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  Carla Hall.

  Jer’s Squares.  We got to meet Jerry Swain and hear him speak about his candy and company at the Metropolitan Cooking and Entertaining Show.  We tried 4 varieties of the squares (bite-size chocolate peanut butter products), including the Original, Cara Mella, Pretzo Chang-o, and Toffee Break. All were excellent and addictive, especially the Original.

• Carla Hall’s Cookies & Granola. Carla has an amazing personalty (very fun and friendly and inviting). Her granola contains a variety or nuts (including pumpkin seeds) and dried fruit and is very very good–we killed two packages of it pretty quickly. She makes little tiny cookies in both sweet and savory varieties. I was especially partial to the savory Goat Cheese and Dried Cranberry and sweet (gluten free) Hawaiian Wedding (coconut, lime, powdered sugar) varieties. Whole Foods carries 5 of the 10 varieties of cookies.

• Moorenko’s Icecream. Of the 8 varieties we’ve tried, our favorites are the Prune Armenac, Chocolate Malted, Fresh Ginger, Honey Lavender, and Vanilla. I am not a fan of the Pistachio White Chocolate (I don’t like white chocolate), Grapefruit Campari Sorbet (it was too bitter), and Orange Cream Ice (it was a texture thing but I don’t think she got it wrong). Whole Foods and many other markets carry these ice creams.

• Lucy’s gluten free (and vegan) cookies. We tried the sugar cookies and the cinnamon thins at the Metropolitan Cooking & Entertaining Show (Bloom was handing them out so must carry them), and both varieties are very tasty; They would be good for regular cookies, but for a gluten free product, they are great (crunchy and delicious).

•  Saffron Road has some good gluten free chicken nugget products in Wholefoods freezer case. While we prefer the Tandoori Nuggets to the (battered) chicken bites, both are good (and gluten free). We’ve talked about their other products here.

• Viva La Papa Peruvian potato chips are available at the Fairway Market in Manhattan, but are not yet in stores in DC. We tried 3 varieties, Anticucho BBQ, Mixed Chillies/Lime, and Sal De Maras (sea salt), and the one we preferred was the chilli/lime variety, which tastes more like what we expect BBQ chips to taste like than the Anticucho BBQ.

Some of these products were from the Metropolitan Cooking & Entertaining Show. It was a great show where we also got to see Guy Fieri, Mary Beth Albright (we’ve met her previously and love her), and Paula Deen present.

-JAY

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