Disclaimer: This is a sponsored post for McDonald’s All Day Breakfast. Nichole was compensated for this post.

We very rarely went out to eat when I was growing up, because our very small town had only a few places where you could feed a family on a budget. But every now and we’d have a big treat, and 75 percent of the time that treat was a trip to McDonald’s.

My order at McDonald’s was always the same — a McNugget Happy Meal with “orange drink” and honey dipping sauce — until I reached that nebulous age when my mom let me order something that wasn’t on the Happy Meal menu. And that was when my allegiance to my one true McLove, the Filet-O-Fish, began. In the 20ish years since, my loyalty to the Filet-O-Fish has not wavered. Not even when they went to half a slice of cheese and stopped toasting the bun and started steaming it instead.

Until recently, I never would’ve fathomed ordering anything other than fish-sandwich-small-fry-and-a-medium-orange-drink-please. But a few weeks ago our regional McDonald’s restaurants invited me to try out their all-day breakfast offerings. The all-day breakfast does not include the Filet-O-Fish, sadly, so I had to branch out.

We visited two McDonald’s restaurants in our area to sample the all-day breakfast. The first was after Pete and I had dropped Poppy off for classes downtown, and Pete (as he generally is) was hungry. We shared the Bacon, Egg and Cheese Biscuit with a side of hash browns and some orange juice. Pete was very excited to have the opportunity to share his review of it with you. Here’s what he thought:

“McDonald’s Breakfast: Day One.

The Bacon, Egg and Cheese Biscuit was pretty good. The biscuit had a sort of crumbly texture and it was kind of buttery. I like a buttery biscuit. The egg was flat but delicious. The bacon wasn’t as crispy as I’d like it to be, but the cheese went well with it. I think the hash browns weren’t as good as some other stuff I’ve had, like french fries and sweet potatoes. I expected the texture to be more crunchy and the flavor to be more french fryish. The orange juice had the exact right flavor of oranges, and it was just delicious.”

I agree with him almost entirely. The biscuit was really flaky and buttery, which is exactly what I look for in a biscuit, and the bacon was flavorful but could’ve been crispier. I’m not a big fan of eggs, but the egg component was innocuous in combination with everything else. The hash browns were a little too salty for me, and the only thing wrong with the orange juice was that it wasn’t that fake and delicious orange drink that I just can’t quit.

At 450 calories and 24 grams of fat, the Bacon, Egg and Cheese Biscuit wouldn’t be a great everyday choice if you’re looking for a healthy breakfast. The Fruit and Maple Oatmeal, which comes in at 290 calories and 4 grams of fat, would be a much better option. But if you’re looking for a savory breakfast indulgence, the Bacon, Egg and Cheese is where it’s at.

Poppy reluctantly joined us in our second McSampling, which took place when I neglected to pack our lunches for homeschool co-op. (Thanks for saving my pun-definitely-intended bacon, McD.) Poppy is a very particular eater, and she didn’t like my plan to give her something other than a cheesy tortilla for lunch. Once I presented her with a platter[ref]One of my fellow homeschooling moms questioned the use of Styrofoam in their pancake packaging, and that did give me pause. I know they changed over to cardboard on everything else a long time ago, and I wonder why they’ve stuck with Styrofoam for the flapjacks.[/ref] of pancakes, though, she was perfectly happy. “They tasted like butter cakes,” she said after finishing them off.

Pete tried a Sausage McMuffin with Egg for his second all-day breakfast option, and he wished he had stuck with the Bacon, Egg and Cheese Biscuit. He probably would’ve been fine with the whole thing if it had the same scrambled-ish sort of egg that was on the Bacon, Egg and Cheese, but he thought the egg on the McMuffin had a “weird texture.” So he ditched the egg and added the sausage patty that his sister had rejected from her pancake platter and made a double-stacker Sausage McMuffin.

Overall, I was impressed with the items we tried from the McDonald’s all-day breakfast menu. I’m not about to denounce my allegiance to the Filet-O-Fish, but it’s possible that I’d consider a biscuit as an alternative every now and again. I know that isn’t the last McDonald’s biscuit Pete will eat, and I’m hopeful that discovering that she likes their pancakes will make McDonald’s another option on Poppy’s list of acceptable stops.