Bits of hot dogs When things are slow, Mr. Tidbit has come to believe, one can always count on one branch or another of Kraft to come up with something silly. This week it's not another kind of Oreo from Nabisco or another odd flavor of pudding from Jell-O; it's Mini Hot Dogs ("New! Great for snacking!") from Oscar Mayer.
Yes, if for some reason the idea of just a portion of a hot dog strikes you as a wonderful snack idea, Kraft has saved you the inconvenience of having to cut a regular hot dog into two or three pieces. Instead of buying 10 Oscar Mayer beef franks (16 ounces total), selling for $2.54 at one discount supermarket and having to tediously cut one into pieces for a snack -- or instead of just eating the whole hot dog -- you can get 20 beef Mini Hot Dogs (10 ounces total) for $2.89, a mere 82 percent more per ounce.
How convenient. For Kraft.
(FYI, according to the nutrition panel, one serving of Mini Hot Dogs is four of them -- 2 ounces total -- more than one regular hot dog.)
Little baked appetizers Here's something new from the Pillsbury part of General Mills: Savorings Flaky Pastry Bites -- little frozen dough-wrapped appetizers that you bake in the actual oven (not the microwave), so that the dough really comes out -- you know -- baked! There are three kinds of filling -- which peeks through slots in the dough: Buffalo style chicken; cheese and spinach, and mozzarella and pepperoni. You might have called that last one "pizza," but a box of 12 of these little goodies costs $4.19, and they probably figured that "mozzarella and pepperoni" sounds a little more appropriate to that price point.
By current standards, they're not convenient: You need to bake them 18 whole minutes and then let them cool five minutes -- altogether that's most of an episode of "Reno 911!" But they're pretty good.
AL SICHERMAN
