Good news for people who are sensitive to artificial colors and flavors: Necco Wafers are going all natural. The new Necco colors will be sourced from natural material: purple cabbage, turmeric, beet juice. The flavors will also be natural … which is sort of a good thing, except that the manufacturer will continue to offer wintergreen (pink wafers), licorice (gray), and clove (purple), along with more popular flavors like orange, lemon, cinnamon, and chocolate.
There was a casualty in the switch, though: There are no more green Necco Wafers. No great loss. They were reputedly lime flavored, though as one commenter cracked on Slashfood, “They taste like Pine-Sol.” Slashfood also points out that the same company that makes Necco Wafers also makes Conversation Hearts at Valentine’s. Yeah. That makes sense.
Never in the history of humanity has there existed a Halloween pumpkin-purchasing flow chart as descriptively accurate and generally useful as this one, which ran in the excellent online comic Sheldon. Flow charts: If you’ve got a lot of information and little space, they’re the way to go. Even if the topic is squash.
The new cookbook from the minichain of Grand Central bakeries scattered throughout Portland and Seattle is full of simple, classic recipes: clafouti; rustic fruit tarts organized by season; “hand pies” filled with spicy potatoes or steak and onion; homemade graham cracker sandwich cookies filled with vanilla cream … the list goes on. It’s not a book of fancy trendy things, just stuff that is timelessly appealing, presented in a way that feels accessible and nonintimidating. It would be a nice gift for someone just getting interested in baking.
Actual point proven by the New York Times’ first-person story about the Park Slope Food Coop: You kind of get what you pay for when you ask an MFA in poetry to perform manual labor.
“Most of the motion gameplay involved a lot of shaking controllers to mimic the actions you’d do in actual cooking: Waggle the Wii remote to shake out the seasoning and cut vegetables; shake the Nunchuk to retrieve your saucepan or bowl; tilt the remote to oil the saucepan, pour liquids and turn the stove on and off.
“There’s also a timer for how long each item should be cooked, so you have to watch the clock. Thankfully, to speed things up you simply hit the C button. To earn extra points, try multitasking by beginning to cut and cook the potatoes for the potato salad while handling other food-prep chores.”
Hey! Sounds like my kitchen where I grind out a dinner every single night.
Apparently, drinking coffee in the nude—even in one’s own house—can have legal consequences. The CBS Crimesider blog covers the harrowing story of a dude in Springfield, Virginia, who woke up, happily noted that his roommates were gone, and had a cup of coffee without bothering to put on clothes.
“Things got complicated when a passer-by spotted the bare-skinned barista while taking her 7-year-old son to the local school bus stop.”
The onlooker alleges that the man exposed himself at his doorway and in his front window. Was the guy ignorantly stumbling around in the buff or a pervert? It’s now up to a court to decide. If found guilty of deliberately exposing himself, the man faces misdemeanor charges punishable by up to a year in jail.
As the Mexican Day of the Dead starts to pick up cultural steam north of the border, the Daily Beast digs into the holiday a bit, taking the casual reader past the colorful candy skulls that represent the outer limit of knowledge for a great many Americans. Here are three thumbnail insights from Beast contributor Ana Sofia Pelaez that merit reading in their majestic original form:
1. In the Yucatán, the holiday is called Hanal Pixán and can be translated as—and this is pretty cool—”the path of the soul through the essence of food.”
2. It’s not just food that gets served up as part of the offering process. “Vices as well as pleasures are remembered, and beer, tequila, mezcal, or even cigarettes can be included.”
3. The Day of the Dead is really the Days of the Dead: November 1, notes Pelaez, is dedicated to children who have passed on, while adults are remembered on November 2.
You won’t believe it, but guess what—Slate has published an article wherein a writer for the magazine is a total contrarian buzz-kill. While most of us celebrate autumn with Halloween costume parties and obligatory airings of It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, Slate embraces the season by dusting off a three-year-old article with the following thesis: “Apple picking may be a satisfying ritual and pleasant day out with the kids, but it’s also a wasteful scam.”
In the story, Daniel Gross says of apple picking, “It’s the best use of child labor since Manchester’s early 19th-century textile mills,” and declares that it “sheds light on some unflattering truths about the American economy.”
We can only hope that the magazine spikes Gross’s upcoming piece about Christmas cookies, in which sprinkles are compared to “a rainbow of tiny thalidomide pellets,” and, while talking about linzertorte cookies, Gross invokes Stalin’s liquidation of the Soviet kulak class.
Red Bull’s recent promotional freebie for its cola is probably the coolest thing it’s done since it sponsored extensive can-derived art. The promo, as shown on the Dieline package design blog, is a custom bag containing a custom box containing the 17 key ingredients that give Red Bull Cola its taste. Say whatever you like about energy drinks and mass-market colas—the ingredients that go into Red Bull Cola look damn near majestic when presented in raw form in a compartmentalized wooden box.
William Saletan of Slate is entitled to his own opinion, and—in general—he tends to make good points. This week, he may have taken the basic Slate premise (whatever sensible-sounding thing that anyone, anywhere, has said or done is actually—surprise!—wrong) to its logical extreme.
“… if you don’t get enough ‘sparkle’ from the smaller can, no problem. The mini containers ‘will be sold in eight-packs,’ says the company. Just open a second 7.5-ounce can, and you’ll get 20 percent more sparkle than you used to get from a 12-ounce hit. You’ll also get 20 percent more calories.”
In other words, introducing a new, smaller size of Coke is bad because we’re now going to drink two cans and consume even more calories than if we’d just had one regular-sized can.
And if they were 45-calorie cans would we consume five of them? God forbid Coke comes out with a zero-calorie option, because we’d all drink an infinite amount of soda and Coca-Cola would come shooting out of our pores.
