FOOD FOR THOUGHT
Bertolli enters arena of bottled pasta sauces
By Wanda A. Adams
Food Editor
Time for a little mailbag miscellany: new products and some observations.
Pasta sauces: Bertolli, best known for its olive oils, is bringing out a line of bottled pasta sauces. It claims its tomato-based sauces are bottled the same day that the tomatoes are picked (which is all very well if the tomatoes are, in fact, ripe). One sauce that sounds interesting is a version of classic aglio e olio — olive oil and garlic — with chunks of fresh tomato. The line includes eight tomato-based sauces and three creamy Alfredo-type sauces. Suggested retail is $2.79 for a 26-ounce jar.
Burger King is refreshing its menus nationally. The latest introduction is a breakfast item, the "Egg'wich," which combines an english muffin with a fried egg, Canadian-style bacon and American cheese.
Press releases often lead to hilarity in the newsroom. The latest to spark guffaws was from wineanswers.com, which actually went to the trouble to play host to a taste test to determine the best wine matches for America's top 10 favorite frozen entrees. (No. 1, by the way is beef and ricotta lasagna, and with that, they advise you to serve pinot grigio — also called pinor gris — or cabernet sauvignon.)
On the face of it, this isn't such a bad idea; one quarter of us routinely drink wine with meals, and most of us use frozen entrees from time to time. It just doesn't seem very likely that when you're sitting down to a dinner of something that comes in an oven tray you're going to worry too much about which wine to serve. Horrors, darling, you can't pour a chardonnay with creamed chipped beef!
Watercress update. Just about the time I learned to make watercress namul (Korean watercress salad), a pest called the aster leafhopper cut O'ahu watercress production by half and nearly put the second-largest farm on the island out of business. For the past six months, farmers and agricultural experts have been battling to rid their ponds of the bug, which turns watercress leaves yellow. Many grocery stores and farmer's markets have been receiving only a spotty supply of watercress.
But John McHugh, a crop management specialist for Watercress of Hawai'i, an industry association, reported last week that supply should get back to normal in the next month or two. Nakatani Farm in Waiawa/Pearl City, which had to uproot its entire crop, will begin harvesting a new crop this week, he said. "It's been a rough period," he said, but something like this tends to come along every couple of decades. "We always figure out a way to manage it."
