With zero sugar and zero calories, Whole Earth sweetener has been one of my best “food finds” in the past couple of years.

My typical weekday breakfast is plain Greek yogurt with granola and chia seeds. I prefer the taste of vanilla yogurt, but unfortunately it adds about 18 grams of sugar per serving. I eat between two and three servings since this is my entire breakfast, so the carbohydrates can really add up fast. Half of a packet of Whole Earth is enough to just give it some flavor without making it too sweet. I usually add the other half to my coffee.

Whole Earth is the only sweetener that I’ve used that doesn’t have an aftertaste. While taste is subjective, many others have commented similarly after trying it for the first time. Besides my yogurt for breakfast, I also use it to sweeten homemade lemonade and iced tea.

There are only four ingredients in Whole Earth sweetener: erythritol, stevia leaf extract, natural flavors, and monk fruit extract. I’ve tried stevia by itself in the past and didn’t care for how overly sweet it is or its strange aftertaste, but I haven’t noticed it when it’s blended with the monk fruit.

Unlike other sweeteners that come in flakes or a fine powder, Whole Earth is made into actual grains just like real sugar to give you the appearance and texture that you would expect.

The packets couldn’t make it any more convenient to keep some at work, in my car, and in my desk at work. This box of 400 packets will last me over a year. It’s a bargain at only a few cents per packet.

“Sardines?!?”, I can hear some of you saying. Unless you absolutely detest the thought of eating any fish, I’m convinced that those who say they don’t like sardines just haven’t yet tried quality ones. It’s similar to stating that you don’t like peas when you’ve never had anything other than the soggy, salty, pale canned variety. The fresh, crisp ones from the garden have escaped your notice because you never think it was possible for a pea to taste so good.

I was one of those weird kids who liked sardines. My favorites were the ones packed in yellow mustard. Later, I discovered the ones that came in hot sauce. Matiz sardines entered my life when I received some in a care package while deployed to Iraq. I gave away the “el-cheapo” sardines I had bought at the PX after I tasted what quality sardines tasted like.

Sardines are now my favorite “superfood” for a number of reasons. First, quality sardines are delicious. They are like an upscale plate of tapas that you can enjoy in your kitchen – no need to travel to a café in Valencia. Second, they’re an excellent protein source loaded with heart-healthy omega-3 fatty acids, calcium, and a ton of other vitamins and minerals. Lastly, you’d be hard-pressed to find a more convenient snack that can deliver the macro and micronutrients of a can of sardines.

There are so many different ways to eat sardines, but I prefer to eat them straight from the can as a protein-rich snack before bedtime. I’ve also had them on a salad as well as grilled while I was in Spain. As they are already cooked, you don’t have to worry about heating them to a certain temperature if you are cooking with them.

Matiz Wild Spanish Sardines are different than the cheap grocery store varieties. First, they’re huge – two to three per tin instead of five to six with the latter. This translates to more big, meaty portions of fish with fewer tails. Second, there is no substitute for quality olive oil. Cheap sardines that are packed in oil usually use low-quality soybean oil (read: unhealthy garbage that we as Americans already consume way too much of).

These are wild-caught using sustainable fishing practices in the eastern Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Spain. Sardines in general are some of the best fish we can eat from a sustainability standpoint, not to mention from a nutritional one as well.

You’re likely to try a few new varieties for the first time with this multi-pack. There are four cans of the traditional sardines in Spanish olive oil, two of spicy piri piri pepper (my personal favorite), two of lemon essence, and two cans of smaller sardines called sardinillas with sweet piquillo peppers.

I like hot things, but I want to still be able to taste my food through the heat. Tapatío is my favorite hot sauce because of how it balances flavor with heat. When my wife and I go out for Mexican, I usually ask for a side of the house hot sauce as well as a bottle of Tapatío. About half of the time, I actually prefer the Tapatío.

Apart from putting it on Mexican food, burgers, and pizza, I like to add a little to my clam chowder.

I discovered Tapatío when a fellow Marine received a bottle in a care package while we were deployed to Iraq. Lunch was usually an MRE. Some were better than others, however there weren’t any entrees that couldn’t be saved with the addition of some good hot sauce. Some MREs contained miniature plastic bottles (about an inch high) of Tabasco sauce in the plastic-wrapped cutlerty kit, but oddly enough they had usually already evaporated.

Everyone perceives spicy flavors differently, but I would describe the taste as moderately spicy with very little vinegar taste. Most “boutique” hot sauces I’ve tried use far almost always go overboard on the heat and also add too much vinegar, which in my opinion, results in a bitter finished product with flavor that you can’t actually taste.

If you live in a medium-size town to a large city, you shouldn’t have any problem finding it somewhere, but you can save quite a bit buying the multi-packs on Amazon. If you really go through it, you can order a 12-pack of the larger 10-oz. bottles (these are double the normal size that are included in the 3-pack or when you buy individual bottles) and pay about $2 a bottle. Hot sauce keeps far longer than its printed expiration date.

My high school years overlapped with Surge’s 1997-2003 existence. A quality Friday night involved my friends and me ordering pizza and drinking this bold green nectar of the gods while we played multiplayer Goldeneye on N64.

Coca-Cola made some minor changes to the formula, but it tastes exactly like I remember. This probably isn’t something you order if you didn’t grow up with it, but for the uninitiated, it’s a bright green citrus soda that is like a cross between Mountain Dew and Mello Yello but with a flavor that is as sweet as it is sour. The caffeine content is comparable to other citrus sodas.

They did bring Surge back in single 16 oz. cans for sale in convenience stores several years ago, but it has since disappeared again from retail shelves, however it is available in Burger King’s Coca-Cola Freestyle fountain machines.

It’s certainly more pricey than it was back in the day even when you adjust for inflation, but keep in mind that they’re shipping a pretty heavy package for free if you have Prime.

I discovered my love for quality cheese several years ago the first time I went to Spain with our school’s exchange.

Trying new cheeses is one of my favorite things to do when I go to Costco. Stored properly, most cheeses will last at least a month in your refrigerator after you open them. I keep an assortment of cheeses in our garage refrigerator to put out when we have guests. Before I discovered these cheese storage bags, I usually only had one block of choice on hand at a time and felt rushed to eat it, as it went bad after about a week because I was storing it improperly.

Many people make the mistake of storing cheese in a plastic ziploc bag. This is the worst thing you can do, as cheese will rapidly begin to mold if it can’t breathe.

The Formaticum cheese storage bag is a professional cheese storage solution. Each bag measures 6.25″ x 11″ and is large enough for most wedges or blocks sold in grocery stores. There are XX spaces per bag for labeling the name of the cheese, the date, and a nice diagram that lets you circle the type of animal that produced the cheese.

You can fold over the tops to close them and the bag doesn’t fall apart.

The manufacturer suggests using a separate bag for each variety of cheese, as the inner liner can retain trace odors from cheeses previously stored. In other words, don’t store your new block of swiss in a bag that previously contained blue cheese.

These seem pricey considering that there are only 15 per box, but keep in mind that they can be reused several times. I also believe these will save you money in the long run by reducing the amount of cheese that you end up throwing out. You could forget about a piece of cheese you placed in one of these bags and it would still be fine several weeks later.

These are also ideal for storing charcuterie. I recommend keeping a separate bag or two for storing meats so that the meat doesn’t take in any residual flavors or odors from cheese that was previously stored in the same bag.

I have no love for Chicago style pizza – the Windy City’s take on hot dogs is another story. Two of the most elusive ingredients required to make an authentic Chicago dog are sport peppers and the neon green relish. I have never seen either of these in any grocery store in Columbus, OH.

I used to get my quarterly fix at Sonic’s, but unfortunately they discontinued the Chicago dog a few years back. Specialty hot dog shops usually sell them, but the closest one is almost 40 miles from where I live.

Vienna is like the Heinz of ketchup when it comes to hot dogs and hot dog condiments. Regular relish and other types of peppers just don’t cut it. I would compare it to eating a hot dog rolled up in a piece of white bread instead of a hot dog bun.

The peppers were surprisingly crunchy — this is coming from a pepper enthusiast who grows several varieties commercially as a market gardener.

These 12-ounce jars will last you awhile if you’re a casual consumer. Here is a link for a 4-pack of the same sport peppers and a 4-pack of the neon green relish. These are about half the price of buying the combo relish/pepper pack. This is the way to go if you make this style of hot dogs regularly and don’t mind storing them in your food preps, as the jars will keep unopened for several years.

Click here to see my write-up for how to make the perfect Chicago style hot dog.