SusteNation

A munchy crunchy snack

For my second installment of "organic snack foods I had to try", I'll be talking about the Sensible Foods Organic Sweet Corn.  I had mixed feelings about this one at first.  I love fresh corn on the cob, but was skeptical that a dehydrated corn snack could come close to that experience.  I was right and wrong.  It doesn't match the experience of fresh corn on the cob, that hot juicy texture isn't there.  The pleasant surprise, though, was that it was still delicious!  It had all of that good sweet corn flavor, with just a hint of salt, and it had a great crunchy texture, not at all chewy or tough like some dehydrated food snacks.  Before I knew it I had finished the whole bag and was wishing I had another.  Score this one in the category of snacks I'll be ordering more of, and Sensible Foods is probably worth further investigation, perhaps the Organic Apple Harvest!

Pictures available here.

Hell's Kitchen Exeunt

As I said in my last post about this show, I was intrigued enough that I had to watch the finale.  I think the episode aired on Monday (yes, I watched it on TiVO), so I'll go ahead and ruin it for you all!

I didn't watch the show much, so I'm basing a lot of this on the extremely long recap portion of the finale, but it seems like they did what most reality shows do these days in their casting.  They picked a bunch of people who made for "entertaining" TV instead of people who would have been good competition for the job.  I mean is it really surprising that the experience Sous Chef beat out a fishmonger and pizza chef?  Put a bunch of highly qualified people together and let them battle it out, that would be some real action.  There were some hints of brilliance in the challenges they put these people up against, and I must admit a guilty pleasure in watching Chef Ramsey berate people mercilessly, but in the end I could have picked the winner and most of the final 5 by simply reading the bios.  Take a cue from sports, people don't want to watch a blowout.

I didn't realize who Gordon Ramsey was when I caught my first episode of the show, and now that I know how highly regarded he is, I'm suprised he let this get dragged down the path of Donald Trump's Apprentice.  I guess it must have been a lot of money.

Hell's Kitchen Challenge

I certainly haven’t been watching it regularly, but I happened across an episode of Hell’s Kitchen last night, and found that one of the challenges truly captivated me. Chef Ramsey, the show’s master of profanity, prepared a dish, and each of the contestants had 20 minutes to try to recreate the dish simply from tasting it, with absolutely no description of what was in it. I can’t imagine trying to do something like that, and I was amazed that one of the contestants actually got it dead on. Of course there were later accusations of cheating (it’s FOX reality TV), but I still thought it was very cool. Enough so that maybe I’ll watch the big finale next Monday.

My one big question in watching the show was, do the diners at the restaurant hear all the yelling and swearing that’s going on in the kitchen? From what I could see, it seems pretty open, but everyone just sits there eating their meals like nothing out of the ordinary is going on.