Steaming ahead

Steaming ahead In 2008, Mr. Tidbit observed that the latter half of the first decade of the 2000s "will surely be remembered by future anthropologists for the discovery of steam. You can't walk down the street these days without tripping over some frozen product hissing at you about the wonders of steaming. Unless he missed something, a notable absence in the great steam derby has been any product from Stouffer's Lean Cuisine.

Until now.

Now there are eight kinds of Lean Cuisine Market Creations microwave steam-in-the-bag dinners -- two with shrimp, four with chicken and two kinds of cheese tortelloni. (Mr. Tidbit is informed that tortelloni are big tortellini.)

Mr. Tidbit has never been clear about how steaming improves meat, but the Market Creations steamer bag probably is an ecological improvement over the two-plastic-tray microwave steamer basket (plus cardboard packaging) in some other brands of microwave-steamed food.

Flaxen Total General Mills has added a sixth flavor of Total cereal: Total Plus Omega-3s cereal, honey almond flax flavor (whole-grain flakes with flax clusters and almonds). Mr. Tidbit thinks it's the first major-brand cereal flogging its omega-3 content.

In case you hadn't noticed, omega-3 fatty acids are what we aren't getting enough of lately. (Antioxidants from pomegranates are so last-decade -- and there already is Total pomegranate blueberry flavor cereal, although there aren't any pomegranates or blueberries in it.)

Quick lesson: Omega-3 fatty acids, specifically DHA and EPA (referred to by showoffs as docosahexaenoic acid and eicosapentaenoic acid), are nice for cardiovascular health. The body is able to make some DHA and EPA from another omega-3 item, ALA (alpha-linoleic acid), found in flaxseed oil and canola oil. The new flavor of Total has 10 percent of the daily value of ALA, from ground flaxseed. There's more DHA and EPA in oily fish, but maybe Total Plus Sardine didn't sound good.