The great poet Boris Pasternak once said that “surprise is the greatest gift which life can grant us.” Well my friends that may be true, but life can bring us unwanted surprises too.

Several years ago, while TastingBuds Peter and Jon were sipping on after work beers, an unexpected visitor… well… plopped out to greet them.

Everyone who lives in Austin knows that the local grocery chain, HEB, sells many tasty varieties of corn tortilla chips (white corn, yellow corn, even Texas shaped) at the low, low price of $0.99 or $1.50 depending on what sales are going on.

On this particular day, Peter was feeling a bit fancy and decided to go for the premium $3.00 bag of tortilla chips, thinking they would taste 2-3 times as good. All was fine and dandy until the Buds took their first bite. For some odd reason the chips weren’t salted at all, and the taste was off.

Thinking that maybe this bag contained some healthy, low salt version of our beloved tortilla chips, we soldiered on by eating a couple more odd tasting chips.

When we could take no more, we decided to read the ingredients to see what could have gone awry. When lifting up the bag the giant, chock full of salt, hard as a rock, mass of tortilla you see before you landed on the table. You could probably have hammered nails with this thing.

Apparently this mass of corn somehow had fallen into the fryer, absorbed all of the salt in our batch, and went unnoticed until it turned about 12 shades darker than any chip should ever be.

Grossed out, the Buds stuck to drinking for the remainder of the happy hour and the tortilla chips went straight into the trash.

They say that there is a silver lining to every cloud, and despite the tortilla chip FAIL we at least have an amusing story to share with friends.

Happy Tasting and here’s to no unwanted visitors in your food,
Peter