Blessed by the Potato

There’s a hole in my cupboard between the Penne and the Zoodles, the demarcation between boxed and canned food where my Kraft Dinner used to be. It’s empty right now. That used to be a dire sign of a Kraft Dinner shortage, and somewhere in my house a klaxon and flashing orange light would go off signalling me to run off to the 24-hour grocery store to get more post haste.

Now, however, that hole will stay there, a sad gap toothed reminder that somehow they broke Kraft Dinner. I first noticed a few months ago, in the last box I had right before they changed to the new box artwork. The cheese was not right, and not in the way that it’s usually not right. It had a strange chemical taste to it… which is difficult to describe considering it was fake cheese and food colouring to begin with. Something has definitely changed though: the cheese is runnier and just not as tasty, and I haven’t been able to find anything I’ve been doing to cause that. So it’s their fault, whether it was a cost cutting measure in the face of rampant food price inflation, a change in suppliers, or just a damned mistake, it matters little now. Kraft Dinner is broken, and there is none in my cupboard.

For a while, at least, I will keep the hole there, an empty space preserved in memory of my most popular hot lunch. While I mourn. As time passes perhaps that spot will be filled by PC macaroni and white cheddar sauce, or maybe the general pasta supplies will spill over and fill it up. Perhaps I will try again in a few months, once the memory of what real Kraft Dinner tastes like fades (if such a thing is ever possible); perhaps I will grow to miss it so much that I buy a box just for show. Perhaps the Fast ‘n Fancy rice dishes can return to the bottom shelf from their exile above, reuniting with the other starchy foods in the midst of this tragedy. For now though, there’s a hole in my cupboard where my Kraft Dinner used to be.

And there’s a hole in my heart where my Kraft Dinner used to live :(

In Charlottetown, we found that Little Christos is open again. This used to be my favourite pizza place when I was a kid — pizza worth driving 2 days in from Ontario for. Unfortunately, they closed down about 10 years ago after coming out with their own line of frozen pizzas for the grocery store (which perhaps cannibalized their restaurant business). While it was good, it wasn’t quite like I remembered. The story is that the son of the original guy is running the place, with all the original recipes… and over a decade does dull the memory a bit, but nonetheless I couldn’t help but feel that the pizza I had this week was a lot cheesier and a lot less fluffy than the ones I remember. I also recall the pizzas having more sauce, and a bit more spice to them — but then, lacking in sauce can just be a variation thing even with the original recipe. Talking with the staff, they say that sometimes the pizzas just don’t quite rise up as much, and that the fluffy thick crust with the really large bubbles was their signature back in the day. It might be upselling, but she said that next time I should order a large since the smalls and mediums don’t rise as much in the oven.

Little Christos aside, PEI always seems to be at the forefront of pizza technology. Garlic fingers, for one, are an awesome and incredible invention that for some reason is quite slow to spread to Ontario (though we do load up on them when we’re at Pizza Delight in Penetang!). Dipping sauce also got it’s start out there, AFAIK, and is now way more popular in Ontario than it ever was out there, helped no doubt by the switch from “donair” to “creamy garlic”. This year, I saw in the Greco pizza place fridges for their pizza slices. Rather than having the pizzas that you order by the slice sit under hot lamps or wither at room temperature for hours on end, they throw them right in the fridge to “preserve freshness” and then heat them up again when ordered (which you have to do anyway with the heat lamps or room temperature displays). If you think cold pizza is even better than fresh (which is a particular breed of insanity that only seems to affect females in my experience) then you can even get it cold, right out of the fridge. Will this trend catch on and move west to Ontario? I kind of doubt it, since it seems kind of sketchy and would require a lot of equipment and changing of displays — Greco may have done it partly because they co-branded with Capt. Submarine, and turned their former pizza-by-the-slice display into a sub topping/prep area; the “pizza fridge” looks to my eye like the same fridge they used to store their bottled pop in, just with some new decals. Nonetheless, I’ve got to hand it to them for their clever ideas, and if I see chilled pizza taking off in Ontario, I’ll know that it was out there first.

Another not-quite-pizza invention is the bread bar from Piazza Joe’s. I wish I had thought to take a picture of it, but it’s basically a very large open grill where you can toast your selection of a number of different types of bread and top with a selection of spreads. It seemed to me like a huge waste of energy: this giant grill pumping out heat non stop when a couple of toasters could do almost as good a job. It was, however, a neat and entertaining way to get your pre-dinner bread, and it was nice to have a selection of breads with everything from white sandwich bread to sourdough baguettes. The bread bar idea has now been implemented in the Cornwall Pizza Delight, so it’s spreading…

In other news, I’m back in Ontario. The trip went well, but the internet over the dial-up really sucked balls. I haven’t read the Liberal Green Shift plan yet, but hope to soon and to share my comments with both of my readers. Stay tuned! The Canadian Capitalist has posted his take on it and there’s a small discussion going on over there.

I used to love Hershey’s Special Crisp: a chocolate bar with peanut butter rice crisps, a thin layer of caramel, covered in milk chocolate. It may just have been the perfect chocolate bar. For whatever reason, they discontinued it many many years ago here in Canada. In the States, that bar has continued as the Whatchamacallit. I was in a Rite Aid store the other day specifically looking for this wonderful chocolate bar, and found to my great pleasure that it was on sale at 3 for a dollar — a better deal even than buying chocolate bars in bulk from Costco back home. I bought 15 bars pretty much cleaning them out, and they are every bit as glorious as I remember Special Crisp being.

Now I’m contemplating going back for more, though according to their website the sale ended yesterday, and it would cost me over $5 to take the trolley down. I kind of wish I had bugged the clerk to get another box for me to really clean them out, but there were like 8 people waiting in line behind me that day. So now I’m going to try to see if someone in the states would be willing to buy a box or three and ship them up to Canada for me (I found a company a few years back that offered to this, specifically selling chocolates and candies not available in Canada, and the cost was like $1.50 per bar; it’s good, but not that good).

In other news, the conference has ended and I won a student presentation award :) The internet is back up after going so long without it. I don’t think I’ve gone 3 days without internet access since the 90’s.

We went tried to go surfing yesterday, but were only so successful. The place we went to offered lessons for something like $75 per person, but of course we didn’t make an appointment so we couldn’t do that. However, the rental place did give us a board and a wetsuit for $17 and let us make fools of ourselves. I think we were almost as successful doing that as we could have been with a short lesson, no matter how professional. Nearly everyone managed to get up on top of the surfboard in a standing position, if only briefly, while I alone seemed to have trouble just riding the wave on my stomach. I kept getting off balance and flipping around, sometimes hitting my head on the surf board as I was plunged underwater. Despite stating repeatedly that there were going to be plans to go out last night, everyone just went to bed after getting back from a day of being thrashed by the waves. I’m trying to figure out what to do with my last bit of time here, and I think I’m going to go to the San Diego zoo. I’ve got 600 MB of space left on my camera, so hopefully that’s enough to get a lot of shots of the wildlife :)

This will likely be a multipart post since I’m probably going to want to cover a lot of ground and dig up a lot of figures, but just don’t have time right now. For now, a quick point to make:

“Switching to ethanol [to fuel cars] was a big thing, until they realized they are starving people.”

[clarification for context mine]

This is just one representative quote (from an off-hand comment on Preet’s site) of a sentiment that I’ve been seeing a lot lately. There is some sort of food crisis happening right now, and it’s snowballing astonishingly quickly. There are food riots in poorer countries, and even in the States there are the beginnings of rationing on rice.

I’ve got my doubts about the ultimate utility of ethanol production, but I also think that it’s far too easy to blame biofuel production for the current food price spike. From what I can find, about 20% of the US corn crop went into biofuels last year, and it’s pretty much the only food crop that gets diverted to that stream. 20% of the crop looks to be within the normal range of crop yield variances, and last year was a record crop to boot. It may be a factor, but I have to say that something else is leading to food price inflation and starving the world…

It was not so very long ago that we were having a conversation with Ryan about lactose intolerance, or “lactardation”. Many people in his family are lactarded, and he was ordering essentially a cheese-covered dish of baked cheese with a coffee and cream on the side. He waxed on about how much he loved cheese, and that if he ever became lactarded like the rest of his family, to just put him out of his misery because life just wasn’t worth living without cheese. So it would be fitting that at that very meal I ordered a chocolate milkshake, and about an hour later found myself with terrible gas and cramping. The realization set in:

I was lactarded.

Oddly enough, I seem to be fine with regular milk and cheese — in fact, as a vegetarian cheese is one of my primary protein sources, and it never seems to bother me. It is somehow the combination of chocolate and ice cream that seems to set my stomach off. Not wanting to blame chocolate ice cream for anything (that stain? it’s… umm… blood), I resisted seeing the connection between my intestinal issues and ice cream consumption. After all, I couldn’t actually be lactose intolerant, because of all the other dairy I eat without a problem! Perhaps there was some other reaction with ice cream and chocolate that could explain the issue… but I couldn’t find any. Not even made-up ones on the internet.

The big test came this weekend when we went out to the marble slab and I packed one of my sister’s lactaid pills. Lactaid pill + chocolate ice cream = no tummy issues. That to me suggests some sort of lactose issue, even if I can’t explain why I’m fine with cheese. Of course, coming out fine after a single test isn’t really definitive, so I suppose that, in the name of science, I will have to go out and eat more ice cream. Just to be sure. It’s that or go to the doctor for a proper test, and between you and me, I’ll take the ice cream.