmassy about it except for the packaging and the little green and red doodads on the nonpareils—in fact, there's nothing very memorable about it at all.

But since it's near the holidays and they did drop the price a bit, I'm feeling like another 7 out of 10 is in order here. I wouldn't be upset if Santa stuffed my stocking with another pack of the Jingle Blend on Christmas morning...but I wouldn't be super thrilled either.

7 out of 10 stars.