four course meal

The Taylor Farms bagged salad at Sam's Club is normally excellent. Our family goes through salad fast enough that I can buy two three-pound bags and a bag of the broccoli I like without any fear of it going bad before we use it. I was surprised and disappointed by the two bags of salad that I bought on Monday. As usual, I rifled through the packages looking for the ones with the most distant expiration date. I found several that expire on July 24, which was, at the time, over a week away. The label promises that the greens are "triple hydrowashed." Well, mine may have been hydrowashed but they were not "hydrodryed." The salad in both bags was soaking wet, which caused the lettuce to wilt. Being too cheap to throw it out, I ate the wilted salad after using a paper towel to soak up the excess water. For my next shopping trip, I went across the parking lot to buy a three-pound bag of Fresh Express salad at Wal-Mart. At that store the broccoli comes on the stalk instead of in a BreatheWay bag. When I got home, I cut a little bit off the end of the stalks and put them in a container of water like you would do with fresh flowers, except that I put the container in the fridge. Another time I used the same technique to revitalize some broccoli that had started to get rubbery. We slice up the stalk and add it to our salads.

Speaking of things at Sam's, I thought the original selling point of Pringles was that they wouldn't get broken in their cans. I wonder why they now put them in bags.



Can raw scallops really get cooked by sitting in lime juice? I saw Ingrid Hoffman make some ceviche on a talk show recently. I found the actual video clip of it on her website. Curious about the process she described, I looked it up. A Washington Post article explained that the acid in the lime juice has the same effect on the meat as cooking.

For dessert, I recommend a faux ice cream sandwich. It was a year ago when my daughter suggested we try making root beer floats with frozen fat free whipped topping. At the time, I found a website with the idea for placing frozen whipped topping between two graham crackers. I didn't get around to trying it until a couple of weeks ago. It was just okay until I figured out that I should use a chocolate graham cracker and that I should leave the sandwich in the freezer for a week. The graham cracker softens up and takes on the texture of a real ice cream sandwich. I grabbed a handful of Ziploc bags and made a batch to share with the family. I used one whole container of frozen fat free whipped topping and one of the three sleeves of graham crackers in the box.