Review: Van's Ultimate Cheddar Penne Gluten Free Pasta

A while back, Van's sent me a box of some of their new gluten free pastas.  I've reviewed one already, but I've been a little slow in getting around to reviewing the others.  The good news is that dried pastas have a long shelf life, so I was able to delay my review of this box of Van's Ultimate Cheddar Penne Gluten Free Pasta until now.  This box of gluten free pasta comes in at 7.0 ounces and within that are three individual servings.  Each one cup serving is 280 calories (prepared) and has a whopping (or so they say) 28 grams of whole grains in every serving.  So, with that, I was ready to dive into Van's take on the American classic dish, macaroni and cheese.

Review: Smartfood Feta Herb Hummus Popped Chips

With this final review of my Kroger clearance section binge, I'll touch on the one chip that I found to have the most interesting flavor combination of the three in this small 0.8 ounce sized bag of Smartfood Feta Herb Hummus Popped Chips that I picked up at half price.  Normal price is $1.00 and each bag has 110 calories of garbanzo bean based fun.  As I've said in previous Smartfood reviews, hummus can sometimes be a controversial food because a lot of people really, really do not like it.  I am not one of those people and I'm honestly intrigued by it.  Plus, I think hummus based popped chips serve as a good base because since hummus is such a neutral flavor, it's a great base to really showcase other flavor combinations and that's what it'll be trying to do here.

Review: Smartfood Garlic Tomato Basil Hummus Popped Chips

I mentioned in my last (and also first) Smartfood review that I picked up a bunch of these mini bags of chips in the clearance section of Kroger for half their original price.  That splurge leads me to the source of today's review of these Smartfood Garlic Tomato Basil Hummus Popped Chips.  Typically, these lunch sized bags run at about $1.00 per bag and they are 0.8 ounces and 100 calories.  I know that a lot of people are creeped out by hummus, but I find it tasty (along with the tomato basil flavor combination), so I was more than ready to try these chips out for today's review.

Review: Green Giant Zesty Cheddar Roasted Veggie Tortilla Chips

I mentioned in my last Green Giant review that I had the freaking brand theme song locked in my head.  Fortunately, I've managed to shake that and because it's not rocking my head and driving me crazy anymore, I figured now was as good of a time as any to look at one of Green Giant's original chip flavors with this bag of Green Giant Zesty Cheddar Roasted Veggie Tortilla Chips that I picked up on sale at Marsh for the low, low price of $1.00.  Each bag is 5.0 ounces and has five servings per bag.  For those of you keeping score at home, one serving is about ten chips and each of those servings is a 140 calories.

Review: Kellogg's Special K Cheddar Cracker Chips

I had previously reviewed some of Kellogg's Special K Cracker Chips before and had found them to be quite good, in an interesting way.  Since my local Meijer has basically been giving these Special K products away (as you'll be see this week with reviews), I picked up a box of these Kellogg's Special K Cheddar Cracker Chips on sale for $2.50.  You know, using cheese as your flavor seems like it is the easiest and oldest product development trick in the book.  I can just see these development putting all their heads together trying to come up with flavors and then ultimately settling on the ultimate fallback flavor, cheddar cheese.  There's absolutely nothing wrong with that as there are some outstanding cheddar flavored products out there, but it does amuse me that everything seems to have a variation of that flavor.  For nutritional purposes, these cracker chips have 110 calories per serving (27 chips per serving) and there's roughly 3.5 servings in the 4.0 ounce box.  One hilarious aspect, at least to me, was that these come in a HUGE box and when I looked and saw that the contents were only 4.0 ounces, it kind of made me chuckle.

Review: Quaker Popped Cheddar Cheese Rice Snacks

Editor's Note:  While the product has stayed the same, Quaker now markets these under a different named and they are now called "Quaker Popped Rice Snacks." The review below applies the same.

Quaker Quakes rice snacks:  yours and my favorite product reviews.  Ha!  Next in line is the Cheddar Cheese flavored rice snack.  At 140 calories per serving (about three per bag), this ranks as the most calorie laden offering in the Quakes product line.  I picked this one up at Meijer on sale for $1.00 (as you can probably tell, I only buy Quakes when they are on sale for $1.00 or less).