Snikiddy Review and Giveaway

We were lucky to have the opportunity to try two varieties of snacks from the Snikiddy Company! Snikiddy makes snacks for kids from wholesome and real ingredients. Snikiddy was started by a mother (Janet) and daughter (Mary). They were both very passionate about children's health and wanted to create healthy foods for children.

Snikiddy snacks come in several different varieties including: Barbeque Baked Fries, Sea Salt Baked Fries, Southest Cheddar Bakes Fries, Bold Buffalo Baked Fries, Cheddar Cheese Fries, Classic Ketchup Fries, Original Seasoning Baked Fries, Grilled Cheese Puffs, and Mac n' Cheese Puffs. Their snacks are gluten free, corn syrup free, preservative free, and are low in saturated fats. The Barbeque Baked Fries and Sea Salt Baked Fries are also vegan and peanut and tree nut free, which is exciting for those with food allergies!

We were sent a coupon for two packages of Snikiddy snacks. I found Snikiddy snacks at my local Whole Foods store and picked-up the Original Seasoning Baked Fries and Grilled Cheese Puffs. I wanted to try one of the allergy friendly flavors, but unfortunately my Whole Foods did not carry either of the two vegan flavors. My two kids (that can eat milk) and I tried both flavors. We enjoyed both but the Grilled Cheese Puffs were our favorite. My son and daughter had actually never had a cheese puff before and my son was very leary to try it (as usual!) But once they tried them they loved them! I really enjoyed them as well, plus I was happy that they were healthier than the typical cheese puff! We would definately recommend Snikiddy snacks!

Buy It! You can buy Snikiddy snacks online through their site, Amazon and Peapod and other local grocers listed on their site.

Win It! Snikiddy is giving away a prize pack including three bags of Snikiddy Snacks (which may vary), an art pack and a chip clip! The giveaway is open to U.S. Residents and followers of this blog. The giveaway will close Thursday, July 7th at 11:59 pm. Winner will be selected via the Random Number Generator and once notified will have 48 hours to respond or a new winner will be selected. Please leave a seperate comment for each entry or you will not receive credit for additional entries.

Mandatory:
You must be a follower of Too Blessed to be Stressed and visit Snikiddy and leave a comment telling me which flavor you would like to try (this is one entry).

Additional Entries:
Like Snikiddy on Facebook.
Like Too Blessed to be Stressed on Facebook.
Blog about this giveaway (please leave the link in your comment).
Post on Facebook on this giveaway (please leave the link in your comment).

All opinions stated in this review are my own. I was not compensated for this review, but was provided with the stated products to review.

Sassy Scribblers post will be back soon!

Blogger has been having issues the last couple of days and all posts that have been created from Wednesday evening through this morning have disappeared. They are saying that they should be restored soon (if you would like to read their explaination you cna find it here). I have tried to re-post the Sassy Scribblers giveaway, however all they have restored from the original post is a few pictures and about three sentences of text (which is frustrating since it was a couple hours of work!) I apologize for any inconvience and if it is not restored soon I will re-write the post from scratch and re-post.

Glory Glass Magnets Review and Giveaway

Glory Glass Magnets is an Etsy shop run by Martje. She makes glass magnets, paperweights, crayon rolls and original art notecards. Many of her products include original art she has created.

Her magnets are not only for the fridge, but they she also carries Alphabet Magnet sets for children. Each set includes the entire alphabet, three larger magnets with words and a great case to hold them which inlcudes additional words for your child to practice spelling.

Alphabet Magnet Set

She also carries adorable magnets. They come as in sets or individual magnets.

It's a Bugs Life magnet set

I also really like her Scripture themed magnets. This set includes three magnets, two with verses and one with a lamb. She has several Scripture themed magnets available.

The Lord is My Shepherd magnet set

Her paperweights would make great teachers gifts. This one is my favorite:

Glass Paperweight for the Teacher

She also sells notecards with her original artwork. They are created with ink, watercolors and pen printed on linen cardstock. She sells both mini card sets and standard sized notecards.

Six Mini Notecards with a Large Magnet

The shop also sells push pins. They are 3/4" and have a atrong thumbtack affixed to the back.

Zoo Animals Thumbtack set

I think that she has many great gift ideas. Two other items she carries are her Message in a Bottle and her Sentiment Stones. The Message in a Bottle is personalized and contains your own message and an image of your choice. The Sentiment Stones are glass "peebles" backed with words of encouragement.

Message in a Bottle

Sentiment Stones

I was sent an Alphabet Magnet set for my review. I was so excited to recieve them since my son is just learning to read and we are currently working with our three year old on her alphabet. The magnets come packaged in a great little box, which is perfect for keeping them all together.

The set comes with one magnet for each letter in the alphabet (plus an extra e, l and p), three larger picture magnets, and the bottom of the box has a picture for each letter in the alphabet and the corresponding word written out. I gave them to my son to play with them along with my husband. He loved them. They worked on words for a while, then when my husband went to do something else he left the box with my son. My son proceeded to put all the letters in alphabetical order. Then he placed them in his box he has been carrying around for the last couple days. His box includes his current favorite things and I think he has decided that they are his! I love these magnets. I think that they are great for teaching the alphabet, reading and spelling. My children love to use hands-on items for learning and I think that these would be perfect for hands-on learners.

Buy It! You can purchase items from Glory Glass Magnets on Martje's Etsy site.

Win It! Glory Glass Magnets is giving away an Alphabet Magnet set to one of my followers! This giveaway will end on Tuesday, May 3rd at 11:59 pm EST and is open to U.S. residents. The winner will be selected via Random Number Generator. The winner will have 48 hours to respond to my email with their mailing address or another winner will be selected. Please leave a seperate comment for each entry.

Mandatory:

You must be a follower of Too Blessed to be Stressed and visit Glory Glass Magnets and tell me your favorite item from her shop.

Additional Entries:

Heart Glory Glass Magnets on Etsy

Like Too Blessed to be Stressed on Facebook

Like Glory Glass Magnets on Facebook

Write a blog post on your blog about this giveaway (please include the link)

Post on your Facebook page about this giveaway (please include the link)

All opinions on this post are my own. I was not compensated for this post but was provided with an item for review.

Simple Food, Inc. Review

I am so pleased to share with you my review of Simple Food Soynut Butter. Simple Food makes soynut butter from organic soybeans that are not genetically modified or heavy sprayed with pesticides. Their soynut butter is peanut and tree nut free, vegan and gluten free. They only produce soynut butter in their factory so there is no chance of cross contamination from other allergens.

Although they only make soynut butter they make several varieties. The varities that they produce include no sugar- no salt, sea salted, sweetly salted, cinnamon sugar and chocolate.

Simple Food sent me two jars of their soynut butter- cinnamon sugar and chocolate. I was so excited to try these flavored soynut butter flavors, since the only soynut butter I have ever tried has been plain. They were such a treat! I first tried the cinnamon sugar flavor. It was really yummy and reminded me of cinnamon toast. My daughter tried it on a pancake and also enjoyed it. It is hard to get her to eat meat, so this is a great protein alternative for her!

I tried the chocolate and I would have to say that this is the best soynut butter I have ever tasted. It really tasted like chocolate with a hint of peanut butter. I ate it plain and also on top of ice cream and it was really delicious.

My opinion of Simple Food's soynut butter is that it is really tasty and I would definately recoommend it. It was such a treat to be able to taste a different flavor of soynut butter.

Buy It! You can purchase Simple Food's soynut butter on their site, please click here. You can also purchase it at select health food retailers and on Amazon.com.

All opinions in this review our mine. I was not compensated for this post, but Simple Food provided me with two jars of soynut butter to review.

I. M. Healthy SoyNut Butter Review

The I.M. Healthy brand sent me a jar of their SoyNut Butter to review. I was so excited because I had not tried SoyNut Butter before and the only peanut butter substitute that I have tried was Sunflower butter. I think that there is a definite difference! The SoyNut Butter tastes more like peanut butter and is not grainy. Besides being peanut and tree nut free my favorite part about SoyNut Butter is that it is not as sticky as regular peanut butter.

SoyNut Butter is available in creamy, chunky, honey, unsweetened, and chocolate. It contains 15-33% less total fat than regular peanut butter and 33-50% less saturated fat than regular peanut butter. They also make roasted sweet corn and gluten free corn crumbs. All of their products are peanut, tree nut, dairy, sesame, egg, gluten and shellfish free and are manufactured in a facility free of these foods to avoid cross contamination.

I tried the product plain and then I decided to make peanut butter cookies. The cookies recipe I used was from their site. You can find the link to their recipe page here.

Chewy SoyNut Butter Cookies

1/2 cup shortening

3/4 cup I.M. Healthy Creamy SoyNut Butter

1 cup brown suagr

1/2 cup white sugar

2 eggs (I substituted this with 1/2 cup unsweetened applesauce)

2 Tbsp light corn syrup

2 Tbsp water

2 tsp vanilla extract

2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour

1 tsp baking soda

1/2 tsp salt

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Mix shortening, SoyNut Butter, brown sugar, eggs (applesauce), corn syrup, water and vanilla together. Make sure all lumps are out of mixture. Combine flour, baking soda, and salt. Mix all ingredients together well. Place on a cookie sheet and bake for 10-12 minutes.

I really enjoyed the cookies and my children and husband (who is not peanut-free and loves peanut butter) enjoyed them as well.

I really enjoyed their product and would recommend it to anyone that is avoiding peanuts or tree nuts.

Buy It! SoyNut Butter is available at many large grocery stores, on Amazon and Nutricity as well as the SoyNut Butter site.

Disclosure: The I.M. Healthy Company provided me with a jar of SoyNut Butter for this review.

Fun Suprises at the Dollar Store!!!

We went the the Dollar Store today after church and while we were waiting in line I saw small individual bags of animal crackers in the snack aisle. I decided to check the ingredients and all they contained were wheat and soy, so I thought they would be perfect for my son's preschool snack bag. I also decided to look at the Moon Pies- which also only included wheat and soy (however they are produced in a factory with peanuts and treenuts, but since J's peanut levels are pretty low we have decided to start giving both of the older kids foods with this warning, but only if my husband and I are with them- we don't want to take that chance if someone else is watching them and is not familar with the epi). Next I checked out the fudge striped cookies, which also only contained wheat and soy (which was really shocking to me) and the E L Fudge chocolate grahams which also only contained wheat and soy. So we left the Dollar Store with four new snacks for the kids to try. After lunch we let the kids try the Moon Pies (did I mention that chocolate and marshmellows have to be their favorite foods) and they both loved them!

Snack Pack Pudding

Yesterday while walking the aisles at Meijer (which is by far not my favorite thing to do!) I decided to check out the ingredients of the Snack Pack Pudding. All of their pudding has milk in it with the exception of the Lemon pudding. Of course I grabbed one for my little ones to try out. They have never eatten pudding- even Princess R who is not allergic to milk- I have never made it or bought it for her since her brother can't have it. Both children enjoy lemon flavored things so I thought I would give it a shot. J really liked it and almost finished it and Princess R ate about half of hers- so I think that the pudding was a success (they would have probably eatten more if they had not just eatten a hot dog and watermelon for lunch and my daughter was also very interested in watching tv too). Jell-o also makes some instant pudding flavors that do not have any of the top 8 food allergens, just check the label and substitute whichever type of milk you use- but I will caution you do not use vanilla flavored milk- the vanilla really comes through the pudding and that is all you taste.

**Update- after putting the remaining pudding away I noticed that the lids stated that they contain real milk (I did not notice this before I fed them to J and milk was not on the ingredients list) so I contacted Hunts. They emailed me back and reassured me that the lemon flavor does not contain milk.

Namaste Cookie Review

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My older son J had a Christmas party at his preschool today. There are two children in the class (including him) with food allergies. J has milk, egg and nut allergies and the other little boy has a gluten allergy. So in order to make sure that everyone could enjoy the party the other mother and I organized the food. I decided to make cookies and since I am not an expert in gluten allergies I bought a Namaste cookie mix. I had never tried any other their products before but they are free of many of the common allergens. The mix calls for two eggs, oil and water to be added to the mix, so I replaced the two eggs with 1/2 cup unsweetened applesauce. When I purchased the mix I was not aware that it did not include any chocolate chips, but was a plain cookie mix, so I added Enjoy Life chocolate chips to the mix. The cookie mix was very oily and did not really resemble a regular cookie dough. While the cookies tasted good, the texture was a bit grainy and was almost like an oatmeal cookie. Overall, I will probably stick with my regular cookie mix (since I don't need to bake gluten free and since the mix, without the chocolate chips was 5.99) but all the children did enjoy the cookies.

More Finds at the Grocery Store

It seems like nearly everytime I go to the grocery store I find new items that are allergy friendly to our allergies. It never ceases to suprise me everytime I find something new I thought we would not be able to eat. I think part of the reason that I was meant to go on this diet is so that I would be forced to find more things that my children can enjoy. While I have always tried to make sure they could eat things, I am trying to find additional things for myself since there are a lot of foods that I miss. I went to Aldi last Friday and they have graham cracker pie crust that only contains wheat. Then I went to Kroger and found that Jell-o brand pudding (only the instant sugar-free) had several flavors that did not contain any of the 8 major allergens. I also found that frozen Lenders Bagels (at least the blueberry flavor ) only contained wheat. So on Sunday I decided that maybe I should try making a "cheesecake"- the cheesecake was cheesecake flavored pudding in a graham cracker crust. I made it with vanilla flavored coconut milk and it tasted like a vanilla pudding pie- not like cheesecake. I think that next time I try the cheesecake pudding I will use rice or coconut without vanilla. We also made another trip to Kroger today and I found that there are a few varieties of Pop-Tarts that only contain soy and wheat. So I was not able to try them, but J and Princess R enjoyed them on the trip home.

New Baby Snack

Today I took a trip to Whole Foods and saw that they carry Healthy Times Teeting Biscuits. I have wanted to buy these for Mr. T, but I thought I was going to have to buy them online, so I was pleasantly suprised that I can pick them up at Whole Foods along with my chocolate chips. Mr. T has really been taking to table food the last couple of weeks, so I thought he was ready for these. I tried teeting biscuits with my first son, but we had a major issue when his face broke out in hives since the ones he tried contained milk and he is allergic to milk. Healthy Times teeting biscuits do not contain milk, eggs, peanuts, treenuts or soy, but do contain gluten. Anyway, Mr. T loved the teeting biscuits (I was glad I put one of our large shirt bibs on him, because he was a MESS! )

Fake Peanut Butter and a Yummy Snack!

This week I have been craving something sweet, but different from the chocolate chip cookies that I make several times a week (I have a sweet tooth but also a chocolate tooth!) While I was at Kroger searching for nutritional yeast in the health foods section (which I could not find) I decided that I wanted peanut butter. They had a couple different kinds, Soynut butter is out since I can't have soy, so I opted for Sunflower Butter. It is really good. It does not taste exactly like peanut butter, but it is really good and tasted very similar, but it does have a little bit of a grainy texture, which if you eat it cooked in something or with something else you can't tell. The next day for lunch I tried it in a "peanut butter" and jelly sandwich, which was really good, but my kids weren't really keen on it. Then Sunday I used it to make Food Allergy Mama's Snickerdoodles- my kids loved these (it took a while to convince J to try them, but after that I could not get J to stop eating them!)

Here is the recipe:

Snickeroos (Food Allergy Mama's Baking Book, by Kelly Rudnicki, page 160)

1 cup dark corn syrup (I only had light so that is what I used)

1 cup sugar

1 (15-ou) Creamy soy nut butter (I used Sunbutter)

6 cups crisped rice cereal

2 cups chocolate chips (I used Enjoy Life)

Spray a 13 x 9x 2 inch baking pan (all the spray that I have found has soy in it so I use non-stick foil to line the pan).

In a medium saucepan boil the corn syrup and sugar until the sugar is dissolved. Stir in the soy nut butter until thoroughly combined. In a large bowl, combine the cereal and the soy nut butter mixture, press the batter into the prepared baking dish.

Place the chocolate chips into a microwavable dish and heat on high 45-60 seconds, or until melted. Using a spatula, spread the melted chocolate over the batter. Let the mixture cool completely and cut into 1 inch squares.

Fried Food, Yum!

Well I finally made used the McCormick's Beer Batter and Hush Puppy mixes I mentioned a couple weeks ago. I used the beer batter mix to make fish and shrimp and also made the hushpuppies. They were both really good for being free of milk, egg, treenuts, peanuts and soy (they weren't quite Long John Silvers or Captain D, but I never expected them to be!) we used McCormick's cocktail sauce for the shrimp, but I really missed my tarter sauce! I am sure this will be something that we will have again!

Review of allergy friendly foods

Last Monday I made a trip to Whole Food for my Enjoy Life chocolate chips and I came out with a couple of new things to try. I ended up leaving the store with three packages of chocolate chips, three boxes of Whole Foods rice milk, So Delicious Coconut milk and Roads End Organics 123'z Chreeze. On Monday I thought with J starting school it would be a nice suprise for him to try mac n' cheese so I made the box of 123'z Chreeze and served it to him, Princess R and made a bowl for myself. Princess R tried one bite and told me it was yucky and J would not try it until I bribed him (this is not unusual for him) and once he did try it he told me he did not like it. I tried it and did not care for it myself. It had a funny taste and odor about it. I saved the rest of it and a couple of days later I added olive oil to it (this was a suggestion from the back of the box), well I don't think that this suggestion helped at all. I was glad to have the ability to buy one box from Whole Foods (I think it was about $2.50 a box, whereas at the local health food store it is priced over $4) before I bought a case of the cheese packets for $12, which I had contemplated doing.

On Thurday I tried the Whole Foods Vanilla Rice milk. It has the same texture and taste as Rice Dream for at least $.50 less a box. The only issue I had with it was this morning when I had a couple of clumps at the end of the box (I think this is a user error, as I don't think I shook the box enough)!

This morning I also tried SoDelicious Vanilla Coconut milk. I was expecting an overwhelming coconut taste, since some of their ice cream has a lot of coconut flavor (which I don't mind since I like coconut). The texture is thicker than rice milk and the price a half gallon of coconut milk is about the same price at Kroger as two quarts of rice milk.

*I was not paid to try any of these products, I purchased all of them myself, with the exception of the coconut milk that the dairy manager at Whole Food let me try for free.

Coconut Ice Cream Here I Come!

So for the last month one of the things that I have missed the most has been ice cream (right behind cheese and candy bars). When J's doctor told me today that I could have coconut I was super excited because the Purely Decedent Coconut Milk Ice Cream has been calling my name! We had to make a trip to Kroger tonight for a few things so I went to the health food section and checked out the coconut milk ice cream. There were a few that I could not have, but the one I was really hoping I could have (the chocolate chip cookie dough) did not include any ingredients I am trying to stay away from! So I purchased one pint of chocolate chip cookie dough (which is on sale this week at Kroger for 2.99, normally it is priced over $5!) I took it home and scooped a little into my bowl and a little into J's bowl. J took the tiniest bite of ice cream I have ever seen a child take (J is always hesitant to try new foods, he has been like this all his life, we struggled to get him to eat anything until he was 18 months old). He said he liked it, but wanted to save it until tomorrow. I loved it! It has a coconut taste to it (I am a huge fan of coconut so this did not bother me) and there were yummy chunks of cookie dough and chocolate chip pieces in it. I loved this ice cream so much that I went back to get another chocolate chip cookie dough and a cherry amaretto pint!