| Those pickles are from when?
When my husband goes to Chicago to visit his mother, I fear for his safe return. It's not the air travel that frightens me, nor the chance that he'll be blown around the Windy City, or taken out by an urban thug. I'm afraid his mother is going to poison him. "How was your flight?" I asked, touching base one evening by phone. "Great!" he said. "Mom and I are just sitting down to dinner." "Oh. And what (here's the part where I began to cringe) are you eating?" "Well, Mom has a nice canned ham," he said. "And a nice box of frozen peas. And a very nice box of potato flakes." Call me a snob, but it wasn't the idea of those cans and the boxes that made this fresh-food fanatic fear for my husband's life. It was the code-word "nice." Translation: Food that's been around since the Eisenhower era.
Retail food prices hit 17-year peak
Retail food prices have increased by 4.6 percent since January, making 2007 the priciest year for food since 1990.According to figures from the United States Department of Agriculture, the price of foods containing high amounts of protein have increased the most. The cost of beef has increased by 6.4 percent. Poultry is up 7.8 percent. But both are trumped by milk, which costs 9.5 percent more than it did at the beginning of the year.“It's unbelievable the prices, the percentages they've raised," said Lee Moran, director of food services at Conemaugh Township Area School District.Earlier this week, the school district raised lunch and a la carte menu items. Moran said the best a school can hope to do is break even on providing meals.A third of a pint of milk now costs 20 cents, Moran said.
College students learn to serve
HOLLAND -- Lynden Sass, 18, wore her blue Crocs Saturday as she volunteered at the Inn at Freedom Village for the first time. She noticed an older man wearing the same shoes, but his were red. Their connection was instant. Mike DeGood, 92, told her that when a person gets to be over 90, he should have a pair of "holey" shoes. "You would think I have known Lynden for 20 years," said DeGood, while the two joined other residents drinking coffee and eating pastries on the patio. Sass learned DeGood was married 70 years before his wife died and that his hobby was building steam engines. One of six college students at Freedom Village, Sass was among 400 volunteering in Hope College's "Time to Serve" program, now in its eighth year.
Tailgating: Party in the parking lot
Tailgating guru Joe Cahn has been traveling around the country in an RV trying to put an end to some stereotypes.
"I've been dispelling the myth that tailgating is a bunch of drunk guys in the parking lot" says Cahn, who is also known as the NFL's Commissioner of Tailgating.
For 11 months out of the year, Cahn travels to pro and college sports stadiums to eat in parking lots. Ever since selling his New Orleans cooking school in 1996, Cahn's life has been devoted to tailgating and what it represents in American culture.
"We talk football and we find we have more things in common with people than we do differences," Cahn says over the phone from Lambeau Field in Green Bay, Wis. "It's a cross-section of America in the parking lot." It's also about the grub.
Zaxby's restaurant takes wing in Port Wentworth
PORT WENTWORTH - Construction on Port Wentworth's first Zaxby's, a Southeast favorite for chicken fingers and Buffalo wings, is now well under way. Licensees Brad Whitfield and Craig Jones will introduce the restaurant, at 100 Old Richmond Road, behind the new CVS at the intersection of Highway 21 and Highway 30, in the early fall. The new location will create an additional 40 to 50 jobs for the area. "We're proud to offer Zaxby's to the residents of Port Wentworth," said Whitfield, who has been involved with Zaxby's for more than three years. "We look forward to becoming involved within the community as a good neighbor and business partner." Whitfield graduated from the University of Georgia in Zaxby's hometown of Athens in 2003 with a degree in finance.
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