Progresso Soups Prize Pack: Yummy

Progresso soups wants you to know that there are four new, great tasting soups that have 28% of the recommended Daily Value of fiber per serving (7 grams) and have no added MSG* or artificial flavors. The new varieties include Chicken Tuscany, Creamy Tomato Basil, Hearty Vegetable and Noodles and Home style Minestrone. I love to eat soup in the winter and was excited to try out a can of Progresso. We have eaten it before and I can honestly say, the Chicken Tuscany does taste good because it comes with a good amount of chicken and veggies. They also sent us some adorable soup bowls, spoons, coupons and soup and want to share this prize package with you. You can download coupons and check out more about Progresso soups, including calories and fiber amounts at their website Progressosoup.com.

CONTEST:

TO ENTER: Leave a comment here letting us know what kind of Progresso soup you would like to try. I will e-mail the winner when the contest ends on November 13^th. Good luck!

Progesso and My Blog Spark provided the review and giveaway product.

Bake Me a Wish Cake Giveaway, Yummy!

When you ask my family to review a cake, we will leap to that “difficult” challenge! Bake Me A Wish is an award winning on line bakery that will make all of your sweet dreams come true. They have tons of gourmet cakes that you can personalize and each one comes packaged in an elegant gift box. We were sent the Triple Chocolate Enrobed Brownie Cake . Here is the description from the website: Our moist & fudgy brownie cake goes through three chocolate “passes” before it’s “done”: first it’s enrobed in rich chocolate, then it gets completely blanketed with a shower of dark chocolate shaves; last, the cake is finished with milk and dark chocolate glazes drizzled all over and the Belgian chocolate plaque of your choice; for a brownie dessert that’s over-the-top-triple-delicious!

BOOKROOM REVIEW

The cake arrived securely packaged in a cooler surrounded by ice packs. It was hot the day it arrived, but the cake arrived perfectly intact and nice and cool. Pass! Now on to the taste, I am not a huge chocolate fan, (I’m a cheesecake gal) but this cake was absolutely yummy! It handily passed the taste test for all the members of my family, especially my husband. Pass! What else I like is Bake Me A Cake will personalize the cakes and the cost is comparable to what you would spend for a special occasion and very convenient to order from their website. You can order them at www.bakemeawish.com. Below is more information from their website. Also 5% of your order will be used to assist our effort in sending gourmet occasion cakes to soldier’s overseas, which is so awesome!

Our gourmet birthday cakes, baked in our award-winning New York City bakery, can be sent overnight, nationwide and are guaranteed to arrive on the day you request or your money back. Each delicious cake includes a greeting card that you can personalize and comes packed an elegant gift box. Make your loved one’s next birthday, anniversary or holiday an occasion to remember by sending a gourmet cake from Bake Me A Wish!

We accept advanced orders for Birthday Cake deliveries, up to 2 months from today. Send a cake today by ordering on line or calling us at 888-YUR-WISH (987-9474) M-F, 9am to 5pm; we have experts waiting to assist you on everything from the appropriate cake flavor to recommendations on how and when to ship your cake.(from the website)

GIVEAWAY

One of Bookroom Reviews lucky readers will win their own Triple Chocolate Enrobed Brownie Cake! You will LOVE it you guys!

TO ENTER: Visit Bakemeawish.com and comment here what other cake you would love to try.

ADDITIONAL ENTRIES (MAKE SURE THEY ARE IN SEPARATE COMMENTS TO COUNT)
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This contest will end on August 18th and I will e-mail the winner. You will have 48 hours to respond. Make sure and check back for more giveaways all this month! Bake Me A Wish provided the review and giveaway products to Bookroomreviews and was not an influence in the honesty of this review.

I Loved, I Lost, I Made Spaghetti Book Review

THEMES

REVIEW

Giulia Melucci always feels compelled to cook for her new boyfriends, because “good food is the best complement I can think of to the many pleasures love offers.” When the relationship ends, she cooks for herself, to mend her broken heart! Either way, cuisine seems to be a staple in her life that helps her get through everything.

An autobiographical and humorous book that includes many recipes, it is easy to identify with Giulia’s search for a mate. She dates bon vivants, depressed intellectuals, writers, composers, Croatian translators and many other eccentrics and bohemians. She finds all of them inspirational – cooking-wise – but in the end impossible as life partners.

Giulia writes with an intelligent and colorful sense of detail that makes you feel as if you are there in various settings partaking of a meal with her and her current boyfriend. Because of her publicist’s work for Harper’s, the Atlantic Monthly and other literate periodicals, her life is “charmed” with book parties and famous authors, and we can imagine attending these galas ourselves and then coming home and cooking, where the familiarity absorbs any rarity we may have just experienced. She lives to eat elegantly and is always searching for a man who feels the same way. When dates are less abundant she hangs out with her best friend Ginia, making forays into New York City’s vast ethnic restaurant scene.

Giulia’s book is also filled with the recipes of others (her aunt’s, her boyfriend’s mom’s, and those acquired from new people she meets) as she assures us that you don’t need incredible cookery to make fine food, just very good ingredients and a heating source. Cooking is “a way to make sense out of (my) internal chaos. There is logic and order to cooking. What you put into it has everything to do with what you get out of it.”

All of Giulia’s dating stories are intriguing. She writes with a compelling immediacy, as if you are one of her confidants who’s just learning about a new amour and being asked to help her analyze him.  The only problem with this very personal (cook) book is that reading it will leave you perpetually hungry!

Reviewed by Christina Zawadiwsky

Christina Zawadiwsky is Ukrainian-American, born in New York City, has a degree in Fine Arts, and is a poet, artist, journalist and TV producer. She has received a National Endowment for the Arts Award, two Wisconsin Arts Boards Awards, a Co-Ordinating Council of Literary Magazines Writer’s Award, and an Art Futures Award, among other honors. She was the originator and producer of “Where The Waters Meet”, a local TV series created to facilitate the voices of artists of all genres in the media, for which she won two national and twenty local awards, including a Commitment to Community Television Award. She is also a contributing editor to the annual Pushcart Prize Anthology, the recipient of an Outstanding Achievement Award from the Wisconsin Library Association, and has published four books of poetry.

Making Life Better

Need some ideas for great meals that cost less and are easy to make? Making Life Better is a website that you may want to check out. I like to cook simple meals and the recipes there are simple and healthy. They not only share tips for cooking, but other great ideas for beauty, family and much more. Unilever, the consumer package goods company, has spent a great deal of time thinking about how to make everyday life better and help us find ways to create great meals and do more with less. The company’s Web site, www.MakingLifeBetter.com, features delicious recipes, affordable meal ideas and tips that stretch your budget and save you time. From Chicken Francese to Savory Roasted Potatoes, the secret to dinner success in my home is to keep a well-stocked kitchen filled with easy-to-prepare, delicious pantry staples with brands I know and trust. Thanks to Mom Central for the information.

I’ve bookmarked www.MakingLifeBetter.com, and here are a few of the great ideas I’ve found:

·Need a budget-friendly meal? Try Baked Pasta Primavera with Ragu Pasta Sauce, which costs less than $2 a serving. Ragu Pasta Sauce has a full serving of veggies in every half-cup of sauce, so this recipe is a great way to sneak veggies into your kids’ diets.

· Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter! has new Cooking & Baking sticks that bake and taste just like butter! Even better is that they have 50% less saturated fat than butter, 0g trans fat per serving, and provide an excellent source of Omega 3. More importantly, this is a simple change that we can make to help our families live a healthier lifestyle.

·Your family can also enjoy a perfectly seasoned Pizza Meatloaf that you can prepare in no time with go-to ingredients like Lipton Recipe Secrets Onion Soup Mix and Ragu Pasta Sauce.  With two Lipton recipe mix envelopes in each box, your family can enjoy pizza meat loaf one night, and onion burgers the next!

·And definitely look for Bertolli Oven Bake Meals, such as Stuffed Shells, in your grocery store’s freezer. These restaurant-quality Italian classics can be prepared by simply opening the package, pouring the ingredients in your own oven dish and baking. What a great way to skip the Italian restaurant and enjoy a night in – especially if the kids are gone for the evening.

Stop and Shop for Healthy Ideas

Feeding a family of four healthy food can be challenging.  “Healthy” grocery stores make things easy by stocking only items that are good for you, however, the prices are often high, and not budget friendly.  Our local grocery store, Stop & Shop, has been working hard to make choosing healthy foods easier.

Stop & Shop’s new Healthy Ideas program features a “healthy ideas” symbol that is placed on over 3,000 items in the store.  It makes it easy to shop for healthy foods without having to dissect the label.  Stop & Shop considers calories, fat, cholesterol, and sodium content in their criteria for labeling items as healthy.  In addition, they offer healthy recipes, and healthy “swaps” — foods that can easily be swapped to make a meal healthier.

To learn more about the Healthy Ideas program visit their website at www.stopandshop.com. Thanks to Mom Central for the information.