Adventures with Marden's Off-Brand Candy

It's two weeks after Halloween, but whatever. At Marden's, it might as well be Halloween every day.

The food aisle at Marden's is, well...let's call it "eclectic." Sometimes it has things a normal person would actually consider eating; most of the time it's filled with stacks upon stacks of canned Cream of Mushroom soup and every flavor Slim Jim one could imagine. But the candy aisle is almost always a jackpot. I'm showing you the weirder of the things I found; I also got Milky Ways and Reese's and even Ghirardelli.

These are Narbles.

What are Narbles? Well first of all, they are disgusting. They are not "candy fruit slammers," as the packaging would lead you to believe. They are basically imitation Runts. And who the hell buys Runts these days? Except when you're stuck at the tire store when they're frigging with your snow tires, and your mouth is really dry and everything smells (and therefore tastes) like rubber, and all you have is $.25, which is not enough for a bottle of water, but is enough for a handful of candy from the Runts machine in the waiting room. And you instantly regret it. What? I can't be the only person this has happened to.

Anyway, Narbles are worse than Runts. Don't eat them. They kind of look like tiny balls for a mouse pool table.

Next up, Israeli chocolate bars with "popping candy."

These are better-tasting than Narbles, but more weird. It's chocolate with Pop Rocks. If you bite into the bar and chew it, it just tastes like a slightly crunchy, slightly strawberry-flavored chocolate bar. But if you break off a square and let it melt in your mouth, something magical happens. Which caused me to exclaim that "something chocolatey is exploding in my mouth," which of course resulted in my friends basically falling off their chairs laughing.

So in summary, the Israeli Pop Rocks chocolate bar is a pretty solid Marden's investment at $.88, depending on the maturity level of you and/or your friends. But stay away from the Narbles at all costs.