I would argue that I am a person of refined tastes. I am able to appreciate the perfectly simple pleasure of an unadorned potato chip without extra flavor powders sullying its spudly purity. I scorn fancy ice cream flavors with seventeen kinds of chunks and swirls mixed in. I of course feel this shows my culinary sophistication, rather than being evidence that I have never outgrown the three year old’s dread of having different foods touch on my plate.

One combination that always works for me, though, is banana and chocolate, whether it’s that Starbuck’s Vivanno thingy that they aren’t allowed to call smoothies, or else my own frozen banana concoction – which has taught me the virtues of the frozen banana. So I was attracted to these, although the name Banana Babies seemed a bit gruesome. And they didn’t let me down.

The chocolate is not perfect, as the chocolate on an ice cream bar almost never is, because they have to add some extra fat to it to get the manufacturing process to work. But it’s quite good enough.

The banana part is just a little hard to eat at first. You should probably try to be a bit more patient than me and take it out of the freezer for a couple minutes before you eat it. But if you don’t, it’s no big deal. It is definitely edible. The website makes a fuss out of their patented freezing process, which seems mysterious to me – I am curious to go freeze a banana and eat it without putting it in a frozen banana smoothie just to see if there is a difference.

These are also sold as full-size bananas instead of half-banana Babies. I think that would be way too much chocolate; unless they figure out how to make the coating thinner, I’m sticking with this size.

The website trumpets that they are the “World’s Best Chocolate Dipped Bananas!” Since I have never even seen another kind, I can’t address this claim. It also lauds their nutritive value. Bananas are indeed good for you, although it seems sort of cheating to take credit for that. And yeah, dark chocolate is the latest miracle food.

I would take all that with a grain of salt, but this is definitely a much less guilt-inducing treat than many. Frozen bananas are an awful lot like ice cream for something that’s so good for you. So if you want to take advantage of that miraculous banana property without having to wash the blender after making my smoothie recipe, grab one of these.

• Diana’s Bananas Website

Yesterday, McDonalds announced the unveiling of a new site dedicated to Chicken McNuggets fans. Called Nuggnuts, it’s touted as being an online fan community with a Hall of Fame, a Nuggnuts Pledge, and an online store where fans can buy Nuggnuts merchandise. Apparently, this year marks the 25th anniversary of Chicken McNuggets (oh God, I feel old) and the site is a way to connect fans from around the world. They’ve even got a Nuggnuts Facebook page.

As for me personally, I can’t say I’m a Nuggnut - I don’t eat meat in general, and Chicken McNuggets are no exception. Still, it’s a cute idea, and if you’re a fan, you should head on over and check it out!

• Nuggnuts Website

I’ve got to credit the snacksmiths at Michael Season’s - they’re incredibly generous. I was grateful to the homegrown Illinois company already for sending me some of their Baked Multigrain Chips to review a few weeks ago. Apparently, Michael Season’s was satisfied with my review - I was pleasantly surprised, this morning, to discover a second box of Michael Season’s goodies, larger than the first, waiting at my door.

In eager anticipation, I peeled away the industrial tape and cardboard to find… Cheetos, Michael Season’s style. Not only did the “Natural Gourmet” gift me with its “Ultimate Cheddar Cheese Curls” - oh no. The Midwestern proponent of “Feel Good Snacking” also threw in its Cheddar Cheese Puffs in both Original and White Cheddar. To top this all off, they decided it would be a great idea to also include the healthier “baked” incarnations of the Cheese Curls and Cheddar Puffs. I laid the selection across my kitchen counter, feeling a bit daunted - being a lone reviewer, I had my work cut out for me!

I remember liking Cheetos as a kid. Yet, it had been so long since my last run-in with the humble cheese curl that I found myself wondering whether those tasty associations resulted from genuine recollection or nostalgic idealization. Given the maturation of my taste buds and breadth of life experience wrought by more than a decade, I was no longer certain how much I really liked this sort of snack. The only way to know for sure would be to taste. Bearing that in mind, I bravely tore open the bag of Ultimate Cheddar Cheese Curls and popped one into my mouth.

Instantly, I recognized the cheddar flavoring from the similarly-flavored variety of Multigrain chips. What can I say? I really love the way Michael Season’s does cheddar cheese. The cheesiness is far more genuine than I remember Cheetos being, and far better. The texture was crunchy, with a satisfying snap. The curls are surprisingly dense, lacking the dissolution factor I remember from my experiences with Cheetos. These curls were fabulous! I indulged in a small handful before re-examining the nutrition label and deciding it would be wise to save some of my calories for the other cheesy, twisty treats.

I went on to sample the Ultimate White Cheddar Cheese Puffs. I’m sad to report that Michael Season’s doesn’t work the same tasty wonders with its white cheddar flavoring as with its regular cheddar. In fact, the puffs didn’t taste anything like cheddar in my opinion. They lacked the cheese’s characteristic tang. If any cheese flavor was present, it was pretty light. Additionally, I didn’t really care for the “puff” texture. Larger, airier and more uniformly-sized than the Curls, these reminded me of the results of a cross-breeding between the generic Cheetos knockoffs you might find at a Drug Mart and styrofoam packing peanuts. All in all, The so-called “ultimate” White Cheddar Puffs weren’t intolerable, but they weren’t my cup of tea.

I became more optimistic as I turned my attention toward the Ultimate Cheddar Cheese Puffs. Somehow, I suspected a healthy sprinkling of Michael Season’s Cheddar powder could turn cardboard tasty. Withdrawing a puff from the bag, I was relieved to find it slightly more compact than its paler cousins. Tasting it, I found the flavor just as irresistible as everything else kissed by that divine Cheddar dust. Still, thanks to that airy texture, these puffs score far lower in my book than the curls.

Sampling the Baked Cheddar Cheese Curls, I was delighted. Although the curls contain only two thirds the calories and half the fat of the originals, they retain that insanely addictive Cheddar powder. There’s nothing in the lighter version to alert the average taster that these are baked instead of fried. They’re equally yummy - yet I sensed something slightly different about them - a grainier, more “wholesome” taste which I’d also noticed in the Baked Multigrain Chips. Not knowing whether to attribute this to my super-developed palate or the power of suggestion, I arranged a blind taste-test with myself as the victim. For this purpose, I recruited my probably annoyed, but understanding boyfriend.

First, while I waited in another room, I had my boyfriend pour samples of the ultimate Cheddar Curls and their baked counterparts into two plastic bags. He labeled them in such a way that he knew which was which, but I couldn’t tell. I tasted each, in turn, noting the flavor and mouthfeel along with my guess on the exact type of puffy, cheesy thing I was tasting.

My bite from Curls-bag #1 was crunchy, but not incredibly so. It yielded oh-so-slightly to the roof of my mouth, leaving behind a small clump of wheat and cheesiness. The grain flavor was fairly prominent, yet not to the extent of blocking that incredible Michael Season’s cheddar, which bathed my mouth in a realm of pure powdery delight. Due to being able to taste the underlying curl-flour, I guessed I was tasting the Baked Curls.

With a bite from the second “Curl” sample-bag, I realized my error. I immediately recognized my second sample as “baked.” For the first time, I noticed why the chips tasted so wholesome and grainy. There’s actually quite a bit less cheddar powder on the baked curls than their “Ultimate” counterparts. I guess that makes sense, as a great deal of fat (milk powder, etc.) is stored in the flavoring, and “healthiness” was a major aim of Michael Season’s when designing its “baked” line. I asked my boyfriend, and he confirmed my suspicions: bag #2 was Baked!

As it turns out, I’m able to tell the difference after all. I honestly think most people would be able to. Sadly, Michael Season’s lighter version of cheese curls fails to weigh in on taste. However, they are still wonderful (you can’t go wrong with that cheddar powder, period). Anyone who shies away from eating full-fat snacks may well find a new favorite cheese snack. Yet, I’d encourage all the non-compulsive dieters to go ahead and indulge.

• Michael Season’s Snacks Website

Buy Michael Season’s Products Online:

• at Amazon.com

I am deeply suspicious of snacks that make health claims. Healthy eating doesn’t mean giving up pleasure in food. That won’t make you live forever – it’ll just feel that way. As long as you get all your fruits and vegetables and so on at meals, there is nothing wrong with a snack that’s just junk once in a while.

What’s more, I’ve lived through enough bogus food trends – oat bran, low fat snacks that ended up having twice as much sugar, people eating nothing but bacon and meat and thinking it is a health diet – to have learned that any health claim is going to be used as a way to make money by companies whose only interest in your health is whether you have the strength left to take your wallet out of your pocket.

So when I was asked if I wanted some samples of these to review, I was all, “Bring them on! You can’t fool all of the people all of the time! I wasn’t born yesterday! Etc.!”

When the cookies arrived, the ingredient list increased my skepticism and dread. The first is a ‘grain blend’ containing at least of couple of ingredients that I feel are only suitable for feeding to birds (flax and millet) and others that, while a human food, do not belong in cookies (rye and buckwheat) in my opinion.

The rather frighteningly healthy choice of flavors was off-putting also: apple cinnamon surely only counts as a ‘flavor’ for timid babies, and it’s clear that the only reason blueberry is one of the choices is that it’s supposed to be a miracle antioxidant food, not because someone’s remembering their grandmother’s blueberry pie.

So, spoiling for a fight, I stared with oatmeal raisin, since at least that’s really a cookie flavor. And here’s where the plot started to go awry. The bottoms of these were overcooked, with a burnt raisin flavor that I could do without. But they were otherwise surprisingly decent.

I had had a large dinner, so mere hunger was not the reason. For verification purposes, I gave one to my technical staff. He is not very picky, but also not a huge cookie eater. He ate it and asked for a second one.

I decided next to go all the way to the other end of the scale: a flavor called “multigrain.” I think we can all agree that “multigrain” is seriously NOT a cookie flavor. So imagine my surprise that these were quite decent also. They are somewhat like a graham cracker (the only normal cookie that contains whole grain) or an English digestive biscuit. They have a rich grainy flavor rather than that horrible, undercooked, porridgey flavor that whole wheat cookies often have.

The multigrain flavor also didn’t have the burnt bottoms of the oatmeal raisin ones, which was a plus. I even ate a third – of the multigrain flavor - and began to wonder if they contained mind-altering drugs. This was not at all what I had expected. I then tried the blueberry, and the fruit flavor brought to mind a morning bowl of cereal, suggesting that another way you could describe the flavor is something like a good granola or granola bar, but with a cookie texture.

I suspect that the secret that the big food companies have finally discovered is that if you want to up the fiber content of a traditionally white-flour food, you should not confine yourself to whole wheat. I have lately been eating two brands of whole grain high fiber pastas which, I swear, would not make my grandmother spin in her grave, which I found nearly as surprising as these cookies. The pastas are similarly made from blends of different ingredients, and are many times better than whole wheat pasta, which is basically nasty even in its best versions.

I do wonder what kind of fantastical factory processing the grains involved in these newfangled products may be undergoing. But they taste better than whole wheat, and I’m tired of listening to my doctor tell me to eat less white carbs (which seems to be the only nutrition advice she knows), so I’m just keeping an open mind. As far as the cookies go, the rest of the ingredients do include such entirely recognizable substances as butter – imagine that – which I have to give them credit for.

If you are really obsessed with the nutrition facts, note that the big “15g whole grain per serving” on the front of the package translates to 3g of actual dietary fiber on the back nutrition facts label, which is the figure you’d normally be counting and comparing. Which is probably just as well because 15g of fiber in 30g of cookies would basically amount to eating wood shavings, and I don’t care what my doctor says, I would not eat that.

So, you are not going to confuse these with Oreos, and I would not serve them for dessert to company, but they are quite surprisingly OK. Should you really be getting your whole grains from cookies instead of from dinner? That’s for you to decide, but if that’s important to you, I’d definitely give these a try.

• World of Grains Website

If you’re from Australia or have an Australian friend, you’ve probably heard of Tim Tams. They’re billed as “Australia’s favorite chocolate biscuit” and consist of layers of chocolate malted biscuit, chocolate cream filling, and a chocolate coating. Sounds good, right? Up to now the only way for those of us in the United States to get some was to either have some sent over from an Australian friend or pay exorbitant prices at specialty food stores. Well, no more!

Starting this month, Pepperidge Farm is offering both the chocolate creme and caramel varieties at Target stores here in the US. But, you’ll have to act fast - they’re only supposed to be available through March. If you’ve tried them, let us know; if they’re popular enough, maybe this will become a permanent fixture on our snacking scene!

• Tim Tams Website
• Original Tim Tam Article

We’re working hard on updating our look here at Snackerrific. In the meantime, we’d love to hear what you think of the changes! Any suggestions or features you’d like to see? Leave some comments and let us know!

This mystery is part of a series set in Sicily, which has been made into TV shows in Italy that I have been watching on an obscure cable station in my area. It finally occurred to me to go and try to read one of the books that the series was based on. And when I saw that my bookstore had the one called “The Snack Thief,” of course the choice was easy.

The series features as its main character Inspector Montalbano. Montalbano is both an individual and a classic character in many ways: loveably difficult to his devoted staff, strictly moral but willing to tell a lie in a good cause – even if sometimes that cause is less about solving a case and more about standing up his long-distance girlfriend on New Year’s Eve because his cook is making rice dumplings (arancini di riso).

Montalbano has an intense appreciation of good food. He’s not much of a snacker, but given the meals that are described in the books, it’s easy to see why – he can’t possibly have any room left for anything between-meals:

He gobbled up a saute of clams in breadcrumbs, a heaping dish of spaghetti with white clam sauce, a roast turbot with oregano and caramelized lemon, and he topped it all off with a bitter chocolate timbale in orange sauce. When it was all over he stood up, went into the kitchen, and shook the chef’s hand without saying a word, deeply moved.

But snacks come into play in this volume of the series when the inspector is called in because a child, apparently a street urchin, is bullying children on their way to school and stealing their snacks. (The helpful notes in the back of the book explain that Italian schoolchildren eat lunch quite late, so their mothers send them to school with a late morning snack.)

Montalbano’s superiors make a fuss that he is spending valuable time on such a trivial matter. But his attention to the incident is justified when it turns out to be directly related to the main plot of the book: The snack thief is the son of a woman who has disappeared and who turns out to be involved in a complicated ring of criminals and terrorists.

The details of the plot, even after seeing the same book as an episode of the TV show, are a bit overcomplicated and hard to follow for my taste, involving all sorts of machinations with the police bureaucracy, the secret service, the terrorists, etc. I tend to prefer a good old straightforward crime of passion, myself.

But I love the characters and the setting, and you can’t help looking forward to the next time Montalbano has something to eat, just for the sake of his reactions:

The pasta with crab was as graceful as a first-rate ballerina, but the stuffed bass in saffron sauce left him breathless, almost frightened.

And while there are other mystery series where snacks are the foods that are more central to the definition of the characters – I defy anyone to get through more than a couple of chapters of Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum series without needing to go out and get a doughnut, after reading about her eating so many – this is the only one I’ve come across where they play a significant role in the plot. I nominate this one for the Official Mystery of Snackerrific.com.

Buy The Snack Thief Online:

• at Amazon.com

This was tough. What with all the excitement over the election - I never thought I’d live to see people celebrating an election in the streets like a sports win - I was feeling unusually patriotic.

So, comparing these Vermont-made cookies to the Canadian Dare maple cookies, I wanted them to be better. I expected them to be better. They were prettier, for one thing. And larger. And had a nice rustic effect with different amounts of cream in each one, not so factory-made looking. And, Vermont. What could be a more maple-y, all-American place?

But. Mmm. Look, these are definitely good, and if I had never had the other kind, I would give these a good review. If you can get these, you will still be a happy person. Maple cookies are a good idea, and the Dare cookies are not widely available. If you see these, buy them.

But, if I really have to choose… the Dare cookies are more maple-y. They have maple syrup higher in the ingredients than corn syrup, and these have it vice-versa, so that is probably some of the reason. To be honest, I think the nice smell of the Dare cookies must be due to the artificial flavor. But these have artificial flavor in them too, so there’s no choice on the basis of some notion of pure naturalness.

The Dare cookies are also sweeter, I think. This made it harder to judge because mostly I prefer things a little less sweet. And they really are so pretty. It’s a very, very close race. I could come back tomorrow and decide differently, maybe.

So, hey, maybe not every choice is so clear that people are dancing in the streets banging on pots and pans. You would be happy to eat either one of these cookies. That’s snacking we can believe in.

• Maple Grove Farms Website

Buy Maple Grove Farms Maple Cream Cookies Online:

• at Amazon.com

While visiting my Mom the other day, we discovered that we had the house to ourselves, so we brought out the Breyers ice cream. My Mom is a big fan of Breyers, so she always has some various flavor packed away in her freezer. This time it was Breyers Triple Chocolate All Natural Ice Cream.

I’m all for chocolate, but sometimes things can be a little too chocolaty, so I was hesitant to try it, figuring all three flavors combined would give my taste buds spasms. The three flavors in this ice cream carton were: white chocolate, dark chocolate and milk chocolate. I decided to try all of them separately before combining them.

I tried the white chocolate first: I noticed the taste of chocolate right away, but my Mom didn’t think so and said it tasted like plain vanilla. She is so wrong.

The dark chocolate was very rich and chocolaty, and eating that alone would satisfy my sweet tooth. As for the milk chocolate, it tasted just like regular chocolate… nothing special there.

Then I decided to combine all three flavors together to see how that went and discovered that overall, it was very chocolaty, but the taste of the dark chocolate seems to be the strongest.

The texture of this was very smooth and creamy. I could have eaten the whole thing by myself, but my Mom was there and had to ruin my potential pigging-out moment.

Overall, I would say that you should definitely try this if you are a chocolate-lover. Don’t be fooled by the vanilla-looking ice cream on the front, it was definitely white chocolate and it was all yummy.

• Breyers Website

Cape Cod makes the best potato chips on earth. Hey, I’m some person who writes stuff on the Internet - you know it must be true. And potato chips are the best salty snack on earth.

But, for that very reason, I don’t like flavored potato chips, and don’t understand why Cape Cod ever started making them. Why would you want to take the greatest snack on earth, already perfect exactly as it is, and add stuff to it? How can you improve on perfection?

So normally, I would never have tried these. But the other day I found myself eating a sad, boring bag lunch while sitting next to a large box that was half full of tiny bags of these chips. They were free for the taking, and it was a very lame lunch indeed that I was eating. And the bags were so tiny that even if I had to throw away most of the contents of one, well, I would not feel very guilty about not being able to send them to the starving children in whatever country modern parents threaten their offspring with the starving children of.

And it turned out, I not only finished the bag, I wanted another one. Here’s what these tasted just like: chips dipped in that kind of dip you make with sour cream and Lipton’s onion soup. Which I admit is not something I have had in a number of years but I swear, it was uncannily identical. Even down to the dairy flavor. The ingredients include buttermilk and sour cream and I have no idea how they do it, but you can taste the sour cream. (I am sure this involves some sort of manufactured dried thing that they do to sour cream that I don’t want to think about, so, I am just not thinking about it.)

Now, I am not saying that I would buy these instead of plain Cape Cod chips. What’s more, I don’t mean this as a change in my general stance of disapproval of flavored chips. Lipton’s onion soup dip is a flavor that is traditionally acceptable with chips, so just because I think these are pretty good doesn’t mean I’m going to try all the other frightful flavors that Cape Cod is now making, like honey dijon or jalapeno and cheddar. Jalapeno and cheddar! These kids today!

But, I am forced to approve of these particular chips. They seem like entirely a good thing. Less messy, more convenient, and less fattening than actual dipping. OK, Cape Cod, you win this one, but keep that mesquite barbeque away from me. This was a surprising and disorienting tasting experience, yes, but there is still a place where I draw the line.

• Cape Cod Chips Website