Category Archives: reviews

Pete finds a new love in the All-Day Breakfast at McDonald’s

10/12/2016 Nichole

Disclaimer: This is a sponsored post for McDonald’s All Day Breakfast. Nichole was compensated for this post.

We very rarely went out to eat when I was growing up, because our very small town had only a few places where you could feed a family on a budget. But every now and we’d have a big treat, and 75 percent of the time that treat was a trip to McDonald’s.

My order at McDonald’s was always the same — a McNugget Happy Meal with “orange drink” and honey dipping sauce — until I reached that nebulous age when my mom let me order something that wasn’t on the Happy Meal menu. And that was when my allegiance to my one true McLove, the Filet-O-Fish, began. In the 20ish years since, my loyalty to the Filet-O-Fish has not wavered. Not even when they went to half a slice of cheese and stopped toasting the bun and started steaming it instead.

Until recently, I never would’ve fathomed ordering anything other than fish-sandwich-small-fry-and-a-medium-orange-drink-please. But a few weeks ago our regional McDonald’s restaurants invited me to try out their all-day breakfast offerings. The all-day breakfast does not include the Filet-O-Fish, sadly, so I had to branch out.

We visited two McDonald’s restaurants in our area to sample the all-day breakfast. The first was after Pete and I had dropped Poppy off for classes downtown, and Pete (as he generally is) was hungry. We shared the Bacon, Egg and Cheese Biscuit with a side of hash browns and some orange juice. Pete was very excited to have the opportunity to share his review of it with you. Here’s what he thought:

“McDonald’s Breakfast: Day One.

The Bacon, Egg and Cheese Biscuit was pretty good. The biscuit had a sort of crumbly texture and it was kind of buttery. I like a buttery biscuit. The egg was flat but delicious. The bacon wasn’t as crispy as I’d like it to be, but the cheese went well with it. I think the hash browns weren’t as good as some other stuff I’ve had, like french fries and sweet potatoes. I expected the texture to be more crunchy and the flavor to be more french fryish. The orange juice had the exact right flavor of oranges, and it was just delicious.”

I agree with him almost entirely. The biscuit was really flaky and buttery, which is exactly what I look for in a biscuit, and the bacon was flavorful but could’ve been crispier. I’m not a big fan of eggs, but the egg component was innocuous in combination with everything else. The hash browns were a little too salty for me, and the only thing wrong with the orange juice was that it wasn’t that fake and delicious orange drink that I just can’t quit.

At 450 calories and 24 grams of fat, the Bacon, Egg and Cheese Biscuit wouldn’t be a great everyday choice if you’re looking for a healthy breakfast. The Fruit and Maple Oatmeal, which comes in at 290 calories and 4 grams of fat, would be a much better option. But if you’re looking for a savory breakfast indulgence, the Bacon, Egg and Cheese is where it’s at.

Poppy reluctantly joined us in our second McSampling, which took place when I neglected to pack our lunches for homeschool co-op. (Thanks for saving my pun-definitely-intended bacon, McD.) Poppy is a very particular eater, and she didn’t like my plan to give her something other than a cheesy tortilla for lunch. Once I presented her with a platter[ref]One of my fellow homeschooling moms questioned the use of Styrofoam in their pancake packaging, and that did give me pause. I know they changed over to cardboard on everything else a long time ago, and I wonder why they’ve stuck with Styrofoam for the flapjacks.[/ref] of pancakes, though, she was perfectly happy. “They tasted like butter cakes,” she said after finishing them off.

Pete tried a Sausage McMuffin with Egg for his second all-day breakfast option, and he wished he had stuck with the Bacon, Egg and Cheese Biscuit. He probably would’ve been fine with the whole thing if it had the same scrambled-ish sort of egg that was on the Bacon, Egg and Cheese, but he thought the egg on the McMuffin had a “weird texture.” So he ditched the egg and added the sausage patty that his sister had rejected from her pancake platter and made a double-stacker Sausage McMuffin.

Overall, I was impressed with the items we tried from the McDonald’s all-day breakfast menu. I’m not about to denounce my allegiance to the Filet-O-Fish, but it’s possible that I’d consider a biscuit as an alternative every now and again. I know that isn’t the last McDonald’s biscuit Pete will eat, and I’m hopeful that discovering that she likes their pancakes will make McDonald’s another option on Poppy’s list of acceptable stops.

Gardening, partner campaign, Reading, reviews

How to hide a whole salad in your front yard

02/02/2016 Nichole 2 Comments

Farmer Ted is a gentleman in our circa-1955 neighborhood who has converted nearly all of the property around his home into an urban farm. He has fruit trees, a small pond and some ducks in the back yard, and a grid of raised beds covers his fenced-in front yard. He has chickens, too, and he made an ingenious wheeled coop for them that he moves from raised bed to raised bed every season. I admire the whole set-up every time I walk past it, and I almost always notice a small detail or smart feature that I’d never spotted before.

The neighbors across the street from him, however, are not so impressed. According to Farmer Ted, they’ve reported him to the city for all sorts of infractions in an effort to shut down his sustainability efforts. I haven’t discussed the matter with them, but he says they want the neighborhood to look like it did 55 years ago — with a green lawn and some nice, tidy landscaping.

So Farmer Ted wants to grow his own food on his own land, but his neighbors want the view from their living room to be more landscape than farmland. Is there a compromise to be found? Well, maybe not for Farmer Ted and his neighbors. I’m pretty sure the neighbors listed their house for sale recently, so I guess Farmer Ted won that fight.

Angela England's "Gardening Like a Ninja" It may be too late for our neighbors, but you can avoid a lot of gardening-related contention with your neighbors by becoming a Ninja Gardener.

Angela England’s new book, “Gardening Like a Ninja: A Guide to Sneaking Delicious Edibles into Your Landscape,” tells you which edible plants are most easily hidden in your traditional landscaping and shows you how to arrange them to look picture-perfect, but it’s a great resource even if you don’t have cranky neighbors to assuage. The book contains impressive lists of edible plants, their uses and their ideal growing conditions. Angela shows you how to build your edible garden from the ground up — lingonberries or strawberries down low and lavender or persimmon up top, perhaps? — which is very helpful for gardening novices like myself.

The list of edible plants in Angela’s book is as eye-opening as it is informational. You’d expect a plant like rosemary to be in such a guide, but did you know you can eat parts of a hosta? Dice that into your salad and eat it. (Or wrap it in bacon and broil it, maybe. Angela says the tender, leafy shoots are somewhat asparagus-like.)

So far we’ve kept our gardening efforts confined to the back yard, but “Gardening Like a Ninja” has me looking at the long-neglected island bed in the front yard in a new way. There are two dogwood trees and a big bush whose name I don’t recall anchoring it, and there used to be a lot of lavender around the anonymous bush. As much as I’d love to have some fruit trees, I’m not going to take down the big guys already there to make that happen. The lavender is pretty well dead, though, and everything else out there is ornamental, so I’m going to spend some quality time with “Gardening Like a Ninja” over the next few weeks and see if I can’t come up with an appetizing way to bring that sad space in the yard back to life.

Disclaimer: Angela England sent me a copy of “Gardening Like a Ninja” for review.

mother-daughter book club, Reading, reviews

Some 10-year-olds and their moms discuss “Serafina and the Black Cloak”

12/10/2015 Nichole 2 Comments

Last month we had some friends over to discuss our burgeoning book club. The girls agreed on a name for the club — the Witty Kitties — and the moms tossed around a few ideas for our inaugural book. We decided on Robert Beatty’s “Serafina and the Black Cloak,” because the author is local and the girls have all visited the Biltmore Estate, where the novel takes place.

Here’s the dust-jacket synopsis:

Serafina has never had a reason to disobey her pa and venture beyond the grounds of Biltmore Estate. There’s plenty to explore in Mr. and Mrs. Vanderbilt’s vast and oppulent home, but she must take care to never be seen. None of the rich folk upstairs know that Serafina exists; she and her pa, the estate’s maintenance man, have lived in the basement for as long as Serafina can remember. She has learned to prowl through the darkened corridors at night, to sneak and hide, using the mansion’s hidden doors and secret passageways.

But when children at the estate start disappearing, only Serafina knows the clues to follow. A terrifying man in a black cloak stalks Biltmore’s corridors at night. Following her own harrowing escape, Serafina risks everything by joining forces with Braeden Vanderbilt, the young nephew of Biltmore’s owners. Braeden and Serafina must uncover the Man in the Black Cloak’s true identity before all of the children vanish one by one.Serafina’s hunt leads her into the very forest that she has been taught to fear, where she discovers a forgotten legacy of magic. In order to save the children of Biltmore, Serafina must not only face her darkest enemy, but delve into the strange mystery of her own identity.

The “mother” contingent of our mother-daughter book club had given the girls a list of questions from the author’s “Serafina” discussion guide to consider while they read the book. The girls all diligently recorded their thoughts in their book club notebooks, which they brought with them to our meeting this week.

I was impressed with the consideration each of the girls put into the questions and with their insights about the story. They went pretty deep into some of the questions, particularly the one about whether or not it would be right to use the Black Cloak. I can’t really share their ideas about that without getting into major spoiler territory, but I can tell you the majority of them thought it would be a bad idea. My child said it might be justifiable if you really wanted a cupcake and had no other way to get one. I hope she was being facetious.

Regarding the less-revealing questions on their list, they found Serafina to be clever, brave and caring, and they agreed that the overall themes of the book were loyalty, family, trust and the internal struggle we all face between the darkness and the light. They all thought the Big Twist about the young heroine was “so, so cool,” and they can’t wait to learn more about her in the next installment of the series.

Poppy didn’t love the scary parts of “Serafina,” but she liked the book despite that. The other three girls in attendance loved it without reserve. Overall, the girls rated it 9 out of 10 kitty paws.

You can read the first chapter of “Serafina and the Black Cloak” at Robert-Beatty.com.