My family travelled on an epic two month road trip this summer. No easy feat when faced with remote locations and food allergies. After
actually enjoying two months in a minivan with three kids, coming home was bittersweet. A nice surprise was on our doorstep to great us, however. It was not one, but two boxes of goodies from
Enjoy Life Foods and Erica over at
Celiac and the Beast.
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| Hitting the road in West Texas |
The first box contained snack sized bags of Plentils in a variety of flavours. The girls and my husband devoured these like we had been stranded on a desert island for two months, not traveling throughout North America. I'll share more about these later - pictures of them inhaling Plentils and grunting, "Mmmm", "so gooood...", and "more!" wasn't pretty. When they're feeling more civilized, we'll try again.
The second box contained the Enjoy Life Foods new line of five baking mixes. They're gluten and top 8 free. Since our family is only peanut free, with an avoidance to some milk products, we have no problems eating gluten and do so with gusto. Honestly, my experience with gluten-free items in the past left a bad taste in my mouth - literally and figuratively - so I wasn't jumping up and down to try them out. I expected grainy, bland and something je ne sais quoi. The kids had different ideas - they were begging me to heat up the oven before the bags were unpacked. Just what every mom wants to do after unloading a minivan, right? But since I hadn't been grocery shopping, the cupboards were also bare and so that's exactly what we did.
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| Yum! The finished product |
Up first were the brownies. Because if you don't pick chocolate first in this house, you were obviously switched at birth. I had heard from Sarah at
Don't Feed my Monkeys, that the brownies were extra tasty when you added a half cup of Enjoy Life Chocolate Chips, and so we took her advice. Enjoy Life has made the baking mixes easy peasy - add oil and water, pop them in the oven and voila! Again, I didn't have high hopes for these brownies, but I was more than pleasantly surprised. They were really, really good! If I didn't know better, I would have put money on it that these were made with a traditional recipe. They were moist, gooey, chocolatey goodness and no detection of a grainy taste. The kids shoveled them down - their years of training in polite Canadian manners completely out the window - and declared they were 'the tastiest ever'. And don't think we're all sunshine and roses over here. I really tried to find something troublesome with this mix, but it was an all out hit. I'll definitely add these to our shopping list. I'm thinking they would be perfect for those late nights when you get an "oops, I forgot to let you know before" email from the teacher that reads there will be treats in the classroom tomorrow. And since they require only oil and water, you're not scrambling for exotic ingredients at the 7-11 because it's the only place open late. C'mom, I know you've been there.
So all in all - a big thumbs up from the Blue Bear Aware gang.
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