Robot Claw

McDonald’s is doing a special ‘Collectors Meal’ right now, which is a normal Big Mac, Chicken Nugget or Sausage McMuffin meal that comes with a collectors cup. I got this one:

As you can see it’s blind-bagged, which means you don’t know which one you get until you open it. There’s six different cups, and you can only get them if you buy one of the three meals. My Big Mac collectors meal cost me the princely sum of $14.86, which means this cup wasn’t cheap! Let’s see which one I got…

Hot Wheels and Barbie. In other words, the worst one. Others include Snoopy, Minions, Jurassic Park, Beanie Babies and – best of all – McDonalds characters.

However there’s a side to these cups not visible in the photos: they’re plastic. McDonald’s is know for decades of glass collectors glasses but apparently for this promotion they’re cheaping out with plastic cups. They’re not even dishwasher safe!

So my verdict: absolutely not worth the extra cost, and the fact you have to eat American McDonald’s food is a second reason to avoid.

But what’s this…?

As it turns out Canada was doing a very similar promotion! It differed in several ways: there are four glasses instead of six, the glasses are made of glass and you can just buy them outright for $3 each!

Keen-eyed readers will have looked at the decoration on the box and guessed what was inside, but let’s see:

Yes it’s also the Hot Wheels & Barbie one! Again not the best (I wanted the Grimace one) but better than the USA version in my opinion. So I’ll give the Canada promotion the thumbs up over the USA one.

But what’s this now?

It turns out Australia is also doing this promotion, and they’re doing glasses as well, but they have two additional ones that Canada doesn’t (Minions and Coke). Also the method of obtaining the glasses is even more restrictive than the US version (you need to buy a Quarter Pounder meal)!

I was going to end with a smart line about how if I was my brother and happened to be in Australia right now I’d get one and send it to me but… well I sort of hate these glasses and don’t want any more 🙂

Despite ardent searching, I had never previously found a plain chicken instant ramen during a Japan trip. This time, I did! Let’s add it to the review series:

This is not just any chicken ramen, this is the chicken ramen; the very first ever ramen made by Nissin. It also has some sort of omelet inclusion, but we can ignore that for the purposes of blog review eligibility 🙂

As with most ramen made for the Japanese market, the flavour is already infused into the noodles. Similar products I’ve tried in the past have been a bit too intense for me, but I kept an open mind if only because I didn’t have anything else for breakfast this morning.

Incidentally this product contains Calories, 9.6 g of fat and an incredible surely-the-translator-has-made-a-mistake 5300 mg of salt!

After a struggle with a slightly mysterious kettle, hot water was secured and the product was prepared. The omelette (?) brick melted instantly when water was poured on it, released the egg and veggies into the soup. The noodles cooked well. It was time to eat!

It was good! In fact it was quite good! It didn’t taste much like what I think chicken ramen should, but the taste wasn’t at all disagreeable (unlike the ‘grass’ taste many bad chicken ramens have) and I didn’t even mind the weird egg bits floating around. Using my undisputed chopstick mastery, I ate it all.

I liked this enough that if I lived here I would happily eat it again. It’s definitely not up to the hallowed heights of Gefen, but it’s easily a solid 8 out of 10.