Bertolli Classic Risotto Review and Giveaway - Closed!

Bertolli Risotto Winner is.....

Evelyn Damptey!! 

Congrats Evelyn, I'll be contacting you to send you the coupons for Free Bertolli Risotto!  They are sooooooo good, I hop eyou enjoy them as much as my family does.  They have become a staple in our meal rotation now!



With the weather already starting to cool down here in my part of the country, it's been a great time to start reintroducing soups and heartier foods back into our dinner menu.  Luckily I have had some help from Bertolli!  Their Meal Soups are wonderfully warm and filling and make a quick and easy meal option for my family on busy nights.

 

Having said that, my boys need variety.  Man cannot live on meal soups alone.  Which is why Bertolli is continuing to expand it's line of frozen meal options to include some SERIOUSLY AMAZING risottos.

 

 

 

I love risotto, but it really is a LOT of work to make, which is why I have only ever made it one time and it didn't really turn out all that great.  I don't have the kind of patience it takes to do risotto the right way so it comes out creamy and delicious.  Bertolli Classic Risotto was made for people like me. 

 

It's full of high quality veggies and meats and it only takes about 12 minutes, from start to finish, to cook.  It comes out of the bag looking like this:

 

 

 

After 12 minutes and a few stirs, it looks like this: 

 

 

 

My family was equally divided between the Roasted Chicken and the Garlic Shrimp flavors.  I absolutely adored the Bertolli Roasted Chicken Risotto, which was full of asparagus, portabello mushrooms, big chunks of roasted chicken, all mixed with italian rice in a creamy parmesan sauce.  

 

You guys know by now that I kind of have some weird texture issues when it comes to food.  I hate mushy veggies so I'm always a little skeptical about the vegetables in frozen meals, but found the asparagus to be perfectly cooked.  The rice wasn't mushy eather.  It still has a nice "tooth" to it, even after cooking in the sauce.  The whole dish had a nice earthy flavor from the mushrooms and the chicken was moist and flavorful. 

 

My boys both loved the Bertolli Garlic Shrimp Risotto.  It was chock full of italian rice and garlic shrimp with decent size chunks of zucchini, yellow squash and red peppers in a white wine cream sauce. Again, none of the veggies were overcooked, which is actually pretty amazing, considering that it doesn't take much to overcook squash.  The Garlic Shrimp Risotto had more of a garden fresh taste to it.  The red peppers really livened up the dish.  And there was plenty of shrimp so no one felt like they got gypped with the seafood. 

 

The only problem I had at all with cooking the risottos was that regulating the heat on my electric stove so that the rice didn't stick to the bottom of the pan (I really miss my gas stove).  I turned my head for just a minute and when I got back to my pots, the Garlic Shrimp Risotto had begun to stick to the bottom of the pan, but I caught it in time to salvage the dish so no harm was done.

 

I am excited to find more quick and easy options for family dinner time.  Bertolli offers a wide variety of frozen options now that give busy moms some great options for quick, easy and healthy meals. 

 

Wanna Win Bertolli Classic Risotto? Bertolli has graciously offered two coupons for free Bertolli Classic Risottos to one of my readers!! Go check out the Bertolli website and then leave a comment telling us which Risotto you wat to try first. 

Want extra entries? Do any of these and leave a comment with links to your posts, tweets or status updates:

• Follow my blog
• Tweet about the contest
• Like the Bertolli Facebook Page
• Post a link to this giveaway as your status update on Facebook
• Mention the giveaway on your blog

Contest will end on October 30th at 12 midnight MST. Winner will be chosen by random drawing using Random.org and notified if chosen. Please make sure to leave your email so I can get in touch with you if you win! Thanks for reading and good luck!

 

***Disclosure - Bertolli provided me with products to help facilitate this review. However, the honest opinions shared on this review are my own.**

Suburban Haiku: Boys to Men Review and Giveaway

Winner Update:  I decided to give BOTH of the contest entrants a copy of Peyton's Suburban Haiku: Boys to Men!  Congrats to Miss Jenno and NoraRuth!!  Thanks for sharing your boymom haikus with me and my readers and thanks to Peyton Price for inspiring me to live a more full life!



About a week and a half before Mother's Day, mother, haiku writer and humorist Peyton Price ran across my blog and asked if I would be interested in talking about her newest book, Suburban Haiku: Boys to Men.  After reading the title, it was completely obvious that both Peyton and the book are perfect compliments to the I Am Boymom blog, so how could I say no!?  Three haikus in I was hooked.

I'm not gonna give too much away about the book, other than to say it is an insightful, touching and truly hilarious view of raising boys from a mom's perspective, written in 3 line, 17 syllable haikus.  From the first haiku to the last, Peyton draws us in to her parenting world, using humor and the familiar 5-7-5 rhythm to chronicle the lives of her family.  The end result is a surprisingly funny and tender account of a mom watching her boys grow into men.

So two things happened to me after I read Suburban Haikus: Boys to Men.  First, I remembered what I already knew but tend to forget in the flurry of daily family life:   I'm not the only mom who doesn't have perfect kids.  Knowing that there are other moms out there struggling to teach their kids how to be happy, successful adults helps me not beat myself up on the days when pre-teen emotions and hormones are raging and I can't seem to get things under control.

The second thing that happened is that I recognized something has been missing in my life.  When I started this blog, it was because I needed a way to process my thoughts and feelings about being a mom to two boys who challenge me on a daily basis to be a better person. We have been in survival mode for so long now that I lost sight of my purpose for recording our journey.  I remembered, after reading Peyton's haikus, that I can create memories with my words and that by doing so, I can help my boys find meaning in their own lives when they read about themselves through their mother's eyes.  

I am in awe of women like Peyton Price, who find ways to use their talents to bring joy and happiness to their own lives while bettering the lives of their families.  Suburban Haiku: Boys to Men is a wonderful reminder that simple observations can become poignant memories that bind our children to us forever.

I so cannot wait to read some of Peyton's other haiku books!  Are you feeling the same way?  Wanna win a copy of Suburban Haiku: Boys to Men for yourself?  Peyton Price has generously offered to give an ebook version of the book to one of my readers!!  You can get either the Nook or Kindle version, all you have to do is share a quick parenting haiku in the comments.  I'll leave the first haiku comment to get you all started.  Easy peasy, right?  Then for extra entries you can do one of the following:

• Follow my blog if you are a new reader
• Like Suburban Haiku on Facebook
• Follow Suburban Haiku on Twitter
• Follow I Am Boymom on Twitter
• Check out Suburban Haiku website and tell me what other Peyton Price book you might like

The Deets:  Contest will end on May 31, 2012  @ 12 PM MST.  Winner will be chosen in random drawing or by Random.org the following week and winner will be notified by email.  Good luck and thanks for stopping by!  vvvvvv Now on to the haikus! vvvvvvv 

Goalforit Review

Well, here we are...the beginning of a New Year.  As usual, I am procrastinating having my yearly internal debate about what goals to set for myself and my family so we can feel like we are making progress.  I used to be way more goal-oriented than I am.  Something about adding kids to the equation really threw me off my game and in the 12 years since the first one was born, I haven't fully regained my footing when it comes to planning, goal-setting and achieving life dreams.  So I am grateful for the opportunity to review tools and programs that help me as I search for ways to get on more solid ground when it comes to training my children and retraining myself to set goals in order to achieve the successes we seek in life. 

Goalforit is a great new online resource that provides a variety of free solutions for personal success that are easy to use and can help bring more focus, balance and fulfillment into everyday living.  Did I say FREE?  YES!!  I did!!  Goalforit is free and the sign-up process takes about 30 seconds, so I was liking the program right from the start.  Free and Easy?  How often does that combination come up in life?!?  Okay...back to the review...

The program allows users to create personalized charts to help track their progress in various areas of their lives. For example, my oldest son has decided that he wants to work on being healthier this year.  So we sat down and made a chart that would help him see what he needs to work on each day to develop healthy habits.  It looks like this:

He can check his own progress and we set it up with a daily email reminder so that if either one of us forgets to check the chart ( with his ADD and my hormonally induced "brain fog" we need all the help we can get!) we will get a gentle cyber nudge to keep us on track. 

I also set up a Chore Chart for Little Man.  The chore charts are customizable so you can create your own chores that aren't already listed on the site and there are fun stickers the kids can use to check off the chores they've done.  Again, parents can set up email reminders or print the charts out so kids have a visual reminder. 

The Chore Chart can help teach kids, tweens & teens many important lessons, including:

• Responsibility; A Chore Chart is an ideal way to help your kids feel like they are making a contribution to their family by doing their part around the house.
• Understanding right from wrong; Setting behavior goals is an important way to help children strengthen their character and judgment.
• Healthy Habits; Teaching good habits involving nutrition and physical activity are the cornerstone of prevent obesity in children and adolescents.
• Money Matters; The optional point system teaches children three important lessons for managing money; earning, spending and saving.

A unique feature that Goalforit has incorporated into its program is the ability to include friends and family in your plans through the use of the community settings  Simply add the people you want to be able to view your progress and they can check in to see how you are doing and help cheer you on as you work toward your goals.  I can see where this would be a great tool to help  a person stay motivated with really big challenges, like weight loss or training for a marathon.  Nothing like accountability and a cheering section to help spur you on when you are feeling a little less than positive, right?!  If you're doing a group thing that includes friends and family in different locations you can all post your progress right to your Facebook pages to keep everybody updated and motivated. 

Overall I think that Goalforit is a great online tool. And since it doesn't cost anything to try, my family and I will be using it over the next few months to try to bring some order and balance to our otherwise chaotic lives.  Here's to a successful year of reaching our goals!

**Disclosure: This is a compensated post, written on behalf of GoalForIt. However, I am never under any obligation to write a positive review, and the opinions posted here are always mine and mine alone.**    

Dentyne Gum Review and Giveaway!

You might remember me mentioning last year that we chew a lot of gum in our family.  My husband is seriously freakish about his breath, which I guess is a good thing, because he eats a lot of garlic and onions and spicy things which could leave a really bad impression on someone important if my husband inadvertently breathed on them after a chips and salsa binge.  He chews so much Dentyne Arctic Chill that he started buying the little bottles of gum that fit in your cup holder.  You know...like these:

Only without the killer graphics. Until NOW!  Did you notice the awesome artwork on this particular bottle of Dentyne?  Pretty cool, yes?  Dentyne has partnered with artist Anthony Yankovic to introduce some premium badge edition bottles.  They come in twelve bold, badgy, limited edition designs for three flavors—Peppermint, Spearmint and Arctic Chill™.  Anthony previously produced limited edition designs for trend and badge-driven categories like Apparel, Skateboard and Snowboards.  Here's a link to Mr. Yankovic's website where you can peruse more of his work!

I love the edgy, eclectic look of the artwork.  There are so many interesting little details on each label that with 12 different label designs, a person could get seriously engrossed in Anthony Yankovic's artwork while chewing the gum!  And let's be honest...the reason most of us chew gum is to enhance our sociability factor by ensuring our breath is as fresh as it can be!  Or as Dentyne says:

Dentyne® is a must-have socializing essential that allows socially addicted consumers to practice safe breath for the confidence to make a close connection instantly.

The fun packaging?  Well that's an amazing bonus.  Here's how I'm using my container of Spearmint with the Anthony Yankovic label:

That last picture?  Showing all the artwork?  Took me 15 minutes to balance the bottle of gum on my steering wheel to get this cool shot.  I did it while I was waiting for my kids to get out of school.  I do these things for you, my loyal readers. You're welcome.

The lady in the car next to me watched me taking pictures of my Dentyne Gum Bottle for awhile before she finally asked what I was doing.  I told her all about the great product and the amazing limited edition artwork labels.  She knew all about Anthony Yankovic!  Apparently her son is a skater and has seen some of Mr. Yankovic's stuff on some high end skateboards.  I was really impressed by her hipness so I gave her some gum.  And I told her how she could win 3 Dentyne premium badge edition bottles herself, by entering my blog contest.  You know what she did?  She ran immediately to her car and peeled out of the parking lot before she even picked up her son to enter the giveaway.  Okay, I exaggerate...she actually just walked with me to the school gate to wait for our kids.  But she did write down my blog address so she could enter when she got home.   

 

What, what?  Yeah, I said it!  You can win 3 limited edition Anthony Yankovic Dentyne Bottles for yourself!  All you have to do is leave a comment telling me where you would put your Anthony Yankovick Dentyne Gum Bottle or tell me who you would share it with.  Contest is open to US residents only and will end on February 12th at 12 midnight PST.  

Want extra entries?  

• 
  
  Twitter this contest
• 
  
  Post a link to the contest on Facebook
• 
  
  Blog about this contest!
• 
  
  Add this contest link to a Mr. Linky on a giveaway site (leave a comment with the name of the site!) 

Leave me separate comments for each entry so I can make sure you get counted for each one!  Good luck and thanks for stopping by!

**I did not receive monetary compensation for this post.  Dentyne did supply products for me to sample in order to facilitate this review.

PR OK

I Am Boymom is PR Friendly! Are you a PR representative for products? A creative person who hand crafts great stuff? Maybe an entrepenuer looking for new and innovative ways to promote your product? Please contact me!

I promise to give an honest opinion about any product I receive, that includes the good AND the bad. I will not mislead my readers. If a product does not work properly, I will say so. I do go out of my way, however to find as many positive aspects as possible about the product and I don't look forward to giving negative reviews, so as long as you have a decent product and can be realisitc about hearing an honest opinion, we should be able to work together.

If you have something I can give away to my readers, even better! I Am Boymom readers LOVE free things! I am more than happy to help get your product out in front of the masses!

Boymom welcomes Press Releases, but can not promise I will promote your item if it is not something I can test myself.

Because this is a family site, I ask that your product be family friendly.

Okay...there's all the preliminary business talk. Done and out of the way. Ready to get started? Send me an email via my Contact Page and we'll discuss your ideas in detail.

By the way...While Boymom does love her some comment love, I don't love comments posted soley to promote products and reserve the right to delete such comments. If you are gonna take the time to stop by and leave a comment, at least comment on what I wrote before you promote yourself for free on my blog! Deal?