Another belated Monkey Monday. 2 March 2009 1:43 pm
Posted by Tracy in : Harold McGee,consumerism,cooking,geekery,news,pasta,pictures,random,school , trackbackLateness and weird timing have sort of been a theme for me lately, dangit. Later this week I will post about the 24-hour food record I did for my nutrition class, and the weird timing issues around that assignment (Superbowl Sunday was seriously the closest I could get to a “normal” day to record). Last week’s timing was such that I was too busy having a sinus infection to do my supermarket participant observation until darn near the very last minute on Thursday — but as always, food stores are completely fascinating to me and the Whole Foods at Columbus Circle is no exception. Check out this awesome shelf tag:
Yes, that’s right. Sea salt and vinegar Kettle Chips fit in a special diet! Celebrate your choices! I love sea salt and vinegar Kettle Chips, so clearly my diet is a special one. Just like I am ever so very special. It all makes sense!
Something I failed to look for at the Columbus Circle Whole Foods, but which I am now on a mission to find, is a cranberry juice drink that does not taste like liquid candy. What got me thinking about this is a bottle of “less sugar” cranberry cocktail that turned out to be “we replaced sugar with Splenda” cranberry juice cocktail. NO! I don’t care what the sweetener is, I want juice that isn’t too freaking sweet. I know, there’s “less-” or even “no-sugar” kinds sweetened only with fruit juice concentrate, but whatever. They’re still too sweet. I want an option in between the inside-out-face-puckering unsweetened juice and the fruit juice flavored sugar water that’s called cranberry juice cocktail. Is this too much to ask?
Let’s see, any other timely little tidbits I can’t really stretch into a whole post…. Oh! Harold McGee experimented on the traditional instructions to cook pasta in a huge pot of boiling water, with amazing results. I mean, I generally cook a pound of pasta in 2-3 quarts of water instead of 4-6 like it says on the box, but McGee not only reduces the quantities of cooking liquid, he even successfully cooks pasta starting in cold water. I know, crazy. But I’m totally going to try it, especially the part with turning the cooking water into sauce, which sounds great after years of drinking pasta water on camping trips and loving it. The food blogosphere went nuts with this news; my favorite related posts were by Rachel Laudan and Holly and Skip of Almost Italian. And finally here’s McGee’s own follow-up post (he says his New York Times column on the subject got more responses than any other — awesome!)
