Miracle Frooties

Travis and I like to think we're pretty adventurous when it comes to food. We will pretty much try anything once...twice if we like it. So when the opportunity to purchase some Miracle Frooties tablets arose, Travis jumped on it.

Miracle Frooties are a tablet made from a berry grown in West Africa. The berries contain a glycoprotein which binds to the tastebuds on your tongue, causing sour and bitter things to taste sweet. The effect is temporary, lasting up to 2 hours, and once it wears off, everything tastes as before. They have no side effects and are completely harmless. Because of this bizarre switch of flavors, some people host "flavor tripping parties", in which the host supplies sour and bitter foods for guests to taste after eating a tablet.

They came in the mail today and we decided that we were going to give them a try. After we put Penelope to bed, we prepared our arsenal of flavors from what we have around the kitchen.

We decided since these are 10x that we would split a tablet. The directions say to place the tablet on your tongue and very slowly move it around until the tablet is dissolved.

Tablet-ness!

After the tablet dissolved, we prepared ourselves for the taste test. Here's the verdicts:

Vodka - Tasted like water that burns the back of your throat
Sour cream - Tasted like yogurt
Lemon Juice - Ever been to Chick-Fil-A, and they didn't add enough water to the lemonade to
                       dilute it down? That's what this tasted like.
Starbucks Hot Cocoa Powder - Super sweet, super rich chocolate
Cottage cheese - This didn't taste any different to me. Travis said he noticed a slightly sweet taste
Soy Sauce - Sweet, but still tasted like soy sauce and still salty
French's Spicy Brown Mustard - This was the biggest surprise. It tasted like honey mustard!
Distilled Vinegar - Tasted sweet until you swallowed
Red Wine Vinegar - Tasted like sweet red wine vinegar until you swallowed
Martell Very Fine Cognac - All you taste is the aftertaste, and you don't taste the alcohol
                                          (apparently we don't like cognac, who knew?)
Crown Royal - No flavor, and very little burn
Hendrix Gin - The cucumber and rose flavors that Hendrix is famous for was brought to foreground
                      and you could really taste the unique flavors. There was also no bite to the gin
Mini Chocolate Chips - No difference
Crispex cereal - No difference to me. Travis noticed a sweeter flavor
Cherry Craisins - The cranberry tang was gone, but they still didn't taste good
Golden Raisins - Tasted like...well, raisins
Frank's Red Hot - Tasted like a spicy banana pepper. I thought it was actually really good!
Sriracha Sauce (Asian Pepper sauce) -  The sour flavor in the sauce was gone and all you tasted
                                                                was the chili
Balsamic Vinegar - Tasted like a sweet vinaigrette dressing
Spanish olives - Tasted less tangy but still like olives
Laughing Cow Garlic and Herb Cheese - The garlic flavor in this was a lot sweeter
Laughing Cow French Onion Cheese - This tasted the same to me, but was slightly sweet to
                                                             Travis
Ketchup - Tasted really gross, like someone added WAAAAY too much sugar to ketchup
Grapefruit La Croix - La Croix is a sparkling water that is lightly flavored, and the berries made it
                                  taste like regular sweetened soda

All in all, it was a very fun experience! Next time I go to the grocery store, we're gonna get some more stuff we can try (Granny smith apples, lemons, etc). Who knows? One day we may host our own "Flavor Tripping" party! :-)

Bake Fest 2011

Merry After-Christmas! Was it a good one? Did you enjoy spending time with friends and family? Was the food awesome? Was Santa good to you?

For me, the answer is just yes. To everything. We had a great Christmas. It felt just like being in NH with my extended family. The fact that we replicated that feeling tells me it was an awesome Christmas. And of course, Santa was EXCEPTIONALLY good to Penelope. :-)

Perhaps one of the staple activities around the holidays is the baking of yummies. This year, I baked more than I ever have before. I enjoyed it, but it was quite stressful. So here it is! The breakdown of Bake Fest 2011.

1 batch of gingerbread men for Thanksgiving bake sale at the church
1 batch of gingerbread men for Christmas bake sale at the church
2 batches of gingerbread men for Candace and Fezziwhig Party
1 batch of gingerbread men to send to family
1 figgy pudding (yes, like from the Christmas carol)
1 baklava for the band
1 chocolate cake for Christmas Trifle

Each batch of gingerbread men makes approximately 4.25 dozen cookies. Weird number? It's because the number of cookies depends on the cookie cutter I use. The gingerbread men make 4 dozen, the ninjabead men make 4.5 dozen, so it evens out to approximately 4.25 dozen.

So 5 batches of cookies =  21.25 dozen = 255 cookies! That's A LOT of cookies! I also made a traditional figgy pudding, a baklava for the band, and a chocolate cake for a Christmas trifle I make every year for Christmas. Needless to say, I'm done baking for awhile!

Figgy pudding ready for the oven!

All in all, Bake Fest 2011 was awesome! I had a lot of fun baking, and loved decorating all those cookies. Although I have to admit, after awhile, they all sorta started looking the same (YOU try decorating 255 gingerbread men differently!!) :-) My new Kitchenaid mixer definitely helped!

Merry Christmas to me!!

So now that Bake Fest 2011 is over, what's next? Well, just a little thing I like to call "The Great Kitchen Clean-up 2011" :-)

What did you bake for Christmas this year?

It's been awhile...

Just wanted to let you know that I'm still around. I have been baking LIKE CRAZY! So much so, that I've dubbed the past month "Bake Fest 2011." I also recently received and award from a friend! So excited about that! I will definitely get back on after the holidays and do a legitimate post! I promise! But for now...

Merry Christmas!!

One of my favorite sites

In case you haven't figured this out, I love to cook, and I'm always looking for new recipes to try. There are a couple of goto sites I use on a pretty regular basis (allrecipes.com, my recipes.com, etc), but there is one that I always look at first. It's Gina's Skinny Recipes. Gina takes non-WW friendly meals, and turns them into healthy yumminess. Now, I'm no longer doing WW, but it doesn't change the fact that the recipes are awesome and taste super yummy!

Some of our favorites are:
Asian Turkey Meatballs with Line Sesame Dipping Sauce
    - So yummy, and easy too! And the dipping sauce is to die for!

Chicken Quesadillas
   - The sweet and spicy avocado mango salsa makes this recipe amazing!

Spinach Lasagna Rolls
   - Another staple in our house and SO easy to prepare...and Penelope likes them!

Low Fat Chewy Chocolate Chip Oatmeal Cookies
   - Seriously, the best oatmeal cookie I have ever had! They don't even last 2 days in my house!

And these are just our favorites! There are so many more that I regularly make! And she is so nice. Have a question? Post a comment and she'll answer it, most of the time within a few days! It's like having your own cooking teacher! :-)


We made the Filetto di Pomodoro for dinner tonight. While we didn't like it as a spaghetti sauce, I bet it'll taste super yummy in other recipes that call for tomato sauce (like Spinach Lasagna rolls!). And it can be frozen for 6 months! Woot!

If you like to cook, and love lower-fat options for a lot of recipes, you definitely need to check out Gina's Skinny Recipes!