Ocean Spray Cranapple - a good ratio of cranberry to apple
flavor but too sweet, making it obvious that what you were
drinking was mostly sugar water with a bit juicy adulterant.

Teddie super chunky peanut butter - I was fond of Teddie, the
house brand of Leavitt, having regularly bought the smooth
ever since I moved back east in the late '60s. It has the best
peanut flavor and has an unimpeachable list of ingredients.
This super chunky is indeed what it says, with maybe half
peanut chunks in a tasty substrate. I wouldn't buy it, because
it's less versatile than smooth, but Bonnie, who loves crunch,
prefers it. It's really quite delicious, probably the best of
its kind.

Belvoir Fruit Farms organic elderberry lemonade - this actually
comes from England but is imported by an outfit called Brands
within Reach, now part of the ominously named New Age Beverages.
A pleasant florality, reminding one of Riesling in a good way
but Dawn dish detergent in not so good a way. The lemoniness is
sort of like Realemon, despite the lemon juice component not
being from concentrate. It's both too sweet and too tart and
would do well in a spritzer on ice but not so great straight.

Rolling Hills Farm organic soymilk, vanilla flavor - pleasant
milky texture and fairly good not too beany taste. Lightly
sweet, lightly vanillaed. With a couple ounces of orange juice
added, it thickened up in a not too curdly way into an okay
facsimile of an Orange Julius, which pleased me. Oddly, a
further experiment involving a tablespoon of sugar made it a
little more Juliesque but not more satisfying.

Two fat pasta tastes.
S&S Deli chicken Parm with ziti - Jerry went out with his friend
Sam to this place, which I'd visited a couple times in the '70s
with stoned or drunk friends, because it was open all hours. I
was never taken with the food or the prices. The menu was vast,
the food half vast. So he got this despite not liking ziti and
being forbidden tomatoes on his diet. He ate a couple bites of
the chicken and found the taste funny; wouldn't eat the ziti;
and belatedly being a good boy, scraped off the sauce. And
sensibly not wanting to leave 2 lb of food on his plate took it
home for Bonnie and me, so I got to taste the S&S food for the
first time in 40 years without having to go there. It's just as
crummy as ever, but the prices ar no longer hopeless - this cost
$12.95, and the serving would easily have served two. So. The
ziti was not bad for ziti - I don't see the point of fat tube
pasta unless maybe it's baked with sauce, and then only maybe.
In the currently fashionable treatments, it's plain boiled and
sauced, sometimes not even that. This came a little past al
dente though possibly cooked to order or at least the same day,
a bit chalky tasting, with a scanty amount of stereotypical bad
red sauce (who knows, maybe he ordered it light on the sauce).
That was more than a third of a pack, so a pound cooked. Over
that a 10-12 oz chicken cutlet done in the traditional nonna
way, egg, crumb, egg, which tenderizes and produces a tender
not quite crisp crust with a distinct nonna taste. The chicken,
to give them credit, was tender enough though scanty as expected
in the flavor department, any character imparted by the coating,
which was (all minuses) lightly herbed with dry Italian seasoning,
lightly cheesed with green can equivalent, and apparently partly
whole wheat. Over that was melted a Provel-like goo. I salvaged
this by tossing it in garlic butter and melting real cheese over.

Wegmans Super Pasta penne rigate - this is probably the worst
product from this store I've ever tasted. It has the
characteristic spoiled aroma and taste of whole wheat but in
fact is made of a bizarre witch's brew - durum semolina, whole
wheat durum flour, kamut, corn starch, pea protein, egg white,
flaxseed, dicalcium phosphate, ferrous sulfate, niacin,
vitamin D, thiamine mononitrate, riboflavin, folic acid.
Brownish in color with an aroma of oldness and rancidity, I
first thought it was ancient, but it was well within its due
date. Cooked up rubbery, though I admit it held its sauce well
(there's a reason for the rigate). Taste of whole wheat, with
the aroma miraculously sticking to the strainer even after
washing afterward.
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