Oreo Day

I don't think there is another cookie that leaves that black crust in the corners of your mouth quite like an Oreo. Young. Old. Black. White. Brunette. Blonde. There is no discrimination when it comes to the Oreo cookie. We all love them! Lunch boxes have housed the little goodies for generations and have you looked in the Oreo aisle lately? There is an Oreo for everyone now! They even have reverse Oreos with vanilla wafers gently hugging chocolate cream. Oreos have even gotten involved with several other ingredients and have created recipes. There are loads of them from pies to cupcakes to milkshakes to candy bars. My personal favorite...dirt cake. You can't get much better!

It all began in 1898 when several baking companies decided to come together to form the National Biscuit Company or, what we fondly know as, Nabisco (Na Bis Co). Their first little treat were the Barnum's Animal Cookies that came in a little red box that looked like a cage with a string on it. Now I thought this string was a handle. That is what I always used it for, but, after reading some articles, I found out that the string was actually put there to hang it from a Christmas Tree. Oh. The precious Oreo was born in 1912 which makes it 103! That's one old cookie! Not much has changed. Like the saying goes, if it ain't broke, then don't fix it! One thing remains a mystery...where did the name come from? Theory 1 - "or" which is the French word for gold which was the color of the old packaging. Theory 2 - The hill shaped test version (I'm not sure what that means) but the German word for mountain is "oreo". Theory 3 - two "o"s sandwiching "re" for "cream". Last, just because it was short and simple. You never know. Kodak was named after what the shutter sounded like! No matter what the name stands for or where it came from, the Oreo cookie is an American icon. Over 362 billion of the little chocolatey delights have been sold which makes the Oreo the best-selling cookie of the 19th century and the BFF of milk for all time!

National Frozen Foods Day

Okay, so frozen food wasn't really invented. If you chuck a handful of peas out your door in a snow storm, then chances are...you'll have frozen peas. It is what naturally occurs when fresh food enters a cold environment. It works on toes and fingers too. We have another name for it though...frostbite. Let's just stick with food though. Before there was Clarence Birdseye (yes, the name is not just a product line), there was frozen food. It was mushy and tasted terrible. No one really ate the stuff. It was actually banned from New York state prisons! They called feeding the stuff to their prisoners "inhumane". Wow! It must have been bad!! The idea for GOOD frozen food came from salt mills. The workers knew that the quicker crystals formed, then the smaller they were. That was the problem with frozen food. It took a while to freeze the food therefore the ice crystals that were forming were larger and ripped and deformed the food tissue making the food mushy and gross. Flash freezing created smaller ice crystals and not so much tissue damage leading to tasty, right-out-of-field flavor! Clarence Birdseye figured this stuff out (he must have been eating his veggies) and created a whole manufacturing line. He commissioned DuPont to invent cellophane for wrapping everything up and then there would have to be freezer cars for transportation and freezers for storage. The first line of frozen food began in 1930.

During WWII, refrigerators got a little better and there was a shortage of tin due to the war effort (you don't want to eat from those tin cans anyway - too much sodium). The popularity of frozen food began to soar and the varieties began to grow which included orange juice. In the 50's Americans developed a love for the TV! Families would gather around the TV together. Besides a TV, what else brings a family together? Dinner! Frozen dinners, aka TV dinners, become a family favorite with the compartments for complete meals. As time went on, frozen food has taken on a life of it's own. Now it occupies some prime real estate in the grocery store. There are more than just veggies! Snacks, low-fat dinners, pizza, fruit...anything you can pretty much imagine!! So open another bag of frozen peas and salute Clarence Birdseye for starting the frozen food revolution!

Pancake Day!

Ahhhhhh, the pancake...the flapjack...the griddlecake. Such exquisiteness comes with so many names and so many styles and flavors and accessories!!! Also, our modern day pancake comes with a pretty lengthy history as well. Can you believe that Stone Age women may have been cooking up some flapjacks on a hot and convenient rock?! What! Scientists have poked around at some 30,000 year-old ancient tools and analyzed  a few starch grains and found out that there may have been pancakes. Now they were probably not the fluffy goodness of today drenched in Log Cabin syrup, but were probably something more like the hard, tasteless pirate food called hardtack. They Ancient Greeks were no strangers to the pancake. They were called tagenias and were made from wheat flour, olive oil, honey and curdled milk and sweetened with honey. Breakfast of champions? Elizabethans enjoyed their pancakes on Pancake Day or Shrove Tuesday. Things can get a little slim for Christians around Easter so Pancake Day was a good day to eat and enjoy. They made their pancakes with spices, rosewater, sherry and apples. Across the pond in America, our 3rd President, Thomas Jefferson, enjoyed a good pancake or two. Here in the states they were not only known as pancakes, but hoe cakes, johnnycakes and flapjacks. Pancakes have even gotten their own restaurant...The International House of Pancakes!!! Pancakes played their own special part of history. Ready for a stack!!