Craft beer?

Big Y has a really loose definition of "craft beer."

(Look carefully at the top shelf.)

That Fried Egg Photo

What is it with this picture?

It appears in tons of those "click bait" advertisements you see all over the web. In fact, it's possible that Google might sense the presence of it and present one of the pitches in an AdSense advertisement right on this page in the right-hand sidebar. 

The picture seems to have no origin. Doing a reverse-image search only brings up various ads. Examining the EXIF data embedded in the pictures yields no information at all.

And so, we have this picture of fried eggs - disgusting, overcooked, nasty-looking fried eggs - appearing here and there across the internet.  And I have no clue why an advertiser would choose this particular image for the products they sell.

Don't bother clicking on any of these.
They don't link to any shitty sales scams.

This seems to be the most common application of the picture right now: Some kind of mysterious "testosterone trick." What do eggs have to do with testosterone, anyway?  If eating eggs made men hairier or more muscular or grow a bigger dick, most guys would look like gorillas dragging a three-foot cock behind them like some veiny pink dragon tail. It's obvious that this frying pan full of ruined breakfasts isn't really the key to testoteronic mastery.

Especially when many more secret Man-Hormone-Trick advertisements are like this one, featuring attractive women who would appreciate a better "performance." 

Wilford Brimly would
be pleased.

But apparently, overfried poultry embryos are also the key to an odd trick that destroys diabetes. (It certainly would be odd if eating lots of eggs could destroy diabetes, I admit.)

I'm trying to figure out how a wrinkle solution would horrify a surgeon. Maybe if you grew an extra leg out of your back and the rest of your skin had to stretch to fit it. That would probably horrify a surgeon. And get you locked in a government lab for experimentation, too.

Italian people seem to associate fried eggs with unlikely medical benefits, too. This ad is wicked common on Italian websites. They use our eggy friends to advertise a miracle "Antidote to Obesity" which can help you lose 30 pounds a month from your belly, ass, and thighs.

It works in the US, too, though in the American version, we're told to "Eat more fat." Is that really necessary?

Fall Magazine Overview

Standing in the checkout line at Stop & Shop yesterday, I took a look at the magazines:

Bon Appetit - Grown-up Comfort Food Comes Home For Fall

Better Homes & Gardens Good & Fresh - Comfort Food Favorites Made Healthy!

Woman's Day - Fall Comfort Food

Everyday with Rahael Ray - It's Comfort Food Season

Obviously, Autumn is for comfort food. (As opposed to summer, which is for discomfort foods like poison ivy salads and sour little green berries that give you the shits.)

.

Sunscreen, anyone?

Sign at Hannaford's in Brattleboro, VT.

International Foods at Stop & Shop

Behold the awesomeness of the International Foods selection at my hometown Stop & Shop supermarket:

Frozen mini-egg rolls, meatballs, mini-tacos, burritos, pizza rolls, and of course Smucker's peanut butter-and-jelly "Uncrustables." It's like being in some bizarre parallel universe where all the Chinese foods are sold in cans by LaChoy and all the Italian foods are made by Chef Boy-R-Dee.

Barq's - "It's Good."

I picked up a 24-pack of Diet Barq's root beer the other day, and the first thing I noticed was the slogan above the logo: "It's Good."

Now, it may have been a while ago, but the last time I had bought Barq's, the tagline was "Barq's Has Bite!" which was a reference both to it's snappier flavor compared with other commercial root beers and it's caffeine content (not many root beers are caffeinated.) Long-time drinkers of Barq's have noticed that the flavor hasn't been quite the same since Coca-Cola acquired the brand and started tweaking the recipe (some people have complained that the "bite" seems to be a thing of the past) so I got all set to write a sarcastic blog post about Barq's lazy marketing department not being able to think of anything more clever to put on the label but "It's Good."

I always try to do at least a little research about things I'm going to write about so I don't come across as being completely stupid, and when I started to dig into Barq's long history I found out that the company was founded as Barq Brothers Bottling Company in 1890, started selling Barq's in 1898, and their original slogan was simply, "Drink Barq's. It's Good." Well shut my mouth wide open. The best I could do with that info was make a lame joke about how they dropped half their original slogan because people nowadays have half the attention span they used to. 

Sniff Test: MAN CANDLES by Yankee Candles

Two days ago, the news broke that Yankee Candles had begun marketing a line of candles to men, imaginatively called "Man Candles."

Lynnafred and I were heading up to Greenfield, and Yankee Candle's home store in Deerfield MA happens to be right off of I-91 on our way, so we decided to stop in and see what these Man Candles were all about.

Yankee Candles in Deerfield is a "destination store," as well as a popular stopping point for vacationers traveling north to Vermont, so it's usually packed. We were lucky on this early Friday morning to find few customers.

Not many customers. Tons of candles, though.

The place is a maze of showrooms. We wandered around for a while before finally giving up and asking a very friendly sales associate for help.  On the way to the store, Lynnafred and I were joking about the Man Candles, calling them "Mandels." So of course, when I inquired about them, I asked the sales associate where we could find the "Mandels...uh, sorry, I mean the Man Candles." She took it in stride, though, and just laughed and pointed the way.

We would never have found it without her help. Yankee Candles has about a billion square feet of retail space here, with multiple duplicate displays scattered here and there grouped by theme. But the Man Candle display is this small, 4-foot by 4-foot cluster in one of the side rooms. It really was rather underwhelming. Since just about every other scent in the store was represented by sixteen thousand candles each and the Man Candles were lucky to show a couple dozen in the frontages, we guessed that Yankee is gingerly dipping their toe into the testosterone pool here.

The sales associate (whom I am going to call "Helen" from now on to protect her identity) offered us whiffs of each of the candles, along with some surprisingly frank personal assessments of each one, before leaving us to our own devices.  Here's what we thought of the new Man Candles:

Man Town

Yankee Candles' Catalog Says: Escape to the man cave with this masculine blend of spices, woods, and musk.

Helen Says: "It reminds me of the cologne a stationery salesman would wear."

Our Impression:  Lynnafred and I took a snort of the fragrance, looked at each other, and said - both at the same time - "It smells just like Axe!"  before breaking out in laughter. I don't know what we expected, though I imagine a place called "Man Town" would smell more like old pizza boxes, sweat socks, stale beer, and crotch.

Riding Mower

Yankee Candles' Catalog Says: Hot sun. Cool breeze. And the intensely summery scent of freshly cut grass.

Helen Says: "This is one of my favorites."

Our Impression: Very grassy aroma, but more like a freshly cut field than a suburban lawn. The smell I experience from freshly cut grass has fruity, almost watermelon-like notes to it.

Wandering the store, we found another fragrance YK calls "Green Grass" with the description, "Nothing says summer like the familiar heady scent of a freshly cut lawn." The only difference between Riding Mower and Green Grass, besides the name and arguably more masculine label design on the Man Candle, was a touch of perfuminess in Green Grass.

First Down

Yankee Candles' Catalog Says: Game on! This combination of orange, patchouli, vetiver, and leather is as exciting as game day.

Helen Says: "It smells like leather and sweat."

Our Impression: Leather, yes, but not just any leather. First Down really does evoke the smell of a well-used, well-oiled football. Unfortunately, the rest of the fragrances combine to smell like an electrical fire.

Also, patchouli's association with hippies totally disqualifies it as a men's fragrance.

 2 x 4

Yankee Candles' Catalog Says: The warm, unmistakable scent of freshly planed wood and sawdust evokes a sense of confidence and quality.

Helen Says: "This one really needs tweaking. It doesn't smell like sawdust at all."

Our Impression:  2 x 4s are usually pine or spruce, and so the sawdust that results from framing a shed or building a workbench generally smells woody, a bit resinous, and a little like freshly grated nutmeg. The smell of genuine sawdust and shavings is one of my favorite things. And Helen is right - these candles don't even come close. There is a strong woodiness to the scent, but it's an "old barn" smell, not "freshly planed wood."

If I were going to buy any of these candles, it would probably be "Riding Mower." It has the most authentic of the aromas. Even at that, I don't think I like it enough to spend thirty bucks on it. I'll just go outside and cut the lawn.

Update on New Round Premium Saltines

Has Nabisco backed down a little on the price of the new round Premium Saltines? As reported here on May 4, the new and smaller 10.5-ounce boxes had originally hit the shelves priced at $2.49, the same price that Nabisco had been selling 16-ounce boxes of square crackers.  Now, the regular price has been reduced to $1.99. That's better, but it's still jacking the price per pound up by 55 cents.

Stop & Shop Takes Self-Service Scanning To A New Level

Photo by Stop & Shop

In April 2009, I wrote a blog post about ScanIt!, a hand-held scanner you can use in Stop & Shop to tally up your groceries as you shop, and then breeze through the checkout line in seconds because your shopping is already tallied, bagged, and ready to pay for.  I use it all the time because it saves me tons of time in the store, and even if I have a huge cartload of items I can still check through the express lane since I only have one single remaining thing to scan - my shopper's card - before I have to pay.

Now, Stop & Shop has brought that innovation to my smartphone. Available now for Android and iPhone, ScanIt! Mobile puts your shopping right at your fingertips.

I was on my way in to Stop & Shop and saw the big posters promoting the new app, so I scanned the QR code, downloaded the app for my Android phone, and started it up. Set up was fast and easy:

1. Use your phone's camera to scan the bar code on your shopper's card.
2. Choose the Stop & Shop location you usually shop at
3. Start shopping!

Now, instead of having to carry a scanner around in the store, I can just start up the app when I walk into Stop & Shop. The app automatically connects me with the store's wifi network and hooks up the ScanIt! database, and I'm ready to scan items for checkout. The app also delivers special offers and any electronic coupons you may have loaded to your shopping card. At checkout time, I just scanned the "I'm Done!" barcode at the register, paid, and left. Easy. It's pretty great.

In my testing, I did find a couple of bugs.

• The software has some trouble with colored barcodes. Some of Stop & Shop's frozen veggies, for example, have green barcodes on the packaging and it took a couple of tries to get the barcode reader in the app to recognize them.
• ScanIt! Mobile automatically turns on your phone's wifi connection when you start it (so it can connect in the store.)  But you need to remember to shut your wifi off when you leave the store, because the app leaves the wifi active when you exit from it.

Other than those little quibbles, I thought it was pretty sweet. One less gadget to carry around the store, and the functionality was pretty good. Thumbs up.

Now if Stop & Shop could just get a Twitter account, I'd be perfectly happy with them.

Brilliant Marketing

Multipacks of Doritos, available in the same aisle as video games and accessories at Walmart. Now if they'd just add a display of Mountain Dew, it would be perfect - one-stop shopping for gamers.

Nightmare Snacks

I'm completely conflicted regarding this granola packaging. On the one hand, it's very colorful and original. On the other hand, they're kind of creepy and I'm not sure I'd really want to have them in my house at night.

The one on the left kind of looks like The Gromble from Aaaaaah! Real Monsters, though, so that's kinda cool.

The Dollar-Nine Store

There's a "dollar store" at the local mall called Dollar 'N' Stuff.  Their signs used to say, "EVERYTHING $1 OR LESS" but recently they've added some fine print to each of them. "EVERYTHING $1.09 OR LESS EXCEPT DRINKS PLUS TAX"

Ricotta Cheese Overview

What do you look for when you buy ricotta cheese in the supermarket?  Do you go for a national brand? A smaller regional or local brand? Or do you buy the supermarket's "generic" label? A 48-ounce tub of ricotta (enough to do a large pan of lasagna) can run up to ten dollars or so for a national brand, and even having a coupon doesn't always knock the price down to the level of a store brand. So what do you do?

Personally, I look at two things when I'm shopping for ricotta cheese.  The first is the ingredient panel. There is no reason for ricotta cheese to contain anything except milk (whole or skim or a combination of both) a curdling agent such as lemon juice or vinegar, and salt. After all, if you were going to make it yourself, that's what you'd use.

After checking the ingredients, I look at the price tag. Given identical ingredients, I don't see a reason to pay a lot more for one brand over another.  Most of the time, that leads me to buy the supermarket's house brand.  Stop & Shop, for example, sells excellent ricotta much cheaper than most of the big brands.  And at ShopRite, the difference can be even more startling - Sorrento brand ricotta cheese is double the price of ShopRite's private label.

This is a typical supermarket ricotta cheese display - in this case, at ShopRite in Enfield CT. There are several varieties to choose from: Sorrento, Biazzo, ShopRite's house brand, Polly-O, and Sam Malucci & Sons (a local brand made in Hartford CT.)  Every one of these brands except one are made with the same ingredients: Milk, vinegar, and salt. The one brand that uses other ingredients? Polly-O, a product of the Kraft company. I never buy it - even when a coupon is involved - because I don't like the looks of the ingredient panel (pasteurized milk, whey, milkfat, salt, vinegar, guar gum, carrageenan, and xanthan gum.) The label says "all natural," and it's true that guar gum, carrageenan, and xanthan gum are indeed "natural" products. I just don't happen to agree with Kraft that they belong in cheese.

So...when you buy ricotta, are you brand-loyal or price-loyal?

What's Up With Welch's Grape Jelly?

I saw an ad for Welch's Grape Jelly the other day, starring their happy spokesman Alton Brown.  

At the end of the ad, Alton mentions that Welch's Grape Jelly contains no high-fructose corn syrup. That was delicious news to my ears, because I read labels and one of the things that puts a product on my "Do Not Buy" list is the inclusion of HFCS - and I haven't bought Welch's jams or jellies in a long time.

But when I checked out the labels at the grocery store, I found that apparently, nothing has changed. All of the Welch's jams and jellies, regardless of packaging (large or small jar, ridiculous squeeze tube, and so on) show that Welch's is still using corn syrup and high-fructose corn syrup, and not a bit of cane sugar.

So, what's up, Alton? Is this a transitional period where sugar-sweetened jelly is on the way but the last of the HFCS syrup still hangs around? Or is someone just blowing smoke up our ass?

Check out the Welch's in your supermarkets, and let me know in the comments if you find the no-HFCS version there.

Eggies Hard Boiled Egg Cooker

Check out this ad for a product called "Eggies."  Apparently, their target market is "People Who Don't Mind Being Called Too Stupid To Peel An Egg."

What...the...HELL??

This was in the markdown bin at Stop & Shop - presumably because one of them was missing, and not because textured cock-shaped rubber toys are slow sellers.

The illustration on the box doesn't even make an attempt at subtlety.

Because You Don't Poop Correctly

"Digestive Health" products are everywhere.  The most famous, I guess, is Dannon's Activia brand yogurt, with ads starring Jamie Lee Curtis as The Poop Lady.  And now the Jolly Green Giant jumps in the shit with DIGESTIVE HEALTH VEGETABLES.  

"I'm so proud of that last one that
I left it in the bowl for you to admire."

Yeah, that's definitely the smile of someone who takes regularly-scheduled dumps. I bet when he pinches one off, it's the size of a redwood.

Marie Callender's Frozen Lasagna - And How ConAgra Dun Goof'd

Back in 2009 I did a comparative review of frozen lasagna, tasting and ranking eleven different products. Marie Callender's Meat lasagna was one of those products. I ranked it in the middle of the pack in the "Good" category - not outstanding, but not bad.  It was a little wet, a little salty, and much sparser with the cheese than the package art would suggest, but the sauce was fairly authentic-tasting, and I said I would buy it again if it were on sale.

Yesterday morning I stopped in ShopRite on my way to work, looking for a frozen meal I could take for lunch. I noticed that the Marie Callender's Lasagna label had changed - ConAgra was touting a new recipe and claiming that this new "three meat and four cheese" lasagna was "preferred over the leading meat lasagna." I decided to give it a try.  Little did I know while I was eating lunch and taking notes that this very product (or at least ConAgra's marketing of it) was starting to go viral.  More on that later - first, the review.

On the surface, very little has changed with Marie Callender's lasagna. It is still very wet and overly salty and the package art still hugely overrepresents the amount of cheese found in the pan.  There are still the same number of noodle layers, and they are still thick and a little tough.  There is no question that the recipe has changed, though.  The sauce is spicier, with a subtle but noticeable hot pepper kick.  And there is a heavy sprinkle of very green, very grassy-tasting parsley on top (so grassy-tasting, in fact, that it's almost distracting. Quite strange.)  The ingredients claim there to be three meats - pork, beef, and sausage - but I couldn't really tell which granules were which because all I could taste was the sausage.  I can't possibly understand how it can be "preferred over the leading meat lasagna," unless the leader is something really awful like Chef Boy-R-Dee Lasagna in a can.  If this Marie Callender's recipe had been on the market in 2009 when I wrote the original rankings, it would fall solidly in the "Unremarkable" category, below Boston Market's Lasagna With Beef Sauce.

So, given this totally "meh" product, what could ConAgra do with it that would cause them to take so much heat from bloggers?

As reported in the New York Times today, ConAgra tried to pull a fast one on a group of bloggers in New York City.  The bloggers were invited to try out an "intimate Italian restaurant" puportedly run by the host of TLC's Ultimate Cake Off, celebrity chef George Duran. What the bloggers didn't know was that they were actually served Marie Callender's new frozen lasagna while being taped by hidden cameras. The idea was to use what they hoped would be the diners' "OMG THIS IS FROZEN CRAP??? IT'S SO GOOD I THOUGHT I WAS EATING INTIMATE ITALIAN FOOD!!" reactions in an ad campaign.

The plan backfired, as explained here on the Brandnoise blog. Most of the bloggers involved are upset that they were tricked into eating mediocre frozen lasagna by the promise of a specially-prepared meal by a celebrity chef.  But some of them, I think, are most upset by not being able to tell the difference.  (In all fairness, however, the photos on Chubby's New York Food Diary [link no longer working] seem to indicate that there was more than a little food styling going on before the lasagna was plated and served.)

The end result? Most of the bloggers wouldn't sign the releases ConAgra needed to use their hidden camera footage and the NYC food blogosphere is abuzz with harsh feelings for the company and their PR firm. ConAgra, ya dun goof'd.

Al Gore Fruit Snacks

Don't be fooled by the label on these fruit snacks.  Toy Story is only part of the picture here. Take a look at the snack shapes on the front label.  Especially that blue one.

Somehow, the molds for the Buzz Lightyear shapes were tampered with, turning them into Al Gore Fruit Snacks.

Not to worry, though, I'm sure they have a very small carbon footprint.

Jojo Jelly Beans

If you saw the movie Tropic Thunder, you might remember a scene with Jack Black doping himself up with white powdery drugs he keeps in a Jojo Jelly Bean box. Apparently, someone thought there would be a huge demand for Jojo Jelly Beans thanks to the riotous comedy stylings of Jack Black and so Dreamworks brought out actual Jojo Jelly Beans as a movie tie-in candy.

By the time I found Jojos in job lot store in Maine, I had completely forgotten about Tropic Thunder (movies with either Ben Stiller or Jack Black tend to do that to me anyway; it seems that with both of them in the same flick, the effect is magnified.)  What attracted me was the packaging featuring a nightmare clown vomiting jelly beans down his tongue and into the mouths of two dead-eyed children.  "Multi-Flavor Colorings!" also cracked me up.  Only after I got them home and really looked the package over did I realize that it was a tie-in, thanks to a Tropic Thunder logo, complete with the MPAA's R-rating.

Still...jelly beans!  Insane murder clown!  Win, right?  Right??

No.  Wrong.  These jelly beans totally suck.  Inside the package, there are green, pink, yellow, red, and orange jelly beans, and the flavors of each are nearly indistinguishable from one another. They have a strange floral quality (and not good floral, like orange-blossom honey or rose petal tea, but bad floral like your ancient maiden aunt's eau de toilette that she splashes on in lieu of a bath.)  And although they're soft and pliable inside, the coating is like sugarbrick.  I was going to give them a pass on the brickness, seeing as Tropic Thunder came out in 2008 and who knows how long these things might have been sitting around in a warehouse, but I notice that several places are still selling them online so I'm just going to be a douche and assume that they were shipped stale from day one.  Unless you simply can't live without the graphics on that box, you really are better off skipping this purchase if you find them.

Photo by Boston American

Jojo Jelly Beans are made in China and distributed by Boston America Corp., a company which specializes in making kind of mediocre products in extremely clever packaging which make you want the hell out of them.  Seriously, I could devote an entire blog post just to their stuff, from generic energy drinks with awesome videogame labeling, to kind of mediocre candy packaged in the most bitchin' tins ever, to theme-printed bandages.

Photo by Boston American

Many are the times I've come home with candy in tins the shape of Nintendo's Super Mario mushrooms made by Boston America - there is no denying the packaging is cool even when the product inside isn't, strictly speaking, the best stuff you can buy.