Take the cheapest pasta you can find. The five pound bag of spaghetti marked down to 99 cents. Take the cheapest, commercially prepared sauce you can find. The extra large can of “tomato sauce” that looks worse than dog food, even on the artfully designed label. Cook the pasta in salted water, heat and add the sauce, and you still have a higher quality product than you usually buy frozen in the supermarket. On top of that, you could freeze that into dozens of portions and save yourself a fortune.
Your Money’s Worth…

A while ago I’d posted about The Special K Challenge and my personal disdain for the marketing scheme. I explained that Special K is hardly a nutritious or filling breakfast and suggested a substitute of oatmeal as an alternative. Not long afterward, Quaker Oats released a Weight Control Oatmeal product that followed every piece of advice I’d made, consisting of no added sugars, a boost of fiber content, protein and whole grains.

Now Special K has released a product to compete with that, Special K Satisfaction. This new product boasts a mix of protein and fiber to help you resist temptations and stay full longer, strongly implying, at least to me, an admittance that their original Special K cereal is lacking in the satiety department. The product contains roughly 200 calories, 4g fiber and 10g protein, putting it on par with a cup of plain oats. That is to say, Special K requires nearly 30 ingredients, including fortified vitamins, to be the nutritional equivalent of even the most basic of oatmeals, consisting of nothing other than water and oats. It’s up to you where you want to find your satisfaction for breakfast, but I’m sticking to the oatmeal.

It has come to my attention recently that Nosh-Blog has gone offline. Since it was hosted at a university, I suspect that Jon has moved on to other endeavors and they thought it reasonable to delete his directory from their servers. This is a tragic loss to the internet as a whole. Or, at least, to me. I fully intended to some day sit down and read the entire archive, but I didn’t, and now I can’t. R.I.P.…

Recently Kellogg’s Special K has been heavily marketing itself as a diet food. You can take the Special K Challenge as featured in Shape magazine, which consists of a daily breakfast of Special K, skim milk and some fruit, followed by a cereal bar for lunch, fruits, vegetables and snack bites for, well, snacks and then whatever you’d normally eat for dinner before you switched to a diet based on cereal. Special K has only 110 calories per bowl! This means I can eat an entire box of cereal a day and still lose weight, right? Well, I have a few problems with this, so I’ll categorically rant about it and then offer a more reasonable alternative.

The Most Important Meal of the Day…