"rave" news and stories

Dubbed "lollipops for the new generation" by the company, Jelly Belly's LolliBeans are one of the company's newest products and were promoted at the SF Fancy Foods Show along with their new pomegranate jelly beans. Lollipops are hardly innovative, as far as candy goes, but the company seems surprisingly excited about these pops. Each one is shaped like a very large (over 1 inch long) jelly bean and is embossed with the famous Jelly Belly logo, and 10 flavors - very cherry, watermelon, sizzling cinnamon, strawberry cheesecake, cotton candy, blueberry, tangerine, bubblegum, grape and lemon - all of which are as true-to-life as the original Jelly Bellys are.

Perhaps if I had picked up a Strawberry Cheesecake pop instead of a lemon I would have been more impressed, but this was simply a good - not fantastic - piece of candy.

The Lollibeans are available at candy and gourmet stores nationwide and will probably be more widely available as we head into Easter.

Capogiro Gelato is a small artisanal gelateria based in Philadelphia. The family-run business works on a very small scale, producing gelato in batches of just 1-3 gallons using almost entirely locally sourced ingredients. Their milk comes from grass-fed, hormone free cows and the produce they use is hand picked, varying from season to season and delivered directly from farms and by growers. This seasonality means that the gelateria has more than 250 different flavors in its repertoire, all produced with the same devotion to high-quality that is applied when sourcing ingredients.

The attention to detail is well worth it. Capogiro Gelato makes some of the best that I can remember tasting.

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I'm not usually a big fan of cold breakfast cereals and usually will opt for something like oatmeal (steel-cut or regular), pancakes or maybe even fruit salad. I do like breakfast to be simple, though, so I keep a couple boxes of cold cereals around. This weekend, I stumbled upon a box of Post's new Honey Bunches of Oats with Cinnamon Clusters at the supermarket and must confess that the entire box is almost gone after only a few days.

Honey Bunches of Oats consists of three kinds of slightly sweetened whole grain flakes and , in this case, cinnamon coated oat clusters that don't skimp on the cinnamon. The cereal is not overly sweet and reminds me very much of french toast, since I add vanilla and cinnamon to my french toast batter.

This cereal is fantastic, even when eaten dry, as a snack in the afternoon. It's a lighter, more flavorful alternative to granola and worth a taste if you come across a box at the store.

Baked chips, when compared to regular fried chips, lack a certain something. They don't have the flavor or texture of regular chips and this is especially true in the case of tortilla chips. Eating Well set out to taste test some healthier chips and noticed, when reading the labels, that not all fried chips are equally "bad" for you - and many had more fiber and less sodium than their flavorless baked counterparts, with only a few more grams of fat. Out of 20 different chips tested, they picked out their top choices.

• RW Garcia Stone Ground (140 cal., 4g fat/.5g saturated, 4g fiber per 1-oz serving) - This brand got the "smart choice" award from the reviewers, who described them as being "authentic" and having a "great corn flavor." As an added bonus, each serving only had 40mg of sodium, the lowest in the test group.
• Santitas White Corn (130 cal., 6g fat/1g saturated, 1g fiber per 1-oz serving) - Salty, corny and crunchy, these chips actually had less sodium than most of the chips in the taste test. They weren't high in the fiber department, though.

The different varieties of grape are not well known to me, despite having spent significant amounts of time in the California wine country, because the grapes offered in stores are most likely to be tagged as either "red grapes" or "green grapes." Occasionally, there will be a variation, when "black" is thrown into the mix. Why all the vagueness when there hundreds of types of grape grown in the world? Perhaps the stores don't want t set the bar too high. Some grapes are definitely better than others.

These grapes are a type of muscat grapes, grown in California. They are known for being exceptionally sweet and are often used to make dessert wines. Despite the fact that they are often considered to be the world's oldest cultivated variety of the fruit, I rarely see them in stores. It's a shame because in addition to being sweet, they are incredibly light and juicy, with a taste and aroma that remind me distinctly of tropical fruits like lychee.

The point of this all is to take a chance on grape varieties that you don't buy that often when you see the in stores or at a farmer's market. You might just be pleasantly surprised!

[Photo by Nicole Weston]