What’s in my Pantry: Granola

One thing I really love to always have on hand is granola. It doesn’t matter what kind, I just find that it’s so useful and an easy go-to when you need a snack. If you get the right kind, it can also be really healthy, and help kick those hunger pains that appear mid-day. My personal favorite is the Vanilla Almond Granola by Creative Snacks Co..

Ways to utilize granola:

• Eat it alone, especially the chunky kind
• Top off your yogurt
• As a cereal
• Mixed into oatmeal for some crunch
• Mixed into salads
• Added to a trail mix
• Added to muffins
• Make granola bars
• make granola balls with oats
• Added to smoothies
• Sprinkled onto ice cream
• On top of cupcakes
• Added into breakfast pastry recipes

 

Health Benefits of Granola:

• Aids in digestion
• Lightweight, but filling, which aids in weight loss
• Promotes healthy cholesterol
• Boosts energy
• Provides many nutrients, vitamins, and minerals, such as Vitamin-C and Iron
• Reduces blood pressure
• & more!

 

Do you have granola in your pantry? If so, what kind?

–>Lynda

What I Ate Wednesday 4/30/14

About that weather today!!!  Flash flood and tornado warnings are fun!  Especially when my dog child wakes me up at 5am by jumping on the bed because she’s afraid and needs someone to cuddle with her and make her feel safe!  She’s a cutie though, so it’s alright. 🙂

 

Breakfast:

 

I started off with my typical coffee with organic half and half.  It’s about that time for me to go to the grocery store again, so today, I’m working with what I’ve got.  My breakfast was a container of Yoplait French vanilla yogurt mixed with some all-natural vanilla almond granola by Creative Snacks Co. and a Nonni’s cioccolati biscotti.

Lunch:

 

For lunch I ate some tri-colored rotini pasta with Classico vodka sauce.  I also drank a bottle of water.

 Dinner:

 

My dinner was a Grilled Market Salad from Chick-Fil-A with their zesty apple cider vinaigrette dressing.  I also had a small cup of coffee with cream from Starbucks…gotta keep myself awake when I work at night!

 Snack:

We had an event at my job tonight, so I drank a small glass of Perrier and had a cupcake from the local bakery, Sugarland.  It was delicious, but unfortunately, I don’t have a picture of the cupcake because I was at work, and I just didn’t think to take a picture of it.

When I got home, I drank a cup of Bojangles sweet tea, because it was just sitting there…waiting to be drank…by someone…and I couldn’t let it go to waste!  It was clearly from my boyfriend’s dinner, he just never drank it.  So I did instead!

It’s not much, but that’s everything for this weather warning Wednesday!

Bows and Arrows,

Lynda

What I Ate Wednesday, 2/12/14

I guess it is just going to snow on every one of my What I Ate Wednesday’s! I am just now posting this because a snowpocalypse has hit North Carolina and it knocked out my power for a good 10 hours. Everything would be fine if I would have taken the weather seriously and actually stocked up on food and toilet paper. Yeah, we’re getting dangerously low on toilet paper and I’m not brave enough to venture out. I have already heard enough honking and BOOMING from accidents happening to keep me inside until all of this ice and snow is completely gone! I do, however, have coffee so everything is okay! 😛

This is what I ate on Wednesday leading up to the crazy snow storm.

Breakfast

I decided to eat something different for breakfast! I made myself a turkey sausage, egg, and cheese sandwich. The cheese is muenster and the bread is whole grain. It was pretty tasty! I also had a banana and some delicious coffee with organic half and half. That cute little baby on my coffee mug is my nephew, Dylan. 🙂

Lunch

For lunch I made tuna salad and I ate it with Sundried Tomato and Basil Wheat Thins. I used to only eat tuna plain with just a little light mayonnaise, but Lynda got me hooked on adding sweet pickle relish to it. I just used one can of chunk light tuna in water (drained), some salt and pepper, about a tablespoon or less of light mayo (I never measure it), and maybe a teaspoon of relish. I am not a big fan of mayo. I never have been, but I don’t mind it in tuna for some reason. I have tried using other things in my tuna before though. A “healthier” alternative I have tried before is hummus.  It is a little different, but it’s actually really good. I always eat my tuna with crackers of some sort. I am hooked on these Sundried Tomato and Basil Wheat Thins. They are seriously SO good. If you like wheat thins you should give these a try.

Snack

I wanted a snack so I ate one of these Yoplait greek yogurts with some KIND granola. I did not eat the cat, but he insisted on being in the picture so I just went with it. So meet our cat, Jack! Also, don’t worry I don’t eat off of this table. The yogurt is vanilla flavored. Nutritionally I don’t think these are that bad. They do contain some artificial sweetener (sucralose) which I generally try to stay away from, but the ingredients list is not very long, so that’s a plus. I only eat these occasionally so I’m not really concerned about the artificial sweetener in them. I used to buy Chobani Greek yogurt pretty often, but most of them contain so much sugar, albeit natural sugar, but still sugar nonetheless. Greek yogurt is a good source of protein and provides a decent amount of calcium, but for me personally I prefer other options most of the time. Here are the Nutrition Facts for the Yoplait yogurt if you’re interested. I have to confess that I don’t know if I ever even looked at the nutrition facts on the KIND granola, so I can’t tell you much about it. I just know I love KIND bars, so when I saw KIND granola I snatched it up and put it in my belly. This is the Cinnamon Oat clusters with flax seeds kind. I sometimes sprinkle this on my oatmeal too. Yum!

Dinner

Dinner was some sort of chicken and rice that I cooked in the crock pot.  Because I did not take the impending snow storm seriously I didn’t bother going to the store to stock up on groceries. Everyone always makes fun of us Southerners for overreacting and running to the grocery store at the first sight of snow only for us to get like 2 inches and it’s gone by the next day. Well, I really wish I would have overreacted this time, or reacted period. By the time I realized going to store might be a good idea it was too late. Traffic was at a standstill all over Raleigh. Poor Lynda was trying to get home in it and it took her 3.5 hours to drive 8 miles! Anyway, the point is I found a recipe online for slow cooker chicken and rice because that is pretty much all I had on hand. I failed to take a picture of it, but it wasn’t pretty anyway, so you aren’t missing anything. It was good though and very easy. Here is the recipe I somewhat followed.

Later on I ate one cookie dough Oreo cookie. I only ate one because we only had one left in the entire package, which may or may not be a good thing depending on how you look at it. I also had water with all of my meals, but I did not photograph that for some reason.

That is everything I ate yesterday. Hopefully this snow will clear out of here soon. I certainly hope it’s sunny and warmer for my next WIAW. Thanks for reading!

Bows and Arrows,

Ashley

A Nature Box Review

I’ll just go ahead and admit it.  I’m kinda, sorta, slightly addicted to subscription boxes.  Not to the point that my entire income supports said addiction, but there was a point in time that I was subscribed to four different boxes at once.  I know. Four.  There are some people out there that get a different box each day of the month, so really, four is nothing in comparison. However, I just couldn’t justify it.  Nature Box, however, is one of those lucky boxes in which I decided to subscribe.

Armed with a 50% discount on my first Nature Box, thanks to Pop Sugar Must Have, and my love for subscription boxes, I signed up right away to receive awesome healthy, wholesome snack foods right at my door!  And indeed they were!  The first box they curate for you, with a variety of snack foods to try, and they even included a bonus snack, which was exciting!  After your first box, you can choose what comes in your box from there on out, via their website. This is actually my third and most recent box.

What I received in my box this month:

Firecrackers:  Spicy rice crackers

These were good.  Nothing spectacular, but not bad either.  I will say that I have finished the entire bag, granted I received them over a week ago.  They were great to have in my purse as a snack at work.  I will say that there was nothing “spicy” about them.  I rarely enjoy spicy foods, in fact, I generally avoid it if it says spicy on the label, but these were not spicy at all.  The entire bag was only 105 calories, and it took me four different attempts to snack on these before I finished the bag off, which means only 26 calories per snacking!

Far East Rice Crackers

The next snack in my box was similar to the first snack.  These differed in that they contained dried peas, and the rice crackers were seasoned a bit differently as well as coming in multiple shapes.  This entire bag contained only 140 calories!  In comparison to the last snack, I did like these better as the different shapes seemed to have a different texture.

Lemon Tea Biscuits

I love tea, so I love these little biscuits I can snack on with my morning tea!  I received these in a previous box, and I liked them so much, I ordered them again!  However, I would like to note that the lemon flavor is quite subtle, so if you’re looking for something zesty, this is not it.

Granny Smith Apples

These are dried apple slices.  And that’s literally the only ingredient, but it’s an awesome twist on eating our daily serving of fruit.  The first one I ate was strange, but I quickly became addicted and have ordered them in every other box so far.

French Vanilla Almond Granola

Let me just say, nom.  That about sums this granola up.  Nomtastic.  Seriously though, hands down the best granola I’ve ever had.  And it’s an awesome addition to yogurt, or to just eat as a cereal in the morning.

That wraps it up for the items I received this week in my Nature Box.  If you’re interested in getting Nature Box for yourself or for a friend, here are some details!

It’s $19.99 a month for 5 snacks to be delivered to your door.  For $5.00 off your first Nature Box, use the code REFER25.  Nature Box contains NO high fructose corn syrup, NO partially hydrogenated oils, NO artificial sweeteners, NO artificial flavors, NO artificial colors, and 0g trans fats! 

Bows and Arrows, ex’s and oh’s,

Lynda

Disclaimer:  These are my own views, and in no way was I contacted by Nature Box to review their products.