Snack Review: Smartfood Popcorn Clusters

I love popcorn for breakfast. Every morning, I always take those 100 calorie bags of kettle popcorn with me to work, because they are low in calories and they take a while to eat. However, for the past few weeks I took Frito-Lay Smartfood popcorn clusters with me to work and not only were they tasty, they seemed to satisfy my hunger every morning.

These delicious clusters contain something different in each flavor. Each flavor was coated in caramel, but not so much that it stuck to your teeth. The popcorn had a fresh crisp texture to it and I had to stop myself from pouring the whole bag down my mouth. There were three flavors that I tried: Chocolate Cookie Caramel Pecan, Honey Multigrain and Cranberry Almond.

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Snack Review: Fiber One Honey Clusters Cereal

Whenever I speak to people who monitor their dietary lifestyle, they seem knowledgeable about the major components. They track their carbohydrate, protein, and fat intake religiously; however, when I inquire about their fiber intake, I get met with blank stares.

Despite its lack of popularity in dietary discussion, it’s a vital component of maintaining homeostasis. For those who aren’t familiar with what fiber is, it’s a generic term given to the portions of plants that when consumed are not digestible. It can be anything from cellulose to chitin to lignin. Why is this good? Well, for starters, since our bodies lack the enzymes to digest fiber, we cannot convert it to sugar, and thus it has no caloric effect (this is why a piece of celery has so few calories in it, aside from it being mainly water).

Within fiber, there are two delineations: soluble and insoluble fiber. Essentially, soluble fiber conforms to a gelatinous state in liquids, while insoluble remains intact. Each in turn has varying effects on your body from preventing colon cancer (insoluble) to lowering LDL cholesterol (soluble).

Part of the reason I feel fiber is not generally consumed in its recommended dosage is because of the foods that contain them. Since it is a component of plants, you’ll only find them in various grains, fruits, vegetables, legumes, nuts, and seeds. And let’s be honest, how many of us snackers out there munch on kidney beans or flax seeds when there are cookies available?

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A Dissenting Opinion: Micheal Season’s Honey Chipotle Chips

The people at Micheal Season’s are masters at putting their products in the hands of capable snack reviewers, so both Rachel and I wound up with a bag of Micheal Season’s Baked Honey Chipotle Chips. Yet, despite our superior snacking skills, we’ve managed to come up with starkly different opinions on this product, just as experienced wine tasters often disagree on the best years for Burgundies (I still say the ‘92 was better than the ‘03, dammit!). So sit back and relax as I make a case for my new favorite chips, Michael Season’s Baked Honey Chipotle.

As I’ve stated before on this blog, I’m a spicy snack lightweight. This hearkens back to the days when my dad would pay me a dollar to eat a Blue Chip, and I would spend the next fifteen minutes with my tongue under the kitchen faucet (that dollar was totally worth it, though).

My fear of all things spicy was only reinforced by traumatic food accidents – such as the time I was eating fried vegetables at a Chinese restaurant, and accidentally swallowed a whole chili pepper. After losing hearing in my left ear, I sprinted out of the restaurant (sticking my friends with the check) and into a nearby CVS, where I ripped open a gallon of milk and chugged it until I felt nauseous. That chili pepper haunts me to this day.

So, imagine my surprise when I tried one of Michael Season’s Honey Chipotle chips and f’ing loved it.

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Snack Review: Michael Season’s Honey-Chipotle Baked Multigrain Chips

An unexpected package arrived for me yesterday. Unfortunately, by the time I reached my apartment complex, the office had been closed for hours. Inaudibly cursing L.A. traffic, I headed home for the evening, hoping the package would contain a shipment of delicious, or at least borderline-edible snacks for me to review. Based on the info provided by our lovely editor Caitlin, I was expecting either ice cream or chips and crackers from a small artisan company.

What I found upon retrieving my booty this morning was indeed Snackerrific-related. It consisted of chips from a small purveyor of high-quality snacks, but not the chips I’d been anticipating. Observing the postage, I noted my parcel came courtesy of Michael Season’s, a brand with which this site and its reviewers have an intimate familiarity.

I’m sure opinions vary from snacker to snacker, but I’ve grown quite fond of Michael Season’s all-natural twists on salty snacking favorites. The brand’s wholesome, healthy image is nearly sufficient to reassure me I’m treating my body as a temple while I inhale a half-bag of their cheese curls. So although I would have liked to try something new and adventurous, I was grateful for the opportunity to visit a not-so-old favorite.

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Snack Review: Fage Yogurt

As you may recall from previous installments of Linda vs Yogurt, my life-long horror of fruit-flavored yogurt was temporarily banished by Rachel’s Wickedly Delicious Yogurt, but then a tragic relapse was caused by Trader Joe’s Black Cherry Yogurt.

So when I saw that this Fage yogurt came in honey flavor, this seemed like a good thing: a new flavor I could try that was nothing like fruit. It’s better not to think too hard about honey, which is basically insect vomit, but on the bright side, that is definitely not a kind of fruit, right?

The package says that this is “Greek strained yogurt.” I assume they mean that the excess moisture is drained off, as you can do with normal yogurt if you put it in a strainer lined with cheesecloth. Which is not exactly what I would call ’strained’ even though a strainer is involved, but I can’t discuss this further at this point because now I’m having that thing happen where you know how you write a word too many times and it stops losing its meaning? Strain strain strain. Is that really English? We’ll just have to move on.

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