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: MunchPak.com Snack Box

Today's review is an interesting one for me.  It's a review of not necessarily the individual products (there will be some quick looks though) in this review, but more of a review of a service.  In this case, that service is MunchPak.com.  A representative of theirs reached out to me a couple weeks ago and asked if I'd be interested in trying their service and since I'm always on the lookout for freebies (ahem...if anyone out there has any that they'd like to send me, I'm game), I more than willingly said I'd give the service a look.  So, after a bit of time the United States Postal Service delivered me the box of goodies that you see above.  There were a variety of products in there, including chips, candy, gum, etc.  Basically, all sorts of different kind of munchies (get my clever word usage there?).  What was also interesting, and the MunchPak website advertises this with their slogan of "New & Popular Snacks From Around The World", a lot of these snacks were from various countries.  When I looked through the box, there were some snacks from Mexico, Japan, Korea, Turkey, Indonesia, etc.  It was kind of funny to me, in a way.

MunchPaks can come via a monthly delivery subscription service and also come in various sizes, meaning the quantity of snacks in your box.  As you can somewhat see based on the picture above, I got the "Original" version which includes 10-20 snacks.  I'm not going to review everything, but let's take a look at some of the products in the box below the fold.

Review: Stonyfield Organic Petite Creme Mon Cherry Amour Low Fat Sweet Fresh Cheese

Today's review is a big moment in the Stonyfield Organic Petite Creme review history.  It's one of the last flavors that I've actually seen in my store and it's also the one that I've been looking most forward to because of what the flavor actually is consists of (black cherry).  So, it was with a high sense of anticipation and eagerness that I grabbed this single serving container of Stonyfield Organic Petite Creme Mon Cherry Amour Low Fat Sweet Fresh Cheese out of the dairy case at my local Meier for $1.25.  This 5.3 ounce container comes in at 130 calories and packs in ten grams of protein into its cheese.

Review: Stonyfield Organic Petite Creme Ooh Lala Peach Low Fat Sweet Fresh Cheese

It's kind of amusing to me that when I find a new product, I just plow through as many variations of that product as I can find in a short period.  That's definitely the case with these Stonyfield Organic Petite Creme products as I've just been making my way through each of their flavors in prior reviews.  My quest to review everything continues today as I take a look at yet another flavor of this product line with this Stonyfield Organic Petite Creme Ooh Lala Peach Low Fat Sweet Fresh Cheese that I picked up at Kroger for $1.00.  It's 5.3 ounces and has 130 calories and ten grams of protein in this single serving cup of cheese.  Yep, cheese.  I still can't get over that one.  Anyway, it's also gluten free in case you were wondering.

Review: Stonyfield Organic Petite Creme La Vie En Strawberry Low Fat Sweet Fresh Cheese

I shared in my last Stonyfield review that the fact that the container was sweet fresh cheese and not some sort of yogurt (Greek or otherwise) kind of surprised me as I didn't notice it when I bought it.  It wasn't bad, the fact that I was eating cheese kind of shocked me.  So, without that element of surprise, today's review of this single serving cup Stonyfield Organic Petite Creme La Vie En Strawberry Low Fat Sweet Fresh Cheese starts out with me knowing what I'm walking myself into, which is always nice.  I was able to pick this one up for $1.25 at Meijer and each cup is 5.3 ounces with 130 calories and ten grams of CHEESE protein.  Now, I don't speak French, but it is a Latin-based language and I did take three years of Spanish in high school, so I can at least parse my way through the name of this product to see that this basically means "Life in Strawberry."  Umm, okay...kind of a bizarre tagline, but if it's good, I guess the name doesn't really matter (unless you are Ben & Jerry's changing the name of an AWESOME product like they did by changing "Clusterfluff" to "What A Cluster...").

Review: Stonyfield Organic Belle Blueberry Petite Creme Low Fat Sweet Fresh Cheese

As I've been writing these posts recently, it seems like I've been hitting on a lot of what I'll call the "greatest hits", meaning that they are manufacturers that I reviewed somewhat frequently in the past but have stayed away from recently because I haven't been able to find that many new products or flavors that interest me.  Stonyfield Organic is one of those manufacturers as I haven't touched on one of their products since February 2014 and it was as far back as May 2012 before that.  Upon some recent browsing at Meijer, I saw that they've introduced a new line of products in their Petite Creme line.  What makes this line of products interesting is that while they may look like yogurt and be sitting next to the yogurts in your local store, they are not in fact yogurt.  They are actually modeled a French cheese that silky and eaten just like yogurt (yes, I had to look this up).  That seemed kind of odd and intersting to me, so I picked up several of these Petite Cremes on my Meijer trip for $1.25 each and this Stonyfield Organic Belle Blueberry Petite Creme Low Fat Sweet Fresh Cheese comes in at 5.3 ounces with 130 calories and ten grams of protein.

Review: Van's Natural Foods Gluten Free Say Cheese! Crackers

Do you ever get tired of free samples?  I hope the answer to that question was no.  If it was yes, I seriously question you.  Just kidding.  Anyway, I know that I love free samples and today's review is another Van's Natural Foods free sample with today's review of Van's Natural Foods Gluten Free Say Cheese! Crackers.  These came in a box with five snack sized portions of gluten free crackers.  Each bag is 1.0 ounces and comes in at 140 calories.

Review: Van's Natural Foods Nacho, Nacho, Man! Gluten Free Multigrain Chips

The Van's Natural Foods free sample gravy train continues (for me).  Today, in my second review, I'll be taking a look at something in an entirely different product line than the original review with my look at this bag of Van's Natural Foods Nacho, Nacho Man! Gluten Free Multigrain Chips.  Cute name, eh?  I'm not one that is a big fan of the Village People, but I do have a sense of humor (I think), so I can appreciate the play on words.  Anyway, this bag comes in at a total weight of 5.5 ounces and within that bag, there are five servings of multigrain chips that are about 130 calories per serving.

Review: Atkins Italian-Style Pasta Bake

I've touched on several Atkins products on the blog before and that includes nutrition bars, drinks and also frozen foods.  Today, I'll be dabbling once again in frozen food territory as I was able to pick up this Atkins Italian-Style Pasta Bake at Kroger for $3.99 (I had a coupon to knock that price down to $2.99 thankfully).  This one came in at a solid 9.0 ounces and had 360 calories with a pounding 33 grams of protein.

Review: MorningStar Farms Tomato & Basil Pizza Veggie Burgers

When I was in elementary school, our school cafeteria would serve something that they called pizza burgers once a week or as least every other week.  These pizza burgers consisted of a base of a hamburger bun, a "pizza" mix on top (it was more like Sloppy Joe mix) and then melted mozzarella cheese on top of that.  For some reason, we all thought those were spectacularly delicious.  Why do I bring that up?  Well, this review of the MorningStar Farms Tomato & Basil Pizza Veggie Burgers reminded me of those.  Of course, MorningStar Farms' version is nothing like those that we had in the cafeteria, but at least the name is similar enough that it reminded me of an oddly fond memory from my youth.  Anyway, for this addition to the MorningStar Farms review series, I picked up a box of these pizza burgers on sale at Kroger for $3.00 and each box contains four burgers at a weight of 2.36 ounces and 120 calories per burger.

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).