Thank you to King Arthur Flour for sponsoring this post!
I enjoy making meals, snacks, and goodies from scratch. I really, really do. But I don’t enjoy when my life feels like an endless cycle of make food/clean up/make food/repeat. So I supplement homemade foods with packaged food and feel no shame.
After all, there are plenty of packaged and convenience foods that are perfectly wholesome. Frozen veggies? Stocked in my freezer. Canned beans? All over it. Store-bought whole grain crackers and bread? Couldn’t get through the week without them. The happy reality is that there are more and more packaged choices with ingredient lists that read like a family recipe, not a mad scientist’s lab experiment.
I recently had the chance to try a new line of baking mixes from King Arthur Flour called Essential Goodness. They’re exactly the kind of shortcut I like–a simple ingredient list and the ability to come to my rescue when an extra half hour makes all the difference in my day. Can you relate?
My favorite from the line-up was the little black dress of baking: the chocolate chip cookie. You can’t go wrong with chocolate chip cookies, whether you’re rushing a dozen to a school potluck or serving them warm with a scoop of ice cream to guests after dinner. And these don’t disappoint.
Their Everyone’s Favorite Chocolate Chip Cookie Mix contains only eight ingredients: King Arthur unbleached enriched flour, semisweet chocolate chips, cane sugar, brown sugar, salt, baking soda, natural vanilla flavor, and natural molasses flavor. You mix in a stick of butter and one large egg. The fun twist: The instructions on the box include easy tweaks for making chewy, crispy, and cakey versions. So of course I had to test them all. Chewy was our family favorite, but my gang happily devoured them all.
The Essential Goodness line also includes Sour Cream Coffeecake, Cloud 9 Pancakes, Lemon Bars, Cinnamon Sugar Puff Muffins, and Vanilla Bean Cheesecake Bars. All the mixes have real ingredients like real lemon, sour cream, and vanilla bean. What they DON’T have are artificial colors or flavors, hydrogenated oils, preservatives, corn syrup, or GMOs.
I was so happy to see these mixes at my local store. Find out where you can buy Essential Goodness mixes in your area here. Even more reason to choose them: For every mix purchased, King Arthur Flour donates the costs of a meal to Feeding America, the nation’s largest organization dedicated to fighting domestic hunger. They’ve committed to donating a minimum of one million meals in the first year of sales.
Now that’s pretty sweet.
Disclosure: I was compensated for this post and received free baking mixes to try. All opinions are always my own!
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Never feel guilty about using canned beans! They’re generally better than home-cooked dry beans, because you can’t know how old your dry beans are, which makes the cooking time unpredictable; whereas the cannery knows the provenance of their beans and can cook them just right. As a result, I find canned beans are usually much better tasting, and unlike the ones I cook myself, they’re cooked to just the right tenderness. Also, canned beans go on sale while dried beans almost never be, so canned is often cheaper, as well.
Well, probably you shouldn’t feel bad about cookie mix either – I just had to speak up for canned beans. . .
Anna–Oh I definitely don’t feel guilty! 🙂 Interesting points about canned beans, good to know. I know some people are purists and don’t do canned stuff but I certainly do!
Well, I mainly mentioned it because in conversation with my mother-in-law, she frequently apologizes for using canned beans as if it’s some horrible compromise, and it makes no sense to me. The only possible drawback is higher salt content, but I’ve read experiments indicating you can reverse that by rinsing the beans.
Yeah, I found these in the store this week! Thank you, Sally! I absolutely love your posts. So sensible!
Thanks Jericha. Hope you enjoy the mixes!