With New Years right around the corner, are you ready? Do you have some healthy living resolutions you are making this year? Or do you have some health issues in your family that you are constantly working around like lactose intolerance or gluten free? Marianos has health key™ tags to make your shopping even easier!
Now, I have had several #MyMarianos experiences, so I could have easily showed you how the tags have helped with my own lactose intolerance (yes, they have healthy tags that show “no lactose”). Instead, I wanted my friend Diana to have her very own Mariano's experience. She had never shopped Mariano's before, so I was able to give her a tour of the store while we shopped for gluten free ingredients. Now, I have been helping Diana for the last year shop for gluten free items. Until Mariano's came around, finding gluten free items has been incredibly difficult in our area. Most places just don't carry them or if they do, they are incredibly expensive. Diana's family has gone gluten free due to one of her sons having alopecia. (Alopecia is a type of hair loss that occurs when your immune system mistakenly attacks hair follicles.) Through research she has done, she found out that eliminating gluten from their diets could help. Instead of having food in her home (aff) her son can't eat, they elected as a household to go gluten free, and I have been helping them find gluten free foods ever since.
Now, Mariano's gluten free section was “amazing”, and I am quoting Diana on that. She was absolutely floored that they had a frozen (aff) food selection on top of having a shelf stable section on top of having gluten free items throughout the store labeled with the gluten free tag that you see above (another thing we noticed is that if you look above the tag itself on the price tag on the shelf, it is also noted on there what the healthy tag is).
She even told me finding kits like this are terribly hard to find normally:
Now, instead of a boxed kit, we decided after our Mariano's trip that we were going to make some homemade cookies that everybody would love. I even had Diana sign up for aMariano’s Rewards Cardfor even more savings. She was shocked how affordable everything was on our shopping trip.
We decided to make some Gluten Free Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies. (My husband didn't even realize there was no gluten in these cookies, so a double win!)
Ingredients:
2 (aff) eggs, lightly beaten
1 cup of sugar
1 cup of creamy peanut butter
Half a bag of gluten free chocolate chips
Whisk eggs and sugar together. Let stand for 5 minutes until the sugar dissolves.
Stir in peanut butter.
Stick in fridge for about 5-10 minutes.
Measure about 1 tbsp of dough and roll into a ball.
Place on baking sheet at 350 degrees for about 10 minutes (until edges are golden brown).
Makes 2 (aff) dozen cookies.
These cookies are super delicious, gluten free, and just fun to make (and shopping for the ingredients was a fun experience!). If you want to learn more about Mariano's make sure you follow them on Twitter and Facebook!
How would you use these health key tags? Are there any other gluten free recipes I should try?