I have a feeling that the Whole Foods Moms are not going to love me after this post.

But here’s the thing, I named my blog Binkies and Briefcases because I believe in balance. Even though I’d love for my whole family to eat 100% organic whole food all of the time, at this stage in our lives that’s just not realistic. We have active kids, busy schedules, and we are in a temporary living situation until our new home is finished. 90%of my kitchen supplies are still in storage. To give you an idea, I made fried zucchini the other  night using a plastic fork to flip them during the frying process. Sadly, the fork did not survive. Happily, I managed not to burn myself.

You get the idea. Anyway, the point is, sometimes we just need the, well, convenience of convenience food.  

I’ve been really paying attention to the labels at the store lately, and I’ve found a few products that we really like because they are easy, not any more expensive than their less-healthy counterparts, and they taste good. 

This is not a sponsored post (although I wouldn’t mind if these brands decided they want to send me a check), I just wanted to share because we’re crushing on them right now.

Utz Potato Chips

These are a local product. They are made right in my grandparents’ neighborhood. If you’re not in the mid-Atlantic region, then I’m sorry for your loss because these really are yummy. We have always bought these chips anyway because they taste good and we grew up on them, but even after I started worrying about switching our family to whole foods I just kept right on buying them because…

They only have 3 ingredients: potatoes, oil, and salt. I only buy the original or ruffled version, which has the same ingredients list, because the other flavors have more ingredients. Granted, cottonseed oil isn’t the best kind of oil in the whole universe, but I’m okay with giving these to my kids as a sometimes food.

The next convenience food I wanted to share with you is 

Annie’s Homegrown Mac & Cheese

Macaroni and Cheese is my middle daughter, Abby’s, favorite food in the whole entire world. She would eat it every day. Often, she does. It’s MUCH cheaper, not to mention easier and faster, to buy a boxed version than to make it from scratch. 

I buy this at Target.You can also buy it here. This week at Tar-Jay the stove top kind was on sale for $1/box, which is only a few cents more than other well known brands. I also really appreciated that they had a box with a character my children recognized. It can be hard to explain why we aren’t buying “the Monster’s Inc. kind” or “the one with the Transformers on it.” 

I like that the pasta is organic, the cheese is real (“Cultured Pasteurized Milk, Salt, Non-Animal Enzymes” as opposed to “WHEY, CORN SYRUP SOLIDS, PALM OIL, MILKFAT, SALT, MILK PROTEIN CONCENTRATE, CONTAINS LESS THAN 2% OF MEDIUM CHAIN TRIGLYCERIDES, SODIUM TRIPOLYPHOSPHATE, CITRIC ACID, GUAR GUM, SODIUM PHOSPHATE, NATURAL FLAVOR, LACTIC ACID, CALCIUM PHOSPHATE, MONOSODIUM GLUTAMATE, YELLOW 5, YELLOW 6, ARTIFICIAL FLAVOR, ENZYMES, CHEESE CULTURE); MODIFIED FOOD STARCH, MALTODEXTRIN, POTASSIUM CHLORIDE, ACETYLATED MONOGLYCERIDES, SALT, MEDIUM CHAIN TRIGLYCERIDES, APOCAROTENAL (COLOR).”-actual ingredients  for the “cheese” in the other brand.)   and that there aren’t any hormones or artificial colors or flavors.

Abby and Penny both ate the microwavable kind for lunch today. I believe it was $3.50 for a box of 5 pouches, which is about $0.70 per serving.  I tasted it and was surprised that it tasted very familiar, much like the stove top version of the brand in the blue box.  

I also buy other Annie’s products at Target, although I do find that many of them are more expensive than the non-organic versions of the same snack food.

I’m sending 3 boxes of Annie’s snack mix bunnies for the kindergarten class snack tomorrow. It would have been cheaper to buy something else, but I feel better knowing that I’m not giving the kids hormones and chemicals.

Have you tried any of these products or are there others that you can share?