Tag Archives: sponsored post

Eating, Restaurants, reviews, sponsored

Pete finds a new love in the All-Day Breakfast at McDonald’s

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.

mcdflapjacks

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.

sausagemcmuffin

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.

Diversions, sponsored

It’s time to shed the flip-flops and pick up the backpacks, kids!

3 Comments

My dad usually picked me up for the summer a few days after school ended for the year — I still remember the day he picked me up at school on the last day; totally awesome — and he brought me back home just a few days before the next school year started. It meant that I got to spend nearly every possible day of the summer with Dad, but it also meant that I usually went more than two months without much contact with my friends. This was in the Dark Ages, before Facebook and Twitter were around to give us the opportunity to give one another very important updates on, say, lunch or that cute boy at the mall.

Judging by Melissa’s get-up, this was backstage at “Bye-Bye Birdie,” which would make it my junior year in high school (1994-95). The babe in the Roxette shirt is Stephanie, who dug this gem up from the archives.

So the first day of school for me was always exciting. It was a chance to find out what my friends had done over the summer. To see who’d gotten their braces off or who’d had them put on. To see who’d finally had a growth spurt. To see who’d become Totally Cute and to check out the Totally Cute New Kid. It was the day you found out who was in all of your classes and who had the locker next to yours. If you were lucky, it was either the Totally Cute New Kid or the kid who’d become Totally Cute over the summer.

But that wasn’t the only reason I loved the first day of school. Beyond my obsession with cute boys, there was my abiding love of office supplies. The No. 2 pencils sharpened to a deadly point, the plasticky sharp smell of a brand-spankin’-new Trapper Keeper, the notebook paper unmarred by even a solitary mark? Be still my heart. Uncapping a good pen for the first time can still make my day a little bit brighter.

Yep. I’ve always been this nerdy.

Marching band practice with Heather. This is probably also from junior year, and it’s also presented courtesy of Steph.

My kids are homeschooled, so they don’t have that definitive First Day of School to look forward to, and we don’t do a big shopping trip for new school clothes or to gather new school supplies.

(We do, however, order new curriculum. And the day the UPS guy shows up with the new stuff? Christmas in July. Poppy’s new math workbook got here yesterday, and she immediately stretched out in the floor to knock out some arithmetic. The nerd, as they say, doesn’t fall far from the nerdery.)

These days we really wouldn’t need to go out for a big shopping trip even if we weren’t homeschoolers. The internet makes it pretty simple to get a hold of whatever you need without leaving your couch. This is one of my favorite things about the internet in general; I like my couch and am generally loathe to leave it.

This year eBay’s making your back-to-school shopping even easier by putting everything you need in one place. Not only can you do your back-to-school shopping without leaving your couch, you don’t even have to leave their web site. They have clothes for your little lady, Chucks for your fella and backpacks for everybody.

And Imma let me finish but hold the phone there’s a Doctor Who lunchbox set available. It looks kinda small, but I’ll bet you could fit a whole lunchroom’s worth of PB&Js in there.

In addition to being your source for awesome lunchboxes, eBay has a couple of neat back-to-school promotions coming up:

  • eBay is hosting a Back-to-School Twitter party from 3-5pm EST on August 14th, when they’ll be talking about ways to take the stress out of going back to school. Go to ebay.com/schoolparty to RSVP!

  • eBay’s Back to School Pinterest Sweepstakes is giving away a $100 eBay Gift Card every day until August 31.

  • Are you heading off to college? eBay is also giving away a $5,000 eBay shopping spree to make over your dorm room! That one also ends August 31.

  • Finally, you could win a $50 eBay gift card in the eBay What’s In Your Backpack Instant Win Game on Facebook. An A-plus to you if you guessed that one ends on August 31, too.

    • This compensated post is part of a Splash Creative Media campaign on behalf of eBay. Opinions within remain 100 percent Nichole’s own. Especially the part about the thrill of the Trapper Keeper.