What’s that got to do with the price of milk?
As part of my conversion to a cheapskate, I was comparing low-fat milks. For a while I’d been buying Pura Light Start or Rev. The supermarket brands are a lot cheaper, and maybe my taste buds are AWOL, but I can’t really detect a huge difference in taste.
But how do they stackup on nutrition? Lacking anything better to do, I decided to compare.
| per 100ml | Pura Light Start | Rev | Safeway low fat | Coles lite |
| Energy kJ | 183 | 191 | 193 | 193 |
| Protein gms | 3.6 | 3.4 | 3.3 | 3.3 |
| Fat - Total gms | 1.0 | 1.3 | 1.4 | 1.4 |
| Fat - Saturated gms | 0.6 | 0.8 | 0.9 | 0.9 |
| Carbohydrate gms | 5.0 | 4.9 | 5.0 | 5.0 |
| Carbohydrate - sugars gms | 5.0 | 4.9 | 5.0 | 5.0 |
| Sodium mg | 45 | 58 | 43 | 43 |
| Calcium mg | 126 | 126 | 124 | 114 |
| Cost per 2 litre carton | $4.37 | $4.69 | $2.79 | $2.99 |
I’ve listed the Safeway online prices here, with the Coles online price for the Coles milk. I haven’t checked the Aldi nutritional information, but their Farmdale light milk is $2.57 for two litres.
Nutrition-wise it appears the Pura Light Start has a bit less fat, but other than that it’s much of a muchness.
I find it amazing that Rev is so similar to the Safeway or Coles Lite milks, but there’s such a huge price difference. I doubt I could pick it in a taste test.
At least it’s all simpler than back in the day when it was Rev for me, Skinny Milk for her, and full-cream for the young-uns.
What milk(s) do the rest of you buy?
No more flavoured instant noodles
Us Bowens occasionally get an upset stomach, something we have dubbed Bowen Belly. Recently it’s been less frequent for me, thankfully.
But on Monday I was foolish.
I was passing through the supermarket and bought one of those instant noodle meals. I wanted a quick cheap easy meal. I must have temporarily forgotten about “tasty” and “nutritious”.
It might sound innocent enough, but in this one was a sachet of chicken-flavoured chemicals which seems to have done me no good at all.
Monday night was not pleasant. My stomach was groaning, gurgling, and painful. The nausea kept me up much of the night. Not nice.
Tuesday morning I was suffering from lack of sleep, and still feeling queasy, so decided to work from home, at least periodically, in between bouts of sleep. Happily most of it had gone by the afternoon, and I was able to venture out of the house.
Now I know why in old Britcoms they take the mickey out of pot noodles. For example, Red Dwarf’s Dave Lister saying he’d rather eat dog food. I note from the Wikipedia entry that one flavour, “Bacon Sizzler” was withdrawn after health concerns…
The lesson here: don’t eat crap. If I want a quick easy noodle meal (at a not unreasonable place) there’s a perfectly good noodle place near home which will do me a freshly cooked meal for about $9 — as well as several other options on the way home from the station.
Daniel’s roo chilli
This is my fairly quick chilli recipe, adapted from a recipe in 4 Ingredients by Kim McCosker and Rachael Bermingham.
Dice onion and cook in a little canola or olive oil in a saucepan until brown.
Add about 500 grams of kangaroo mince, cook until brown.
Chuck in a sachet of Taco mix or your preferred other type of lazy supermarket prefab spicy mix.
Add a can of diced tomatoes, a can of red kidney beans, and half a cup of water. Stir.
Grated in a carrot and a zucchini and keep on stirring.
Cover, simmer for 15 minutes or as long as you like until it’s all cooked up, stirring regularly.
This serves about three. Serve with light sour cream. My kids also like it with grated cheese.
If the Easter bunny doesn’t come…
…he may have been detained by the local sweet shop, who appear to have chained him to a telephone pole.
Working the queue
McDonalds in Elizabeth Street — at least at busy times — appears to now have someone who takes peoples’ orders while they’re still in the queue. The order is keyed into an electronic gizmo, which presumably goes into the Maccas computer, and the price of the order is quoted to the customer, and a ticket with a reference number is handed over. The customer then queues, hands over the ticket, pays, and they get their order.
Is this a more efficient use of that employee than getting them to actually staff another register and serve people in the conventional way?
Perhaps not. Joel Spolsky noted critics’ views of a similar phenomenon in Starbucks:
Expediters are not really there to see to it that a customer’s order is filled more quickly, they believe. Rather, expediters exist solely to prevent people in line from giving up and wandering off, maybe to go to the Dunkin’ Donuts around the corner. Once a customer places an order, the logic goes, he or she feels an ethical obligation to wait for it to be filled, no matter how long the process takes. Expediters are there to lock in that order as soon as possible.
Interesting. Whether that’s the philosophy behind the Maccas lady working the queue or not, I don’t know, but it’s not clear to me how it was the best use of her time. Though perhaps there’s no space for another register?
(OK, OK, I admit it: I went in for a Filet’O'Fish. I was hungry and in a hurry, OK?)
Roo mince
A while back I tried kangaroo sausages (”kanga bangas”). Can’t say I really liked them.
But in the past week, I’ve tried kangaroo mince, in two recipes: spag bol, and chilli.
Perhaps it’s because the taste is partially hidden amongst a mass of tomato and other ingredients, but both these were hits — little difference in taste from the usual beef, and the kids and myself gobbled them up eagerly.
Why would you switch?
- Greenpeace claim that kangaroo is better for the environment: roos require less land-clearing than cattle, they consume less water, and produce less
fartsmethane gas - It’s healthier. Roo mince contains just 1.3% fat, about a third the amount of fat in lean beef
- It’s cheaper. Coles online lists lean beef at $15.50 per kilogram, whereas kangaroo is $7.29 per kilogram
So I’m a convert. I’ll buy roo mince in future.
Maybe the next test is to try roo burgers.
But I’ll stick to beef for snags. (The Peppercorn lean beef sausages I recently found in Safeway seem pretty tasty, and less unhealthy than most.)
Snacks
Just comparing some of the snacks I regularly take into work, or buy from the charity boxes or fundraiser boxes.
| Snack | Sultanas 40g | Banana 118g | Apple 182g | Giant Freddo Frog 40g | Carmans Apricot & almond muesli bar | Mars Bar 60g |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Energy | 536 kJ | 440 kJ | 396 kJ | 884 kJ | 796 kJ | 1150 kJ |
| Protein | 1.1 g | 1 g | 0 g | 3.3 g | 4.7 g | 2.1 g |
| Fat - total | 0.2 g | 0.5 g | 0 g | 11.8 g | 8.2 g | 10.4 g |
| - saturated | 0.0 g | 0 g | 0 g | 7.4 g | 0.8 g | 6.2 g |
| Carbohydrate | 26.0 g | 27 g | 25 g | 22.9 g | 22.8 | 42.3 g |
| - sugars | 25.3 g | 14 g | 19 g | 22.3 g | 4.7 g | 36.7 g |
| - dietary fibre | 2.4 g | 3 g | 4 g | ? | 3.3 g | ? |
| Sodium | 18 mg | 1 mg | 2 mg | 36 mg | 13.5 mg | 89 mg |
| Potassium | 324 mg | 422 mg | 195 mg | ? | ? | ? |
Source: Bananas, Freddo, various packets. Recommended daily intake.
So the energy (which of course if unused turns into fat) in a Mars Bar is about triple that of a banana or apple. Yikes.
I feel like going for a jog.
See also: Recommended daily intake levels
Medicinal reasons
I’d been meaning to write about this anyway, but one of Richard’s Twitter posts reminded me: If only more medical problems could be solved by simply ingesting more caffeine. The world would be a better place.
Indeed.
The cluster headaches I suffered from last summer did return this year, but happily the medication has been very effective at curbing them.
When there is a twinge over and above what the medication can handle, as the Wikipedia article notes, caffeine can make a difference.
I don’t normally drink Coke — overall it’s not a very healthy thing to consume — but have found slurping down a can provides of enough of a burst of caffeine to help a lot.
So as my sister commented (when she gave me some unwanted cans), I drink Coke for medicinal reasons.
PS. It appears that Coke Zero contains the same amount of caffeine, but no sugar, which might be a better option when one requires a medicinal caffeine infusion, though in fact a cup of tea appears to be an even better option.
