CBS San Francisco Most Valuable Blogger

This morning I received an email saying that I’ve been named as a Finalist for this year’s CBS San Francisco’s Most Valuable Blogger award in the Dining/Entertainment category!!! It was such an unexpected wonderful surprise and both my husband and I are still shocked!

My Bay Area fans and readers of Just One Cookbook, THANK YOU SO MUCH!!! I feel really honored to be selected and I wish that I can thank each one of you in person for being part of my blog life.

The voting will end on September 9th, 2011 and if you enjoy my blog, would you please cast your vote for me? It’s just one click. You can support me by clicking on the badge below and click on Just One Cookbook. Thank you!

This month instead of reviewing on restaurants around SF Bay Area and beyond, we decided to do a product review on a new snack called cruncha ma me. The company is based in Berkeley and we wanted to support local Bay Area companies, so here’s the review from my husband Shen.

Dear readers, welcome to the first product review on Just One Cookbook. We were lucky to be selected by Cruncha Ma-Me a few weeks ago as taste testers (we received these for free). As parents, Nami and I are always looking for healthy snacks for our children and ourselves. If you look at ingredients on cookies boxes and other snacks in grocery stores, oftentimes half of them sound like they belong in a “chemistry lab” rather than our stomach. For Cruncha Ma-Me, the ingredients are pretty straight forward, just edamame, veggie, sea salt, and all-natural yeast extract.

Japanese restaurants often serve edamame as an appetizer, and personally, my favorite one is the spicy garlic soy edamame from Ozumo’s in San Francisco. There’s something addictive about popping the beans out of their shell one after another into your mouth. In the sample packages provided to us, one is just plain edamame and the other one was a veggie medley. The veggie medley contained corn and bell pepper in addition to the edamame. The texture was flaky with a crunchy core, and since they were freeze dried the edamame and veggie were very light. What I really liked was that the edamame was crunchy but yet you can still taste the flavor. The sea salt did not overpower the natural flavor of the beans. On the other hand, the sea salt was a bit on the saltier side for me and I wish they used just slightly less. The veggie medley had similar texture crunchy but the flavors were slightly sweeter due to the corn and bell pepper.

We did enjoy both snacks but the downside to eating freeze dried snack is that they make your mouth dry. Luckily we had some icy cold green tea in the fridge and it went perfectly with Cruncha Ma-Me. I did not love the snack but for health reasons, we would definitely pick this up in a supermarket for my kids and ourselves as a healthy alternative to chocolate covered cookies.