Gluten free brownies - a product review

I have to start this post with a confession: I've blown off my diet. I maintained the food sensitivity diet pretty well--even when eating at restaurants in the US--for about a month. While stringently maintaining the diet, I noticed that I had a bit more energy and noticeably less sinus drainage, so I can now see the cause and effect behind my body's reaction to eating certain foods. Before this experience, there were too many variables associated with my fairly minor symptoms. Was my nose running because of an allergic reaction to something in the environment? Was it acid reflux? Was I coming down with something? Or was it something I ate? Would my nose really run because of something I had eaten several days in the past? Now I have a much better idea.

That knowledge was worth the effort. But with my international travel schedule, maintaining that diet on the road, in so many places where the food preparers and servers do not speak english, was not worth the effort. Here in the US, I now eat pretty much whatever I want, but I minimize my consumption of the reactive foods. It seems to be a nice compromise. I live an active, healthy lifestyle, and eat foods in a combination that seems to be working very well. Given a choice between eating 'reactive' foods and non-reactive foods, I'll choose the latter most of the time and I'm fine. It's working for me.

With that confession/discussion out of the way, I'll move on to my latest product review, another great product from Juli at The Cravings Place. You can see another of her products that I reviewed in this post.

I'm running out of time so I'm going to make this a quickie...

I used her Ooey Gooey Chocolatey Chewy Brownie Mix to make brownies and, despite the fact that I messed up, made some great brownies. My mistake? I used the wrong sized pan. Apparently it makes a difference! Who knew? She calls for a 9" x 13" pan and I used a smaller glass dish. I ended up cooking my version for about five minutes longer than prescribed in order to get them "done". When we ate them while still warm, they were pretty good, but the taste was different from what we expected. Had we had vanilla ice cream to top them, that would've been great and we wouldn't have noticed, but the taste was just a tad "off". Then the next day, I had some more and the taste grew on me. I put the remainder in a Ziploc bag and took them on a trip with me. The more I ate, the more I liked them. If you had never had the conventional kind--the kind made with eggs and all the conventional stuff--you would love this stuff. As it was, for me it took a little transition period, but now I do like them very much.

Inside the box you find two bags. One bag has the powder mix; the other bag contains chocolate chunks. Those chocolate chunks taste pretty much just exactly like the dark chocolate I used to love buying in Germany. I dumped it all together in the mixing bowl, mixed with oil and water as described by the directions and found it all very easy and (now) very tasty. I'd definitely do it again.

It doesn't get much easier than this to make and, after my adjustment period, I give it two chocolate-covered thumbs up.