So, “by hand” to you means no use of tools?
Someone says they baked a cake themself. Did they grow and mill the flour? Bake it through body heat?
Impressive, to encounter someone even more pedantic than I.
I used to drive past a grocery store on the way to work every day that advertised “ho-made pies.” I don’t know if the description was accurate or not.
If asked, a local sports bar will freely admit that the soup-of-the-day comes from a can of Campbell’s. The closest thing to handmade in the daily soup and sandwich lunch special is the sandwich, where the cook slaps together some ham and a slice of cheese between two slices of toast. As they say, they’re a sports bar, not a fine dining establishment.
What puzzles me is Tito’s Handmade Vodka. Is Tito distilling this stuff in his bathtub? How do you even hand-make a distilled spirit?
Technically, hot air is a part of distilling.
You can go into any Panda Express, look into their open kitchen, and see people chopping vegetables, mixing sauces, and cooking things in woks. It may not be gourmet Chinese cuisine but it’s as “made from scratch” as anything else.
There’s a craft distillery I’ve visited a few times. They talk about small-batch distillation. I forget the specifics, but each batch is numbered, as are the bottles filled from that batch.
Tito’s isn’t distilled in small batches, but it is hood vodka IMHO.
This is a hand scraped floor.
The one that annoys me is buy one get the second one 50% off. IMHO it would be less misleading to say buy two and get 25% off both. My guess is the reason they do this is to take advantage of people who are not very mathematically literate, the idea being to get them to think that 50% off is better than 25% off, and that buying one is cheaper than buying two.
The term I see more in use for such things (and by NO means is it limited to food) is “homestyle”.
Which is… well, not quite as much puffery, but OMFG, do they apply it to anything they want in order to evoke that emotional response.
Riiiiight up there with “Artisanal” and “Rustic” in terms of information-empty appeals to marketing. At least, as to how they’re normally used.
Didn’t they make those pink and white animal crackers (cookies)? I still have an unreasonable fondness for those.
If a soup is made from scratch in a restaurant kitchen, I don’t have any problem with it being called homemade. If it were made anywhere else – including an actual home – I wouldn’t think it fit.
I have. It’s becoming more common here in SoCal. Homemade these days has a bit of a connotation of old-fashioned.
I don’t see the “homestyle” much. I think because it sounds fake. Isn’t there even a brand of bread called Home Style?
There is a well known takeaway chicken place up the road from where I used to live. They have signs up for their “famous” chips that have been “voted the best chips and gravy in Sydney.” A friend once asked the guy serving him who voted them into this exalted position. He tilted his head toward the other staff and said, “We did.”
I don’t think that’s why - I think it’s because of the (many, many) people who insist that " buy one get one free" means they have to be allowed to buy one for half price. Because after all , one at $4 plus one free means they are really $2 each. Any way you could say “buy two get 25% off each” will have people wanting to buy a single one for $3, since two would be $6
Not the large multi-regional company, this was a smaller and unrelated local company that sold only within a region of 100 miles or so of the home office (and where the large company did not market their stuff).
With but one get one free that makes sense. But the buy one get one half off seems wrong to me. It’s not just the 50% vs. 25%. It’s the use of “get” when in reality what they mean is you have to buy a second one, you’re not just getting it.
On the other hand, I live around the corner from a place that claims to have the “Best sabich in the universe”. The thing is, they aren’t necessarily wrong. Sabich, which is a type of sandwich, is only really sold in Israel, and my neighborhood place is probably the most famous sabich stand in the country and definitely the most famous landmark in my city (pop. 50,000). It also makes a really, really good sandwich - I’ve never seen a ranking of the top 5 sabichs in the country that didn’t include it.
So the place is a good contender for the best sabich stand in Israel, and if it is, that means that it’s also probably the best sabich stand in the world. As to whether it’s the best sabich stand in the entire universe, that depends on whether the universe is infinite or not. If it is, then logically, the universe has an infinite number of sabich stands of equal or better quality. If the universe is finite, though, then the chance that sabich is made on some other planet is infinitely small, so I’d have to say that my neighborhood joint is the best in the universe.
“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe”
“House” just means the building in that context, though. Like “house wine.”
And for that matter, when one orders “meatloaf”, one never gets the whole loaf.
As Carl Sagan once pointed out, to bake an apple pie from scratch, one must first create the Universe.
Our local Pizza joint, which is usually very good. They make a Pizza Rustica.
Well, it’s neither pizza or rustic. Looks like a Hot Pocket. Tastes worse.
I swear they buy them pre-made off a truck and drop them in a deep fryer.
That’s… actually a really good point. I may have to re-think my irritation at the usage.
But of course that slacker started way too late:
