But it’s not the same thing to put a pot on the stove with continual heat being added and cook for 5 minutes, or to pour boiling water into a plastic cup and let it cool for 5 minutes. As Yllaria points out, the pasta doesn’t get done.
From my own experience (not a student, but a non-cooking person): if you only use a kettle and not a stove, buy Asian pasta (I think they’re called Ramen noodles in the US?). They are much thinner and don’t need to be cooked. I also used to buy small packets of Asian noodle soup - a packet of noodles, just add boiling water, and a small envelope with the spices and artifical chicken taste and the garlic and oil, which you can leave out, and simply drain the water to eat the noodles.
Santa brought me one last Christmas as a stocking stuffer. That is exactly how mine worked - in with nice spaghetti, out comes this semi solid lump of ex-pasta. I thought I was doing something wrong.
Luckily, I knocked mine off the counter and broke it, so I got to toss it without hurting Santa’s feelings.
My absolute favorite is the infomercial for the pot with a colander for a lid. Not only does it imply you are too inept to pour hot water & pasta into the sink, it actually shows a woman flailing at her attempt, burning herself, then making the “I’m frustrated!” face.
But wait! What if all you had to do was turn the pot…upside down!!!
You mean, the same thing you do when you have the colander in the sink? Like that?
Of course, a year later, a roommate moved in with the same pot. Of course, the lid doesn’t stay on, which actually makes it worse than using a colander in the first place.
A bit lame compared to some of the others here, but the one that’s always amazed me are those ads for chips (crisps) whose entire point is that they are crunchy. Really really crunchy. Yep, we promise our food item makes a lot of noise when you eat it, and that’s all we’re telling you about it.
Why exactly would I buy food like that? I could walk over leaf litter and get the same “benefit”.
I bought one and I love it. I enter my house through the back door into the living room, which doesn’t have an overhead light fixture. The only reasonable spot for a lamp is in the opposite corner from the door. Now I have a light switch right inside the doorway, and I don’t stumble around in the dark and trip over the cats(as much) anymore!
I haven’t seen this one in a while, since we got rid of cable, but there was the one for the egg peeler thingie. The woman making all her myriad attempts to peel some hard-boiled eggs just made a complete mess of it, totally overplaying everything to the point of being absolutely ridiculous. Yeah, fresh eggs, when hard-boiled, can be difficult to peel. But so difficult that you have to get some egg-peeler doodad? Nah.
I have one of those. I got it for .25 cents at a yard sale. It makes the slices uniform, which is nice if you are going for appearance as well as taste.
“If it doesn’t get all over the place, it doesn’t belong in your face.”
Actually, I prefer food *not *to get all over the place, thank you.
“This side tingles, so I know it’s working!”
Or you could be having an adverse reaction to the dandruff shampoo that will lead to extensive, painful blistering and permanent hair loss.
Any dog food add that incorporates the word “gourmet.” An animal that must be actively hindered from eating garbage and drinking out of a toilet bowl is not a gourmet.
So many OTC meds put menthol (or whatever that mint derivative is) in their products just to make it feel tingly. That way, dumbkopfs who think medicine has to sting will think it’s actually doing something. One probably can’t feel the actual active ingredient at all.
Hey, I know - I’ll put menthol in bat guano and sell it to folks to rub on their heads. “It’s tingling, so I know it’s working!”
what about that commercial where that scary looking woman is boiling potatoes in the same pan as eggs. ewwwww!! i don’t even know what the product is that she’s selling. maybe a spatula or something. and then there’s one that shows cans of fruits and vegetables with the exact fresh fruit or vegetable sitting in front of the canned version. i’ve never seen a canned apple in my life!
Ditto for animals that eat raw birds, rodents, and insects–and lick their own buttholes. “Restaurant-inspired food for cats”? Imagine a cat-inspired restaurant . . .
So, the honored guest will be having Rongeur with a side of Papillon. Would you prefer your Ronguer fresh-killed, or will you be making use of our maze for the stalk? Very good, monsieur. Might I suggest the Nepeta as a freshener for the after-dinner lick? I find that the tongue does need some freshening after cleaning merde from one’s posterior.
Ah, yes, an excellent choice. I shall bring over an assortment of frolic feathers for monsieur’s appraisal following the stretch, yawn, and tail flirt.
I’ve not only seen them, I’ve bought them. Leaving aside canned apple pie fillings, there are Luck’s Fried apples and canned applesauce.
What’s wrong with cooking potatoes and hard-boiled eggs together? My sainted mother does that when she is making potato salad. I haven’t seen the commercial so the woman may indeed by scary-looking.
Remember the pump toothpaste fad? The commercials always showed people trapped in a hellish world of lost toothpaste caps and ridiculously excessive glops of toothpaste because no one could manage using the old fashioned tubes.
Now that we’re pretty much back to tubes, they all seem to have a flip-top rather than a screw on top so at least half of our nightmares have been banished.
Most ridiculous in this category, the one that peels the eggs with a bellows that injects air through a hole. The instructions are clear - soak the eggs in ice water for fifteen minutes, then put the egg in the Eggstractor [sup]tm[/sup] and peel 'em in a snap.
Of course, if you take the time to soak the eggs in ice water for fifteen minutes, you don’t need a bulky, ugly, cheaply-made plastic machine to peel 'em; the shells will come off clean the usual way, every freaking time.