Review - Walkers Hoops and Crosses

Yes, yes, I know - another review. It seems I'm easily bought with food. As an aside, I got offered weight loss treatment for review a while ago, which I declined as I have a terrible aversion to talk of weight loss. Weight GAIN, however, I can get on board with.

As I have probably stated before, I don't have a sweet tooth. I do, however, have a BIG weakness for savoury. Alongside cheese, I think crisps are probably my biggest weakness. How could I therefore turn down the opportunity to try Walker's new "Hoops and Crosses" snacks?

Bizarrely, I think they are actually aimed at the kids. How dare they.

The Blurb:

The "selling point", if you will, is that these new snacks differ from their existing range in that they are a) baked (and therefore lower in calories than standard crisps - 85 cals in a packet to be precise, although it should be noted that you do only get 18g in a bag, vs 25g for a standard bag of Walker's crisps), and b) 56% wholegrain. According to the people at Walker's 27% of children in the UK do not get any wholegrain at all. Obviously, I'm not a nutritionist, and can't verify that myself, but a quick google search confirms that wholegrain is generally a Good Thing.

The thing about lower calories can often be that other nasties are put in to replace the lovely taste that fat gives us (sugar and salt being the obvious candidates). So, yes, the hoops and crosses are higher in sugar than normal crisps because of the specific flavours used, but I was pleased to see that they aren't noticeably higher in salt.

The Taste:

Hoops and Crosses comes in 3 flavours - Roast Beef, Prawn Cocktail and Salt and Vinegar. Sadly we were sent the roast beef flavour, because I confess that, despite my love of crisps, I personally loathe both roast beef and prawn cocktail flavours, finding them generally too strong and artificial-tasting (interestingly it appears Walkers do not do their "standard" crisps in roast beef flavour any more). However, it seems they went down a treat with the rest of the family, so what do I know!

The overall texture is similar to other baked corn snacks, and while the wholegrain is visible, it did not seem to affect the taste in any way.

The verdict:
I'd buy these - although I'd love to see a few more flavours!
7 sardines out of a full tin of 10 ;-)

Review - Lizi's Granola

Much to my children's disgust, I'm a terrible Puritan when it comes to breakfast. If it was up to me, they would eat unsweetened gruel every day. I've never bought "children's" cereals coated in sugar or chocolate, and I'm always very conscious that any cereals I do buy are as unsweetened as possible. As we've never had chocolate spreads or frosted cereals in the house, my children have never really questioned this - and, at the risk of sounding terrible smug, I have to say that their favourite breakfast is either porridge with a bit of dried fruit or just a sprinkle of cinnamon.

Yes, there are health reasons for this, but also from a purely selfish point of view, I essentially buy what I like, and the rest of the family have to lump it. I'm a big believer that children should basically eat the same as adults as early as possible, and I'm very, very lucky that my children are not particularly fussy eaters.

Before you all think my diet resembles that of Gwyneth Paltrow, yes, we do have the odd treat at weekends - and that includes breakfasts, whether it's a fry-up, or a pain au chocolat. The children have always liked to have a bowl of what used to be called "crunchy oat cereal", but these days everybody seems to be calling it granola.

 My reluctance to allow them to have it every day has mainly been down to the sugar content, so when I got an email from the folks at Lizi's Granola telling me about the low sugar and low GI in their granola, I was intrigued.

Lizi's Granola comes in various flavours  - Treacle and Pecan, Pink Apple and Cinnamon, Organic, Belgian Chocolate and Original. We reviewed the Original flavour:

Taste:

The Original cereal contains (amongst other things) oats, coconut, cashew nuts, pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds, hazel nuts, almonds and walnuts. However, I have to say that the nut content is not immediately visible from the bowl above. I assumed this would be a good thing, as DD1 likes some nuts, but does have a tendency to pick out larger lumps. However, she did say that she didn't like the taste as she couldn't pick out those specific nuts she didn't like (so much for not being fussy...)

Personally, I liked the consistency this gave the texture - it didn't seem to have the larger lumps of oats stuck together that you get with other granola. I appreciate this may be a personal preference though.

It definitely tasted less sweet than the previous granola we had tried (which was a Sainsbury's own brand one), which is a no-brainer as it contains half the sugar content:

I found the taste just the right sweetness, however, I think I would end up adding a bit more interest to the flavour overall by adding some other bits of fruit (dried or otherwise) into it, which I fear may be slightly counterproductive!

"Fillupability":

Lizi's sells itself as having a low glycaemic load (as obvious from the prominent GL on the label), which, as far as I can tell is another way of measuring "good carbs". (You can find more about GL on their website) The simple theory being that these carbs release energy slowly , keeping your blood sugar stable and feeling fuller for longer.

I have to say I never really struggle too much with this as I eat a lot of oat-based cereals anyway, but in my unscientific use I definitely didn't feel any mid-morning hunger pangs, so guess it works!


Overall Value for Money:

This 500g bag retails at £3.45, so roughly similar to other "premium" granolas, so if I saw it I'd probably buy it again.

I quite like the fact that you can buy multiple bags online at a discount, both on their own website, and via various online eco stores, as well as amazon. It also retails in supermarkets such as Tesco and Waitrose.


Final Tin rating: 8 sardines out of 10 ;-)

Are you an adventurous eater?

Note: vegetarians look away now... ;-)

So it seems that the horsemeat scandal is widening to encompass more countries and a wider selection of food producers. I think most people would agree that it's a shocking state of affairs all round, and everything that can possibly be said about the whole thing has probably already been said.

I have to say, however, that the big issue for me was the pure and simple fraud of it, rather than the any ickiness about it being horsemeat. You see, while I would never in any way condone cruelty to animals, I am not at all sentimental about them either. Guess what? I've eaten horsemeat, and it tasted quite nice.

In fact, when I thought about it, I realised that over the years I've digested quite a lot of what some people would consider "non-standard" meat items:
- snails
- alligator
- ostrich
- kangaroo
- crocodile
- reindeer
- elk
- just about most game you can think of
- goat
- eel
- most raw fish
...and pretty much every seafood/shellfish you can conceivably imagine.

I'm not a huge fan of offal, but I will eat it to be polite, and have probably had my fair share of liver, hearts, kidneys, tripe and tongue in my time. I've therefore always prided myself on how adventurous my palette is and it pains me somewhat when my eldest daughter in particular turns her nose up at perfectly un-adventurous food items!

In many ways, our diets have become more adventurous than in my childhood. My children have eaten a huge number of exotic cuisines from around the world that I wasn't aware of as a child. In a lot of other ways, however, some foods that were quite commonly found on our table when I was a child seem to have fallen out of favour completely - not only various animal "extremeties" (am I the only one who remembers eating giant bovine tongues, oxtail and pigs trotters?), but also meats like rabbit - wonderfully tasty, yet which has seemingly fallen prey to sentimentality about cute bunnies. Previous food scares obviously play a part, but also perhaps a certain "sanitisation" of our food that results in more processing and ironically a move further away from being able to tell what is in it.

It seems you have more chance of being adventurous with food with non-meat items these day. A quick perusal of recent recipes list the following items that I hereby confess to never having tried:

Chia seeds (never even heard of these before)
Quinoa (ditto)
Flaxseed
Goji berries
Salsify

...although perhaps I may be forgiven as most of those are not home-grown traditional UK produce.

Quinoa. (Apparently.)

Perhaps we're on safer ground with these of course, although pesticides and genetic modification also mean that there is never any guarantee that things that we don't expect also end up in non-meat items. Other that growing your own there is no real fail-safe way of knowing what you are consuming.

Anway, all of that is a convoluted way of asking what the weirdest thing is that you've eaten? I'd love to know!