Even the best vegan dessert seems to be lacking something. Namely, butter and eggs. But those who wish to avoid animal-derived ingredients for health or ethical reasons deserve something more than another tofu silk pie.
Amy’s, known for its natural/organic frozen meals, has a new line of frozen vegan cakes, chocolate and orange, both of which I got to sample at a vegan friend’s dessert party. And they’re actually not bad! Moist, not too crumbly, and tender. The chocolate one wasn’t quite as intensely flavored as I like, but the orange one was dead-on with tangy, vibrant citrus, and the texture of both was meltingly rich.
As blogger Hannah Kaminsky of BitterSweet points out, the cakes are also beautifully packaged in cardboard pans decorated with gold flowers, making them look very different from your typical Sara Lee crap: “this looked like something taken straight from a bakery or given as a thoughtful gift. I wouldn’t be at all ashamed to put it straight on the table, just as is.”
Charges for filtered tap water, bread, butter, and takeout orders nickel-and-dime cost-sensitive customers in a way that Citysearch restaurant editor Josh Ozersky describes as “counterproductive and stupid.” One particularly outrageous incident mentioned in the story: a $3 charge for bread and an additional $2 for butter at Co.
“No cost was mentioned when bread was requested and delivered to a Post reporter last week — and a waiter refused to give a refund. ‘Bread and butter are not hidden charges,’ restaurant spokeswoman Danielle Pagano said. ‘They are both affordable menu items.’”
Way to defuse the situation; instead of acknowledging that many customers would quite sensibly regard hidden charges for bread and butter as repulsive and shocking, Pagano just sells them as “affordable menu items.”
Stealth charges are not a new phenomenon, of course; a 2006 article from Zagat details such sneaky fees as a 75-cent ding for a sprinkle of cilantro atop a dish.
For its part, Eater defended the “sneaky” restaurateurs by printing a letter by Carlos Suarez, owner of Bobo, which was lambasted in the Post article for its $1 water charge.
The Washington Postprofiles David Kessler, the Harvard-trained doctor, lawyer, medical school dean, and former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration whose passion for sensible eating drives him to root around in dumpsters to figure out what kind of crap Chili’s puts into its food.
The profile of the author of The End of Overeating is fabulous stuff, containing science, subterfuge, and sensational nutritional disclosures. A highlight from the Chili’s dive:
“The ingredient list for Southwestern Eggrolls mentioned salt eight different times; sugars showed up five times. The ‘egg rolls,’ which are deep-fried in fat, contain chicken that has been chopped up like meatloaf to give it a ‘melt in the mouth’ quality that also makes it faster to eat. By the time a diner has finished this appetizer, she has consumed 910 calories, 57 grams of fat and 1,960 milligrams of sodium.”
Kessler says that eating “highly palatable” foods, i.e. those dripping with sugar, fat, and salt, rewires the brain so that the craving for said foods becomes uncomfortable if the eater is reminded of a trigger food. In other words: Fast food ads work. And you shouldn’t watch the beginning of Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory on an empty stomach.
KFC wants you to try its new grilled chicken so badly that it’s giving it away free: All day today, KFC is giving each customer one free piece of grilled chicken. For its part, competing chain El Pollo Loco will gift customers with a free leg and thigh plus tortillas and salsa tomorrow.
As satiric blog Food Network Humor writes, “the people at KFC actually had the audacity to put her in a white CHEF’S JACKET. The woman is not a chef! Opening a can of salty mushroom soup and pouring it over raw chicken in a crock pot is NOT cooking. Embellishing the flavor of Cool Whip with extract does not make you a chef [any] more than drawing a house on a piece of paper makes you a carpenter.”
Here she is in the new KFC spot:
Hey Sandra, what tablescape goes with fast-food chicken?
I am an absolute freak for rhubarb. If I see those gleaming red stalks in a grocery store or someone’s garden, if I spy a piece of rhubarb pie in a bakery display case, if I even see the word “rhubarb” on a printed page, I start drooling as helplessly as one of Pavlov’s mutts.
As you might imagine, I also collect rhubarb recipes: CHOW’s Rhubarb-Almond Bars and rhubarb-laced Knockout Punch are in my regular rotation. But it’s tough to find a good recipe for one of my rhubarb staples: rhubarb jelly. Commercially made rhubarb jelly is all but nonexistent; if a jelly company uses rhubarb at all, it’s always combined with strawberry. I’m happy to make my own, but most rhubarb jelly recipes also invite in the insidious strawberry.
The rhubarb jelly recipe from the ’wichcraft cookbook, however, is just about perfect. Lots of rhubarb. Lots of sugar. Just a little bit of lemon. The recipe is for refrigerator jelly, meaning you have to use it all up or it goes bad in a couple of weeks, but I don’t see why you couldn’t can it to have it around during the no-rhubarb months.
The only downside is the time the recipes takes, since the rhubarb has to macerate overnight with the sugar and lemon. Funny that, since the recipe is part of a larger recipe on making a PBJ. Do you know many people who want to take two days to make a PBJ? Yeah, me neither.
By the way, if you too are a rhubarb freak, just about anything you’d want to know about the vegetable (yes!), from growing to cooking to medicinal uses, can be found at the Rhubarb Compendium.
If you haven’t read the web comic Daisy Owl, it’s worth a look—it’s a sweet, tightly written, bracingly funny series following the adventures of a bear, an owl, and the owl’s two presumably adopted human children.
A recent strip features the presentation of a dinosaur birthday cake with the following introduction: “A dinosaur cake could be anything. Even a plain, circular, vanilla cake. You see, all biological matter is recycled. A percentage of the atoms in everything organic were dinosaurs at one point, including this cake, and even ourselves. So, in the truest sense, this is a dinosaur cake.”
Baggu landed on the reusable bag scene a while ago, but now it has expanded its offerings to include new sizes (baby and big), a handy grocery kit (five bags in a little drawstring sack), and a nylon mesh produce bag, which you can use in place of those clear plastic bags from the store.
Why drink your booze when you can don a hazmat suit and stand around breathing in gin fumes? That’s the question London bar/art installation Alcoholic Architecture asks. Open only for two three-day sessions (one last week and one lasting through Saturday), the bar is a project of prankish British design firm Bompas & Parr, known for its custom-molded bespoke jellies and “flavour tripping” parties at which participants consume miracle fruit.
Apparently, standing in the stinky mist for 40 minutes is about the equivalent of one drink. But I agree with Dlisted, which snarks: “Now, do you get to drink gin as well as breathe it in? … After 20 minutes of not getting drunk by breathing in booze vapors, I’d sniff out the source and stick my mouth on the damn mister. 40 minutes sober in a bar feels like ten lifetimes to a drunk!”
This video, by ITN’s This Is Genius, will tell you more, but be warned: You’ll really want to punch the guy who says, “Hence, ‘Alcoholic Architecture,’” with an astonishingly smug expression.
Well, I just don’t know what to think about this new Burger King ad for its Kids Meal, which now contains a SpongeBob SquarePants toy. Is it weirdly amusing, with its SpongeBob-costumed dancers (dig those tube socks!) fitted out with square-butt pads, and the King breakdancing? Or is it super creepy to feature hoochie dancers and the charming statement “Booty is booty” in an ad for a kids’ food product? You be the judge.
Parenting blog Strollerderby reports that the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood has “taken offense” to the spot, and quotes CCFC director, Susan Linn, as saying: “It’s bad enough when companies use a beloved media character like SpongeBob to promote junk food to children, but it’s utterly reprehensible when that character simultaneously promotes objectified, sexualized images of women.’”
To be fair, I’ve only seen the spot running after 9 p.m. or so. This would indicate the crowd being marketed to is not children, but instead their parents, potential buyers of 99-cent kids’ meals who are presumably not shaken up by square-ass-shaking dancers.
Just the thing for a busy work day: half-remembered Sesame Street shorts about food. First, two aliens who seem strangely ill-adapted to life on their home planet are encouraged by a shared desire for nectarines to work together:
And milk gets a kind of creepy zip in our second film, which leaves all who see it with a vague feeling of unease. Could it be the female vocalist’s delivery of the song’s ululating cry for “Milk, miiiiii-iiiilk?” Or is it the intercut scenes of a child crying alone in her crib?
