Crunchy Cookie Bars. Cookies & Snickers, Cookies & M&M's, Cookies & Twix, and Cookies & Milky Way. $2.99 per 11- or 12-ounce box containing 10 bars.
Bonnie: These new M&M/Mars Crunchy Cookie Bars are a cross between a dry cookie and an unrecognizable candy bar. In other words, they're horrid. The only one tasting anything like its namesake is the Snickers variety, and that's with a large stretch of the imagination (prompted by the label's logo). What were they thinking? I'm guessing this is M&M's attempt to make candy less fattening. But these are just wasted calories.
Carolyn: Crunchy Cookie Bars are your favorite M&M/Mars-brand candy atop a cheap-tasting crunchy vanilla cookie. This is yet another way that M&M/Mars has devised to get its products into the homes of parents who won't let in plain candy bars. (The other way is this company's Kudos granola bars.) The Twix one also tasted like its namesake candy bar, Bonnie. But my enjoyment of all these great candies was greatly diminished by the poor-quality cookie.
Nestle NesQuik Very Vanilla Milk. $1.29 per 16-ounce bottle.
Bonnie: My initial reaction to this NesQuik Very Vanilla Milk was that it was cloyingly sweet and, in terms of sugar, not much better than a can of Coke or Pepsi.
Then I remembered a study I'd read in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association from researchers at the University of Vermont. They found that teenagers who drank flavored milk had a higher calcium intake and a lower soft drink and fruit juice intake. The calcium benefit is even better in the case of teens who drink Very Vanilla because it's calcium-fortified, providing 40 percent of the recommended calcium in just half a container. That's paramount because nearly nine out of 10 teenage girls and seven out of 10 teenage boys don't get the calcium they need.
Make no bones about it, our kids aren't getting enough calcium. (Actually not many of us are.) That's why I recommend NesQuik over Coke, Pepsi, Hi-C or Hawaiian Punch any day.
Carolyn: In recent years, supermarket dairy cases have been flooded with flavored milks, including such exotica as banana and cookies 'n' cream. It's only now that anyone's gotten around to the obvious and popular vanilla flavor.
NesQuik Very Vanilla Milk is thicker than regular milk you flavor yourself. In fact, it's more like a vanilla milk shake than vanilla milk.
Louis Rich Dinner Starters. Chicken Alfredo, Four Cheese & Chicken, Chicken Teriyaki, and Sweet & Sour Chicken. $3.99 per 12.8- to 13.6-ounce package.
Bonnie: Dinner Starter is the right name for this new convenience product from Louis Rich. It contains just chicken and a sauce. To turn it into a meal, you have to prepare pasta or rice and add two cups of vegetables, as suggested in the "Great Additions" section of the box directions. Louis Rich also suggests serving the Four Cheese variety with a green salad. I think all of these starters could use one.
Dinner Starters bases its nutrition facts on three servings per box, which is realistic only if you add all of these vegetables. If not, two servings would be more realistic. In that case, you'd be eating about 3 1/2 ounces of chicken and way too much sauce. The Alfredo and the Four Cheese provide more than half the suggested daily limit for fat and almost all of the daily limit for saturated fat; the Teriyaki pushes the daily ceiling for sodium. The Sweet and Sour is the lowest in fats and sodium, but it contains a hefty 10 teaspoons of sugar.
Carolyn: Louis Rich Dinner Starters are the latest step in the evolution of meal kits. Notice I said evolution rather than progression or perfection.
Although it takes less time to heat these than it does to heat frozen meal kits, it will still take you 20 minutes to cook the rice or pasta that these kits don't provide. The chicken is unduly salty and processed-tasting. The Alfredo and the Sweet and Sour are the best of the only-OK sauces, but they taste even better with some vegetables they don't contain.
Bonnie Tandy Leblang is a registered dietitian and professional speaker. Carolyn Wyman is a junk-food fanatic and author of "Jell-O: A Biography" (Harvest/Harcourt). Each week they critique three new food items. © Universal Press Syndicate