I was introduced to Aunt Gussie’s Sugar Free Cookies when I was in New York in September. There was a huge display of them at the Whole Foods Market on 7th Avenue. I decided to buy a package of the cookies and I opted for the Spelt Sugar Free Chocolate Chip ones and found them to be quite good. Spelt is a wheat alternative that’s high in fiber and allows nutrients to be absorbed more quickly than traditional wheat.

Before heading home from New York, I looked up Aunt Gussie’s website and used the store locater option to see if there were any stores in the San Diego area that carried the cookies. According to the website, both Whole Foods Markets in San Diego carry them, so I figured it would be easy to find some more at home. Not quite the case, I visited both San Diego locations, I spent an hour at the Hillcrest location trying to find the cookies, no luck at all. The La Jolla location carried a couple of varieties, but not ones I wanted, certainly no match for the large section of them the New York location had, no doubt due to the fact the company is based in New Jersey, so it’s pretty much local to New York.

I ended up finding them at my local Jimbo’s Naturally. The local 4S Ranch location in Rancho Bernardo had two spots on the shelf for them, one was sold out which I’m guessing was the sugar free chocolate chip cookies and the other was the sugar free biscotti style cookies. I didn’t but those. I was told the Escondido location definitely had the sugar free chocolate chip cookies and I had to stop in Escondido today so I stopped by there. Sure enough they had the Sugar Free chocolate chip cookies, except these were the Sugar Free Chocolate Chip cookies with Almonds. Not exactly what I wanted, but I’m okay with Almonds so I bought a package. Very good!!

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When McDonald’s started selling Angus One-Third Pound Burgers, it took a page from West Coast burger chain, Carl’s Jr, which introduced sit-down restaurant style burgers a few years ago under the name “The Six Dollar Burger” which they were selling for $3.99. So in response to McDonald’s introduction of similar premium burgers, Carl’s Jr decided to take on McDonald’s head on by introducing their own version of the Big Mac called “The Big Carl.”

The Big Carl takes on the Big Mac, blatantly with a lot of the advertising for it offering side by side comparisons to the Big Mac, some done humorously as if the burgers were talking to each other (think the Apple commercials with Mac vs. Windows except instead of two actors, it’s just closeups of the burgers with voiceovers.) And others use Carl’s Jr.’s more signature sarcastically toned humor as seen in the commercial below which compares the burgers with a take on the old Big Mac song. I particularly like Carl’s more sarcastically toned commercials ever since they introduced a campaign showcasing a guy looking clueless in a supermarket with the slogan, “Without us, some guys would starve.”

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Last year I had purchased a San Diego edition of the Entertainment coupon book, and hadn’t used it much, so I spent the better part of October trying to use as many of the coupons as possible to at least recoup the purchase price of the coupon book. I had kept the coupon book in my car to make it easier to use the coupons but it seemed the book ended up stuck between the center console and the passenger seat of my car forgotten for most of the year.

Prior to the start of October, the only coupon I had used was a discount on some Cinnabon cinnamon rolls I purchased last year for Thanksgiving when my roommates and I ended up hosting some fellow co-workers for Thanksgiving. So I was a little miffed about having spent about $40 for the coupon book and only used $3 worth of savings from it. So the challenge was on to use enough coupons to make the original $40′s spent on the book worth the price I paid before most of the coupons in the book expired on November 1, 2009.

The problem with most of the coupons is that they are two for one offers and generally the only coupons out of there I use are the restaurant coupons. And since I often just hit restaurants alone, using the coupons isn’t the most convenient option. Another challenge is that with 2009 being such a rough year, some of the businesses featured in the coupon book had closed down during the year. And some of the coupons for chain locations were only good at specific locations. All of which are barriers for ease of use. And few coupons were redeemable close to where I live in Poway too.

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In addition to seeing the Speak & Spell when I was browsing through the channels, I also came across an infomercial for a weight loss program called “The Food Lovers Fat Loss System” by some mysterious guy named Robert Ferguson. I stopped to watch the infomercial out of curiosity to what the gimmick of diet program is. And from what I saw, it looks to me that the program is very similar to what I’ve learned on Jorge Cruise’s Belly Fat Cure program.

The infomercial claims that its possible to still eat all your favorite foods and do so in a way that makes it so that it will speed up your metabolism and help you lose weight. It then has some older lady with lesbian-esque spikey hair proclaims she can eat chocolate, pastas with cream sauces, pancakes, and has kept the weight off for over four years. My first thoughts were, yeah, all of those can be done on the Belly Fat Cure, but how can this lady have kept the weight off for four years if this a program that looks pretty new? Robert Ferguson then says you’ll eat so you’ll never be hungry, never have food you don’t like, and never deprive yourself of the foods you love.

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I was recently asked what the nutritional breakdown of my Sugar Free Nanaimo Bar recipe was and I thought I’d see what Google would came up with for finding out how to do that. I ended up finding Recipes.SparkPeople.com which would not only allow me to find out the nutritional information for my recipe but would allow me to compile my recipes into a virtual cookbook.

I found the interface for entering ingredients a little clunky because I ended up having to manually enter nutritional information from a lot of the products I used in my recipe. And then I ended up having to do some funky calculations to determine how to translate that nutritional information into the quantities needed for the recipe. Take for example the Xylitol featured in the recipe, the nutritional information for it is based on a 2 teaspoon serving size and part of the recipe calls for 1 and 3/4 cups of it. So it was a little tricky, fortunately, the final recipe doesn’t show the weird quantities and sizes I had to enter to calculate the recipe.

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When I was in New York, I went to a Junior’s restaurant specifically to try a slice of their sugar free cheesecake. It was absolutely incredible as I detailed previously on my blog. (Click here to see my entry about the Junior’s Sugar Free Cheesecake. So needless to say, I decided it was time to order a whole cheesecake and it was definitely good enough to justify a price tag of $29.95 plus $11.00 for shipping.

I placed the order for the cheesecake a week ago and picked to have it shipped on Monday, October 19th, for delivery today, October 21st. I had actually forgotten I had ordered it by the time the email from Junior’s showed up in my e-mail box to indicate the cheesecake had shipped and the e-mail also provided the UPS tracking number so I could monitor it’s progress on its way across the country to me here in San Diego.

I watched the cheesecake progress from it’s arrival at the Lawnside, New Jersey UPS center, it’s transfer to the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania processing center, where it was loaded onto a airplane and arrived at the Ontario, California processing center. As soon as it arrived there, I even reported to co-workers I told about the cheesecake that my cheesecake had landed in California. And soon after the cheesecake was sent to the UPS center in San Diego where it was loaded into a truck and arrived at my door in a brightly colored box in the Junior’s colors.

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The kind folks at Cumberland Packaging, the makers of Sugar In The Raw, sent me some samples of the Stevia Extract In The Raw product. As someone who’s been on Jorge Cruise’s Belly Fat Cure program since April, I’ve been actively replacing sugar with a lot of alternative products, such as Truvia, and PureVia.

One of the big challenges is trying to find good natural substitutes for sugar, unlike the popular “packet” type sugar alternatives you usually find offered everywhere such as saccharin, aspartame, and sucralose all of which are toxic man-made chemicals. Stevia is a great alternative but I’ve only tried it when it’s blended with a sugar alcohol such Erythritol, as is in the case of both Truvia and PureVia. Those brands say that they combine the sugar alcohol with the stevia to help remove the bitterness of plain stevia. So I was a bit hesitant to try plain stevia.

So when I saw the opportunity to have the makers of Stevia Extract In The Raw to send me some samples, I thought it was a great opportunity to do so. I was following them on Twitter and they were offering samples to their Twitter followers. They saw on my profile that I am a bit of a blackjack expert so they asked me a blackjack question before sending me the samples.

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My mom is an avid fan of QVC and about a month ago, I somehow ended up on QVC’s website and one of the items that popped up to look at was a Sugar Free Chocolate Mousse Cake from Junior’s Cheesecakes of New York. I ended up clicking on it just to check it out and it looked amazingly good. There were endless reviews of how wonderful the cake was, so I was intrigued. I saw they also had a Sugar Free Cheesecake listed that also was highly reviewed. As I am on a low sugar program I thought it might be worth trying one of these, but I was a bit hesitant to spend $30-$35 plus another $11 for shipping for a whole cake and QVC also charges tax, so a few more dollars on top of it for something I haven’t tried. Plus that’s a huge chunk of money for a single cake.

Well since I had an upcoming trip to New York, I decided I was going to wait on these expensive cakes and take advantage of the fact Junior’s has restaurants in New York and hunt one of the restaurants down while in New York and try a slice of their cheesecake. I looked up Junior’s website and found they have several restaurants in the New York area and it looked like for my visit to New York, my best option was to find the one in Times Square, so I added it to my agenda for New York.

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You might be asking since when does United Airlines serve Which Wich? sandwiches on their flights. How on Earth would they be able to customize a “hot wich” mid flight? Unfortunately, that’s not (yet) a service they offer. I can just imagine a flight where every seat back is equipped with a Which Wich? bag, and a red Sharpie for passengers to check a page in the flight magazine to write out the basic type of sandwich they want and then use the bag’s check boxes to further customize the rest of the bag and write on a seat number instead of a name so that an inflight Which Wich? attendant could prepare the sandwiches and have them delivered hot and fresh to passengers in flight, but unfortunately that’s just a dream at this point.

In the era of airlines trying to nickel and dime their passengers for all the formerly included services, such as food offerings on cross country flights, the good thing is they allow you to bring your own food on board. So which airport offers Which Wich? in the terminal? Well none in California at the moment. How I got a Which Wich? sandwich on board my red eye flight from Los Angeles International (LAX) to Washington, D.C.’s Dulles International Airport (IAD) was stopping at the Which Wich store in Carlsbad, California where I had bought two sandwiches, one to enjoy hot and fresh there in the restaurant and the other to take with me on my flights.

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Burger King’s claim to fame is their slogan where they invite you to “Have It Your Way” where they encourage you to customize your burger or other food items to however you like it. They even go so far as to claim there are over 240,000 different combinations of how to customize the items on their menu. And despite all this, when I decided to stop at my local Burger King in Poway, they failed miserably on the customization I was seeking.

I stopped in to my local Burger King and after reviewing the nutritional information they had posted on the wall, it looked like the only way I was going to be able to get a burger with relatively no sugar, was to ask and see if they could wrap the burger in lettuce instead of a bun. I went to the counter and asked if it was possible to have the burgers wrapped in lettuce instead of a bun, the girl at the counter didn’t know, asked her manager as she had no idea how to even ring in the burger and have it wrapped in lettuce. The manager said it would be possible and that she would take care of letting the staff in back that would be assembling the burger know to use lettuce instead of a bun.

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