The Watery Gourmet

PRODUCT REVIEW: WhoNu? Nutrition Rich Cookies

2012-01-14T19:24:00.000-08:00

The shtick behind WhoNu? cookies, aside from the baffling spelling, is that they are "healthy" cookies. I have to admit, this is something that I had long wondered: why had no company made cookies with added nutrients? I always assumed that it could be done cheaply and with little effect on the final product's taste. Well, WhoNu? has confirmed this. It can done.

Each serving of three cookies has 160 calories and a whole bevy of nutrients. Very cool. I'm glad to see a company trying to take something that is traditionally unhealthy and make it healthier. As the box states, the cookies have as much fiber as a bowl of oatmeal, as much calcium as a cup of milk, and as much vitamin C as a cup of blueberries. There is more on the back of the box that I won't bother listing.

Before I talk about the taste, I want to talk about the philosophy. I am very dedicated to dietary health, and as such, I don't like dodges. Not for some vaguely Christian moral reason about not enjoying anything, but because unhealthy foods are unhealthy. Trying to take something unhealthy and make it sorta'-healthy does not eliminate our reliance on the product. The same principle applies to diet sodas. Yes, they are zero calories, but the goal is not to continue drinking soda while simply dodging the calories with some ersatz sugar. The goal is to stop drinking soda altogether.

At the same time, sweets and treats are great. They are an important part of anyone's diet because we very much should be enjoying all elements of the culinary world. Cakes, pies, cookies, and candy, while something that should not be eaten constantly, should be eaten every now and then. They are great! And if, in your periodic treat-eating, you can find a product that is healthier than other, comparable products, it only makes sense to eat it.

So, I guess, my review comes with a caveat. These are STILL COOKIES. They are high in calories and do not fill you up. Just because they are better than other cookies does not mean that they are better than eggs and toast. With that said, on to the review.

These cookies are excellent. No, they are not gourmet, but the company was obviously not shooting for that. They wanted to make a direct competitor to Chips Ahoy and Oreos. I didn't do a direct taste test, but I could tell from memory that the Oreos rip-offs taste slightly different. They are not quite as sweet, but at the same time, they have a slightly better chocolate flavor.

The Chips Ahoy wannabes taste identical to their target. Two of my friends said that they tasted slightly different, though. I would have been happy that the cookies are made with no HFCS and no hydrogenated oils, but they went one step farther and loaded them with nutrients and fiber. Unfortunately, the Oreos use palm oil, which is made with the blood of baby orangutans. Cute ones.

The actual nutrition levels are quite high. These would literally be a better breakfast choice than many cereals. As such, it is impressive that the flavor is the same. If you treat these as cookies, and simply replace extant Chips Ahoy consumption with these, I cannot recommend them enough. But the danger of using them as replacements for otherwise healthy foods is very real. I repeat: these are cookies.

Truly, they needed to be cookies! These needed to not be health food. We already have healthy "cookies" littering the shelves of Whole Foods across the nation. Instead, what the market needed was Chips Ahoy without the crappy ingredients.They did that and did it perfectly. These taste like cookies. Are they the best cookies? No. But neither are Chips Ahoy. So if you eat Chips Ahoy, stop, and start eating these.

WhoNu? Cookies: RECOMMENDED

PRODUCT REVIEW: Starbucks Blonde Roast

2012-01-11T13:28:00.000-08:00

Starbucks is making a big deal out of their first light roast, and rightfully so. This is far and away the lightest roast that they have ever produced. In fact, I think that they went further than they needed. Most people would have been happy with a coffee that was merely not charred to a crisp.

This shift in strategy is coming in response to huge pressure from McDonald's and Dunkin Donuts, both of whom offer lighter coffee that, in many taste tests, is significantly preferred over Starbucks house roast, and, as near as I can tell, universally preferred over Pike Place. I have never been a fan of the 'Bucks' blasted house roast, and Pike Place is too bland. Blonde, specifically the Willow Blend, is much better.

The light brown appearance and healthy, undamaged beans bode well.

The roast is such that there is little-to-no oil on the surface of the bean and has a very light-brown color. Compare this to oily-as-hell and nearly black beans of Starbucks' usual selection.

This bloom is slightly down from its peak. Not bad.

I liked that the beans appeared to be fresh, with a much better scent and bloom during brewing. I don't know how well the beans will hold up after sitting on a grocery shelf for awhile, but perhaps Starbucks was forced to use fresher beans because they couldn't hide low quality with an obscene roast.

The nose is significantly better than anything else Starbucks makes, both from the beans, grounds, and final brew. Talking about flavor notes in the coffee is not an academic affair like with everything else at Starbucks because the terroir of the beans has not be cruelly executed.

The initial flavor profile is obviously very similar to Starbucks' ordinary roast, but there's more of it there. Notes of toasted bread, berries, and small amounts of caramel, peanut butter, and chocolate are all noticeable. It is a much more interesting and pleasant roast to drink.

There is a huge caveat to this, though. The coffee brewed in Starbucks locations is weak, watery, and lacking all punch. The Veranda blend is partly to blame: it isn't as punchy as the Willow blend; but that's only part of the story.

Both home preparation methods produced wildly superior cups to what I got at-location. The siphon-pot (3:30 heat, no cold compress) brought out acidity to the detriment of the coffee. It gave it way too much bite and an astringency on the finish that was not hidden by milk. I didn't bother with an espresso double, but the espresso single worked well. I certainly would not opt for this method, but it wasn't bad.

The sweet spot was hit with pour-over, specifically the Clever Coffee Dripper (4-minute steep). It brought out every drop of rich flavor from the beans and produced none of the biting acidity of the siphon pot. There is much more body hidden in these beans than Starbucks' preparation method would indicate.

The brew at Starbucks is not something that I would buy. It is adequate, but compared to the drip coffee available from smaller cafes, and even sometimes McDonald's, it doesn't justify its higher price. The whole beans in a bag, on the other hand, are something that I would certainly buy. While, as always, I recommend finding a local roaster for maximum freshness and quality, both critical for good coffee, blonde is some of the best coffee that you can buy on the shelf. It more than earns its recommendation.

Starbucks Blonde Roast: RECOMMENDED

Peanut Butter Comparison Part Deux

2012-01-03T18:11:00.000-08:00

My first, and thus far only, product comparison cum taste test was for peanut butter, which I did, like, a hundred years ago. That analysis resulted in Skippy Natural easily beating all of the other sweetened peanut butters. Since then, Jif has also launched a natural version of their peanut butter, but after trying it, my previous conclusion stands: Skippy Natural is the best sweetened PB available on the market.

In retrospect, I regret not having included natural peanut butters. My rationale was that, since sweetened versions make up the vast majority of sales, an analysis that focused on them would be more useful to buyers. Since then, though, I have given natural versions a fair shake, and let me tell you... once I tasted the rich, delicious, peanutty goodness of natural butters, I will never, ever, EVER go back.

Obviously, that makes the winner of this comparison a forgone conclusion; Skippy is most certainly not taking home any prizes. But does that mean that all natural butters are better than Skippy? Read on!

Yes. Yes, it does. You must admit, I can never be accused of circumlocution. Skippy is inferior to essentially every brand of natural peanut butter on the market. But within the natural brands, there is a great deal of difference.

I tried to find multiple natural, unsweetened peanut butters, but the market is pretty thin.¹ For example, aside from Skippy Natural, Wal-Mart carries Smucker's and nothing else.² Target, with a higher SES target demographic, carries a wider selection, but the majority of their offerings are still sweetened and buffered with some sort of oil. Real, natural peanut butter is, for some reason, just above a niche market. This is sad, because I think that if more people allowed it to become part of their diet, they would wonder how they ever did without.

And speaking of without, further ado. On to the ratings.

Smucker's Natural: 95
Delicious in every way I could expect a peanut butter to be. It's rich, with little bite, and fabulously mellow roll-off into a rich, roasty aftertaste. It tastes the best, but, strangely, I don't usually buy it. Why? Wouldn't you like to know!

Teddy: 88
Teddy has a more acidic bite in the primary taste. It's not as mellow as Smucker's and the roll-off isn't as smooth. It does have a subtle sweetness that Smucker's does not, which is pleasant. Ironically, I buy this more often than Smucker's. Why would I do something so silly? A cool trick to prevent a requisite mix of the peanut butter with every serving is to stick it in the refrigerator, which stops the oils from separating. This also increases the viscosity of the butter, which is helpful with natural PB as when it is warm it has a tendency to ooze out of sandwiches.

Teddy remains soft and spreadable when it is cold. Smucker's, oddly, acquires the consistency of cement after a couple of days in the fridge. This is only fixed with a warming period and a little re-mix. I find this annoying enough to avoid Smucker's and buy Teddy. Smucker's Chunky is not afflicted with this problem, but sometimes I just want creamy, dammit.

Woodstock Farms: 87
This small organic brand lacks the nutty texture of Smucker's and Teddy and is much more comparable to traditional butters like Jif and Skippy. It is very smooth and thus blankets the palate more, but this actually had the counter-intuitive effect of attenuating the flavor. It has a distinct sweetness to it and is brighter than Smucker's, but without the acidic bite of Teddy. Its smell is very weak compared to the rich, peanut flavor that explodes from a jar of Teddy or Smucker's. As far as flavor goes, I like this about as much as Teddy. But that nutty, somewhat crunchy texture of Teddy and Smucker's is far more appealing to me.

Smucker's Organic: 82
Almost like a cross between Teddy and Smucker's, it has a significantly weaker flavor than either. It has no bite, but it is also missing all of the mellow roast of Smucker's Natural. Quite a disappointment. While that bite from Teddy is unpleasant, it has a richer peanut flavor, making it better. Smuck-Org, as I shall now call it, also suffers from the same problem as Smuck-Nat in that it turns into carbonite when chilled. Letting it warm, re-mixing, then cooling alleviates the problem for a day or two, then it becomes carbonite again.

Skippy Natural: 60
Once having the rich, smooth sweetness of natural peanut butters, Skippy is positively cloying and simple. The taste is hollow and has an almost metallic tinge to it. Because of the addition of palm oil as a stabilizer, the butter has an oily yet tasteless quality to it. Real peanut butter is oily, but the peanut oil tastes like peanuts. I could never go back to this peanut butter. If your kids absolutely can't do without sugar in their PB, this is certainly the best variety to buy. But trust me, keep some deliciously-delicious natural PB for yourself.

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1: There is a wider variety of peanut butters available online, including variants from Smucker's such as Adams and Laura Scudder's, and smaller companies like Krema. The problem is that most of the time, you cannot purchase a single jar online. You can only buy a pack of three or more. If you do not like the peanut butter, you must either grin and bear it, give it away to friends, or throw the peanut butter away.

2: I didn't include any almond butter, pecan butter, or peanut butter that has been blended with something, since that isn't peanut butter.

The Problem With Fiber

2011-12-18T12:34:00.000-08:00

Do you know what fiber is? If not, boy do I have some crazy shit to tell you.

First off, I should confess that I am a fiber nut... which sounds like a cereal. After researching the digestive tracts of all of our closest genetic relatives, it is obvious that our tracts have evolved to handle vastly higher amounts of fiber than the average American is getting. The USDA recommends between twenty and thirty grams of fiber daily for an adult. The average American is getting less than ten. TEN. It is truly amazing that anyone is able to poop.

Chimpanzees, by comparison, eat hundreds of grams of fiber in a day. Granted, they spend, no exaggeration, 90% of their waking hours chewing, so it is equally obvious that we should not be trying to eat the same diet as our chimpy cousins. But while our digestive systems may be structurally different for this reason, they are mechanically nearly identical. Our guts all operate on the same principles, as it were. Fiber is a critical element in our diets. It is far more important than we initially thought and its importance grows with each passing scientific study. We absolutely need to be eating more fiber. A lot more.

But what is fiber? Likewise, as we discover how important fiber is, we discover how different kinds of fiber do different things. Insoluble fiber is the kind of fiber that Grandma referred to as "ruffage" and aside from differences in water absorbtion, they all do pretty much the same thing. This is the fiber that you can get from bananas, whole grains, and nuts and seeds. How insoluble fiber works is being researched, but a likely-accurate guess is that it literally tears through your digestive tract, creating tiny cuts that elicits fluid production and peristalsis. This mechanical nature means that all insoluble fiber is pretty much the same.

Soluble fiber, on the other hand, has better-understood mechanisms. It's also here where the kind of fiber that you are getting is important. Soluble fiber, while initially not digestible by the human tract, is digestible by other little things living in our tract. These helpful little bacteria, which I imagine to be as cute as Water Bears, eat the fiber and produce biologically active byproducts. These byproducts have far-reaching benefits for our physiology. But as you would imagine, slight differences in fiber structure will result in different end-products after the bacteria eat it. It is simple chemistry.

It is this simple chemistry that flummoxed me after I discovered FiberSure and was confident in my high fiber intake. FiberSure, now called Metamucil Clear & Natural, is great. It mixes cleanly into nearly everything. Sadly, it's not nearly as good as I thought, and my earlier confidence affirms the danger of nutritionism when it stands unanalyzed.

FiberSure is made from inulin, a plant fiber that is actually a carbohydrate. In most cases, the type that you see on store shelves has been derived from chicory root. Inulin mixes so easily because it breaks down easily into the superfine powder that is Clear & Natural. Its taste in slightly sweet, but it is otherwise neutral. You can, and I do, mix it into almost anything.

So if inulin is so amazing, why did it suddenly explode on to the market? Because until recently, it wasn't classified as a fiber. After it got that label, food companies were free to exploit it. Unfortunately, as is infuriatingly the frequent case, they are increasingly exploiting this to your detriment.

Have you ever tried a FiberOne or Fiber Plus granola bar? Taste great, don't they? That's because they are candy.

NINE GRAMS OF FIBER?! That's amazing! How do they do it?!

With inulin, that's how. Take a butchers at the first ingredient: chicory root extract. As in, inulin. What is the second ingredient? Chocolate chips. Beyond that, and the sugar contained therein, let's count the sugars: Corn syrup, sugar, HM corn syrup, and fructose; four. That is candy with near-zero nutritional benefit aside from the added inulin which you could get more easily and cheaply by simply stirring it into a glass of milk.

Moreover, the damned thing has the same calorie count as two large eggs. You could make an entire omelette for only slightly more calories and a whole butt-load more nutrients. You could buy the 90-Calorie versions, but they achieve that energy reduction by simply reducing the size of the bars: 23g instead of 40g.

Kellog's Fiber Plus bars are an even bigger lie. Let's break it down...

Sizes

pouch, 5 ct, 6 ct (Limited Availability), 10 ct, 5 ct

Ingredients

CHICORY ROOT FIBER, ROLLED OATS, CRISP RICE (RICE FLOUR, SUGAR, MALT EXTRACT, SALT, MIXED TOCOPHEROLS FOR FRESHNESS), SUGAR, SEMISWEET CHOCOLATE DROPS (SUGAR, CHOCOLATE, COCOA BUTTER, DEXTROSE, MILK FAT, SOY LECITHIN, CONFECTIONER'S GLAZE [SHELLAC, HYDROGENATED COCONUT OIL]), INULIN FROM CHICORY ROOT, VEGETABLE OIL (HYDROGENATED AND/OR PARTIALLY HYDROGENATED PALM KERNEL, COCONUT AND PALM OIL)†, CANOLA OIL, FRUCTOSE, CONTAINS TWO PERCENT OR LESS OF HONEY, COCOA (PROCESSED WITH ALKALI), GLYCERIN, TRICALCIUM PHOSPHATE, WHEY, CHOCOLATE, SALT, GUM ARABIC, BAKING SODA, SOY LECITHIN, SORBITAN MONOSTEARATE, POLYSORBATE 60, VITAMIN E ACETATE, NATURAL AND ARTIFICIAL FLAVOR, ZINC OXIDE, ALMOND FLOUR, NONFAT DRY MILK, WHEAT STARCH, PARTIALLY DEFATTED PEANUT FLOUR, SOY PROTEIN ISOLATE, BHT (FOR FRESHNESS).
†LESS THAN 0.5g TRANS FAT PER SERVING

First ingredient? Inulin. Then we have more inulin later on. Combined with that are six instances of sugar, and two examples of hydrogenated oil. Not only is there too much sugar, they are also making sure that you get your daily dose of trans fats. Because, remember, they can legally claim zero grams of trans fat per serving as long as it is below 0.5g... which means that they shoot for 0.49g.

In general, if you are buying anything with either Kellogg's, Post, or General Mills logo on the box, it is likely one step above eating garbage. Obviously, even these kings of crap produce a few good things. Both Fiber Plus and Fiber One cereals are actually quite healthy, being loaded with every kind of fiber there is. The gold standard is obvious original Fiber One, which is nearly equivalent to going into the woods and grazing. The downside is that it hasn't been blended with various soluble fibers. Likewise, standouts like All Bran, Grape Nuts, and the iconic Cheerios all make good decisions for part of your morning routine.

I stress the part of element to that statement because you are insane if you are eating solely cereal in the morning instead of yogurt, eggs, chicken, bacon, granola, fruit, and vegetables. Not only are those options vastly superior to nearly ever cereal as regards nutrition, they also taste better. Make French toast with high-fiber bread. Make an omelet with cheese and a single-serving box of mixed veggies. Pour yogurt and some granola over berries. There is nothing saying that all of these options can't also be paired with some cereal. These simple meals take only slightly more time and you will charge out to greet the day filled with energy.

But back to fiber.

As the focus on national health has increased, all of the cereal companies are trying their level best to market cereal that is healthy, but still tastes like cereal. That means sugar. Frequently tons of it. Kellogg's Smart Start, most types of granola, Raisin Bran, Special K, Honey Bunches of Oats: all of them are masquerading as healthy when, in fact, they are far from it. They are only healthy as "part of this complete breakfast," which is one of the greatest lines of bullshit in the history of advertising; the breakfast would still be complete without the cereal.

That is the final point of this rant: marketing. It was marketing that confused me. I was taken in with dietary pick-up lines about easy fiber, high fiber, more fiber, digestive health, and other such statements that have not been evaluated by the FDA. Knowing what you know about a healthy diet, look at the borderline-criminal advertisements for Frosted Flakes, where they stress sports, and health, and an active lifestyle. Frosted Flakes Gold is packaged like it's some kind of exercise supplement. Which I guess is good, because you had better exercise like crazy just to burn off all of the calories that you are taking in from their sugar-bombed fat flakes.

If you can't tell, I have nothing but respect for the cereal companies, and very little of that.

I do not blame the companies, though. A company does what it does, that is, make money. It is legally obligated to the share-holders and only makes what it thinks people will buy. People have a habit of buying foods that are loaded with sugar and are shockingly unhealthy for them, so any smart company is going to make those products. We can't, nor should we, force companies to make foods that won't sell, but we need to make a system that doesn't facilitate disinformation and lies. It is from here where the problem springs, and with those who created this system where the blame truly lies.

I do not blame the cereal companies, I blame the politicians that accept their bribes. Oh right, I forgot. It is not bribes. It is campaign contributions. I expect companies to earn money and do whatever is legally allowed to do that. I expect our representatives to actually do what is best for us.

We have a simple task: make a rule set that is internally coherent, provides information to consumers, gives freedom to companies, does this based on the best science available, and is instituted to specifically be updated based on that science on a set schedule.

This is not hard.

I hope that this short introduction has shown you why it is critical that fiber gets classified as an essential macronutrient, and that the various kinds of fiber get separate classification. That we have no daily recommendations for it nor rigorously defined separation between those various kinds is a serious problem, one that is far greater than the busted Food Pyramid ever was. The nebulousness must be eliminated. Doing so would immediately remove the ability of food companies to trick us with nonsense like high-fiber grape juice. As it stands, we have crap-loads of products filling the shelves touting HIGH IN FIBER, and what they should actually say is "High in Inulin!".

While that may not sound quite as catchy for the marketing department, I don't care. The marketing is lying, and we don't have the regulations to hold them accountable. That needs to change, because I read everything ever, and even I was fooled. What chance does a harried parent have?

REVIEW: Chain Casual Dining Restaurants (UPDATE)

2011-11-29T13:43:00.000-08:00

Chain restaurants that fall into the "casual dining" market bracket have, over the course of the last twenty-odd years, come to dominate the landscape. They have been the catalyst to a nearly complete reorganizing of the target markets, have nearly killed the previously booming haute-cuisine industry in the US, have increased the amount many people are spending on food by multiple times, and have likely played a major part in the increasingly alarming size of the American waistline. They have, in a very literal way, redefined food in America.

I could write an entire book on the effects of casual dining has had on our fine country, but instead, for the more limited scope of this article, I will write mini-reviews of each one. I won't bother much addressing service, atmosphere, or design, since all of them seem to subscribe to the exact same philosophy. Also, I won't assign a $-rating to them since their prices are all similar. Instead, I will talk primarily about the food with brief mention of price. Again, the star ratings are based on my traditional ratings system and not in exclusive comparison to other casual dining restaurants.

My reviews are limited to what I have nearby, but living in the northeast, nestled between Boston and New York, provides me with access to nearly every major chain in the country.

An issue that I generally had with many of these places is that the menus are laughably similar, and they all followed the same strategies to hide poor ingredients. Cheesecake Factory is one of the worst, with nearly everything on the menu tasting heavy, greasy, and cheap.

UPDATE: I've added Johnny Rockets to the list.

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Chili's- **1/2
Chili's is one of the "junk wall" trio, the other two being Applebee's and TGI Fridays. They have the same personality, the same menu, and the same goddamned "junk wall" aesthetic that was done three minutes after it started. Chili's is the most muted of the three, and as time has gone on, they have moved away from this design, but bits of it remain. Much like TGI Friday's, the food is mostly decent. Anything that is grilled is good. Avoid all of the fried foods because, one, they are ungodly bad for you, and two, frying hides bad ingredients.

Applebee's- **

Applebee's is the second of the trio, the largest, and also the worst. I've never had bad food at an Applebee's. Quality control is obviously high, and unlike some other restaurants, like Olive Garden, they don't overreach the quality of their ingredients in their recipes. But that also means that all of the recipes are either quite bland or taste like something that I bought at Stop & Shop and microwaved. The menu is borderline identical with both Chile's and TGIF, the only difference being inferior recipes.

TGI Friday's- **1/2
The third and final member of the "junk wall" trio is also the worst when it comes to bolting crap to the wall. I hated it the moment I saw it. As far as food is concerned, it has the genuinely good Jack Daniel's menu, and anything that is grilled is rather tasty. Ingredients are of acceptable quality. Chicken has good, meaty texture, and the steak, while a bit tough, is flavorful. It is in many of the other recipes where it falls down. Salads are literally DRENCHED in dressing unless you ask for it on the side. Fried foods are overwhelmingly greasy and heavy, as is the pasta. Still, it's a tasty, fairly-priced restaurant that can handle massive crowds, so there is rarely a wait. I generally don't go to TGI Friday's, but if friends were going, I wouldn't complain.

IHOP- **1/2
IHOP makes mostly acceptable food, with a few things that are legitimately tasty. Unlike Denny's, they do not totally screw up basic breakfast food. French toast, eggs, and other simple things are always cooked well. When you venture into more complex territory, such as omlettes, the menu becomes a bit more disappointing. Things like steak and other such dinner items are not terribly good, but nor are they bad. If I was in a bind, I would have no issues eating an an IHOP. Given the choice, though, I would always opt for someplace better, like T's.

Denny's- *1/2
How one screws up eggs and toast is beyond me, but Denny's manages it. The eggs are flavorless, the toast tastes like wonderbread, and the bacon is rubbery and overly greasy. Why anyone would pay to have this prepared when they could screw it up at home for less money is a mystery. The sweet stuff, a standby for both IHOP and Denny's, is cloying and simplistic, with the absolute pinnacle being their Sweet Ride nachos, which were fried tortillas covered in crappy chocolate syrup and aerated whipped cream from a can. I have never had anything even remotely tasty at a Denny's. The best that I can say is that I have never been poisoned. On the bright side, service is usually good, even though someone gets arrested at every Denny's location in the country at least once per day, and Denny's are always very clean. Every time I enter a Denny's, it is against my will.

Cheescake Factory- **

I have never had a fully satisfactory meal at the Cheesecake Factory. I don't want to go so far as to call it bad, but the food is always fatty, greasy, sugary, breaded, dipped, and slathered in sauce. Their website says:

"The Cheesecake Factory menu features more than 200 menu selections made fresh from scratch each day — using only the highest quality ingredients — which combines to create our remarkable tastes."

If by remarkable tastes they mean remarkably average, then they are right on the money. The bit about highest quality ingredients is laughable. Chicken is gummy. Steak is tough. There are a number of recipes that are very good. It depends on if the ingredients for that item are naturally cheap. I suspect that much of the poor quality has to do with with offering over two hundred items. Two hundred?! No kitchen can produce two hundred items and keep quality at the utmost. It would be the size of a warehouse.

Cheesecake Factory also holds the distinction of being the Worst Restaurant in America, according to Men's Health Magazine. They say that "No establishment better represents the confluence of factors that have saddled America with an ever-worsening obesity crisis." Would you want to eat there?

California Pizza Kitchen- ***
The food is a mixed bag at CPK. Pasta is too salty, which is a common problem at these chain restaurants. Salads are, likewise, covered in dressings and toppings, turning what should be light and flavorful into something that is heavy and fatty. The pizzas are good enough to lift this place up to a full three stars, though. The topping selection is unique, prices are fair, and the quality is good. While I would always opt to make my own pizza at home (it's SO easy), this place beats out the legions of crappy little local joints that are named after some guy quite easily.

Red Robin- ***
Red Robin is another place that does what it does and does it well. They don't overreach their ingredient quality with their recipes. Their toppings are fresh, prices are little on the high side, but still fair. Some of their recipes, such as their chicken sandwiches, are light on the herbs and spices and lean toward bland, but nothing is bad. The design is a bit garish, with strong Junkwall aspirations inside, but they seem to be aiming Red Robin at the child market, and it works well for that. This is a great place to bring kids for a treat. But for the adults, avoid this place during kid-friendly hours like the plague. Everyone has kids. All of the kids are little psychos. And the noise combined with an aesthetic that looks like Pee Wee Herman's nightmare will drive you away such that you will never want to return.

Johnny Rockets- ***

I've never had anything that wasn't tasty at a Johnny Rockets. I hear tell that quality can vary wildly from location to location, but the ones in Providence and Cranston, RI. have never failed me. These dance a line between fast food burgers and burger-house burgers. By that I mean the size of the patties and the overall presentation of the food is similar to any other fast food joint. Here, you get things wrapped in paper and you buy all sides separately. Menu items are all very simple, but like Red Robin, this prevents them from overreaching their ingredient quality. The 1950's kitsch isn't overwhelming and doesn't seem bolted on, since the whole concept of a Golden Age diner is woven into the company's DNA. Most burgers are in the $6-$7, which places them just below the burgers at places like Red Robin and Smokey Bones, and just above the burgers at Five Guys. This is a tough spot, from a value perspective, but I think that it works. I like the atmosphere, service has always been excellent, and their milkshakes are the bomb, as you young folk say. I go to Johnny Rockets frequently.

Cracker Barrel- **

I hate absolutely everything about Cracker Barrel. I hate its kitsch. I hate its ambiance. I hate its decor. I hate its religious foundations. I hate that they make you wait in a "country store" for your table. Even if the food was amazing, I would never visit. Unfortunately for them, the food isn't amazing. It's greasy, overly salty, and poorly cooked. They have a good breakfast selection, but their food is no better or worse than IHOP. Like many chain places, nothing at Cracker Barrel is bad. But if it doesn't stand out in some fundamental way, why go? I see no reason, and as such, I don't.

Olive Garden- *1/2

How something like this succeeds in a state where half of the population is Italian leaves me baffled. First, the good: the salads are all acceptable, and the pasta is decent. The sauce is entirely unremarkable and herbs and spices seem to be something to which the chefs have never been properly introduced. The pathetically weak flavor is indicative of freeze-dried herbs used across the boards. Ingredient quality is noticeably poor. Chicken, something that is generally seen as bulletproof, is 100% borked at The Olive Garden. It is always rubbery, flavorless, and fatty on the palate. Steak is never cooked correctly, but not like it matters. The meat is very cheap. Olive Garden also holds the distinction of using my most hated advertising tagline in history: "When You're Here, You're Family." Fuck you. No I'm not. If I was family, you wouldn't be charging me.

Ruby Tuesday- ***
I remember Ruby Tuesday as being a Junkwall restaurant. They may have been, but they certainly aren't now, at least, which is great. Their menu is similar to the Junkwall Trio, but everything seems to be a notch above. There are no glaring piles of fried apocalypse, and few tricks to hide poor ingredients. They have a wide selection of burgers which are usually a hit, and with a wide selection of other foods, they are an entirely acceptable place to buy a meal.

Longhorn Steakhouse- ***
This is the reason why the meat at Olive Garden, the Junk Wall Trio, and Cheesecake Factory have crappy meat: it costs a lot! Outback Steakhouse is a chain, but all of their meat is of rather high quality, and, big shock, their steaks cost almost as much as many singular steak houses. As long as you stick to their steak creations, the food is good. Their sandwiches and salads frequently underwhelm, with bland flavors and no inventiveness. Longhorn has significantly toned down their kitsch in recent years, and the dining room is much more pleasant for it.

Outback Steakhouse- ***
Outback is like Longhorn's little brother. They are quite a bit cheaper across the board, but their quality is also noticeably lower. I've had a number of tough steaks, with more fat than there should be. Everything has always been flavorful, and their menu is much wider than Longhorn. For example, Longhorn has two sandwiches on the menu, Outback has six. Outback also follows the Junkwall aesthetic a bit, with weird shit nailed to the wall, but it's not too bad.

Bertucci's- **1/2

Bertucci's pizza is very good. They also have a gigantic array of available toppings. Their prices are just this side of insane, though. You are undoubtedly better off trying local pizza places until you find a good one. Either that or make pizza at home; it's very, very easy. Their pasta is universally too salty. They must honestly cook it in sea water. Their red sauce is watery and bland, with zero body and no punch. There are quite a few jarred sauces that are significantly better. Seafood quality is low, but not terrible. If I wanted non-pizza Italian food, the only place that I would prefer less is The Olive Garden.

Ted's Montana Grill- ***
Ted's has one of the best interiors of all of the chain restaurants. It still has the fundamental aesthetic of a designed restaurant, with large open spaces filled with tables. But the muted wood tones, large, impressive prints of paintings showing the wide open spaces of the Old West, and rustic design touches provide a genuine sense of splendor and charm. All of this is made hilarious when you find out that the restaurant has nothing to do with Montana, farms, or cowboys, and the eponymous Ted is actually Ted Turner... who just wanted to make a steak house.

Everything is of very high quality. Recipes are austere. The centerpiece of the menu is their selection of bison meat, of which I'm not the biggest fan. The only major knock against them is that their prices are quite high. Where most places sell burgers for $8-$10, Ted's starts at $10 for a naked burger, and gets as high as $15. Bison meat adds $3 to each burger. That is a pricey burger. With that in mind, Ted's is still a very good restaurant. You will enjoy your food.

Smokey Bones: ***1/2

Smokey Bones is great. They have a large, dynamic menu of high-quality food. Their BBQ options are all excellent. Their pulled pork is hands-down the best that you can buy at any chain. Their prices are fully competitive. Their kitsch is a little off-putting, and since they changed owners and were rebranded a "fire grill," whatever the hell that is, they have bits of "wisdom" posted around the place that read like something out of The Man Show scripts. It's not enough to detract from the food, though, which is great. If you want BBQ, I would recommend Smokey Bones over every other chain, and even most local places.

Carrabba's- ***1/2
This is one of my favorite chain restaurants. I very much enjoy eating at Carrabba's. Recipes are always thoughtful, decently-sized, and ingredient quality is good across the board. This is what Olive Garden should be.The dining room has little kitsch. Aside from the requisite fake wood texture, the bulk of the things on the wall are prints of old photos of the founders' mother. The whole restaurant is a bit dim, which is annoying, but the quality of the food more than compensates. Herbs and spices are present and they don't taste free-dried. The oil that comes with bread is a legitimate replacement for butter. And the dessert selection is among the best of all chains.

Texas Roadhouse- ***
I like Texas Roadhouse. It has good quality meats and recipes. I cannot stand the character or decor. You can eat peanuts as you wait for your table. Do not look for a garbage can in which to place your shells, though. There isn't one. They do this on purpose because they want you to throw your shells on the ground to really drive home how down-fucking-home quaint their restaurant is. It's practically a local bar down in Texas, h'yuk!!! Fuck you. This is forced charm. It is kitsch. When what makes your place charming is part of a corporate plan, it is not charming. It is annoying. Give me a damned garbage can.

Birthday celebrations are the most obnoxious of all restaurants in the entirety of the galaxy. They wheel out a saddle, scream, holler, and point a light in the face of the subject like they want information. Worse, people actually seem to enjoy this, because no less than nine hundred birthdays will happen while you are there. This horrifying show is enough to keep me away for ever.

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I have a love-hate relationship with chain restaurants. On the one hand, they are an economic force that is causing local restaurants to either step up their game or go out of business. This is a good thing because local places have a tendency to simply do the same thing, and do that same thing, at times, poorly. The chains come in with brutal efficiency, marketing, style, cheap prices, and the ability to handle massive crowds.

It is also a bad thing because they force conformity upon the general market. Local restaurants will simply fall in line, and before you know it, all of the restaurants in the area are serving the same damned food. Unless you live in an urban center, your selections are very limited because of these restaurants.

Moreover, since the restaurants are usually not run by people who want to own restaurants, profit is the deciding factor in recipes and ingredient choices. Obviously, profit is always important, but most local places are run by people that simply enjoy running a restaurant. But since they have less to save by switching to lower-quality materials, as they are serving fewer meals, they are less inclined to do so. Compare this to the horrible quality frequently seen at chains. Because saving $0.25 per meal equals huge profits when your restaurant is pumping out fifty million meals per year.

That said, there are quite a few places out there that are truly a cut above. Restaurants like Carrabba's, Smokey Bones, and Ted's show that even a major chain can be a legitimate destination. They can be such because they don't shoot for generic food. Their menus have unique, identifiable character. There is quality out there in the din. Sometimes it is hard to find, but the quest is, without doubt, worthwhile.

Funny Corn Syrup Video

2011-11-18T10:14:00.001-08:00

I have a tolerate/hate relationship with the corn syrup ads that ran on television over the past few years. I can respect the corn industry's desire to protect public opinion of their product, but at the same time, they have to know that what they are selling is bad.

Bad because it tastes inferior to sugar,¹ bad because it's the final step in a massive government subsidy clusterfuck, and bad because the body might process HFCS differently from ordinary corn syrup and sugar.² That is something that they happily ignored in those television ads, in their twisted Socratic dialogue, with an interlocutor character who is plainly retarded.

I had to opt to embed a low-quality version that a YouTube user uploaded since the official versions forbid embedding and moderate the comments. You can find the second official video here. Some inventive spoofs on these ads were created that deserve posting.

High-fructose corn syrup should always be avoided. If a product has it in it, don't buy it. It is that simple. Do. Not. Buy. It. Not because it may be bad for you in some physiologically obscure way. Not because you only want to buy organic crap. But because it is indicative of a company that is cutting culinary corners. This eliminates basically the entire cookie aisle, I'll admit, and pretty much everything that your children want, but that's a good thing. HFCS is the Boy Scout badge of a bad dietary life.

At the same time, I do not like to treat HFCS as some bugbear that is the cause of our obesity problem. It is absolutely not. If that were the case, countries without significant HFCS consumption like those in Europe or Asia, would not be seeing large weight increases. They are. Everyone in the Western world is getting fatter, the problem is just more apparent in the US. This is most likely because we were the only Western Nation not obliterated by World War II. Thus, we were able to get down to the important business of consumption directly after the war ended.

No, it is our overall lifestyle that is causing obesity. And while the emergence of HFCS might have encouraged our increasing desire for sweetness in the food that we buy, it is not the cause. That does not mean that we all should not be aware of how our food is made and from whence elements of our diet come. Truly, the more aware we are, the more likely we are to make overall better decisions. Not because we are terrified of HFCS or some other dietary boogeyman, but because we recognize that good diet has as little sugar in it as possible.

There is some evidence to indicate that this happening. According to the USDA, from a peak in the year 1999, overall sugar consumption in the US is on a downward trend. It may even get back to pre-1980 levels within the next five years.

This is obviously not the only piece in the puzzle as US obesity rates are continuing the rise. The reasons for this may be very bad, indeed.

I fear that the reduction in sugar with a corresponding continued rise in obesity evinces the growing divide between the dietary haves and have-nots. Sugar consumption is going down, but only among those in the middle and upper areas of the Socioeconomic Status scale. As this chart shows, overweight levels have remained flat since the late 1980's, and saw a downward trend in 2005/2006.

This next chart shows that overweight levels have actually remained flat for the past four decades. This indicates that the bulk of weight gain has happened in those genetically susceptible to weight gain and those too poor to buy better food. As the quality of cheap food has taken a nose-dive, as has the diet of those who will be attracted to ever-cheaper products.

Is HFCS worse for you than sugar? Maybe, but if there is a difference, it is likely small. But that doesn't mean that those inane corn syrup advertisements are correct. They ignore the fact that as HFCS consumption has gone up, obesity levels have gone up. They ignore the fact that the cheapest food is the only food loaded with HFCS. That does not indicate a causal connection, but it does indicate that they are likely somehow linked. If you care about your diet, you should avoid HFCS as much as possible. And as I have discovered, as much as possible means never eating it at all. Well, except for the occasional Milano.
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1: In multiple semi-scientific studies, people are frequently able to tell the difference, but many actually prefer the flavor of HFCS-sweetened drinks to the sugar-sweetened varieties. I think that it is because the HFCS versions are sweeter. Just look at the Pepsi Challenge, where Pepsi was preferred by a majority of people. This was explicitly because Pepsi is sweeter than Coke.

2: This is a problematic aspect of the debate. A few studies have shown some connection, with one very strong study done at Princeton University being widely criticized. Other studies have shown no unique link between HFCS and health issues. I think that the debate is something of a canard. Sugar is bad in excess. HFCS is indicative of cheap, poorly-made products. So why would you want to eat sugar in excess in cheap, poorly-made products?

Pies, Pies, The Musical Fruit

2011-11-15T12:50:00.001-08:00

As with every holiday, pies are on the menu. There's just something about them. I recommend making your pies because, first, it's incredibly easy, and second, there's nothing like a pie straight from the oven. If you don't have time, though, Rhode Island has two excellent locations to get top-flight pies made-to-order.

My number-one choice is, no surprise, my favorite bakery in Rhode Island, The Village Hearth, in Jamestown. Their crust is ultra-buttery, crisp, airy, and the pies are filled with immaculately prepared fruits and fillings. If I was to pick the best pies in RI, it would be them.

My second pick is, again no shock, Pastiche, in Providence. This choice also works much better for those in the Northern part of RI and on into Massachusetts. While I prefer the more provincial pies at Village Hearth, Pastiche's Dutch Apple Pie, Pecan Tart, and Pumpkin Praline Tart have their own merits. And, importantly, you won't find anything better for a good thirty-mile radius around Federal Hill.

Some Random Good Diet Tips

2011-11-08T19:19:00.000-08:00

I have been slowly performing a complete overhaul of my diet over the course of the last year. I've been actively increasing my vegetable intake, I've been carefully crafting more meals at home, and all along the way I have been choosing options that take up as little time as possible.

That is one of the biggest issues for people who have become acclimated to the high-speed lifestyle allowed by eating out. You never have to worry your pretty little head about timing, or preparation, or cleanup, NO! You simply walk in, receive food, consume food, walk out.

Eventually, one's social life grows adapted to this. It ultimately becomes a chore to eat. You don't want to eat, you want to do other things. The timing calculations that we perform to determine trips to and from work, whether we say yes or no to an impromptu night at the movies, or whether we consider hanging out to even be an option in any setting, all of them become dependent on the assumption that food will take very little time.

The state of our economy makes the 1950's Golden Age ideal of dinner on the table every night nearly an impossibility. Very few households have a single income anymore, meaning that very few households have their own, private chef in the form of a stay-at-home parent. At-home gourmet food is basically impossible except for those who treat cooking as a hobby or passion. This state of affairs might help to explain the rise of food porn, celebrity chefs, and FoodNetwork.

So we are left with at-home meals that impinge upon our lives, an imposition toward which business society is becoming increasingly antagonistic, or restaurant meals that cost a lot and absolutely destroy our waistlines. This is not a tenable situation. We must either, as a nation, accept radically different dietary standards, or change the direction of our economy.

Faced with this reality, I have spent the last year trying to find a happy medium. I want healthy foods that I can prepare in under thirty minutes. I don't really consider money since simply shooting for health and speed results in reduced cost. That is unless you frequent pre-made meals from the store or fast food joints. But as I discovered, even the oft-cited bastions of poor diet like Wal-Mart can be treasure troves of healthy food, just so long as you know where to look.

Tip #1: Buy frozen vegetables.

Target especially has an enormous selection of store-brand vegetable mixes that are surprisingly tasty. The vegetables used are of good quality, and if you prepare them carefully, they end up being fantastic. It is unfortunate that nearly all of the pre-made mixes use either palm oil or hydrogenated oils of some type or another, but the amounts used are small, and I think that the benefits of increased vegetables in the diet outweigh any amount of trans-fats ingested.

That criticism only applies to the mixes, of course. The raw vegetables are just that, raw. They are the very embodiment of health in an easy-use package. They microwave in minutes, go well in groups, and can be kicked up a notch with herbs and spices.

Canned vegetables are useful if you don't have the freezer space, and a great option for canned beans of all shapes and sizes. The only problem with canned veggies is the salt content. They, and by they I mean the secret alien overlords, frequently can veggies in salt as both a flavor enhancer and also a preservative. Give canned vegetables a wash under cold water before cooking or serving them to get rid of most of the salt.

Other than that, you should be storing enough frozen vegetables to require a small chest freezer in your basement. They are cheap, can be prepared lightning-quick, and provide a panoply of flavors for your enjoyment. The final great thing is that frozen vegetables are available at Wal-Marts and Targets across the country.

Tip #2: Buy meat and freeze it.

Meat is fantastically healthy for you, just so long as you take it easy. A solid pound of ground beef every day is not the best course towards full-body health. But used in moderation, it is protein-dense, filling, and lower-calorie than a large serving of bread or pasta. For example, a 6oz steak contains about 300 calories. A flour burrito tortilla, just the tortilla, is 220 calories.

There are huge advantages not just associated with price or health. Restaurants will frequently use lower-quality meat with a higher fat content. When buying for the home, you can seek out the highest quality beef, pork, and chicken. Remember, always shoot for the leanest ground beef that you find; look for light, evenly distributed marbling of fat in steaks; and always buy chicken that has a deep, golden color to it. Avoid the pale chicken because it has a wildly higher fat content than the high-quality stuff. A good starting point is Purdue. It's not the best, but it's far from the worst. If you have a Trader Joe's nearby, they have excellent chicken. Buy your Purdue at Wal-Mart to get it for hilariously cheap. I'm talking $3 per pound.

Target maintains a great selection of pre-frozen fish steaks: tilapia, salmon, cod, and others are all available under their Market Pantry and Archer Farms brands. With these, you can maintain a constant selection of over a dozen meats, all ready to be cooked in under 30 minutes.

If you choose to buy in bulk and freeze like I do, you can regain much of the good texture from using unfrozen meat by thawing and cooking slowly. But since the goal of this is to be fast, a boneless chicken breast thaws in five minutes or less in a microwave, then cooks on a cast iron pan in about 15 minutes. You can always cover it in herbs and spices, olive oil, throw in some fresh veggies, and broil it in that same pan for about 25 minutes. That will result in better texture. If cooking meat quickly on a hot iron skillet, set the temperature high and flip the meat frequently; every 2-4 minutes or so.

Maintaining a collection of various meats and frozen veggies, when combined, results in a nearly limitless variety of meals. Meat is your friend.

Tip #3: Maintain a massive spice cabinet.

Herbs and spices are essentially zero-calorie. They are free flavor. Use them on your veggies. Use them on your meat. You will discover that when using actual flavor, you become much more sensitive to salt levels in your food. Salt is fantastic as a flavor enhancer, meaning that it is best in extreme moderation.

Tip #4: Learn to love sandwiches.

I do not snack very much. If I am feeling a little peckish, I have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Or I have a deli sandwich. They are utterly fantastic little meals that you can easily get under 400 calories and come loaded with flavor. The complex mix of ingredients is also more likely to fill you up and provide better fuel for a longer time. Finally, make your sandwiches with high-fiber bread to get 50% or more of your daily value for fiber. Just remember to avoid mayo or any form of liquid calories like dressing. These can push a sandwich into gut-busting calorie territory very quickly and it's hard to measure and regulate the amount applied.

Tip #5: Add Metamucil to everything.

It was previously called FiberSure, but it is now called Metamucil Clear & Natural. It is a powder, it contains 50/50 soluble and insoluble fiber, and it dissolves in anything. You could dissolve half-a-cup of this into a glass of milk and barely notice it.

Tip #6: Don't worry about calories from the stuff that Grandma would like.

By this, I mean the things that frequently get hated on for being high calorie but have been staples of the American diet for a hundred years. Whole milk? There is no evidence that it causes weight gain, and there is a small amount of evidence to indicate that it's better for you than 1% or skim.

I think the focus on these things come from dieticians desperately trying to find anything and everything in the environment that could be causing the weight gain that we see in the population. As such, they say to avoid juice, milk, and even fruit! Ignore this advice. If you are fat, you are not fat from orange juice, milk, and eggs. You are fat from snacking, pre-packaged foods, and eating out too often.

There is an extensive proviso to this tip, though.

<history-lesson style="entertainment: low;">

After World War II, the biggest problems that we as a society had weren't nutrition or weight, but calories. Many people simply were not getting enough. Hunger remained an extensive problem in Europe into the 1960's.

The response to this was to get calorie counts up as quickly as possible, and that meant cheap food and processed food. Remember, at this point, the idea of being deficient in specific nutrients was a relatively new idea, since up until that point, people either had enough food or they didn't. Those were the only states in which people found themselves. As such, the medical literature was primarily knowledgeable about the effects of a total lack of food.

Thus, we saw the rise of brands like Wonder Bread and such childhood staples as Twinkies, Fritos, and Eggo waffles. It's tasty. It's cheap. And it's loaded with calories. Just what a growing population needs!

Unfortunately, it wasn't. We actually needed much more. Before that, our diets of farm-grown produce, mom-made bread and dough, and whatever meat we could raise made for a rather complete meal. After that, the things we weren't even thinking about started making their absence known.

Fiber was one of the biggest issues. Afflictions like IBS, diverticulitis, and constipation were nearly unheard of before the end of World War II. After the war, calories went up, fiber took a dive, and these new illnesses suddenly rose in prominence.

So while Grandma generally had good judgment, the post WWII era, which will forever be the Grandma generation, also had underlying values that are incompatible with today's dietary environment. It's not hard to find out which bits of Grandma's wisdom are no longer up to snuff. All you have to do is hit up Wikipedia.

</history-lesson>

Tip #7: Avoid eating out.

And when you do, count calories. The calorie count in foods from restaurants is almost always stratospheric. Sometimes, this is simply because they know that people like large servings and thus happily oblige. Other times, it is because they do not want to use high-quality ingredients and instead use lots of salt, sugar, and high-fat meats to make the food taste good.

Funny enough, the foods that you get at the oft-maligned fast food joints are usually not terrible as regards calories. They are not great fuel, in that the nutrient make-up of anything that you buy is going to be rather simple, but it's hard to get a fast food meal above 1,000 calories without chugging soda. For example, a Double Cheeseburger and large fries from McDonald's is only 940 calories.

You will also be amazed by how much money that you save doing this. As an exercise to provide further motivation to continue, while you are preparing your food, think about where you would have gone or what food you would have ordered, price it out, and tally it all up. If you eat out frequently, your monthly savings could be in the hundreds of dollars, while the food you are eating is undoubtedly superior fuel.

For example, McDonald's meals usually ring-up at about $5. For an at-home power meal, 2/3 lb of Wal-Mart Purdue chicken is $2. Two packs of Green Giant frozen vegetable mixes is $2.60. Add in $0.20 worth of herbs and spices and the at-home meal costs less than even McDonald's. The price difference is only amplified when you consider that most states tax prepared foods but not raw materials.

Tip #8: Find tasty drinks.

Water can get so boring. Zero-calorie sweetened drinks all taste like ass, and they can apparently make things worse. And while I consider milk to be an amazing drink, I think I would start to hate it if I had to drink more than a glass or two per day.

There are lots of flavored drinks out there that you can safely drink. I positively guzzle V8. I have no history of heart issues, so the salt doesn't concern me. Moreover, an entire bottle only equals about 100% my daily value. Orange juice is somewhat high in calories, so you may not want to drink it all day, every day. Also, the acid would just start to hurt. But again, OJ is something that Grandma would love.

Tea and coffee are wonderful, wonderful, drinks. Caffeine is being shown to have a broad array of positive physiological benefits, and both coffee and tea have unique benefits with yet-unknown mechanisms. A little sugar, honey, or milk and you have a delicious drink that's low in calories and big in benefits.

Drinks that you cannot safely drink are the non-refrigerated juices. They are almost always juice "cocktails," of super-sweetened water and a smattering of actual juice. These are little better than soda.

Tip #9: Force yourself to eat things that you don't like.

Your body is an incredible machine. It does much more than simply digest your food, it actually "decides" which foods taste good.

Have you ever found yourself craving a particular food? It happens to everyone. One day, for seemingly no reason, you can't get enough oranges. This is because something inside of oranges is needed by your body and your body "remembers" that those nutrients were paired with that particular taste. As such, from somewhere deep inside the unconscious parts of your brain, a signal is sent up to the conscious part of your brain to find 1000 CC's of oranges, stat.

This is why the recent discoveries that artificial sweeteners make people gain weight makes perfect sense. Your body tastes sweet and gears up in anticipation of sugar, because some mechanism in your body associated the two things. When it doesn't get that, the whole system is thrown out of whack.

You can use this mechanism to your advantage. By taking foods that you know are loaded with nutrients but you do not usually like, and forcing yourself to eat them will allow your body to associate that flavor with the burst of good stuff. As a result, you will begin to like these foods and can integrate them into your diet.

This does have a few limits. For example, some people are able to taste a level of bitterness in cruciferous vegetables such as broccoli that others cannot. No matter how much you eat these vegetables, for some people, children especially, they will always taste bad.

Tip #10: Explore and expand your diet.

Studies show that people who like many types of food are thinner. This seems obvious. If all you like are hamburgers and chicken wings, losing weight isn't going to be an easy endeavor for you. Explore, for Pete's sake!

Tip #11: Find healthy snacks.

Assuming that you do not have access to a Super Wal-Mart, your Wally World will likely have an enormous snack section. Use it. The snacks are always cheapest there and they have identical selections of crackers, nuts, jerky,

For example, Planter's Nut*rition line of nut mixes are excellent snacks that are filling and loaded with good stuff. Nowhere else on Earth are they as cheap as at Wal-Mart.

Tip #12: Don't let yourself get hungry.

Being hungry is the hiiiiighwaaaaay tooo the danger zone. It's an oft-repeated humorous story, when someone who is hungry walks into a store and leaves with $297 worth of crap that they never intended on buying because everything looked so good.

This same story applies to your kitchen. If you wait long enough that you are very hungry, making sure to not snack or wait until a good meal is prepared will require willpower, which we cannot abide. The goal is to want this food. Time your meals. All of the above tips make preparing a real meal quick and simple. You can walk into the kitchen and have good food, good fuel, nearly as quickly as opening up some prepackaged bar. Only if you wait until you are hungry will the risk of failure arise.

Conclusion:

I hope that this has been of some use. Changing your diet for the better is shockingly easy. It requires little self control or "willpower," it doesn't cost more to eat healthy, and you provide your body the fuel that it needs to do stuff. Your energy levels will rise, you'll feel better, truly, all of life will be better because the machine that carries you through it is running more efficiently.

What you need is the desire. After I tell you all of this, you may decide that the pleasure of eating cheesecake twice a day is greater than the pleasure of having a lean, mean, machine as your body. I derive pleasure from the latter, you from the former, and that is entirely alright. I am absolutely not applying a value judgment to either lifestyle. I am saying that I have found pleasure in my dietary life. I do not completely restrict myself from snacks, but I desire to rarely eat them because I would rather consume better fuel. If you do not desire the same thing, this is not for you, and you will fail if you attempt it.

That is the only kink in my plan. If you do not desire it, then you simply don't desire it. I could show you all of the evidence in the world; one cannot choose to want something. He or she simply does. If the idea of viewing your body as a machine, and thus providing it the best fuel possible, is appealing to you, I think that you should try this.

A Little Rant About Starbucks

2011-10-31T17:03:00.000-07:00

I like Starbucks. But man oh man, the stuff in this video rings very true.

My New Design House

2011-10-02T20:19:00.000-07:00

I'm starting a new design house. I specialize in web design, brand design, and brand management. My prices are very competitive and I work incredibly quickly. If you want a solid brand, and a website that is mostly devoid of fluffy Flash and Javascript, thus concentrating on the actual, I dunno', content, hit me up. Check it out at http://kovodesign.blogspot.com.

Dietary Medicine And Other Nonsense

2011-09-23T20:42:00.000-07:00

I strongly dislike vegans. True vegans. I dislike them because of the inherent morality to their lifestyle and the irrevocable flipside of that coin: doing otherwise is bad. This of course means that what I, you, truly everyone else is doing, is wrong. They try to couch their arguments in terms that are scientific, or dietary, or physiological, but the initial motivation is always morality. Obviously, not all vegans are true vegans, some of them simply follow a vegan diet for other reasons, of which there are a few.

The second reason for disliking the moral motivation is that it is absolute. Regardless of evidence to the contrary, a vegan diet is always "best." This means that most advocates of these diets will use terms like toxins and wellness in attempts at supporting their diet as something other than morally feeling right. These are non-technical terms and prevent advocates from being sued. If they said that these diets will improve blood chemistry or otherwise quantifiably increase health, they would be lying and could be sued. The diet does do things, but not the same thing for all people.

Underlying much of this health/wellness marketing angle is the idea that food can be medicine. You can see these perspectives in "detox" diets, cleanses, purges, and foods that "do" this or that. Foods increase your sex drive, let you run longer distances, increase your strength, clean up your skin, grow hair, foster world peace, and any number of other quack claims. Again, the flipside of this coin is that we need medicine to cure something, and that something is inevitably the result of whatever the vegan hates. What they hate is more often than not corporations and anything that they produce. This brings me to my first bulleted point:

1: Food does things.

Absolutely untrue and a bad way of looking at food. Food is not medicine, food is fuel. Your body is an amazing, wonderful, efficient machine. It has been honed by hundreds of millions of years of evolution and does what it does with any food that you give it. Medicine works through the usage of chemicals that were not widely available to the evolving physiology of our bodies and as such have the ability to hijack certain physiological mechanisms. Some drugs hijack the pain pathway, such as Advil, preventing the sensation of pain. Other drugs hijack pleasure pathways and can become addictive, like Heroin. If Advil had been a common occurrence in our ancient diet, pain, which is evolutionarily good, would have grown to be produced by a different internal pathway. The goal of pharmaceutical research is to find chemicals that dance around our bodies' natural mechanisms and produce effects which it has not evolved to handle.

One of the most infuriating examples of an absolute moron believing this was Bob Marley. He had cancer of the toe and was advised to amputate the toe. He refused, citing some wacky religious beliefs. Then, as he was dying he finally sought treatment, before abandoning it in favor of holistic treatments that involved, you guessed it, dietary changes. We continue to see this absurd belief in people like Jenny McCarthy, who claims that food fixed her son's autism. This shows a shocking ignorance of both how food works and what autism is. I'll give you two guesses as to whether McCarthy is a vegan, too, but you'll only need one.

There is nothing magical in vegetables or fruits. Our bodies evolved to eat these things. Our body expects protein, and it gets protein. It then does what it does with protein. No hijacking takes place. Our body does many great things when we eat steak, cake, and Reese's Pieces. Just the same as our body does great things when it eats tofu, whole foods, and multivitamins.

There are many foods that can cause bad things when eaten over time: increased weight, triglycerides, bad breath; but what fixes that is not the addition of "curative" food, but by simply stopping consumption of the problem foods. Eating a hamburger every now and then is perfectly healthy, but eating two per day for a decade can kill you.

But even then, that doesn't always hold true. All dietary things exist on bell curves because everyone has different physiology. Some people can, in fact, eat two burgers per day for a decade and be fine. They don't gain weight and their blood chemistry remains within acceptable boundaries. This is because some bodies can do different things with the same food. To liken it to the way that different engines perform differently with the same gasoline isn't totally inaccurate.

There are a few chemicals that are found in food that may have medicine-like effects. They might lower cholesterol or decrease irritable bowel syndrome symptoms in non-dietary ways, but these connections are always slight. Drinking red wine might help with blood chemistry, but Advil will practically always cure headaches.

The perspective that food can act as medicine is the most culturally problematic nugget of pseudo-knowledge generated by the vegan/vegetarian movement. They give people the impression that eating a "detox" diet for a period of time will help flush out the residue of their ordinary life. There are no toxins. There is no residue. There is nothing wrong with you that food will cure.

2: A Vegan/Vegetarian Diet Is The Healthiest Diet.

Unfortunately for those who follow specific diets, all diets, if otherwise balanced and with good exercise levels, are more or less equal. The only diet that showed scientifically significant differences was a diet where a large chunk of animal protein came in the form of red meat. Namely, following said diet increased the likelihood of heart disease.

There is small evidence to support that the healthiest diet is one of an ovo-vegetarian, or someone who's animal protein comes in the form of eggs and no other meat. But this is thin evidence. The dietary benefits of fish are enormous, chicken is a lean, mean, protein-packing machine, and even the much-maligned red meat, when eaten in moderation, will cause little-to-no increase in health concerns. Again, the body is a wonderful thing and it will do wonderful things: building muscle, removing toxins, pooping; all of which will happen regardless of your diet.

Again, vegan/vegetarian supporters will jump on this and declare that meat is optional. That is true. But there are lots of things in our diets that are optional. The only reason for picking out meat is for, you guessed it, moral reasons.

That's not to say there are not specific physiological benefits to vegan diets. Truly, there are many people who find that for sporting events, vegan and vegetarian diets help them a great deal. Many distance and endurance runners are vegans and vegetarians. But as with everything I've mentioned, not all of them are. Many of them find an endless stream of hamburgers to be the best fuel for them.

That is the reason why when talking about this proponents have to use nebulous, non-technical terms like "wellness" and "toxins." They can't legally make any claims that this food or lifestyle will result in X. Are there many people out there for whom a vegan or vegetarian diet would be the healthiest choice? Yes, certainly. But there are just as many people who would do best eating grilled chicken all day.

With all that said, veg/veg diets can do some wonderful things. As I mentioned, there are some good reasons for going vegetarian and vegan. If you are having a hard time losing weight, a vegan or vegetarian diet can help you lose it. The "if" in this situation is a big one, though. You will lose weight if you maintain that diet. This is, again, true for all diets. There are many diets that will help you lose weight, but only if you maintain them for the rest of your life. Veganism and vegetarianism are no different.

In essence, that is the reason why I hate the staunchly pro-veg/veg movement: they claim amazing properties to the diet. This has effects on people who have no interest in the actual diet, but take bits and pieces of the claims and can thus be taken in by snake-oil cleanses and detox diets. The supposedly rational consumer is shockingly stupid sometimes. For example, the exploding market for gluten-free foods. Why? Because people think these foods are healthier than ordinary foods. Why? Because special gluten free foods are, in the grocery store, usually placed next to health bars and whatnot. This one isn't even up for debate. Gluten free is not in the slightest bit healthier than other types of foods, but people are vacuuming it up.

What's important is having a good, well-rounded diet that tastes good. If that happens to be vegetarianism, more power to you! But it can just as easily be a diet that involves all forms of meat. To espouse a veg/veg diet for purely moral reasons is ridiculous. For one thing, most people won't listen, and for another, advocating an ethical theory that includes all living things is impossible to support philosophically. Leave the morals at home and eat what you want.

P.S.

There are some tenable reasons for being a vegetarian based on environmental concerns. I find these arguments valid, if not entirely persuasive. I guess the ultimate point is that, if you decide to go veg/veg for environmental reasons, there is little with which I can argue.

Also, I did not discuss the Atkins diet, which while not endorsing anything moral, is just as silly as a vegan or vegetarian diet. What it does do wonderfully, though, is illustrate how diets on either end of the spectrum can show positive results in studies. All food is optional, because our bodies are wonderful things.

PRODUCT REVIEW: Rancilio Rocky Coffee Grinder

2011-09-18T16:18:00.000-07:00

PRODUCT REVIEW: Starbucks Anniversary Roast 2011

2011-09-15T18:46:00.000-07:00

Starbucks coffees are really hit or miss, what with their massive supply line, and I briefly pondered whether the drastic increases in coffee prices would affect their quality. First, I can safely say that Starbucks quality is generally in-tact. I was surprised by the number of broken beans in the bag, but that could be a result of rough handling by anyone in the supply chain. Prices are significantly higher, though. The half-pound bag was nine dollars, and that makes the proposition of buying coffee from a local roaster all the more attractive. But this is neither here nor there. Neither over hill, nor over dale.

The 2011 Anniversary Blend is the annual release of a blend onto which they slap a brand. I haven't tried earlier versions, but I suspect that the blends are whatever is available in large amounts, and since the anniversary comes out at the same time every year, the blends are undoubtedly similar.

I like the new blend. I'm a bit disappointed by the level of the roast, as I usually am with Starbucks. Instead of relying on my grind level, I'm going to start referencing how much the beans weigh per level tablespoon of unground beans. Most roasts are in the 6-8g range, while Anniversary 2011 is 4.5-5g. That is quite dark indeed.

Luckily, unlike the incredibly disappointing Tribute Blend, Anniversary retains some flavor. It's dark, roasty, very mellow, and goes wonderfully in an espresso double. It's still darker than I would have liked, and the age of the beans is very apparent when extracting a shot: the crema is thin, thin, thin. While these would have been deal-breakers in most circumstances, Anniversary is perfectly balanced and such a good "standard" coffee, that I can't help but give it a thumbs up.

I finally have a siphon pot and pour-over setup, so I can give you more rounded reports of the flavor. Unfortunately for these beans, both pour over and siphon amplify their shortcomings. Espresso does very, very well with rich, simple blends. Truly, in most espresso cases, the simpler the blend, the better. The slow extraction of pour over make the most of vibrant, complex, lightly-roasted coffees. The age of the beans is again apparent with a near-nonexistent bloom. Still, as with the espresso, it's very good "standard"-tasting coffee. Complex? No, but it's leagues better than Folgers.

So while I was disappointed by the roast level, and thus the pour-over extraction, the rich espresso and good basic flavor make up for it. My only serious reservation is the price, and it's the reason why I'm hesitant to recommend it. Nine dollars for half-a-pound is a LOT of money, especially when you can buy excellent coffee fresh from local roasters like Updike's Newtowne or Coffee Exchange for less money. Worse still, prices might get higher, rendering Starbucks a non-option (Starbucks Reserve coffees, at $30 per pound, are already the domain of lunatics).

Price aside, though, it's a good coffee. I just hope that bean prices don't get any higher, or only a maniac would buy Starbucks.

Starbucks Anniversary Blend 2011: RECOMMENDED

A Delicious Cannoli at Pastiche.

2011-09-07T11:10:00.001-07:00

From The Watery Gourmet

It's well-priced, too.

A Major Tip For Espresso Fans

2011-09-01T12:35:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure how popular at-home espresso actually is. I would imagine not very, since the cheapest machines are $500-$1,000, but one couldn't tell that from the fanatical circles that arise on the internet. For example, if you know what Coffee Geek is, you probably have an at-home espresso machine.

There are a few how-to's available online, most of them bad. And you can certainly find many tips buried within the annals of message boards everywhere, but even there, the tips are dodgy. There is only one tip that isn't frequently discussed but should be known by everyone who wishes to make coffee under pressure, be it Aeropress or full-on espresso: use fresh beans.

You always hear how fresh beans are important and to never buy beans from a grocery store. These bits of advice are usually said in the same breath as some hateful comment aimed at Starbucks being only for those who don't understand true coffee. But, truthfully, fresh beans for ordinary drip coffee isn't nearly as important as simply grinding them just before use. I've used Eight'O'Clock coffee beans for pour-over and gotten a more-than-acceptable cup of coffee, simply because I ground first.

Espresso is entirely different. Crema is impossible with old beans. You will only receive thin, watery espresso with only the faintest hint of cream on top. Not the rich, creamy, sweet, oily goodness of fresh beans. The thickness and body of espresso is entirely dependent on the freshness.

Likewise, since you're producing your espresso under pressure, you need evenness throughout the puck. Whereas with drip coffee, unused grounds from yesterday will do completely fine today, in espresso, the different moisture levels in the two masses of ground coffee will reduce your crema levels and make accurate extraction impossible. You will never get good espresso with grounds of different ages. For old beans, this is doubly critical since the moisture level in the beans is already low.

So that is the end of my tip. Only use fresh beans, and only ever extract grinds that have been ground at the same time.

A Series Of Latte Art

2011-08-25T08:51:00.000-07:00

Latte art is always popular, probably because it looks cool, so here is a series of my latte art creations taken over the course of a few days. Cafes only ever show you photos of the best art they've ever done, which only one guy can do. This is how lattes should look every single time.

From The Watery Gourmet

Honeydew And The Tyranny of Bad Fruit Salad

2011-08-14T14:06:00.000-07:00

How many times have you walked into a restaurant or cafe, looked at the fruit salads on display, and thought to yourself "Mmmmm, you fruit salads sure look good"? And those fruit salads seem to say back "Yes! We are! Look at how colorful and fresh we look!" I do this damn-near once per week. And every time the fruit salads talk to me, I respond with "LIAR! You are not tasty! You are unripe and poorly prepared! You are here to trick me and steal my money!"

Talking fruit aside, I'm sure that you know my situation. Fruit is something that needs to be cared for, monitored, and prepared with love. For example, you can buy apples year-round in most grocery stores. And for eight out of those twelve months, the apples taste like starchy butt. Why do people keep buying them? Because they look good! Why do stores keep selling them? Because people keep buying them! The entire fruit industry is predicated on these duplicitous little whores known as out-of-season fruits.

I'm not a locavore fanatic. I'm also not a fanatic about only eating seasonal food. The wonders of refrigerated trains and trucks have allowed us to get fresh foods all year round, and I think that is peachy keen. The cat's pajamas. The bee's knees, even. My complaint lies with those that sell it. They rely on the prettiness of fruit to continue selling, but they never seem to test the product for flavor before putting it on the shelf.

Could you imagine wine producers simply throwing wine up on a shelf without trying it? Of course not! But we do it with fruit every day. Where with packaged products, we're guaranteed quality compliments of rigorous controls on the part of the manufacturer, fruit pushes that responsibility to the grocer. We have many smaller grocers out there who have built a business on promising quality produce. The ones of which I'm aware generally started out exclusively as fruit and produce stands and simply evolved into more complete grocery stores. But the original philosophy of trying the products before freaking selling them remained.

Restaurants and cafes are the worst of the lot. At a grocer, one could reasonably make the argument that the grocer simply puts what's available on display and it's the customer's responsibility to do the variety of sniffs, squeezes, pokes, and taps required to determine if a fruit is good. I think that a good grocer should still do their gourmet best, but the argument at least has merit.

Restaurants and cafes have NO such leeway. They simply chop up fruit, put it in a container, and call it a day. They don't do taste tests. They don't store fruit and wait for it to ripen. It's off the truck and into your mouth and it tastes like it. This is unacceptable.

When we go to a restaurant, we're generally paying for basic ingredients. Unless you go to a comically high-end restaurant that has more Michelin Stars than customers, your ingredients are precisely what you'd get from your local grocery. You pay for the preparation, the attention to detail, and the artistry of inventive combinations.

Even at the lowliest of restaurant, this is what we are paying for. Making most of the things at an average eatery are pretty easy. The value comes from having someone else guarantee the quality of the ingredients, storing them, preparing them, and keeping sufficient supplies on hand. The extreme cost of eating out is a tenuous balance and all of those variables must be met for it to be worthwhile.

I suspect that this is the reason why casual/fast food like Panera Bread, Chipotle, Five Guys, and their ilk have been positively exploding onto the market. Their business models are all very similar: finely focused menu; assembly-line production of items; and extreme quality control. This keeps prices low, quality high, and service quick. The value equation is so heavily weighted in their favor that people have to think of reasons to not go.

In these cases, the quality control is institutionalized. It's not part of a philosophical drive of one or two leaders. But this doesn't matter. The market was tired of getting crap for low prices, or good stuff for a huge difference in price. The average meal at McDonald's, which all but defines the low end, is about five dollars. The average meal price at TGI Fridays, which is decent, is around thirteen. Nearly three times as much. There was nothing in between.

Obviously, this market vacuum wasn't going to last forever. Actually, it's amazing that it lasted for this long. I think that it's because the segment into which Chipotle et al have entered was once dominated by local restaurants. The very same local places that I am now disparaging for lack of quality control and a lack of gourmet sense. It is no surprise, then, that small, local restaurants are hurting badly in the face of this cheap competition, as they damn well should.

The title of this article specifically references fruit salad and honeydew. Honeydew is the bane of all who like fruit salad. It's an utterly delicious melon once ripe, but you'd never know that. It's NEVER ripe. Compare this to the fruit available at Starbucks, which usually has fruit salads of some sort available. Or the fruit salad at Panera bread. The fruit is always ripe. Are they doing this for gourmet, philosophical reasons? Regardless of whatever tripe Howard Schultz tries to feed us, they aren't. They're doing it because good quality is good business! If you are a local restaurant and you do not have this level of quality control, you will fail, and importantly, you deserve to fail.

You might have succeeded for a time compliments of little competition, but mark my words, the market wants quality, and if Panera, Chipotle, and others have shown anything, it's that no matter what you are selling, there is a major corporation out there just waiting to turn your product into an assembly line and sell better food for less. It's not hard to prevent this! Start with the honeydew, lather, rinse, repeat.

Eat More Fiber

2011-08-12T09:15:00.000-07:00

And I mean A LOT more. If statistics are to be believed, you, the reader, are almost undoubtedly not meeting the USDA's recommendation. Worse still, I have concluded that the USDA daily fiber recommendation is inadequate.

I will attempt to be brief and not boring, but I'm not promising anything. Our digestive tract is much smaller, as a function of body size, than the tracts of our primate cousins. Chimps, gorillas, orangutans, all of them have massive digestive tracts. Truly, we have one of the smallest digestive tracts in the entire animal kingdom. Look at snakes; they're a giant, mobile intestine with a mouth!

No one has ever found this odd since animals eat a very rough diet. Snakes spend their time digesting whole, unchewed rats, and chimps spend the bulk of their time eating leaves, branches, some fruit, and the occasional piece of meat. For a long time, everyone assumed that our digestive tracts changed over evolutionary time by virtue of our ability to find higher quality foods, and eventually nutrient-dense meat which we were able to masticate and more quickly process in comparison to other meat eaters.

This perspective was supported with the analysis of primates that either carefully choose high-quality foods, like Baboons, or consume a huge amount of animal matter, such as monkeys that eat bugs. The digestive tracts of these animals, both in structure and size, are very similar to human digestive tracts.

This perspective changed slightly when researchers started finding that a raw diet doesn't provide enough nutrients for a proto-human duking it out with other animals on the plains of Africa. Even with meat included in the hypothetical diet, there simply wasn't enough energy to support significant populations of large, upright omnivores. While it's still somewhat controversial, an increasing number of researchers are accepting that the real change, the change that pushed us beyond anything that the Earth had yet seen, was cooking.

Heating food breaks down all of the chemical bonds that our digestive tracts would have otherwise needed to break, making the extraction of nutrients much easier. This results in a higher "net" gain, where your body must expend less energy to do the digesting. Cooking unlocked massive untapped reserves of calories that no other animal had ever had.

A few generations later, and bam, we had a more-or-less modern human digestive tract. From this point on, it was always assumed that the digestive tracts of humans and higher primates were functionally different, but no one ever did any real research until the late 80's and early 90's. It was then that they found that, on a functional level, the tracts of chimpanzees and humans were nearly identical. We digest food the same way, our tracts are simply smaller.

Now here's a fun fact about the chimp diet: they eat a ridiculous amount of fiber. Hundreds of grams per day. They can do this because they spend damn-near every waking hour eating. All of the dietary benefits that one can expect from this are probably accounted for in chimp physiology, and it gives us insight into our own functioning.

Fast-forward to 6:45 for the part where humans try to eat a chimp diet.

The question, of course, is whether imitating chimp diets vis-a-vis fiber intake is a good idea. I think that it is. The USDA recommends 25-30 grams of fiber per day. This doesn't include a breakdown of soluble and insoluble, which I will discuss in just a moment.

If the chimp digestive tract evolved to process buckets of fiber, so did ours. Chimps eat hundreds of grams of fiber per day. The average American eats less than eighteen. Obviously, humans cannot process the amount of fiber that chimps can, but no matter how far our digestive tract have moved from chimps, these numbers cannot be reconciled.

Fiber works in two ways. The soluble fiber breaks down, it ferments, in the body and binds with a wide array of chemicals in the the digestive tract and in the blood stream. It attenuates blood sugar spikes, drops cholesterol levels, and normalizes lipids. Truly, soluble fiber has so many benefits, researchers are finding new ones every year.

Insoluble fiber is the fiber that simply passes through the digestive tract. It's mode of function isn't completely understood, but it's assumed that it physically scratches the interior of the digestive tract, increasing fluid production and digestive action. The more fiber you eat, the faster you digest.

This has an equivalent in the chimp world, where chimps' digestive systems respond to varying fiber levels as an indicator of the outside world. Low fiber levels indicate nutrient dense, fresh foods at the beginning of the growth season. The digestive tract slows down to extract more nutrients from these foods. As the foods mature and become harder to digest, the fiber levels rise. The digestive tract responds by speeding food through the system more quickly to allow the chimp to eat more.

Not only are humans eating the most nutrient-dense food in the history of the world, but our fiber content is so low that our digestive systems are taking their sweet damn time about it. We are getting every calorie possible from those Pop-Tarts and this is undoubtedly contributing to our increasing weights.

You may have heard that high fiber intake can have a negative effect on nutrient absorption. Not only is this true to a degree, it's absolutely expected. If high fiber causes our bodies to push foods through our system more quickly, not absorbing all of the food is the point. We live in a world of such extreme plenty, getting the required nutrients is easy. The problem is getting too many of them.

I think that a person's dietary life should revolve around fiber intake. Everyone should get at least 100% of their fiber via food, and this is easy! Two slices of Double Fiber bread from Arnold provides half of your daily requirement. Two tablespoons of peanut butter provides 20%. A single PB&J sandwich and you're three-quarters of the way there. One sandwich!

Integrate beans into your diet at some point during the day and you've easily met your 25-30 gram target. Once you have done this, exceed your target with supplements and special foods. For example, Fiber One cereal gives you 28g of fiber in one cup. Mix it with strawberries and blueberries and you have a fiber-rich super meal.

Add Metamucil to everything that you cook or make. Add it to sauces, add it to drinks, add it to water. Metamucil has a distinct advantage over other forms of fiber in that it is easy to use and 50/50 soluble and insoluble fiber. The startling list of benefits from soluble fiber will likely only grow, so you might as well get on that bandwagon now.

I need to address the claim posited by many vegetarians, most vegans, and essentially all raw food consumers: the human digestive tract is so similar to other primates that we should be eating their diet. This is stupid.

Functionally, our systems are very similar, but structurally they are very different. It is not just the length of our tracts that is different, but the ratio of large to small intestine. Moreover, these vegetarian claims also seem to ignore that chimps will eat as much meat as they can manage, usually unlucky monkeys and bush babies.

Every bit of research done indicates that we have been eating meat for millions of years and that our diet must be different from other primates for us to thrive. I am not talking about the removal of meats, cheeses, and Pop Tarts from the diet, I'm simply saying that our digestive tracts evolved to handle much larger amounts of fiber than we are currently giving them. Along with all of the other things that we want, increased fiber intake is critical.

P.S.

I forgot to add that with increased fiber comes increased water. If you don't ensure that you are drinking 8oz of water every two hours, not only will the fiber be less effective, you might actually increase your chances for constipation.

Steaming Frozen Milk

2011-07-30T10:19:00.000-07:00

When making a latte, I like to stick my milk-filled carafe in the freezer for a couple of minutes to get the temp down. Well, today, I forgot that I had done that and went about my business for about 45 minutes.

The milk was, as wouldn't surprise anyone, half-frozen. I tried to break it up with a spoon to not much avail. So, I figured, what the hell. I jammed my steam wand into the milky little arctic ocean and turned it on.

The ice faded very quickly, the whirlpool whipped up, and about twenty seconds later, I had a perfectly-steamed carafe of milk. It worked! Delicious.

So, yes. If you ever accidentally freeze your milk, don't worry. Just jam that wand into the frozen mess and turn that mofo on. There's no need to cry over frozen milk.

My First Pinkberry In RI!

2011-07-21T19:31:00.000-07:00

My last visit to a Pinkberry was in New York back in 2007. They have seriously beefed up their offerings since then. More flavors, more toppings, and less thudding techno.

REVIEW: Parker House Restaurant ***1/2 / $$$$

2011-07-15T13:27:00.000-07:00

The Parker House Hotel Restaurant is one of the more storied restaurants in New England. Not only is it the namesake of Parker House rolls, but it is also the origin of Boston Cream Pie. The hotel has been in continuous operation for over 150 years and is an absolute landmark in Boston history.

The restaurant is fabulously appointed, with giant chandeliers dropping down from twenty-foot ceilings, well-dressed tables, intricate carpets, and lighting that is a bit too dim for my tastes. It is not ultra-refined in details and service like, say, the restaurants of Alain Ducasse such as Le Louis XV, but I like that. I find, and always will find, details for the sake of details nothing more than an excuse to charge more money. And classic French service and cuisine is filled with details for their own sake.

I have now been to The Parker House on four occasions and enjoyed it very much each time. The service is always good, and the decor is a treat. There is also a relaxed sense that one gets, probably because it is, after all, a hotel restaurant. They have a buffet for brunch and breakfast, and bar patrons wander in and out. It's not a restaurant where you feel that there is any particular behavior or dress that is expected. Even if those things are expected, I like being in a restaurants where it feels like they aren't. And the Parker House has the benefit of both feeling that way, and also being that way.

The food is all flawlessly prepared. But, again, likely because of its status as a hotel restaurant, all of it is just very good, default expensive food. Good cuts of steak? Check. Lobster in some form? Check. I can't say much bad about, since it's all, again, perfectly prepared. And it's also not for those with a bland palate. But it's also not anything that you couldn't get elsewhere.

One bright spot for me was the onion soup. It is the absolute best onion soup I've ever had at a restaurant. The onions are actually cooked, which is a concept that many places seem to not quite get, and it has a powerful wine flavor to it. It bathes your tongue in a rich, beefy broth, and the whole experience is invigorated with the strong sweetness of the onions, and the bright twinge of the sherry. The kitchen was also not stingy with the cheese, which, again, is a memo that many other restaurants have not yet gotten.

Other than that, if you want some standard continental fare with a New England twist, prepared perfectly, in what is arguably one of the nicest dining areas around, you would be well-served to check out the Omni Parker House Restaurant. And if you are from far away lands and want to visit Boston, the hotel's decor is like a luxurious time machine to an era before modern design ruined everything. I like everything about The Parker House.

Omni Parker House Restaurant: ***1/2

60 School Street
Boston, MA 02108
(617) 227-8600

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Good Dinner At Providence Prime

2011-07-10T14:07:00.000-07:00

Providence Prime remains my favorite steak house in Rhode Island. They've moved away from the "steak house" model that became so wildly popular during the economic boom moreso than any other place in the state. Most of the steakhouses were very reticent to move away from the model, where you order a steak and get... a steak. Nothing else. You want sides, you order sides. This is an enormously profitable restaurant model, but also depends on people with more money than brains.

I only wish that Prime had kept their pastry chef, since their desserts are pretty boring, now. If you want some excellent dessert options, your only options to really have your mind blown are Al Forno and Cafe Nuovo.

Pinkberry Now Open in Rhode Island

2011-07-09T11:48:00.000-07:00

While Rhode Island certainly hasn't been lacking for frozen yogurt, what with Juniper, Red Mango, and Froyoworld, it's cool to finally get a location from the brand that restarted the craze. Thankfully, this Pinkberry location appears to be taking it easy on the thudding techno music that me feel like I was living inside a Fisher Price version of The Matrix.

As you can see, the crowds were not insignificant. I witnessed quite a few people, including myself, simply leave and wait for another day.

Fake Fats Makes us Real Fat

2011-07-06T15:59:00.000-07:00

A study has been released showing the same hypothesized effects of fake fat that have been speculated to exist for fake sugars. Namely, our bodies taste fat and sugar, and thus prepare for an influx of calories. When no influx comes, it throws our metabolisms out of whack, our energy levels drop, and our bodies amp up the drive for more food.

Christopher Wanjek has a good article on it over at Live Science, but there are a few things that I want to add. Primarily, even if we didn't suffer negative effects from fake fats and sugars, they would still be a bad thing.

The emotional awakening that is required to not only start a healthy life, but stick with it, requires abandoning old eating habits and behavioral patterns. When I ditched pre-packaged food and soda years ago (and lost nearly fifty pounds in the process) I went back some time later and tried to eat the foods that once constituted so much of diet and I couldn't! Doritos tasted like cheese-flavored slime, Snickers burned going down, Coca-Cola caused a near-instantaneous diabetic coma; this food tasted like shit!

It was my emotional, physiological epiphany. So much of the food that we start eating as kids remains tasty simply because we keep eating it. If we break the pattern of sugary consumption that started when young, we lose our taste for the foods.

Fake sugars and fats does not do this. We try to maintain our old, unhealthy patterns with fake food and are surprised when our diets fail?! Of course they fail! The behavioral patterns that foster poor eating are only encouraged with fake junk food. We need to eliminate the sensation of junk food altogether. We need to replace it with healthy foods until we stop craving the junk. Then, the emotional and cognitive changes necessary to lead a healthy life have taken place.

Admittedly, for some people, this is easier said that done. The only junk food that I crave anymore is ice cream and the occasional root beer float, but for others, the cravings may persist. But no matter how strong your desires, the only way to win is to eliminate the cravings. If your dietary life is defined by resisting temptation, you've already lost. You have to find a way to eliminate the temptation, or reduce it to a point where it rarely enters your mind. Using fake fats and sweets does not encourage behavioral changes and only serves to make you weak in the face of junk.

Continued Testing of Archer Farms at Target

2011-07-06T11:07:00.001-07:00

Target, partially in response to the economic downturn, partially in response to Wal-Mart, has wildy expanded its food offerings. Truly, they've managed to turn small sections of their stores into veritable supermarkets. Obviously, they skew pre-packaged food, since those have longer shelf lives, wider profit margins, and require a lower level of maintenance. But every Target has a central section that has a surprisingly large selection of fruits and veggies. Moreover, they have Purdue chicken for cheaper than anywhere else on Earth, as far as I can tell.

But it's in the freezers that Target really impresses. They have a selection of frozen vegetables, pasta, meat, seafood, and pre-made goodies that easily matches most supermarkets. Likewise for their sections of cereal, breads, snacks, and coffee.

Target's in-house, mid-range, wanna-be-organic brand Archer Farms is represented with about 1,000 products in the freezers, and I've been busily trying them all. Considering Archer Farms' high-end aspirations, many of the things that I've purchased have been rather disappointing.

First up are the frozen appetizers, such as bite-sized spanikopitas. These are almost universally too salty, and no matter the tricks that I used, they tasted like pre-packaged food. In fact, anything that was perishable, the frozen pizza, the dips, frozen desserts like the Cheesecake Bites, or Asian entrees were all overdone with one particular flavor. Most tasted acceptable, but only in comparison to other frozen foods.

Their meats, such as sausages and fish, are rather good. They taste as they should and there is nothing about them that stands out as negative. The same goes for their dairy, juices, frozen fruit, and baking mixes. In general, their raw materials seem to be of universally good quality.

I didn't try their tea, but their coffee is as good as one would expect from supermarket shelf coffee, that is, stale but decently flavorful. It wasn't a disappointment per se, since all it did was fulfill my expectations, but I still wouldn't buy it.

Their pasta sauce was a big point of hope for me. High quality pasta sauces are not cheap, with the best one, Rao's, costing significantly more than any other sauce on the shelf. A jar of Rao's can quickly eliminate much of the cost savings of having pasta at home. As a quick experiment, I picked up two jars from the shelf, Mario Batali's Tomato Basil and Archer Farms' Tomato Basil for a comparison. At only $3.99, the Archer Farms jar was half the price of the Batali brand.

It didn't specifically taste worse, but it did taste cheaper. It was closer in flavor to the lower-priced brands, but if placed among them was certainly one of the better sauces. Its smell was much less complex and enticing than the Batali sauce, and the flavor was predominantly tomato. Batali's sauce is more complex, a little sweeter, and it doesn't bathe the palate in thick tomato flavor, thus overpowering other elements. All things considered, Archer Farms is good, but I'd still either make my own, or opt to spend the extra cash on Mario Batali or Rao's.

I think that the takeaway from Archer Farms is that, if the product that you are thinking of buying is a raw material, be it meat, or jam, or bread, it will be quite good. If it required preparation somewhere, such as pizza or frozen meals, it's a total crap shoot.

PRODUCT REVIEW: Kashi TLC Cereal Bars

2011-06-19T14:15:00.002-07:00

If you want to avoid high-fructose corn syrup, palm oil, and hydrogenated oils, your selection is really freakin' thin in the world of pre-packaged foods. And the products that are made not using these ingredients as part of the company's philosophy are usually doing so to cater to some self-righteous/important element of society, like Whole Foods-dwelling hipsters. Thus, the ingredient list is more about whatever ingredients are trendy and not about making the food taste good. Oh, and speaking of Whole Foods...

Kashi is definitely one of those hipster companies. I generally don't like anything they have for sale. Their cookies don't taste like cookies, their cereal tastes like twigs while somehow being less healthy than FiberONE, and their stuff is over-priced.

But their cereal bars are a bright spot. They taste good, with strong fruit flavor, and a complete compliment of real ingredients. Compare this to Kellogg's Nutri-Grain bars, or, more accurately, ANYTHING that Kellogg's makes, and you'll be amazed at the crap that Kellogg's shovels onto your breakfast table.

Even their "healthy" foods like FiberPlus, with 35% your daily fiber, comes with hydrogenated oils, specifically hydrogenated palm oil, so not only are orangutans dying for this oil, you're dying eating it. And remember, if there are hydrogenated oils, and they say 0% Trans Fats on the nutrition label, THEY ARE LYING. It's a legal lie (anything below 0.5 grams per serving can legally be listed as zero), but it's still a lie. And you can be damn sure that the trans fat amount is as close to 0.5 grams as chemically possible.

But back to the Nutri-Grain bars specifically. They're a trainwreck. The only thing that's worse are the Special K 100 Calorie Fruit Crisps, which have near-as-damnit NO fruit in them. Eating a Nutri-Grain bar in the morning is like eating a Reese's cup for breakfast.

Let's dissect a Nutrigrain bar. The filling in the Strawberry Kashi TLC bar lists its ingredients as Pear Juice, tapioca, cane juice, apple powder, strawberry puree, corn starch (unmodified, whatever that means), vegetable glycerin, water, natural flavor (why?), and more fruit juice.

In contrast, the Nutri-Grain bar lists its filling as containing high fructose corn syrup (sugar), corn syrup (sugar), strawberry puree (Yay, fruit!), sugar (more?!), Sodium Alginate, Corn Starch (modified... still puzzeling), Citric Acid, Natural and Artifical flavoring, Sodium Citrate, Dicalcium Phosphate, Methylcellulose, Carambel Color, Malic Acid, RED #40.

Most of the chemicals on that list are scary-sounding but totally harmless and widely used. It's the THREE inclusions of sugar in various ways that boggles my mind. How much actual fruit is in their "fruit" bars?! It reminds me of Family Guy's spoof of Tony the Tiger.

So it was with great happiness that I discovered that Kashi's bars not only have real food in them, but taste good! Let me repeat that, this Kashi product TASTES GOOD. It tastes like it has real fruit in it, because it does, and while the cake part is a little bark-like, it actually matches the sweetness of the filling very well. My only wish was for more filling in any given bar.

They still aren't the healthiest breakfast around, but if you include this as the on-the-road element to your morning meal, it's quite good. I've bought these in bulk from Amazon and use them as an inter-meal snack. I think that they're peachy-keen.

Kashi TLC Soft-Baked Cereal Bars: RECOMMENDED

They're After Me, Dad! They're After Me!

2011-06-11T09:16:00.000-07:00

I had a dream last night where I was being pursued by a demon that looked a lot like the ghost from The Grudge crossed with the girl from The Ring. Weird thing was, she was a corn demon. Somehow I knew this, and I remember an image of corn in the dream, so yeah. And to fend her off, I was throwing Pepperidge Farm cookies at her to defend myself. I kicked myself awake when the demon tried to bite my feet.

Now be Freud for a second and analyze my dream.

I'm DREAMING about high fructose corn syrup! I can't escape it!

All that's left now is to dream about hydrogen atoms trying to steal my vegetable oil, and the ghosts of murdered orangutans hanging from the palm trees that are, for some reason, in my back yard.

Worst Food Commercial of all Time

2011-06-05T12:58:00.000-07:00

There are many bad commercials out there. All ads for drugs are atrocious. Car commercials are usually annoying. Anything intended to "help around the house" are damn-near always horrifically sexist and borderline false advertising. But in the world of food, there is one commercial that stands out as stunningly bad. A commercial so God-awful, it made me want to MURDER people when I first saw it.

That this... this, thing was a conscious creation of a large group of people makes me wonder if they were all, in fact, evil Satan worshipers. After they took every annoying, precocious kid from advertising history and extracted their DNA, they injected it into the womb of Mephistopheles, who, nine months later, birthed a clot of black bile, sludge, and cynical hatred made manifest from which this child rose, looking like Carrie at the end of the prom scene. It takes the most annoying aspects of every "It's Shake n' Bake, and I helped!" commercial since the product's creation and distills it down into 30 seconds of sheer advertising horror.

They then played this commercial during EVERY COMMERCIAL BREAK ON EVERY CHANNEL ON THE PLANET FOR OVER A YEAR.

Behold, the Welch's Makes Your Lips Smack television commercial, circa 1999.

USDA Launches MyPlate Pyramid Replacement

2011-06-03T11:59:00.000-07:00

I briefly mentioned my hope that the USDA wouldn't totally bork the new food pyramid. Well, they borked it. Not totally, though. It's better than the current Food Pyramid, but that's not hard, and I think that it's still fundamentally worse than the old food pyramid. WTF USDA?

First off, I actually very much like the pyramid structure. The plate structure is also rather good. I think that, correctly used, both designs would communicate what needs to be communicated. The issue is that they're completely failing to communicate these things.

Like, for example, the recent (and in some cases, not so recent) revelations that shortening is the equivalent of eating poison. You're as well off eating sticks of butter dipped in Frosted Flakes. It's obvious that many people don't know this. This is CRITICAL INFORMATION that should be communicated in the recommendation graphic.

Or how about the fact that they're recommending low-fat or fat-free milk, while there is no evidence to support it being better for you. In fact, some evidence supports whole milk being possibly better for you then fat-reduced varieties, but that's splitting hairs. The important fact is that there is no evidence supporting the low-fat assertion.

Their recommendation of whole grains is extremely problematic. Look in your local cereal aisle. The number of sugary cereals that advertise "Rich in Whole Grains!" is sickening. The plate should have said "Fiber," because that's what's actually important. Soluble and non-soluble fiber is what you actually want from that stuff, and lots of it So even though it's RICH IN WHOLE GRAINS (smiley face!) it's still low in fiber and unhealthy. Simply saying whole grains just gives our loving food companies another buzz word to obfuscate into oblivion.

I am happy to see that there appears, appears, to be no politicization of the recommendations. The "whole grains" part of the plate is questionable, as is the usage of the term "protein," instead of meat. The meat industry has spent lots of time trying to convince the public to see meat as something other than, well, meat. The USDA is saying that their market research shows that people know that "protein" means a diverse group of foods, such as tofu or beans, but I'm not so sure. And as any dietician worth their salt knows full well, people might say one thing while thinking and doing another.

The plate is only one issue with the American diet, though. Truly, the largest issue are our absurd agriculture policies. It brings to mind the 2007 documentary King Corn, which discussed the ridiculous state of farm subsidies. Namely, our farm subsidies are SO fucked up, we are paying people tax payer dollars since their lawn once had corn grown on it. Corn is far cheaper than it should be, and because of that, our diet is predominantly corn. Extruded corn, puffed corn, baked corn, corn meal, corn syrup, HFCS, well, you get the idea. And what isn't corn is soy, because it is also horribly over-subsidized.

And which companies are benefitting from this subsidization? The biggest ones, and ONLY the biggest ones. The little guys invariably get pushed out. So, shocker, the big guys are very averse to having the subsidies changed. As are the American junk food producers, since their shitty food is made of almost nothing but cheap corn. They bribe, oh, I forgot, they don't bribe, they make campaign contributions, to various politicians, who then keep these subsidies alive.

This isn't conspiracy theory nonsense. Remember, I'm always talking about how I'm not anti-corporation. I am, in fact, very pro-corporation. Corporations should not have morals. Their goal is to make money. Sometimes, this can manifest itself in moral behavior.

For example, it is in a corporation's best interest to keep its customers happy and healthy, so it might encourage exercise and sell healthy foods. But it also might not care, since its market is so huge, like McDonald's. It is not McDonald's job to worry about your waist line. It's yours. But it is also our government's. And the fact that our representatives, that supposedly care about us, are encouraging a broken system that gives countless billions of taxpayer dollars to rich, evil companies, while at the same time encouraging the American populous to get fatter and sicker, is a travesty of the highest order. We should hang these politicians from trees, bury them, and salt the earth where doth their bodies lay.

So, yes. The new MyPlate is better than the old MyPyramid, but the real progress, the real change, is yet to be made.

PRODUCT REVIEW: Turkey Hill Ice Cream

2011-05-29T19:32:00.001-07:00

I've mentioned Turkey Hill in a few other reviews, but decided that it's deserving of its own, full review.

What do you want when you get ice cream? For me, ice cream is simple. It needs only three things: smooth, creamy, mouth-coating texture; strong, natural flavorings; and fillings that are larger than five molecules across. Even in ice cream that pretends to be high-quality, Edy's/Dreyer's for example, fillings are pitiful, flavor is artificial and weak, and there's so much air whipped in that the you get only marginally more calories than by simply breathing.

Turkey Hill isn't that ice cream. It gets everything right. The texture is perfect, the flavor is strong, and the fillings are large and delicious. Their cookies & cream, my favorite flavor, is the best that I have found in the grocery freezer. The peanut butter cup, which is actually sweetened peanut butter swirled into the ice cream, is beyond good. It is hands-down the best peanut butter ice cream in Turkey Hill's segment.

I used to refer to this segment as the half-gallon segment, but, compliments of increasing food costs and a marketing belief that people are stupid and won't notice smaller packages, half-gallons no longer exist.

If you want ridiculous fillings, Turkey Hill is not your brand. They produce the standard flavors with standard fillings. But in that arena, they best even many of the premium brands. And in the brands that are better flavor-to-flavor, like Ben & Jerry's, the differences are usually small. But compare Turkey Hill to other half-gallon brands, and the differences are stark. Turkey Hill is vastly superior to Blue Bunny, Hood, and Breyer's.

In the world of wacky fillings, Turkey Hill doesn't perform as well. While they produce their fair share of CRAZY ice cream, it really doesn't hold up to the premium brands. The kind to which I'm referring when I describe their excellence is their, um, standard(?) brand like the kind pictured in my image. If you stick with that, you'll never be let down.

In the world of non-premium ice cream, Turkey Hill is the bar by which others are measured. It's that good.

Turkey Hill Ice Cream: HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

A New Not Food Pyramid

2011-05-28T20:39:00.001-07:00

The USDA's redesigned food pyramid, produced in 2005, was widely panned as somehow worse than the original one, which was itself widely criticized. Don't worry, the government is on the job. These guys know how to do shit right.

And by that, they are going to release a completely new food pyramid. So new, in fact, that it won't be a pyramid at all. It's going to be some "plate" design. I'm sure it will make complete sense.

Forgive me for being skeptical, but the government spent years on the 2005 pyramid, and it was ridiculous. It made no sense, provided no help whatsoever, and managed to ignore almost all of the developments in dietary science from the previous two decades. It was an absolute clusterfuck.

I really, truly, deeply hope that they don't make the situation worse. People NEED guidance. There is so much contradictory evidence out there, and so much of it is wrapped up in ideological baggage, it eventually just drives people away. They throw their arms up, stop their inquiry, and keep doing whatever it is that they're doing. And as we've moved further away from Grandma's "everything in moderation" motto, what people are doing is getting increasingly worse.

Please, please, pleeeeaaaase, government people. Do right by the populace. Don't bend to lobbyists from whatever-the-fuck industry has its finger up your butt. Produce a simple graphic that gets it right. It can't be that hard.

Pinkberry in Rhode Island

2011-05-16T15:04:00.001-07:00

For those in the know, they've been long able to get a froyo fix in the form of Juniper on Thayer Street (who recently launched a new website). But if you absolutely must have genuine Pinkberry, I have good news. According to the Pinkberry website, a location will be "swirling" (cute) soon in Garden City in Cranston. No information has been given on the opening date, but I'd assume that they're hoping to open for the summer season, which means soon.

For those interested, the major difference between Pinkberry and Juniper is the yogurt. Juniper tastes more like yogurt. That's not a good or a bad thing, it simply isn't as icy and tart as Pinkberry. I like them both a great deal. And after having Juniper for a couple of years, now, and having tried Pinkberry again, I actually like Juniper more. But I'm splitting hairs at that point.

UPDATE: I found the location. It's across from Anthropologie and directly next to Sunglass Hut.

View Larger Map

UPDATE 2: The opening date has been set at July 9th, so make sure to mark your calendars!

PRODUCT REVIEW: Starbucks Three Regions Blend

2011-05-11T10:34:00.000-07:00

Starbucks is back. Last month they released their Tribute Blend, which was a disaster. It was a blasted mess of a bean, with nearly all of the terroir charred from the bean by an aggressive roast. I was doubly disappointed because I had just had Casi Cielo for the very first time, which was a fantastic blend. Starbucks has completely made up for it, though, with Three Regions Blend.

Open the bag and you're hit with a very strong bouquet of fudge and brownies. It's funny, since very little of this initial smell gets to the palate. Also nice, Starbucks' description of the coffee is rather accurate. It's a very toasty coffee, with a lot of bread, mellow roast, and just a small amount of spice. It does better the lighter your serving. A heavy espresso double was blowing out the flavors and delivering too much roast. A light double was good, and an espresso single was very good. Moreover, this isn't a very cremariffic coffee, so there's no real reason to use a double.

I'd imagine that drip coffee will simply blast the beans, since I found that they tasted best with a cooler brew. In this quest, pour-over, or my chosen brewing method, Aeropress are ideal. My favorite method was far and away the espresso single, which drew out all of the best flavors. There was a lot more terroir than in many other Starbucks blends and beans, which was probably helped by a comparably light roast. As I always mention, Starbucks usually needs a low grind on my Rancilio Rocky, sometimes as low as 3, with most good espresso blends needing a 9 or 10.

As far as Starbucks beans go, Three Regions blend is visibly lighter. There's a smaller amount of oil on the surface, and the color has more brown to it. Casi Cielo, still Starbucks' only legitimately impressive blend, required a 9. Three Regions needs around an 8. Still, the roast is more than light enough to give the beans character.

Three Regions Blend is a definite buy. It tastes fresh, and does very well in an Aeropress and a single. Just avoid making any doubles with it.

Starbucks Three Regions Blend: RECOMMENDED

McDonald's Goes Upmarket. Analysts Get It Wrong.

2011-05-10T13:01:00.000-07:00

McDonald's is at it again, with a multi-billion dollar renovation of locations, with new furniture, colors, and amenities. Analysts see this as McDonald's trying to move into Starbucks' territory, or differentiate themselves from the other fast food stand-by's. Both of these perspectives are only partly true. The underlying motivation is much grander and has been on McDonald's mind for two decades.

In my review of Five Guys Burger and Fries, I discussed something that I've been mulling for time. Namely, the stratification of dietary classes in America. As time goes on, and scale drives the price and quality of certain foods ever lower, we'll have the lower class eating total garbage that costs almost nothing, and anyone who can afford it will be eating better and better.

As with the Arch Deluxe so many years ago, this is McDonald's trying to prevent that future from becoming reality. Because in this economic mechanism, anyone who competes on price will be actively pushed downmarket, resulting in ever-thinner profits, and lower-SES customers. When fast food was simply fast food, something everyone ate now and then, this future wasn't a threat. But now, with fast food being further segmented into high and low-quality, it's a game of musical chairs to see who can get away from the low-end more quickly.

Onward: How Starbucks Didn't Change Much At All

2011-05-08T19:43:00.001-07:00

I'm sure by now that many of you are aware that Howard (I keep wanting to call him Charles) Schultz has written a book. It's hard to miss; it's prominently displayed in every Starbucks on the planet. It's supposedly about how Starbucks realized that it had lost its way, found its "soul" once more and has since enjoyed success. Umm, ok. I'll play along.

I managed to get my hands on a copy of the internal Cliff's Notes passed out to employees, which included a a synopsis of the book and some, hehe, talking points. Now, before I go any further, I want to stress that I enjoy going to Starbucks, and among fast food, the service is, without doubt, the best.

The first, third, and fourth talking points are all pretty standard fare. It's the second point that I find almost laugh-out-loud ridiculous? Not your standard business book? You don't read many business books, do you? That's, like, the formula for business books. Not only that, it's the formula for any interview on any news program of anyone who has ever been associated with business at some point in their life. Either that or it's an incredibly truncated essay on To Kill a Mockingbird.

And on that first point, I find Starbucks' rediscovering of their soul to be almost entirely semantic. All of their actions are couched in quasi-spiritual terms, but strip those away, and everything that Starbucks did is standard operating procedure for a food service company trying to reinvigorate sales. They beefed up their marketing and drastically revamped their food selection. Their "re-training" of baristi did nothing. Truly, multiple coffee comparisons came out after the training sessions declaring Starbucks to be far from #1. Moreover, I had lattes from two separate locations the day after training. One was from an anchored location inside of a supermarket, which did not receive training, and another full location that did receive training. This was as direct a comparison as could be hoped for. The post-training latte was terrible. The milk foam was coarse and overly hot and the espresso tasted burnt. I'm assuming that the machine was simply not calibrated, but you'd think they would have made a point to do this right after the much-ballyhooed event.

The ordeal seems to me like they conjured up good-sounding words to describe what they were doing, then handed the entire thing over to people who couldn't have given less of a shit about soul or mission, and simply did what they knew would work, because their "food service 101" text book from business school had an entire section on it.

Oh, and if you're thinking that My Starbucks Idea is somehow an example of Starbucks bucking standard business practices, you're quite mistaken. I submitted ideas to that website and read hundreds more. Any ideas that could have been truly revolutionary, inventive, or otherwise disruptive never made it anywhere, regardless of the number of votes that it received. It's not just me saying this, Brand Autopsy, which is run by a guy who used to work for Starbucks, analyzed the "success" early last year. It's not pretty. Starbucks didn't even offer free WiFi when that article was written, even though customers demanded it, and it had already been offered at local cafes since sometime in the High Middle Ages. Oh yeah. Really rocking the boat there, Starbucks.

Again, Starbucks should ditch its high-falutin' language, it does no one any good, and recognize what they are. They are fast food for people who don't want to be seen with a bag from McDonald's or Dunkin' Donuts. That's obviously a big market. And I would know. I'm frequently seen with a Starbucks bag.

Bodum Double-Walled Latte Glass Review

2011-04-21T13:34:00.000-07:00

Peet's Coffee WTF?!

2011-04-14T19:24:00.000-07:00

I just went to Peet's Coffee for the very first time. I read a lot about coffee, go to a lot of cafes, and drink more than his healthy. I can say pretty definitively that Starbucks is the target of buttloads of animosity and is referenced derisively as Charbucks more often than not, while the other major chain, Peet's, is always spoken of in not-so-quiet reverence. The phrasing of this criticism is usually how only idiots go to Starbucks, and those who really know coffee will always go to Peet's instead.

Well all I can say to that is WTFUCK?! Their food selection was quite good. Better than Starbucks' currently is, even though the selection at the 'Bucks is a bit wider. If Peet's food has always been this good, then yes, their food was much better than Starbucks before they changed all of their recipes and food selections.

But it's the coffee that matters at a coffee shop, and it's here that had me shocked. For one, I was blown away, literally blown away! It was Boston. I was shot while waiting in line. But after getting out of the hospital a couple of months later, I returned and picked up the latte that I had ordered. It was a bit old, so I ordered a new one.

First off, Starbucks is lampooned by those in the know for using what are known as super-auto machines. These are the machines that grind, tamp, espress, and almost automatically steam milk. The problem with these machines is that while they can be operated by a trained chimp, the espresso is never as good as from a traditional grinder/machine setup, and the milk foam is never anywhere close. So color me surprised when I walked up to the counter and saw two super-auto machines pumping away behind the counter.

It was a Schaerer, a brand of which I know, but have never seen one in actual use. At least it's not the Frankes that Panera Breads use. Panera has some truly awful espresso. The espresso itself tasted alright. The machine was obviously well-calibrated and clean. The problem, though, is that a latte from Starbucks, when (...when) their machines are well-calibrated, they taste just as good. Worse still, just like Starbucks rather frequently, the milk foam was atrocious. Look at it!

That's terrible foam! I don't get commercial super-auto machines. I owned a Jura Capresso Z5 for years, and while it took a little tweaking, I was able to squeeze out some really good milk foam and espresso. These are commercial machines that frequently cost eight times as much and the product is either only comparable or inferior. Just compare that Peet's latte to this one, made with the $3,000 Jura Capresso Z5, and the next one, which was made with a $2,000 semi-auto espresso machine.

Peet's coffee is so far behind those two examples as to be akin to putting Jessie Owens in the Special Olympics. If Peet's Coffee is like this at every location, then I can safely say that those who mock Starbucks and espouse Peet's are the ones who actually know nothing about coffee. You can work yourself into a self-important, anti-corporate rage all you want; Starbucks isn't too bad.

QUICKVIEW: Church- +++ / $$

2011-04-13T20:45:00.000-07:00

I don't like Boston. It's a nightmare to navigate, everything costs a fortune, and parking is insane on every day of the week. At least in Providence, weekends provide some degree of reprieve, and in the summers, the city is damned near empty. Boston has none of these advantages. So it was with great distaste that I traveled to Beantown for a photography show in which my sister was participating. Both girlfriend and parents were in attendance, and we planned dinner after the show, before the driver arrived to pick us up.

First off, Boston is actually quite nice when one is walking. Granted, I was in a state of ninja-like heightened awareness the entire time since I assumed that every person we passed was, in fact, a mugger. But other than my urine-soaked underpants, the day went off well. A high point was Dinner, which didn't fulfill any of my fears about inner city life. My sister's apartment was less than a five minute walk from an entire street of restaurants, driving home how great it is to be able to walk to everything, and one that stood out was Church.

It's website was urban and hip, menu was good, and prices were amazingly reasonable. The bar selection was excellent for such a small bar, and the wine list was commendable if unremarkable. The interior was, again, hip and modern. It was romantically lit, but not too bad. Unlike other "romantic" restaurants, you could actually see your food. I liked the modern style, deep reds and browns, and candles littering the walls. If I have a criticism of the interior design, it's semantic. Why is this place called Church when there isn't even the slightest homage to a church in the place? At least nail someone to the wall.

Service was excellent. Attentive, but not too. Polite, fast, and trained in all of the professional flourishes that evince a highly polished management team. The selection is primarily comfort food with an acceptable amount of innovation. What really stands out, though, is how affordable everything is. Only two items break the $20 barrier, with most in the mid-teens. It seems that much of the menu is meant as an accompaniment to drinks, providing nibbles in between attempts at getting laid. The music venue attached to the restaurant supports this assumption.

The margherita flatbread was good and fairly priced at $5. The bread itself was soft and chewy on the inside, with good texture, but was good and crispy on the outside. The sauce was a very simple and extremely flavorful tomato sauce. I like my sauce with more complexity, but I can't fault the quality. Mozarella was fresh and mild, and the basil had acceptable kick.

Entrees included the macaroni and cheese, which was... macaroni and cheese. The cheese was rich, and it certainly wasn't the bland, creamy, mouth-filling "blah" that many mac-&-cheeses are, and the churizo added acceptable bite, so thumbs up. The artisan pasta was disappointing. It was expensive for a small serving and didn't stand alone as an entree. The pasta was perfectly cooked, and the large dollop of delicious goat cheese on top was well-placed, but that was it. Spinach, cheese, and some noodles for $16? That's rough. The steak sandwich, on the other hand, was a good deal for $12 with flavorful-yet-tender meat and being well-prepared. Steak tips were a mixed bag. The tips themselves were tender enough but not very flavorful, and they would have been well-served by a spicy sauce alongside them. This disappointment was eased by the excellent Parmesan and truffle french fries and perfectly prepared asparagus which were served beside the tips. The Buttermilk fried chicken and waffle was a great take on some rich comfort food. It was a small serving but still well-priced at $8. It would make a great appetizer for two people.

The size of the menu and the fact that some of their items are homeruns (appropriate considering their proximity to Fenway) outweighs some of their stumbles. I suspect that if I lived in Boston, I would find myself at Church regularly. It's affordable, with good food, and a very enjoyable dining area. Moreover, as I mentioned, it's one part of a duo with its counterpart being a music venue that looks suitably like a wanna-be, but not quite as dirty, CBGB.

As the Church website so subtly puts it, they provide "music. food. booze." I guess it's best to be direct about these things. So if that three word mission statement sounds good to you, give Church a shot. I'm sure that you'll be satisfied.

Church: +++

69 Kilmarnock Street
Boston, MA 02215-4821
(617) 236-7600
http://www.churchofboston.com/

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Hours
Monday through Friday 5:00pm to 12:00am
Saturday & Sunday 11:00am to 12:00am
Club
Every day 5:00pm to 2:00am

Starbucks' Mini Cupcake

2011-04-12T20:11:00.000-07:00

I had one of Starbucks' mini cupcakes. It was pretty good. Still too heavy on the icing, but I'm getting used to that from mass-market cupcakes. It's better than anything I've ever had from a supermarket, so that's something, but at $1.50 for one, $2.50 for two, it's a little pricy. The whoopie pie isn't terribly good, the brownie was decent, and the cake "popsicles" are just stupid ideas, even if they taste alright.

REVIEW: Five Guys Burger and Fries- ***1/2 / $

2011-04-09T18:30:00.000-07:00

Oh frabjous day, callooh callay, I chortled as I ate. I have lived to see a time when fast food is legitimately good! That day has been here for years, in some areas of the country, but around Rhode Island, we've been wallowing in fast food hell. In-N-Out, Sonic, Carl's Jr.; none of these venerable restaurants are anywhere near us. When Chipotle arrived, we finally had a taste of what really great fast food could taste like, and the wait for a burger joint of equal quality was just freaking interminable.

We have Beef Barn in Cumberland, which is just as good as the best fast food, and even cheaper(!), but it's out in the middle of nowhere. I want something that's on every street corner like McDonald's... but good, unlike McDonald's. Well, Rhode Island might not have one on every corner yet, but we finally have two locations of a brand that could, conceivably, one day, have a whole bunch of locations peppering New England: Five Guys.

I have no idea why it's called Five Guys; it was started by two guys, and one of them was a woman (UPDATE: I have since found out why. The five guys were the husband and his four sons, even though the actual owners were the husband/wife team). Truly, the branding was so terrible that I assumed that it was some crappy local joint destined for failure when the location on Route 2 in Warwick opened up. But no, it's actually a large franchise with over 600 locations in North America, with more undoubtedly on the way. Even better, they've been winning awards with their burgers, even topping the legendary In-N-Out in a recent Zagat survey.

After hearing this, I set about to try them. A grueling journey of nearly twelve minutes exhausted all of our resources, and we were half-dead upon arriving. Thankfully, free peanuts that are available by the front door provided succor. Oh, and about the free peanuts, it's nice that they've chosen to provide sanitary, clean, easy-to-use paper baskets to load up. The only other place that I know of to provide free peanuts is Texas Road House, which serves them up as part of some grotesque schtick where you shell the nut and throw the remnants on the ground. It's just like a local bar, h'yuk! Fuck you. No it's not. It's disgusting. Give me a trash can.

It was a Saturday at about 5:00pm, so I'm assuming that this isn't always the case, but the place was bedlam. There was a long line, and the dining area was about 75% full. The sheer size of the kitchen staff blew my mind. They must have had ten people grinding away behind the counter, with perhaps more in reserve. The crew size paid off, though, with lots of orders coming out with great speed. It was slightly slower than, say, a McDonald's, but not by much, and faster than a Johnny Rockets.

The noise level in the dining area was "intense" according to my girlfriend, Danielle. People in the kitchen were yelling information to each other, people were yelling at each other in the dining room. The line waiting for orders to come out was squeezed in with the condiments and soda. As Danielle put it, "I think I have shell shock from what just happened." The energy level is much higher than any other fast food place at which I've eaten, even Chipotle during the rush. It's something that I can certainly deal with, but it's also something that I would avoid if possible.

Prices are excellent. I came into the place and, coming from a restaurant management perspective, the amount of money that they're spending on labor must be enormous. Well, it's easy to see how this works. They are selling in bulk, and they don't really give you an option to not buy in bulk. It's in this way that their prices are not that much higher than McDonald's. Five Guys' cheese burger is $4.99, which includes two patties by default, and ALL toppings are included in the price. McDonald's Angus burger is $3.99, with a similar level of toppings, and only one patty. You can opt to buy single-patty burgers, which are called, ahem, little hamburgers. This is still a huge hunk of food, and further illustrates their business model of forcing bulk on you. They further default to bulk delivery with the french fries, where even a small overflows from their serving cup and partially fills the bag in which they're stored. A large fry is honestly the equivalent of two whole potatoes.

When I ate the Angus burger from McDonald's, it didn't taste half-bad. The problem was that it tasted like the best McDonald's burger that I had ever eaten. The bread still had this odd sweetness that McDonald's bread has, the cheese was still crap, and the burger tasted like a McDonald's burger, just better. Five Guys tastes like a burger. Their patty is very beefy, with very little seasoning (which I would have kinda' liked). It's tender, juicy but not too, and not at all greasy. I ran across a single hard bit in the beef, but that did little to detract from the impression of quality. The toppings were crispy and fresh, and there are OH so many of them, and the bacon was delicious. It tasted like real, fresh, hot bacon. Not rubbery strips that have been sitting in an oven for hours. The only disappointment was the cheese, which was crappy American cheese, with no option for any other kind. I guess fast food has to have its calling card somewhere. Make no mistake, though, these are, without doubt, the best fast food burgers available.

The french fries offered a similar impression of quality. It's obvious that fries are a popular item, since their supply of potatoes has overflowed into the dining area. Bags of the little spuds were everywhere. They're a bit soft for my taste, but perfectly seasoned, popping with fresh potato flavor, and hot, hot, hot. I very much enjoyed the Cajun seasoned fries, which tasted like real Cajun spices, like, paprika! Spicy! I'd ditch the ordinary fries for Cajun on every visit.

By the end, I was done with my burger, and not even halfway through my small fries. Danielle couldn't finish either, and a girl next to me at the counter couldn't finish her single-patty burger. These are large, hearty burgers for very little money. I was not as impressed here as I was with Chipotle, which really blew me away with the incredible quality of every item, but at the same time, Chipotle is significantly more expensive, with all menu items at $6 or more. Still, I see them both standing in the same vanguard of quality fast food that is sweeping the nation.

All of this makes me ponder the state of fast food in the United States. McDonald's, Burger King, and all of the old guard have built up large numbers of locations, extremely advanced logistics, and an almost unreal level of quality control. But at the same time, they've built up reputations as fast food, and that means crappy quality.

We first saw market segmentation with the emergence of so-called casual dining restaurants like TGI Fridays, which upped the price and service, but not so high as to be competing with expensive, singular restaurants. This pressure in the middle of the market caused many, if not most, of previously expensive restaurants to adapt some of the trappings of casual dining, such as no dress codes.

McDonald's and the rest of the fast food industry, instead of increasing quality or selection, doubled down on price to compete. Prices either dropped or stayed the same regardless of inflation, and we saw the emergence of dollar menus. What this threatens to do, though, is amplify the market and demographic segmentation, creating the dietary haves and have-nots. Those that can afford to spend a little more will continue to do so, forcing fast food to drop prices and quality even further in an effort to spur growth. But this will drive more of their demographic up-market, and the feed-back loop continues. We'll eventually end up with casual dining and high-end fast food like Chipotle serving the middle class, and traditional fast food serving the bottom 10% increasingly bad food, thus further relegating this demographic to an eternity in the lowest echelons of society.

I think that McDonald's was aware of this destiny way back in the 1990's when they introduced the Arch Deluxe. It was a disaster for them, but that insight into the direction of the market is probably why they're doing gangbusters business while Wendy's and Burger King fight for small growth numbers (McD's is about three times the size of BK, but does TEN TIMES the revenue). They absolutely don't want to be the company that's shoveling slop into the mouths of the lowest of the low demographic.

Perhaps this is too complex a subject for a simple restaurant review, but sitting in Five Guys, eating a legitimately good hamburger, and leaving with a stomach bursting at the seams for less than $6, I realize that McDonald's has problems on the horizon, and it's only going to get worse.

Five Guys Burger and Fries: ***1/2

http://www.fiveguys.com

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Starbucks CEO Doesn't Drink Frappuccinos. Tries To Make This Seem Less Bad.

2011-03-31T12:34:00.000-07:00

In a recent interview with questions submitted by users, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz was asked what he dislikes at Starbucks. He responded the he doesn't "like any of the drinks that have been pre-sweetened, in terms of frappuccino and things like that," and that he's "a purist when it comes to coffee."

Just say it like it is, Howie. You don't drink Frappuccinos (Frappuiccini?) because they TASTE LIKE SHIT. Their caramel flavor is bearable, but I'd still be hard-pressed to finish a small. They're bitter, with a tangy, artificial sweetness to them. Nothing about them tastes high-quality or gourmet. I would expect a similar beverage from Dunkin' Donuts.

In general, I think that Starbucks' offerings are very high-quality. Frappuccini is not one of those offerings.

Diet Advice From The Watery Gourmet

2011-03-27T12:18:00.000-07:00

The manifestation of your genetic form is your choice. If you are really fat, you can choose to not be fat. If you are scrawny, you can choose to increase your muscle mass. It might be much harder for you than someone else who is "blessed" with genetics that predispose them to whatever figure that you want. If you want to lose weight, your genetics might necessitate a diet of beans, chicken, and carrots for the rest of your life. Is that fair? No. It's not fair. It sucks. But just because the choice is more difficult for you doesn't mean that the choice doesn't exist.

Previously, I put the word "blessed" in marks because it's not necessarily a blessing. Lots of medical research shows that people who are super-skinny regardless of diet are prone to dying of every malady imaginably, aside from diabetes, than those who are predisposed to weight gain. Being predisposed to extensive muscle growth burns more calories Having a healthy pile of fat on your body makes you more likely to survive extended medical problems. Being fatter keeps you warmer than someone with a BMI of 4. These are legitimate advantages and only get glossed over in our image-conscious popular world.

But back to the concept of choice. Much of how you look is determined by your genes. The extent to which certain aspects of your genes are represented is a choice, though. Again, in our image-conscious world, helped along by a healthy dose of religious moralizing, the opposite of the ascetic existence, one in which we indulge pleasure and taste, is seen as necessarily bad. Think about that. When you eat a slice of cake instead of doing sit-ups, you are making a choice. You are choosing that the pleasure of eating that cake is of higher value to you than not eating the cake and conserving caloric intake.

This is not an inherently bad choice. It is our society that tells you that it's a bad choice. You are being a bad person for indulging your desire for pleasure. It's one of the sins, and was written explicitly by Saint Thomas Aquinas as something to be avoided. We eat to live, we don't live to eat. But why? Why shouldn't we live to eat? It's great! We don't do it because abstinence in all things is the Christian ideal, which gets us closer to God. If you don't happen to believe in the Christian god, then you're hosed, because you're still subject to the social expectations that this ingrained value programming has injected into the zeitgeist.

Problems for people arise when they choose cake and then feel bad about it. They then get sucked into diet scams. I went to Amazon and searched for diet products in the Health and Beauty section. I found over 4,000 items. Certainly not the largest section on Amazon, but remember, NONE of these products have been shown in a reputable study to be any better than simply eating a better diet. That's why they all, I'd wager 100% of them, if they make a claim about weight loss on the packaging, print in absurdly small print a disclaimer saying that this must be combined with an exercise routine. It's a scam. Plain and simple. You might very well have lost weight with these products, but I say with nearly complete certainty that the product had nothing to do with it, it was you and your dedication to a healthier lifestyle. On a funny note, I found the pictured Atkins mix to so resemble a bag of "Atkins Chow" as to warrant a new package design firm.

If you want to be thin, and you can't seem to manage it, you have to move even further towards the ascetic lifestyle of 24/7 salads. You might NEVER be able to eat cake. Cheese, cookies, pastries; they're all right out. But no matter what you tell yourself, you can be thin. Jogging five miles, every day, salads with grilled chicken every day. That doesn't sound like something that I'd like to do, frankly, and if that's what you would need to get thin, then that's unfortunate, but still your choice. You are making the choice to continue eating cake, cheese, and cookies. And that's not bad! If I had to make that choice, I'd pick cake on any day of the week. But I am making the choice explicit and do not regret my choice. I embrace it.

That being said, very few people need to make that choice. Do you have a glandular or hormone problem? No you don't. You're lying to me and to yourself. Alright, yes, some of you certainly do have medical problems that result in your body turning even carrots into fat. People with severe glandular problems make up less than 1% of the population. People with moderate glandular problems and depression included only bring that number up to 1%. That means you are fat because you are making the choice to be fat.

Weight loss is a simple equation of fewer/better calories and more exercise. Every day. You need to integrate it into your life. Going to the gym once or twice a week will DO NOTHING. You need to go every day and make a fundamental shift in your diet. If you can't find anything that is acceptable on a daily basis, then you either need to change your expectations or accept the fact that you are choosing to not lose weight. I've lost nearly 50 pounds from my greatest weight of 260 pounds. I woke up early to make sure I was able to eat a high-fiber breakfast. I made sure to walk or jog multiple miles every day. I stopped drinking sweetened drinks of any kind. I do pushups and pullups randomly throughout the day. I integrated all of this behavior into my day. It stopped being exercise and diet and simply became part of my life. If you can't do that, stop fooling yourself. You'll fail, and then you'll go back to complaining about how you can't keep the weight off.

I have been discussing fat at this point, but many of the same criticisms also apply to those who wish for greater muscular definition but find it hard to achieve. Some people can lift a weight once per day and look like Hercules. Others can lift weights all day long and still only see middling results. These people have it easier than those who are overweight because of our focus on an ascetic ideal, but it can still be difficult for them.

These poor saps are taken for a ride in ways that dieters aren't. Magic pills and powders intended to make you FREAKIN' 'UGE sell for silly amounts of money and usually don't do anything. At least lots of the diet foods out there are still food. It might be terrible food, but it's at least a meal. Pills, powders, shakes, creams, bars, and all of the other things promising you an Arnold-like physique only work with extreme work-outs, and then you don't need them. The difficult part is already done. Just eat chicken and rice.

Our world is an Eden of excess. Our primordial drives don't know what to do with what we've wrought. Food and pleasure is everywhere, so we indulge it. We then feel bad about it. The problem is not the desire, or even the indulging, it's the regret that we as a society feel afterward. We eat like crazy and lie about, then we say that we simply can't avoid it! We say that we'd have those six-pack abs, only if this or that was different. We'd be thin, only if. We'd run every day, only if. All excuses for a choice that you are making but then pretending like you didn't. No. You made the choice, and it's time to stop whining that you did so.

My father has given me a few choice pieces of wisdom. I'd say the one that has had the greatest effect on me is that a loser is not defined by what they have achieved in life, but whether they whine. If you spend all day long complaining, it doesn't matter whether you live under a bridge or in a palace, you're a loser. By rendering the choices we make explicit and taking responsibility for them, we lose the ability to whine and complain, because it was our choice. It is our power. And they are our bodies.

Yet Another Poor Study Shows Benefits For Organic

2011-03-22T09:48:00.000-07:00

There are many studies that show benefits to organic foods over traditional foods, with an equal number showing no difference at all. The only difference is that the ones showing no difference are usually of a greater scale, both in sample size and time. This new study is of decent size, twenty-two brands in all, done over two years. They sampled milk during the winter and during the summer and it's that bit of info that I find interesting, which I'll get to in a bit.

The study was measuring levels of various fatty compounds in the milk and it found that organic milks had higher levels of good fats and lower levels of bad fats. Ohh, but the story isn't nearly that simple. As I mentioned, measurements were taken during the summer and winter, which produced wild fluctuations in fat levels for both conventional and organic. This indicates, as they mention in the article, that diet likely has a large part to play, since both milk and meat from grass-fed cows is lower in fat than cows fed with feed products. But one then has to ask, why bother advocating organic foods and not simply say we should feed our cows grass? Easy! You can't get self-righteous about grass.

Moreover, there are areas where conventional milk did better than organic, namely one C12 and all four measures of C14 fats. It is too much of a stretch to advocate organic from this study, or any of the other studies measuring similar things, even from a purely healthful perspective.

One interesting aspect of the data that they briefly mention in the article is that bad fats appear to be trending up in both types of milk as time goes on and good fats are trending down. Obviously, within ten years, cows will be producing 100% butter directly from their udders.

How TV Did Nothing To Your Life UPDATED

2011-03-20T12:45:00.001-07:00

Ok, I totally meant to post this to another one of my blogs. I might as well leave it up, but yeah. That's why it seems so out of place.

I've been thinking a great deal about How TV Ruined Your Life and its anti-consumerist message. It rips apart many of the arguably very negative aspects of our material society and highlights grotesque examples like My Super Sweet 16.

But hidden in these attacks, and truly the attacks from anyone who talks about how modern aspects of life are bad is the sociological fallacy of The Good Ol' Days. It is the same phenomenon as the World in Decay perspective that so many religions have. Essentially, now is bad, some other time is necessarily better. By almost every metric, this is wrong. That's why I call it a fallacy.

Instead, what I think the show, and all of the synonymous perspectives are lamenting are symptoms of underlying issues. Materialism, celebrity culture; these are not the problems. The problem is a society filled with shallow, half-dead shells of humans. People two-hundred years ago would have been materialistic just as they are today, only they didn't have the materials with which to do it. If anything, the only variable keeping the general population of this bygone day from turning to the perverted excesses of the the elite (who's opulence was either equal to or far greater than that of today) was a society that told them the abandon all hope.

The problem we need to address is a population of unfulfilled humans who reach out into the world for things that fulfill primal, nebulous, hind-brain type pleasures. These provide fleeting bits of happiness, and they're left unsatisfied and yearning for more, but at least they were something approximating happiness for a short time.

It's then no surprise that the things that he attacks directly in his show are all of the pleasures and fears that cater strongly to the reptilian parts of noodle: Fear, death, possessions, and sex & companionship. We focus on these because we are animals programmed to focus on them. We shouldn't be pointing to TV and media, we should be pointing to an educational and societal system that doesn't bother to give kids an understanding of the world to inoculate them to such thinking and behavior.

PRODUCT REVIEW: Wal-Mart Great Value V8 Fusion

2011-03-19T13:22:00.001-07:00

Well, much like a musician when Weird Al parodies their work, or an entertainer being roasted by the Friars' Club, a product knows that it's hit when Wal-Mart produces a "Great Value" rip-off. V8 Fusion is officially a mega-hit.

The Great Value version is fifty-nine cents cheaper, $2.39 compared to $2.98, and after checking the ingredients and nutrition info, I had hopes that the flavors would be similar. No such luck. As you can see from the photo, the Great Value variant is significantly lighter in color. The same effect can be seen in the taste. It's both less flavorful and more watery in texture. The official V8 is better in ever regard.

Great Value's juice isn't bad, but one of the reasons why the Fusion is such a hit is because it tastes very good in pretty much every way. It's a tasty combination of vegetable and fruit juices that even picky (also known as pricky) children would like. Wal-Mart's made the juice taste cheaper and more like "kid's" juice. It's not bad enough to not recommend, but at the same time, I have a hard time recommending it. If budget is a serious concern, and you buy a LOT of this stuff, that sixty cents per bottle could mean significant savings over a year. But if if you don't fit that scenario, buy the V8.

Great Value V8 Fusion: RECOMMENDED

PRODUCT REVIEW: Starbucks Tribute Coffee

2011-03-13T11:38:00.000-07:00

Starbucks' new Tribute coffee, celebrating forty years of life, is ironically appropriate. But before I get to that, a peeve. Starbucks has not been around for forty years. Yes, the very first Starbucks was founded in 1971, but it is so distantly related to the current permutation of Starbucks as to be significant in name only. They didn't sell drinks until 1987, when Howard Schultz bought the chain from the founders and rebranded his own burgeoning coffee chain, Il Giornale, as Starbucks. Thus, the Starbucks of today is actually Il Giornale with a different name. I've posted the original logo so you can see the strong similarity between it and Starbucks' current logo. Basically, the Starbucks name is forty years old. Starbucks as it is is only twenty-four.

Now on to the coffee. After my last roast review of Casi Cielo was such a success, I came into this one with high hopes. Sadly, I have had my hopes run through a grinder like so many coffee beans. I said that this coffee is ironically appropriate, and by that I mean it is ironic that a company that has been so known for burnt coffee as to earn the moniker Charbucks should celebrate its anniversary with a blend that is burnt indeed. It is further ironic that a company that made its name and fortune with expensive espresso drinks should celebrate with a roast that doesn't go terribly well in espresso.

As a semi-objective measurement of roast level, I use my grinder, a Rancilio Rocky, and the required grind to get a perfect espresso shot. Most good espresso grinds like Black Cat require grinds in the area of 10 on my grinder. Casi Cielo required a 9, the darkest Starbucks I've ever had required a 4, with most Starbucks coffees requiring a 5. Tribute requires a grind of 5-6, so it's right in line with their other offerings. Amazingly, it tastes darker than this would indicate. I can taste almost nothing but roast. Smooth, yes, but roast nonetheless.

I'm left with some confusion. Until Casi Cielo, I always assumed that Starbucks was actually incompetent, but I now know that they aren't. They can produce an excellent roast if they want to, which means that this coffee is a conscious choice. Why would a company knowingly create a dark, blasted husk of a bean (I mean that in general, not to Tribute specifically)? What flavor profile are they shooting for? To what demographic are they trying to appeal? I'm very confused. Regardless, this was a disappointing coffee. Their standard espresso roast is much better for espresso, and I've had better pour over with a multitude of their other blends and single origins. It's certainly not disgusting, and in less-gourmet times, I might give a thumbs up. But in the face of stiff competition from local roasters and even Starbucks' own selection, I can't recommend this coffee.

Starbucks Tribute Coffee: NOT RECOMMENDED

Grant Achatz Makes a Burger

2011-03-12T09:52:00.000-08:00

Grant Achatz of Alinea fame likes burgers, apparently. His burger recipe isn't what surprised me with this article and video clip, no. It's how his name is pronounced. I think that the source is pretty definitive, too. It's him, saying his own name. I always assumed that it was pronounced ay-SHATZ, or perhaps ay-CHATZ. I was WAY off. It's actually AKE-etz. Also, perhaps it was the sauve, serious photography that he's always in, but I didn't expect Grant to be so... nerdy. As he was making the burger, I half-expected him to drop a Dungeons & Dragons reference. Which would have been really cool.

Grant Achatz Makes the Ultimate Burger (Men's Health)

Yes, Do End Farm Subsidies

2011-03-03T10:44:00.000-08:00

Mark Bittman has a good post over at the NY Times, titled "Don’t End Agricultural Subsidies, Fix Them." His thesis is right there in the headline. He argues that our ridiculous farm subsidies, manifested in comical situations like houses with subsidized lawns because the land once grew corn, should not be simply ended, but diverted to medium-sized farms and other crops. I think that this is a wonderful idea. Doing this would, in an instant, transform the American dietary landscape for the better. It is such a good idea, in fact, that it will undoubtedly never happen.

What Bittman is asking of our government is subtly, logic, common sense, and leadership. Our government is incapable of that. Whether it was ever capable of that is academic, but it's certainly not capable of it now. In the past, I could simply point to the Republicans and say that they're the problem, because they usually are, but here, I can't say that. Just as many Democrats as Republicans are in the pockets of big agribusiness. And yes, I do mean to imply that they are taking bribes. I think most level-headed people can agree that lobbyists are borderline bribes, so I'll just go ahead and call them outright bribes. According to Opensecrets.org, agribusiness is the number six lobbying industry in the country. With that much money being spent by evil empires like Monsanto and ConAgra, change is an impossibility.

We have to move in bold, neanderthal-like steps for our government to get anything done. We either keep the farm subsidies as-is, or we get rid of them. To argue that there is an achievable middle ground is the perspective of a political Pollyanna.

PRODUCT REVIEW: V8 Fusion With Green Tea

2011-02-28T14:39:00.000-08:00

I love V8 Fusion, as does, apparently, the entire country. It's been a massive, runaway success for the company, selling tens of millions in product in its first year alone. It's proven to be big enough of a hit where Wal-Mart has even introduced its own Great Value version of the drink.

Capitalizing on this success, V8 continues to release new versions of Fusion and has now introduced an entirely new variant, a sort of double-fusion of Fusion and green tea. I was hyped and grabbed the bottle. I assumed that they just soaked a green tea bag in V8 fusion, but no. That would have been hoping too much, and it also gives me an idea to just do that myself.

V8 Fusion with tea is 50% juice and 50% tea, and the 50% that's tea has been sweetened with, ugh, sucralose. Why couldn't they have just used extra grape juice, or, sacrilege, sugar. Mercifully, the sucralose flavor is mild, here. No, the biggest problem is that the flavor is just so bland and mild compared to ordinary Fusion. That 50% that isn't juice is sorely missed. The flavor is hollow, you kinda' sorta' taste the green tea, and the sucralose makes itself known very quickly as the flavor leaves your palate. And, as with most sucralose-sweetened drinks, that flavor is the last one to leave your tongue after you stop drinking it.

Unlike drinks completely flavored with Splenda or aspartame, which means diet or diabetes, this is not zero calorie nor zero sugar. It has 10g of sugar and 50cal per serving. This is a drink that you drink because you want it, not because you're limited in your choices. As such, the use of sucralose is open to criticism. It makes it taste bad. Yes, yes, I know that not everyone can detect the difference; but I can, and so can most of my friends.

I initially puzzled, who is this drink for?! It's not diabetes or diet friendly, but it's flavor is negatively affected by the presence of sucralose. Why would they put sucralose in at all? Then it hit me. I'm coming at this drink from the wrong angle. It is not V8 Fusion. It is bottled, pre-sweetened green tea with juices added. This is for people who drink bottled Green Tea like crazy, because they think that it's somehow healthy, but want something that tastes, I dunno', good.

That is where my dislike is rooted; the bottle is branded incorrectly. If they had called this Lipton Green Tea with V8 Fusion added, I would never have even considered it, and I would have never been disappointed. As such, if you come at the bottle with this perspective, you won't be disappointed. In fact, you might be ecstatic to find bottled Lipton tea that doesn't taste like butthole. But I'm not reviewing Lipton, I'm reviewing V8 Fusion, and this concoction just isn't up to snuff.

V8 Fusion with Green Tea: NOT RECOMMENDED

America, Diets, And The Expensive Lunch

2011-02-25T14:35:00.001-08:00

Christopher Wanjek, one of my favorite medical writers on the internet, has posted an article about the recent research linking diet soda consumption and an increased risk for strokes. He repeats a sentiment from various food and diet writers who are complaining that "the health police" are telling the world that they can't drink diet sodas. Obviously, this is delivered in a derisive way, implying that the health police, whoever they are, are telling us that we can't eat or drink anything.

First off, if any of the health police had been previously saying that diet soda was alright, they were idiots. I can't think of a single doctor or dietitian who would say that drinking any kind of soda is recommended. As a treat, yes, but nothing more. Just because diet soda doesn't have any calories in it doesn't mean that it doesn't have other stuff in it, as Wanjek points out in his article.

I find this typically symptomatic of the American perspective on, well, life. We are on a constant quest for fun, while trying to avoid paying for it. We are, in essence, on a quest for a free lunch. This philosophy manifests itself no stronger than in diet. We consume diet gimmicks and exercise equipment in amounts unseen anywhere else in the Western world.

For example, there is something distinctly American about the Atkins diet; just the idea that we can be thin by eating lots of meat! Don't pay any mind to all of the other countries that can't even afford meat. Or the fact that most dietary scientists say that eating the meat-rich diet of an American would be impossible for the entire planet.

No, we want to eat candy for dinner. We want to exercise without actually doing any exercise. That exercise one really blows my mind. What do you think exercise is? It's moving your body! You can't move your body without moving!

The absolute pinnacle of that quest were those batshit crazy electric belts that supposedly jolted your muscles into moving. Don't prefer some insane exercise gimmick? Don't worry! There are diet products that will make it seem like you're exercising all the time, even when you're sitting in front of the TV, which is apparently the American dream.

Even I, super genius, fell for one of these gimmicks about ten years ago. I was young and stupid, and ever since high school had ended, I was starting to put on pounds. So I tried a product called, subtly, Ripped Fuel. It's still available now, but at the time it was using ephedra, which has famously since been taken off of the shelves. Probably a good thing, since I took one-sixth the dose, pegged a temp of over 103, had a racing heart, and didn't sleep for two days.

Um... healthy.

The ephedra actually did something, though! But eating something that simply burns fat is inherently unhealthy, so it got banned! Shocker, it worked by the only mechanism that a pill could possibly burn fat, by raising your body temperature. Which can prove lethal, as it did for many sports stars.

But the banning of ephedra didn't stop the diet companies from producing billions of pills of other total nonsense. They are the very definition of snake oil. And all of the commercials say, somewhere, in very small text, that the results seen are rare and can only be achieved with changes to diet and exercise. But the rest of the commercial makes damn sure to make it seem like you'll see those results with the pill alone. You will NEVER BE THIN BY SITTING IN FRONT OF YOUR TV AND SWILLING BACK SODA!

I'm not saying that a life of leisure and food is immoral or bad, I'm saying that only a moron could possibly think that they will ever achieve results with these stupid products, sold on TV, at one in the morning. And America is fucking filled to overflowing with morons (See P.T. Barnum, even though he apparently never said it). You can choose either a lean, muscular body, and exercise regularly and eat well; or you can have a soft body and small muscles but enjoy leisure and fatty food. You cannot have both.

Even with the wildest advances in science, you will likely never be able to have both. Genetic science would have to develop a human that stores no fat, and has muscles that grow regardless of exercise levels. That simply cannot be a stable organism. I can only assume that a person like that would grow and look great, until they literally explode at age thirty-five.

Regardless of what advertising tells you, there is no free lunch. You wanna' know how I lost fifty pounds? I'll tell you for free. I started eating more fruit and vegetables and exercised every day. It was easy. So easy, in fact, it's apparently really hard.

Penn & Teller did an excellent episode of Bullshit! about food around the world, and the disconnection between America, where we're all fat, and Africa, where they're all starving to death.

The True Price of Food

2011-02-24T11:04:00.000-08:00

Raj Patel is an up-and-coming author and intellectual with a focus on the economies of food. I really like him. This video covers much of his general thesis and I think that it's well worth a watch.

The Problem with Oatmeal

2011-02-24T10:01:00.000-08:00

It has recently been brought to my attention that oatmeal is prepared poorly across most of the American culinary landscape. This subject was raised by Mark Bittman over at the NY Times in regards to McDonald's newest breakfast creation: McOatmeal. Or perhaps just oatmeal. You can never really tell with McDonald's.

Basically, like everything McDonald's touches, they've taken something that could conceivably have some significant nutritional value and stripped it entirely of anything close. Truly, Bittman argues;

A more accurate description than “100% natural whole-grain oats,” “plump raisins,” “sweet cranberries” and “crisp fresh apples” would be “oats, sugar, sweetened dried fruit, cream and 11 weird ingredients you would never keep in your kitchen.”

But it wasn't Bittman's attack on Mickey-D's that had me upset. In fact, I find it rather pointless to attack McDonald's for making a sugar-infused pile of crap since that's what they sell, and everyone knows it. McDonald's sells a particular product to a particular demographic, and they know that demographic very well. That demographic does not want health. They want crap. More power to 'em.

No, what had me upset was his attack on Quaker instant oatmeal. Maybe it's because I've been fed this stuff since I was an itty-bitty childer. Maybe it's because Quaker's marketing is so good. For whatever reason, I've never looked at the nutrition information.

I was a little relieved to find that the nutrition isn't nearly as bad the article made it out to seem. Yes, the Cinnamon Roll oatmeal has 9g of sugar compared to raw oats 1g, but that's about it. Instead, I have left this informational expedition more confused than I went in. Raw oats are 150cal per half-cup. Instant Cinnamon Roll is 160, with many other flavors at an identical 150. There's less fat in the instant oatmeal, not more. But there's also less protein and fiber.

My biggest takeaway, and I think the biggest thing that anyone should take, from this is a new desire to make fresh oatmeal. Buy raw oats, milk fruit, and whatever the hell else you want to put in it. It won't necessarily be cheaper, but it will be better and better for you.

Smaller Sizes Are Invading our Shelves

2011-02-08T17:27:00.000-08:00

I noticed awhile ago that Dove bars have mysteriously lost one of the bars from the package. Where once, your ducats would have bought you four bars, the same price now only nets you three, count'em three, bars. That's a 25% drop! It's basically a trick. They're assuming that a large price increase will cause a larger drop in sales than the same price and simply putting less inside the bottle. I don't like it, but we're in an extended economic downturn, while at the same time, many raw materials on which these manufacturers rely are becoming more expensive.

GOOD Magazine and Consumer Reports hooked up and produced a small infographic showing that this event is spreading across the entirety of the supermarket. Again, I understand that inflation happens and that, eventually, the price has to increase, but I don't like it when companies try to trick me.

Haagen-Dazs vs. Ben & Jerry's

2011-02-07T17:38:00.000-08:00

I just bought both a tub of B&J's and H-D's cookie dough ice cream. I keep trying Haagen-Dazs because it just has to be better than it always is. It's the original gourmet ice cream! How the hell is it so disappointing?

I don't know how, but it is. Time and time again, I try it and am let down. It's never bad, certainly, but it's never good and is usually inferior to good half-gallon brands like Turkey Hill. So yeah, continuing, I compared the two and Ben & Jerry's, as always, came out on top. Haagen-Dazs has an excellent finish that B&J's is lacking. It feels like it was made with fresh vanilla. The cookie dough also has a floury taste that makes it taste more like real cookie dough.

Regardless, the Ben & Jerry's vanilla flavor, while not as complex, has much more punch to it. Ben & Jerry's is denser, with a richer, smoother texture to it. The same goes for the cookie dough, which is sweeter than Haagen-Dazs. There's also more of it, and as Ben & Jerry's knows full well, the best ice cream is ice cream that's being used to glue together bits of other things. I tell myself that this will be the last time that I buy Haagen-Dazs, but I'm sure that I'll try again.

So yeah, if you want a cookie dough ice cream, Ben & Jerry's should be at the top of your list.

PRODUCT REVIEW: Lots of Soup

2011-02-03T17:37:00.001-08:00

Soup is delicious, doncha' think? The problem with soup is, once you've had fresh soup, canned soups just taste terrible. The meat is all rubbery, the vegetables are lacking any sense of freshness, and there is a shocking deficiency in flavor and punch considering the salt levels. It was with this desire for good soup that I set about trying various small brands on the supermarket shelves.

Most of the soups didn't stand out. No punch. Pea soup. Tomato soup. It's as though the elimination of meat translated to the elimination of flavor. Two brands stood out with some legitimately inventive-sounding flavors: Pacific Foods and Dr. McDougall.

Pacific Foods:

Pacific Foods soups were the real stars of my endeavor. Every soup of theirs that I tried were punchy, flavorful, thick, and filled with fresh-tasting vegetables and ingredients. I tried their Hearty Carton soups, which are all vegetarian, but unlike Dr McDougall, as we'll see, they didn't sacrifice anything. The Chipotle Sweet Potato and Poblano Pepper and Corn Chowder, my personal faves, were hot enough to knock my girlfriend on her ass. Thick, spicy, and fantastically delicious. The most notable difference between the brands was how firm and fresh all of the potato tasted. Coming from canned soups like Progresso, Pacific soup was a whole new world. Once you try these soups, you'll never go back to Progresso. I look forward to trying their canned soups that include meat.

Pacific Foods Hearty Carton Soups: HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Dr McDougall:

Apparently, Dr. McDougall isn't just a food company, but an entire diet company predicated on minimal processing of vegetable matter. Similar to Pacific Foods, the ingredients were firm and fresh. They tasted like home-made soup. Unfortunately, it was made by your good-for-nothing uncle as opposed to Grandma. Unlike Pacific, Dr McDougall only produces vegetarian and vegan foods, and as any good gourmet knows, vegan is a synonym for flavorless. Their minestrone soup has suitable amounts of flavor and presence and isn't too oily. It's a very good pre-made minestrone. Sadly, that bright spot only makes their other soups all the more disappointing. Both tomato soups are oily and have no complexity to their flavor. I had to load them up with pepper, crackers, and parmesan cheese to make them palatable in large amounts. The black bean soup was similar in its complete lack of depth. It was just overwhelming bean. Dark, bland, palate-covering, bean. But, considering the good minestrone, and the quality ingredients, I think that Dr McDougall is at least worth a shot.

Dr McDougall's Soups: RECOMMENDED

Knives, Knives Everywhere, Nor Any Drop To Drink.

2011-01-26T10:18:00.000-08:00

I'm in the market for a knife. Now, a few years ago, this would have been easy. I would have bought a Wusthof knife. Wusthoff and Henckels were the original high-end knives available in the US. My Grammy had Henckels, my Mom had Wusthof, and that was that. You had one or the other. I mean, you could be retarded and buy a Cutco knife, but why the hell would you do that?

Compliments of Food Network, I think, the American consumer has become increasingly gourmet; increasingly discerning. This means the market for cooking equipment has exploded. So along with Wusthof and Henckels, in the world of chef's knives we now have Global, MAC, Shun, Tojiro, Nenox, Hatori, and a bazillion others. Where the hell do I start?!

The two big places from which to buy knives appears to be Germany and Japan. Germany obviously gives us Wusthof and Henckels, but Japan's offerings are seemingly limitless. And I have no freaking clue how to distinguish the knives from one another.

My quest began after I bought a new Wusthof Classic and was somewhat disappointed with its cutting ability. I realized that, because of my mother and grandmother, I had bought something without doing any research. I never do this! Without further ado, I hit the interpipes and found this comparison that put both Wusthof and Henckels (my boys!) BOTH of them near the bottom of the list! Holy shit!

Now, admittedly, this was out-of-the-box sharpness, and my own experiences with my Wusthof don't completely line up with his test, but my knife certainly doesn't compare to his descriptions of the top knives.

So I've made the decision. I'm going to buy new knives. I'm not going to buy German, so I'm left with the Japanese. Holy crap, I have no idea where to go with this. The sheer number of high-end Japanese knife companies is overwhelming. The number of styles is overwhelming. There are different thicknesses, different metals, and even different types of blades. I found Japanese Chefs Knife, which has a comically bad website, but is actually an upstanding company. They have knives for sale that exceed $2000 for ONE KNIFE.

I can't rely on advice from celebrities. Alton Brown uses Shun, but the comparison wasn't kind to them. Thomas Keller endorses MAC. I really have no idea where to go. If you were hoping to get some final resolution to all of this, I'm sorry to disappoint you. I'm using this to express my bewilderment at the number of options. I'll update this with the information that I acquire and hopefully provide some info for other knife shoppers.

Organic Milk Better For You?

2011-01-17T18:42:00.000-08:00

I'm not convinced. Generally, I'm skeptical of anything having to do with organic-this, or artisan-that. That's not to say that some studies haven't shown differences, but more studies have shown benefits in the other direction. Generally, no difference is found, but especially regarding produce, those nasty, industrial, chemically grown fruits and veggies are more frequently better for you than their organic counterparts.

I'm often proven right because organic food has little to do with actual health and everything to do with damning the man. Just because a hypothesis seems right in your head doesn't mean that it's going to be borne out in experiments. And when your primary motivation is moral and social, your scientific sense is going to be clouded.

As it is with this study. I can think of one big thing and that is that organic milks are almost always pasteurized by the ultra-high-temperature process. Anyone who's done a taste test between milks knows that UHTP changes the flavor of the milk significantly, and anyone who's ever tried to steam milk for espresso knows that the chemical changes are significant enough to make it annoyingly difficult. That means that major chemical changes are happening in UHTP milks in comparison to standard milks. Was this controlled for? I don't know, but I'd like to know. Did they include control milks? Those that are produced on gigantic scales but are not organic, like Parmalat?

Again, without details, I won't say this is bunk, but I'm suspicious. I find it especially laughable that the lead researcher recommends that everyone switch to organic. For one thing, has she noticed that organic costs TWICE AS MUCH as excellent non-organic, and three times as much as standard Wal-Mart milk. To say that people should just triple their spending on one of the Western life's staples is ridiculous. And what about milk-steaming, espresso fiends like me, huh? What of us?!

Organic milk is better for you, say scientists

PRODUCT REVIEW: Starbucks Casi Cielo Coffee

2011-01-13T10:33:00.000-08:00

I just bought a half-pound of Starbucks to get me through the snowstorm and gave their seasonal roast, Casi Cielo, a shot. I am legitimately impressed. I knew I was in for something different when the usual setting of "4" on my grinder was way too fine. The darker the roast, the finer the grind, and Starbucks ain't called Charbucks for nothing.

After two blown shots, I was amazed to find the coffee requiring a grind in the "8-9" range. Holy crap! So, I knew it was going to be different, but good? I was about to find out.

It's good! Like, really good! This is easily the best Starbucks coffee that I've ever tasted in espresso. Whereas other times, I bought Starbucks because my Black Cat hadn't arrived in time, or I was unable to make it to Updike's Newtowne or Coffee Exchange, with this, I don't feel as though I'm missing out by drinking it. It's very rich and smooth, always good for espresso, but actually has some fruity bite to it. It's an excellent choice for espresso, be it doubles or singles. I haven't tried a triple, but if it works in a double, it usually does well in a triple, too.

Now, I know that I'm late to the game with this. Starbucks introduced Casa Cielo over three years ago. But that knowledge only leaves me more confused. If Starbucks knows enough to make this, why haven't they applied this to their other coffees? Or their in-house espresso? While I still prefer my favorites (UpTowne, CofEx, and B-Cat), this is a legitimately good coffee and everything Starbucks makes should be like this.

Starbucks Casi Cielo Coffee: RECOMMENDED

P.S.

And just for fun, here's a picture of some latte art that I poured into a cup of Casi Cielo. It was tasty.

Survey is Dead! Long Live Survey!

2011-01-02T09:15:00.000-08:00

Wow! Pumpkin Pie trounced the competition in the holiday treat survey. 54% of people preferred pumpkin pie for their holiday junk, and the pie that I figured would at the very least be a contender, apple pie, barely registered. Homemade cookies made the only other sizable contribution to the voting pool, with 25% of the votes.

But now, after all of that indulging, you're fat, you're bloated, and you need to.... MAKE A RESOLUTION!!! This is a food blog, and if surveys are any indication, food-related stuff takes up three or four of the top ten resolutions, so we're perfectly aligned to talk about this.

If your resolution was about food, what form did it take?

PRODUCT REVIEW: Nonni's Bakery

2010-12-22T13:30:00.001-08:00

I'm doing a double review for two of Nonni's products, their biscotti and their Tusconi.

Cutting straight to the chase, their biscotti is the best biscotti on the supermarket shelf. They come individually wrapped, which helps keep them all supremely fresh. They are crisp, with not too many nuts, and a good, high-quality chocolate. Their turtle pecan biscotti comes with chunks of toffee inside, which adds a sweet, buttery, cruncy, chew to the cookie. And if you prefer, you can get almonds in place of pecans in yet another variety. The selection of cookies alone is enough to recommend Nonni's. I just wish that a variety pack was available.

I still prefer the biscotti available from local Italian bakeries, such as Scialo Bros. on Federal Hill, which are just epic in their dedication to huge amounts of everything in them. But Nonni's more than makes up for that by being available in most major grocery outlets. I very much like Nonni's Biscotti.

Nonni's Biscotti: RECOMMENDED

Nonni's Tusconi is made of fresh, high-quality ingredients, individually wrapped, and looks delicious. Unfortunately, it tastes like the brownie from my fifth grade school lunch.

Nonni's Tusconi: NOT RECOMMENDED.

PRODUCT REVIEW: Mario Batali Pasta Sauces

2010-12-18T17:27:00.000-08:00

Rao's is the best jarred pasta sauce on the market. Mario Batali's isn't better, but considering that it is cheaper, how close does it get to Rao's? Pretty close, but given the choice, I'd still take Rao's. I compared their vodka, marinara, and tomato basil sauces, and without fail, Rao's sauces had more punch to them, were heartier sauces with greater chunks of fresh ingredients, and also had more body, whereby they coated my mouth with flavor.

Batali's sauces, in contrast, were universally thinner. They were much lighter sauces with milder flavors, body, and few chunks of ingredients. The sauces tasted far from bad. For example, the tomato basil was rich, smooth, and had a fresh, sweet flavor to it. Everything about the sauces was smooth, sweet, natural, with just the right amount of salt to bring flavors out. They're just so lacking in body and flavor in comparison to Rao's sauces, though. Rao's uses more seasoning, more garlic, larger amounts of fresh ingredients; truly, everything about Rao's is one (sometimes small) step above Batali.

Still, if you can get Mario Batali sauces, they're good in every way. A high-quality sauce for a fair price. Jars usually run in the $5-7 range, but I think that I would always opt to spend the extra $2 on Rao's, given the choice.

Mario Batali Sauces: RECOMMENDED

PRODUCT REVIEW: Delacre Royal Moments Cookies

2010-12-07T11:21:00.000-08:00

As always I'm on the lookout for pre-made goodies without HFCS or vegetable shortening. Bahlsen and LU cookies are two of my widely-available favorites, and I think that we can add Delacre to this list. After trying a few of their cookies I'm happy to report that they're certifiably good. The biscuits are of high-quality, dense, crisp, but not buttery. Most of their cookies use vegetable oil, not the hydrogenated kind, in place of butter and it tastes it. For example, the biscuit in LU's Petit Ecolier is noticeably creamier on the palate and tastes more, for lack of better descriptors, decadent.

The chocolate in Delacre cookies is also behind LU. There's a bit of bite to the aftertaste and a lack of smoothness that betrays a cheaper chocolate. It's of greater quality than a Hershey bar, certainly, but I expect more from something that crows about its rich, Belgian chocolate. It's weird, because the ingredients in the Delacre are, at least quantitatively, better than the Lu cookies. They use real vanilla, as opposed to vanillin, but there it is; the chocolate in the LU cookies is better.

While this isn't the most ringing endorsement I've ever given something, it's still a damned good cookie. Paired with a hot cup of espresso, it's a good little getaway, even if I'd prefer to have LU's Petit Ecolier.

Delacre Royal Moments: RECOMMENDED

http://www.delacre.com/Home_us.html

Pies Pies, What Wonderful Pies!

2010-12-04T21:57:00.000-08:00

I forgot to mention on Thanksgiving that my favorite bakery in Rhode Island has pies available for the holidays. The Village Hearth in Jamestown makes the most bestest pies that you can buy. If you're in the market for someone else to make your holiday dessert, there's only one place that you need to go. They're a bit pricier than other places, but trust me, these are pies, and pies are important. Spend the extra cash and get some good pies to follow up a good meal. And if your meal is bad, wash the taste out with pie.

PRODUCT REVIEW: Black Cat Espresso

2010-12-03T12:31:00.000-08:00

Black Cat espresso is the flagship product of the now officially world-class cafe, Intelligentsia. Because of its fame, widespread availability, and quality, I think that calling it the bar by which other espresso blends are measured is not an exaggeration. I'm a big fan of Black Cat and buy it quite frequently and this product review has been something of a late comer.

First thing that someone coming from Starbucks or grocery store coffees will notice is how light the roast of Black Cat is. I'm not entirely sure what it was, but for whatever reason, America has grown accustomed to super-dark coffee roasts. This has benefits and detriments, of course. Dark roasted beans can make anything taste acceptable, so that's good, but it does that by erasing the terroir of the beans, which for good beans is bad.

The best espresso roasts are loaded with sweetness, chocolate, caramel, with the roasting process creating not char, but the flavor of lightly toasted bread. You don't ruin this with a dark roast! Go try local roasters and their espresso roasts. You'll find that many of them, if not most, will have espresso roasts in the city to full-city range, with some even including roasts as light as half-city. Again, the exaggerated flavor of the espresso process brings out everything the beans have to give, so more so than any other process, espresso demands good beans.

Black Cat is a case study in this. It's rich and smooth, and even when you screw up shots it tastes pretty good. When you get it right, it tastes amazing. I must admit to preferring my espresso a bit richer than Intelligentsia shot for. They obviously want a bit more complexity, which they openly admit, whereas I am totally happy to have espresso marked almost exclusively by chocolate and caramel. This is not a knock against it, obviously, since they are skilled roasters shooting for a specific flavor profile and they achieve that goal with aplomb.

That being said, there is one thing that pisses me off about this roast and that is how easy it is to screw up. It's a very light roast and this means that your espresso machine is going to be hyper-finicky with it, frequently side-channeling and wanting you to change your grind level from day to day. It can be a major pain. It's aggravated if you have an already pissy machine, like my La Spaziale Vivaldi II.

But that's my problem, and yours if you choose to use BC, and the only thing that is a true knock against the beans are the price. They are rather expensive at well over $1 per ounce. You can buy them cheaper from other retailers (Like NeedCaffeine.com) than through Intelligentsia... for some reason... but it's still far more expensive than other famous blends, like Stumptown's Hair Bender or local blends like that which can be had (in Rhode Island) from Updike's Newtowne or New Harvest.

To put a point on this whole discussion, Black Cat is a high-quality espresso. It's worthy of its fame, and, while expensive, tastes fantastic. You would be well-served to drink this if you like espresso.

Black Cat Espresso: Highly Recommended

http://www.intelligentsiacoffee.com/about/black-cat-project

PRODUCT REVIEW: Breyers Extra Creamy Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Sandwiches

2010-11-16T12:48:00.000-08:00

Holy crap, these are terrible. The ice cream texture is icy, the ice cream flavor is artificial, the cookies taste like some kind of floury mess with fake chocolate chips in them.

The chocolate chips are NOT fake, though. They just taste terrible and waxy. The cookie is the way it is, I assume in an attempt to prevent them from becoming too hard when frozen. So, instead of just using real cookies that taste good and accepting that people might have to chew a bit, we have this mess. It tastes and feels like a cookie in which the baker accidentally added too much flour and then also baked the cookie for about half the necessary time.

Everything about this sandwich is bad. It's only redeeming quality is that it is not poisonous.

Breyers Extra Creamy Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Sandwiches: NOT RECOMMENDED

PRODUCT REVIEW: Immaculate Bakery

2010-11-15T15:51:00.000-08:00

I am on a seemingly endless quest to find foods that are made with food, as opposed to some substance that has been turned into another substance via the wonders of science. This means no hydrogenated oils. No artificial sweeteners. In their place I want eggs, butter, sugar, and other things that can be bought in bulk in the baking aisle.

Sadly, this eliminates nearly ALL pre-made baked goods. Pepperidge Farm, while remembering many things, have forgotten how to make cookies without hydrogenated oils. Pillsbury, among others, are a veritable chem lab in a cookie. While I recognize that most of these ingredients are totally harmless and have been true wonders of the chemical age, they taste inferior. Butter tastes better than hydrogenated oils. Sugar tastes better than HFCS.

So it was with great interest that I tried Immaculate Bakery products. I'm covering all of their items in this review since they are pretty consistent across their line. I first tried their chocolate chip cookies. They are without doubt the best pre-made chocolate chip cookie dough on the market. As are the sugar cookies, the biscuits, and scones. They are moist, sweet, flavorful, and taste as close to home-made products as anything I've tried from the freezer.

As far as taste and especially texture goes, their cookies are leaps and bounds ahead of the competition, as are their joyously simple ingredient lists. Everything about them is better. Their crescent rolls are better, but not to the degree of the cookies, and their cinnamon buns make Pillsbury buns taste cloying in comparison.

If you are going to buy pre-made cookies, biscuits, or scones, Immaculate Bakery is your best choice.

Immaculate Bakery: HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

http://www.immaculatebaking.com/

Chocolates the World Over

2010-10-27T20:35:00.000-07:00

Huffington Post has an article about chocolate makers in Brugge, Belgium. Apparently, there are artisan chocolate makers on almost every street corner making world-class candies from cocoa nibs that fall from the sky. Sounds like my kind of place. While the article didn't fail to cause an increase in saliva production, I think chocolate in the Rhode Island area is pretty good. All of the makers might not be in the same city, but while you would walk in Brugge, you can drive in RI. Moreover, Rhode Island has Garrison Confections, a world class place in the truest definition of the term.

And while we're on the subject of Rhode Island chocolates, Garrison is going to start holiday hours for its factory store. It's down some crap-hole alleyway in Central Falls, and it's easy to miss the street even with GPS, but it's totally, completely worth it.

Old World Chocolatiers in Brugge (Huffington Post)

PRODUCT REVIEW: Kicking Horse Espresso

2010-10-24T12:11:00.000-07:00

Well, this is sorta' a product review; Kicking Horse makes many varieties. I discussed my disappointment after opening my 1kg (2.2lb) bag of espresso, which lists as a medium roast, to find it very dark indeed. Just to give you an idea, lighter espresso roasts like Black Cat or New Harvest require a grind setting of 9-10 on my grinder. Darker roasts are lower. Crappy supermarket coffee is usually so dark and dry that it requires a setting of 2-3. Starbucks is usually 4-5 and, drumroll, Kicking Horse is 6. A 3-4 grind difference from other medium espresso roasts reveals just how much of a chasm there is.

So it came as no surprise to find that the espresso also tastes very dark. There's more there than Starbucks, but not too much. Very roasty. It's not terrible, and if you prefer darker roasts for your espresso, this is quite good, but if this is medium, what the hell are their dark roasts? A bag of black powder? I'm drinking it, and enjoying it, but I think that calling this a medium roast is an inaccuracy. It makes me hesitant to recommend it even though I will because it is a good dark roast. If you buy, expect it dark, because it is.

Kicking Horse Espresso: RECOMMENDED

Insta-Crabs

2010-10-21T11:56:00.000-07:00

Getting crabs from a vending machine sounds like something that happens to college freshmen. But no! These are actually the kind of crabs that people want... just from a vending machine. I can't tell if Japan is at the vanguard of modern society, or if it's just fucking weird. Regardless, here it is, vending machine crabs. Guaranteed alive or you get three free!

crabby vending

Portland Maine Gets Its Huffington Due

2010-10-17T11:21:00.000-07:00

Portland, Maine, a surprisingly gourmet city, has received a workup in photos from the writers at the Huffington Post. The quality of the city is likely because there's fuck-all to do up in Maine. If you live anywhere in Maine, and want to do anything, you have to go to Portland. Thus, the city acts like it has double its population.

Not only does Duckfat, one of my favorite places in Portland, get mentioned, but it was put on the list compliments of Matt Jennings, chef at La Laiterie in Providence! And we come full circle. It's a short list of photos, but it makes me want to visit the city all over again.

Chefs' Guide to Portland, Maine (Huffington Post)

Michelin is Unimportant

2010-10-17T10:37:00.000-07:00

Josh Ozersky has written a Time article expressing similar views as myself on the Michelin Guide. His specific criticism of the guide isn't the act of reviewing itself, but the perplexing way that the guide writes reviews.

Roger Ebert said it best, a critic is not someone who determines what is "good" and "bad," terms too nebulous to use effectively; no, a critic is someone who says whether they liked something or not and effectively explains why they liked it or not. The explanation is the skill of the critic, not their status as an arbiter of taste. It's in this important task that Michelin fails.

I argue that Michelin fails because it's stupid and useless for all but the most self-important in the internet age. Just as Gayot, or San Pellegrino's 100 Best Restaurants (an intellectual task on par with arranging angels on the head of a pin), the final result will undoubtedly bring increased attention and money to the top eateries, but the effects on food at large will be small if not completely hypothetical. And if food isn't changed on at least a regional level, how can we say that some restaurant has been great as opposed to merely a good place to get some food?

My greatest criticism is that these reviews largely ignore food-at-large. All of the major review sites are utterly obsessed with French food, and only recently have they become enamored with molecular gastronomy. I'm nearly positive it's because MG allows those who advocate for it to feel even more self important. Want evidence of this? Many of the products of molecular gastronomy aren't actually terribly hard or expensive to make. If anyone tried to open a discount MG restaurant, it would go under in a month. The price is part of the reason for going.

I like to review restaurants and I think the job of the critic is actually an important one. It prevents people from going someplace and wasting money; it helps restaurants that are worthwhile succeed in an increasingly-crowded market; and, almost eugenically, it helps moves the bad restaurants out of the market, thus freeing space for new ones to try their hand. Michelin doesn't do any of these things. With terse, useless review snippets, stars given to already famous, hilariously expensive restaurants, limited coverage, and a positively myopic view of global cuisine, we're left to ask, what does the guide do?

Very little, I argue. Except let you feel even more self-important when you eat at Le Bernardin.

Restaurant Ratings: Is Michelin Lost in the Stars? (Time)

Dove Bars & Pancakes

2010-09-22T18:25:00.001-07:00

Notice anything... AWRY? You can't see because they no longer show the number on the front of the box, but Dove bars only have three bars in the box. I'm not sure when they started doing this, but it has to be recent; I buy these pretty regularly. It's interesting that, instead of raising the price, they've reduced the number in the package. This is a trick that lots of companies will pull in an attempt to avoid exposure and possibly piss off consumers. I'm pointing this out not as an attempt to defame Dove but to simply hold it up as an example of the greater economy. I think that in better times, they would have had no problems raising the price.

I don't think I've ever discussed my love for the pre-made jugs of Bisquik. I don't use them, but I still think that they are marketing brilliance epitomized. Let's face it, pancake mix isn't exactly a red-hot and innovative market, so any advancements in that area are going to come from marketing. Look at it with a critical eye and it's a profligate waste, in the same vein as 100-calorie packs and packaged salad mixes. But I'm not discussing whether it's a good deal or not, I'm simply in awe of the idea.

Industry Renames HFCS

2010-09-22T11:03:00.000-07:00

Apparently, instead of, ohhh I dunno', NOT using high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) anymore, they're going to take a page from the American automakers playbook and simply rename the offending ingredient! The new name? Corn sugar.

You can practically smell the Calvin Klein aftershave coming off the MBA that thought up this brilliant plan. Everything about it is retarded. First, technically, it's correct. But they'd still have to call it high fructose corn sugar, because HFCS is not simply corn sugar. That would be corn syrup, which no one has an issue with.

First off, saying that there is no evidence that HFCS is linked with health problems is a total lie. There is conflicting evidence, but that is far from no evidence. We have a variety of studies showing that there may be a link between HFCS consumption and lower-quality blood chemistry and weight gain. The fact that there may be any link at all shows that, if alternatives exist, we shouldn't eat it.

Just stop using it! Use ordinary corn syrup. Use sugar. Use molasses. As a manufacturer, I understand that you have to think about your bottom line. I also understand that government subsidies, tariffs, and other regulatory muckings-about have made sugar more expensive than it should be (GO-GO Gadget government intervention!). But think about your demographic groups.

People who are very concerned about HFCS will appreciate, and also be willing to pay the small premium for, your use sugar. For example, if you have to raise the price of Chips Ahoy by $0.50, that is a significant percentage increase, but it's not large in practical terms. The people who cannot afford that increase or are unwilling to pay are very unlikely to be the demographic that cares or is even aware of the controversy.

Split your demographics. Make Chips Ahoy Natural for the markets that care and continue to make the ordinary Chips Ahoy for other markets. Don't try this semantic dodge, it will just piss people off.

Goodbye High Fructose Corn Syrup, Hello Corn Sugar (Signed, Corn Industry) (Huffington Post)

Starbucks Stuff

2010-09-14T14:26:00.000-07:00

I was in Starbucks today at around 5pm and saw something I haven't seen before. People! On Laptops! Hangin' out! While I would imagine that the crowd of digerati (is that word even still being used?) at Coffee Exchange at the same time is five times the size, it's still impressive. I saw four people. Considering that, in the past, I would see one or two at most, this is a big success. I'd be curious to see the actual connection numbers, but Starbucks will undoubtedly never release the raw data, because that will just show how stupid they were to have not done this years ago.

More About Raw Milk

2010-08-31T19:53:00.001-07:00

I've been gearing up to buy some raw milk, I just haven't gotten around to it yet because I'm lazy. Truth be told, though, I also have a little bit of lingering fear about all of the nasty little pathogens inside of raw milk that are just eagerly waiting to kill me, because almost every other living thing on Earth is in some way eager to kill me.

Scientific American has a work-up of the current debate over raw milk, discussing as much as space allows from both perspectives. They have an utterly (udderly?)amazing reference to a form of microbe purification that is apparently used on things like canned hams, where the food isn't actually heated, instead it's subjected to intense pressure, which, I assume, literally crushes the bacteria. Cool, very cool. But not nearly as cool as killing all the bad stuff with sound waves? Sound waves?! I would totally kill my bacteria with The Beastie Boys.

I still feel that if someone wants to buy raw milk, they should be allowed to. I have an internal debate going on if raw milk should be labeled as dangerous, like cigarettes, by law or not. Still, even though the chances of getting sick are higher from raw milk than from pasteurized, they're still rather low. I also have the immune system of a shark (look it up). It's too bad that Rhode Island has laws against raw milk, since that means I have to make a trek to some farms in Massachusetts. That also means that, in the hot, hot days of summer, my trip home, and to the waiting deep chill, is going to be longer than I would like. So either I can bring an ice-filled cooler or wait till fall.

Got E. coli? Raw Milk's Appeal Grows Despite Health Risks (Scientific American)

QUICKVIEW: Fairlawn Cafe - +++/$$

2010-08-25T21:42:00.000-07:00

I'm a huge fan of breakfast. Breakfast is the only meal of the day where you can eat almost anything and call it fair. Just think about. French toast loaded with sweet cream cheese. That's not a freaking meal, that's a dessert that you're masquerading as a meal. But at the same time, it's equally reasonable to eat a 12oz porterhouse, which is also not a meal; it's three meals.

So, yeah. I go out to breakfast a lot and love making it. It is in this breakfast-loving mindset that I happily present to you the Fairlawn Cafe. It's a small, nondescript shop in a proto-stripmall in suburban Lincoln. The outside is easy to miss, but you can easily spot it on weekends by the huge crowd of cars vying for the small number of parking spaces.

The inside is dense and quirkily... quir... quirkishly... uniquely appointed. It reminds me of Julian's on Broadway, just without the tattoos, Cloves, and pretentiousness. There are very few spaces to sit and the tables are small, but they make use of what sidewalk they have to wedge in a few more tables during the summer.

Service was a bit slow but very friendly and attentive. They have a large number of aesthetic flourishes that combine to form a sense of distinction, for example, you receive chilled water in a capped bottle, and orange juice is brought out in a wine glass with an orange twist. Very simple stuff, but it's nice to see a cafe adding a little flare to otherwise pedestrian tasks.

The menu is enormous. The kitchen is apparently dedicated to the proposition that all ingredients are created equal, and can be combined in any way imaginable... and put on the menu somewhere. A whole page for various french toasts. A whole page for eggs Benedict. A whole page for omelettes. And multiple pages for sandwiches and other breakfast foodstuffs. The menu alone would have been impressive, but they also have multiple signs both inside and out displaying specials and more menu. Smoothies, salads, sandwiches, you get the picture. If you even remotely like brunch food, you'll find something here that you like.

And about that food, it's delightful. High-quality ingredients combined with inventive breakfast ideas like the tiramisu french toast. It had coffee-flavored sweet cream cheese. Very good and sporting an excellent price. My friends followed my french toast lead, because, duh, french toast is, like, totally the best food ever. For example, french toast is good, french toast with pan-seared apples, cranberries, brie, and walnuts is even better. Their standard breakfast offerings are exactly as you would expect, but prepared well. Eggs, toast, and very soft but spicy home fries. I like my home fries super-crispy; these were more like broiled potatoes, but the tasty seasonings made them enjoyably different. They serve dinner and lunch-type stuff, which I have yet to sample, but I have no reason to espect anything other than good to very good.

So after a single trip, Cafe @ Fairlawn (or Fairlawn Cafe, I'm not sure which, really) is one of my favorite breakfast places. It's right up there with T's. And if you live nearby, they deliver! That eliminates any reason whatsoever to not give them a shot. A great selection of excellent food and good prices, including a few recipes that I've seen nowhere else, really makes this a winner.

For those interested, Fairlawn Cafe has very little presence on the web, so I've uploaded a number of their menu pages to my Picasa gallery.

UPDATE: Here are some more photos of their available french toasts and crepes.

Fairlawn Cafe: +++
Price range: Entrees- $5-$10

893 Smithfield Avenue
Lincoln, RI 02865-3534
(401) 365-1385

View Larger Map

Hours
Monday & Saturday 7:00am to 2:00pm
Tuesday through Thursday 7:00am to 4:00pm
Friday 7:00 am to 7:00pm (serving dinner)
Sunday 7:00am to 1:00pm

My New Qik Stream.

2010-08-22T12:39:00.000-07:00

I have started a new vlogging channel at Qik where I will upload videos. I've wanted to upload videos from the places that I visit and review, but the post-processing takes so much time that I never find the drive to finish it. Qik gives me the ability to not only make videos but directly upload them on-site. They're rough, unpolished, and the video isn't of terribly high-quality, but it's stupid-easy. I'm hoping that this will be the motivation that I need to start creating more, higher-quality videos to go along with these impromptu ones.

UPDATE: I just realized that my old videos display with that, as such, you should probably ignore them.

UPDATE AGAIN: I just uploaded my first real video and I've found that there's a pretty bad delay such that the end of my videos sometimes get cut off. I'll try to compensate for that in later videos.

A Very Long Engagement

2010-06-30T09:42:00.001-07:00

I've been a bit lax in posting, lately. I'm working on an epic how-to about home espresso that's taking awhile to write, film, and edit. It'll be up soon, along with a redesign of the blog. Yaaaaay.

Fatal Error: There Has Been an Exception in Your Butter

2010-06-21T09:08:00.001-07:00

I am now keenly aware of keeping my butter out of the sun.

Latte Art Wallpaper

2010-06-13T10:48:00.000-07:00

I uploaded a Latte art wallpaper at my fō-tō-gră-fē blog. I'm re-posting it here in case anyone would like some beautiful coffee forever tempting them on their desktop.

4:3 ratio

From fō-tō-gră-fē Wallpapers

16:10 ratio

From fō-tō-gră-fē Wallpapers

Paula Deen Cutting Board

2010-06-07T19:50:00.001-07:00

I bought this Paula Deen cutting board because it was the biggest cutting board I could find for cheap. Thankfully, they included this helpful weights and measurements on the side to remind me of such important data as 1 cup equaling 8oz and 2 cups equaling... 16oz. They apparently think that people will be so consumed with their cooking that basic math will just be too freaking much. We're only human! No one can live at this speed!

Raw Milk.

2010-05-14T21:49:00.000-07:00

I generally side with the scientists, and they say raw milk has no benefits in comparison to pasteurized milk, nor does it cure anything. But, it HAS to taste different. Even though pasteurization doesn't take the milk past its heat tolerance point, it gets it damned close. Changes in chemical structure do occur, as any scientist will admit, and I'd love to find out how raw milk tastes. I'm healthy enough, I think that I can take a shot of ebola, or hanta, or whatever raw milk carries.

If you're drinking Hood, stop, and start drinking Rhody Fresh. If you're drinking Rhody Fresh, stop and start ordering from Munroe Dairy. Munroe's 2% tastes better than Hood's whole. There's a big difference. So I'm left to wonder if there can even be a big difference moving from Munroe to raw. I'm especially intrigued because of my latte making. Steaming milk requires the proteins and fats in milk, both of which are damaged by heat. Could raw be the sweet, creamy, milk-filled, holy grail of latte production?

I'm going to try, and if you want to, this page has the info you need. Be aware of the risks. You can get sick from this! It's of a low probability, but it can happen. As for me, I look forward to my lattes.

Pasteurization Without Representation (The Atlantic)

PRODUCT REVIEW: Cascadian Farms Frozen Vegetables

2010-05-14T21:14:00.000-07:00

This is going to be a group review, since it would be silly to review just their corn or broccoli. My girlfriend and I are pretty busy doing things. We don't really have the time that we want to dedicate to making meals on a nightly basis. We're also too lazy to wander too far every day. Thus! Our reliance on frozen foods was born. We can't bring ourselves to buy frozen meals (seriously, yyyyuk!), but we will buy frozen raw materials. As such, our freezer is completely open to frozen vegetables.

If you've ever eaten frozen veggies from the likes of Birdseye and Green Giant, you know that they're totally acceptable, but not really the best of the best. Broccoli is heavy on the stems, corn isn't exactly bursting with flavor, and the peas are small. Broccoli is the worst offender. It's usually so bad that I'll keep everything else frozen, but the broccoli gets bought fresh and steamed in a microwave steamer bag.

If your nightly meal sounds similar to that, do I have the product for you! Cascadian Farms is organic, but don't hold that against it. Its vegetables are in a different league than GreeGi or Birdseye. More expensive, but as worth the extra money as anything in the store.

The corn is exploding with super-sweet flavor. The texture is denser with more snap. I swear, even the color is better. The peas are large and not the slightest bit mushy. The pre-made blends like the Garden Vegetable Medley are absolutely amazing for frozen food. Not just acceptable, but downright friggin' good. It's the broccoli, though, where Cascadian hands the other brands their deportation order. NO stems. Not one. Just big, beautiful, tender florets that steam up and taste as close to fresh as I think anything frozen could ever taste. The only sore spot was the spinach. It was watery and light-to-devoid of flavor. It didn't taste bad, but that's kind of because it didn't taste like much of anything. I wouldn't buy that again, but that might just prove that you shouldn't buy spinach frozen. I mean, would you buy iceberg lettuce from the freezer?

As I mentioned, their products are more expensive. Single-steam, 8oz boxes usually cost about $1 more than comparable products from Green Giant and others, but it's completely, totally, 100% worth it. Cascadian Farms are the best frozen veggies that you can buy. And, honestly, can you really say no to a company that does this?

Cascadian Farms Frozen Vegetables: HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Illy Needs to Check Itself Befo' It Wrecks Itself.

2010-05-14T20:34:00.000-07:00

Giorgio Milos, a master barista from Illy, and apparently ambassador to the world for Italian-style espresso, has a few choice words for American espresso. Thankfully, I have a few choice words for him.

His article is vaguely elitist, but not too bad. No more elitist than anyone writing about some food about which they know too much. But he makes mention of the "authentic Italian technique," which I found funny. First off, espresso has gone far beyond little Italy. The most renowned, successful, award-winning cafes are all outside of Italy. An Italian Barista has yet to win the Barista World Championship. The Clover was invented in the US. Psychotically complex syphon pots for making coffee are more common in Japan than Italy. Global espresso consumption was fundamentally defined by an American company. Italy... is small potatoes.

Second, he says that if these foundations that "that international associations agree on" aren't met, it's not espresso! What International associations? Ones of Italian origin, perhaps? Truthfully, I have no idea to what organizations he's referring, but I think it's ridiculous no matter what. Food stuffs evolve. It's like saying that just because we added chocolate chips to vanilla ice cream, that it's no longer ice cream.

He then uses the "some people think that" trick for which Fox News is so famous. As in, like Fox News uses the line "some people think" and then simply states its own opinion as though it's supported by others, he critiques beverages from "cafes," as though ALL American cafes have the same problems, then proceeds to talk about roasting like others don't know. Strange, even in little Rhode Island, the quality, taste and style of drinks varies wildly from cafe to cafe.

He talks about cafes using, gasp, 20-25 grams of espresso for a drink. First off, I have no clue where the hell he went. I have never encountered a cafe that does that. Upwards of 20grams? Yeah. More than that? Never.

Finally, he assaults poor grinds. I find this freakin' hilarious, but also telling. I use pre-ground Illy when I'm lazy or my grinder is out of commission, so I'm well-acquainted with it. I now know why it is absolutely impossible to get a perfect double: the grind is aimed at singles, the virtues of which Milos can't seem to extol enough. It's pretty easy to nail 9-bar and 25 seconds with a single, unless you tamp with a metal press, getting the same 9/25 espresso out of a double is impossible. I've gotten close! But not quite.

I can grind the slightest bit finer and nail 9-bar in both a single and a double easily. And even in Italy, doubles are a thing! It's not like no one in Italy drinks a freakin' doppio (Italian for double) now and then. And it's that that makes Milos wrong. He attacks the grind more than anything else, and yet, Illy's grind could use a little help.

And, frankly, any company who produces these:

Has NO room to speak.

A Winning Formula for Traditional Espresso (The Atlantic)

Extinct Cheeses.

2010-05-12T11:11:00.000-07:00

I didn't know that cheeses could go extinct. Extinct? Really? I guess it makes sense. Languages can do it. Anything that requires constant participation. Regardless, this gives me a great idea! We need to start a massive, gourmet cheese factory that's sole purpose is the make as many cheeses as possible! If we centralize cheese manufacturing into a giant cheese clearing house, sort of like a stinky Amazon, the global market can support the making of small, artisan cheeses. The global market for cheese is so huge and diverse, even the smallest cheese operation could be supported.

France's Distinctive Cheeses Are Disappearing (Huffington Post)

Creatine is Great.

2010-05-11T15:15:00.000-07:00

I've had a light weight-lifting routine for a number of years, now. It's the way I stop from becoming an absolute porker as I pursue my hilariously opposed life as a gourmet. I started taking creatine not as a physical supplement, but for its cognitive benefits. With even a small dose, increases in memory and processing speeds have been noticed. I'm always after ways to give myself an advantage in... in... whatever the hell it is I do that requires an advantage (Got it, Street Fighter IV!), so after hearing that Creatine is actually pretty well-supported experimentally, I was on Amazon with my credit card out.

But holy crap, I noticed quite an increase in my weight-lifting stamina. I've gone off and on Creatine multiple times to make sure that it's not in my head, and I feel highly confident that it is a real effect. It has no effect on how much I can lift, nor does it affect my ability to handle weight and cardio without tuckering out completely, but if I slowly work my muscles, I can do significantly more repetitions per set.

Without creatine, it is difficult to impossible to do three sets of ten reps of a tricep lift with a 30-pound weight in each hand. With creatine, I can do three sets of twelve reps with more in reserve. I'll frequently do fifteen or sixteen reps on my final set. It's very impressive.

Side effects? After not taking any for a few days, then taking a decent dose, I fart... a lot. Combined with my hilarious doses of Fibersure, I fart even more. My urine is also incredibly odoriferous. I can't describe the smell. It's just... a smell. And holy crap is it a smell. It dissipates quickly, but it's strong as hell.

I haven't encountered any other side effects. My dose isn't high enough where I'm bloating. My muscles don't look any bigger, which is a big goal of many body builders. And since I drink a lot of water anyhow, I haven't encountered issues with dehydration.

Considering the cognitive benefits, I recommend creatine to anyone. The studies show no nasty side-effects, and if the only notable result from extended usage is smelly pee, I think it's pure gold.

Continuing Adventures in Latte Art

2010-05-11T10:35:00.000-07:00

I was able to grind out some pretty good pieces of latte art with my old Jura Capresso Z5. But it was never meant to do that. It took a LOT of work and fiddling to get it done. Still, I managed this, and also these. Not baaaad, I'd say. But still not barista-level work. Now you can see the difference between a machine that's just playing around, and one that's meant to be used and abused.

Uh Oh, LaGasseos

2010-05-09T10:29:00.001-07:00

Oh Emeril. You whore.

PRODUCT REVIEW: Planters Black Label

2010-04-29T10:16:00.000-07:00

Planters is making a big push to expand their brand. Their first big effort was launched about eighteen months ago with the NUTrition line of mixed jars and food bars. I recommended both of those as quite tasty, especially the delicious mixes. I was also happy to see a real focus on quality in these new products, more so with the mixes. The bars are good, but they're a bit high in weird ingredients and a bit low in actual nuts.

Planters newest family member are Black Label. Ooooooh. Black Label. Sounds exclusive. Well, as exclusive as anything sold at Wal-Mart can get. This is certainly no Johnny Black.

I think it shows that Planters is really trying to expand their brand with the noticeably omission of peanuts from any of these mixes. Up until the NUTrition mixes, I don't think Planters even made a mix without peanuts in them. Hell, they were apparently so infamous for making their mixes primarily peanuts that they started listing maximum percentages for peanuts on their mix jars.

But here, zip. Zilch. Nada. No peanuts to be seen. The two most used seem to be almonds and cashews, with macadamias and pistachios making a couple of cameos. While the limited selection of nuts might be disappointing, the variety of flavors and dips will not be. Chocolate, chipotle, Santa Fe, sea salt and cracked pepper. These are not your ordinary nuts. This sort of flavor experimentation is usually restricted to small, niche-label food brands sold either online or from specialty resellers. But no. Here's Planters throwing the universe upside down.

Also surprising is the price. A large jar of Santa Fe will set you back $10 minimum, and small jars of the dark and milk chocolate mixes sell for nearly $6 at Wal-Mart. But that price certainly goes somewhere. The seasonings on the Chipotle are spicy and don't taste artificial like on most chip seasonings. The chocolate-covered nuts use a surprisingly high-quality chocolate, especially the dark.

And as I mentioned with the NUTrition mixes, these are NOT low-calorie foods. They are decidedly high-calorie. So don't think that almonds and dark chocolate, the super friends of super foods, make this overly healthy. If you add them to an otherwise healthy diet, you're good, but if you just munch on these bad boys, your weight will grow faster than you can say "Oprah."

The label has yet to expand nationwide, and currently you can only get the chocolate ones at Wal-Mart locations. Mentions of the Black Label start popping up online about a year ago, so I'm assuming that Planters has been rolling the product line out since then. It hasn't gotten an official mention on the Planters page, either.

I'm a bit torn as to how to recommend this. They're all good, but local shops dipping their own chocolates and adding higher-quality (but perishable) seasonings will be better. So I'll recommend this with a caveat: if you can get these same products locally, they'll be better. But as it stands, these are some of the tastiest snacks nationally available.

Planters Black Label: HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

New Starbucks Machines.

2010-04-28T20:47:00.001-07:00

Starbucks' roll-out of their new espresso machines is finally hitting the more rural locations that I usually frequent. Apparently, the machine should be in around 75% of locations, on its way to 100% some time next year. It's part of Starbucks continuing effort to change its direction by staying exactly the same, but saying that it's trying to be different.

I don't mean to bash Starbucks, I actually like them, but their efforts at turning around their fortunes are laughably poor. Instead of unleashing a torrent of business model experimentation, they're doing the same thing. Their food selection is decent, but overpriced and limited. Their WiFi is still limited. Their coffee selection is still limited. The list goes on. The design of the new machine is now on that list. What's the big difference? Well, it grinds beans as opposed to using pre-ground coffee packs. That's good. And it's also shorter! Oooooooh! This means that the barista has a better "connection" with the person ordering the drink by blocking "the visual sight line the customer previously had to watch the drink being made, and for the intimate experience with the barista." If there was ever something that the customer didn't care about, it's that.

But enough about that. How's the machine? First off, it looks different than the picture being passed about. The sides are a copper color and it melds in with the Starbucks aesthetic better. And the baristi are universal in their love of the machine over the old Thermoplans. The big difference that they're reporting is temperature stability. Apparently, under heavy load, the old Thermoplan machines would suffer from pretty bad temperature fluctuations in the shots. I'm assuming that this explains the wide differences in drink quality I've encountered at Starbucks...es.

The biggest difference that I've noticed is the milk steam quality. I haven't had a crappy steam job at any location with the new machines, whereas I've had numerous poor lattes on the old boxes. It's still semi-automated, which means no latte art-ready foam, but it's velvety and feels good on the tongue. Starbucks does a good job of talking up the machine at this online Flash app which also gives you the best view of the machine apart from actually going.

The thing that keeps running through my mind is that, if this machine is as good as they say it is, why does Starbucks insist on using only ONE bean blend? Their current blend is adequate, in that it tastes like coffee and isn't too bitter, or sour, or dark, or anything. It's just this bland thing sitting smack dab in the middle of a dark-roast flavor profile. It's crema level is very poor, and there's simply a lot of room to open up the variety.

Having one blend at Dunkin' Donuts or McDonalds is fine. They're not a coffee shop. But Starbucks is a cafe. They should have half a dozen coffees, at least one more type of espresso, and other ways to explore the coffee world. That's why a cafe exists! If I just wanted a high-quality cup of joe, I'd make it myself. As it stands, local cafes are whomping the 'Bucks in this department.

If Starbucks really wants to push the envelope, which I'm beginning to think that they don't, they should make a machine that can espress multiple bean types. Because until they do that, there's nothing bringing me to Starbucks over Coffee Exchange or Updike's Newtowne save for convenience. And now that I've got a new machine, even that's fading.

Survey is Dead. Long Live Survey!

2010-04-18T19:38:00.000-07:00

Well, I last asked in which season you eat the most, and boy did you answer. 54% of your answered that you eat the most in winter (just keeping warm). Fall barely got 9%, spring got NO votes, and summer only landed 18%. The remaining votes went to people who eat 24/7.

Now with summer here, I'm curious as to your favorite frozen delight? Yogurt? Ice Cream? Milk shakes? Let your voice be heard.

PRODUCT REVIEW: Archer Farms Pre-Ground Espresso

2010-04-18T12:17:00.000-07:00

Imagine my surprise and delight when I discovered that Target had their own house brand of pre-ground espresso beans. Targets are everywhere, while places that carry Illy are... not. Better still, the grounds were contained in the same metal tin as Illy. Similar size, shape and price. Everything seemed to indicate that Target was targeting Illy quite directly.

Usually store brands are at least comparable to the name brands, and since I'm still getting used to my new espresso machine (read: screwing up shots) I figured saving a few bucks was worth it for the sake of experimentation, even if the final product wasn't quite up to snuff.

So, I was already going into this with low expectations, and I'm happy to report that Archer Farms espresso missed even those. First off, it's not the slightest bit comparable to Illy. The blend is way off. It's more acidic and not in a good way. The texture of the grinds is also different. Illy has a powderyness to it, along with the slightly larger bits of coffee. Archer Farms is certainly super-fine, but is completely missing that powder texture.

This is the only thing that explains my problems with the shot. I tamped my shot, began the pull, and water flowed through the shot like shit through a goose. I got slightly strong, bad, coffee. I assumed that I had simply tamped too lightly. It happens. Did it again, with a deliberate, strong tamp. Same thing. Next step, doubling my tamp pressure. I pushed down with at least sixty pounds of force. Same thing.

I blew through five shots. Every one was the same, regardless of what I did. This grind is nowhere near Illy and completely useless for espresso. The package is a complete lie. I would imagine that if you had a moka pot, Aeropress, or even French press, then this would work fine. But in a real espresso machine, that applies real pressure, this is laughably off the mark.

Archer Farms Ground Espresso: NOT RECOMMENDED