I spent Saturday in a conference room full of farmers and nutritionists. I scored a media pass to the Canadian Organic Growers conference, and besides the free organic lunch, everyone went home with a bag of organic swag. Most of the stuff was from President’s Choice Organics and included cereal, chocolate and tea. Some of the bags included pasta, while mine had a box of Nature’s Path organic chocolate chip cookie mix. We use other Nature’s Path products such as some of their cereals, and even the frozen waffles, so I was vaguely interested in the cookie mix.
As a die-hard home baker, I can’t remember the last time I bought a pre-made mix of anything [1]. My folks sometimes send me one of those “beer bread” mixes in a clay pot things at Christmas, but I think I still lived with my folks the last time I used a mix for anything. Certainly, they got used frequently when I was growing up, and I can recall my Grandmother using mixes for various things quite frequently, but then, it was the style of the time (her being a 50s housewife, after all), she had a brood of kids and grandkids to feed, and she hated cooking.
I was going to set the box aside for a food bank donation, but my curiosity got the better of me. Maybe they had figured out some way to make box mixes better these days. Maybe thirty years on, they were better tasting than stuff made from scratch.