I was procrastinating for a few hours and doing what I usually do which is to say, rifle through every blog, forum and online newspaper my fingertips can recall. Self-pay jails (at $82 a night), another bombing in Pakistan, the life and times of Tamara de Lempicka, but it was the following topic in coolrunning that sent me off on a whirlwind tour of sites not usually traveled (by me anyway): Better Peanut Butter?. Thus began my quest to discover more about PB2– an “all-natural” powdered peanut butter with a hefty reduction in fat and calories that has everyone from chowhound to hungrygirl to coolrunning clamoring for more. Not one dissenting opinion which I have to admit made me think twice about taking a second spoonful of my own freshly ground insanely decadent honey roasted peanut butter. Apparently it’s at least 90% if not 100% as good as the real thing.
The company, Bell Plantation, apparently has its roots in agricultural research and evolved into developing peanut-based products to help deal with the 1.2 billion pound peanut crop surplus and help out America’s peanut farmers. An opportunity to satisfy both my pb&j cravings and support the farming economy at 54 kcals per serving? My JetBlue Amex in hand, I was ready to plunge into the powdered PB pool and join the others. I happily registered as a new user and started to fill my cart.
At some point, I stopped to look through the rest of the site– I was curious to know how this masterful peanut butter was really created (to be honest I wondered, if peanut butter could be made to taste like peanut butter with 1/3 the calories and fat, then why hasn’t Skippy or Jif been able to make this leap? Was there some special process or were they just willing to sacrifice a whole lot more peanuts to help drain that surplus.).
Funny thing is: aside from the nutrition panel, I couldn’t find an ingredient list or even a rudimentary description of the peanut butter making process. Even in their FAQs, there was no comment on this. Rummaging through a few other blogs and other media, I found some reference to this being an ‘all-natural’ product, slow roasted and pressed to remove the fat, but from a third party source and it wasn’t even clear where she got her information.
I started to think too much I think. I suppose the feat of creating a low-cal peanut butter that tastes as good as the real-thing is enough. I should be happy about that. But I guess I’m suspicious by nature– if this was just a matter of squeezing the fat out, then why can’t Kraft (Proctor & Gamble) do it just as well?. It began to annoy me that a company that was selling a product to a potentially more nutrition (or at least calorie) aware consumer base would have addressed this issue a little more handily than with a picture that looks it was taken from the 1950’s archives.
I’m making a big deal out of something altogether trivial– part of this is because I am in fact, procrastating- the other part is because well, I’m irritated that most people just seem happy to have found the ‘no-pudge’ of peanut butters. The only problem is, I can’t think of any product for which there is a low-cal variant that tastes like the real thing.
Filed under: Life in general
The subject of bowel movements comes up more often in conversation than I’d like to admit. I’m still not sure if this is a reflection of my own personal obsession or if the world is in fact, fastidiously fixated on this most fickle of bodily functions. It wouldn’t be fair to speak of others’ toilet tribulations without first introducing my own first. This of course begs the question as to why I feel this would be an interesting subject to anyone but myself, but fortunately this is my memoir.
I just pooed (pood?). For those who know me as a daily poo-er (which is to say most of my friends and acquaintances) would perhaps not think this is such a feat, but I just pooed <i>at night</i>. I am a by-the-book-AM-caffeine-responsive kind of gal and this deviation from my ritual is a little off-putting. I wondered, for example, as I was sitting patiently on the toilet flipping through the garden furniture section of the latest West Elm catalog what impact this might have on my poop volume in the morning. Is this indeed some surplus I gathered from the day– or will this negatively impact how satisfied I feel tomorrow morning?
I suspect that this unusual evening event was brought on by a patient I saw this evening. She was a 64 year old woman with irritable bowel syndrome who was recently taken off her zelnorm (voluntarily taken off the market Novartis because reports of increased heart disease in people taking this drug) and subsequently became quite constipated– for five days, she did not poo. The radiologist reported that he hasn’t seen that much stool on an x-ray in a v.e.r.y. long time. She was already eating bran buds for breakfast <i>and</i> lunch, taking colace, on miralax and had tried sennakot and dulcolax, both of which made her sick.
And I thought I had poo problems.
Filed under: NYC apartment search
I thought I found it. My new home. A converted junior 1 bedroom in the middle of the World with a gigantic rooftop terrace. The price at $535K is a little steep, particularly with a monthly maintenance of $1364, but for a sunny pseudo one bedroom with a large terrace in the center of the center of the World, it would surely be worth the countless nights eating ramen and the ensuing high blood pressure, obesity and worse even, dermatologic nightmare that would certainly result I asked my sister to check out the openhouse tonight– the initial impression was quite nice she reports. Doorman, clean, nicely renovated, incredibly large terrace that easily play host to many a rooftop chill. Then, there it was. The incessant whiirrrrring of the central AC for the building not located 10 feet from the terrace. A sound perhaps only slightly less intense than the one a 747 jet might make.
I suppose this means back to the drawing board.
Filed under: Notable purchases
Water from the ceiling dripped onto my old iBook last week. I held out as long as I could, but now I’m the proud owner of a new MacBook, which as always, I promise to keep clean and tidy.
Filed under: Life in general
I had one of those days when nothing that comes out of your mouth is as you intend and everything you hear grates on the friable, burned out nerve endings barely keeping your sanity from unraveling I would say on a scale of 1 to 10, today was a 3– just to give you some perspective, getting hit by a car would rate the day as a 2 (being terminated by said car wreck would obviously make the day a 1). Thoughts swim in eddies in my already tempestuous mind. I’ve got whirling dervishes from too many old thoughts, new thoughts, bad moods and a rare glimpse of what life could be like if I were a simple dish washer. Though I suppose if I were a dishwasher, I’m sure I would discover yet another set of worries and other existential crises with which I could sully this wonderful blog of mine.
It’s often days later when I realize that I’m about to get my period and all this makes perfect sense in hindsight. I never thought of myself as a moody sort of person, but I think I close look at the mirror over a 30 day period would prove the power of self denial. I simply become an intolerant frump. Must stop. Smell roses. Breathe.
I can’t lie. Recently I’ve begun to find life more overwhelming. The enormity of the next 60 years (let’s be realistic– my HDL exceeds my LDL by 30 points, unless I am hit by a car, I think I’ll be good for the long ride) lies ahead of me. What will I do in al that time– even worse, what happens if after 30 of those years, I feel the same way as I do now? This is not me worrying about the root cause of my existence (I figure at bottom, I’m like the rest of the humans– here to procreate, advance the race, eat cheetos limons until my tears run orange), but me figuring out how to not waste my time here. I’m slowly beginning to realize the value of children besides the fact they’re quite cuddly. Children give us a sense of purpose in life, a lineage to trace our past and to reinforce our existence into the future, even when we physically cease to exist. No matter how hard I try to convince myself that my work is important, I keep thinking that the relative contribution to our race is miniscule compared to having children, which already I see as quite minimal. Of course, this perspective makes it difficult at once to find value in work for work’s sake– I’d rather have children then.
I’m rambling. I suppose part of it is a reflection of my internal pandemonium, part of it is because I’m a little sleepy.
Take care all. And remember, there really is no reason at all for you to be reading my blog.
