Mild pettiness & nonsense food.

So, while I was in Lyon, I intended to cook a few meals, and so I visited an Aldi and a Carrefour for both snacks and groceries.

I also bought one item basically for the pettiness of it.

My Airbnb provided laundry detergent and dishwasher detergent -- but only one pod of each in a twee little cup on the counter, and I was here for an entire week. 🙄

So I found a good laundry detergent that I knew I would want to take with me to London and give to Rachel afterwards (the British are savages and simply do not sell good fragrance-free detergent, and the French one I found--while not truly fragrance free--was a quite mild scent by comparison).

But Rachel doesn't have a dishwasher so I would be leaving that detergent behind.

Aldi sells a very nice pod that I find works very well and is convenient but it was more expensive and for the next guest it was equally likely that my host might choose to be stingy and withhold the remaining pods, so I decided to be cheap AND make that more of a hassle, and bought -- for a single Euro! -- this stupidly large 2 kilogram box of the cheapest dishwashing crystals I've ever seen.  

(You're welcome, everyone who does dishes in this Airbnb for the next million years.)

I also purchased food!

Some of those foods were nonsense.

For example: I was keeping dancer's hours over the weekend.  Though this event was much less nocturnal than Toulouse's fusion event, the dance here was still running until 1:00.  So I purchased this very stupid popcorn.

 "Golden Power" (what a name) is the name of the Aldi house brand of energy drink in France that competes with Monster, and so yes, that's caffeinated popcorn.

Which also tastes like knockoff Monster.

3/10, I don't recommend it, but as a sweet snack that helped keep me awake after classes and before the evening dance, it was useful.

Speaking of sweet snacks:

The French have learned that you can fry almost anything until crispy and it will be delicious.

As demonstrated by:

Yes, that product is a form of snack crisp/chip that's made of fried, lightly sweetened crêpe batter.

Honestly it wasn't bad.

The caramel flavoring tasted very vaguely of Maple syrup though, which is never a flavor I utilize on my crêpes so I found that very disconcerting.  5/10.

But speaking of crêpes. . . I was horrified / delighted [ed note: delightified?  Horrilighted? awful, both of these options] to see this insanity in the Aldi.

Because the Germans have an infinite interest in efficiency and cleverness but perhaps lack the decency that God gave a goat.

Allow me to explain what you are looking at:

This container is mostly empty.  Its primary ingredient, by volume, is air.

Aside from air, it contains flour and emulsifiers and some form of chemically deconstructed egg powder that probably involved sorcery and some salt and sugar and it's instant crêpe mix that you don't even need to dirty a separate container to make.

The container simply tells you to add 400ml of milk directly into the bottle, shake vigorously for a minute, wait a couple of minutes, shake once more, and then pour it straight into your cooking pan, like some sort of cultureless peasant.

Yes of course I had to buy it.

I had to know.

Because surely the mix would be bad? Right? It would clump, it would be poorly balanced, it wouldn't cook right when you used real butter and a properly heated pan and would bubble or get horribly lumpy or watery or both?

Damnit.

Dammit.

They were, honestly, pretty damn good crêpes.

(The variation in the shapes and edges are due to the fact that I couldn't find the detachable handle for the pan I had to use so manipulating the cooking surface was awkward.)

Were they as good as my grandmother's, or Monsieur Brown's? No, of course not (Thank heavens!).

But with both savory (cheese, peppers, ham) and sweet (Confiture des Mirabelles, butter) fillings, and with a little coffee, they made a good breakfast.

Heaven help me, but if this product were available in the states I'd probably keep 2 canisters and a liter of UHT milk in the back of a pantry shelf as a strategic reserve brunch option for treating weekend guests.

8/10.

Dammit.