Tag: cooking

The Internet teems with deals. Dealcatcher.com alerts you to many of them.

Like this one: “If you switch to Qwest fiber-optic long distance,” reports Dealcatcher, “they will send you a $100 check (a real check, not just credit).” You get 5.9-cent-per-minute long distance, anytime; no monthly fee; your name removed from all major telemarketing lists; and a $25 coupon for taking an online tour of the service.

“A hundred dollars buys a lot of 39-cent cheeseburgers,” concludes Alan Light, who kindly sent me this link.

That was a reference, of course, to yesterday’s column, about McDonald’s, which elicited a skillet of responses.

Someone named Harold wrote: “Hey, you missed out on the Senior drinks at Mickey Ds for 25 cents!”

Wow. A quarter for a sarsaparilla? This deal may not be available in your area, but it’s certainly worth admitting your age to find out.

Paul Langley: “Our dog Perry, a Border Collie, who just turned 13 and refuses to eat dog food as of last fall, well knows the McDonald’s cheap burger secret. Every Sunday he goes to the drive-in window and gets six cheeseburgers (they’re 49 cents here in Boston) and has two a day until he returns on Wednesday to get eight regular burgers (they’re 39 cents here) which last until Sunday when the cycle repeats. Sometimes he lets his dads buy extra so they can have some too. There is one flaw to your otherwise excellent plan and that is that at the McDonald’s we go to they limit the quantity to 10 per customer.”

Not when I bought my 20, they didn’t. But if there is such a rule, this may be its genesis:

Jesse Lunin-Pack: “Your story reminds me of my days running the kitchen at a sleepaway camp (my first brush with responsibility, age 21). The local McDonalds advertised 25-cent hamburgers, and I ordered 1000 of them. We cooked up some fries and fed the whole camp for less than it would have cost us to cook all the food ourselves, and the kids LOVED it. The next time they did it, the McDonalds added some fine print to their offer — limit of 10 per customer!”

Toby Gottfried: “39 cents? You forget the $10,000 for the coronary bypass operation.” (Splurge, several of you suggested, and eat non-meat Boca Burgers instead.)

Rick Mayhew: “Taco Bell has 39 cent tacos on Wednesday (soft) and Sunday (crunchy). My wife and I have a meal for $1.67 (tax included). We drink tap water. The funny thing is, we like it. If it were a hardship then they wouldn’t taste nearly as good!”

I just find that dog so annoying. Isn’t he in the Taco Bell ads?

R. J. Kirsch: “[In the spirit of] Cooking Like a Guy™, have you read Cooking Without A Kitchen: The Coffeemaker Cookbook, by Peter Mazonson?”

No, but it’s clearly my kind of book. Amazon says “Unique utilization of the appliance. Basket is used to steam food and carafe to heat items.” Fun, quick, healthy and little clean up. My kinda cuisine.

Are you all aware, incidentally, that you can poach a salmon in your dishwasher?

It’s true!

CHEAPBURGERS

I don’t want you planning any big dinner parties around this until you verify it for your own community, but McDonald’s — Mickey D’s, as gourmets know it around the world — seems to be giving away the store. I walked in Sunday night, the guest of a guy who cooks like a guy, and confronted the usual brightly backlit billboard of enticing $2 and $3 choices. Nowhere on the board did it reveal the secret my friend claimed to know (he told me he had seen it revealed in a massive TV ad campaign): that on Sundays, cheeseburgers are 39 cents at McDonald’s.

“No way,” I had told my friend, much as a muggle might regard the prospect of an all-owl postal service. (I read Harry Potter over New Year’s.)

“Way,” he insisted. “Watch this.”

And before you knew it, we had all feasted royally . . . his treat . . . and I had forked over $8.40 (with tax) for an additional 20 cheeseburgers “to go.”

Therefore:

1. Buy cheapburgers. If I had been thinking clearly, I would have bought 50 or 100.
2. Freeze. Not the ones you plan to eat in the next few days, but the rest.

That’s it. When you’re hungry, just microwave for a minute. I had one just now for breakfast. Outstanding. (Charles was beyond horrified.)

Hint: To moisten even more delectably before microwaving — and to increase the nutritional content of your meal — lift the top bun after 40 seconds and add a glop of ketchup. (Ketchup is both a fruit and a vegetable.) Then microwave a final 20 seconds. I don’t usually like to complicate my recipes with an extra step, but in this case, it’s worth it.

Note: Requires no cookware or utensils of any kind, either for cooking or dining. The cheeseburgers come individually wrapped, suitable for microwaving. Clean-up, upon completion of the meal, consists of scrunching the wrapper into a ball and rebounding it off the wall into the trash. (Scrunch with all ketchup and grease on the inside, so as not to mark the wall.)

Want to save even more money? Wednesdays, plain hamburgers are 29 cents.

Thirsty? Quaff, naturally, with an ice cold bottle of Honest Tea.

Money no object? Mondays, chicken McNuggets are 79 cents. Go wild.

Vegetarian? Well, truthfully, I think we’ll be hearing more and about animal rights, and finding it less and less preposterous. I’m not a big carnivore. But 39 cents? My taste for a bargain overcame my greener, healthier self.

This is my last column of the century, so I think I should write about something more important than vegetables. (“The beet,” Russell Turpin writes in response to last month’s column, “is also the most serious of vegetables. Don’t take my word for it. Borrow a copy of Jitterbug Perfume, by Tom Robbins, and read the first paragraph.” Adds Denise Sumner: “It’s the only book I’ve ever read in which a beet — or any vegetable, for that matter — is so….well, appreciated.”) Or frozen grapes. (“Another thing you can do with frozen bananas,” writes Anne Speck in response to someone who had put in a word for freezing banana slices, “is throw them in the blender with a spoonful of cocoa or carob powder and a splash of vanilla. Blend it up and you have something resembling a chocolate milkshake without the fat.”)

But what?

I could try to just give each of you a hundred dollars, as money is what a lot of you seem to be interested in. (Me, too.) But American Express has already beaten me to that punch. In order to get you to sample its free brokerage commissions, Amex will now give you $100 cash for opening a brokerage account (refer to Wall Street Journal “Promotion Code 100” and/or call 800-297-7006 if you have problems).

It was once enough just to offer free commissions. Now Amex is paying you $100 to try free commissions. My hunch is that, if this works well, Amex may offer a free toaster as an enticement to take the free $100 to try the free commissions. Toasters have always been a draw for this sort of thing, because their little toast thermostats so quickly break (assuming you never clean them, which no Cooking Like a Guy™ guy ever does), leaving them little more than fire hazards. So everyone could use a new toaster, if not now, then soon, and offering them free would be a way to encourage people to take the free $100 to try the free commissions.

There are huge profits to be made from a promotion like this, which must be one reason American Express stock has been soaring. I can’t compete with a powerhouse like American Express, so rather than give you $100 from my own pocket, I will just join you in running over to American Express for my free $100.

So. No vegetables, no grapes, no free money.

What then? The shirt off my back?

No — although, thanks to alert reader Gary Krager I can steer you to an almost-free $40 men’s dress shirt. (Click here.)

So, then — what?

It seems to me that a few fond words about the Twentieth Century may be in order.

Being a glass-half-full type, I see not the horrors of the Twentieth Century, like the World Wars and Apartheid and the failed communist experiment, but the fact that we survived them and may have learned something from them. Let’s hope. I see not the Depression, but the estimable institutions it caused us to create — principally the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Reserve System, which have served us well.

The amazing thing about this century of radio and TV and automobiles antibiotics and movies and computers (and Velcro and zippers) is that for the first time we realized that virtually anything is possible. Flight -– even to the moon. Instant wireless communication from any mouth to any ear on the planet. Bloodless surgery. Genetic engineering. Even immortality, Bill Gates has noted — and I’m quite sure he’s right — is by now “just a software problem.” (Unsure in just how many decades they will finish debugging the code, I am eating as healthily as I can.)

We could certainly screw it up. But we now have it within our grasp to do almost anything. For thousands and thousands of years, since we lived in caves, this was merely the stuff of dreams.

The other amazing thing about this century — if less miraculous, no less important — is the progress we’ve made in recognizing the fundamental validity of individual human rights. (“We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal, that . . .”)

• It was only 79 years ago that women got the vote. By now, even most Republicans think it’s a good idea — even though the Bible says women should be subservient.

• Until just 35 years ago, African Americans were still officially second-class citizens in part of America. By now, happily, most of that is ancient history — even though the Bible says, “slaves, obey thy masters” (Colossians) “with fear and trembling” (Ephesians).

• And until just 8 years ago, when the Governor of Arkansas began running for President, the issue of fairness and equality for gays and lesbians had never been placed on the national agenda, debated in prime time. Today, much of mainstream America has come to know us as their friends and neighbors, sons and daughters, colleagues and employees. The Republican leadership has yet to get this one right, but they will.

Anything is possible, and every constructive citizen deserves equal rights and respect. Not a bad century. This next one could be even better. With your help, it will be.

And at least until these crazy e-commerce valuations collapse, a lot of stuff will be free.

Happy New Year!

So here is Honest Tea included among “100 of the most notable beverage brands of the past 100 years,” according to Beverage World. Others include Coca-Cola, Perrier, Snapple, Evian, Bud Light, 7-Up, Jack Daniel’s, Gatorade, Starbucks and Absolut. How come Welch’s made it and V-8 didn’t? Yoo-hoo but not Dom Perignon? Jolt Cola but not Colt 45? So, OK, it’s a little capricious. But it’s nice, after 17 months in business, to be named a brand of the century.

Alicia Rasley: “About 12 years ago my husband and I bought universal life insurance policies, thinking the cash value would fund our children’s college tuition. (Well, that’s what the insurance agent told us!) I think we paid $7000 for $150K in coverage. (Single premium.) The cash value was supposed to increase rapidly, based on the interest rate then — you know 10-12%. Anyway, the latest statement shows the cash value is now around $7400. At least we’re back up around what we put in! And we have had life insurance all that time. But, as you might imagine, we’ve found other ways to save for college. This is a live-and-learn experience, and it’s no big loss financially. But I’m glad we never depended on it for college cash.”

The same term life insurance coverage might have cost $250 a year, and $7,000 invested in the Dow Jones 12 years ago would be worth — what? — maybe $40,000 today.

One of the randomly-rotating “quotes of the day,” at left, is from ex-Harvard Treasurer Paul Cabot: “I don’t understand a goddam thing about insurance, except that I don’t want to have any.” To which Steven Gilbert adds: “At a Berkshire Hathaway shareholders meeting several years ago, a shareholder asked Warren Buffett whether the firm had key man insurance on his life. Buffett replied, ‘We sell insurance, we don’t buy insurance.'”

J. Raymond: “[With respect to Cooking Like a Guy™], fresh blueberries freeze well too. As a more acquired taste, you can peel a banana, cut it into relatively thin slices (similar in size to what you would probably use if you were putting them on your morning cereal) and stack these in a plastic container in the freezer. The stacking takes a bit of trial and error only because the banana slice surfaces tend to freeze to each other so you should “offset” them as much as possible to make them easier to remove (a fork works!) from the container after they freeze. It sounds a bit odd but if you’re a fan of Ben and Jerry’s ‘Chunky Monkey’ you might like this too. The blueberries are easier.”

Don’t miss Anna and the King. I didn’t expect to like it, but it’s wonderful. About love and justice — just like It’s a Wonderful Life and A Christmas Carol, come to think of it. (But I invite the Thai scholars in the crowd to let me know just how egregiously it departed from historical fact.)

VITAMINS.COM

Joe: “My order, almost a month ago, from Vitamins.com also has not come, even after two calls to customer support. You get what you pay for (or in this case, you don’t get what you don’t pay for).”

Brian Miller: “Count me in for another who has not yet received my order from Vitamins.com.”

Sharon: “I ordered from them because of the $25 come-on. Over a month later I have received only a $6 bottle of vitamin E. They are attempting to resolve the unfilled order (a case of Atkins diet bars) but interestingly enough it cannot be handled by email or at the site but only by phone with about a 20 minute wait. The company was not prepared for the volume and hasn’t a clue about service. Planet RX is the best in my experience so far.”

HERBS

Dana Nibby: “Did you know taking ginkgo biloba and aspirin together could cause hemorrhagic stroke? Click here for details from healthcentral.com. I’d do a quick word search on any herb you’re taking, or considering taking, at healthcentral.”

GRAPES

Nick Corman: “I love frozen grapes. Cookies are another thing that always seem to go from being “good/very good” to “excellent/divine” after being frozen. Apple juice too, although many people over age 14 don’t really seem to like apple juice in any state for some reason. A little apple juice popsicle stick, though, is a delight. (Mmmm…now I’m all hungry for grapes and cookies and homemade apple juice Popsicles.)”

From time to time, I offer up a few of my best recipes. For a combination of ease-of-preparation and good taste (in the gustatory if not the aesthetic sense), they can’t be beat.

Recipe #1 – Frozen Grapes

1. Buy grapes.

Seedless. Red or green. I look for the loose ones the supermarket has collected into a plastic container and marked down because they’re almost too ripe.

2. Freeze.

That’s it. I generally put them in one of the large plastic containers the Hot and Sour Soup came in (after washing), or a in a few empty yogurt cups. I sometimes sprinkle sugar over them before freezing, or Equal if I’m feeling righteous.

To eat, merely remove cup from freezer, settle in front of TV, and enjoy. Pure and healthy. Cooking Like a Guy™.

Tomorrow: Variable Universal Life

What vegetable isn’t underappreciated, when you think about it? Yes, people will ooh and ahh over a terrific tomato — oh, those perfect New Jersey tomatoes in August, or the amazing beefsteak tomatoes you get at the Palm (not that you will often find me at the Palm, but when you do, I will be the guy who ordered the tomato). But tomatoes are ringers, being, as they are, members of the fruit group as well as the vegetable group. (This is what makes ketchup the indispensable food: a fruit, a vegetable, and a condiment.) Fruits are adored. The apple of his eye, a real peach, a plum of an appointment, the fruits of their labor — fruit has long had an outstanding P.R. firm. And the tomato has ridden the coattails of that good will. (In the old days: “She’s some tomato!”)

But tomatoes aside, who ever really gives vegetables their due? “He’s as dumb as an eggplant,” is the kind of imagery you get with a vegetable. Mr. Potato Head. Punch-drunk boxers with “cauliflower ears.” Children shoving spinach to the other side of their plates. Presidents eschewing broccoli. When was the last time you saw someone looking admiringly at a carrot (other than a horse)?

So I think after 949 of these daily columns it is about time — considerably past time — to say a few good things about beets.

Well, and artichokes and potatoes and all the rest of them, really, but you don’t have all morning, and I’m not getting paid for this, so let me just point out:

1. Artichokes are the ideal appetizer if you’re having a nice dinner because they take a long time to eat. (If you really like someone, dinner should be artichokes and lobster. If you really don’t: consommé and boneless filet of sole.) Nor do artichokes require melted butter, let alone that awful heavy sauce some people feel compelled to drown them in. They’re awesome just boiling (40 minutes or so) in their own juices. Be careful not to eat the chokes and kill yourself.

2. Potatoes saved the Irish and the Irish — and I don’t say this just because Charles is Irish — saved civilization. Seriously. You can read it in a book: How the Irish Saved Civilization . So it doesn’t take a Ph.D. in logic to make the connection. Potatoes saved civilization.

3. Beets are a kick-ass vegetable. A single beet has enough red dye in it — not fake dye, natural beet dye — to paint a large house. People don’t realize this, because there is so little demand for red houses, but it’s true. (Or is not true, but, if you have ever boiled beets, seems true.) And they taste good! People don’t realize that, either, but grab hold of a jar of borscht at your supermarket — the kind “made from real beets, not from concentrate” — and I say, move over Tropicana! Just work up a sweat, grab a bottle of borscht from the fridge, shake it up and swig it down. Forget the sour cream, and certainly forget heating it up, although that can be good too. Just chill, shake, and swig. Shake, rattle, and roll.

Tomorrow: Underappreciated Stocks

THANK YOU, GROVER NORQUIST

Following up from yesterday, may I say one more thing about Grover Norquist?

Things were pretty good in the Nineties: low unemployment and an economy pretty much in balance, with everyone getting richer and our National Debt shrinking relative to the size of the economy as a whole.

But thanks to Grover Norquist, things are even better now. Sure, we’re on the brink of national bankruptcy, politically paralyzed, and a third of us are below, at, or barely above the poverty line . . . but we have lower taxes! And if we’re rich, much lower taxes. God forbid we ever make the mistake of going back to a Nineties-style economic balance. The Republicans are all but unanimously pledged to make sure we never do.

IN CASE YOU LIKE NEWT

The new Republican front-runner. Yes, there was the thing about pressing his second wife for a divorce while she was in the hospital. But this is mainly about his hucksterism. Pretty devastating – here.

DEPT. OF IRONY

“We have candidates for President now saying that government can’t create jobs. These are guys with government jobs. They’re ON THE GOVERNMENT PAYROLL. Saying government can’t create jobs. Government created YOUR job.” – Lawrence O’Donnell, MSNBC

APRICOT JELL-O

If you ever find yourself in a situation where you’re allowed to eat JELL-O, but not red JELL-O – or even if you don’t – I have pretty wonderful news for you: apricot JELL-O. It’s really good (lemon-lime JELL-O is punishment no one deserves) and you can go even crazier and mix it with Haagen-Dazs peach sorbet. I know a thing or two about cooking.