Yesterday, B and I began cooking some of the desserts for our Thanksgiving meal. B made her Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Cake. I made Dark Chocolate Peanut Butter Banana Ice Cream. We will soon head out to B’s parents’ house where we will spend the day playing, watching movies, and cooking the rest of the food for our meal tonight.
Here’s wishing you and your family a very Happy Thanksgiving!
The news programs and blog sites have been a buzz recently about Congress declaring Pizza a vegetable. Not some eggplant, pepper, spinach, and broccoli laden version of pizza. What was being referenced was your typical school lunch slice of pizza.
I have bad memories of school lunch pizza. I clearly remember a girl taking her fist and punching her pizza. The indentation she made was clearly visible… until the pizza began to “recover.” It morphed its shape back to the pre-fist-punch shape. This pizza apparently had healing capabilities or was cooked with a liberal dosage of rubber. Possibly the latter considering that kids also used to bounce the meatballs around the lunch room. (I wish I was joking. And, yes, I usually brown-bagged it.)
So pizza a veggie?
Well, despite the reactionary tone, Congress didn’t exactly make this declaration. They did do something nefarious to anyone who wants kids to get nutritious school lunches, though. Currently, an eighth of a cup of tomato paste counts as if it had the same nutritional value as a half cup of vegetables. Most other veggies need to be half of cup’s worth before they are counted as a serving. The Obama administration wanted to remove the tomato paste exception. Congress blocked this.
Some, mostly the food companies, hailed the decision pointing to the fiber and other nutrients that tomato paste contains. I’ve used it in my cooking from time to time, too. So I wondered. How nutritious is it?
The Washington Post tried stacking tomato paste against various fruits. They found it fared pretty well. Still, they pointed out, fruits and veggies vary wildly in their nutritional content. As they put it: “A half-cup of avocado is quite nutritionally different from a half-cup of zucchini.”
I got to thinking that the best thing to compare tomato paste with are actual tomatoes. After all, tomato paste isn’t claiming to be zucchini or spinach or apples or oranges. So why stack it up against those. Let’s see how 1/8th cup of tomato paste compares to 1/2 cup of tomatoes. Thankfully, Calorie King let me easily look this information up.
So 2 tablespoons (1/8th of a cup) of tomato paste contains nearly twice the calories and much more sodium as the “equivalent” (as defined by Congress) amount of chopped tomatoes. (They could use low sodium tomato paste, but let’s be honest here. They’ll likely use the regular stuff.) It also has nearly twice the sugar, twice the carbs and none of the calcium. Tomato paste does best chopped tomatoes when it comes to potassium and slightly beats it out in dietary fiber. Still, I don’t think the calorie/sodium/sugar tradeoff is worth less than 1 gram of added fiber.
Tomato paste clearly doesn’t stack up, but perhaps it has more vitamins? Calorie King didn’t display this information, so I found another website, Self Nutrition Data, that did.
Here is the nutrition data for 1/2 cup of tomato paste. (They didn’t let me modify the amounts.)
Now, here is the information for 1 cup of chopped tomatoes.
They look sort of the same until you realize that you need to divide the tomato paste percentages by 4 and the chopped tomato percentages by 2. Here’s a handy chart with the final “serving size” percentages:
|
Vitamin A |
Vitamin C |
Calcium |
Iron |
|
| Tomato Paste (1/8th cup) |
10% |
12% |
1.25% |
5.5% |
|
Chopped Tomatoes (1/2 cup) |
15% |
19% |
1% |
1.5% |
You can see that tomato paste still falls short in vitamins A and C. It has a slight lead in calcium which is interesting given that Calorie King showed it as having 0mg. (I’m guessing that was due to rounding for a 1/8th cup serving.) It also has a decent lead in iron.
So, should pizza (or, more accurately, tomato paste) be defined as a vegetable. Most certainly not. First of all, there is the nutritional data that I showed above. Perhaps, the best reason comes from NHL, though. My third grade son, upon hearing this, declared: “But tomatoes are fruit, not vegetables!” He’s right. They are. You might as well declare apple pie a veggie. Perhaps we need to hire Jeff Foxworthy to run a special of his TV game show for Congressfolks. We’ll call it: Are You Smarter Than A Third Grader?
When blogging, it can be discouraging to post day after day and see little to no comments. Almost worse than no comments, however, are tons of comments. Tons of spam comments, that is. Since I last deleted the spam comments (on November 9th), this blog has gotten over 1,600 spam comments. That’s over 130 per day or 1 spam comment every 11 minutes! Here’s a graph of my spam comments day to day.
That big red line shows how many spam comments I got daily. The green line hugging zero? Those are my non-spam comments. If only I could transform spam comments into real comments, I’d have more comments than I could reply to. Of course, if I had that ability, I think I’d use it on all of those “Nigerian Princes” and “European Lotteries” that keep e-mailing me.
Thankfully, Akismet snags most of the spam comments. Sadly, some slip through. This means that spammy comments are visible on my blog until I take them down. I think I need to find some WordPress plugins to help reduce my spam load.
What do you do to reduce spam comments? Also, any guesses on how many spam comments this post will get?
My parents came for a visit this weekend. Unfortunately, given economic circumstances (on both ends) and the distance between us, we don’t get to see each other as often as I’d like. The boys kept getting more and more excited as “Bubbe-and-Grandpa day” drew nearer. Finally, the day arrived and the boys couldn’t have been happier. Here are a few highlights from their visit (in no particular order):
Wii Bowling
While enjoying some downtime at our house, we started up the Nintendo Wii. My mother, who I never think of as a gamer, opted to play a game of Wii Bowling with the boys and me. The end score was quite impressive. (As usual, click on the photo to enlarge.)
“Snoopy” was my mother. That 121 score? That was JSL! He was rocking the virtual bowling alley with two strikes and three spares. He even beat his older brother (who came in with a not-too-shabby 113).
Beating Up My Dad
Ok, this sounds bad, but it really isn’t. After Wii Bowling was done, we loaded Wii Boxing and I handed the Wiimote to my dad. Then, he and I duked it out. I won, but he got some good punches in. I don’t think he expected a simple video game to give his arms such a workout.
Toy Story Mania
After coming back from lunch (and some shopping), we went back to my house. Killing time before I had to start dinner, I put Toy Story Mania into the Wii. This time, NHL, my father and I played. We all had fun playing the various Toy Story-based carnival games. For the record, I won easily. Got nearly my father’s and NHL’s score combined. Part of that was probably because, due to a quirk in the game, I got to play solo in a lot of games. This gave me exclusive access to the point generating activities instead of sharing them with another player.
Knitting Bonding
My mother mentioned that she wanted to learn how to knit a scarf. I pointed out that B has knitted a few. At the time, she was in the middle of two scarf-knitting projects. While the boys, my dad and I occupied ourselves with other activities, my wife and mother bonded over knit-pearl.
“Cooking” Dinner
I wanted to show my parents my cooking skills. I didn’t actually wind up getting the chance to do this. Instead, we went to BJ’s and bought frozen/refrigerated dishes to heat up and serve. Still, eating dinner at home with my parents versus in a restaurant was a nice experience.
Cake Wrecks
I showed my parents the Cake Wrecks book and they kept laughing. When I left it on the table to check on dinner, I saw them flipping through the pages laughing at all of the mangled cakes. I need to remember to e-mail them the URL for the Cake Wrecks blog.
Cupcakes
We stopped by the new Fluffalicious store and got some delicious cupcakes for dessert. It was quite the yummy stop to make (and one I think we’ll be making quite a few more times in the near future).
The whole weekend was so much fun that I (*gasp*) forgot to take photos! We got photos of cupcakes and the like, but realized that we didn’t get a picture of my parents with the boys. Luckily, just before my parents left to go home, we were able to snag this photo of us. (B’s manning the camera – and trying to avoid cars in the parking lot it was taken in.)
I miss my parents already and hope we get to see them again sometime soon.
