How have I missed these before? Is it because I tend to skirt the snack section of TJ's? I mean.....Providing you can exercise culinary self-control, a must for TJ cookies, pumpkin ice cream, et al, buy these. I eat 3-5 a day, if so moved. They crunch, the salt level is perfect, and my best pal, olive oil, is involved. Yes!
Photo via French Fry Diary
So this mechanical gizmo cuts the spud into a twisty thing, and through the miracle of deep frying, the spud becomes fresh potato chips on a stick. These gals raved...
But if you prefer a bread-sized brick of curly fries, that, too, is available at the Fair for the next two weeks.
Eating potatoes, yeah! Boiled! Yeah! People and critters both.
I beg your pardon, Washington Post! OK, I have not read the Harvard study, but that is the most simplistic and erroneous bit of info re the noble spud I can imagine. The piece published yesterday goes on to gush over yogurt, as in "...perhaps the biggest surprise was yogurt, every serving of which kept off nearly a pound over four years."
A serving of your average fruit-laced, high fructose corn syrup-filled commercial yogurt? Or a serving of full fat, plain organic Straus Family Creamery yogurt from happy cows?
So now America's dairy farmers are gloating, and the spud growers are mashing their own heads, and something complex is once more made simplistic, and misleading. And America's diet-crazed women are scooping cartons of Dannon into their carts.
!!!!!
Here's the beginning of a piece just noted today from SeattlePI:
"Pity the poor potato.
First, the anti-carb folks shun it. Now a Harvard study attacks it.
The study published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine says the spud is making us fat.
To which Chris Voigt says nuts.
"If eating potatoes was so bad for you...I'd be dead by now."
That's not hyperbole. Voigt, executive director of the Washington State Potato Commission, went on a potato-only diet for 60 days last fall to counter the negative publicity against spuds.
It made him briefly famous. It also made him skinny.
He dropped 20 pounds. His cholesterol, triglycerides and blood glucose were all down. His cholesterol, for example, went from 214 to 147.
"Every health indicator," Voigt said, "was better or the same."
We of The Potato Museum have other stories like this. We continue to think that eating "good" foods like the potato, and a wide range of other foods, in moderation, is still key. ( We have irritated and annoyed the potato industry by stating here and there that French Fries made fresh should be an occasional delicious treat, not a daily staple, and yet fries consumption is on the rise all over, particularly in China, because the commercial industry is all about processed potatoes. So much for our proselytizing...)
But I should read the actual report. Yes.
Yes, Virginia, there is a place where one can savor fresh cut, freshly prepared, twice fried (seemingly) potatoes with chipotle sauce. And that place astonishly, is an Ayurvedic joint, Annapurna's World Vegetarian Cafe on 4th street in Albuquerque.
A friend of mine wanted breakfast, and I noted what I thought were "home fries" on the menu and ordered a side, as I had indeed eaten breakfast a couple hours prior.
Home fries they were not. I was stunned. The finest fries eaten in months, maybe years ? At breakfast in a calm, fabric draped place with whiffs of cumin in the air.
Read here about the CPA who founded Annapurna with the aim of serving " food as simple as possible – from the earth, just as nature intended, and as prescribed in the Ayurvedic tradition."
Try the earth apples. Truly.
Wallace McCain, 81, the Canadian whose McCain Foods apparently produces more frozen fries than any other company, died on May 13 a billionaire, sitting in the middle of the Forbes billionaire list, in spite of a reputation as a celebrated philanthropist...
McCain Foods does supply McD's with some of its frozen fries, along with Simplot, and others. Just the other day, on a total whim, I pulled into a McD and ordered fries. First time since the 1970's.
OMG the fries were as I remembered---like thin strands of cardboard, bearing zero resemblance to freshly prepared fries made from fresh potatoes. In a word, wretched. In three words, not worth eating.
It occurs to me that I have never bought any packaged frozen fries for use at home. On the theory that if I eat fries, I will either make them myself ( tossed in olive oil and baked, really) or buy them out, from an eatery that makes them fresh. I wonder if there is a frozen fry product for sale that is worth exploring....
Had any Pringles today? Huh? Huh? They get a D- nutritional rating from Calorie Count, with 160 cals for 14 of the little cleverly shaped non-foods. Fat, salt and carb. Always thought they were cardboardy.
According to Potato Pro Newsletter, Pringles, which are fried and not baked, are "made from potato flour, corn flour, wheat starch and rice flour, together with fat and emulsifier, salt and seasoning, with a potato content of around 42 % only."
There you go, world. More to get fat on and with. Take another soda with those salty non-chips!
P&G sold the Pringles brand and line recently for $ 1.5 billion to Diamond Foods Inc., a company started back in the last century by walnut growers banding together in California. Walnuts, in bags. Actual food.
Seeing Pringles for sale always reminded me to rush out and play tennis, somehow. Wonder why that was.
(Hey--the tin(?) makes a zany iPod holder, or so said the geeks two years ago, Dude, the Forever Geeks, that is.)
The most remote inhabited bit of land in the world, as they say--it's only 1750 miles from South Africa...., Tristan da Cunha is a group of volcanic islands, a British Overseas territory, and lucky enough to wave a handsome 2002 flag featuring the Tristan rock lobster.
Said lobster, along with fish, and 200,000 delightfully-plumed little penguins, are underseige from oil spilled by a tanker that broke up off Nightingale Island, near Inaccessible Island, and cousins to T da C itself, which is home to 275 people. Named by a Portuguese explorer after himself, even though he never was able to set foot on the place, T da C survives because of focused agriculture--potato patches are worked by everyone here--along with fishing/lobstering.
In fact, up until WW2, potatoes were the island's currency. A one penny stamp costing 4 potatoes was designed, a few printed, but likely not used.
The local website of T da C states that a team of penguin cleaning experts is set to leave Capetown to help with the birds of Nightingale, that the fishing areas of the two uninhabited areas are closed, and that the Rockhopper Penguins of T da C itself have kept their toes out of the oil.
Not much word re the rock lobsters, though the season for procuring them apparently is officially over.
NB Even though he springs to my mind, what with rocks and hopping, Republican State Senator Randy Hopper of Wisconsin, whose soon-to-be-divorced wife backs the effort to recall him, is not related to the penguins of T da C.
