At Last! Home-Style Goodness in Your Own Home!

Having brought out a frozen fast-food-style French fry, Ore-Ida is test marketing frozen mashed potatoes that include small lumps for home-made authenticity.

Don’t Bother to Wrap It, I’ll Eat It Here

The Coffee, Sugar & Cocoa Exchange, a commodities trading institution, has announced a proposal to deal in Cheddar cheese futures, where you agree to buy (or sell) 40,000 pounds of cheese at a particular price on a particular date. But there’s no provision for cash settlement, so unless you buy an offsetting contract, when the date comes you’ll have to take delivery of 20 tons of cheese in 40-pound blocks.

Pumped Desserts

Teagan Clive, nutrition columnist for Ironman Magazine and sometime actress, sells an ultra-serious little book called “Diet Desserts” (her cake recipe is basically egg whites, cornstarch, whole-grain flour and fruit juice). “Diet Desserts” seems very much a shoestring publication, typed and stapled, but probably just the thing for an iron pumper with a sweet tooth. It’s $10 from Diet Desserts, P.O. Box 2292, Venice, Calif. 90294.

Sweet Fibrations

Sunsweet California is a tasty, though odd-sounding, chocolate-covered prune-and-almond bar. It’s filled with the equivalent of four prunes per bar, giving it a significant potassium and fiber content. Prune grower Steve Varnhagen got the idea from Norwegian friends, who carry chocolate and prunes when cross-country skiing and mix them when hungry. So far the bars, which sell for around 69 cents, are available in Los Angeles only at Westward Ho markets.

And They Never Even Know They’re Orange

Orange roughy dwell in the deepest reaches of the ocean; most catches are made around half a mile below sea level. Since they live in the dark, they feed on prawns, squid and fish that glow in the dark.