WHAT'S NEW ON THE GROCERS' SHELVES

Famous Amos Cookies. Oatmeal Chocolate Chip & Walnuts, and Toffee Chocolate Chip. $2.99 to $3.19 per 16-ounce bag or box.

Bonnie: When I was a newspaper food editor, Famous Amos once came to visit me with a plateful of his delicious chocolate chip cookies. These new packaged Famous Amos cookies aren't nearly as good as that mouthwatering memory, but they're not bad. Nutritionally they contain about 1.5 to 2 grams fat and 35 calories per mini cookie, which makes them slightly fattier ounce for ounce than many other packaged oatmeal and chocolate chip cookies.

Carolyn: In the early days of hawking his gourmet chocolate chip cookies, Famous Amos often wore shoes decorated with pictures of watermelons.

"It's hard to have a bad day with watermelon shoes," he would explain to anyone who asked. That's my kind of attitude. And these new Toffee Chocolate Famous Amos are my kind of cookie. Though still not the gourmet nuggets of Famous Amos' Sunset Boulevard cookie-stand fame, they're much better than the Famous Amos cookies I bought in a supermarket after Famous Amos sold his company. That could be because Famous Amos Cookies has yet another new owner.

Keebler has retained Famous Amos' original appealing bite size but introduced a convenient and classy-looking new resealable stand-up package to both coasts and, nationwide, these two new flavors. Though the oatmeal was a bit dry, its walnuts and chocolate were present in more than the usual packaged-cookie microscopic pieces. But the Toffee Chocolate, flavored by mini chips of both these flavors, was Heath Bar delicious.

I don't own watermelon shoes. But when this new flavor shows up in my grocery store, I'll be there with my Spam earrings on.

Melissa's Seaphire. $2.99 to $3.99 per 4-ounce package.

Bonnie: This is the weirdest new food we've tried in ages. Seaphire is an emerald green plant that's grown in sea water near the Sea of Cortez that has a crisp, crunchy texture and salty taste. A serving -- defined by importer Melissa's as 3 ounces -- contains a mere 30 calories, lots of vitamin A, some vitamin C and 1,350 milligrams sodium, or half of the recommended daily sodium limit.

Melissa's hopes that you'll use it in lieu of salt in recipes. I'd say there's not much hope of that unless you love the taste of seaweed.

Carolyn: Once again, Bonnie and I disagree. On the weirdness scale, Seaphire doesn't come close to the Brusssels sprouts Gummi Bears and flavored beetle larvae we wrote about in our April Fool's Day column.

Seaphire also doesn't taste like seaweed as much as green beans that have been sitting in a salt-water marinade. Which is not to say everyone should run right down to their store and buy some.

Whereas grains of salt blend evenly into a dish, Seaphire creates big pockets of extreme saltiness. Cutting the Seaphire up into tiny pieces could minimize this problem, but then, adding green beans and salt instead would be lots easier and cheaper.

Country Time Lemonade Iced Tea. Classic, Raspberry, and Peach. $3.15 per 19-ounce canister yielding 6 quarts.

Bonnie: I prefer lemonade made from lemons, iced tea from tea leaves, and lemon ice tea made from both these natural ingredients.

I have to admit, though, I was pleasantly surprised by the ingredient panel of Country Time's Lemonade Ice Tea mix. It contained only sugar, citric acid, instant tea, natural flavoring and colorings, and of course, something to keep the crystals from caking.

Considering that most other drink mixes are artificially flavored and colored, this isn't too bad.

Carolyn: Is there any drink that says summer refreshment better than lemonade? Perhaps only tea. Country Time Lemonade Iced Tea brings these two refreshment powerhouses together in one drink.

It has all of regular Country Time powder mix's smoothness, sweetness, economy and convenience but with a darker color and taste. In other words, this is tea-flavored lemonade rather than lemon-flavored tea.

(Bonnie Tandy Leblang is a registered dietitian and creator of Express Lane Cooking: A Simple Solution to What's for Dinner (Universal Press Syndicate). Carolyn Wyman is a junk food fanatic and author of "Spam: A Biography" (Harvest/Harcourt Brace). Each week they critique three new food items.)