New Math in the Produce Aisle

I think someone at the supermarket was having some math issues when they came up with this one:

So let me get this straight…  The green bell peppers are 2 for a dollar with the “Sell your Soul and Save” card, and $2.50 for two without it, but somehow you end up saving $4.00 on the whole deal?  I wish my bank account worked like that.  Maybe if I worked for the government…

Oh, and by the way, welcome to the people who somehow seem to be ending up over here (specifically, over at my Totem Lake Mall post) from Metafilter, by way of deadmalls.com.  What would you call that, a meta-metalanche or something like that?

A Mystery Restaurant in Renton - What Was This Previously?

This one’s just a bit outside of this Blog’s usual territory, but this is a place that I have been curious about for a while.  This is the Stir Restaurant, an Asian restaurant in Renton that is on Bronson Way right next to one of the I-405 onramps.  Based on the overall appearance of the building, it’s pretty apparent that this used to be some sort of fast food restaurant, but I haven’t been able to determine exactly what it was previously.  Some features of the building (particularly the orange “stripe” on the underside of the roof) seem reminiscent of something you might have found on an older Hardee’sRestaurant (link goes to a site with a some pictures of Hardee’s restaurants for illustration) before those places got turned into clones of Carl’s Jr.,  but I haven’t ever seen anything to suggest that Hardee’s ever existed in this state (or even west of the Rockies, for that matter.)     I suppose there’s also the possibility that this could have been a Jack in the Box (I seem to recall seeing that roof style on some of the older ones) but I can’t be sure of that either.  Does anyone out there happen to know what this place used to be?

 

No Wonder Kids Aren’t Eating Enough Veggies

It looks like I might have underestimated the mind-numbingly simple milk carton quizzes that I discussed earlier.  Here is one of the latest examples:

Note where the “arrow” in the middle is pointing.  If I’m understanding this correctly, that means that we’re supposed to be feeding our kids 5 bucketloads of veggies per day in order to keep them healthy?  Why not just save yourself the trouble and just install a trough in the dining room?  Sure, the kids might complain a bit, but what kid doesn’t complain about eating their veggies? 

 

Taqueria Guadalajara - Your Friendly Neighborhood Taco Truck

In honor of Cinco de Mayo, I decided that today would be a good day to pay a visit to the friendly neighborhood taco truck for lunch.  It seems that I wasn’t the only one, as the nice weather helped to draw a pretty good crowd to the place for lunch today.

Taqueria Guadalajara has been around the neighborhood in one spot or another for a number of years now (it tends to move on a semi-regular basis,) and serves up some tasty food for pretty reasonable prices, even if the truck does look a bit rough around the edges these days.  Currently, it resides in the parking lot of the Overlake 76 gas station at the corner of 148th and Northeast 24th (which would actually put it just barely within the Bellevue city limits, but most people around here still seem to refer to it as the Redmond taco truck.) 

My usual order is one of their burritos with either chicken (pictured above) or Carne Asada, a steal at $4.50 (tax included.)  At most of the other places in the neighborhood that serve burritos like this you’d be hard pressed to get out the door for much less than seven bucks, and this one is quite a bit tastier than most of those.  The tacos here are pretty good too, although they aren’t anything like what you’d expect a taco to be if you’ve been raised on Taco Bell and other gringo fast food.  Either way, Taqueria Guadalajara is a nice spot to grab a quick bite to eat in the Overlake neighborhood as long as you can actually find it (if it moves, I’ll be sure to update this post to keep up with it.)

Got Milked?

Recently at work, they changed the brand of milk that they provide in the breakroom coolers. Usually, such a change wouldn’t warrant much attention (after all, milk is milk, right?) but one thing that I’ve noticed over the years is that there seems to be some unwritten law that all milk cartons of a particular size are required to contain some form of advertising geared toward elementary schoolers. In most cases this appears in the form of some sort of puzzle requiring roughly second grade reading comprehension to solve which inevitably extols the virtues of milk-drinking, or occasionally they might throw some popular preteen pop cultural icon on the box in barely legible monochrome and call it good. On the other hand, sometimes they go just a little further:

Meet Smoooth, Darigold’s suspiciously androgynous spokescow, now with 33% more vowels than the leading brand! Sunglasses and a bright red mohawk that would get a door slammed in your face if you showed up for a date with it lend automatic street cred (provided that it still happens to be 1988.) With those looks, Smoooth should need no introduction, but the side of the carton provides a little background

As you can see, no expense was spared on the adjectives here. Not only is Smoooth a super-cool, hip, chocolate milk drinking, number one bovine, but he/she’s also an ambassador of fun. Unless there’s some UN proclamation I don’t know about that has made Casual Friday a universal human right, I ca’t think of any situation in which an ambassador would dress like that, especially when acting in a presumably official capacity such as appearing on a milk carton. And since when do cows actually drink chocolate milk anyway? For that matter, do cows that are presumably capable of lactation still drink milk in the first place, chocolate or otherwise?  It’s probably best not to think about these things too much…

My Very Nearly Award-Winning Chili Recipe, and Other Deep Dark Secrets

If you believe everything you see on random shows on Food Network, practically everyone out there has some sort of top secret chili recipe in their head, which they keep a closely guarded secret: a pot full of meats, veggies, herbs, spices and quite possibly just a little voodoo.  I don’t think I’m doing anything quite that complex when I make chili, but I do have a recipe that I tend to follow.  Last night for Family Home Evening in the singles ward I attend, we were doing a chili cook-off for the activity.  I knew going into this that I was likely to be facing some stiff competition, so I was going to need to be on my game. 

There was just one minor issue with this: I was short on time.  Where I usually allow several hours for my chili to simmer before serving, I had about an hour and a half (give or take a few minutes) between the time that I got off work and the time that I would need to be serving this stuff to a discerning audience, which meant that I would have to take a couple of shortcuts from my usual recipe to ensure that I would actually have something to serve here.  I also have this innate tendency to tinker with the recipe at inopportune times as well, which may have manifest itself a time or two here.  Nonetheless, since I have not yet heard any reports of anyone getting sick after eating the stuff last night, it’s probably safe to go ahead and share the recipe that I used to make this.  After the jump, see what I do to make chili in a blind panic to feed a hungry crowd, complete with gratuitous photos that my siblings can use to nag me about the cleanliness of my kitchen.

New Cereal in Old Boxes

If nothing happens to grab your attention while you’re passing through the cereal aisle at your grocery store, it’s certainly not from lack of trying.  It seems these days that cereal boxes keep getting more and more ostentatious in an effort to grab the attention of easily distracted youngsters.  On the other hand, the contents of the cereal boxes themselves haven’t really changed a whole lot over the years, and a lot of the brands of cereal we have on the shelf today happen to be the very same brands that our parents ate while they watched Saturday morning cartoons back when they were kids.  Perhaps in an effort to stand out by bringing back memories of a simpler time, General Mills has recently started putting a number of their most popular cereals in throwback packaging.

These two packages go quite a ways back.  Based on looking at vintage cereal box pictures found on this site, I’d say that the design on the Wheaties box is probably somewhere in the late Forties to early Fifties, hearkening back to a day before they started using pictures of real athletes.  I wasn’t able to find an example of the design on which the Kix box was based, but if I had to guess, I’d say they used a very early design, perhaps  even from the Thirties or Forties.  (Kix was first introduced in 1937, and was in fact the first example of the now popular “puffed” style of cereal to be introduced.)

The designs on the Lucky Charms and Golden Grahams boxes are somewhat newer,  Golden Grahams cereal was first introduced in the Seventies, and the very Seventies looking design on the package (which survived largely unchanged well into the Eighties) reflects this.  In fact, the rather more generic packaging used for Golden Grahams these days kind of tends to get lost on the shelf As for the Lucky Charms box, that particular design seems to have been used through the late Seventies and early Eighties (Here is a picture that shows this box design with an offer for Star Wars stickers, and another one on the site shows a similar design with Battlestar Galactica stickers as well.)  Interestingly enough, there are some subtle changes to the Lucky Charms box.  The picture of the cereal on the box reflects the current lineup of  marshmallows, which is far more diverse than the three or four shapes that the cereal had back when this box design was current.   The text has also changed somewhat, so that the modern box reads “frosted toasted oat cereal with marshmallow bits”, where the old box reads “Sugar frosted oat cereal with marshmallow bits” (although the word “sugar” was later eliminated on the older boxes as well.)   Currently there is also a vintage box in this style for Honey Nut Cheerios as well, but I don’t have a picture of that one right now, and to be honest, the packaging of that particular cereal has changed surprisingly little between now and then.

As you’ve probably noted from the pictures, General Mills is currently offering a set of T-shirts at this website in conjunction with these throwback boxes.  Unlike the T-shirts offered in some promotions, the ones from this one actually look like the type of thing that a sane person might actually wear out in public.  I suspect you could probably even find similar tees in one of those goth-infested pop culture outlets at your neighborhood mall, at a significantly higher price than the $5 (plus shipping and handling, of course) that these ones are being sold for.  In fact, there’s just one tiny little problem with the T-shirt offers…

 

It seems that when someone copied the front of the box onto the design used for the back of the box, they didn’t bother to remove the T-shirt offer.  I guess I can see their point though.  Looking through the cereal box archive linked above, it is  surprisingly difficult to find a cereal box of any vintage that doesn’t have one special offer or another plastered on the front of the box.  I guess this means they’re just keeping with tradition, right? 

Fruity, But With Just a Hint of Whatever I Rolled In Down in the Yard Last Week

Just in case you have had that little nagging sense of guilt over the fact that you aren’t spoiling your dogs enough lately, over at Neatorama today they link to something that should rectify that quite nicely.  The fine folks at Bark Vineyards have turned their attention to the four-legged members of our respective families, and have produced a variety of “Wines” intended for consumption by dogs and/or cats.  The term wine is used only loosely, as the product contains no actual wine, and in fact doesn’t involve grapes anywhere in the process of making the stuff.  With names like Sauvignon Bark, Meowlot and Pinot Leasheo, the ingredients for most of the “varietals” consist mainly of chicken or beef broth with a few dehydrated vegetables and things like that thrown in, and these concoctions are intended to be poured over your pet’s food as an added treat. 

The end result is probably a lot more palatable to a dog than a bottle of your finest Pinot Grigio would be, but it comes with a hefty price tag of more than $20 a bottle, which might be just a bit hard for most pet owners to swallow, especially for something that one could probably mix up in their kitchen without too much trouble if they were so inclined.  It appears that the product is being positioned more as something to be given as a gift rather than something one would serve to their own dogs, as evidenced by the assorted paraphernalia available to compliment the product itself.  On the other hand, if you’ve made the decision to become a food snob, why not take your pets along with you?  You might find it difficult to train them to be picky eaters such as yourself, but in the end you’ll have yet another feather in your proverbial cap the next time you need to belittle some pesky commoner.

More Restaurants You Didn’t Know Existed Here

I meant to post about this back in November, but forgot about until I went through my photo backlog last night.  This is down in Federal Way, next to the recently opened Wal-Mart Supercenter:

 It’s a Del Taco restaurant, and as far as I can tell, it is currently the only one to be found anywhere in the Puget Sound area (the website shows one location in Vancouver and one in the Tri-Cities, but no other ones near here.)  Much of the menu here falls into roughly the same category as Taco Bell:  pseudo-Mexican type fast food for cheap, although they also have burgers on the menu for some odd reason.  I did try a couple of items while I was down there, but it wasn’t enough to really get a good feel for the place.  Looking at the franchising section of their website, it does appear that they are interested in moving further into the Seattle area, but seem to be focusing on the area to the south in Tacoma, Olympia and Centralia, as well as Bremerton.  I will note that the “Beyond hot” Del Scorcho sauce they provide is exceedingly wimpy, especially given the hyperbole used in the name, which has inspired the design of a monster truck. 

Also of note is the co-branded KFC/Long John Silver’s in the background.  Long John Silver’s is another brand that I have not seen in this area before, although with much better alternatives for that type of food to be found around here, I’m not sure why they bother. 

Fresh From Highway 23

Harley Davidson Motorcycles have always had a certain image associated with them, one of rugged individuals in leather jackets with big American motorcycles seeking adventure on the open road and/or at the nearest roadhouse.  It’s a culture that I have little familiarity with, and it’s definitely not a lifestyle for everyone, but that doesn’t stop people from trying to  look like they’re a part of it.  Oftentimes old-school Harley riders have been known to lament the increasing number of RUBs (short for Rich Urban Bikers) in their hobby, riders who treat their bikes as just one of the many toys they bring out on the weekend whenever they feel like it and generally make fools of themselves in the process.  For anyone out there looking to take part in the tough guy biker image without all the painful tattoos or overgrown facial hair, Here’s one way to start:

It’s not just any beef jerky, it’s Harley Davidson Road Food, Fuel for the Wide Open Road (or so the packaging claims.)  I suppose that this is one way to get your product to stand out in a field of basically identical competitors (I suspect that an untrained observer would probably find it impossible to distinguish one company’s jerky from another,) although this means that you end up paying for the name.  At this particular store a 3.25 ounce package of the Harley-branded jerky costs the same price ($5.99) as a 4-ounce package of Oberto jerky.  This means you’re paying roughly 19% more to have the legendary Harley Davidson logo emblazoned on your package of beef jerky.  It’s clear that people will gladly pay extra money for a prestigious brand name on a lot of products when a less expensive yet functionally identical substitute is available, but what isn’t exactly clear is that people will do so for their snack foods. 

There’s also the fact that of all the products that one might wish to label as “road food,” beef jerky would definitely fall somewhere on the less advisable side of the list.  When you’re buying potato chips or a pack of Twizzlers, you can be reasonably certain that they didn’t scrape it off the side of the road, stick it in bags and charge $6 a pop for it, but who knows where this stuff is coming from?  It’s all part of the adventure of it, I guess.  And although it’s not particularly clear from the picture shown here, the display you see pictured here just happens to be in the supermarket’s beer aisle, which happens to be the last place in the supermarket (or anywhere, for that matter) that I would ever want to be finding people buying “road food.”  Of course, the crusty old Harley diehards out there would probably tell you that the bugs in your teeth are the only road food you’ll ever need, but that’s beside the point.