Foodie Pen Pal - March

This is my fifth time participating in the program. I'm loving how I can try new foods from around the United States.

This time I bought for Nichole who lives in New Jersey and works in Manhattan, a place known for incredible food. Since she doesn't have a blog, she wrote a little blurb for me to post here.

What a great box! I received some wonderful teas which should be very relaxing and refreshing as well as some delicious local coffee. I also received my favorite snack, apples and peanut butter, the peanut butter came in handy dandy travel form. I will certainly be enjoying my chocolate/peanut butter hybrid spread which is absolutely delicious and has been hidden from me for way too long. It's delicious and I plan on putting it on just about everything. Also, kindly and thoughtful enough, included was a magnet and a small history on Ohio.

Caitlin who lives in Washington, D.C. sent me my box. She had it ready for mail pick up before leaving for a trip but it wasn't picked up. So she repackaged everything and sent it overnight. The barbecue sauce did not make it so I used a towel to wipe off the items in the box. Even with those two setbacks I loved my box. Everything was very much appreciated.

The items that did survive the trip.

She was extremely thoughtful and had looked at the blog. She saw that one of the boys (the Wee One) loves fruit snacks so she sent some that all natural with no high fructose corn syrup. He absolutely loved them. His first comment was "They have a dot com." Only my boy!

This pink salt came with a lot of discussion with my family. One reason it's pink is because of the iron content. So Hubby decided he needed to take some and experiment on it to see if it was magnetic or not. Of course the conclusion was that it was not magnetic. The Wee One loves salt so he enjoyed tasting it even though it was pink.

She also sent me an Irish soda bread mix. Since I was sick over St. Paddy's Day, we hadn't had our special Irish dinner yet. We had in on the 23rd instead. I did not want to use all of the mix right away so I decided to make the biscuits instead. We enjoy biscuits more than bread. Caitlin suggested putting either raisins, currents, orange zest, or certain herbs in the dough. I opted for the orange zest. The whole family enjoyed them!

I love granola and cinnamon so this was perfect for me. I've eaten it for breakfast with my vanilla coconut almond milk (a rarity because I don't like milk on my cereal). The walnuts were huge! Yum!

I ate up all of the bag she sent me and found a place an hour and a half away that sold the granola.  The place is near my favorite zoo so we took a side trip there when we went to the zoo last week.  I bought myself some more bags of the granola.

Pistachio cardamon shortbread with the recipe. It is absolutely delicious! I'm enjoying it one piece at a time.

Thank you so much Caitlin for this delicious box of goodies.