Category: Random

making fast food fancy

I’ve written before how the food you get at fast food restaurants often doesn’t resemble how it looks in the TV commercials.  Now there’s a website devoted to taking meals from fast food restaurants and making them looking like meals from fancy restaurants.  Their motto is: “Yeah, it’s still bad for you — but see how good it can look!”

Here’s an example, where they took a Wendy’s Baconator combo meal and made it unrecognizable.  Afterwards it looks like one of those dishes from a very expensive restaurant, where they don’t give you enough food and you don’t know what the food is.

Wendy's Napoleon

If you’re curious how they did that, here’s the link to the page explaining exactly what they did.

I have to admit, it does look fancy.   But it doesn’t look appetizing.   I would be hesitant to eat that based on appearance (except for the bacon crumbles).   Try to get your mind to reconcile the fact that the pile of mush in the middle is the actual ingredients from a double cheeseburger.  It just doesn’t want to compute…  And not only does it fail the logic component of my brain, but it makes me kinda sad…  That’s no way to treat a burger!

a new way to chart weight gain & loss

We recently had another Buffet o’ Blog staff meeting at Larry’s Pizza (which seems to be one of our primary meeting places, for good reason).  One member of the R&D (Research & Development) department came up with a new niche product.  Not everyone will want this new invention, but we could see a few places buying one.

The idea is a toilet that has a scale built into the seat.  It’s not for taking your overall weight, but for telling you how many pounds you lost.  There would be a digital screen that would display this info.  It would also have a top 10 list of high scores.  This would be great for fraternity houses and certain all-you-can-eat restaurants.  (FYI, this idea came after we were all through eating, though I’m not sure if we could even be grossed out in that situation — we were quite focused on consuming large quantities of pizza.)

Another related idea would be to have scales in the chairs at all-you-can-eat restaurants, so it tracks just how many pounds of food you just ate.  I think that would prove popular, too, at certain locales.

limit of 250 sandwiches at Arby’s

Arby’s has a new special where you can get 5 regular roast beef sandwiches for $5.  They’ve done such things before.  But this time, there’s a catch — there is a limit of 250.  That’s not a typo.  Here’s how the ad looks:

Arby's 5-for-5 deal, limit 250

Why is there a limit of 250 sandwiches?  Do they have a recurring problem of people ordering more than 250 sandwiches at a time?  I don’t get it…

Since they have that limit on there, I reckon if you wanted more you’d have to go through the drive-thru again, perhaps having the driver and passenger change seats.  But I don’t recommend that, because having 250+ roast beef sandwiches in your car might cause it to permanently smell like roast beef.  Can you imagine how full your vehicle would be if you put 250 sandwiches in there?  That would take up a lot of space!

And of course you can’t eat from Arby’s without also having their infamous curly fries!  You need to have those in proportion with your sandwiches, because they go great together.  So then you’d have somewhere near 250 packages of curly fries.  That many fries in one spot might cause the smell to waft a few blocks.  Then everyone within that radius would be craving Arby’s, and the store would be overrun with business.  Perhaps that’s their plan.  It makes me want to go there…

I’d like to see someone order 250 sandwiches, to see how the workers there respond, and to see how full the customer’s vehicle would be.  So if anyone out there does any “research” into that, let me know, and send a picture of 250 sandwiches…

what is locust bean gum?

Do you ever look at the ingredients of the pre-prepared foods you eat?   Occasionally I do.  And thus begins our story.

My wife recently acquired a coupon for a free package of Starbucks’ caramel macchiato ice cream.  It’s a mix of vanilla and coffee ice cream, with swirls of caramel.  I don’t care much for coffee, but she liked it.   We happened to look at the ingredients on the back of the label, and noticed that the last ingredient was “locust bean gum”.  I don’t know what that is, but the name of it doesn’t sound appealing.

Normally the lower-tier ingredients have scientific names, such that the average consumer has no idea what it stands for (and is too lazy to bother looking it up).   But with a name like locust bean gum, that just opens the door to a lot of questions.  Let’s start with, “What does that mean?”  Is it locusts ground up into beans, or do the locusts eat the beans and then “extract” the gum (a la a certain coffee), or is it locust-flavored beans?  I have no idea, apart from rampant speculation.

So it’s time for some research*.  I found that it’s a galactomannan consisting of a B-D-mannopyranose backbone with 6 branchpoints linked to a-D-galactose.  A detailed explanation of what that means is WAY beyond the scope of this article.  However, a quick summary in English is that it retards ice crystal growth by forming a structured gel at a solid/liquid interface.  I suppose it has to do with the texture and viscosity of the ice cream.  But that still doesn’t answer where it comes from.

But I’m not sure I want to know…  Sometimes it’s good to not ask too many questions.  Just enjoy your ice cream…  🙂

* My research consisted of a single search and looking at one link on the first page of results.