Why don’t they put ketchup on a Big Mac?  Every other burger gets it.

Poor Big Mac.

(The picture makes you a bit hungry, doesn’t it?)

And by that, I mean “the rules about food” rather than “food is great”.  Although it is, of course. 

I have always had a few food rules that I live by.  They never seemed strange to me, but having married and had a family of my own, I see that other people (read: Hubby) see things different and think that my food rules stink.

A few example of my food rules?  Read on:

My Rule #1 - If I serve pizza or burgers for supper, the accompanying vegetable must always be salad.  Never hot veggies like peas or broccoli.

My Rule #2 - The same applies to Italian meals like lasagna and spaghetti.  If I decide to serve a vegetable with it, it’s salad again.

My Rule #3 - I love ketchup but there are certainly things that it should not go on.  I am a bit contrary on this one because:

• French fries, yes.  Any other type potato product (mashed, scalloped, roasted, etc), no.
• Baked beans or any other tinned tomato-saucy food, no.
• Salad, no.  Never.  And yes, I know someone who does that.

My Rules #4 - Once milk has been poured on my cereal, I must eat it promptly.  If something comes up and I can’t get to it quickly, it is ruined.  I cannot stand soggy cereal and, in my view, that process starts immediately after the milk has added.

My Rules #5 - Sweet foods are for dessert and savoury foods are for meals.  The exceptions to this rules is pancakes, which I’ve just decided to have for lunch.  When I told Hubby about my choice, he said that he’d have a couple after lunch, but not for lunch.  Crazy guy.

My Rule #6 - Hubby has no trouble having a cookie while he’s waiting for supper.  Me, I see that as possibly spoiling my appetite and I save the cookie for dessert.

My Rules #7 - Sandwiches are boring.  When lunchtime arrives, I much prefer something hot or out of the ordinary.

My Rules #8 - Soup is boring.  I never eat soup.  It’s like a slightly lumpy, often salty drink.  I would eat a chunky soup and I love stew.  But soup… yawn.

My Rules #9 - All kinds of bread are good for toasting, but are only to be eaten with specific other foods.  For example, when I make toast, I’ll make it with all kinds of bread: white, whole wheat, rye, etc.  Then I add margarine or jam.  And when I have hamburgers, I like to have the bun toasted.  But a bun, or bread roll, should not be toasted and buttered and eaten with breakfast.  I remember moving in with Hubby and watching him do that and, obviously, there’s nothing wrong with it, I just wouldn’t do it.

My Rules #10 - Peanut butter:  no, never, not under any circumstances.  Not with chocolate and not on toast or bread.  Not with fruit, cake or even out of the jar.  Gross, gross, gross!  But peanuts are yummy.

My rules have relaxed immensely as I’ve gotten older.  They were more strict in that I didn’t like any ‘wet’ part of my meal, like baked beans, touching my bread or potatoes.  But I’m over that now and I actually enjoy having a couple of different flavours and textures in the same bite.  I know, shocking.

Do you have any food rules?

The other day, I mentioned wanting a Test Tube Alien for my birthday.  Although the packaging states that it is for ages 7 and up, I figured that my 35th was the perfect time to get this new toy. 

I asked for it, and I got it!

The alien I was given is called Yagoni and ‘he’ is, according to the website, the protector of the good aliens and is an intelligent and respected leader.  Great!  At least I got one of the good guys!

The alien arrives in a cocoon within the test tube.  The instructions say to fill the test tube with water to ‘hatch’ your alien.  After you add the water, it starts to fizz and overflow.  Hold it over the sink and watch closely as you start to see a flashing green light.  Within a few minutes, you can make out a face too!  It’s a little bit creepy as you wonder what is emerging through the fizzy liquid.

When the fizz slows, you can empty the water out and rinse it a few times.  This is the first time you get a real glimpse of your alien.  Mine, Yagoni, has a large, transparent head.  He has a red body with yellow feet.  He also has big, dark eyes and two antennae.  You can see the ‘computer’ inside his head that obviously makes this whole thing work.

Following the instructions, I combined the sloog (included) with more water and fed my alien.  Sloog is apparently a “nutrient rich food from their planet”.  I don’t know what sloog really is but if I find out, you’ll be the first to know.

Before you add the sloog water, your alien’s heart (located in its forehead, by the way) will flash orange, indicating that it is starving.  Add the sloog water and the heart will flash red.  Your alien is happy and healthy.  A green flashing heart indicates drowning, meaning that you alien has too much water.

How does your alien know if there is enough or too much water?  It has tiny sensors at the base of its antennae and at the tips too.

Two more packages of sloog are provided but I only ended up feeding it two altogether.  One packet is still sitting on my desk.  Yagoni does not seem to have suffered.

Now, a week or so after Yagoni hatched, he is about twice the size that he was.  His body expands outwards as well as upwards.  He only has another inch and a bit to go before he’ll reach the top of the test tube.  I assume that he’ll stop growing at that point.

So, to recap, as long as you keep the water at the appropriate level – which is in between the two sets of sensors, your alien will stay alive and well.

What do I do with it now?  Not much, really.  I check its water level, like I would a houseplant, and that’s about it.

So, Test Tube Aliens:  cool toy or waste of money?  You decide.

We, as well as our neighbors across the street, live at the very end of a street and so have no one on one side of us.  We love it, as we can almost imagine that we’re alone.  We’re loners, really. 

I was standing at the kitchen sink yesterday, washing some dishes, when I noticed the neighbors across the street pull into their driveway.  The man got out and went to unlock the front door.  Then I watched the woman get out of the car holding what looked like a small white cloth.  Perhaps a wipe or something.  She walked over to the fence that divides their property from the clearing beside it and then tossed the cloth over it.  She then went back to the car and started getting the shopping bags out.  She brought a couple of bags into the house, where they surely have their very own garbage can, and I could tell that the cloth that she threw over the fence never even crossed her mind again.

We’ve noticed that this couple doesn’t recycle, so we already had a low opinion of them.  Judgemental, I know, but who in their right minds doesn’t recycle nowadays when they have the facilities to do so?

I couldn’t believe what I’d just witnessed!  I wanted to go out there and rant at her.  It is SO out of order to be dropping garbage on the floor, especially if you at directly outside your own home.  I don’t even spit my gum out on the ground and I never, never drop any garbage on the ground.  Candy wrappers, scraps of paper, old receipts… nothing!  I put them into my pocket and bring them to my home garbage if I don’t find one sooner.

I don’t mean to sound so high and mighty but littering like that is just plain wrong.

Did I rush out to pick up the garbage she’d dropped?  No.  The wind was blowing strongly and I knew that the cloth would be at the next block by the time I got out there.  In fact, I watched it blow away.

A day later, I’m still seething about it though.

We did our groceries at Food Basic again today.  I’m not a big fan of grocery shopping but it does give me a tiny bit of retail therapy.  What can I say; I love spending money!

With our son’s GFCF diet, we spend quite a bit more time shopping for food now than we did before.  We read every label and search, normally in vain, for something to feed him.  Eating gluten-free isn’t that hard and neither is eating dairy-free, but comibining the two has proven to be a bit of a challenge.

While reading the label on the potato chips, I discovered an interesting and disturbing trend:

Firstly, I should explain that the Food Basics brand is called Equality (part of the Fresh Obsessed group) and these products tend to cost less that brand name items and they are packaged in a rather plain blue design.  We buy a lot of Equality products because we find that the quality is just as good as the food from the big names and the price is right.  A lot of the products are transfat free too, which is very important to us.

So I was reading the label on a pack of the Equality brand Ripple potato chips that have a flavor that would be described as plain, regular or salt.  I was pleasantly surprised to read the ingredients as potatoes, canola oil and salt. 

Such simple ingredients!  You wouldn’t call the chips healthy - because chips are never described as such - but the list makes me feel good about feeding them to my children who, by the way, love them.  I know what’s in them and I understand each ingredient.  No long words, nothing ‘hydrogenated’ and no words that end in ‘ate’ or ‘ium’ or ‘ide’.

But then I went further and looked at the flavored chips:  barbeque, sour cream & onion, all dressed, etc.  The ingredient list was shockingly long and confusing.  Obviously, I put a pack of the plain chips in our shopping cart rather than the flavored ones!

When I got home, I tried looking up the ingredient list online but found that although the company had a website, the ingredients were not listed there.  I wanted to be able to post the list here but obviously I can’t remember the details from the packet I read earlier today.

So instead, I will quote from the President’s Choice website, which is the brand from the Independant store.  For the record, when we’re not shopping at Food Basic, you’ll find us at the Independant and we regularly buy their store brand as well.  Their website is much more comprehensive and includes ingredients.

Here goes:

PC Thin Ripple Cut Potato Chips - Regular Flavour
Ingredients:  Specially selected potatoes, vegetable oil, salt.

Sounds good!  But then there’s…

PC General Tao Chicken Chips
Ingredients:  Potatoes, vegetable oil (canola and/or sunflower and/or corn), seasoning [sugar, brown sugar, hydrolyzed soy and corn protein, fancy molasses, spices (including chilies, ginger), salt, maltodextrin, monosodium glutamate, onion powder, gum arabic, natural flavour (including garlic), caramel colour, sunflower oil, citric acid, glucose solids, disodium inosinate, disodium guanylate, silicon dioxide], salt.

Oh my.  What does it all mean? 

OK. How about organic chips?

PC Organics Regular Cut Potato Chips - Barbecue
Ingredients:  Organic potatoes, organic sunflower oil, seasoning (organic sugar, organic tomato powder, sea salt, organic corn flour, organic onion powder, organic garlic powder, organic spices, natural mesquite flavour, citric acid, silicon dioxide), sea salt

And, everybody’s favorite:

PC Kettle Potato Chips - Cheddar Cheese & Green Onion
Ingredients:  Potatoes, vegetable oil (sunflower and/or safflower and/or canola), seasoning [modified milk ingredients, corn maltodextrin, green onion powder, sea salt, sugar, cheddar and enzyme modified cheddar cheese solids (contain soy lecithin, hydrogenated soybean oil), yeast extract, sunflower oil, spice, garlic powder, citric acid, disodium phosphate, corn syrup solids, flavour], sea salt.

Can you understand why I chose to stick to Regular chips?

Oprah had Dr Oz on again today.  He seems to be a real hit with the audience and obviously people are sucking in all the health information that’s he’s providing.  We live in a time when everything apparently causes cancer so a little bit of truth from Dr Oz is refreshing.

Dr Oz and Oprah talked about all kinds of things and eventually invited the viewers to check out Oprah’s website to download the test that the studio audience were doing.  I went to the site and came across the Staying Young Aging Quiz.  That, in turn, lead me to the Real Age website, which also seems to involve Dr Oz.

The quiz runs through questions about your health, family history, food intake, vitamin intake, exercise regime, sex life, stress levels, etc, and then provides you with your real age.  This will most likely not match your calendar age, but it hopefully won’t be too far off.

My calendar age is 35 years, as I turn 35 in about a week.  Interestingly, as I do very little exercise, my real age is 37.2 years.  Not bad!  Much better, in fact, than I imagined.  Obviously though, the test has pointed out several areas where I definitely need to make improvements.

I’ve sent the link to Hubby so we’ll see how he does.

How did you do?