"crisp" news and stories

Wandering past the mini-farmers market than takes place on Tuesday mornings by Rittenhouse Square, I spotted a basket of rhubarb. It's been nearly a month since I'd seen rhubarb at the market, I had thought it was gone until next spring. But it was there, and at a fairly good price too, so I scooped up a pound to go with the elderly strawberries in my fridge.

I sliced up the fruit and rhubarb and tossed them with a little vanilla-infused sugar and a squirt of lemon juice. While they sat, getting juicy and delicious, I quickly pulled together a topping. I like the topping for crisps to be reminiscent of granola (occasionally I actually just use granola if I'm in a hurry and have it around) and so I dumped approximately a cup and a half of rolled oats into a bowl (I do not measure for things like this). I added a cup of chopped pecans, a sprinkling of cinnamon and nutmeg, a bit of light brown sugar and half a stick of softened butter. I used a pastry blender just to break down the butter a bit and finished combining it all with my fingers.

I transferred the fruit from bowl to baking dish and evenly distributed the oat/nut/sugar/butter mixture across the top. It went into the oven for about 25 minutes at 350 degrees, until the fruit was tender and the nuts were toasted. It was delicious hot, but it is even better for breakfast, straight out of the fridge, with a scoop of plain yogurt along side.

photo by Marisa McClellan

The British Heart Foundation (BHF) is mounting a campaign to educate Britons about "hidden salt, fat and sugar in common foods" to give people some perspective on the foods that they are putting into their bodies and to try to encourage healthy eating habits. Their focus, for the moment, is on crisps. A survey done by the BHF revealed that 49% of children from 8-15 ate at least one package of chips (crisps) each day, and 20% ate two or more. They are consuming roughly 5-liters of cooking oil every year at that rate, or about 1 1/3 gallons.

Crisp-addiction isn't limited to kids, though. As a whole, the nation consumes "a tonne of crisps every three minutes, enough to fill an Olympic size swimming pool every 14 hours." Using the number provided by the BHF, which says that the average 1.2-oz packet of chips has 2.5-tsp of oil, there are about 950-gallons of cooking oil consumed for every tonne (2,204 lbs) of crisps, a massive amount over any length of time.

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A banana chip is a thin, deep-fried slice of banana. Once fried, the slightly sweet chips are crisp (often bordering on rock-hard) and oily. Because they look like fruit, some people mistake these for a healthy snack, but they are far from good for you. A one ounce serving has about 150 calories and 9.5 grams of fat, almost all of it saturated.

On Trader Joe's top 100 list, they included something called banana crisps. I only tried them recently, since nearby Trader Joe's seemed to be perpetually sold out of them. Unlike the traditional deep-fried diet disasters, these chips are baked. They are ultra-thin and akin to an ordinary potato chip in both looks and flavor, and actually make a great substitute for regular potato chips because they don't taste very banana-like at all, though they are slightly sweet rather than salty. Best of all, each one ounce (2/3 cup) serving has only 40 calories and 1 gram of fat.

[Banana crisp image via Trader Joe's Fan, which has a great review of them, too)