Some Blog Site

A good meal plan is to eat as many different colors as you can. This would normally be something like blueberries, oranges, corn, broccoli, cauliflower, beef, strawberries, jellyfish, etc. The more different colors you eat, the more different nutrients you get.

I put that strategy into action today for lunch – I packed M&Ms.

My earlier post had been about some new chocolate (or chocolatey) cereals. Phoebe had commented that another cereal has joined the breakfast game: Kellogg’s Frosted Mini-Wheats Little Bites Chocolate.  I have now had a chance to try it.

First of all, cereal names are starting to get way too long. I have thus abbreviated Frosted Mini-Wheats Little Bites Chocolate to FMWLBC. Perhaps the long name contributes to what some are claiming is an identity crisis.

Second, it has a decent taste but that comes at a price: calories.

My updated rankings are:

1. HBOwrcc – it has decent taste with the best nutrition
2. CChex – it has the best taste with the worst nutrition
3. FMWLBC – it has good taste with the worst nutrition
4. SKCD – it has the worst taste with the worst nutrition

And here is the nutrition information:

The only redeeming nutrition factor is that it has a lot of fiber. But there are less-sugary ways to get fiber in your diet if that’s what you want. The other plus is that it uses real sugar and real chocolate, with no corn syrup.

Since this week’s topic seems to be germs, and since my wife bought a 5-pound tub of cookie dough from Costco, I thought I would write that cookie dough is much better before it is cooked.

It is not necessarily a contrasting opinion from my previous post about using paper towels to open bathroom doors. The difference is that one is risky with no reward and the other is risky with a decent reward. Why risk something if there is nothing to be gained? That is why I don’t want to grab bathroom door handles with my bare hands. Or why I am mildly concerned that everyone in the bathroom touches the sink faucet to turn on the water, washes his hands, then touches the freshly-contaminated faucet handle to turn off the water. Doesn’t that defeat the purpose of washing your hands?

I am a fan of the automatic faucets, and I have been known to take the suds from my hands and wash the non-automatic faucet handle so that it will be clean for me to touch after I rinse my hands. And I do not pull the paper towel handle with my hand – usually some part of my arm between the wrist and elbow.

But, all that aside, I do enjoy raw cookie dough, even though that term is redundant. Cookie dough, as any dough, is raw. If it were cooked cookie dough, it wouldn’t be dough anymore. It would just be a cookie. I do occasionally think about salmonella as I am eating a spoonful of sugar-and-chocolate goodness. But these days, as long as my cookie dough doesn’t have tomatoes or peanuts or pistachios, I should be okay. Besides, most large-scale food companies use pasteurized eggs, especially for ice cream and eggnog.

I have fond memories of mom’s KitchenAid mixing bowl filled with cookie dough. My favorite was the chocolate chip with M&Ms. My guess is that only a third of that dough ever made it into cookies. It, like hot fudge, was best served on a spoon.

One interesting tidbit: salmonella is named after the guy that discovered the bacterium – Dr. Salmon.

Another interesting thing I learned is that the edible parts of the egg are clean; people get salmonella from dirty shells. From which end of the chicken did the egg come? So wash the shells just before use, and that should be the most help.

This is Some Blog Site’s review of chocolate cereals.  Not the traditional chocolate cereals, aimed at children or certain younger siblings, but the newer varieties: normal cereals that have added a chocolate (or chocolatey) twist.

My results, in order of recommendedness (the first cereal is the most recommended):

1. HBOwrcc – it has medium taste with the best nutrition
2. CChex – it has the best taste with the worst nutrition
3. SKCD – it has the worst taste with the worst nutrition

The descriptive phrase on the Special K box is “chocolatey pieces”: not real chocolate, but some chocolate-like substance.  I tried a piece of chocolatey just by itself, and it didn’t have that much flavor.  The worst part was that it left a waxy coating in my mouth.  It was very disconcerting.  The waxy feeling is not so noticeable while I’m eating the cereal normally (flakes, chocolatey pieces, and milk), but it’s at least in the back of my mind.

How can I give two cereals the worst nutrition?  Chex has more sodium and more calories, but Special K has more saturated fat and more sugar.  Which one is worse depends on what your nutrition needs are.  But either one is worse than Honey Bunches of Oats. Note: all nutrition information is based on 3/4 cup for a serving.

The key?  Special K has high fructose corn syrup, whereas Honey Bunches of Oats has just the regular corn syrup.  And Chex has just corn syrup colids but no high fructoseness.  Syrup solids?  Aren’t those mutually exclusive?

Be careful of the trash cans with lids that flip up when you step on the pedal.  I had cut up some cantaloupe and was trying to throw away the remains.  I stepped on the pedal and tilted the cutting board so the remains would slide into the trash can.

But the lid didn’t flip up right away, so, slightly panicking, I stepped harder on the pedal to get the lid to open before the cantaloupe fell.  The timing didn’t quite work out as intended: the lid did open, but it opened as the cantaloupe was falling.  The cantaloupe hit the lid as it was opening, so the lid threw the remains up and back.  They hit the wall and slid down behind the trash can, between the stove and the cabinets, a very inconvenient place to reach.

One of the things my wife finds odd is that I prefer wax paper over sandwich baggies for sandwiches when I pack my lunch.  No one in her family ever used wax paper for that, so she was confused/surprised why I did that.  That’s how my mom made bag lunches, so that’s how I do it.  And since I make my own lunches, my wife has no problem buying wax paper for me.

Wax paper is better than the plastic bag thingies.  First of all is cost.  One roll of wax paper is $1.29, and that is for 75 square feet.  I use about 1 square foot of wax paper per sandwich, so that’s about 1.7 cents per sandwich.  The sandwich baggies with the zipping-and-locking-type fastener run $1.99 for 50 bags, or 4 cents per sandwich.  That more than twice the cost.  And sometimes the sandwich won’t fit in those, so I would have to use the quart-size bags, at 5 cents a bag.

Secondly is size.  Wax paper can accommodate various size breads without much hassle.  I can’t use the non-zipping sandwich bags anymore because now all the bread is shorter and wider (low-profile bread) than the traditional squarish slices.  So I can’t fit my sandwich into the bags that are intended to hold sandwiches.  I suppose I could cut my sandwich into pieces and arrange them to fit into the bag, but why bother?  Wax paper can be cut a little longer for larger bread or shorter for smaller bread.  I have found that placing my sandwich at an angle, before folding the wax paper over it, allows for better coverage of the low-profile bread.

The only category in which the zip baggies are the winner is air- and water-tightness.  But I am taking my sandwich to a desk job, not white-water rafting, so I don’t care much about water-tightness.  And as for air-tightness, I have noticed that the bread does get a little stale after 36 hours in wax paper.  If you are making a week’s worth of sandwiches at once, then that may be a consideration for you.

Summer is the time for fresh fruits and vegetables, and one of the items in late August and early September is corn.  We were given several ears of corn by a farming family.  The children and I were in charge of getting the corn ready for cooking, and then my wife would handle the actual cooking part.

So I showed the kids the art of proper shucking.  I showed them the tassel and how to remove all the silks from the ear of corn.  Okay, you can never remove all the silks, but close enough.  They left that part to me anyway.  I also showed them how to shuck the corn – pull each one off and you’ll eventually get down to the kernels.

I saw that my demonstration piece had a hole that went through several shucks.  So I put a couple of them back (I hadn’t removed them so they were still attached at the base of the ear) and then showed the kids how the hole went through each layer.  I told them a bug must have eaten through it.  Then we got to the kernels and I showed them that the hole went right through the kernel.  At that point, the older child informed me that a worm was on the end of the ear of corn.  My response was that was the one that had been eating our corn.  So we threw him away (him being the bug, or the corn, as we did dispose of both).

The next day, I got home from work a little late, and the family was already eating dinner.  My son then informed me that there was a caterpillar on the window.  It was actually on the window frame, and it was not a caterpillar but another corn worm.  I assumed it was another worm that had escaped from the bag of corn, but my wife was not happy with the thought that there could be more corn worms roaming the house.  I threw that one away and we have not seen any since.