al dente
Now, I know I have a few readers who cook, and all I can say is, My dears, you are NOT adequately taking care of America while I’m gone.
On Japanese cable, they tend to air US shows with almost no commercials; that means that a show that’s an hour long at home has fifteen minutes of dead space at the end, and on some channels, they fill up the time with kitchen gadget commercials.
So it is that I’ve just spent several minutes laughing my ass off at a commercial for something called the Pasta Express. I couldn’t believe it wasn’t a parody. Are people seriously that easily gulled? You pour boiling water into a plastic tube full of pasta and let it sit for fifteen minutes? We’re making wallpaper paste, I assume? The commercial is beyond ridiculous, purporting to save the hapless householder from such difficulties as aiming the pot so that the pasta lands in the collander and…uh, I’m not sure what else the point is. You can’t possibly be shortening the cooking time by not having a heat source keeping the water boiling. And even the commercial makes the pasta look clumpy when it comes out of the tube.
But you can apparently use the thing to make hotdogs or boiled vegetables and other things that are difficult to make with an ordinary stockpot and stovetop, too. Yet another advance in modern life.
No one’s been minding the stove er, store.
Good grief, John, those are two of the scariest links I’ve seen in a good, long time.
Yeesh.
Heh, heh, heh. Western Civ is alive and well, ain’t it buddy?
I got the first one off of Rachel at Tinkerty Tonk.
Most of the time we eat Chinese, which takes 30 mintues to prepare if you are as good a cook as my wife. Any couple who has decided to have kids and then has both patrents so busy that pizza occurs almost nightly on the menu has seriously skewed priorities, in my book.
Yeah. It’s hard to be too harsh on people who didn’t learn from their families how to run a household; at least those who are taking the cooking classes are addressing the issue. I just…I mean, my parents taught me to scramble eggs and make pancakes and light the oven (we had a seriously ancient stove with no pilot light) when I was in elementary school. My mother was like, “You are not going to make your wife wonder why I didn’t teach you to take care of yourself.” We all know that that particular worry was needless, but still. My friends all knew how to fend for themselves in the kitchen when we were in college, too, and many of them had grown up with both parents working.
My mom took somewhat the same attitude. (I’m a week or two older than you, so it’s gratifying to learn the attitude survived another generation.)
But you should realize that just because it’s being advertised doesn’t mean anybody’s buying it. A bottom feeder opportunist can make a quite comfortable living from “selling” commercial failures.
That’s why they’re called bottom feeders.
(Avoiding the STRONG temptation to add “Dearie” at the end there.)
M