As I alluded to yesterday, my busy schedule of tech support house calls this week has given me more than the usual amount of opportunity to spend time in some of the many Starbucks locations that dot the Greater Boston landscape. Consequently, I wound up trying one of the latest comers in their never-ending parade of lame breakfast sandwiches, the sausage, egg and cheese “piadini”. The name comes from an Italian flatbread called piadina, which is essentially the same thing as a flour tortilla. Piadina is used as a basic wrap for all manner of fillings, not merely breakfast, and is even eaten plain as daily bread. The Starbucks “piadini” is more like a rustic tart, made with pastry dough folded into a rough square. They offer the sausage-egg-cheese filling and a spinach-feta-ricotta filling. Like all their other previous attempts at breakfast sandwiches, these are pre-baked elsewhere and just re-heated in their fancy-schmancy turbo ovens.
Even though their turbo oven is supposed to make things nice and toasty, this sucker was like half-cooked pie dough when I got it — not firm enough to retain its shape when picked up, so that it sort of drooped on my fingers like Silly Putty, but just firm enough to start to crumble when I tried to fold it up a bit. It was also almost completely devoid of any discernible flavor. The coup de grace, though, was that it had just enough grease from the sausage and melted Cheddar cheese to drip onto my shirt, necessitating a trip home to change before going to my first appointment. Eminently skippable. I remain solid in my preference for the McDonalds’ sausage burrito as the drive-thru breakfast sandwich of choice.
Last week was as un-busy as this one has been overloaded, so I actually had time to do a leisurely grocery shopping one day and came across a new variation of Splenda with added fiber. The fiber is corn starch that adds a gram of soluble fiber to each packet of Splenda. I use two packets every day in my morning coffee, so it seemed like an easy way to add a little extra fiber to my daily diet. The recommended daily amount of fiber for an adult is 20-35 grams, and most Americans only consume about half of that, so I figure it couldn’t hurt. The corn starch is non-caloric, so there’s no overhead in that respect. It doesn’t affect the sweetening property of the sucralose, either. My only negative observation is that “soluble” seems to be a bit relative, as I have noticed undissolved white residue in the bottom of my coffee mugs when I wash them out, and I have never noticed this with original Splenda. I would give this particular product a thumbs-up.
We are completely ga-ga for this new beverage called Fruit-A-Peel. It’s a fruit-juice-based soda, but it’s mostly soda water rather than mostly juice, so it’s much lower in calories and carbs than ordinary sodas. An entire 1-liter bottle (as shown in the photo) has fewer calories and fewer grams of carbohydrates than a 12-ounce can of regular soda. It comes in a bunch of different flavors, too: grape, lemon, pomegranate, apple, cranberry and blackberry. Bridget and I agree that grape is the best flavor of the whole lot, but I also really like the apple and pomegranate flavors. The cranberry and lemon are probably the weakest of the six. I bought these on a whim one day back during the summer, and since then this has almost completely replaced all other carbonated beverages consumed in our household. It has no artificial sweeteners in it at all, so it’s not non-caloric, but it also isn’t just a mix of flavor chemicals either.
The product is made by Polar Beverages, which is a company based in Worcester, MA. Distribution of Polar’s products is almost completely limited to New England, though you can get it in parts of upstate New York and some places in the NYC metro area.
