Diet foods that don't suck, round two

For your consideration: a couple more diet foods that have passed my most severe anti-suck scrutiny:

• Trader Joe's non-stick cooking sprays--aaaaah, those damned cooking sprays. In theory they should be a boon to anyone wanting to moderate their fat intake, but the reality seldom lives up to the theory. The leading brands blandish promises of real butter-like flavor or real olive-oil content ... but they also deliver a dose of really-icky-tasting artificial flavor, as well as assorted artificial preservatives and additives. Not particularly what you'd call good eats.
        Trader Joe's non-stick sprays, however, actually taste neutral to decent. The can of their canola oil spray I currently have in the house contains (in addition to the propellant) only "100% expeller pressed" canola oil, soy lecithin (the soybean's version of a nutrient found in all living cells), and water.
        I really like using cooking sprays, as they allow me to reserve my daily allotment of fat for more condiment-type uses--like a drizzle of extra virgin olive oil on a salad, or a dollop of sesame oil in an Asian dish. So thank you once again, Trader Joe's, for supplying a product that I can actually use.
     
• Orville Redenbacher's Smart Pop Microwave Kettle Corn -- I swore I'd never get into microwave popcorn, as a result of one too many run-ins with the dreaded Microwave Popcorn reek. In fact, most nuke-corn seems to suffer from similar issues to most non-stick cooking sprays--too many artificial ingredients with sketchy flavor and odor profiles. And after you survived the stink, the actual popcorn wasn't much to write home about. One might as well be eating those styrofoam peanuts used for to cushion breakables for shipping.
        So imagine my surprise when I nuked up some of Orville's "light" kettle corn, and not only did not get reeked out, but found the stuff to be damn tasty! Mind you, this is hardly an additive-free product; the sweet component of the kettle corn, for one thing, is Splenda/sucralose. However, its use is so subtle that I could detect no tell-tale artificial-sweetener aftertaste, and it's balanced nicely against an equally subtle saltiness. And this stuff is also low-fat too. So for those of you who have to wean yourself off a volume-snacking jones, this stuff could be a real life-saver.

Stay tuned for the next thrilling installment of this series! :-)

P.S. Sharp-eyed readers of this blog may have already noticed that formatty things on the webpage are continuing to shift around a little. I'm essentially "rearranging the furniture" this way and that as I keep trying out software features to see how I like them. Eventually, one of these rearrangements will consist of re-doing all the blog categories so that, for instance, there's a whole section for these Diet Foods That Don't Suck entries--but until then, they'll always have the "Diet Foods That Don't Suck" phrase in their title. Enjoy!

Comments

[Anne]

Hi Ellen,

Cooking sprays may have low quality oils in them, or other additives you don't like the taste of, but I promise you, they DON'T have chlorofluorocarbons in them. Those have been banned in aerosols since the early '80s. So, you may have a problem w/ taste, but I promise you can use your Pam (or TJ's equivalent) without fear of damaging the ozone layer. :-)

Anne

[Kirk]

Hi Ellen - I know you might think that this is strange coming from me. But I use a "oil-mister", i.e. like sold by misto - much better then the garbage that is Pam, or even the stuff sold by TJ....

[mizducky]

Ann: Oh dear--what a peculiar brain fart that was. Now that I read your comment, I do recall hearing a ways back that CFCs had been banned--but somehow when I went to write this post, that fact slipped my mind. That'll teach me to throw a post together real quick without full fact-checking! I shall correct the post accordingly--thanks for saving me from looking like an idiot on the Net. :-)

Kirk: I had heard about those Misto things, but had not pursued them because I had also heard that they had problems with clogging up. I'm assuming if you're recommending the gizmo, you haven't had any problems with it--what brand did you get?

[Kirk]

Hi Ellen - Never had a problem with "clogging" but, it will break if you keep over-pumping it all the time - but overall it's alot cheaper then all that Pam stuff - and no chemicals....