I love snacks. I love every kind of snack. Portable snacks. Snacks you eat with a spoon or chopsticks. Snack mixes. Nuts, dried fruits, rice crackers, seaweed, spicy, saucy, sweet, salty… I love it all. I love the textures, I love the sound, I love the flavor combinations. Snack mixes are convenient for an on-the-go fuel source that keeps me from getting hangry. I can take a handful and go about my business. I can watch a little TV or surf my phone while I munch a couple mouthfuls.
You don’t see snacks like that in the states
Since we’ve been in China, we’ve seen some interesting flavors of things. They have Western brands that we’re used to seeing but they’re offered in unique flavors, like Cucumber or Italian Meat flavored Lays potato chips. There’s something that looks like it’s beef jerky but it’s in cubes. Sometimes it’s individually wrapped. In that same section of the store is something called “fish tofu.” I stuck it in our basket when Kim wasn’t around but haven’t tried it yet. Keep an eye peeled for that one.
The Walmart down the street from us has an entire aisle dedicated to nuts and nut mixes. We’ve been in need of a healthy protein source so we went to something quick and reliable, something we ate a decent amount of back in Maine and something we thought would be relatively easy to select and purchase. While Kim compared roasted almonds and cashews, I browsed the other side of the aisle, where the nuts-and-other-things were. I saw crab roe flavored broad beans and peanuts coated in some kind of crunchy-looking shell. I was considering the broad beans because I like crab and I’ve eaten roe on sushi rolls, but then I saw this gem:
Take my money!
We had been avoiding peanuts our last couple months in Maine while we were eating a Keto-based diet. I like peanuts. They’re not my favorite nut but I felt a reunion was in order. And I like spicy stuff. And I like shrimp, so it seemed like a good idea to buy this bag. As you can see from the little circular picture on the bag, it looks like the dried shrimps are intact. Whole shrimp! I couldn’t wait to try this snack mix.
I ripped open the top, first noticing its resealable feature. Nice job, Huang Fei Hong! You want to keep my nuts and shrimps fresh, time after time. I appreciate that. I saw the peanuts next and noted that they didn’t have a lot of seasoning on them. Maybe they had ninja spice: you can’t see it until it hits you right in the throat. Then I saw the shrimps. All their little bodies and faces.
They reminded me of a snack I ate when I did seasonal work at an orchard in New York. In addition to their cider and kettle corn and cider donuts (that I made) they sold gimmicky things too. They sold candy sticks and gum and Crickettes, which were little boxes of dried whole crickets and grasshoppers. The whole cider donut kitchen staff shared a box one time, on a dare. We bought nacho flavor. We all popped a dried grasshopper in our mouths at the same time. It was definitely dry, crunchy and kind of nutty.
Small in size but big on crunch
The shrimp were very similar to the grasshopper. Thin and crunchy and kind of nutty. And unfortunately there was not a lot of spice in either the nuts or the shrimp. But the crunch is fun.
Overall, this is a decent snack, except for its lack of spiciness. And there’s something that gets caught in my teeth. It looks like little red toothpicks. I think it might be shrimp antennae? I’m happy to have tried this but won’t be buying it again.
