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Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

cubbyathome.com

601–610 of 721 posts

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#601
post #525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why on earth would I make pancakes from scratch when I can buy Krusteaz? If someone gets enjoyment from buying their flour, sugar, baking soda, salt, buttermilk, and oil separately, and turning pancakes into an entire weekend morning activity involving a sinkful of dirty dishes, then they should definitely do that. Meanwhile I’m dumping a cup of Krusteaz into a bowl, adding water, and eating pancakes within five minu…

I can't tell if this is supposed to be ironic or not.

It’s not. I’m a mom with two kids at home, I write software for a living, and pancake mix is one of the staples in my pantry. Why this is so bizarre you would think it ironic, I have no idea.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#602
post #510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s correct. Some grandpas don’t know how to fix their own car or build their own furniture, either. I’m not sure if you’re expressing surprise or disdain here, but neither seems called for.

Sure but then I'm sure people aren't boasting about their grandpa's tradition furniture build process that involves following instructions from ikea

Yeah, no. Family recipes rarely work like that anymore. My mom’s lemon meringue pie recipe is from the Pillsbury cookbook from 1960-something. My chocolate cake recipe is straight off the back of the Hershey cocoa box. It is way more common for grandma’s fudge to be the Fantasy Fudge recipe off the back of the marshmallow creme package than it is to be some heirloom recipe. Do non-cooks not know this, and actually think everyone’s mom’s recipe for everything is the equivalent of a traditional furniture build?

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#603

Earlier quoted context omitted.

C'mon now, orange juice or cheese - perfectly safe? Unless you are specifically out to gain weight or needing extra calories due to hard work, you should not be drinking your calories. With orange juice you have sugars stripped from fibre and you can glug the sugars in a dozen oranges just glugging away for a few seconds. To eat those oranges would take an hour if you had to peel them first. Cheese is worst thing eve…

> Cheese is worst thing ever for saturated fat, which clogs the arteries, gives you diabetes and sends you to hospital for some bypass surgery. Besides, what is natural about consuming dairy? The bull gets jerked off, the cow gets artificially inseminated, the baby gets eaten and the milk for the baby gets stolen. That is just plain weird. Technically everything is natural if you want to see it that way. At least no…

komali2 says> Cheese is worst thing ever for saturated fat, which clogs the arteries...

News alert: the cholesterol hypothesis is dead, but many people, like parent poster here, cannot let go:

https://www.sott.net/article/441076-The-cholesterol-hypothes...

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#604

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why on earth would I make pancakes from scratch when I can buy Krusteaz? If someone gets enjoyment from buying their flour, sugar, baking soda, salt, buttermilk, and oil separately, and turning pancakes into an entire weekend morning activity involving a sinkful of dirty dishes, then they should definitely do that. Meanwhile I’m dumping a cup of Krusteaz into a bowl, adding water, and eating pancakes within five minu…

In the UK we eat pancakes (crêpes) once a year (for some reason). It takes me no more than five minutes to make the batter from scratch. I do it the night before so it's ready to go, but you don't have to. I use one bowl. I imagine if you did it more frequently you'd become even more efficient than I am.

I do make crêpes from scratch, on the rare occasion I make them. They’re simpler than buttermilk pancakes, with fewer ingredients, and it is a one-bowl operation.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#605
post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Box cakes aren't much of a thing in other places, I would be very surprised if any grandma's recipe would include "box cake" here. (I have, in fact, never seen any cake recipe here include box cake)

Box cakes are widely available in most of Europe. They taste more than ok but sure nobody here would claim it’s a family recipe.

Available, sure, but the small sliver they get in the baking aisle probably says all you need to know about the turnover they generate.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#606

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, that's fair then. But I wish you would have replied to the comment making that claim. Not one by a different person making a different point.

The comment I replied to stated > That person listed a lot of completely different ingredients. Did you dismiss them all out of hand for a specific reason? I gave the specific reason to dismiss those ingredients. I took the two comments together trying to say that the boxed goods do things impossible for a home baker. I apologize if the intent of my comment wasn't clear.

I'm confused. So you are dismissing them?

Then I do disagree with you. Dismissing the ingredients needs an actual reason they're bad, not just a way to replace them.

If you were only saying it's possible to replace them with simple ingredients, that would not be a dismissal of the ingredients themselves.

> I took the two comments together trying to say that the boxed goods do things impossible for a home baker.

I don't think so. bruce511 was replying to a completely different part of the ancestor comment, disliking the list of chemicals regardless of whether they do something unique, and tavavex was rebutting a dislike of chemicals.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#607
post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried my best to update several of my family recipes. A common measure in many of them was “an egg” e.g. “an egg of butter, cold”. This is meant to be an egg-sized quantity of butter, but what was a normal sized egg in 1905?

There are some baking recipes which measure the other ingredients relative to the weight of the eggs you have at hand. Like, "flour equal to twice your eggs weight"

Thank you! I never considered it a relative measurement.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#608

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The recipes were objectively not making the same thing without the update. To fix your scenario, the build system that is installing the wrong versions and blowing up is the nostalgic one . And yeah it has some optimizations but it also has a bunch of anti-optimizations at this point. The new one is annoyingly different to look at but it actually sets up the server correctly. "Stay in your lane" is not the way to add…

But it is. Cooking is not merely chemistry. Historically, it is providing for one's family at the hearth, the until-very-recently physical center of the home. It is the natural progression from lactation; one still receives sustenance from the Mother. OP divested the recipes of that traditional tie. It's as if OP mathematically designed a Christmas tree with optimal packing, using a 3-D printer: an imitation Christma…

OP improved the traditional ties for the actual recipe, while damaging the traditional ties of the formatting.

It's a mixed bag, not a dummy barging in and ruining everything.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#609
post #558

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How dare OP adapt their family recipes so they can be usable. What an affront to nature. Are you all reading your own comments? Their mother can keep using the old version if she wants. It literally doesn't matter.

> How dare OP adapt their family recipes so they can be usable. What an affront to nature. It's an affront to tradition . And that's important to a lot of people. It happens not to be important to a lot of very inward-looking geeks here on HN, so I felt it was important to call out that disconnect upthread. You can't show up to your elders with a pull request and performance data and expect them to accept it. That's…

You can think they did more damage than good, but if you think they weren't explicitly working to uphold tradition then you didn't read the comment right.

Re: Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

#610
post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

She's upset that the recipes are different If she's like my mother, she probably thinks of these recipes as a connection to her parents and grandparents. The importance is not in the finished dish, but in the history of this specific artifact, including: the hand writing, the original index cards, the references to the bowls she remembers as a little girl. I understand this. When I see my grandmother's recipes, hand-…

I really wish I had kept a note of what my parents called "neeps and tatties" soup - which was served with thick oatcakes from the local baker. I do see recipes for it online but they look very different (spices? cream?).

https://www.tinnedtomatoes.com/2013/09/scottish-tattie-neep-... is a stew recipe that looks similar to something I would have growing up. I think it was a basic stew with whatever was ready to eat, so we never had a specific recipe for it.
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