Way to go General Mills

I just saw a commercial for General Mills that got me excited.

"Do you mean the same General Mills that makes famous cereals such as Cheerios, Chex, Wheaties, and Lucky Charms as well as others?"  "Do you mean that General Mills?"

"Yep, that General Mills."

"But why would a commercial from General Mills get you excited?"

"Well, let me tell you."

The commercial starts off by telling you that whole grain is the first ingredient in all Big G cereals and although that sounds like something that should be noteworthy if you read the nutrition label you would expect there to be a greater level of dietary fiber listed and it seems pretty low by comparison.  So no that is not the part that got me excited.

It is the next thing they mention that really got me excited.  Their cereals contain No High Fructose Corn Syrup.  O happy days.

I still think that HFCS or high fructose corn syrup is slow poison that creates long term negative health impacts that we still don't fully understand but that we will pay for in the years to come.  There are a lot of web sites out there that discuss HFCS, and if you haven't run across the topic you might find it an interesting research project, but from what I have seen I have serious concerns about it and have personally taken to reading ingredient labels and actively avoided foods many times because of the presence of HFCS.

And now to see yet another major company using the tag of "No HFCS" as a way to promote their product makes me think that the movement is gaining some traction and is moving forward.

There are other companies that have seen this as an opportunity and others will follow.  Whether this is an honest effort on behalf of their customers' welfare or a marketing ploy like being a 'green' company I don't know but I will take it.  I really hope the movement will continue to grow.  To me this is bigger and more important than peanut allergies, glutton scares and organic labeling.

General Mills I hear you and applaud you.  Hey Coke and Pepsi and all you other soda makers, are you listening?  It is time to get real.  Hansen's Soda is the real deal.  I know Pepsi has made throwback soda and I look for it.  To get a real Coke you have to look for an import from Mexico at three times the price.  Really?  It is time to get with the program.  If for no other reason than that real sugar just taste better than laboratory created substitutes that slowly kill you.

This is Ed Nef with a view from the Farrwest.

The gift of a cookie

Tis the season for the giving of gifts and that got me thinking.

Now we have all heard that “it is better to give than to receive” and that saying in itself has many different levels to ponder about but I was thinking more along the lines of the giving and the gift side of the equation.

Cookies are wonderful magical things. The smell of cookies baking in the oven, then cooling on the rack, and then lightly burning fingers as they approach then melt in your mouth with their tasty delights has got to rank up there as one of the greatest pleasures in life. What could be better, than perhaps fresh baked bread to give a scents of home?

The varieties are endless, from hard and crunchy to soft and chewy, or no bake cookies that pop out quickly to pastries that take all day to prepare, or simple dough cookies to those with added ingredients such as chocolate chips, assorted nuts, fruits and of course various secret family recipes. With so many to choose from there has to be a favorite (or should I say several favorite) cookie(s) out there for everyone.

If you were to give the gift of a cookie, which is better, to give the gift of your favorite cookie or to give the gift of the favorite cookie of the person you are giving the gift to?

Now I chose cookies because there are so many different kinds of cookies that I don’t know of anyone that doesn’t have at least one kind that they like and maybe one kind that they like a little less. (If you can’t tell, I really like cookies. I have more than one favorite. You cannot go wrong sharing a cookie with me. And although I am learning to like them a little better, floater cookies (better known as raison cookies) are not as high on my list.)

So in choosing a cookie to share with another, do you pick your favorite cookie (out of the many) as it represents a little bit of who you are and thus the act becomes one of sharing yourself with another, or in others words you are giving of yourself to another and because it is one of your favorites it represents your love and passion (did I tell you I like cookies) with someone that you feel good about and you want to share that feeling of warmth with them?

Or do you take the time and effort to find out what the favorite cookie is of the person you wish to give a cookie to then continue to put forth the effort to make the cookie just the way they like it in order to share with this person something you now know they will appreciate thereby also giving of yourself through your time and efforts and once again being able to share that feeling of warmth with them?

As the receiver of the gift of a cookie, do you receive the cookie gratefully at all times? Do you say “Thank you for this cookie” but secretly say “This cookie is o.k. but I really wish it was my favorite cookie instead” or “This is my favorite cookie, how did they know” or “All right, I got a cookie”? (I generally tend to the latter.)

So in this season of fretting and stewing over the commercialism and materialism that our gift giving has become, perhaps we should just step back and give the gift of a cookie (or a plate of cookies). After all, it’s not the gift but the thought that counts. Oops, there is another saying with multiple levels to ponder. But that will have to wait for later. Right now I need a cookie.

This is Ed Nef with a view from the Farr West.

Product Review: Vacuum food savers.

I am sure many of you have seen the infomercials advertising home vacuum sealers to preserve food. The idea is to buy in bulk and save money then repackage with the vacuum sealer to use the food in a more suitable manner, either through sizing or just allowing more time to use the food before it spoils. It is a great idea and I was hooked.

I am a great conservative and love to save money and with careful shopping you can find some items that are cheaper when bought in bulk (though that is not always the case, so shop smart and read the labels and calculate and compare) and if not you can always wait for a really good sale and stock up. Problem is when you stock up really big on a really good sale, will you have time to eat it all before it goes bad? When I was single I had a hard time finishing half a loaf of bread before it started growing penicillin in its natural state. Vacuum sealing food sounds like just the answer I was looking for.

Next problem, as many of you may have seen the same infomercial and have been tempted to jump on board, is the price of these popular units. Foodsaver which is the company that made the idea of vacuum sealing so popular has several different units on their web site beginning at $79.99 and running up to $299.99. The one on T.V. seems to have been priced around $129. That rates an ouch in my book and I just couldn’t justify it so I never bothered, though it was always in the back of my mind that if I could find a decent price on one I would probably go ahead and get one.

Years went by, I got married and I came across a Rival brand sealer that was on close out at the local megalamart. Since there were now two of us to share one machine’s usage and the price was around $50 I quickly talked myself into it.

The Rival machine works pretty much the same as the Foodsaver machine as near as I can tell. Looking at the two side by side they look very similar and comparing our usage method to that seen in the demonstrations given for T.V. I would say that they are comparable.

I must say that we did have fun with it…for a time. It was way fun to put food in a bag and suck the air out. We created a mini production facility and went to work sealing away blocks of cheese and family pack purchases of meat for later use. We felt like we were doing ourselves good by our efforts. The packages went into the freezer and the food stayed useable long after other buys would have been tossed. The idea worked.

Mostly..., as I mentioned, we would set up a mini production facility I meant that in a fun way but the reality is that you almost had to set up a small production run whenever you wanted to use the sealer. Because there was extra effort involved in set up and clean up, the sealer got used less and less as time went on.

Also, you had to buy rolls of material and create your own bags in the size you wanted or buy pre-made, pre-sized bags. There are also canisters that you can buy that are supposed to attach easily to the machines and provide a quick reusable platform for storing rice, sugar, pasta and such. Well, the bags were easy enough to make though we sometimes made them bigger than they needed to be thus wasting some material. We seldom did the 'cut open the bag take out what you need and reseal the bag' because it was a pain to retrieve the machine each time for what should have been a simple set up. No wonder they say that many people leave them out on their countertops, it's just easier that way. The special design canisters worked about twice and we were never able to get a seal to hold after that. They are pretty much just like any other canister now.

The sealing of the bags was a wonderful thing to do and watching as it happened…when everything went right. Sometimes it didn’t, or wouldn’t. Sometimes the machine would just whirr away and nothing would happen because we didn’t have the flap just right or there was an uneven cut along the leading edge when we tried to make our own bags. That is my guess anyway. Also if there was any chance of a liquid being involved there was also the chance of a mess being involved. It is hard to suck out air without sucking out the liquid so if you were going to save soup for a later microwave reheat at work, be very careful. That applies to juicy things like fresh fruit, and marinating steaks and chicken breasts like they show on T.V.

Well, we did use it for quite some time (but nowhere near as much as I thought we should) before one day the pump was running like crazy and nothing was happening no matter what we tried. Our machine had given up. We still liked the idea of a food sealer and thought that we would get another one at some point but we never made it a high priority or found ourselves willing to pay the going rates for a new machine. We thought about switching to the Foodsaver brand but still couldn’t justify the price even with two of us using one.

Normally the story would end there but we were walking through the store the other day and came across a hand held battery operated food sealer vacuum pump put out by Reynolds (the same people that bring you Reynolds wrap). The price was a blowout bargain by comparison to the units we had been looking at. The Handi-Vac starter kit with the pump and a couple of bags was less than $10. I think that included the batteries. I could live with that so we bought it, brought it home, broke it out and gave it a try.

I can tell you right now this is the way to go. If you have ever thought of getting a food sealer and you are not going into the business and need a commercial unit, this makes sense. The pre-made, pre-sized bags are a wonderful design. If you can operate a self-locking bag you can definitely operate this system. And its reusable.

Put the food in the bag, press out as much air as you normally would closing these bags, seal the bag with the self locking seal, then apply the hand vacuum pump to the bag at the spot indicated while on a hard flat surface and begin to remove the air with the push of a button. Air comes out, just like the big boys and its done slick as a whistle. If you want to readjust things inside, or get something out, go ahead and open it up at the self-locking seal, pull out what you need and reseal it and put the vacuum pump to it again and your done. I like this, a lot. It works.

I think a big part of the difference is that with the Foodsaver you suck the air out first and then try to seal the bag with a heat source that fuses the material together, while the self-locking stirp on the Reynolds bag is operated by running your thumb across it like we are all used to from using sandwich bags and then applying the vacuum pump after the bag is sealed and ready to go. This simple reversal of steps in the process makes all the difference.

Some things to remember are to not overfill the bag and when filling it be sure to leave the pump corner empty enough to create a flat surface to run the pump on. The bags are a special design with a pump spot that is a one way valve to allow the air to escape but seal tightly after the air has been removed. The bags also have a rough surface inside. This is to allow the air a pathway out of the bag around whatever you are storing when the vacuum pump is working.

So what is the cost of these special bags? I was just in the local store looking for some replacements and found packages of the quart size for about $0.23 each and gallon size around $0.30. Not too shabby when you consider what it gets you as well as the easy reusability feature.

There is one other entry level vacuum food sealer competitor and that is Ziploc. They have a system that is even cheaper but it uses a manual pump to create the vacuum function. From my experience, using a manual pump is a two handed operation most of the time and that would mean you would still need a third hand to work the bag. Since I am looking for simplicity and functionality I think the better pick is the battery operated unit Handi-Vac from Reynolds.

Bags from both Ziploc and Reynolds have similar design features. There are some lettering and highlighting differences but not enough to change the functionality of either bag. The Ziploc bags do have a textured inner lining that runs across the whole of one side for the air pathways where as the Reynolds bag only textures a couple inch strip across one side. Both work equally well.

The pricing on the bags seem comparable to so the only difference is in the cost of the manual pump vs. battery operated, or $3 vs. $10 in the starter kits. Since the store I went to was out of the Reynolds bags in the size I needed I decided to try the Ziploc bags and they worked just fine. Both seem to make a quality product and at a whale of a difference in price compared to the popular Foodsaver brand but then again, you don’t have to pay for all that late night T.V. advertising time.

So what did we do with it? We bought a 5 pound bag of shredded cheese at the local Costco for about $2 more than the normal 2 pound bag at the local grocer, broke it down into 5 one pound bags, vacuum packed and put them in the freezer. Then we did the same thing with a 5 pound bag of pepperoni, first wondering how much to put in each bag to cover one pizza and then remembering that it is no trouble to open it up, take out what we needed and reseal the remainder. How cool is that?

Now I know that this is no consumer reports with a comparison done over months of testing with detailed analysis of vacuum rates, seal pressures, freezer burn protection and time intervals, but this is also not a paid endorsement, (if it was I would tell you so). This is just my shared experience and opinion on a pretty good idea. I hope you find it handy.

This is Ed Nef with a view from the Farr West.

Pizza talk

Just when I thought pizza couldn’t get any smaller Dominoes comes out with their newest add of Three ‘Full Size’ one-topping pizzas $4 each. If you can catch the fine print you find that the ‘full size’ pizzas are whopping 10-inches. The few pizzas I have had from Dominoes are o.k. but they were never over the top great and they have never been a bargain no matter what deal they have running.

I remember one sale where you could get any pizza for half price. That sounded wonderful to me so I ordered the largest pizza they had with all the toppings, I mean the works. The final price was still 60% more than I was used to paying but it was going to be worth it because this was going to be the best pizza they could make. I waited with great anticipation as the smells from the store wafted into my already anxious nostrils. I was hungry.

They called my name and I went to the counter to retrieve my bounty when the guy hands me a rather small box. “What’s this” I asked, “I ordered the large.” “That is the large”, he replied. Their large was a mere 14 inches. I took the box and went my way thinking live and learn. The pizza was once again, just o.k. and come to think of it I haven’t been back since. Mediocre is what mediocre is.

I have often been disappointed with the national chains and often with other people’s pizza recommendations. This was not the first time I had been disappointed. I remember a time when my buddies and I had a coupon (poor starving students that we were) to buy a large and get a medium free at the local pizza joint, one that was supposed to be highly recommended. Well, we ordered four pizzas for the five of us thinking that should be enough, but no, the large was a 14 incher and the medium even smaller. We ended up having to buy another pizza to polish up our appetites. You see, when it comes to pizza, size matters almost as much as the quality.

As a matter of comparison, our normal places had a large that was 16 inches in size with one of our favorite places having a 17 incher that would generally feed three of us. Their pizza was so good that when they had the grand opening of their second store my friend and I went and ate the equivalent of a large pizza each. Those were the days. I can still handle a 12 incher as an individual pizza but I am more apt to split them now.

There are places with bigger pies, like the one that used to make a wonderful New York style 20 incher and a couple of college places where you can find a 23 incher, but I must insist that quality still matters. Volume used to work when I was a kid and just wanted to fill my belly but since that time I have acquired some taste buds that are pretty insistent that the food I stick in my mouth be appropriate. I am all too happy to oblige whenever I can.

Pizza is a necessity and one of those little jewels life has to offer. I think I am feeling the need again.

This is Ed Nef with a view from the Farr West.