What’s For Lunch?

Posted Nov 15, 2006 by Patty Kim

Updated Nov 15, 2006 at 11:32 PM

How about feasting on some tips to eat well, exercise and nix stress?

You can do it with fitness instructor June Kittay. The best part? It’s FREE.

The city of Tampa is sponsoring the Lunchtime Exercise & Lecture Series, part of its Keeping Tampa Fit campaign.

Here’s the skinny:

Catch June from noon to 1:30 p.m. each Monday through Dec. 11 at Lykes Gaslight Square, 400 N. Franklin St., Tampa.

Make sure you’re wearing workout clothes and tennis shoes.

If you need help through the holidays, this is for you!

11/20—Why Exercise?

11/27—Staying Fit Forever

12/4—The Art of Food & Nutrition

12/11—Food Sensitivities—Testimonials

If you’ve got questions, call (813) 274-8615 or visit the city of Tampa’s Parks and Rec Web site.

 

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How Festive Is Your Attire?

Posted Nov 15, 2006 by Sandy Hughes

Updated Nov 15, 2006 at 05:30 PM

Well, Darlings, the holidays are fast approaching, and the party invitations are starting to pile up.  Which means we’re faced, once again, with the inevitable question:

What To Wear?

No matter what the invitation says, (or doesn’t say) about attire, we know that many of you are already agonizing over it, especially over the trickier events like Office Parties, Open Houses, and anything so vague you’re not sure what it is.  (You know, the kind we mean—like the invitation that says “Come Gather ‘Round The Wassail Bowl!”, or “Naughty Or Nice—Come As You Are!”)

And we don’t blame you.  After all, not only does one have to walk that precarious line between too dressy, too casual, too sexy, or too dowdy, but one also has to carefully rotate outfits to avoid wearing the same thing with the same people.  For those of us who keep holiday outfits and friends for several years, this can get tricky, not to mention expensive.

So before we discuss specific types of parties, let’s talk about building the foundation for your Party Wear wardrobe.

Here are a few a few basic strategies we use get through the season:

Keep and store any good holiday pieces and reuse them from year to year. 

Even if it’s hopelessly out of style right now, chances are you’ll be able to wear it again someday.  Velvets, tartan plaids, and lace blouses can all be worn forever, and, who knows?  That elaborate Christmas Sweater from the ‘80’s,—you know, with the hand-knit holiday scenes and the fringe and the appliquéd bells?  (C’mon, we know you had one) could be just the thing five years from now.
And if you’re not sure you’ll remember what you wore with which people each year, keep a written, running list and store it with your other holiday items.

Dress up old basics, or slightly outdated outfits, with a new trend.

Some years, that might have meant adding a Pashima and chandelier earrings.  Other years, it could have been a brooch and some kitten-heeled mules, or a maybe a sparkly shrunken cardigan.  This year, it can be patterned hose,  wedges or peeptoes,  a sparkly chain or pendant,  and maybe a trapeze jacket or an empire top.

Don’t forget about hair, makeup and nails.

So many times when we’re trying on outfits, we don’t take into account our hairstyle or the makeup we’ll be wearing.  Sometimes all you need to make an outfit “holiday” is a smoky eye or red lipstick, which is good news when you’re trying to stretch your wardrobe across several parties.  Just remember that you need to choose your poison:  Elaborate hair—worn “big”, long, or wavy—needs a simple outfit (meaning neutral colors and little embellishment or detail) and toned-down makeup.  Strong makeup—say, smoky eyeliner, or sparkly eyeshadow, or red lipstick—needs smoother hair and a relatively simple outfit as well.  And when the focal point is on your body—that red satin jacket, gold lame sweater, ruffly blouse, lace skirt, etc.—hair and makeup should be dead simple.  In other words, let one thing shine at a time.

Try to invest in one “killer” item each season.

Whether it’s a basic, like a superb little black dress, or a distinctly holiday item (the red satin, the emerald green velvet, the gold lame, etc.), if you buy one new thing each year you’ll be able to rotate it into outfits from party to party and year to year, using our “Keep and Store” plan. 

So, assuming you’ve acquired, or are planning to acquire, some Basics and a few Killers, what do you do with them?  We’ll have to get to that next time, Dears—all this talk about parties is making us thirsty.
But we promise we’ll continue the discussion, from what to wear to the Office Party, to what in the heck “Festive Attire” actually means, next time.

Until then, Cheers!

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If You Blend It, They Will Come

Posted Nov 15, 2006 by Jeff Houck

Updated Nov 15, 2006 at 05:15 PM

The biggest star in the universe the past week? (No, it’s not Borat.) It’s Tom Dickson.

Dickson a week and a half ago posted video of himself at WillItBlend.com testing out his Blendtec home blender by cramming various household items into the appliance. Marbles. Golf balls. An entire Extra Value Meal. A rake handle. Twenty four credit cards.

The videos have exploded in popularity on the video service YouTube (The golf ball video was No. 1 for several days) and sent sales at the Orem, Utah manufacturer through the roof.

I talked with Dickson and his marketing director George Wright last week about the unlikely fame the blender spots have achieved.

First of all, you’re my hero.

Dickson: Which video did you like best?

I enjoyed the entire value meal going in. And as delicious as it looked, I have to say that the grinding of the rake handle down to a nubbin was probably. But I will say that in the previews before each video, the entire corn cob looks very promising, I’m looking forward to seeing that one.

The thing that struck me was that you’re wearing a white lab coat, which is very authoritarian. And there’s an air of “let’s see what happens if we do this,” which was very Letterman-like.

Dickson: We’re into real radical things, anyway. I grew up racing go-karts and motorcycles. I held the record in the M Class when I was 15 ½ years old in northern California drag racing. I grew up on motorcycles with lots of power. I put a Honda 350 engine on a go-kart when I was 15. Just did crazy things.

That’s the whole reason you have a go-kart.

Dickson: I have four go-karts now. One of them I can hit zero to 60 in less than three seconds. It goes 103 mph.

You’re like the uncle I always wished I had.

Dickson: I’m 60 years old. I just turned in one of our Acuras that was out on lease. Our videographer did shots of me going over a jump at about 60 mph. I get all four wheels off the ground. It scrapes bottom. In fact, as the sun goes down, you can see sparks coming out from underneath.

So you’ve always been involved with mechanized, motorized stuff.

Dickson: Yeah. The whole thing translates. Fourteen years ago when I made the first blender jar and screwed a motor to the bottom of it, and fashioned the first blade with winglets on it – just like a jet, where the wings go up at the tip – one of the first things I did, I had it mounted in a vice. I was showing it to a friend and I had a sports coat and a shirt on. And I put a box of 250 matches in it. I didn’t even have the mold for the lid yet, so I took a plastic sheet and put it over the jar. I hit a foot pedal and it blew up. I mean, it blew. And I’ll never forget looking at my right sleeve and [seeing] smoke up my coat. I’m sitting going, “Ooooh, wow,” because I don’t know if I’m on fire or what. And I shook my arm and smoke was coming out my sleeve. The smoke slowly filtered up and we had to leave the building.

How long have you been making blenders?

Dickson: That was 14 years ago.

Why blenders?

Dickson: I started in pharmaceuticals. I made the first motion sickness patch in the world in 1971. My boss was the inventor of the birth control pill. I made the only IUD – intrauterine device – that’s been on the market for the past 30 years when all the other IUDs were taken off the market.

Which pharmaceutical company was this?

It was ALZA – which stands for Alejandro Zaffaroni, the inventor of the birth control pill for Syntex Research Company in Palo Alto, Calif. He started his own company using the first two letters of his first and last name. I was the 24th employee there and the first hands-on guy there. Most of the guys were gynecologists and ophthalmologists and all these other “ologitsts,” including the inventor of the first synthetic rubber in America.

Then I ran some wheat through a vacuum cleaner and blew it out into a pillow case with a Kirby vacuum. I started a new company even though I still worked at ALZA. I developed the first high-speed wheat grinder, which was a major breakthrough that relegated all the old stone mills to the Stone Age.

What year was this?

Dickson: When I ran it through, it was was … 1975. Then I started Kitchenetics Corporation, which we still own. We sold $50 million worth of wheat grinders. This was the first high-speed mill where you could put anything from high-moisture rice to make tempura batters to whole wheat.

So I figured we had the best wheat grinder, now we need a bread maker. Bosch had the best multi-function machine that would make 9 pounds of dough. So 14 years ago, I developed the first American-made 1400-watt machine. The blender was so good on that people started using it commercially. And that was the first commercial blender that had ball bearings in it in the history of blenders. Then we developed the first in-the-counter blender, the first blender with a quiet box and the list goes on with the innovations.

But we’ve never been good marketing people, Jeff. So we keep developing better and better blender.

Which blender do you use in the videos?

Dickson: Basically the one we use is a home model, which is a $400 unit, the Blendtec Home. Occasionally we’ll slip our big jar on it. It comes with a 2-quart jar and 13 amps. We also have a 15 amp, an 18 amp and a 20 amp. 

You started shooting these videos how long ago?

Dickson: About a week.

Are you serious?

George Wright: We put the first one up a week ago. We’ve got a room down there we call our Demo Room. I went down there one morning about a month ago and there was sawdust all over the floor. I go walking in and I go, “What the crap happened here? What’s goin’ on?” And somebody looked at me and said, “Oh, Tom was in here last week testing our new jar.” So he was just throwing stuff into the blender to see if he could destroy it … if it would hold up. And my initial reaction was, “I wanna watch that.”

So what happened was I started to talk to Tom and I asked, “Would you have a problem if I videotaped some of this stuff?”  And you know Tom. He was, like, “No, this is great!”

What was the first thing you did?

Wright: Marbles.

And how did it progress from there?

Dickson: We’ve actually done marbles for years, and also obsidian. We once did an infomercial for Finger Hut in Minnesota. They had seen Oster do a marble in a blender and it didn’t break the coupling. So, I went home and put 50 marbles or so in. Then I got obsidian rocks. We’ll do that in the future, too [on the Web site].

Wright: They’ve been doing these tests for years. They just never videotaped it.

What’s been some of the response you’ve gotten in just a week?

Dickson: We’ll tell you what happened yesterday. Look on YouTube. We’re No. 1 rated. In one day, we’ve had half a million viewers.

Which one are they looking at?

Dickson: Golf balls. The golf balls.

I have to tell you that I don’t know if I was more alarmed that you ground up your wife’s credit cards or that she had 24 of them.

[Dickson and Wright laugh.]

You’re a braver man than I.

Dickson: Actually, she still has all the cards in there. We got other people to bring in obsolete cards as well as mine and everything else. I have two credit cards, a $100 bill and a driver’s license. But she has an enormous pile of these things. I think it’s a status thing for women. We put all of hers out, we put all of the others people were throwing away in there so we could pull them out together.

I’m looking at YouTube right now. There have been 413,000 views,  there are 764 comments. It was named 820 times as somebody’s favorite. You’ve become the Mr. Wizard of YouTube.

Dickson: You should scroll down a little bit and see the video comments, because they’re blending me. It’s really funny. Click on that one.

Will He Blend… This whole thing is only a week old?

Wright: It is. We put it out there, we purchased the Will It Blend site and did a Google search on “Will It Blend” and it got a total of zero hits. Now if you go and do a search you’re going to get 360,000 hits.

Have you ever done video before?

Dickson: Not really.

Does it surprise you? It’s stunning how fast this all took place.

Wright: We fully expected we were going to have a lot of fun with this. And we knew as we started into this campaign we knew we were a company who had the best blender – bar none. However, guys like you and most of the country didn’t know that. So when we started this viral campaign, we hoped we would be able to get this out. The response so far has been phenomenal. 

Dickson: The one thing we want people to make as a leap in their minds is that if you put food in there, it blends it.

I noticed that someone mentioned in the YouTube comments the “Bass-O-Matic” skit from “Saturday Night Live.” Has this ever come across anyone’s mind at this point?

Wright: We had a conversation about that today, didn’t we Tom?

Dickson: We’ll definitely do that.

And you’ve gotta say, “That’s great bass!”

Dickson: People ask for things, like blending our own blender or a competitors blender.

What are some of the requests people have?

Dickson: I have in my hand right now a Magic Bullet with marbles in it. I’ll grind the marbles and then I’ll put the whole motor base in there.

We have an 8 megapixel Cannon OES Rebel camera that we’ll blend. First I’ll blend the camera and then the lense. What else, George.

Wright: Cellphones, iPods.

Dickson: We have a whole pile of stuff in my office.

How theraputic is this?

Dickson: Oh, it’s great.

Does it relieve tension for you?

Dickson: Oh yeah.

Wright: You know, Jeff, you’ve actually gotta see filming day here. It’s something else.

It’s gotta be nothing but giggles and knee-slapping and “Let’s put the office furniture in.”

Wright: It is hilarious. We’ll sit back there and laugh all day. And Tom, what you’re seeing is no act. That’s the fun thing about what we’ve done here. It’s all real. The performance you’re watching out of our machine is real. Tom is being himself One hundred percent himself.

Is there anything you won’t blend in it?

Wright: I don’t know, I haven’t run into that yet. [laughs] We’re always up to try anything.

Does the employee of the month get to blend whatever they want?

Dickson: The first one, we just sequestered ourselves off and started to videotape. We pulled the doors closed while we were doing the blending. The employees would walk past while we were filming and see what we were doing and it’s almost like this circus show. They couldn’t help but look in and see what was going on. They’d turn and walk away and shake their heads.

Have you seen any change in sales yet?

Dickson: Absolutely. In one week, sales are up 20 times.

Wright: I just had a request from a New York TV station. They want us to come up there and blend oyster shells.

Dickson: I have two or three 12-ounce bags of spinach. It’s really gross looking. But the way it drinks…

That’s the thing. A couple of these things, you have people actually drinking this stuff.

Dickson: Even the bone in the chicken is reduced to nothing.

How do you decide who gets to drink?

Dickson: Oh, everybody wants to drink. [In the Extra Value McDonald’s video] that’s my uncle, who’s 85 years old.

What’s his name?

Dickson: Floyd. Uncle Floyd. He’s the one I said he doesn’t have any teeth. We also have a gasoline-powered blender that we’re going to fire up. He rides a scooter around the factory, because he doesn’t walk real fast. We’re going to put a cup holder on the scooter and get him from the back. And I’ll fire up the blender.

It’s a blender you can ride?

Dickson: You don’t ride it, but it’s got grips on it. It has a Weed Eater engine with an expansion chamber on it. It has handle bars, a roll throttle and a kill button and our jar. I’ll fire that up and I’ll pour out a smoothie and hand it to him and he’ll put it in his little cup holder and ride off on his scooter.

 

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Camping Is More Complicated Than It Seems

Posted Nov 15, 2006 by Janine Dorsey

Updated Nov 15, 2006 at 11:20 AM

Today’s lunch is a simple one of on-the-run leftovers. No, I couldn’t whip up an elaborate meal last night because I was too busy learning the ins and outs of Girl Scout Camping.

I went camping alot as a kid, usually in a pop-up camper, sometimes on a boat in the Florida Keys.  It all seemed so simple back then. I guess because I wasn’t in on the deployment of the mission.

Now I am a troop leader and a simple overnight visit with 13 second grade girls in tow is similar in scope to storming the beach at Normandy.

The kids are supposed to carry all their gear into the campsite, but on the list they have more than their bodyweight in spare clothes, foul weather-wear,  utensils, toiletries, bedding and craft supplies.

We’ll also be dragging in our own toilet paper, S’mores ingredients, cleaning supplies, emergency drinks and snacks and “amusements.”

On the way out of camp, we’ll be toting all of above PLUS our garbage, finished crafts and recyclables. And alot of memories of a good time. 

One thing we will NOT be bringing is the fixin’s for an Italian sausage sandwich!

Just kidding, Marty.

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Paula Deen To Storm Sarasota

Posted Nov 15, 2006 by Jeff Houck

Updated Nov 15, 2006 at 10:47 AM

Jennifer McPheeters, events coordinator for Sarasota News & Books wrote this morning to say she’s had a huge response to my item in A Taste of The Stew about Paula Deen’s appearance Dec. 12 at the store. Deen is coming as part of a book tour to promote “Paula Deen Celebrates! Best Dishes and Best Wishes for the Best Times of Your Life” (Simon & Schuster, $16.50)

She asked that I pass along this notation:

She’ll be here exactly two hours—6-8 PM—on 12/12.  She’ll briefly address the crowd, and then sign books.  She WILL NOT personalize - only a signature - and they have asked that we limit it to two books per person.

For what it’s worth, Mother-In-Law of the Stew made the Savannah Sheet Cake from the book for a birthday party last weekend. It was so good, I thought I had shoplifted with my mouth.

 

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