water water everywhere

and who knows what to drink? i went to the new market basket that opened recently near me to pick up some stuff last night and as it was less crazy (and i wasn't feeling like shit) when M&i went on saturday afternoon, i took the time to actually wander up and down the aisle to get a sense of the layout. it wasn't that different from the others in the area, but i had to laugh when i hit the water aisle.

it was nothing but water.

bottled. spring. fruity. plain. vitamin. fizzy. flavored with sweet n' low. flavored with splenda. energizing. relaxing. filtered. distilled. big bottles. little bottles. gallons. pods.

i just stared in amazement at just how water crazy a society we have become. in the past, water and soda would live in the same aisle, usually soda on one side, water, bottled teas & energy drinks on the other. but there, they have an entire aisle for soda. a separate aisle for water. fruit juice/drinks are in their own aisle (filled one entire side). energy drinks are somewhere else. tea/coffee based drinks have their own 1/2 side of an aisle. i was amazed at just how much variety there is in the beverage world. sure i know that it's nuts - everyone wants a piece of the beverage market, but i hadn't realized just how bad it was when i realized that there was more beverage selection than there was frozen foods, or the entire produce department.

guess we like water.

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random pictures of the moment: oddball food type products

if i want a float, i'll pick up some vanilla ice cream and pour the root beer over it. i don't need it pre-mixed for me.




not like i didn't think this some time ago, but i think M&Ms have jumped the shark with this one.

both were spotted in target this evening.

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Bastard Gas (according to Bobby Hill)

something tells me that they should be called Corn McNuggets, flavored with a little chicken and TBHQ

YUMMY!

So What Really Is In A McDonald's Chicken McNugget?

The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan is a fascinating book that details the changing eating habits of Americans. I can't recommend it highly enough. It explains how, over the last 30 years, we have become a nation that eats vast quantities of corn – much more so than Mexicans, the original "corn people."

Most folks assume that a chicken nugget is just a piece of fried chicken, right? Wrong! Did you know, for example, that a McDonald’s Chicken McNugget is 56% corn?

What else is in a McDonald's Chicken McNugget? Besides corn, and to a lesser extent, chicken, The Omnivore's Dilemma describes all of the thirty-eight ingredients that make up a McNugget – one of which I'll bet you'll never guess. During this part of the book, the author has just ordered a meal from McDonald’s with his family and taken one of the flyers available at McDonald’s called "A Full Serving of Nutrition Facts: Choose the Best Meal for You." These two paragraphs are taken directly from The Omnivore’s Dilemma:

"The ingredients listed in the flyer suggest a lot of thought goes into a nugget, that and a lot of corn. Of the thirty-eight ingredients it takes to make a McNugget, I counted thirteen that can be derived from corn: the corn-fed chicken itself; modified cornstarch (to bind the pulverized chicken meat); mono-, tri-, and diglycerides (emulsifiers, which keep the fats and water from separating); dextrose; lecithin (another emulsifier); chicken broth (to restore some of the flavor that processing leeches out); yellow corn flour and more modified cornstarch (for the batter); cornstarch (a filler); vegetable shortening; partially hydrogenated corn oil; and citric acid as a preservative. A couple of other plants take part in the nugget: There's some wheat in the batter, and on any given day the hydrogenated oil could come from soybeans, canola, or cotton rather than corn, depending on the market price and availability.

According to the handout, McNuggets also contain several completely synthetic ingredients, quasiedible substances that ultimately come not from a corn or soybean field but form a petroleum refinery or chemical plant. These chemicals are what make modern processed food possible, by keeping the organic materials in them from going bad or looking strange after months in the freezer or on the road. Listed first are the "leavening agents": sodium aluminum phosphate, mono-calcium phosphate, sodium acid pyrophosphate, and calcium lactate. These are antioxidants added to keep the various animal and vegetable fats involved in a nugget from turning rancid. Then there are "anti-foaming agents" like dimethylpolysiloxene, added to the cooking oil to keep the starches from binding to air molecules, so as to produce foam during the fry. The problem is evidently grave enough to warrant adding a toxic chemical to the food: According to the Handbook of Food Additives, dimethylpolysiloxene is a suspected carcinogen and an established mutagen, tumorigen, and reproductive effector; it's also flammable. But perhaps the most alarming ingredient in a Chicken McNugget is tertiary butylhydroquinone, or TBHQ, an antioxidant derived from petroleum that is either sprayed directly on the nugget or the inside of the box it comes in to "help preserve freshness." According to A Consumer's Dictionary of Food Additives, TBHQ is a form of butane (i.e. lighter fluid) the FDA allows processors to use sparingly in our food: It can comprise no more than 0.02 percent of the oil in a nugget. Which is probably just as well, considering that ingesting a single gram of TBHQ can cause "nausea, vomiting, ringing in the ears, delirium, a sense of suffocation, and collapse." Ingesting five grams of TBHQ can kill."

Bet you never thought that was in your chicken McNuggets!

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note to self: maybe getting this wasn't such a good idea. (nevermind the whole reduced fat thing. what the FUCK was i (not) thinking?)

Local markets pull Peter Pan peanut butter

Stop & Shop and Shaw's, two of New England's largest grocery chains, said today that they responded to reports of a salmonella outbreak by ordering their stores to pull all Peter Pan peanut butter off their shelves.

ConAgra Foods Inc. of Nebraska touched off national concern when it disclosed that certain jars of its Peter Pan and Great Value peanut butter had been linked to an outbreak of salmonella that has sickened people in 39 states, the Associated Press reported.

ConAgra indicated that the outbreak was tied to jars whose lids bear a product code beginning with 2111, the AP reported.

Stop & Shop Supermarket Co. said that to its knowledge, no tainted peanut butter had been found in its stores, but as a precaution, company officials today ordered all Peter Pan peanut butter to be removed from store shelves, company spokesman Robert Keane said.

The chain has also programmed its cash registers to issue an alert in the event that a Peter Pan peanut butter jar had somehow eluded the recall and a customer showed up with it at a checkout line, Keane said; if such a jar were to be swiped over the scanner, the store employee at the cash register would be alerted that the product was not for sale.

Stop & Shop does not carry Great Value, another peanut butter brand linked to the salmonella outbreak, Keane said.

Based in Quincy, Stop & Shop operates 385 supermarkets in the Northeast, including about 120 in Massachusetts.

Meanwhile, Shaw's Supermarkets Inc., a New England chain based in West Bridgewater, said its 210 stores were instructed to immediately remove all Peter Pan peanut butter from store shelves, spokeswoman Judy Chong said.

Any customer who has recently purchased Peter Pan butter at a Shaw's can return it for a full refund or exchange it for a comparable product, Chong said.
(By Chris Reidy, Globe staff)

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hahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha...

one of my favorite foods is the simple avocado. unfortunately, i don't know many uses for it outside of guacamole, salads, sandwiches and sushi (a little toro, some avocado, spicy mayo, make it maki and roll in tobiko and you have one of my all time favorite sushi rolls, but i digress).

so i'm watching Good Eats and they are doing a show on avocados and did you know, that the word 'avocado' is a bastardized pronounciation of the Aztec word 'ahuacatl'?

and guess what that means.

TESTICLE!

hahahahahahahahaha...

it's fun being childish sometimes.

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fun fun fun

had a good weekend all things considered. actually, looking back, it wasn't bad at all.

i was able to get my haircut (snuck in an appt w/my usual stylist...yes, molius has a hair stylist)

closed out my safe deposit box in my former town of residence (prompted by FLAB's decision to charge me money for it)

didn't get paged this weekend by Train Wreck, altho apparently some nurse paged the pager and never received any response. funny that, the pager never went off for me, so what pager were they paging? besides, i bought a brand new battery for our pager when i saw that it was running low, just to make sure that i didn't miss a page. but i have got to love DH's attitude.

D: did you get paged?

Mol: nope. bought a new battery, but no pages.

D: ok, thanks.

and talk about your timing - i started writing about not being paged and DH comes over to ask me about it. heh.

so, after getting my haircut, i meandered back, but never stayed any place where i couldn't get back home pretty quickly if i did get paged. fortunately, we have 60 mins to respond to a page, so if it takes even longer to actually deal with the issue, that's fine, but as long as we respond in an hour, we are good. no page, no response by me :-)

just submitted my hours for having the pager last week. the next time i get it, i'll get the entire weeks worth of pager money rather than broken into 2 separate payments.

went out to dinner with M & F. we F wanted steak, but Outback had a 60-70 min wait, so we ended up trying a place in Bedford called Lemon Tree. wasnt' bad, altho M & i grossly misjudged portions on the sushi we ordered. we thought it was going to be sushi (fish on rice balls) but instead it was sashimi (just pieces of fish). now, the fish was pretty good, and it was the best octopus we've had (not overcooked and rubbery like most places seem to do it). plus the fish was fresh, and M didn't find the mackerel as strong as it usually it. she doesn't care for it too much, but found this to be better than most. (mackerel has a strong fishy flavor, and is stronger the less fresh it is, but this time it wasn't as strong)

stopped by Marshall's afterwards. i was suprised to see they had suits in my size (43R) as i rarely see my size. in the past i've generally gone with a 42L or 44R, but when i got a new jacket a little while ago, we found the 43R was the best fit for me. both suits weren't bad, but a little pricey. plus i don't really need one at this very moment, so i passed.

it was a nice evening all around.

sunday i slept later than i have in a long time which was nice, moreso because i didn't get paged by Train Wreck. got the paper. M & i went to lunch at Joe's, which was a rather lackluster experience. we split the burger, and wanted a salad rather than fries (trying to address
that sticky-outy-tummy syndrome) and waitress looked at us as tho we had 5 heads. our soda was pretty much flat, and we weren't even offered a basket of bread to nibble on while we waited. after 20 or so minutes, both of us are starting to be more than mildly annoyed, watching the tip percentage drop like a stone. finally, after 25-30 minutes, our waitress comes over with our buffalo tenders and asks if it is alright if she brings our burgers out at the same time. (yes as
we were hungry and very annoyed at this point) the saving grace of the meal (not much of one given our entire experience there) was that our burger was cut in half and we each had the requested salad on our plates. so, that was nice. we had been figuring that we'd get everything on a plate and we'd have to divide it up, plus ask for a second plate, but they did it for us. so that was the only real saving grace of the meal.

the burger was ok, the salad was heavy on the iceberg, and the buffalo tenders were lacking any real flavor. they were also pretty cool, but that was more because we ate our burger first, so they sat for a little while, but even so, there was next to no zing, no flavor. most disapointing.

bought some maple syrup at TJMaxx afterwards (i only buy the real stuff, none of this corn syrup based maple syrup.) cost me nothing as i used a gift card i got a long time ago, so that made it even better. and it was produced in vermont too, so i won't be disowned by a friend of the family were she to find out i bought canadian based maple syrup.

spun thru chez target, picked up exciting napkins and magnetic picture frames for the few pictures on my fridge which have started to curl (which has been driving me nuts of late) so they are all now flat and i am happy.

simple dinner of tomato spinach soup (homemade - trader joe's veggie stock works wonderfully for this) and grilled cheese w/tomato.

new simpsons was above average i thought, altho the ending was rather weak and abrupt. that unfortunately seems to be the trend of late. i liked the beginning when they got back home after taking a drive and bart had lisa open the envelope he gave her at the beinning which had a drawing of homer stuck under the garage door, and of course that's exactly what was going on. pretty funny.

not much else going on these days. my car is no longer rejected as i got that taken care of this morning on the way into work. it failed the emissions test, so i had that fixed last month. that only took a few mins and it came out with a spiffy '2' sticker. fortunately, the re-inspection only take a few mins as they are just checking to make sure whatever failed was fixed. all the safety stuff passed with flying colors (colours?) last month which is why i have a '2' rather than a '3', but that's ok. i got it done inside the 60 days required and now i can forget about it for a year. or until the next problem arises that will cause it to fail. i'm shooting for an in/out/pass next year. this is 2 years in a row it failed, so it might be nice if it passes next time.

oh well. things are quiet at work right now, but that will change pretty quickly, so i should get back to work.

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