Paldo Aloe Drink: Pomegranate

I used to see Aloe drink all the time when I was a young lad shopping with my parents in the Asian grocery store but was always turned away by its weird texture. Then one day, on my first food based adventure with Foodette we bought a bottle of regular green aloe drink from the local grocery and I’ve been hooked on it since. The taste of regular aloe drink is crisp and refreshing and tastes like really expensive Muscat grapes. The texture however is something that could take getting used to. The texture of aloe drink is mostly liquid I would say but contains little chunks of aloe pulp. The texture of aloe pulp is very much like the texture of grapes. A drink that tastes like Muscat grapes and has a pulp similar to grape pulp, it’s probably the best thing ever. You’ll love regular aloe drink as much as I do if you like grapes as much as I do, which is a lot.

I stumbled on this different flavor of aloe drink the other night after losing a bit of money at the casino. I saw this on the shelf of a local exotic foods market and thought: “I love aloe, and I like pomegranate too, this could be awesome!” At a price of over $2 a bottle, I was expecting the next greatest thing since regular aloe drink. What I actually got was a bottle of disappointment equal the amount of disappointment I would feel if the next Call of Duty game would feature the voice talent of Justin Bieber in collaboration with the whole cast of Glee.

I still haven’t figured out how they people at Paldo could mess up something that is as delicious as aloe drink, but they did. It was like they took the worst parts of pomegranate juice and the worst parts of aloe drink and bottled it. The juice tasted like artificially flavored pomegranate sugars with added bitterness in a futile effort to emulate the taste of natural pomegranate. The aloe did not absorb any of the flavors of the juice at all, thus it tasted like soft tasteless grape pulp.

It was sometime between the artificially bitter-sweet juice and the tasteless pulp to realize that I had been robbed for a second time that night. There was a moment of despair similar to the moment I had lost my final hand of Spanish 21. I had bought an overly expensive drink that was terrible. It wasn’t something that can be attributed to not having an acquired taste. It was because the drink was just terrible. The flavors are completely artificial and the aloe pulp is unflavored. Even if the aloe pulp absorbed the flavor of the juice it would be terrible. I’m going back to the ever refreshing and delicious green aloe drink which I can drink all day every day I don’t give a fuck.

IKEA Swedish Meatballs

There are some points in a man’s life when he just has to stop everything for just a second and re-evaluate his life and think: “What the hell did I do to end up at this point?” I encountered one of these moments when a few days ago when I was having a really busy day with interviews, working on projects, and final exams coming right around the corner. I only had about 30 minutes of time in the middle of the day before I had to meet with a group to work on a project and right after having an important interview to attend for an internship with the IRS.
Due this small time gap and the proximity of food locations in the area, the most viable option was to grab some food at the Ikea down the street. I looked at the menu and decided that the most interesting choice of food that would really define this place would be a plate of Swedish Meatballs. After I sat down with my plate of food, I looked at my food, the receipt, and the people around me. It was at that moment; I just had to ask myself “What the hell did I do to end up here?” and had to take a few minutes to re-evaluate my life. At the end of it, I felt a bit upset that this epiphany and eye opening moment came from a simple lunch break at a Swedish Furniture store, but all in all the rest of my day went perfectly.For those of you readers who don’t know what an Ikea is or what their business model is, but in a few simple words, Ikea is a cheap furniture store. Their basic business model is to provide cheap, assemble it yourself furniture that may not be the best quality but it gets the job done. The same can be said about their food. It’s really goddamn cheap, I got the entire meal and a large can or sparkling pear juice for under $5, you really can’t beat those prices. The food also closely follows Ikea’s central business model. It’s not the best quality but it gets the job done.The main meal can only be described as generic. If you just imagine generic meatballs, then generic mash potatoes, with generic gravy on top, and a generic berry sauce on the side. There you go, that’s what you have an Ikea meal. The berry sauce is supposedly made from lingonberries, which can only be found in Ikea because I’ve never seen them elsewhere. No matter what this berry sauce is made of, it tastes like a much sweeter cranberry sauce. The meatballs themselves were nothing special, I was sure they were actually made or some sort of meat and not a meat substitute but at those prices, who knows. The mashed potatoes were the quality of what I would expect from a box or a Hurricane Katrina FEMA relief kit. All in all the quality of the food at Ikea is comparable to the food you would get at a college food court. It’s not the best quality, but a poor college student can afford it and when you’re really goddamn hungry and strapped for cash, it gets the job done.