Serving Suggestions

I work for a company that makes frozen Chinese food. It is Chinese in the same way that frozen pizza is Italian food.
I work in R&D.
Today our task was to create Preparation Suggestions for frozen dinner kits. Those tips on the package that tell you to add peas to the Mac and Cheese for a healthy treat or to punch up your frozen meal with a squeeze of lemon juice.
The basic criteria are that the items need to make sense in the meal, taste good and do not point out that the product we sell is not up to snuff. Then we need to test that it could be made by your average American consumer. This involves making and tasting many options some of which are bad.
There are several questions here we need to ask ourselves in this process. Who follows the serving suggestions on packaged food? Is it useful info for the consumer? Does this person have any sense of how to cook? If they are buying a meal kit from the freezer then they may no. But if they are enhancing it with further ingredients then they might? Can we enhance the emotional response of the consumer to the food? Are we adding items that people might have? French’s Fried onions are a better choice than fresh mango.
Have you ever followed a ‘serving suggestion” from packaged food? How did it make you feel?

The Gingerbread Project

In between Chirstmas and New Years we built a gingerbread house from scratch. I am not exactly sure why or how we got onto this project. And if we had known what we were getting into it may not have happened at all. After 30 hours of planning, baking, building and decorating we ended up with this. It is an accurate representation of a Victorian Farmhouuse with a wrap around porch.

The top lessons learned

1. Have your architect make templates.
2. Hard crack sugar syrup is better than Royal icing to stick gingerbread together
3. 26 different pieces of gingerbread takes a long time to bake
4. The children will eat important pieces of the house if they are left alone too long.
5. Gingerbread is an ephemeral form that should be “eaten” by New Years Eve.
6. Once you start to wire the house for lighting you have crossed the line.
7. Graham Crackers and burnt sugar syrup can make replacement walls in a pinch.
8. Rice Krispie treats with food coloring can be made into trees, bushes or a number of other plants.
9. If you make your roof out of caramel it will slide off the house overtime or really overnight.

We are now in the process of planning next year’s house. It will be bigger and better in a yet-to-be-decided architecturally accurate style. Feel free to let me know what style that should be.