Delicious Low-Cal Snack: Apples and Blue Cheese

I’m at a place where I don’t really don’t care about losing weight to be thin; I like being big. I’m getting into the HAES movement and I’m already rebellious about everything from local government to our education system, so why not add body image? That said, I’d like to be a bit smaller just to be more comfortable and to be able to keep up with my five-year-old; we took a hike with her 4-H Clover Kids Club yesterday and it wore me out! So I’m just walking, dancing, and eating things I love smartly.

I wanted to share this delicious find with similarly minded people: Laughing Cow Light Blue Cheese. And apples. Oh man, is this mana from heaven. Here’s what you do: cut an apple in half and give half to your kid, friend, lover, whatever. He or she needs it anyway. Cut the rest up in wedges for yourself.

Now go and get a wedge of Laughing Cow Light Blue Cheese, which tastes just like the real thing but is only 35 calories and oh, so creamy. You’ll have enough cheese to just about cover each wedge if you dip them into the cheese, and the snack is so filling and delicious that you don’t feel deprived at all. In fact, it’s pretty much a treat to me. Add the fruit and cheese together and you have a snack that’s under 100 calories, and much better for you than those prepackaged 100-calorie packs, too.

Bacon Cologne? Something Only A Swine Would Wear?

A Subtle Gift for The Boss?

Bacon Cologne? A company has introduced a bacon cologne and it is selling. And it is not being used by farmers to improve the scent of their hog pens, with a little floral a-do-o for their pigs. It is for human use, to be sprayed on men.

Bacon Cologne? I don't believe it? What's going to come of us? Cologne from bacon scent? Heaven help us. When is the world suppose to end? What's that date again? Sometime next year?

Well, maybe I am too much in the 20th century? Bacon is pork and pork makes me sick. My objection to bacon is not based on religion, but on health issues. Bacon is fatty. Bacon is full of the stuff that is not good for the body. Bacon increases high blood pressure. Bacon is not a good food But as a cologne scent? It stinks

Bacon Cologne? From the Fargginay company website --The Revolution has begun... The year was 1920 and quite by accident John Fargginay, a Parisian butcher, discovered the ability to dramatically elevate his customer's mood with a secret recipe blending 11 popular pure essential oils with the essence of...bacon.

1920? Huh?

I guess I happily missed that revolution and was unaware of it.

I can see dudes spraying themselves with the scent of plant, like flowers or even a herb, but the scent of meat? And how many hogs have to die to fill a bottle of spray? Why would someone want to smell like a pig? Or like breakfast?

Item from The Young Turks --"Farginnay has released a new bacon scented cologne. Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian discuss the ad and product." See the video.

The Olive Garden: Why?

This less-than-flattering review of The Olive Garden kicked off a vicious (and surprisingly long-winded) discussion of The Olive Garden's merits and demerits on Metafilter. It seems odd but I have noticed before that, of all the chain restaurants, for some reason The Olive Garden seems to bring out the most passionate debates.

I myself am merely puzzled by The Olive Garden. By its strange offerings, its surprisingly high prices, and its continued popularity. I live about halfway between Seattle and the Canadian border, and The Olive Garden is one of the few Italian restaurants in the county.

Even so, it's always surprising to see how amazingly crowded it gets on a Friday or Saturday evening. The entryway is always crowded, the bar is always full, and if the weather is nice the line will spill out onto the sidewalk outside. Even the 15 minute take-out parking spot sees constant traffic from people who apparently stop at The Olive Garden on their way home from work to pick up dinner.

Undoubtedly one of The Olive Garden's most successful aspects is its proximity to the interstate. Its location is prime, just a few blocks from the off-ramp. You can hop off, get dinner, and hop back on and be on your way home. I doubt people would drive very far off I5 to eat there. (But then again, who knows?)

I have lived here for five years, and only been to that particular restaurant once, about a year ago. It was my friend's idea. She wanted wine and also salad, and there ya go.

I was surprised (as always) by the wine prices. $9 seems like a lot to pay for a glass of wine at a chain restaurant, but what do I know? I'm one of those adults who orders soda at dinner.

I was even more surprised by the dinner prices. $25 for a plate of pasta? You're kidding, right? It kind of put the "unlimited" salad and bread sticks in context. Realistically you can't really eat more than two or three bread sticks, and maybe one huge plate of salad. Not least because the servers whisk your food in after you're only halfway through your salad.

The salad was good; the bread sticks a little greasy. Everything was salty, but as someone who's very salt-sensitive I'm used to that.

The food itself was unremarkable. I actually don't remember what I ordered, which is rare for me. And indicative of the food. I felt sorry for my friend's chicken parmigiana, because it looked like they had pummeled that poor little chicken breast within an inch of its life. The thing was less than a quarter inch thick!

Leaving the restaurant, about $35 poorer, I tried not to think about all the food I could have bought somewhere else. That's 35 cheeseburgers off the dollar menu at McDonalds! Sure you wouldn't get the great atmosphere, which was super loud and also humid and overheated from being packed full of bodies. But at least McDonalds is honest about what it serves: cheap food fast.

Photo credit: Flickr/Rob n Amy C

Adventures in Meringue

Yesterday I read an article in the Wall Street Journal about how to make the perfect baked meringue, which the author assured me was both simple and effective. I was intrigued, but extremely skeptical.

Let me back up. These days I'm a reasonably accomplished cook. Although I'm far from an expert, I would estimate that only 5% of my attempted dishes end in failure. That is a significant accomplishment, given that I never really learned how to cook when I was young (I was raised on a steady diet of Hot Pockets).

In fact, in my 20s I attempted a lot of new dishes, and many - maybe most - of them were failures. Put it this way: I had to beg a friend to teach me how to make a grilled cheese sandwich.

One of these most spectacular failures was a lemon meringue pie. The pie crust didn't bake, the filling didn't set, and the meringue didn't crisp up. Overnight in the fridge the pie crust soaked up a lot of liquid from the filling, and floated up towards the top. The lemon filling slid underneath. The meringue formed a slimy coating.

But I, ever the starry-eyed optimist, fed it to my friend C anyway. She, being a good sport and pretty much the best friend ever, tried her hardest to eat it. But I quickly had to admit defeat, and she set down her slice (it was more of a plop than a slice) with relief.

So yes. I was skeptical. So skeptical that I didn't even make any plans for the filling. I figured I would try making the meringue, fail at it, and then go on with my life.

First I separated four eggs, let the egg whites come up to room temperature, and fixed myself an egg yolk omelet (which was gross, if thrifty). Next I threw the egg whites, pinch of salt, and cream of tartar into my blender. Because I don't have a mixer, and because the blender's own instructions SAY THAT IT CAN DO THIS. Whip eggs into stiff peaks. THE INSTRUCTION BOOKLET SAYS SO.

Yeah, so… guess how that turned out. Luckily I was able to kind of cobble it all back together, so I didn't completely ruin my blender. But as for the meringue, I had to finish whipping it by hand, with a whisk. I queued up an episode of Archer on Hulu and went to it. I found it worked best to roll the whisk's handles back and forth between my hands, like a Boy Scout trying to start a fire.

I also didn't have any parchment paper, so I used a few sheets of printer paper instead. Paper's paper, amirite?

But despite all these setbacks, five hours later I had an absolutely gorgeous baked meringue. IT LOOKED JUST LIKE THE PICTURE.

I rummaged through my cupboards and finally decided to make a simple chocolate sauce by melting chocolate chips with a bit of butter in the microwave, then stirring in some sweetened condensed milk. I poured this over the meringue and discovered that I had essentially reinvented the Violet Crumble.

AND IT WAS GOOD.

So to sum up, baked meringue: A++++++ WOULD BAKE AGAIN. I mean, after I buy an eggbeater, obviously.

Frugal Fight: Lean vs. Extra-Lean Ground Beef

This is a question which has frequently stumped me at the grocery store. Clearly, the less lean the ground beef is, the cheaper it is per pound. But if there is one thing I have learned in life, it's that appearances at the grocery store are often deceiving.

Calculating which one you should buy will require some number crunching. This is a situation where you will be glad if you have remembered to bring a calculator to the store. (If you have forgotten, but you have a cell phone, it probably has a calculator function buried in the Tools or Applications menu.)

First, check the percentage. Two typical ground beef packages at the store where I shop will be "96% lean" and "85% lean." This means that the first package contains 4% fat, and the second package contains 15% fat.

(A word on fat: fat lends flavor to the dish, and is necessary if you plan to make a sauce. But for the most part, when you're buying ground beef, you will end up pouring off as much fat as you can. I'm going to assume, for the simplicity of the calculations, that you do not want to use ANY of the fat, and that you will be pouring off and throwing away all of the fat. Obviously this isn't completely realistic.)

Let's say that the first package costs $4.79/pound and the second package costs $3.29/pound.

4% of $4.79 is .19, which means that you will throw away 19 cents per each pound of the extra-lean meat. However, you will be paying $4.60 per pound for the meat itself.
 
15% of $3.29 is .49, which means that you will throw away 49 cents per each pound of the lean meat. However, you will be paying $2.80 per pound for the meat itself.

(Remember how you used to complain in school that you would never need to know algebra? Yeah. Sorry about that. As a refresher, to calculate a percentage as we did above, it's 4.79 x .19 and 3.29 x .49.)

As you can see, this is an odd case where it is more frugal to buy the cheaper meat, which technically requires you to throw more money away. But the overall savings is still considerable - in fact, this meat costs about half as much as the "fancier" kind.

It's never good to throw money away, but the differential here is great enough that it's cheaper to do so. Think of it this way: even the cost of the cheap ground meat AND the fat is still cheaper than the cost of the expensive ground beef WITHOUT the fat.

This should also serve as an excellent illustration of one of my pet phrases, It's Important to Do The Math. For one thing, the price of ground beef varies so widely, you will probably have to do the math yourself each time, until you get a feel for it. For another thing, the results are completely counter-intuitive.

So why is the leaner meat more expensive by pound? Here we get into the murky areas of frugality and food pricing. More affluent (read: wasteful) customers prefer not to have the mess and stigma of all that fat in their meat, and they are presumably willing to pay a premium for the privilege.

But you and I know better now, don't we?!

Photo credit: Flickr/ilovebutter

Cooking After the Move: Part II

Help! What spices and cooking staples should I get?

I recently moved and have started to cook for myself.  I came to a few conclusions after the move that I probably should have learned at a much younger age.

After cooking my first meal in my new place, I realized that either:

a.)   I was a much worse cook than I thought I was.

b.)  I was still in need of the tutelage of El Chef.

c.)   Spices actually do add taste to meals.

d.)  I was in desperate need of a trip to the local grocery store.

e.)   All of the above.

Unfortunately, the answer given to me after I phoned a friend—I really, really want to be a millionaire—is e.) all of the above. My cooking is not all that great, I do benefit from advice more than I’ll ever admit, spices are great, and I need to do some more grocery shopping.

The problem, of course, lies with the grocery shopping. I have no idea how to re-stock a kitchen from scratch. I have utensils and pots and pans (although I’ll probably have to get better cooking gear once I reach sous chef status), but I need the basic cooking staples to get me through the day.

That’s where you come in. I am in desperate need of advice and recommendations on what kinds of food to keep in my kitchen at all times.  I need a grocery shopping list of spices and other staples that are necessary.  I’m on a limited budget, so can’t splurge on 50 or 60 of your favorite spices, and don’t have enough dinero on hand to buy everything that you think I need to get myself through the month cooking on my own.

Of course, you’ll need to know a little of my personal preferences to advise me on what to buy at the grocery store.

1.     I like all kinds of meat, but don’t eat meat every day.

2.     Squash is only good in soups.

3.     I prefer a little spice to my meals over blah.

4.     A sandwich is ok for lunch, but not for breakfast or dinner.

5.     French food is too complicated and time-consuming for me to cook. I’m likelier to stick with a simple meal.

6.     I like to disguise my vegetables with strange spices (and costumes) so I forget that I’m eating vegetables.

7.     I like ethnic food.

8.     Did I mention that I’m on a budget and can’t afford to pay $100 for an ounce of truffle oil and that my palate isn’t refined enough to notice the difference between fake truffle oil and real truffle oil?

Cooking After the Move: Part I

No Spices=No Taste

Stardate 3891.

I feel like the last person on Earth. I moved into my new place on my own and cooked by myself. Because I just moved and lost all of my cooking spices in a random game of chance—please don’t ask-- I think I cooked what might possibly the WORST meal in the history of man- and woman-kind.

Luckily, I was the only person who had to eat my dinner.

I had pasta, parmesan cheese, olive oil, and some garlic. For some unfathomable reason, I thought this would make the perfect combo for a vegetarian meal.  

I was wrong. As I stated previously, my new meal in my new place was the WORST meal I’ve ever eaten in my entire life. The garlic was too garlicky. The olive oil was either too cheap or used too sparingly and added nothing to the taste of the pasta. I could have made macaroni and cheese from scratch—scratched right out of the box—and it would have been a significant improvement over the tasteless crap I shoveled in my mouth that night.

At the last minute, I remembered that I should probably make a salad with the pasta. While my mushy, tasteless pasta cooled,  I took out the spinach for a spinach salad. I have to admit that I was absolutely delighted to see that the spinach was frozen from the relatively short time it spent in my new crisper—I guess that’s just another hazard of living during the second Ice Ages. I ran some cold water over the spinach—which was probably full of radiation from Fukushima—and hoped for the best. The spinach wilted as it thawed. Because I’m such a trooper, I carried on and added an orange to my salad. (And yes, I did peel and put the orange into little pieces.)

I didn’t have anything other than olive oil to make a salad dressing with so I added a dressing that I inherited in the move. The salad turned out much, much better than the pasta, but since the pasta was probably one of the worst things I’ve ever cooked,  this doesn’t mean all that much.

I thought my cooking had improved over time, but I realized the hard way that my cooking is only as good as my spices and ingredients. Stocking my kitchen hasn’t exactly been my first priority. I’ll never gamble away my spices again. 

Hot Pockets: The Ugly Side of the 1980s

My mania for using coupons seduced me into buying two boxes of Hot Pockets this weekend. (Only 99 cents per box!) I used to eat a lot of Hot Pockets, but I literally do not remember the last time I ate one. It must have been at least a decade ago.

Hot Pockets emerged on the national scene in 1983, capitalizing on the sudden rise in home microwave ovens. Hot Pockets were one of those "foods of the future" that we all loved in the 80s. These space age foods typically came individually wrapped, and were either shelf-stable or non-perishable.

Hot Pockets also catered to a relatively new market: Latchkey Kids, home after school and hungry, but without parents to cook proper meals until they came home from work. Your typical latchkey kid was allowed to use the microwave, and thus, could prepare Hot Pockets at will.

I was a latchkey kid, myself. And I ate more than my share of Hot Pockets while waiting for my (single, working) mother to get home from work. She always bought the Broccoli Cheese variety, under the theory that it contained a vegetable, and therefore was healthier than the others.

Revisiting Hot Pockets now, some thirty years later, I was struck by how much they had changed. For one thing, the box proudly proclaimed that the Hot Pockets inside were "Made with REAL CHEESE." You know you're in trouble when the manufacturer takes pride in using "real cheese."

The Hot Pockets of my youth were invariably soggy, and typically leaked filling from at least one poorly-sealed corner. You always had to microwave it on a plate (or at least a paper towel), otherwise you would get leaked Hot Pocket juice (a potent mélange of grease and melted sauce) all over the microwave's turntable, and THEN you would be in REAL trouble.

Today's Hot Pockets come with a "crisping sleeve." You slide your Hot Pocket into the little sleeve, and it - I guess - makes it crispy in the microwave. This was not my experience. I would not describe my Hot Pocket as crisp. "Leathery," maybe. At least it didn't leak juice all over everything. Apparently they have finally figured out how to seal the darned things properly.

The Hot Pocket also had a strangely sweet taste. They didn't put corn syrup in everything back in the 1980s, the way they do now. Not everything was sweet. Some foods - like Hot Pockets - were allowed to simply be savory.

One thing has remained unchanged: the interior of Hot Pockets is still, like, nuclear hot. I nibbled mine carefully, and tried to do my best to squeeze the filling up from the bottom so that it could properly cool. Nevertheless, as I neared the end of the Hot Pocket I was faced with the daunting prospect of biting into a giant sludgy blob of lava-hot cheese goo.

And I did, and I burned the roof of my mouth, and it was 1985 all over again.

Requiem for Sbarro

Due to a high debt load and the overall reduced number of people at shopping malls these days, Sbarro pizza has announced that it will declare bankruptcy. (I can't hear that phase now without thinking of Michael Scott bellowing "BANKRUPTCY!") Oh Sbarro, we hardly knew ye.

Although Sbarro started in 1956, it went public in 1985 - which is the year that inaugurated its sudden expansion into malls everywhere. But my first experience with Sbarro wasn't until I moved to the Lower 48 to attend college in 1990. There were no Sbarro outlets in Anchorage, nor are there today. (I just checked.)

My first "real" job was in downtown Seattle, which has more lunch options than you can imagine. Nevertheless, I frequently found myself eating at Sbarro in Westlake Mall. The Westlake Mall food court offered ample free seating, which is a rarity in Seattle. And they don't care if you camp out for your entire lunch hour, as long as you look reasonably kempt (i.e. not a transient).

For a Liberal Arts major suddenly thrust into the bizarre (and exceptionally dull) corporate world of insurance brokerage, the ability to camp out at a table and draw or write for an entire hour was a real draw. Even better, you could get a table by a window and sit in some natural light for a little while.

Of all the places in Westlake, Sbarro was the one with the consistently shortest lines. Even the servers seemed startled that you wanted to eat there. They offered a lunch special which made a slice of pizza - otherwise overpriced - somewhat reasonable. And it was located near my favorite group of tables on the south-facing wall, so I didn't have to carry my tray very far.

Ever since, I have equated the taste of Sbarro with the desolate feeling of failure, airless boredom, and having taken my first steps on a career path to Boring Town. And with a feeble attempt to ward off same.

Sbarro gives you a pretty big slice, although it costs a surprising amount of money. If you order it to go, you get your slice inside a wedge-shaped cardboard box, which seems like it's trying too hard. The calzones tended to be the best deal (as is so often the case). But my go-to option was the double-decker Chicago pizza. Which was basically a calzone that happened to be offered as a lunch special.

There is a Sbarro in the mall nearest my home now (about 30 miles away). This mall also happens to house the only movie theaters in the area, so I occasionally find myself there. The last time I went to see a movie I showed up early, and decided to have something to eat first. (Mall food is expensive, but it's nothing on the cost of movie theater food.)

Out of nostalgia, I ordered a diet soda and a Chicago double-decker slice. I sat down and took a bite, and all my memories of those miserable mid-1990s years came flooding back. I only barely managed to choke down my slice without bursting into tears right then and there.

But it's not Sbarro's fault that it makes me want to cry. For mall food, it's pretty decent. At least it has vegetables in it.

Photo credit: Flickr//me

Lay's STAX

In the last few years, I have really gone out of my way to clean up my eating habits. Long gone are the days when I would eat at McDonald's for lunch, and have a bag of gummi bears for dinner. Not to put too fine a point on it, but long gone are the days of Pringles.

I was caught by surprise with a wave of nostalgia when I encountered a Pringles display at the Rite Aid yesterday. Then I realized that Lay's STAX were on sale for only a buck a tube, so I bought those instead. (Nostalgia only goes so far.)

In reviewing these, I have difficulty determining what is bad chip design, what is memories filtered through rose-colored glasses, and what is food that was once familiar but now seems strange. I will say that if you spend a lot of time eating real food - fruit, vegetables, whole grains, meals you cook yourself from single-source ingredients - Lay's STAX seem quite strange. Alien, even.

At first, I couldn't figure out how chips would fit into the strange, barbell-shaped container. And unlike the Pringles cardboard canister (which is recyclable, or at least compostable), the STAX container is 100% plastic. Boo! BOO!

It's hard enough to finagle some chips out of the round Pringles can. It's even more difficult trying to reach into the oval-shaped STAX can. You are basically forced to pour your chips out on a plate (or a napkin, or - as was the case here at my desk - a sheet of printer paper). And the plastic can clearly confers no benefits as far as protecting the chips, because as you can see from the picture above, when I opened the canister I found myself staring at a big pile of shards.

When I do eat potato chips, I stick to Lay's Original. No weird flavors, no bad chemicals - they are chips that even Michael Pollan would approve of. Lay's Original potato chips have only three ingredients: potatoes, salt, and oil. It doesn't get more simple than that. And the chips are just slices of potato, none of this mushed-up nonsense.

To put things into perspective, Lay's STAX are basically the exact opposite of that.

The first ingredient is "potato flakes." The third ingredient is "potato starch." It includes three different artificial colorings, and both sugar AND corn syrup. And about a dozen other ingredients besides.

I bought Mesquite BBQ, because my experience is that BBQ flavor is usually decent, and strong enough to cover up a lot of flaws. Not in this case. The flavoring is sprinkled in paltry distribution atop one side of the chip. It does little to alleviate the impression of eating a slice of contractor grade pressed chipboard molding.

I also found the uncanny identical shapes to be unnerving. Potato chips should not be the exact same size, shape, and thickness, their edges perfectly smooth and regular. It's just not right.

The taste is bland and starchy. It's impossible to guess the original source material. These could just as easily be corn chips, or rice chips.

I remember eating a lot of this kind of chip when I was younger. And now, I literally have no idea why you would eat these, when there are so many better and more delicious options. In a world where you can buy Tim's Chips in any flavor you could desire, it almost seems criminal to buy Lay's STAX.

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