The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (Food Edition)

I wish I were one of those guys who gets paid to shamelessly promote name brand products to his friends and family (without telling them, of course), but I'm not. So, I'll shamelessly promote (and demote) products for free, and hope that the retail Gods smile upon me. There's also a nasty, vicious rumor going around that I have strong opinions about things like food, movies, and politics, but it's all lies, I tell you, lies, lies, lies! Just for kicks, I've grouped the following food recommendations into categories that I hope will prove useful: the good, the bad, and the ugly.

The Good

(1) Campari tomatoes. (Bet you saw that one coming, eh? That is, if you are one of the three people who regularly read this blog!) What can I say more? Best store-bought tomato out there. Worth every penny of the $6 bucks I routinely fork over for them at Costco. But then again: I feel more stongly about tomatoes than I do about religion.

(2) Redmond Real Salt. Salt?! you say? There's a difference in salt? I'm afraid so. Redmond salt is mined in Central Utah from ancient deposits and has a distinctive reddish white color that I recognize from my childhood, as we used to buy it in huge blocks that the goats would lick, apparently because they needed the salt and it tasted good. Back then, I suppose, any salt other than white salt wasn't considered fit for anything but livestock, but now that old red salt has gone upscale, and let me tell you: it's good stuff. Tastes waaaay better than the chemically refined Morton stuff you find everywhere, and I actually buy into the notion promoted on the Real Salt label that a clean, natural sea salt, replete with all kinds of minerals, and laid down a bazillion years ago during a time when the air was free of soot, mercury, and flourocarbons is better than what we typically sprinkle on our food.

(3) Dove chocolate. I've tried chocolate from all over the world, and I'll be danged if Dove doesn't make a really, really good bar of chocolate. Dark or milk, I'll take both, thank you!

(4) Trader Joe's chocolate covered pretzels. If crack cocaine came in food form, this would be it. I would probably eat myself into a coma if the bag lasted that long. Seriously wicked stuff, and I don't even like pretzels.

The Bad

(1) Produce from Dick's Market in Centerville. I've seen bad produce in my day, including C-Town on 125th Street in Harlem, where two shrink-wrapped bananas set us back something like $1.50, but even C-Town won't, far as I know, sell 20 rotten pineapples at the same time. I kid you not: I've been there when every last, stinking pineapple was full-on rotten, and they still had the gall to advertise them for $3 or $4 a piece.

(2) Grocery store cooking wines. Small, expensive little bottles of "wine" chock full of salt and preservatives. Yuck! But I haven't found a good alternative as--what am I supposed to do: waltz into the Bountiful liquor store and ask, "What goes well with a thyme and mushroom reduction?" Besides, I can't afford to buy a whole bottle when I only need a cup. Arrghh!

(3) Twinkies. Can't believe I liked them as a kid. 'Nuff said.

The Ugly

(1) Breyer's ice cream. This long time family favorite recently started adding a guar-gum/carrageenan type emulsifier, tara gum, to their "all natural" ice cream, in addition to watering down their brand with all kinds of gooey gooey ice creams with ingredient lists a mile long. (The beauty of Breyers used to be "Milk, cream, sugar, strawberries. Period.") And what makes me really mad is that, even with the tara gum, we haven't been able to find a better brand outside of Haagen Daz, so we still buy the stuff, giving the lie to all the threats I sent to corporate headquarters about "never touching their product again." Ed. Note: Again, I have no strong opinions about food.

(2) Cavanaugh's Chocolates (Bountiful). Look: these guys make a decent American chocolate, and I'll be a sucker for a Mindy Mint until the day I die, but--in addition to being reactionary anti-United Nations whackos--these guys put the "cheap" in "cheap skate." A few year's ago, we decided to take the kids to tour their new factory out by I-15--the tour that offers "free samples"--only to discover that the tour costs something like $5 per adult and $4 per child, with a "free" sample at the end. Gimme a break. Sad thing is: they know they're the only game in town, so they've made millions charging a premium for what is at best a middling collection of chocolates.

Ah, but I'd better bring this rant to a close. Still, I think this idea might have some legs. Please feel free to nominate your own "goods," "bads," or "uglies." Future posts may well take up the same theme as applied to things like cook books, movies, and politicians.