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Betty Ossola really has very little trace on the internet. I did find a great picture of her inspecting olives on eBay: https://www.ebay.com/itm/395395490195
I'd love to see a return of the aluminum containers for frozen dinners. Lazy Dog sells fresh-made take-home dinners (albeit at restaurant prices) in aluminum trays, and it seems superior to those plastic ones. Cooking the food in the plastics, having the tray be pretty much unrecyclable, being mostly limited to only cooking in the microwave as most of those plastic trays couldn't stand a 350F oven for long, pretty terrible experience overall with plastic IMO.

I never really lived in the time when those aluminum trays were a thing though. What were some of the big negatives, other than the obvious cost aspect? Durability? I guess microwavable issues?

I would say today's frozen food is better than the old frozen "TV dinners" we had back then. I always thought the microwave enabled the quality in today's frozen foods? IDK.
I think microwave won out because it was quicker. That said many frozen foods have both oven and microwave instructions and almost universally I find oven tastes better
Actually, I can’t think of a single item that tastes better reheated in the microwave than an oven.

I just recently got an Anova Precision Oven (which has steam injection in addition to otherwise just being a really good and consistent convection oven) and literally everything I reheat now just tastes fantastic.

I imagine foods that need a lot of moisture content are probably better with the microwave, those trays probably wouldn't seal well and you could lose a lot of moisture in the 30min or so it probably takes to reheat from frozen. But in the other direction it seems foods that are crispier usually aren't great in the microwave in comparison.

But IME even with a good microwave a lot of frozen meals tend to reheat somewhat unevenly with the default directions even with a rotating tray. I do admit I've never used a microwave where the magnetron moves though.

I don’t see why they couldn’t do a sealed aluminum top. I remember they used to do that for frozen lasagna.
> I'd love to see a return of the aluminum containers for frozen dinners.

You can't put aluminum in the microwave...

And if you can't microwave a frozen dinner, good luck trying to sell it.

Yet there are some out there. As I mentioned in an earlier reply, Red Baron frozen French Bread Pizzas have no microwave instructions (though people may try it anyway, idk), and either does Stouffer's family sized Chicken Alfredo (except for their sped-up hybrid instructions).
You can absolutely put aluminum in a microwave. Get a smooth aluminum container with no sharp edges or ridges and fill it with food then put it in the microwave. If it does anything except heat up the food I will eat my shirt.
I'd be curious to know how the market is for frozen dinners designed to be microwaved on/in a separate plate/bowl. I usually do that anyway for things that come in plastic microwavable containers
They took forever in the oven, plus however long it took your oven to heat up.
I get that. So microwavable issues.

I'm probably an odd-ball though. If there's oven directions, I almost always go with those. Usually more evenly heated, things can be crispier instead of just soggy, etc. My countertop convection oven heats up pretty quick and uses its fan to cool off pretty fast as well when done, so I can often get a set it and forget it kind of deal reheating frozen foods in it once I dial in the time/temp on convection mode for whatever dish I'm making.

I also tend to let a lot of my pre-made frozen foods thaw in the fridge the day before cooking to speed up cooking times. Once again that usually takes some trial and error to dial in the cook times as the packaging pushes you to keep the food frozen until cooking.

Pretty much that, remembering that you probably didn't have a microwave. Nobody bought a microwave just to get away from aluminum foil.

I hear you on the convection oven, but the real game changer for me was moving into a house with a double oven. The top oven heats very quickly but can fit a half sheet.

> My countertop convection oven

Thank you; I'm with you! I'm not sure I could even bring myself to buy one over it. (I decided not to on cost vs savings basis before having to make that choice, since time to preheat isn't something I generally care about so that's not a benefit to me.)

Ovens are fine, except in the summer when you live in an apartment cooled only by a portable A/C unit. We avoid the big Stouffer's chicken alfredo meal and Red Baron French bread pizzas in the summertime.
How many of the Stouffer's TV Dinners can you recognize in the second photo?

I remember the "Chinese" one (just above the SpaghettiOs) as being especially vile.

Did anybody read the headline and think "SpaghettiOS? Never heard of it, who can keep track of all these Linux distros?!"
>there may not have been any predecessors in the circular-spaghetti game

Except in Sicily, where this type of pasta is traditionally called anelli.

Anelli-O’s just doesn’t have the same ring to it.
You also get circular pasta in Minestrone soup, and the article mentions that canned Minestrone was a thing in the 1950s, but I don't what kind of pasta it had back then.
I usually see minestrone made with ditalini[1].

Which, to be fair, are circular.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ditalini

Packet and tinned Minestrone in the UK have spaghetti hoops (as we call them). Maybe fancier brands use ditalini but I've never see it here.
I love so much about that TV guide recipe insert. The border art, the Kalligraphia font of Partridge Family / Peter, Paul, & Mary fame... but damn those gelatin salads always sound revolting.
Turning "pasta fazool" into a real product was a stroke of genius. Excellent essay on an undiscovered person! But would their research published into the blank space on Wikipedia be greeted with "this article lacks sources/ link context"?

It was okay to compliment women positively on their 'looks' in news articles in the 1950s who ever they were. It was even okay to use that in a teaser vignette of an article, the opening part that is to capture readers. Or a photo caption.

The author claims to find this depressing, but I'll wager Betty Ossola did not. No crime was committed here, and the publicity helped her brand. Even the silliest gaffe of all, a headline that crows that she has "has a Husband", seems something the Husband would rib her about and (nevertheless) was positive in nature. What if the headline said "is yet unmarried"? Still positive.

To find offense in historical things too often people have to imagine some entire upside-down world they think would have been a better world, and imagine that many things that are the result of what they perceive as 'comments of negative value' simply rather have been left unsaid. A lot of positivity in the world simply not there, and people just didn't say as much in that pretend-world.

"The past is a different country, people do things differently there." ~ L. P. Hartley

The present depresses me sometimes as well. There has always been a cultural contingent that follows the First Lady as a fashion icon and even an independent spirit and even awards self-praise for the idea for disconnecting their attention to her with the husband's politics. And follows her charity outreach and autonomous actions. It actually expresses respect for women with these political confines.

All until Melania Trump. The first First Lady it was okay to hate and to ignore. And she received attention (and out of context misreporting) for wearing a shirt that said "I don't care, do u?" which was directly about the media phenomenon that was so sudden in our history. She felt personally stung by it and still holds her head high. And she has the 'looks' too!

I would like to see if Betty Ossola can become a Wikipedia article, I'll work on it in my spare time.

> The first First Lady it was okay to hate and to ignore

I don't know, there was lots of hate and dislike for Nancy Reagan and Hilary Clinton. Seems like a lot of people thought "Just say no" was pretty asinine and out of touch.

And FWIW, I think she deserved the coverage she did wearing the "I don't care, do u?" jacket. Sure, whatever, she meant it to be pointed towards left-wing haters and wasn't supposed to be directed towards the immigrant child separation crisis. But there's a time and place to make a statement like that. Wear it at some fundraising dinner or other public event, not in some place where you're going to visit an ongoing humanitarian crisis. Not when there's such a massive chance for that statement to get misunderstood.

> towards the immigrant child separation crisis

There was no _crisis_ I’m sorry your media did that to you and the potion of the population they whipped into a frenzy. I still remember the journalists using pictures from the previous administration. Effective propaganda to say the least.

That the policy or similar existed previously doesn't make what happened to those kids a crisis.

Quite telling you think the government separating children from their families and losing track of a lot of them isn't considered a crisis. I don't care who does it, it's bad policy and losing them is unacceptable.

Also, while "kids in detention facilities" happened in other administrations, the direct tactic of specifically separating families with no intention of later reunification was something unique to the Trump administration. The "kids in cages" during the Obama administration came across the border unaccompanied, the Trump policy was to separate families and then not tell the families where their kids were.

I'm sorry you don't have the humanity enough to see the policy of child separation is wrong. I'm sorry your media brainwashing led you to think the cages built during the Obama administration was used for the exact same policies as the Trump administration, because they weren't.

Precisely. Couldn’t have said it better myself.

Wear a jacket with the message all you want. But timing and context of the message matters.

Even if I were an anarchist, I wouldn’t wear a “let’s burn it all down” jacket to the site of a massive fire either. Sometimes your message is less important than paying attention to your surroundings, especially as the First Lady.

So yes, she deserved all the anger headed in her direction for that stunt, but the jacket wasn’t the issue. The context, timing, and absolute tone-deafness was.

The article doesn't even address the fact that a company called Franco American makes Italian food.
Truly a missed opportunity to call it Frankie American, or Frankly American if we were going for irony.
I'm going to try making that salad, sounds intriguing.
The v8 gelatin salad?
How about the pizza punch with the V8 and garlic that is "guaranteed to make the teen scene"
The one with tuna
> Reminder that if you were a paid subscriber on Substack, you need to set up a new account here on WordPress (sorry!) and you should have gotten a prorated refund already from Substack.

Huh, weird. Just looking at the page said "Substack" to me, but apparently the characteristic Substack styling has been intentionally carried over after the author has deliberately left Substack.

Which boggles my mind, since default Wordpress styling looks much better than Substack's center-of-the-page styling.

Safik2211
I thought it was about an operating system. Spoiler: it's not.
Uh oh! Somebody missed out on some pop culture!

Dumb question for the folks with kids: how are they indoctrinating the kiddos these days? I remember SpaghettiOs ads from Saturday morning and after school cartoons. Do kids even still do those things?

N.b.: all the people in my life with kids are weird. Delightfully weird, but weird nonetheless. I feel totally out of touch with anyone I might describe as a mainstream parent.

> Dumb question for the folks with kids: how are they indoctrinating the kiddos these days?

TikTok and Youtube shorts.

> Uh oh! Somebody missed out on some pop culture!

A large percentage of the world is not American

Back in my teen years, I would eat a single large can of SpaghettiOs for lunch. (The plain ones, of course; the hot-dog-infested cans were anathema.)
Meatball spaghetti-Os were my favorite.
They had me at “Hello, snackers“