Good Seasons Italian Dressing Cruet Kit SECRET

When we were growing up, our salads only knew two types of dressing: French and the make-it-yourself Good Seasons Italian. In purchasing the Good Seasons Italian Dressing packets, my father had the grocery store under his thumb for he knew the secret of the cruet!

On each of his four children’s thirteenth birthday, he would impart the secret of the Good Seasons Italian Dressing Cruet Kit to us. Now, I will share that secret with you.


Photo by Mike Hopkins

To get consumers hooked on their Italian Dressing packets, those crazy marketing folks over at Good Seasons packaged two packs of the dry dressing mix with a FREE cruet. I think “cruet” was second foreign word I learned right after “Irish Spring.” The cruet that came with the dressing had three convenient lines etched on it for easy construction of the Italian Dressing. First V for vinegar, then W for water and last O for oil. Fill each ingredient to its line (pour in the packet between the W and the O,) cap the lid and shake shake shake. In 1983, my brother was making the dressing and put the oil in first. The resulting explosion took off the east wing of our kitchen and Steve never heard the same out of his remaining ear.

The marketing folks assumed that you would by the cruet kit the first time and then buy the individual packets from then out. But they never calculated the my dad would figure out their little secret.

So back to my thirteenth birthday… after the cake and the gifts, dad took me into the kitchen and showed me the cruet kit and said, “When you buy the Italian dressing in the kit, they give you two packets of dressing and the cruet. If you buy the packets individually, THEY COST MORE PER PACK! When you buy the kit, you are getting the packets cheaper AND a free cruet.” It was then that I noticed the third shelf up in our dishware cabinet was filled with cruets. The everything drawer teemed with the plastic lids. Week by week and cruet by cruet, my father was slowly putting the Good Seasons people out of business.

Just the other day at Kroger’s, I took these photos. I’ll help with the math:
Cruet Kit


$2.79 or $1.395 per packet

Individual dressing packet


$1.59 per packet

A savings of $.195 per packet. I figure in my father’s lifetime, he has saved about $25,345. That’s almost enough to cover the by-pass surgery! He’s also got a basement full of cruets and no other glassware to be found in the house.

As for me? I have saved $1.17 because as soon as Miss Sally noticed what I was doing, she shut down the cruet purchases and made me spend the extra twenty cents to buy the packets individually sans cruet. Miss Sally runs a tight ship.

I can’t wait for my kids to turn thirteen.

EDITOR'S NOTE:
A lot of people find this site because they are searching for replacement lids or cruet kits. If I was smart, I would sell them from this site and make a billion dollars. But I am not smart. If you want to buy the kits on line, look here at Net Grocer.

If you want to complain about why Good Seasons is no longer in your local store, write and/or all here:
Kraft Foods Global, Inc.
Global Consumer Relations
1 Kraft Court
Glenview, IL 60025
1-877-535-5666

Good luck. Please tell them I said, "Howdy!"

Extra Alone

Annie's Lost Ladybug Magnifying Glass

Miss Sally, Greg, Annie and I went to a new park in Westerville. It's a pretty cool little park. There are a bunch of standard park slides, structures and swinging stuff, but there is also a lot of open ended play. From the road it looks like a very standard, plastic park, but once you start exploring, there's a bunch of stuff to do like jump on rocks and build dams and find frogs.

Annie brought along her ladybug magnifying glass. It was Greg's until he lost interest and then Annie adopted it. When we first arrived she was checking out dirt, which to her was pretty interesting.

We did a few activities. I noticed a water table and started taking photos while Miss Sally and the kids were climbing around on stuff. Annie found something that needed a closer look so she called forth for her magnifying glass. But it was nowhere to be found. We looked around the area and checked for little kids who might have accidentally picked it up. Nothing.

Annie forgot about the magnifying glass and we try not to mention it.

Today at work, I needed to take a few photos of some equipment. When I down loaded the photos, I saw the park photos I took. I decided to share the cool water table with my co-workers so I downloaded those photos.

As I was getting ready to crop them, I thought about the magnifying glass and started to look to see if I could see where Annie had set it down.

There it is! That tiny speck of blue and red!

Annie had set it down and I just barely could make it out in that image.

So let's look at the second photo of the water table.

That's a cool water table and...

"Enhance 34 to 36. Pan right and pull back. Stop. Enhance 34 to 46. Pull back. Wait a minute, go right, stop. Enhance 57 to 19."

A ha!

I couldn't believe it! I felt like this was CSI and I needed to make a GUI interface or something.

Before you start casting stones, I will say that this park was wacky enough that there could have been magnifying glasses sitting around for people to use. I bet she played with it and then set it down for someone else to find.

We'll have to got back and look for it. I bet it's still there.

Fight For Your Right - Revisited

Five Guys Burger vs Graffiti Burger

Until today, I had not taken the opportunity to eat at Five Guys Burger or Graffiti Burger. We were debating which one we should go to. So as a good friend of mine once said, "When given two options, take the third." So we got both.

Keegan went to Graffiti Burger and I went to Five Guys. We decided to get a cheeseburger with ketchup, mayo, mustard, lettuce and tomato plus a regular sized fry. We parted ways and met back up after my flight from western Dublin got back in.

The bag on the left is Five Guys and the right is Graffiti.  The Five Guys has fry grease on the bag and the Graffiti bag has "We have tasty buns!" written on the side.  That or the grease on the Graffiti bag randomly spelled words.

Looking in the top of the Five Guys bag, you see a bunch of fries scattered. This is done on purpose at the store. When your order is complete, they put the wrapped burger in, a cup of fries and they dump a small container of fries in on top of everything.

The Graffiti fries are contained in another bag. Here's what they looked like:

So we unbagged the bags to see the contents. First Five guys:

Bag with grease
Burger in foil
Fries in cup
Extra fries (on company plate)
3 - 4 napkins
receipt

Here's Graffiti:

Bag with marker (or magic grease)
Fry bag
Plastic container with burger inside
Pickle spear wrapped in wax paper
A bazillion ketchup packets
Napkins
Receipt with Keegan's name spelled Kigean

One thing that I heard about Five Guys was that they were expensive.  They were not cheap, but Graffiti and Five Guys were about the same price, both around $8.50 for the burger and fries.

Here is the Five Guys burger cut open:

Here is the Graffiti burger cut open:

Both burgers weighed exactly the same at around 12 ounces. (I think... I have to double check this number with Kigeeane tomorrow.)

Here are your heroes:

NOM NOM NOM NOM:

RESULTS!
Five Guys won hands down. It all came down to the meat. Five Guys was more savory. There was definitely meatier, richer taste with Five Guys. Keieganne agreed.

But wait... what about those fries? Graffiti took honors in the fry department. They cooked their fries a bit longer and their taste edged out Five Guys. But not enough for me to stop at two places to get my lunch.

Five Guys wins. I have to admit that I went in thinking that Five Guys was going to be overpriced and under quality, but I was wrong.

The Vaccines - Post Break-Up Sex

I love this song. It is hard not singing the lyrics while around people who might be offended. Luckily I hardly know anyone like that.

Sometimes you need a little practice

I didn't think there was enough camaraderie at work or sharing of mutual agreement of team member participation, so I thought I would set up an activity station to get people prepared to congratulate one another for a job well done.

And yes, it works with uncreative, right handed people, too.

Every. F'ing. Time.

Jesus and IKEA

Columbus Underground and Cbusr meetups

This past Tuesday I went to two separate meet-ups in Columbus. One was organized by Columbus Underground and held at The Jury Room and the other was held by Cbusr at the Woodlands Tavern. Keegan was too busy frolicking in the sand so I went solo.

The Jury Room is a very laid back, old school bar. It's owned by Liz Lessner and she is very cool. We actually got to chat for a little bit AND she bought me a beer. I gave her permission to tell her friends that she knew me. I'm cool like that. I also got to hang out with Thomas. Thomas always has interesting stories about hackers and social engineers.

After about two hours, I bailed on The Jury Room and headed over to Cbusr's event at the Woodlands. I called Freckled Jenn on the way over and she came and met up with me.

I went as @Fake_Dispatch to Woodlands because for some reason he seems to be more popular. Jerk.

I did get meet a bunch of people that I only knew from the internet. Jenn signed up on Twitter while we were there. You can follow her at @FreckledJenn.

Two people I finally did get to meet in person were Rogue Magnolia and The Naked Redhead. I was actually able to con them into taking a photo with me.

Awe, crap. Would you look at my teeth? I missed my dentist appointment a month ago and I look like yellow hell next to Redhead's pearly whites. This will not do.

Much better!

And would you look at that? Rogue is barely even smiling! We can take care of that!

Perfect.

See you at one of the next meet-ups!