Why does anybody buy . . .

[Porthos]

We buy the bags of the "baby" carrots - the cut/trimmed/peeled carrots as snacks for the dogs.

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We were in a Henry's Farmer's Market the other day and they had whole carrots that had been peeled and trimmed and were loose in a bin. And some of them were HUGE!. I dunno. Washing and then peeling loose carrots is fine with me but somehow I don't want food that has lost its natural wrapper and been handled by who knows how many people.

Amen to onion salt and garlic salt. I'm almost rabid about having my kosher salt anyway...

[GlorifiedRice]

margerine.

For the love of God, why?

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I agree totally.

That and cookie dough in a pan...

And potatoes in a can.

[plk]

PLK, ditto on the peanut butter with jelly stripes. I for one only want the peanut butter, only hubby and youngest son likes PB&J sandwiches.

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You dont make samiches with it you eat it with a spoon, least I do.

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But the PB&J are touching each other in the jar! They should touch only when smooshed together manually. The jar must remain pure!

I use margarine when cooking for people who don't eat dairy. It is hard to find one that tastes decent, and even then, I only use it for them.

Oh, and there are some spice rubs where you want onion salt or garlic salt instead of the real thing. But other than for BBQ, I don't use it.

Edited October 22, 2007 by plk (log)

[Porthos]

I do not understand why people buy jarred salsa (Pace, etc). That's just gross.  I can think of no applications where jarred salsa is preferable to fresh (well, perhaps that velveeta + salsa concoction on Super Bowl Sunday - but that's about it).

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I am an unabashed Alton Brown fan but I can weigh on on jarred salsa based upon something he often says about what he will be doing in a given show: "With a little know-how, some basic ingredients and a little time..." It's that "a little time" that is my point.

I love to cook but I spend 13 hours away from home weekdays and generally have errands to run in the evening. If we're having a "make your own tacos" dinner, by the time we've reheated the pre-cooked taco meat, shredded the cheese and lettuce, sliced the olives, heated up some beans and heated up the tortillas I've used up about all the time I've have to get dinner on the table. I would have to forgo salsa out of shear lack of time. Beyond that, even though I know what I can make at home is superior, I rather happen to like Pace's chunky salsa. So in the end, it about having enough time, and I'd much rather have freshly grated cheese and store-bought salsa than already-shredded cheese and fresh salsa. I long for the day when time isn't so much the enemy.

[llc45]

I'll answer that one:  Because pssshting it out of the can and into remarkably high mounds on top of dessert is just too much fun

I disagree..........."into your MOUTH" is the reason

But, canned mushrooms?

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My mother used to make Weight Watchers Mushroom "NUTS"..

Drained canned mushrooms on a cookie sheet, baked till crunchy..

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OMG - So did mine. I would have never conjured up the memory if I didn't read this. My mother, the non-cook, made this all of the time as her snack. I even remember her taking a speech course at a local college with the topic, of course, being "making mushroom nuts". She was so proud of herself. I think she made them almost daily every time she went on WW. I have to go call my sisters now to share the memory...

[llc45]

I do not understand why people buy jarred salsa (Pace, etc). That's just gross.  I can think of no applications where jarred salsa is preferable to fresh (well, perhaps that velveeta + salsa concoction on Super Bowl Sunday - but that's about it).

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I am an unabashed Alton Brown fan but I can weigh on on jarred salsa based upon something he often says about what he will be doing in a given show: "With a little know-how, some basic ingredients and a little time..." It's that "a little time" that is my point.

I love to cook but I spend 13 hours away from home weekdays and generally have errands to run in the evening. If we're having a "make your own tacos" dinner, by the time we've reheated the pre-cooked taco meat, shredded the cheese and lettuce, sliced the olives, heated up some beans and heated up the tortillas I've used up about all the time I've have to get dinner on the table. I would have to forgo salsa out of shear lack of time. Beyond that, even though I know what I can make at home is superior, I rather happen to like Pace's chunky salsa. So in the end, it about having enough time, and I'd much rather have freshly grated cheese and store-bought salsa than already-shredded cheese and fresh salsa. I long for the day when time isn't so much the enemy.

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I'll second the freshly grated cheese over fresh salsa! It's a 10-minute dinner on a weekday when there's nothing to cook. Throw some frozen hamburger (or, in our case lately, ground turkey) in a pan, add some seasonings, grate some cheese and lettuce, and yank out the pre-made salsa and tortillas we always have on hand for just "those" days.

[GlorifiedRice]

PLK, ditto on the peanut butter with jelly stripes. I for one only want the peanut butter, only hubby and youngest son likes PB&J sandwiches.

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You dont make samiches with it you eat it with a spoon, least I do.

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But the PB&J are touching each other in the jar! They should touch only when smooshed together manually. The jar must remain pure!

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Oh go buy some tomorrow and try it!

Bock Bock!

[GlorifiedRice]

I do not understand why people buy jarred salsa (Pace, etc). That's just gross.  I can think of no applications where jarred salsa is preferable to fresh (well, perhaps that velveeta + salsa concoction on Super Bowl Sunday - but that's about it).

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I am an unabashed Alton Brown fan but I can weigh on on jarred salsa based upon something he often says about what he will be doing in a given show: "With a little know-how, some basic ingredients and a little time..." It's that "a little time" that is my point.

I love to cook but I spend 13 hours away from home weekdays and generally have errands to run in the evening. If we're having a "make your own tacos" dinner, by the time we've reheated the pre-cooked taco meat, shredded the cheese and lettuce, sliced the olives, heated up some beans and heated up the tortillas I've used up about all the time I've have to get dinner on the table. I would have to forgo salsa out of shear lack of time. Beyond that, even though I know what I can make at home is superior, I rather happen to like Pace's chunky salsa. So in the end, it about having enough time, and I'd much rather have freshly grated cheese and store-bought salsa than already-shredded cheese and fresh salsa. I long for the day when time isn't so much the enemy.

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YES!

I think we ALL would cook 10 course meals but we have no time...

However I think theres a difference between a FOODIE and a GOURMET...

[GlorifiedRice]

    OMG - So did mine.  I would have never conjured up the memory if I didn't read this.  My mother, the  non-cook, made this all of the time as her snack.  I even remember her taking a speech course at a local college with the topic, of course, being "making mushroom nuts".  She was so proud of herself.  I think she made them almost daily every time she went on WW.  I have to go call my sisters now to share the memory...

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My mother is a prize winning cook who has apprenticed and cooked with some big chefs, but her private eating habits are like PICA (Wiki it)

[Dianabanana]

Cans of bread crumbs.

Bags of bread cubes.

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I've gone my whole adult life without buying breadcrumbs, but I recently bought some Progresso Italian flavored breadcrumbs. I was thinking maybe it would be delicious in a nostalgic kind of way, the flavor I remember from meatball subs and eggplant parmesan as a kid.

But it wasn't.

[llc45]

    OMG - So did mine.  I would have never conjured up the memory if I didn't read this.  My mother, the  non-cook, made this all of the time as her snack.  I even remember her taking a speech course at a local college with the topic, of course, being "making mushroom nuts".  She was so proud of herself.  I think she made them almost daily every time she went on WW.  I have to go call my sisters now to share the memory...

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My mother is a prize winning cook who has apprenticed and cooked with some big chefs, but her private eating habits are like PICA (Wiki it)

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[rooftop1000]

Kraft Dinner

Because I am lucky enough to have a young granddaughter who comes once a week for dinner and loves the stuff.

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Does she love it even more than her grandmother's homemade mac&cheese?

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I am afraid so - she also likes canned mushroom soup better than Nana's! In her defence she loves duck, lobster and crab but only the duck is likely to appear on her plate here!

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Kraft dinner is just a totally different dish - I love it, too, but it's a different kind of comfort food. It tastes completely different from homemade, so it's in it's own category rather than being a pale imitation. At least in my experience.

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I always relate Kraft Dinner to Spaghettios -

If someone in your family made home made Mac and Cheese you ate Spaghettios...if someone could make tomato sauce and good meatballs you ate Kraft Dinner

The first time I tried to make mac and cheese home made I had never even seen the real stuff, I was 24. I melted some cheddar in a bowl with some milk in the microwave. It didnt work

I really dont like the real stuff, its all pale and then if its baked with bread cumbs on top....yech yech yech

T

[MarketStEl]

But, canned mushrooms?

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Because you don't cook with 'em all that often and you want some on hand just in case?

They do taste different from fresh ones. I usually buy fresh on the day I want to cook with mushrooms or put them in a salad.

American cheese, on the other hand... doesn't your deli sell slices of real cheddar? You don't even get the convenience points here, they are the same! Repeat after me: "cheese is not orange!"

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Unless you only buy artisanal farmhouse cheddar, orange colored cheddar cheese is common enough. Even the better supermarket brands (Cabot, Tillamook, Heluva Good) come in colored varieties, especially in the milder flavors.

And process cheese makes better grilled cheese sandwiches because it melts without separating -- there's no oily layer as you usually get with melted Cheddar. In fact, that's one of the reasons J.L. Kraft invented the stuff.

Well on that note, what about Soy Milk? OK, if you're lactose intolerant.. but for health reasons? Milk should not need an ingredient list. I do not believe for a moment that it is actually any better for you than real milk. There's just no way...

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Lower in saturated fat, if you care about that sort of thing.

It's no substitute for milk in cheese sauces, though -- at least not the stuff you find on most supermarket shelves, which has been sweetened. At least what they add to organic soy milk won't hurt you or require analysis in a chem lab.

[feedmec00kies]

Man, I'm so behind in this thread. I'm currently on a trip through some of Europe (pretty much all for beer) and I've been on-and-off with internet this whole time.

I find (and am backed up by what people have been saying previously) that quite a few seemingly ill-advised food purchases have to do with nostalgia or some other associations, like the Kraft dinner and American "cheese" versus homemade mac-and-cheese and sliced cheddar. I like to think of the "bad" versions as existing as a separate entity from the real thing -- something incomparable by virtue of the meaning that people place into/onto them, whether they can describe it or not.

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Silk soy milk is the worst soy milk I've encountered so far, and it's unfortunate that so many people seem to think I'm crazy for complaining about its watery consistency and taste.

I haven't drank as much fresh soy milk as I would have liked, but I grew up drinking Vitasoy (lots of juice-box sized malt-flavored ones, which is the only "malt-flavored" thing of that sort). They used to sell Vitasoy in the refrigerated dairy section, but they seem to have lost out to Silk and that made my family pretty unhappy... especially my sister, who somehow manages to drink 1/2 gallon cartons of chocolate-flavored in like... a day.

I did recently find some cocount Vitasoy "juicebox" containers, and I want to find more. They taste like that coconut jelly "dofu" stuff you can get at dim sum. (This is where I have to ask... why is it called dofu?? It's not freakin' soy! It's agar! I never understood that...)

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I once tried buying canned peas, and I almost died when I tasted them. I will only corn (off the cob) and peas frozen, and blanch them. They always instruct you to heat them to death. I like my veggies to still have some bite and flavor.

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For light beer.. I know some of it's probably calories, but a lot of that garbage is only marginally worse than their "full calorie" counterparts, IMO. It's also a lot easier to become accustomed to drinking some crappy light beer that tastes like bad tap water than it is to appreciate an imperial stout like 3 Floyds Dark Lord. People don't like to look like idiots because they can't understand something.

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And for my own contribution to this list of questions...

Well, I can't think of anything but bottled faro right now (the boyfriend insists on trying to drink as many as he can find in shops so he can be one of the top faro raters on RateBeer... the latest one smells like rotting oranges ). Give me a little time and I'll certainly come up with something no one has mentioned.

Edited October 23, 2007 by feedmec00kies (log)

[Rebecca Kneen]

Lite beer! Foul, revolting crap that used to be against the law (in fact, beers like Bud and Coors, and their "Lite" versions) were the reason the Rheinheitsgebot (beer purity law) was created in 1516: to stop brewers from cheapening their beer by watering it down and putting crap in it.

Bottled water: if your well water tastes bad, figure out what to do to improve it. I guarantee an iron removal system or aerator will be cheaper than a year's worth of bottled water. The waste from bottled water is out of control. Most municipal water is fine to drink, and if you don't like the chlorine taste, you don't even need to filter it: just keep an open jar of water on the counter for 12 hours so the chlorine evaporates. 1 jar on counter breathing, one in the fridge for instant cold drinking, or 2 little Nalgenes in the car for drink on the go. Cheaper, easier and less wasteful, and less time than running to the Sevvy every time you're thirsty.

"baby" carrots: those pre-bagged ones are not baby at all, they are big or oddly shaped carrots that have been put on a lathe and then soaked in sugar water. Which is why they are so expensive and so weird.

Fake bacon bits: WHAT????? They shouldn't be produced, much less eaten. I can't even be witty about them, they're too horrible.

Ditto for processed cheese. No excuse.

Oh, and ditto for Kool Aid, especially the new single serving thing.

I guess I'd have to say single serving anything. It's overpackaging to the max, often destroys the food quality by adding preservatives (see the apple issue), and really, we all have extra yogurt containers around to divvy food up in if we want to.

The excuse for most of these things is time, and I'm afraid I don't buy it. It takes longer to work the extra three hours to pay the inflated prices for single serving prepackage and premade food than it does to buy whole foods and prepare them, and for most of us here, the pleasure is more in the food than in the work we did to pay for the crap.

end of rant.

[Andrew Fenton]

margerine.

For the love of God, why?

"For the love of God" is exactly the reason, at least if you keep kosher...

[eskay]

I buy single serving yogurt.... it's the same stuff, you get 4 different kinds, and it's 5 less dishes a week that I need to wash Plus, I had a bad experience a while back with a lid on a yogurt container coming off in my backpack

This sudden surge in bottled iced 'green' tea has me pretty baffled...I'm pretty sure that any antioxidant health benefits that may or may not exist are entirely offset by the tons of sugar in those things

Another thing--soy lunchmeat. What the heck? A sandwich isn't exactly one of those things thats horribly ruined by taking out the meat; I can think of several different things that would work just as well and probably taste a lot better than faux chicken

[Lindacakes]

Vitamin water. What's up with that?

It's interesting to me how political the underside of this thread is, and I'll drop my Carrie Nation hatchet and not go there, but the person who brought up microwave popcorn reminded me of this:

You know how a bunch of people in the microwave popcorn flavoring factory got a deadly disease called bronciolitis obliterans? Well, a citizen finally got it. How? By spending ten years enjoying regular doses of microwave popcorn, the bags of which he opened and sniffed . . . ah . . . the aromas.

I didn't know you could freeze bacon. Well, I'll be. I eat very little bacon, and I don't like smelling up my house and greasing up my stove for it, so I usually get an order at the coffeeshop and let them thicken the grease on their own exhaust system. But I could see cooking it and freezing it. Nice tip. Thanks.

Pre-made jello. It is so hard to add some water to a box of chemicals?

Pre-formed hamburger patties. It is so hard to pat them into place yourself? Or their identical cousin meat glued chicken formed into little drumsticks.

[Terrasanct]

I buy the pre-formed patties sometimes, even though I think they're pretty bad. My husband is a picky eater and won't eat a real-looking hamburger patty because he thinks they should look like what you get at McDonald's.

As far as orange cheese, it's almost impossible to get cheddar that isn't orange in the west. I noticed when I lived in New Jersey that there was all kinds of white cheddar. Not sure why that is.

[Porthos]

I didn't know you could freeze bacon.  Well, I'll be.  I eat very little bacon, and I don't like smelling up my house and greasing up my stove for it, so I usually get an order at the coffeeshop and let them thicken the grease on their own exhaust system.  But I could see cooking it and freezing it.  Nice tip.  Thanks.

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We've frozen bacon for years. Works just fine.

Can't help you with the odor but it's a welcome fragrance in our home.

Want a less-grease-fumes (at least that's my take) method for cooking bacon -especially since you don't cook it too often. Put a piece of parchment paper on a half-sheet cookie sheet, lay out your bacon strips on the parchemtn paper and bake them at 375 until done to your liking. You don't have to turn them and constantly watch over them. I picked that one up from a grill that sells breakfast.

[jsmeeker]

margerine.

For the love of God, why?

"For the love of God" is exactly the reason, at least if you keep kosher...

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I'm not Jewish, but I thought butter/dairy was OK. It was just mixing it with the wrong stuff (meat) was bad.

Is butter really not Kosher?

[Kim Shook]

I eat very little bacon, and I don't like smelling up my house and greasing up my stove for it,

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You don't like your house smelling like bacon???? If Yankee Candle made a bacon candle, we would have one in every room !

Kim

[kulebyaka]

I'll start:

Why does anybody buy those three-packs of little envelopes of dry yeast, when for about the same amount of money you can get a pound of the stuff?

Next?

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Because yeast goes bad, and lots of people wouldn't use a pound of yeast before that occurs. I also would rather have a convenient package of 3 yeast packets sitting in my tiny cupboard than an enormous sack (thus, kitchen space the issue). The same reason I don't buy a tub of ketchup when it goes on sale.

In contrast, why do people buy food in bulk if in all likelihood they won't use it all before it goes bad? Just fun to waste food because it seems cost-effective?

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Dry yeast needs to be refrigerated. It's even possible to freeze it. I buy it at the health food store in bulk (maybe 1/2 lb. at a time). A tablespoon = 1 envelope. A plus: No overpackaging to add to the landfill.

[rme7]

Why does anyone buy stockpots and pasta pots costing $100-200 [£70-150] when a cheap one, costing less than a third the price, does the job just as well?

Richard

[MomOfLittleFoodies]

Oh boy, I'd better turn in my foodie badge.

I buy margarine and soy milk because my daughter is allergic to milk.

I buy single serving sizes of yogurt because it's handy to throw into lunch boxes, and the perfect serving size for my 2 year old, rather than having to worry about my kids returning gladware containers or thermoses.

I buy yeast in the little packets because I only go through 3-4 three packs in a year.

Precooked bacon is handy when you only need 4 slices for a sandwich, and you don't have the time to cook the stuff the normal way, and clean it up.

Those baby carrots are a regular in our house because my kids will eat them that way, straight out of the fridge, no dip, peeling or steaming involved.

I buy orange cheddar so I can tell the difference between it and the myriad of other cheese in my fridge.

I also use Reddi Whip fairly often... it's perfect for hot cocoa, and my kids like to spray it straight into their mouths.

The ones that really baffle me are some of the vegetarian meat analogs... like Tofurky, Tuno, Chikn, or the really freaky ones I see at the local Pan Asian market that are molded into the shape of a real meat (like 1/2 chickens, eel, ham)