Current Favorites

Just a few of my favorite foods lately. This bananas foster ice cream is SUPER sweet, and I can only eat like 3 bites of it at a time. But of course it's amazing. I found it at the 7-11 across the street, and I haven't seen it in any grocery stores. So it must be super special. 

I really love dried apricots, apples, and prunes. And it's a healthy snack, right? Sure it is! 

Another good healthy snack. At least I tell myself it is. Better than regular potato chips!! I like how they are sweet. I've tried the cheese flavored rice cakes and they aren't as good for some reason. 

Cilantro is SO good, so I really like this frozen corn. It can be a little overwhelming if you eat too much in one sitting, but it has really good flavor for being frozen.

My only Trader Joe's favorite! Probably because I've already blogged about everything I like from there. These frozen potstickers are pretty close to what you get in a restaurant. I've grown to really like potstickers, and it's nice to heat a few up with my meal. 

I've been wanting to buy a jar of Rare Bird Preserves for a while now. I just never knew what flavor to get, and I wanted to make sure it was a good one for $10 a jar! So when I was at the Dose Market, there were samples at their booth, and Cherry Lime was a winner. So I splurged and got a jar, and it is awesome! There are lots of whole cherry chunks, and it's just a really good flavor without being too sweet. 

So my friends Emily and Emily recently took a trip after our Indian buffet dinner to Oberweis for dessert. I had just recently bought a pint of chocolate ice cream from the grocery, and was blown away by how creamy and delicious it was. They serve all kinds of flavors at the store, along with milk and ice cream and other dairy products. This is a coffee carmel chocolate chip ice cream, and it was really good, but maybe a little too many chocolate chips for my liking. Anyway, I love Oberweis now, and I keep buying their pints of ice cream at the store, which I know are probably so bad for you, but taste oooh so good!

Favorite Things and Pie Contest

Boy do I love pretzel buns. I really love anything pretzel-like. Flat pretzel crisps, soft pretzels from Auntie Annies, and pretzel buns are my favorites. I started seeing pretzel buns on burgers in lots of Chicago restaurants, and I think it's slowly but surely spreading outside the city and into grocery stores, too. I bought these mini pretzel buns at Whole Foods, and they made our buffalo chicken sandwiches 100 times better! If somewhere offers a pretzel bun, I usually get it. Keep 'em coming!

Not a good picture, but Oatmeal Squares is one of my new favorite cereals. My mom actually started buying it a while ago, and so I have her to thank, because I probably wouldn't have just bought them to try on my own. They are kind of plain, but have a good oat-y taste that I really like.

Larabar is a really good healthy snack bar, made usually of dates and other nuts or dried fruits. Most of the bars are standard, like peanut butter or cherry, but I was SO excited when I saw this Banana Foster one, and it did not disappoint, let me tell you. It was awesome. It probably had a ton of sugar in it, but it still was on the healthy side, so I scarfed it down. 

Hilary's Cookies is a little cookie shop near my house, but I got this cookie at Whole Foods. They are vegan! I really couldn't tell, so that makes it an awesome cookie. It was really soft and crumbly, and I think I tasted some coconut flakes or something like that, which was different. Good stuff. 

This one is NOT one of my favorite things, but I had to show you because it looks amazing doesn't it? It tasted too healthy for me. Ha! It had that protein powder taste that most of these energy bars have. I was hoping it was going to be really good, but nope. Didn't really taste smores-y at all. 

I was in a pie contest! It was put on by Pastry Chicago. This is my pie. I made a nectarine-blueberry crumble pie. I've never really made a pie with fruit, so I was pretty nervous to make this pie and serve it to the judges without tasting it myself. But it ended up tasting just fine, so I'm just proud of myself for doing it! 

My pal Emily won 5th place with her Spumoni pie! (on the left) I'm so proud of her! I'm so glad that she told me about these contests, and I plan on entering as many more as I can. The next one is Haunted Cupcakes, and I was going to enter, but I'm going to be out of town that weekend :( But I will definitely enter the next one! 

They just turned on the radiator heat in my apartment building since it's pretty chilly out tonight, and it is so loud and it's making the air so dry in here!! I hate that we can't control it. We might have to open our windows tonight so we don't suffocate from the heaters!