Noodles & Company recently brought back their three signature “Grown Up Mac & Cheese” dishes, and to help promote them they sent me a gift bag, which included coupons to try the entrées, some lip balm, an apron and a couple Noodles t-shirts.

Unfortunately for me the shirts were matching “Mac Mommy” and “Mac Kiddo” mother and daughter shirts. It’s a shame too, because I would totally rock a Noodles & Company “Mac Daddy” shirt if they made them. I was also secretly sort of bummed that the lip balm wasn’t mac & cheese flavored, but then again I have no idea if macaroni and cheese flavored lip balm even exists.

Deciding which of the three mac & cheese options (Bacon Mac & Cheeseburger, Chili Mac and Truffle Mac With Baby Portabellas) to try first was a tough decision, but I finally chose their Bacon Mac & Cheeseburger. The dish consists of their regular mac & cheese mixed with oven baked meatballs and bacon and then topped with Cheddar-Jack cheese, house-made breadcrumbs, roma tomatoes and green onions. Noodles actually refers to it as a “deconstructed cheeseburger,” which pretty much sums it up perfectly.

Overall I loved the mac & cheese, and I have no doubt that I’ll be back soon to try the other two choices,but I think that my favorite dish at Noodles would still have to be their buttered noodles with chicken. You’d think something as simple as buttered noodles would be super easy to just make for yourself at home, but I have no idea what it is about theirs that makes it so good. I even found the exact egg noodles that they use and the same type of Parmesan cheese that they sprinkle them with and even then I couldn’t make mine taste half as good as the ones at Noodles. Oh, and their Rice Krispies treats? Don’t even get me started on how good those are!

Writing a food blog I get a lot of companies who want to send me their products to review. The thing is, those products are always edible. Recently though I received an email from a website where you can turn your photos into canvas prints offering me a free print of any photo I wanted. I was originally going to pass on the offer since I wasn’t sure how a canvas print would really relate to a food blog, but then I had an idea. What if I ordered a canvas print of one of the many food photos that I’ve taken for DudeFoods? One picture immediately came to mind… The sandwich I made for National Clean Out Your Refrigerator Day!

The process of ordering the print was as easy as could be. You start off by selecting what size print you want and uploading a photo. You can even log into your Facebook account and choose a photo from one of your Facebook albums which I thought was a pretty cool feature. After that you pick which type of border you want and preview your print you’re all set! They even offer image retouching where they’ll remove things like date stamps and red-eye from photos and fix minor imperfections.

About a week after placing my order I arrived home from work to find a UPS box on my porch. I immediately tore it open and proceeded to marvel at how great my sandwich photo looked as a 16″ x 20″ canvas print.  I’ve never ordered any canvas prints online, so I have no idea how their prices match up against their competitors, but the ordering process is definitely quick and hassle free, which is always a big plus in my book. Now I just have to convince my wife to let me keep it hanging in the kitchen…

A friend of mine is a pilot for JetBlue Airways and when I was over at his house one night recently he offered me a few bags of some chips I’d never heard of called PopCorners. Apparently JetBlue serves bags of these on their flights, and after trying them I can see why. These chips are great and are 100 times better than the crappy little bags of peanuts or pretzels that you get from most other airlines.

The only flavor of PopCorners that my buddy had was kettle, but according to their website they also offer white Cheddar, butter, cheesy jalapeno and sea salt flavors. If the other flavors are even half as delicious as the kettle flavor though then I want to try them all immediately!

Tell me, what’s the only drawback to eating kettle corn? Getting annoying popcorn kernels stuck between your teeth right? With their kettle flavored chips however PopCorners has single-handily removed that one negative thus allowing you to fully enjoy your kettle corn eating experience without the fear of having to floss afterwards.

You know how when you get doughnuts from Krispy Kreme it’s so easy to eat five or six of them in a sitting because they’re so light and tasty? That’s exactly how I feel about these snack size bags of kettle flavored PopCorners.

Basically what I’m saying is that these chips rule, but if you’ve ever flown on JetBlue you probably already know that. They don’t fly out of Milwaukee though so I’ve never been on a JetBlue flight, and on top of that I can’t seem to find these in any stores around here, so it looks like I’m out of luck until my friend can snag me some more or I order some online.