"ritz" news and stories

So one of my duties this Christmas at my sister's house (I'm also making this) is to make a cheese and cracker platter that folks can munch on before and after the main meal. I've done them before, but they always turn out to be just very basic cheese and cracker snacks: a couple of different blocks of Kraft cheeses and a few different crackers. A very basic, low-cost type of thing, and it's OK.

But this year I want to do something different. I want to get a really good selection of nice cheeses and several different types of crackers to place around them. So I need your help! What kinds of cheeses and crackers would make a good selection for my family? Any tips or tricks you can give me to make it just a bit more than the usual "cheese and Ritz cracker" affair? Anything besides the cheese and crackers you'd put on the platter too? Fruit? Chocolate?

That pic on the right looks like a cool presentation.

Clearly, the "flavor experts" at Ben & Jerry's are not Slashfood readers because if they were, they would know that everyone wanted either Italian Renaissance or Wackie Chan to win the new flavor contest. It was one of our most commented-on posts of all time because just about everyone likes ice cream and we don't get the chance to design a really fantastic new flavor every day. We'll have to wait until a future round comes up for our next shot at Wackie Chan because Puttin' on the Ritz is the new flavor.

The ice cream is vanilla based with swirls of caramel and Ritz crackers, studded with chunks of chocolate-covered, caramel-filled Ritz cracker sandwiches. It's safe to say that the "cracker swirls" are made from crushed crackers, though how they'll stay crunchy in the ice cream is anyone's guess.

As it turns out, in a twist that wasn't clear before, the company is only going to make the flavor available to the Florida woman who invented it and her family and friends for the time being. Whether the rest of us will even get to taste the concoction remains to be seen.

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Just when it seems that we'll never get any decent food on an airplane again, Southwest Airlines has introduced a special on-board snack. Produced by Nabisco, "golden airplane-shaped crackers" mark the airline's 35th anniversary. The unique crackers come in commemorative packaging.

Since Nabisco makes Ritz crackers, which already come in various non-circular shapes, Southwest's crackers will probably be very similar to them. The last time I flew Southwest, they were serving mini-pretzels, which I quite liked for an airplane snack. I'll be sad to see them go, even though Ritz are tasty, too. I'm just hoping that they decide to go with mini-airplanes, because the only thing sadder than not getting a snack on a plane is getting one lone Ritz cracker.

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Out of all the food trends we heard about back in December and January, there was one that is clearly becoming a big deal on th packaged food scene: miniature packaging, aka 100-calorie packs. "100 calories!" seems to be the hot new slogan on food products these days. The past three years have seen the market for portion-controlled packets go from 0 to more than 25 different foods. USA Today reports that 18 of the new products were introduced in 2005 alone. With more coming along this year, there is no indication that this trend is slowing.

Some of the newer products include 100-calorie sodas from brands like Coca-Cola, Pepsi and Shasta. These sodas have a mere 8-ounces per can, fewer than the more standard 12-ounces, and are marketed as being more portable than their full-sized counterparts. Coco-Cola says that they're marketed at consumers who wish to "improve their snacking and drinking opportunities."

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