Foodie Penpals - March 2013 #foodiepenpals

Coconut donut thing, chocolate chip cookie, pumpkin bread muffin thing, mystery bread

This month's Foodie Penpal was super thoughtful, and found me stuff at a local bakery - Babycakes NYC - everything is vegan and gluten-free, and of course, no fake stuff! Plus they deliver nationally, and have cookbooks and stuff to boot!
She thoughtfully sent an email when my package was shipped, and I tooled around for a while, waiting. La la la... At some point, I got some little orange slips in my mail box, about shipments I wasn't home for needing my signature. Ooo fun! Maybe I'll go tomorrow... tra la la... And then, like, a week passed. Where is my Penpal package? Huh... Oops. My packages! So I go pick them up... one is from my Foodie Penpal! Woop! Except that one of the items didn't survive. Luckily they were all individually sealed. The mystery bread, which may have been pumpkin or may have been some kind of cranberry bread, was riddled with mold. Waaaaah! The world will never know what flavor it really was! I'm still kicking myself over that! DOH!
But the rest of the items were juuuuust fine, if a little smooshed.

Coconut donut thing: YUM! Mama didn't even TELL the kids about that one! I nommed that bad boy down  after-hours!
Chocolate Chip Cookie: Good stuff! Still all intact and crunchy and perfect. The girls and I split that as an after-school treat.
Pumpkin Muffin Thing: This had gotten smooshed and deformed, but no one cared. I had piled the girls into the car a little early to nab my packages on the way to Z's afternoon preschool, since the Post Office is right in between, and the lines are longer after school. So Z was insatiably curious about my mail. She LOVES getting mail. She is THRILLED when those stupid free local useless newspapers are tossed into our driveway. She is beyond ecstatic when a solicitor leaves a flyer tucked into our screen door. So to steer her away from a highly anticipated package from Japan, I told her that the other package was from my "food present friend."
So she would not rest until she had gotten to sample the goodies. The muffin seemed safest, since I wanted the donut for myself, and maybe the cookie... But between her and the Baby, who she shared little hunks with, I didn't even get to try a single crumb. They sucked that muffin down in the 5-7 minute drive to school!

I sent my foodie package to Calee at Life + Running.

Here’s a detailed explanation of the Foodie Penpals program:

-On the 5th of the month, you will receive your penpal pairing via email. It will be your responsibility to contact your penpal and get their mailing address and any other information you might need like allergies or dietary restrictions.
-You will have until the 15th of the month to put your box of goodies in the mail. On the last day of the month, you will post about the goodies you received from your penpal!
-The boxes are to be filled with fun foodie things, local food items or even homemade treats! The spending limit is $15. The box must also include something written. This can be anything from a note explaining what’s in the box, to a fun recipe…use your imagination!
-You are responsible for figuring out the best way to ship your items depending on their size and how fragile they are. (Don’t forget about flat rate boxes!)
-Foodie Penpals is open to blog readers as well as bloggers. If you’re a reader and you get paired with a blogger, you can choose to write a short guest post for your penpal to post on their blog about what you received. If two readers are paired together, neither needs to worry about writing a post for that month.