al dente
Now, I know I have a few readers who cook, and all I can say is, My dears, you are NOT adequately taking care of America while I'm gone.
On Japanese cable, they tend to air US shows with almost no commercials; that means that a show that's an hour long at home has fifteen minutes of dead space at the end, and on some channels, they fill up the time with kitchen gadget commercials.
So it is that I've just spent several minutes laughing my ass off at a commercial for something called the Pasta Express. I couldn't believe it wasn't a parody. Are people seriously that easily gulled? You pour boiling water into a plastic tube full of pasta and let it sit for fifteen minutes? We're making wallpaper paste, I assume? The commercial is beyond ridiculous, purporting to save the hapless householder from such difficulties as aiming the pot so that the pasta lands in the collander and...uh, I'm not sure what else the point is. You can't possibly be shortening the cooking time by not having a heat source keeping the water boiling. And even the commercial makes the pasta look clumpy when it comes out of the tube.
But you can apparently use the thing to make hotdogs or boiled vegetables and other things that are difficult to make with an ordinary stockpot and stovetop, too. Yet another advance in modern life.
On Japanese cable, they tend to air US shows with almost no commercials; that means that a show that's an hour long at home has fifteen minutes of dead space at the end, and on some channels, they fill up the time with kitchen gadget commercials.
So it is that I've just spent several minutes laughing my ass off at a commercial for something called the Pasta Express. I couldn't believe it wasn't a parody. Are people seriously that easily gulled? You pour boiling water into a plastic tube full of pasta and let it sit for fifteen minutes? We're making wallpaper paste, I assume? The commercial is beyond ridiculous, purporting to save the hapless householder from such difficulties as aiming the pot so that the pasta lands in the collander and...uh, I'm not sure what else the point is. You can't possibly be shortening the cooking time by not having a heat source keeping the water boiling. And even the commercial makes the pasta look clumpy when it comes out of the tube.
But you can apparently use the thing to make hotdogs or boiled vegetables and other things that are difficult to make with an ordinary stockpot and stovetop, too. Yet another advance in modern life.