Matthew's Puzzle and a mom putting it all together

Chex Review and Giveaway

August 2, 2010 By Maryann

Aug 2, 2010
I’m pretty lucky, I live in an area that has a lot of alternative food shopping options. We have health food stores, specialty stores and even Gluten free isles in our grocery stores. But not everyone that is on a GF or GFCF diet lives in areas where they can easily and readily purchase special food items, so they need to know what to look for in their regular supermarkets. One fabulous product to be aware of is Chex cereal from General Mills. The cool thing about Chex (and it is something I didn’t realize) is most of their Chex cereals are GF! (says on the front of the box if they are Gluten Free) And almost all are CF too (Cinnamon Chex may contain milk). That can make shopping so much easier.

Most people think of cereal as just that, cereal; something to eat in a bowl full of milk (of choice of course). But if you are a fan of TV’s The Next Food Network Star (which just did a segment on using cereal in a recipe) or your mom ever used cereal to coat and bake chicken, then you know it can be used for a lot more. I do favor GFCF cereals as coatings for chicken, especially nuggets, but they are also good in desserts. And that is the route I choose to explore when trying out some GF Rice Chex. Chex was nice enough to provide me (through MyBlogSpark, and free of charge) with a really cool prize pack, which they are offering to one Matthew’s Puzzle reader – entry to follow below. It contained one Chex Party Mix bowl with lid, VIP coupon for one box of Chex cereal, a GF recipe card, measuring spoons and a measuring cup. I quickly checked out the recipe cards since I’m such a huge recipe hound. I immediately zeroed in on the Mexican Chocolate Brownies recipe. I had just about all the ingredients in house and it was easily adapted to be CF by substituting Earth Balance natural buttery spread for the butter or margarine in the recipe. I also substituted the Rice Chex for the Cinnamon Chex to make sure that it was fulling CF since Cinnamon Chex says it may contain milk. To make up for the lost cinnamon flavor I just added some to the Rice Chex and to the brownie batter. They turned out delicious and they really were extremely simple to make; something any mom, but especially a mom of special needs kids, love!

Lastly I wanted to point out, since I just found out about this myself, Chex has a lot of GF recipes on their website here and General Mills also offers another website called Live Gluten Freely which is currently featuring Gluten Free Bisquick among some 25o GF products! Who knew? Well, now both you and I know. Check them out for GF recipes, which I know some will easily convert to CF with a little adaptation.

Now, to winning your own Gluten Free Chex Prize Pack simply leave me a comment with one of the following:

What is your favorite thing to do with Chex cereal and which one would you use.

To get additional enteries simply do one or all of the following and leave me a comment for each you do.

Subscribe to Matthew’s Puzzle – use the box on the righthand side of screen.
Follow me on Twitter
Tweet this contest and leave link
Blog about this contest and leave link
Leave a comment on the Chex Facebook page

Gluten Free Pizza

August 1, 2010 By Maryann

Aug 1, 2010
I am so excited to tell you about a GF Pizza. We LOVE a local pizza place, Pazani, around here. But they have never offered a GF pizza before. I even mentioned it to the owner’s wife one day and she was adamant that her traditional pizza making husband would NEVER make a GF pizza dough.

Fast forward to last night. Larry was in the mood for pizza and I said that I was willing to break my GF diet to get some. So Larry heads off to Pazani while I stay home with the boys (they were asleep and already fed). When he gets home he has some big news to tell me – Pazani now sells GF Pizza! They use dough supplied by Still Riding Pizza and then they make the pizza to order! I am so excited I am beside myself.

Still Riding supplies pizza dough through out the nation, so go check to see if your favorite pizza joint has jumped on the GF band wagon here. You can even ask Still Riding to contact your favorite pizza place and see if they would be interested in offering GF pizza. Pretty cool, huh?

NuLife foods Review & Coupon Code

July 22, 2010 By Maryann

July 22. 2010
I swear I think there are no coincidences in life. I got a nice email from the folks at NuLife Foods the other day offering me a chance to try their GFCFSF (gluten free, casein free, soy free) frozen foods for free. Then I get my Autism File magazine and there is an insert from NuLife Foods. I had never heard of them before this and then boom twice in one week. I was really excited to try out their products because I love the idea of them not only being GFCF, but they are also Soy Free which can be a real challenge to find when on an alternative diet.

They sent me 2 “cheese” pizzas, 4 chocolate chip cookies, 2 chicken burgers, 8 chicken nuggets, 2 cinnamon french toasts, and 8 meatballs in their Trial Pack. They arrived packed in a cooler with dry ice and instructions for how to cook each item. Everything is easy to prepare directly from a frozen state, so no need to thaw anything. Which I think is a great selling point for busy moms and dads. The next morning I pulled out the french toast and popped them in the toaster, then I served them with real maple syrup and blueberries. I thought they were very good. I like to make my own french toast, but I loved how simple this was early in the morning. I like to keep some easy to use, good tasting products in the house for those mornings when I can’t get it together to actually make breakfast from scratch. And that happens more than I like to admit. As for the NuLife Foods french toast, one boy liked it very much and the other didn’t really eat them. But that is pretty normal in our home, even (or maybe especially) with homemade items.

We have also tried the pizza, which Matthew said had really good sauce. The boys ate the chicken nuggets for lunch one day. This got mixed reactions. Matthew really liked them, but again, my picky eater Nico, only took a few bites. They reminded me of a very well known fast food chain’s chicken nuggets, so if your child is hooked on them you may have real success substituting these instead. I know that can be very tricky for some of our kids – they seem to know the difference when we can’t.

Lastly I have to say the whole family LOVED the chocolate chip cookies. We got 4 ready to bake frozen cookies. These were yummy. I like to bake and I have had a terrible time coming up with really good tasting chocolate chip cookies. These solved that problem. I liked that they were ready to bake because you could choose to bake as many as you wanted or needed. You aren’t forced to bake off a ton and then not eat them.

The folks at NuLife Foods have offered a 10% discount to Matthew’s Puzzle readers. Simply use the coupon code MATTPUZ when ordering from NuLife Foods.

Foodessentials.com – A Helpful Tool

July 19, 2010 By Maryann

July 19, 2010
I was looking through a Parenting magazine at the OB office today (NO I AM NOT PREGNANT!!!) and I found a short article about Foodessentials.com. So I decided I should check it out. Foodessentials has a list of more than 200,000 brand name grocery store items and their ingredients. What I think is really cool about this app is that it also lists extra ingredients that MAY be in the product. This is extremely important when you are going GF/CF or there are other food allergies. You just can’t chance contamination.

I searched “ice pops” and looked at the first entry that came up. It said that the product may contain gluten in the “natural flavorings” category which usually, but not always, means MSG. Yikes, and to think we were allowing Matthew to have freezer pops at school when the other kids had them as a “treat”. I really should have known better. I never liked them because of the artificial color and artificial flavor, but now I’m really not happy with them when they also could be contaminated with gluten. I guess I’ll be supplying organic ice pops next year for field day!

Take a look at Foodessentials.com for more info.