Pamela’s is a virtual bakery of gluten-free products. There are ready-to-eat cookies and cheesecakes, plus mixes to make bread, cornbread, brownies and pancakes (we love the cornbread and brownies, and will soon be making the bread and pancakes).

• THE PRIZE: One winner will enjoy a gift bag of Pamela’s Products: Baking & Pancake Mix, Bread Mix, Brownie Mix and Cornbread Mix; Chunky Chocolate Chip cookies, Simplebites and Spicy Ginger or Dark Chocolate Chocolate Chunk cookies; a Pamela’s baseball cap and tee shirt; and measuring cups and measuring spoons. Don the clothing and munch on the pre-made goodies while you tackle the mixes in the kitchen!
• To Enter This Gourmet Giveaway: Go to the box at the bottom of our Gluten-Free Section and enter your email address for the prize drawing. This contest closes on Monday, June 7th at noon, Eastern Time. Good luck!
• To learn more about Pamela’s, or to enter their Annual Recipe Contest, visit PamelasProducts.com.

One lucky winner will receive a large gift
bag of cookies, mixes, and kitchen
goodies. Photo by Katharine Pollak | THE NIBBLE.

Code Blue! Stat! Photo courtesy Code Blue.

That’s the term used by hospitals for patients requiring immediate resuscitation. And it’s also the name of a sports drink—or “recovery drink,” as the makers of Code Blue have cleverly named it.

Many drinks can supply hydration, but Code Blue promises essential fluids and nutrients that replenish and revive.

To revitalize muscles, it claims three times the electrolyte level of the leading sports drink and twice as many vitamins and minerals. It contains additional detoxifiers, replenishers and inflammation-reducers that leading brands don’t have.

Code Blue tastes to us like pineapple with a hit of vanilla—but it’s definitely in the category an energy drink, not an enhanced pineapple juice drink. An eight-ounce can is 60 calories. The only caveat is that its 375mg of sodium is 15% of one’s Daily Value.

And the pet peeve is that the Nutrition Facts panel claims that each little can contains 1.5 servings—a game played by manufacturers to keep the per-serving counts down for marketing purposes.

Has anyone ever drunk a partial can (or eaten 2/3 of a granola bar, or other fraction of what looks like a single-serve portion)? Manufacturers of America: Get real!

Evolve kefir drinks are the latter—which makes it very easy to consume vast quantities of beneficial probiotic bacteria. Probiotics help to promote digestive health and enhance the immune system; while smoothies help to soothe the soul.

Learn all about kefir in our review of Evolve Kefir. The line is so delicious, we’ve given up milkshakes and malteds to focus on its delicious fruit flavors. The products are certified OU(D) kosher.

By the way:

• Many lactose intolerant people can enjoy kefir, as long as it is raw and not cooked. Cooking destroys the enzymes that make the product so digestible.

• Kefir is not “drinkable yogurt.” Although it is a cultured milk product like yogurt, with a similar tanginess, the “recipe” is different. Yogurt can be made with as few as two bacteria cultures and probiotic yogurt with another two probiotic cultures. Kefir is a complex colony of many more cultures, as you’ll learn in the review.

See our favorite yogurt products, plus recipes, in our Yogurt Section.

Plain kefir garnished with strawberries and
mint. Photo by Katharine Pollak | THE NIBBLE.

Yogurt parfait with summer fruits. Photo
EatCaliforniaFruit.com.

Celebrate summer by switching to summer fruits: delicious peaches, plums and nectarines from California—available for the next three-to-four months.

You can enjoy this recipe in a bowl or other vessel, but a parfait glass or glass mug makes it look even yummier.

Ingredients Per Serving
• 1 cup fresh California peaches, plums or nectarines, sliced
• 1/2 cup of your favorite low-fat or fat-free yogurt (we like Greek yogurt)
• 1/2 cup granola or 1 ounce coarsely-chopped nuts

Preparation
1. Place half of the fruit in the bottom of a parfait glass or other dish.
2. Top with half of the yogurt and half of the granola. Repeat.
3. Serve immediately.

Check out our favorite yogurt brands.

If you’re Bethenny Frankel, one of the Real Housewives Of New York (and a natural foods chef), you formulate a lower-calorie Margarita in an episode of your reality series. Then, when the most-asked quesiton on the entire Bravo website is “How to make a Skinny Girl Margarita,” you bottle it and sell it (find locations).

The open-and-serve bottled Margarita is all natural, made of 100% blue agave tequila, flavored with lime juice and sweetened with lower-glycemic agave syrup.

While some “slenderized foods” can pass for almost the real thing (SkimPlus milk, nonfat Greek yogurt and sugar-free ice cream are examples), here you know you’re drinking a Margarita Lite.

Nevertheless, many dieters will enjoy saving 75% of the calories, and Ms. Frankel is to be congratulated for providing a lower-calorie alternative to America’s most popular cocktail.

While we don’t like sugary-sweet drinks, to us, Skinnygirl Margarita is missing a bit of sweetness (although the more we drank it and became accustomed to it, the more we enjoyed it).

So we experimented and found ways to improve it!

Save 75% of Margarita calories. Photo
courtesy SkinnyGirlCocktails.com.

• Next we tried adding more agave syrup. Ms. Frankel might have done the same, but for the desire to keep the cocktail to 100 calories/serving. Agave is a great, low-glycemic sweetener (it has an average glycemic index of 32, half that of sugar). While agave has the same calories as sugar (about 17 calories/teaspoon), it is 1.5 times sweeter—so your calories buy you more. You can spare it: Add another teaspoon of agave to Skinnygirl.

• Finally, we rimmed the glass with sea salt (kosher salt is fine, too). Bingo!

Feel free to add a lime wedge or lime wheel as a garnish. It’s not typical with Margaritas (the salt rim is); but we like it as a virtually calorie-free “extra” to chew on.