So, I’m not sure how well this bodes for the nutritional health of today’s average Cheap Eater but the winner of this poll was Salty Food. I’m sure potato chip and cracker manufacturers are breathing a sigh of relief.

I must say that salty food is my Cheap Eats of choice as well. I will take a bag of Doritos over a slice of cake any day of the week. And don’t get me started on mashed potatoes with gravy versus Sweet Potatoes.

Well, Spicy Food didn’t go down without a fight. Salt won over Spicy by a narrow margin of only 11 votes with a total of 328 versus 317. I am pretty surprised that Spicy did so well. Incidentally, when I first put up the poll there WAS no Spicy. I had “Bitter” until I realized who the hell is going to say they like Bitter Cheap Food? You would be some kind of sadomasochist or something.

I was a bit torn over Salty versus Spicy as well since I’m a big fan of Chili Sauce, Peppers, Hot Sauce and Salsa. I like quite a bit of burn in food (Thai food is a favorite). But in the end, my salt-tooth won out.

The Sweets Coalition mustered up significant representation but fell short of garnering even half the votes of either Spicy or Salty. When I was younger I know I used to eat a lot more sweets and candy. It seems like over the years the sweet tooth has fallen out. It remains to be seen if in 10-15 years there will be another reversal and I’ll again go for sugar. I’ve heard of that happening to quite a few people actually.

Of course, I didn’t expect hardly anybody to choose Sour. With just 29 votes, the pucker-up posse was left in the dust. I do enjoy sour food, though I wouldn’t eat it for every meal. For me, it’s sort of an appetizer or between-meal pickup for me. I like sour and tangy fruits like oranges, green grapes, lemons, limes, pineapple and berries.

Well, I’ve put up another poll as you can see. First, I want to say that I don’t judge a person on whether they’re a carnivore, omnivore, veggie, or whatever. To each his own… as long as you don’t try to convert me over to your food lifestyle. But still, I’m curious to see what the stats are among Cheap Eaters. I expect quite a few less vegetarians/vegans and more meat-eaters or equal opportunity eaters, but who knows?

I didn’t know for the longest time that my polling system had been completely foobar-ed until the other day. Well, it was time to change it out anyhow but still it was a bit disappointing to have lost a whole lot of votes. In any case, I’ve got a new poll plugin going that I think actually works better, along with a new poll: Your favorite type of cheap food. Be it salty, spicy, sweet, or sour. Think hard on this one because there’s no combining attributes…

Ah so, I didn’t have the usual screenshot since the system was broken so I’ve had to write the numbers down alongside. It isn’t a huge surprise who the winner would be here. The dashing and dangerous (look at that knife) Alton Brown completely blew away the competition (though I do believe there may have been some “ballot stuffing”) for the Cheap Eats Favorite Food Network Star. If you weren’t one of the 137 people to pick Mr. Brown, I think in most cases it was deciding which of the other 3 food stars were the least annoying, hehe.

I gotta admit that Alton is probably the least annoying and probably most informative of the food stars. You can even get his entire catalog of Good Eats shows on DVD, I’ve watched many of the shows from a friend’s copy.

Rachel Ray came in second with 27 votes as was expected, riding on the “hottie” ticket that rabid Food Network fans have plastered her with. I think she gets a lot of flak for being maybe the most annoying with the giggling and “E.V.O.O”. And what is with her looking completely different in every show? She has 3 shows on Food Network too, so there’s even more change between the different shows on how she looks. Sometimes she looks like she’s put on the pounds and other times she’s skinny as a rail. Weird.

Emeril and Bobby Flay brought up the rear with a handfull of votes each. Thankfully so. The very first time I watched Emeril I was thinking, hey this guy is kind of weird… interesting. However, there have been one too many “Kick It Up A Notch”es and “Bam!”s for my liking; the jokes just grew old. I’ve always thought that Mr. Flay was way too smug and “dormitory” for my tastes and extremely rude to his guests.

I guess if I had more candidates in the Poll it might have been better… Morimoto and Mario Batali would have probably done better. Not Wolfgang Puck or as we like to call him Wolfgang Shyte. The other transformation of his last name is just too obvious, and I refuse to give him that satisfaction…

Well, not only did Dryer’s Ice Cream completely smoke all the competition in our latest food poll, but I inadvertantly chose Haagen Dazs Ice Cream as a competitor. When, in fact, according to the DryersInc site, they also own Haagen Dazs as well as Nestle Ice Cream. Hello, monopoly!

I DID know that the popular Edy’s brand of ice cream is one and the same as Dryer’s Ice Cream. The history of why some people know it as Edy’s and others as Dryer’s is apparently because the original partnership was formed between William Dreyer who made frozen desserts and Joseph Edy who was a candy maker. Nearly 20 years later, in 1947, they agreed to dissolve the partnership, whereby Dreyer retired and handed the biz over to his son while Edy went back to making candy. Dreyers’ son later sold the company and because many people on the east coast still knew the brand as Edy’s, the new owners decided to stick with that same name everywhere east of the Rockies.

In any case, I was pretty sure that Dryer’s would win and I knew that not enough people cared or knew about the “au naturale”allure of Breyer’s Ice Cream (my personal favorite, though why did they choose a name so similar to Dreyer’s??). But I actually thought that Ben & Jerry’s wacky boutique ice cream flavors might be a dark horse candidate. After all they are always mentioned on the Food Network and nearly everyone knows about them. They came close, but no golden ice cream spoon for them.

Thinking about it, I probably should have done popsicles or ice cream bars, instead of just ice cream because there’s more name and shape recognition with them. With ice cream, once it’s out of the tub and into your bowl, there’s nothing (besides taste/texture) to tell you one company’s vanilla from another. But for popsicles and ice cream bars, it’s like, what would YOU do for a Klondike bar…

I got the idea for the new poll because I’ve been watching an excess of Food Network lately. So, basically I wanted to find out who your favorite food network star was. Or if not, then how about who is the least annoying…

I gotta admit I’m pretty surprised that Cheetos won the chips poll by nearly 100 votes. I do like me some Cheetos once in awhile, but I usually go for either Doritos or Pringles (when I can get my hands on a can).

I have good memories of Cheetos in bag lunches when I was a kid… it almost seems to me that Cheetos are a more “kid-friendly” chip than other ones because they are sort of easier to eat for small hands. So, I was sort of expecting Cheetos not to get as many votes as Doritos and other chips because I thought that it would be more “adults” answering the poll. Well, looks like there are a lot of kids at heart reading Cheap Eats…

I am not surprised that Pringles did so well and in fact I thought they were a dark horse to win the race just because there are a lot of hard-core Pringles fans around. I voted for Pringles myself. But I guess I was really, really surprised that Doritos came in last. I really thought that more people were into Doritos… especially college age to mid thirties peeps who I assume are most of the ones reading Cheap Eats.

I have a feeling that Doritos was blindsided by Lays, who were actually my pick to finish last. I mean, I wholeheartedly follow their slogan of “just can’t eat one”, but you’ve got to admit that Lays chips don’t have as much pizazz going for them. Doritos have got that familiar shape and cheesyness, Cheetos are unlike most chips, (shaped a bit like poop), and Pringles have a unique shape and come in a can. Lays are just potato chips. Damn they are good, but they’re pretty plain.

I’m sure one of you is going to write in to castigate me about what I just said about Lays. Oh well. Now as for the new poll… I was over at Impulsive Buy, and since Marvo decided to review the JITB root beer float, I decided to have the next poll be ICE CREAM. Perfect for this mid-summer, chair-stickin’ weather. Now, don’t get mad if I don’t have your favorite brand. I actually really wanted to put up Eskimo Pies and Klondike Bars but decided to just stick with ice cream brands for now… Dryers, Bryers, Haagen Daazs, and Ben & Jerry’s.

The 900 pound gorilla that is Coke was a shoe-in for winning the Favorite Soda Poll. I don’t know if you’re old enough to remember the Pepsi Challenge that they used to have outside of supermarkets many years ago. They’d basically blindfold you and ask you to drink from a cup of Pepsi and a cup of Coke. Then they’d ask you to pick which one you liked better.

My cousin and her friends took the challenge and she said it was kind of funny how nearly ALL of them picked Coke, after which the people running the challenge became extremely rude and basically told them to “move along”. Funny, but typical. Anyhow, going by taste alone I’m a Coke guy myself, and I really like their newer additions, Vanilla Coke and Lime Coke. I hope these don’t go “out of print” like their earlier forays into non-classic style colas.

It’s no surprise that Pepsi lost to Coke in the poll, but what I’m a bit more surprised is how WELL that Dr. Pepper did in nearly beating out Pepsi. Dr. Pepper is a bit of a love it or hate it deal, at least with people I know. I actually like Dr. Pepper a lot and will generally choose it over Classic Coke when given a chance. However, many people I know liken the taste to “medicine” or cough syrup.

Mountain Dew, our good old nuclear green-yellow friend, brought up the rear unsurprisingly. Apparently, “doing the Dew” is not the best slogan in the world. I get that confused with “doing doo-doo” which is an altogether different slogan, hehe. I felt their commercials were pretty lame. But then, there aren’t too many good soda commercials as it is… they all seem to want to show lame untalented pop stars. I’m sure someone will write to prove me wrong. Just don’t get me started on American Idol…

The new poll up at the top of the page is for your favorite chips. I was going to have an “other” category, and then I just decided to hell with it. I’m going to make you pick one of the four… Doritos, Cheetos, Lays, or Pringles.

I could have seen this one coming a mile off. McDonald’s took first place in the Fast Food Poll I had on the site for last month, though not with some serious competition from Burger King. I’m actually quite surprised that Burger King made such a strong showing. It must be all their new “silent scary king mask” commercials that they’ve been pushing lately. Or perhaps it was their Enormous Omelette which seemed to get enormous publicity.

I’m a bit sad that my own fave, Jack in the Box, came in third. Belatedly, I also realized what with the furor over the Wendy’s chili finger incident that I should have included them in the poll instead of Carl’s Jr. I have a lot of good memories from Carl’s first introducing the Western Bacon Cheeseburger though, so I thought I’d include them:

As far as the cheapest restaurant of the four is concerned, all of them have their 99 cents menus and various other promotions. I feel that Jack in the Box promotes their 99 cent menu more than the others, although McD’s definitely has their “Day of the Week” specials that are extremely popular. I actually think Carl’s comes in a bit expensive, but maybe that’s because when I used to eat there when I was a kid I would go for the “strange” sandwiches, like that Chicken sandwich that actually had(has?) alfalfa sprouts in it, which are more expensive than plain old hamboigers.

Continue reading “McDonalds Wins Fast Food Poll” …