Review: Enjoy Life Crunchy Flax and Rice Cereals

My husband and I are always on the lookout for new gluten free products. When Enjoy Life contacted me and asked me if I would like to try and review two of their new cereals, I figured why not? The two cereals in question are Perky's Crunchy Flax and Perky's Crunchy Rice cereal.

According to their promotional e-mail:

Crunchy Flax is 100% natural, sweetened with fruit juice and honey, has 50g of whole grain, 425 mg of Omega-3's and 6g of fiber per serving. It's not only a delicious, but nutritious start to your day!

Crunchy Rice is 100% natural, sweetened with fruit juice and honey and is low fat and low sodium. Enjoy with milk or yogurt (including your favorite non-dairy alternatives), or throw in your trail mix for an extra crunch.

Well, I'll be honest. Before trying either of these cereals, I liked the fact that they were naturally sweetened and have completely pronounceable ingredients.

The Crunchy Flax cereal contains: Whole sorghum flour, ground flax seed, honey, raisin juice concentrate, and salt. A 3/4 cup serving boasts 200 calories, 3g fat, and 6g fiber. (3 WW points, not including milk or other additives).

The Crunchy Rice cereal contains: Rice flour, rice bran, raisin juice concentrate, honey, and salt. A 3/4 cup serving contains 210 calories, 1g fat, and 2g fiber. (4 WW points, not including milk or other additives).

(Weight Watchers Points calculated from the online calculator located here).

Overall, not a bad start to the day, right?

I'll admit that I was hoping more for a puffed-rice type cereal similar to Rice Krispies, and when I saw the package I was afraid the texture would be too much like Grape Nuts. It wasn't though -- the texture wasn't bad at all. However, our household usually eats more sugared cereals so the subtle honey flavoring tasted extremely plain to us by itself. If you intend to eat a bowl of this cereal for breakfast, skim milk and a lot of fruit are an absolute must. (Still doesn't make it too unhealthy, at least).

They're also decent when mixed into (flavored!) yogurt, and add a bit more substance. (When I eat yogurt by itself for breakfast I tend to be hungry by 10 AM -- I think this is where the higher-fiber Flax cereal comes in handy).

Overall, while the Flax is definitely better for you, the rice was the one I preferred. It was slightly sweeter tasting and the Flax leaves a slight aftertaste when eaten dry (which is how I first tried it). I probably wouldn't buy the Flax again, but I might buy the Rice to mix with fruit and yogurt for a quick breakfast.

Review: Enjoy Life Not Nuts! Beach Bash Nut Free Trail Mix

Continuing the list of Enjoy Life product reviews, we came to Enjoy Life's Not Nuts! Beach Bash Nut Free Trail Mix. This trail mix was made up of sunflower seeds, dried pineapple, pumpkin seeds, dried cranberries and dried apricots. Now, my husband wouldn't touch this stuff (he's not a fan of sunflower seeds and absolutely detests anything that ends in the word "berry" unless it's strawberry milk), so this review was all me. It looked pretty decent - I mean, how can you go wrong with sunflower seeds and dried fruits? Looking at the ingredient list I was pretty impressed as well - all the ingredients were 100% natural. It's nice to know exactly what you're putting into your body, and be able to pronounce all the ingredients!

I grabbed a handful and have to say it was pretty tasty - albeit addictive. Since Vince wouldn't have any of it I brought it back to the office. A handful of that all week staved off a 3 PM break to the vending machines - where the trail mixes were full of salt, sugar, chocolate and preservatives - and it seemed to be a much better choice. I'll be honest - I'm not usually a trail mix girl so I don't know how often I'd buy it, especially for just allergen-free me - but I can see it for a good snack to stick in the carry-on luggage during a plane ride. And I'm sure that it's a blessing if you have a peanut allergy!

Review: Enjoy Life Soft Baked Snickerdoodle Cookies

Next on the list of Enjoy Life products to review is their soft baked snickerdoodle cookies. We'd seen them in the store but always passed them by with a "oh, gluten free boxed cookies can't be that good!" So come testing day, we opened the box to try them and saw that, again, they didn't look that appetizing. But, in the interest of science, we each (nervously) took a bite and were pleasantly surprised! Soft, chewy, and cinnamon-y with the texture of a "regular" cookie, this one was a surprising winner!

Now, we've traditionally baked snickerdoodles in the past and they don't taste exactly like the snickerdoodles I remember from Christmastime - but you can taste sugar, cinnamon and spices and it's a good cookie for a snack. My hubby - though he has a huge sweet-tooth - doesn't like many desserts and ended up polishing these ones off pretty quickly!

My one complaint was the packaging - they come in a very light plastic tray with a sheet of plastic. I see their site also promotes individually wrapped cookies - that's more convenient and wouldn't make the cookies go stale right away, but it would be nice to have either a box-full of individually wrapped cookies for freshness, or a seal-able bag to lock in the freshness of the cookies.

Otherwise, these were pretty darn good. Phoebe the puggle loved them, more importantly Vince my hubby liked them, and we'll probably buy them again. Phoebe'd give this product three-and-a-half paws out of four. :)

Review: Enjoy Life Sunbutter Crunch Snack Bars

Well, for a while our main computer was on the fritz and I had to blog using my husband's laptop. However with the purchase of two nice, widescreen LCD monitors from Dell, we're back in business - and that makes posting with pictures that much easier! So here goes.

Back in August I wrote an unfavorable review of Enjoy Life's cinnamon raisin bagels. Well, they were kind enough to send some samples of their products that I might enjoy, so the next few blog posts will be reviews (with pictures, finally!) of some of their other products.

The first product we tried is the sunbutter crunch snack bars. Now we've had some pretty bad experiences with gluten free snack bars in the past so we weren't optimistic about these bars to begin with. Still, it never hurts to keep an open mind and try something, right?

Well, I opened the package and they weren't that impressive to look at. I broke a piece off, though, and it wasn't that bad for a gluten free snack bar. Vince had already written them off in his mind, so in order to get an honest opinion from him I broke another piece off and told him to try it. Suspicious, he asked if it was chocolate (no), and then took a bite. He had the same reaction that I did - it's not something we'd go out of our way to eat, and you can tell it's "gluten free," but it's convenient to stick one in your desk drawer or purse and will do the trick in a pinch. I have to say that it's the best gluten free bar we've found so far - Vince tried the cherry Larabar and was not impressed at all.

In the interest of science (and the fact that she's been doing better about exercising) we gave the puggle a piece of it - who gave it two paws out of four.

Review: Enjoy Life Cinnamon Raisin Bagels

The last time I placed an order of gluten free goods online, I decided to add Enjoy Life's cinnamon raisin gluten free bagels to my cart. I hadn't tried anything from their brand before, but they certainly looked good and had decent reviews overall. My hubby has never liked cream cheese, but he used to love cinnamon raisin bagels with butter, so I figured this would be a nice treat.

They came and were much smaller than I imagined. I know Bruegger's bagels are quite large and more than one serving size per bagel, but I wasn't expecting something quite this small. Still, the package gave off a very pleasant cinnamon smell so I figured it was still promising. We stuck them in the freezer as recommended until the weekend, when we toasted them and added butter.

Well... I'm trying to be as polite as possible here, but they tasted - and had the consistency - of a big, thick piece of cardboard. One bite was all that we needed to realize these bagels were not good at all - I gave the puggle a piece of the bagel to see if even she'd eat the bagels. She took it, played with it for a little bit, grudgingly ate it, and then gave me a dirty look like I did something incredibly mean to her. Keep in mind, our puggle suffers from Coprophagia, so that's saying something.

All in all, we threw out the rest of the package, considered the whole experience a $6 lesson, and decided that, until we hear reputable evidence otherwise, Enjoy Life is brand to avoid.

The puggles rating: 0 paws. Enjoy Life? Anything but!