Outsmart Proctor and Gamble (They're betting that you won't...)

The "Fill" Line Has To Be Around Here SomewhereHave you ever wondered why the measurement cups for laundry detergent are so impossible to read?

Consider that the outside of your box, carton, or bottle is stamped in bright colors in a giant font. Yet the cup they send you to measure out the high performance serum (or powder) is barely legible.  

This is not an accident.

Companies are very, very savvy about their packaging. They spend thousands of dollars testing their packaging with focus groups. No detail is too small--the way the cartons fit into the shipping case, the way the cases stack onto the forklift... there are production engineers and consultants who optimize every step of the operation. Even the slant of the letters on the package is designed to convey a mood and message to the consumer before she ever touches the handle.

So why is the measuring cup so bad? Specifically, why is the "fill line" near the bottom of the cup, andIt shouldn't be this hard. difficult to read? Why is the cup so much bigger than necessary?

Think about it: because the error is always in their favor. The #1 fill line is tough to find. If you add just a 1/4 inch more detergent, that's 33% too much liquid or 40% too much powder. And evidence suggests that Americans use too much detergent most of the time. The #1 fill line is enough for all but the dirtiest loads, even in a full-sized washer.

Too much detergent is bad for your bank balance and bad for the environment. And the manufacturer knows this. The past several years have seen laundry detergents become much more concentrated. This is potentially good environmental policy- why ship more water (as an ingredient in detergent) around the nation? It's true that concentrated products fit more tightly into delivery trucks, which takes diesel-belching vehicles off the road.

But it only works if you don't use 33% to 40% more detergent than necessary. Either way, the company gets "green" press for concentrating their products. So don't let them chuckle all the way to the bank.

Take a sharpie marker and blacken the fill line on the outside of your measurer. Or better yet--substitute an equivalent (like a 1/4 cup measurer--check yours) for the poor one the company gave you. This took me five seconds.

Actually, it really took me 39 years and five seconds, but at least I'm getting smarter.

How to Use 75 pounds of Potatoes

My husband likes to grow things. This summer, he decided to try potatoes. But this is a man who never does anything half way. So now we have to figure out how to store the lion's share of the 75 pounds he grew. And they're fingerlings, which don't store as well as bigger varieties.

We've already had them mashed, steamed and chilled in salad, roasted and baked. Tonight I was making a simple pan roasted chicken dish, and usually would add a couscous or rice on the side. But this time I made a warm potato salad with bacon and peas. And it was completely a cinch. This is one recipe I'll be repeating. (And repeating. And repeating.)

1/4 pound bacon

2 pounds fingerling potatoes, scrubbed

1 cup frozen peas

2 tablespoons white balsamic or white wine vinegar

olive oil (optional)

1 tablespoon minced fresh chives

1 tablespoon minced fresh parsley

Set a pot of water to boil and preheat the oven to 425. Boil the potatoes for 22 - 30 minutes until tender. Meanwhile, arrange the bacon on a baking sheet or in a frying pan. Cook the bacon in the oven until brown, 10-20 minutes depending on thickness. 

Remove the bacon from the pan and set aside. Toss the peas into the hot pan and roast for a minutes or two until hot. Remove the peas into a large heat-proof bowl.

Drain the potatoes and set aside. Carefully cut each one into 1" chunks and add to the peas. Potato skins which begin to peel off can be discarded. If the skins cling tightly, leave them on. (Many of the nutrients are found in potato skins.)

Then, add 1-2 tablespoons of bacon fat or of olive oil to the bowl and toss. Drizzle the vinegar over the potatoes as well.  Mince the bacon, add the bacon and herbs to the salad. Toss once more and serve warm.

Easy Needle Felted Food

Every fall I make a number of handmade items to be sold at our school's winter fair. The proceeds benefit the school's financial aid reserves. My children always get the itch to play with wool too. So this year, for the first time, I let them try needle felting. I was sure my kindergartener would stab himself with the felting needle but he didn't. Neither did my 8 year-old.

Guess who stabbed herself three times? Yes, that would be me. And I chose a difficult project and it isn't close to being finished. Kids: 2. Me: 0.

My younger son chose the apple, which is a bit simpler to make than the pumpkin. Both begin as balls. Each one takes some shaping attention on the top and bottom. The pumpkin gets felted ridges, too.

To my surprise, it was my younger child who had more patience for felting, not the older. While his older brother was content to call the work done, my 6yo was content to sit and stab the apple for as long as it took to get the shape just right.

Who knew?

Birds Eye's Wonder of Vegetables Campaign

This image was part of the Birdseye email. But I've never seen anything like this in a frozen package...One of the fun things about being a food writer is receiving PR product pitches in my inbox. Today's gem comes from the Birds Eye company, the national maker of frozen vegetables.  PR pitches are nothing if not gushy, and this one is no exception.

"Birds Eye®, a portfolio brand of Pinnacle Foods Group, is on a mission to help America “Discover the Wonder of Vegetables™” and announced today the launch of its new campaign with a kick-off event in New York City’s Union Square, featuring an unexpected vegetable farm in the snow."

For people like me, who have angsty thoughts about nutrition every five minutes, this email is torture to read. There's so much about it that's so right, and yet it manages to miss its mark in several painful ways.

I commend Birds Eye for (further down the page) making a donation of "up to" 250,000 pounds of vegetables to Share our Strength's No Kid Hungry campaign. ("Up to?") And more importantly, I understand the temptation to resort to elaborate marketing gimmicks.  In my novel, the main character struggles mightily with the difficulty of marketing plain old vegetables. When you don't believe in magical nutritional additives, the ads are harder to write, aren't they? Julia bewails it like this:

"Because fresh broccoli is never new and improved, never reformulated." 

But when I take a closer look at Birds Eye and its parent Pinnacle Food Group, my sympathy evaporates. Pinnacle is the home of products like Armour Canned Meats (the cheapest kind of factory meat, with loads of salt for shelf stability) and Log Cabin Sugar Free Syrup (Water, sorbitol, maltitol, nutrasweet, cellulose gum, natural & artifical flavors, salt, sodium hexmetaphosphate, sodium benzoate, sorbic acid, sucralose... YUM!)  

Even the Birds Eye vegetable brand itself has some explaining to do. Birds Eye Voila Cheesy Ranch Chicken, a pasta dish, has 760 mg of sodium in a cup-and-a-half serving.  Yet they claim they're "on a mission to help America 'Discover the Wonder of Vegetables.™'" Really?

Beware of smoke and mirrors. And faux snowy vegetable farms in Union Square.

The Freedom To Do Things Badly

Today I split some wood. I'm not very good at it, but I've always loved doing things that are not my forte. Example: pottery classes at the 92nd Street Y. I stink at pottery. But the (very few) objects I made during my ten week sessions there are among my very favorite objects in the world.

At Least They Hold Liquid

At the risk of being a hopeless dabbler, I persist. I want my kids so witness both the attempt and the imperfection. I want to convey to them this: do it anyway. Split wood, even if your daddy can split four times as much in half the time. Make ceramic sake cups even if they're lopsided and the glaze runs. Frost lopsided birthday cakes with glee, and sketch horses that look like anteaters. Do these things for the sake of feeling the maul in your hands, and the crack as the log finally gives.

Even if you don't ever manage to get in touch with your inner woodsman, it will only be that much easier to try the next thing. 

Dear Pottery Barn Kids

I'm a letter writer. I always have been. If I enjoy a book, I seek out the author and tell her so. If I have a great experience at your restaurant, you may receive a dainty note from moi. But if you're a big corporation, and I sense a lack of proper judgment on your part, you'll almost certainly hear about it. From me. I'm fierce. (Just ask me.)

So here's my latest, and its unsatisfying paste-in-our-boilerplate-language answer.

Dear Pottery Barn Kids (sent 4/7/11 via a Web Comment Form)

You make the cutest things in the world.  In fact, I don’t even leave your catalog lying about in my home, lest my own children should discover the existence of an entire custom designed world just their size.  They will have to make do with a few choice selections from your pages.  We are currently enjoying some very nice chambray sheets from PBK.

I am writing with a question.  I noticed that you switched to a shower curtain liner made from EVA, which is supposed to be much healthier than ordinary vinyl.  That’s a good idea.  But now I have to wonder why you still have wall decals—lots of them—made of vinyl.  If it’s such a good idea to change that nasty vinyl bath curtain to EVA… wouldn’t it be an equally bad idea to put vinyl in a child’s bedroom?
Thanks,
Sarah

I received this response two days later:

Hello Sarah,

Thank you for contacting Pottery Barn Kids.

Thank you for your recent inquiry. You should know that Pottery BarnKids requires all of its vendors to comply with all Federal, State and applicable industry standards for product safety, including product materials and finishes. Specific product information, including the names of our vendors, is proprietary and therefore cannot be released. However, we can assure you that our products have been tested and will perform up to your expectations. In addition to providing product warnings where appropriate, we specifically identify allergens known to affect a measurable part of the population with a specific condition, such as allergies to natural rubber latex. For example, floor rugs containing natural rubber latex identify its presence on the label to allow our customers to make an informed purchasing decision.

We appreciate your interest in our products and hope that this clarifies your concerns. 

Kind regards,

June Homesley, Pottery Barn Kids Customer Service

It's really just a pat on the head, isn't it? Of course I understand why. The world hasn't gotten the message about vinyl yet, and how its proliferation could poison our children's groundwater for decades to come. Some believe that its biggest risk is in manufacture--that dioxins escape the factory and poison people and edible fish.

It's bad stuff, but it's in our homes (plumbing) our kitchens (cabinetry liners) and elsewhere. I don't have a vinyl shower curtain or vinyl siding on my house, but I do have a vinyl swimming pool liner. And I feel a little bad about it every time I look upon it's wavy faux-tile blueness.

But let's keep it out of the nursery, Pottery Barn. If not there, then where?

Yay, Parasites!

My view of parasites is largely informed by letters home from my children's school. "Health notice" in the subject line of an email from the school is the equivalent of unexploded ordinance, right? While I'll probably still dread any mention of lice even after today, I've discovered that there is such thing as a good parasite.

See this guy? This giant green Tomato Hornworm (cool people also know it as the Manduca quinquemaculata) was attempting to chow its way through our Big Girls and Brandywines. Now, see all those white things on it? I thought they were eggs.

They're not eggs, they're the larvae of my new best friend, the Braconid wasp. The wasp larvae are eating the hornworms, helping to guarantee a new phalanx of soldier's for next year's fight, too. Go, little white squirmy parasites!

Dream Job Alert: King Arthur Flour

I recently had the pleasure to tour the King Arthur Flour mothership, in Norwich, Vermont.  This wonderful place is just a few miles from my home, but though I write professionally about food it had never occurred to me to knock on their door and ask for a tour.

Enter Erika Penzer Kerekes, food blogger from Southern California.  Not only does Erika write the scrumptious blog In Erika's Kitchen, but she is the warmest, most curious, ebulliant person I have met in months. It was Erika, on her annual trek through Vermont foodie sites, who had the good sense to call the PR people at King Arthur and ask for a tour.

I was more than happy to tag along.  And now I wish they'd adopt me. Where else would you be asked to please eat a brownie, because it's research?

King Arthur Flour makes the sort of high quality products that serious bakers request by name.  I can't call myself a serious baker (perhaps because I can't call myself serious) but I'm partial to several of their products.  Their 100% Organic All Purpose Flour, their Whole Wheat Pastry Flour and their White Whole Wheat Flour are always in my kitchen.  

The King Arthur mothership in Norwich, Vermont is many things to many people: a kick-ass bakery and coffee shop, a vendor of sandwiches and sweets, a world class baking education center and a catalog company for baking ingredients and gear. That special salt just the right grain for dusting hot pretzels? They have it. Lemon Juice Powder to make your lemon bars sing? Check. Professional dough rising buckets, tart pans, square ramekins? Check, check, check.

Our tour guide, the wonderful Terri Rosenstock, public relations coordinator, recently moved from 1000 miles away to take the job at King Arthur, and it's not hard to understand why.  What other workplace wants you to test brownies, and then brings pilates classes right into the company HQ in order to keep employees fit?

King Arthur is absolutely unique in that respect, and in so many others. I'm proud to live within waddling distance from their headquarters.

(P.S. This post was not compensated in any way, even if it sounds as though it was. I'm smitten. Can you tell?)