Subscription Service Review! $8 Raw Spice Bar

Hello friends and welcome back to my blog!

Tonight I’ll be sharing my initial review of a new subscription service that we are trying out. It’s called Raw Spice Bar and it only costs $8 per month. You receive three different single serving amounts of different spices each month, along with a couple of recipe cards containing ideas for how to use your new ingredients.

Now I don’t know about all of you out there in web-land, but I don’t exactly have an adventurous spice rack. To be honest (and I’m kind of embarrassed to admit this here, but…) most of the bottles and containers that adorn my kitchen hutch are different seasonings and rubs for meat. However, it seems like every time I’m on an excursion to the grocery store and I’m browsing the aisle with all the spices and baking goodies, that ish tends to be out of my price range. Now, I don’t mean that if I need or want a certain ingredient, I don’t have the money to go buy it. It means that as an unplanned purchase, those little-bitty bottles hurt the pocketbook!

After I noticed the name first, I then saw the price. $8 per month. Couldn’t hurt to try out a couple of times, could it? I did look up a few different reviews on their service first, but they seemed to vary and didn’t give me much black and white opinion as far as what I wanted to know. So we sent off, excited to try it.

Within a day or two, I received an email from the site (because I’d signed up for their email list or something along those lines before we actually signed up with a credit card) saying that if I signed up for a subscription, that they would include a free Herbs de Provence. I was a little upset at first. A- I’d always wanted to find out what Herbs de Provence are. I’ve only ever seen it called for in very few recipes. B- I just signed up with them! Of course I sent an email to them right away, explaining the situation. Literally, I told them that I had just sent off my credit card info, was still awaiting my first ever package from them and would they please consider including one of the packets of Herbs de Provence with my subscription when it was sent out?

Now, I’ll be honest with you. They never did send me an email back. I wrote it off, assuming that like most other businesses, they were busy making so much money that they didn’t care too much how I felt, one way or the other (I’m looking at you, Honest Co!).

Two days after I received my initial package from Raw Spice Bar, I found another envelope from them in my mailbox. Sure enough, it was the packet of Herbs de Provence, and while the three different packets that you receive each month are typically single-use size (my first three were all the same amount, .3 oz), this was literally 3x the size of those (.9oz)! You can see from the picture up above what type of size difference I’m talking about.

So, Herbs de Provence aside, I’ll tell you about what came in my first subscription envelope. Before I start, I’ll also tell you that I haven’t opened any of my single-use packets because they aren’t resealable and I don’t fancy going out to Michael’s and buying itsy-bitsy glass containers to put them in and trying to transcribe all the information from the packets onto bitty chalkboard paint labels. I’m not a Pinterest star, no shame. I will tell you what information the packets give me, as well as the recipe recommendations that came with them.

First up is the ‘Smoky Chiles & Mustard Memphis’. They all say
“100% Pure Spices
FRESHLY GROUND
.3oz” and that, under the name of the spice, makes up the front of each packet, though they’re different colors. This one is red. The ingredients are on the back, but if you hold the packet up to your nose, you can already smell the black peppercorns and paprika. The ingredient list is as follows: “Toasted Yellow Mustard Seeds, Smoky Paprika, Onion, Garlic, Black Peppercorns, Celery seed, Thyme, Oregano”. The recipe cards suggested using it as both a dry rub for ribs and for portobello burgers.

Next up was a one ingredient packet, colored sky blue. It contained hickory smoked sea salt, which I wasn’t able to smell through the packet. They suggested using it in a creamy potato salad, the recipe which was on their blog. It actually sounds amazing, and I’m pretty picky about potato salad.

The last packet was a royal purple and it contained “THE SUPER BERRIES”. Get this, the ingredients are Amla (botanically known as Amilica Embillicus, is a small tree native to the Indian subcontinent that produces plum sized yellow fruit with some amazing benefits for our health), Acai, Turmeric (the only ingredient I could  detect before opening), Ginger, Wild Blueberries, Lacuma (a misspelling of Lucuma, Pouteria lucuma (lúcuma) is a subtropical fruit native to the Andean valleys and produced in Chile, Peru, and Ecuador) and Spirulina. I wasn’t expecting this one, though I was far from disappointed to find it with the others. The recipe suggestion for using this one was a “Super Berries Acai Breakfast Bowl”. It’s actually an 8 or 9 ingredient recipe, though, so I could much more easily see me using the powdered superfoods packet in a couple of smoothies for the Mister and I. If you’re a lover of smoothies and using Greek yogurt in them like I am, you should give the brand Fage a try. It’s one of the absolute best Greek yogurts that you can get your hands on in North America.

A quick search told me that Herbs de Provence are most commonly used on meat and fish or sometimes in vegetable stews. Some further investigation provided me with a better suggestion, especially since I’ve been trying to get the Mister further away from microwaves. Whole New Mom does a lot of experimentation with popcorn, it seems, and there I found this recipe for Urban Popcorn. 

I haven’t gotten around to buying an independent popcorn maker yet, so if any of you out there get around to trying this or have a favorite use of your own for Herbs de Provence, or any of these blends, leave your comments below!

Have a wonderful day, everyone!