A taste of our shopping basket - product reviews

We just want to share with you all of the great foods we got recently during our grocery shopping excursions:
First, we ordered from Pangea some organic vegan candies ("Purefun" brand)! One is a mint variety with spearmints, peppermints, and pepsin flavored mints. The other package is fruit flavors, such as raspberry, tangerine, and lemon. Overall these candies are sooo good! They aren't too sugary where it leaves your teeth feeling rotten, and they are creamy and smooth in flavor. The flavors are each wonderful; even the mints aren't too strong, which we like. It is nice to just pop in a candy piece after a meal. They also sell root beer flavor, which we want to try soon!

Another product we tried for the first time was "Purity" light orange soy milk beverage. It was actually pretty good, like a creamy orange juice. It is very low in calories and sugar; the only drawback is that it has no calcium and says it uses soy extract instead of real soybeans.

The other product in the picture is of Nature's Choice Multigrain Cereal Bars, apple cinnamon flavor. Overall, we love these bars for a nice snack, because they are healthy and not too sweet. All of the flavors are excellent (triple berry, strawberry, blueberry, etc).

At the grocery store (we go to HEB) they had mangos, tangelos, and turnips on sale. We love mangos, and the tangelos and turnips were something we've never had before. We also bought kale, among other produce that isn't shown. For your grocery bills, what is the one food that you spend the most on? We spend over $15 on organic apples, because we each eat an apple a day, so we have to get about 12 apples per week. :)

Other new items that we bought included herbal teas (Mango and Pomegranate flavors, which are good), toothpaste (Anise flavor, which we haven't tried yet, but sounds interesting), hand soap (wonderful lavender smell; Mrs. Meyer's brand), and fruit juice (pineapple-orange-apple flavor; a powerhouse of vitamins/minerals, even 100%B12!).

The other products in the photo aren't new to us, but we just wanted to show you some of the foods we love. We love Almond Breeze Almond milk, Weetabix bran flakes, Hodgson Mill's whole grain pastas, and Maranatha Almond butter.

We also recently tried Lundberg's Brown Rice Cakes, Flax Tamari flavor. Like all of the other flavors (green tea with lemon, sesame tamari...), they are a nice healthy snack. Note: the Cinnamon Toast flavor is deceiving and contains milk, and of course Honey Nut and Buttery Caramel flavors are not vegan.

And, we finally special ordered at our local health food store the Living Harvest Hemp Milk that Veggiegirl raves about. A word to the wise - shake it pretty good. The first time, we got a clear liquid. It is good and very nutty, although very expensive. Our favorites, though, are still Almond Breeze and Silk Light Vanilla Soy milk. But thanks for the product recommendation, Veggiegirl!

We also bought Pearl Original Soy milk, because it was on sale for $.99! It's good. We love to have more than one non-dairy milk on hand to try different kinds in our cereal for breakfast.

On a side note, after going vegan, it was really hard to find good whole wheat sandwich bread that didn't contain honey. One bread we found this week that was vegan was Earthgrain's 100% whole wheat, stone ground. It has a great texture with little wheat berries throughout. All of our good breads we used to buy, like Pepperidge Farm's Whole Grain German Dark Wheat, contain honey. :(

Wow, there sure are a lot of food products out there being developed! It's always nice to try something new.

-LK