spice up yer nuts.

when it comes to my nuts, i like to keep things spicy. give me a bunch of nuts coated up with copious powder flavor & i'm all good. i'm sure you fondly remember the inaugural year of this blog, when i declared blue diamond wasabi & soy sauce almonds to be my number one snack of the year. maybe your memory ain't that good, so you can only recall as far back as last year, when planters' five alarm chili peanuts came in at #4 on my year-end list. even with that nut love, until now the glorious pumpktoberfest season has been relatively nut-free.

then, early on in this pumpktoberfest season, i came a cross a review on junk food guy for blue diamond pumpkin spice almonds & was all "WAAAHH??? NUTMEG ON NUTS? MUST. HAVE." he noted that he found his at walgreens, which was perfect, as there are a few of them here in nyc & one a few blocks from my apartment. when i went there to get them, at first i didn't think they had them. then i noticed that they were hiding them behind the regular almonds. WTF? the same thing happened to junk food guy. walgreens conspiracy? i think so.

the first thing i noticed about them is that the coating is slightly different than that of the other blue diamond almonds. most of their flavored almonds have a coating that's definitively powdery, where you always end up with a little extra powder on the fingers. with these ones, due to the molasses & brown sugar in the "pumpkin spice seasoning," the coating adheres to the nut & there's relatively no powder. they're closer to a honey roasted peanut than usual for blue diamond.

as for that aforementioned "pumpkin spice seasoning," it's a mix of sugar, spice, sea salt, corn maltodextrin, pumpkin powder, canola oil, corn flour, extractives of paprika, natural flavor, molasses & brown sugar. "extractives of paprika?" couldn't they have just said "paprika extract" & saved space on the label? anyway, though they don't declare what "spice" means, i tasted notes of nutmeg, cinnamon & vanilla. on the grand scale of blue diamond nuts, they're definitely unique but i'd choose most of their other flavors over the pumpkin spice. when it comes to my nuts, i'm not big on sweetness. like i said, i like to keep it spicy. still, they were tasty enough. if you can still find them, they're worth trying out. if you can't, you'll just have to wait til next pumpktoberfest to spice up yer nuts.