This food item is a Grand Slam. Period. I've been eating small squares made out of wheat and rice and covered in cinnamon and sugar called Cinnamon Toast Crunch for years. They taste great. You find the box in the breakfast cereal aisle in a supermarket and you're supposed to cover them in milk and eat them with a spoon for breakfast, but mostly I don't. Many cereals are great plucked right out of the box with your hand, Cinnamon Toast Crunch in particular (and you get to lick your fingers which makes them sticky-er which makes more cinnamon and sugar stick to them etc etc). Not that big of a deal to walk to the breakfast aisle to get snack food, but you're still technically adapting the product to your own purposes. This Trader Joe's product removes all pretense of breakfast and makes BIG Cinnamon Toast Crunch in a bag and puts it right in the snack aisle so you know exactly what you're supposed to do with it. And it costs $1.99. At 840 calories a bag, that's roughly 4.2 calories per penny. Not bad.
When I say 'BIG', I mean about 2.5 times the size of Cinnamon Toast Crunch pieces. I did not include a picture of the actual chips (because I ate the entire bag and didn't think to and it's my first blog entry in a long time), but you can just imagine them. (Maybe I'll post a picture later.) They're mostly whole squares, some large partial squares and at the bottom of the bag are many broken pieces, along with lots of extra sugar and cinnamon particles. Upon finishing the first bag, I enjoyed a familiar flashback to polishing off a box of Cinnamon Toast Crunch in my youth when I shook the nearly empty bag of pita chips and poured the remaining sugar and cinnamon-y rubble straight into my mouth. BAM.
I can maybe see some people being hung up on the word 'pita' in the title of the snack, but if you think about it, it's just the name of the form that the wheat is taking. It doesn't make any substantial difference. Call it Trader Joe's "Big Cereal (TM)* with Cinnamon and Sugar. In fact, I joked about pouring a bag of these into a big mixing bowl and eating them with milk and a giant serving spoon. Or dipping them into peanut butter or yogurt or ice cream. The back of the bag suggests that they are "great as a snack with coffee or tea, or try dipping them in vanilla ice cream as a dessert." Whatever you want.
*Also, if Trader Joe's or any other company wants to market "Big Cereals (TM)", then I will assert that the idea is my intellectual property and will have to be paid as a consultant on the project. I think it would work with most sugar-y cereals. Thank you for not ripping me off!
