Planters Alaskan Wilderness Blend Trail Mix

Two very important things are going on right now. For one, we have a new kitten. Her name is Foodling on this blog, to protect her identity and criminal record. She's a baby Bengal kitten, and she makes things exactly 8,975% more difficult to photograph. Fun facts! Seriously, this cat has the attention span and vapid eyeballs of a non-limpid Zooey Deschanel. And for another, I'm sick. Yes, two days of no heat made my immune system tantamount to that of a homeless person's. I feel like a wimp. So I'm sitting here eating trail mix, the irony of which is not lost on me. I don't hike. I try to avoid trails as often as I can. I eat this on long car rides, generally ones that are above fifteen minutes long because I have the attention span of an infant.

This trail mix is new, and believe me, Planters is incredibly heavyhanded with the visual references to how virile and athletic this trail mix will make you. The health benefits are practically plastered all over the shapely curve of Mr. Peanut's thigh. I think I speak for all when I proclaim "Dayum, Mr. Peanut, dat ass!" Have you been doing Curves for Women? I'm merely echoing your imagined sentiments, readers. You'll thank me later. Alaskan Wilderness Blend Trail Mix is a mixture of honey roasted peanuts, granola clusters, raisins, almonds, blueberries, and raspberries. I write this with a heavy heart as I notice that they forgot to include reindeer jerky and seal blubber, but I'll assume that's a typo and that my next bag will be chock-full of real Northern delights.

For $2.99, this bag is full of goodies. While my favorite were the dried raspberries and blueberries, which, through the magic of science had the texture of sweet, jammy gummy bears, it was impossible to ignore how tasty the honey-roasted peanuts were. No one element was too sweet or overpowering, though the peanuts and granola were definitely the most abundant. The granola really faded out in the mixture, a surprising feat as it was all over the damned place, and the almonds were an outlier in the otherwise finely textured, bite-sized grain of the mix. Biting into one in a mouthful was fairly unpleasant, like encountering a foreign object.

For a trail mix without chocolate, I was impressed at how much I liked this. Again, my biggest pet peeve is the noticeable lack of anything remotely Alaskan- step outside the box! Pine sap! Snow! Oil slicks! because outside of the generic forest clearing and lack of Chris McCandless, I wouldn't have discerned anything regionally specific about this, but for a trail mix, it's not half bad.