>>>Besides saving a ton of money on food, I've lost 20% of my weight and can walk 18 holes without huffing and puffing as I used to. (the golf is still ugly at times, but I'm taking one thing at a time!)
>>>We're getting fresh berries here in NJ now and soon we'll be getting some great local veggies. No need for junk with that kind of food around.
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>>Was there ever a need for junk food?
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>>IMO, junk food doesn't exist. There's food, and there's junk.
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>Where does ice cream fall on your scale? What about cookies? In both cases, does making it yourself change where you put it?
Ice cream is the industrial stuff to which I indulge occasionally :). I even liked the taste of the american varieties - not as much when after a week in the fridge the half-dried contents of the quart bucket start looking suspiciously similar to collagen. Also, the announcement that "nanoparticles will make ice cream more 'creamy' and 'tasty' " (inner quotation marks kept as they were in the source - whatever they meant) doesn't inspire much confindence.
My wife has found a few recipes, and while we don't mean to infringe on intellectual property of Maggie Thatcher (who got rich on the recipe of how to pump lots of air into ice cream), we'll start making our own this summer.
As for cookies - sure, but lots of fruit in it, no whipped cream (that's also suspect and I have trouble digesting it), and always only about half the sugar than recipe said. Sugar hides the true taste of the fruit, anyway. Chocolate is fine, too :). I don't know what was it - the emulsifiers, the cocoa butter substitute (one of those Ennn chemicals) or too much sugar, but I couldn't eat anything Hershey's. My throat feels a bit sore and contracted after a single bite. Zachary's was much better, and the life became good when we found belgian stuff at Trader Joe's. Over here, I've found some of the old domestic brands, but they've pretty soon gone to the dark side - with the same hershified effect, not as strong but still nasty. One brand still holds, Kandit from Croatia, and the simple cooking chocolate, the one you melt for the cakes - that is still done right, and is quite edible. Nestle, OTOH, is blacklisted.
Ah, and the cakes (as in birthday cake - which we call torta, and we translate cake as kolač, which means roughly anything sweet, made of pastry and filling, that is served as pieces)... my dad got into a habit of ordering one for each birthday, and now with grandchildren coming, the shop has lowered the bar and the last one was just a big insubstantial cube of whipped cream and some mass that had lots of margarine in it... so we decided to start making our own again. So much better (and, of course, no whipped cream, about 2/3 of the prescribed sugar, lots of ground walnuts...) that we ate it all in three days. The last one from the shop wasn't even eaten, we threw half of it away.
