So even though being organic is really important to me, it can be f-ing expensive!!

The best tip I can give you to save money is to buy frozen!

Make yourself a smoothie in the morning with Frozen raspberries, strawberries, blueberries, and grass fed milk organic milk.

Use frozen veggies for stir fry or chilli! They get a lil soggier than fresh veggies but chances are they’re collected when they’re at the peak of their season meaning more vitamins for you and more money in your wallet!!

Just a tip from the Smartypantiest!!

Made this recipe myself. It was seriously amazingggggggggg!

1/4 Cup Olive Oil

1/8 Cup White Wine Vinegar

1/8 Cup White Balsamic Vinegar

1 Tablespoon of Lemon Juice

2 Handfulls of Chopped Basil (Chopped Fine)

Salt and Pepper to Your Liking. I like lots of pepper.

5 Big Heirloom Tomatoes (or any tomato really)

Handfull of Chopped Onion

Mix dressing together. Pour over veggies and marinate in fridge for at least 30 minutes.

Yummmmmmmmmm!

It’s no secret that Smartypanties thinks that organic is super important for any doll these days. But don’t take my unqualified word for it. Hit up this article on the Mayo Clinic website to get hte facts!

Please visit Rachel Ray if you’re like me and can’t bear giving up your favorite cheesy and creamy dishes for a diet. This cheese sauce is delectable!

Click here for the recipe!

You lose the calories but not the taste! The secret ingredient is evaporated skim milk!

Let us know what you think in the comments!

Have we mentioned how obsessed we are with Rachel Ray? We just love her! One of the perks of our job is monitoring children’s advertising, which leaves us with a DVR and TV in our office. Being the Smartypanties that we are, we decided to start DVR-ing Rachel Ray and watching her as we eat lunch. We’ve seriously started to learn to actually cook! It’s fantastic.

I digress. There was this dude on her show, David Zinczenko, Editor of Men’s Health magazine who just came out with a new book called Eat This Not That: Supermarket Survival Guide. The book helps you navigate the supermarket and teaches you tricks and pitfalls of the food manufacturers.  For instance, did you know that Fat Free usually just means added sugar and salt. I mean, to quote RR, if you eat 1200 calories of Fat Free, you’re still going to be the size of a house! Touche RR, Touche.

He discussed some good tricks on the show we thought we’d share:

Be on the lookout for high fructose corn syrup–it’s in everything. It’s just like sugar. It’s a little creep that may be causing you to gain weight.

Ignore buzzwords on packaging like “All Natural,” “Fat Free” and their cousins. It’s a nutritional fakeout. Just go straight to the nutrition label. Basically like if you’re purchasing a loaf of bread–it should have 6-7 ingredients. Not 50! You should also aim for 3 grams of fiber per every 100 calories.

I’m definitely going to check out this book. Let us know if you already have in the comments!

PS-WE Heart you Rachel Ray! Have an EVOO filled holiday!

Hi Girls! So, as I mentioned last week I signed up for MyBlogSpark, a service through General Mills that lets bloggers try out new products and share the results with their readers. Yesterday I had the opp to taste Yoplait’s Fiber One Yogurt. I’ve never been the biggest yogurt person so I was surprised to find that I liked it. I tried 2 flavors–Strawberry and Key Lime Pie. The Key Lime was shockingly great. I wasn’t the biggest fan of the Strawberry. It has fake sweetener in it (aspartame), which personally I’m not the biggest fan of. I prefer regular sugar, however, that being said, for a diet these would be great snacks due to the fact that they are only 50 calories and fat free. Did I mention they have 5 grams of fiber in one cup? That’s 20% your daily recommended value of fiber. Not bad for a little snack.

Did anyone see the SNL video imitating the Activia commercial? So funny…

PS- We received the Yogurt as well as the Flip Video camera for free in order to make this post. As always we like to be up front with you girls. It never taints our opinion but just so you know all the facts, there you have them. And get ready for many more posts where I act like a total dork on camera thanks to this snazzy cam!

In sum, I’d buy the Key Lime again, probably not the Strawberry.

So, speaking of disclosing when we get products for free…

We joined a service called MyBlogSpark.com, which sends bloggers new products so that we can review them and let our readers know what we think. So, as always, just want to let y’all know we got this product for free. I mean, you know the drill at this point, it’s the lawyer in us beating the disclosure over the head.And we don’t have to write about the products but I thought my girls can always use a healthy snack idea!

We’re going to try and keep our reviews concise and to the point from now on so here goes nothing…

These nut clusters are a yummy alternative to snacking on plain ol’ granola, which is usually low in protein. Here because of the nuts you get 4g of protein per serving (4.5 servings in a bag). They’re salty and sweet at the same time. Our fave one was the cashews, but go figure that’s one of our fave nuts.

As we’ve said in the past, we’ve been trying to eat less sugar after reading Anti-Cancer. These are surprisingly low in sugar (~8g per serving), which is less than like a sugary kid cereal (which can run at around ~14g/serving). I don’t know if I’d categorize these as a breakfast food, more of like a much healthier alternative to a cookie but something that’ll satisfy your sweet-tooth.

And the Jury says: I’d definitely purchase these on my own. They’re a good thing to keep at your desk when you feel like raiding the office candy bowl. As we’ve mentioned, it’s not good to eat candy between meals because the sugar levels spike your insulin (the perfect environ for cancer to flourish) so we think these are definitely a better alternative. I mean what do we know? We’re not doctors (remember that! but we do take health seriously!)