More than anyone in his right mind would possibly want to know about OSC and his preferences

		Uncle Orson Reviews 1999 • Uncle Orson Reviews Practically Everything • 1999 Summer Movies Worth Seeing • Best of the Year Books

Sometimes it seems as though any product I really like is taken off the market so I have to spend the rest of my life with the petty annoyance of having to make do with poor substitutes.

Scrunge. Made by 3M, this blue plastic scrubbing sponge is simply the best scrubber on the market. Unlike the old steel-wool scrubbers (I grew up with SOS), Scrunge doesn't shed fibers. Unlike the woven scrubbers (usually colored blue so people will think that it's a Scrunge) it doesn't get food bits embedded in it, and it holds up for a remarkably long time. Indeed, it's that longevity that may have been part of its undoing as a commercial product -- it was so durable that people didn't rush out and buy more of them soon enough to make it a viable product.

Or it might have been sales resistance because the backing was one of those second-rate foam-rubber-seeming sponges that aren't good for much of anything. At first glance, it seemed to me, at least, that the lousy backing really marred the product. But upon using it, I realized that the Scrunge surface was so good at tearing away foreign matter without marring the underlying material that we used the Scrunge side for all washing -- fine china and stuck-on pots and charred-on grills -- and the other, smoother surface was used only for wiping up spills.

In short, Scrunge was perfect for its task, and so long-lasting that it was an incredible bargain. But I never saw a major advertising campaign for it, and when it disappeared from the shelves in Greensboro I saw the handwriting on the wall. Everywhere I went, I bought every Scrunge I could find. After clearing the shelves of Harris-Teeter in Myrtle Beach and Giant in northern Virginia about four years ago, I haven't seen Scrunge again. I wish 3M would license the product to somebody else so it could be made available again -- surely somebody could make money on the best scrubbing sponge ever made.

In the meantime, because Scrunge is so long-lasting, and because I bought so many just before it disappeared, we have about five years' worth under our sink. After that, Scrunge will probably be just a memory.

TCBY Yogurt. Greensboro must have been a test market for a line of TCBY yogurts in grocery stores. But these were the best. Instead of the lousy processed fruit bits that make most flavored yogurts inedible (at least to people with serious mouth-feel issues when it comes to lumpy liquids), these were smooth and the flavors were good. I especially liked the key lime pie flavor, but I enjoyed all the flavors except the amaretto and the white chocolate. Naturally, after I became completely addicted, they disappeared and haven't been back. Instead, I make do with Yoplait Light key lime pie, wishing all the time that TCBY had actually put some effort behind marketing these boys.

When I first started buying my own soap, I quickly moved away from the Ivory soap that I'd grown up with. I never felt clean after using it, and besides, I was a sucker for the ads for deodorant soaps. I bought Dial, naturally, like most other people. Then they started coming out with different colors, and these weren't just cosmetic. The almond color actually felt better and smelled better to me. Maybe it was psychological, but ... for me, the proof that the difference was real was that very quickly the almond color became the hardest to find, which is usually an indicator that it's the best and therefore will soon be discontinued (see "Gone but Not Forgotten").

When Dial started making moisturizing bath soap, we tried it and liked it. And then we graduated to their Ultra, which is what Kristine and I use for bathing. We tried body washes, but they left me feeling slimy and we're sticking with the bar soaps.

When Dial started making antibacterial hand soaps, we switched to liquid soaps for hand-washing. We followed the same path with the hand soaps as we did with the bath soaps, getting the moisturizing version and then the Ultra. Unfortunately, the Ultra apparently didn't catch on with the liquid hand soap, so it's not available anywhere that we've found, and we're back to the moisturizing soap in some bathrooms and the regular antibacterial in others.

We hear that the antibacterial soaps can be harmful -- too harsh, or perhaps they kill some "useful" bacteria. We don't much care. We like it, we use it, it makes us feel better to have soap that apparently really does kill bacteria.

We've tried the discount brands, the "long-life" bulbs people sell you over the phone (using pity as a come-on, so you're donating to a cause and not just buying light bulbs). Phillips, Sylvania, you name it, we've tried it. And we always come back to GE bulbs for everything, because, doggone it, they last longer and are far less likely to be defective coming out of the box. When a company does it right, consistently, I can't think of a single reason not to buy their product. The money you "save" by buying cheaper brands you end up losing many times over when you have to replace the bulbs more often.

The only exception is that Phillips is making some fluorescent lights that fit in the sockets for regular bulbs. These cannot be used with dimmer switches or three-step lamps, and most of them are oversized so they simply don't fit in a lot of locations. But where they do fit (for instance, the outdoor lamp on the sidewalk leading up to our house), they work great and last for ages.

We've been eating Lay's potato chips for years, especially Ruffles, and they remain our mainstay. But recently there've been some truly cool new chips. For instance, Terra makes chips from taro and sweet potatoes that are really delicious -- to me, anyway (my family doesn't like them as much as I do; and don't bother with the spiced sweet potato chips -- the spicing is nasty, even though the plain sweet potato chips in the mixed Terra Chips bags are the best).

High-end grocery stores have recently begun carrying Olive Oil Chips with various flavors -- rosemary, cracked pepper, lemon, and plain -- all of which are good, though my favorites are the cracked pepper and plain. The olive oil really does make a difference. And recently Terra came out with Blue Potato Chips made from blue Peruvian potatoes. These are also very delicious, thicker and crunchier than regular chips, but with a delicious flavor.

As for barbecue chips, I'm an aficionado of Lay's KC Barbecue chips; I've tried a lot of others, and I keep coming back to these. And when it comes to unsalted chips, my favorite is made by Utz; unfortunately, I only find these when I shop in northern Virginia.

There is no question that the only great commercial cottage cheese in America is made by Dean's Foods. We found them when we lived in South Bend, Indiana, and they have spoiled us for any other brand. Whenever we go to the upper midwest we splurge on Dean's Foods cottage cheese -- large curd for me, small curd for everybody else in the family -- and it doesn't matter whether you get the regular or the 2%, it's great all the way around.

But Dean's Foods doesn't make it down to North Carolina, and as a result we had to go on a cottage cheese search to find an adequate brand. We tried them all, and they all sucked. Until, to our shock, the Kroger store brand turned out to be edible. Not Dean's, mind you, but edible -- the only cottage cheese worth buying in Greensboro. In fact, that cottage cheese was the only reason we ever shopped at Kroger. But by Orson's law ("Any product that we absolutely depend on will be discontinued") it was inevitable: in 1999, Harris-Teeter bought out Kroger's, at least in our area. We resigned ourselves to living without cottage cheese for the rest of the time we lived here. Until, shortly after the buyout, Kristine bought the Harris-Teeter store brand, just to see if it was adequate, and ... it's indistinguishable from the Kroger brand! We realized that our big cottage cheese taste test was back in the early 80's, before Harris-Teeter bought out Bestway and established a presence in Greensboro, and we had never tried their store brand. So either their cottage cheese was adequate all along, or they had the brains to adopt the same supplier that Kroger had used. In any event, you will all be relieved that we still have cottage cheese in our lives -- though if Dean's Foods started distributing their cottage cheese in our area, we'd switch to that cottage cheese without looking back.

(By the way, if some of you wonder why I have mouth-feel issues with lumpy liquids like fruit-filled yogurt and yet can still eat cottage cheese, I can't explain it either. Cottage cheese is not a problem; lumpy gravy, lumpy jello, and lumpy hot cereal make me want to puke. Who knows why these things happen?)

I grew up on Kraft American cheese. In fact, just as I thought "lettuce" meant "iceberg lettuce," I thought "cheese" meant "Kraft American cheese" in that ubiquitous large brick size -- because I'd never seen any other kind. Oh, I gradually realized that there was such a thing as Swiss cheese, and after a while I even heard of mozzarella (but only on pizza, and never fresh). But the cheese you actually bought and ate and grated for use in cooking, etc. -- that was Kraft American.

And as a result, I thought I didn't like cheese very much.

Then came Velveeta, and I came to understand that there was something so much worse than Kraft American cheese that it made American cheese almost seem edible by comparison. People were using Velveeta as fish bait, and I thought that showed them to have a very low opinion of the judgment of fish. Because it seemed to me that earthworms were much more appetizing.

Then Kraft and Borden started making individually wrapped single-slice cheese food products, and I became an addict. I knew they were junk, and were related to cheese only by coloration, but I found that tuna sandwiches made using Singles rather than bread really satisfied that junk-food urge. This was, needless to say, during a weight-gain phase of my life.

I didn't begin my retreat from bad cheese until I got home from my mission and discovered Hickory Farms. In those days they served little glides of cheese to customers so you could sample them, and I discovered the joys of Gouda, Edam, Monterey Jack, and Colby Longhorn. The best? The very mild but endlessly enjoyable Farmer Cheese. I would sit and eat an entire small Gouda, slice by slice, savoring every moment of it.

But Hickory Farms was as adventurous as I got. When I got married, Kristine brought her loathing for American cheese into our household and I was perfectly happy to accept her preference for mild cheddars, with an occasional dose of Hickory Farms farmer cheese and, of course, the Kraft Parmesan that was an inevitable part of spaghetti dinners.

Then Kristine and I started to frequent a new restaurant in Salt Lake called "The Savoy." This English-themed restaurant (laughable, but true -- they claimed to be English cuisine!) featured a salad consisting of romaine lettuce with bleu cheese crumbled on it. No other dressing. That was it. And it was wonderful. I had always shied away from cheese that was, after all, moldy; but now I couldn't get enough of that salad. Partly it was the discovery that there were lettuces other than iceberg -- that lettuce could actually have a flavor -- but mostly it was that tangy bleu cheese. I started ordering bleu cheese dressing on my salads. And I felt soooooo adventurous.

Naturally, by Orson's law, the Savoy was soon out of business. A restaurant claiming to provide English cuisine is doomed, because if you've ever eaten English food in England, you would prefer fasting. The Savoy was a good restaurant specifically because it was not authentic. But it had opened my mind to the possibility of a sharp, flavorful cheese being interesting and delicious.

Our next cheese move was not toward a new flavor, but rather a new presentation. Sargento began to market pre-shredded cheese. It was such a great idea, especially in the resealable bag, that we became regular customers and followed them into many different pre-shredded cheeses: we regularly keep on hand the Sargento blends of Six Italian cheeses as well as the mild cheddar, and we sometimes get the Mexican cheese blend. As Kraft and then various store brands have started crowding out Sargento, we remain fiercely loyal to the company that invented this way of presenting cheese. Maybe the others are "just as good," but I believe in rewarding the innovator, not the imitator, as long as the original remains good. So Sargento is our brand.

Then we went to France for a month and a half one summer and I had my first experience with those magnificent cheese courses at first-rate French restaurants, most notably La Cagnard in the old village at Cagnes-sur-Mer and Roger Verge's Moulin de Mougin a short distance north of Cannes. Each time we ate at these places, I became more daring with the cheese course, trying tangy goat cheeses and dry cheeses and sharp cheeses and ... well, what can I say? For me, cheese can now be the heart of a meal, and not just in France.

Then, in good Italian restaurants in L.A., I discovered fresh buffala mozzarella in the Caprese salad, which consists only of the mozzarella sliced with perfectly ripe tomatoes, fresh basil, and a robust olive oil. I was in love. It has become my test of an Italian restaurant -- if they can make a good insalata Caprese, I will be back.

In the U.S., the upscale groceries -- Gelson's and Bristol Farms in southern California, for instance, and Fresh Market in Greensboro -- usually offer good cheese selections (by American standards -- nothing like France, of course), and I have come to enjoy:

Buffala mozzarella, packed in brine. It is best when loose, looking rather like poached egg white in water; we slice it on vine-ripened tomatoes with fresh basil leaves from our own garden and a first-cold-pressing olive oil and voila -- we are in Europe again! Or at least in California <grin>.

Goat cheese and feta cheese, various brands, but never the pre-crumbled kind -- I buy them in small bricks and crumble them myself. I'm the only one who likes these in our family, but I like them a lot, and often request goat cheese to be added to a house salad in good restaurants, which can accommodate such requests. And, just so you know, when you eat at Joe's in Venice CA, you want the goat-cheese-and-pear-over-greens salad. In one of America's great restaurants, it's one of the best dishes you can order. And I recently found a goat-cheese Gouda that was to die for.

We still get Kraft parmesan cheese, mostly for the kids, but we prefer the less-finely ground parmesans and romanos and peccarinos we are finding in more and more grocery stores.

And a mainstay of our family's eating is Laughing Cow Cheese -- the original flavor, since the light version is nasty. It used to be a rare and special treat, but now Harris-Teeter carries it locally and we always have it on hand. In Provence, it was a mainstay of our diet -- we'd spread it on brioches and it would be breakfast or lunch.