A Bit of a Snacky Breakfast

This should come as no great revelation but jetlag really screws up your sleeping schedule. The first day we were in Ireland, my wife and I slept for a huge chunk of time, getting up only for dinner (see: Chili Club) before passing back out again. Of course, grabbing that much sleep during the day meant that we were up way too early the next morning. I think I was wide awake by about three that morning, and she woke up soon after.

Normally I wouldn’t find too big of an issue with this as there’s always some 24 hour spot you can find. An IHOP or a Denny’s or even just a 7-11 is usually open. Weirdly, it was a struggle to find a 24 hour place in Dublin that we could hit. Supposedly there was a Circle K mart near our hotel that was open, but when we walked past it at five that morning they were, in fact, closed. And most places didn’t open until at least six, maybe six-thirty. Even normal breakfast joints took their time and didn’t usually open until at least eight. The difference in the morning between America and Ireland was stark.

Eventually, though, we did find a Circle K we could confirm was open just so we could grab a bit of something. We hopped on a bus (which, credit to Ireland, their mass transit system runs 24 hours even if the rest of the country does not) and rode off to the convenience mart for a bit of junk food breakfast. Here’s what we grabbed:

All Day Breakfast Triple

This was the “main course” for our thrown together breakfast, a big, chunky sandwich full of breakfast-y ingredients. The All Day Breakfast Triple was a three serving sandwich (not a triple-decker but three complete sandwich halves) filled with pork sausage, smoked bacon, and egg mayonnaise (really, what we’d call egg salad), topped with Ballymaloe tomato relish and served on white bread. It was hefty and filling, and actually pretty decent for a convenience store sandwich.

The sausage was pretty good, with a nice bite to it and salty flavor. That was the standout ingredient of the sandwich because, honestly, I didn’t even notice the back on there. The egg salad was fairly bland, but inoffensive, while the relish probably added some light flavor but wasn’t exceedingly noticeable. Any bite with sausage in it was solid, and it made for a tasty eating experience. If the sausage wasn’t there, though, the sandwich was fairly doughy and kind of bland (this was especially the case near the edges of the sandwich). It wasn’t perfect, but for early in the morning, when nothing else was open, this was a good enough breakfast to find.

Taytos Cheese and Onion

It wouldn’t be exactly right to say that Taytos are for Ireland what Lay’s chips are for America. Technically Lay’s exist in the UK and Ireland under the name of Walkers, but in Ireland Taytos are for more present, and certainly more beloved. They come in a variety of flavors, but the one you’ll see the most (which seems to be the main flavor always on offer) is Cheese and Onion. Hell, just about every brand of chip in Ireland (and we sampled a few) defaults to Cheese and Onion. It’s the ever present, always there flavor… but it’s also really damn good.

Cheese and Onion is delicious. It has the salty taste of a standard chip (or crisp, if you’re from the area) with a nice smoothness from the cheese, and then there’s a hint of tang from the onion, creating a really tasty snack. Combine that with the light and crunchy body of the chip, which feels airy and even crunchier than a Lay’s, and you have a great chip. It was so good, in fact, that the bag didn’t even last to our hotel room so we could take a picture of it – we destroyed it on the bus ride back. Seriously, though, if Taytos were here in the States, I think they’d destroy Lay’s. They’re that good.

Starbursts

I grabbed these on a lark, with the bag catching my eye simply because the colors of the candy looked different. I was right, too, because Starbursts in Ireland (and all of Europe, from what I was reading) have a different flavor lineup. Their set of flavors are blackcurrant (purple), strawberry (red), orange (orange), and lemon-lime (green). Blackcurrant sounded interesting to me, since that’s not a flavor we normally get stateside, and I just had to see what else was different about these flavors.

Naturally, strawberry and orange are going to be familiar flavors for Americans. I didn’t taste anything all that different for those two (although we’ll get to texture in a moment). Meanwhile, blackcurrant was kind of a blueberry-meets-grape flavor (at least that’s what it tasted like to my uncultured tongue) and lemon-lime was, well, lemon and lime. It had a strong lime forward flavor although not as aggressive as my mouth expected. It was a nice blending of citrus tastes and far better than I would have thought from the label.

With that said, the texture wasn’t quite right for me. The Starbursts melted easier in my mouth than I was used to, dissolving quickly and becoming less chewy and more like a paste. The candies also use real sugar in the mix along with glucose syrup (instead of being sweetened almost entirely by corn syrup), and there was a grittiness to them I didn’t like. The sugar crystals were noticeable and, as the candy melted in my mouth, it felt like sand. I did not care for it. And that kind of ruined the experience, despite the fact that they tasted pretty good.

Flumps

Finally, my wife was drawn to this weird candy, Flumps. The candy is, in effect, a long, twisted helix of marshmallows, which come in a few different colors (blue, yellow, white, and pink). It’s a long bar of marshmallow, soft and chewy, and it’s exactly what you’d expect. If you really like marshmallows, and don’t feel like lugging around a bag, this bar is the perfect alternative for you. But it is just a big old marshmallow, nothing more or less.