Tribune Food: Olive Oil Is The New Crack
• Emily Nunn takes us on a whirlwind safari of inexpensive supermarket items. 'Cause we're in a recession, dontchaknow. It strikes me that the super-cheap foods highlighted — beans, kale, eggs — are also among the healthiest things on the planet. I think it has also probably struck the nine billion other people on the internet who have also made my exact point.
• What goes better with an El Cheapo dinner than a bottle of El Cheapo wine! (That was an exclamation point just there because that was a rhetorical question just there.) The cute and fuzzy Bill Daley reports that wine merchants all over town are seeing spiking sales in the sub-$15 category, and reminds us that we should be thinking in terms of value, not just bottom line.
• Janet Helm has 10 predictions of food trends for 2009. I'm sure they're good but I am religiously forbidden from reading or recapping year-end roundups or pre-year predictions.
• What's up, fraud? Monica Eng takes us into the seamy world of olive oil bamboozlement, wherein the ol' single-press is being diluted with oils of other plants — peanut, soy, and others — and sold as "extra-virgin olive oil." Scandalous! Never has going to the foofy oil aisle in Whole Foods felt so much like buying drugs in an alley! Not that we know anything about that!
• In Tempo Chris Borrelli tries the #!@%¿ Blagojevich Burger at Kuma's Corner: a buger and a slice of baloney (get it?!) sandwiched between two grilled-cheese sandwiches (that's four slices of bread — see AHT's fatty melt) with a dollar sign of yellow mustard for flourish. Satirical!
[Photo via bryangeek's Flickr]
