Taste it Tuesday: Snack Substitute First Edition

Today's Taste It Tuesday is all about snack substitutes. Throughout my snacking life (yes I am a fan!), I equate snacks to fast food or junk food. I have a particularly soft spot for the Hawaiian pizza of Pizza Hut which you can buy for P55 for two slices. Sounds like a great deal, right?

Yessss, until you look up it's nutritional contents. With the help of My Fitness Pal.Com, I was able to find out what I was really eating.

For Taste It Tuesdays Snack Sub, I prowled the grocery store to find a better snack alternative. It must satisfy the following criteria:

1. Easy to find.
2.  About the same price range as my snack substitute (in this case, P55)
3.  Equally filling and tasty and
4. Healthier

After a few minutes, I found this wonderful combo: a small apple and Nestle Fruit Selection Yogurt.

Now, let's check our criteria:

1. It is easy to find! You can buy apples at most grocery stores and fruit stalls by the road (for an even cheaper price). The yogurt, although less common, can still be found in most grocery and convenience stores.
2. The apple is priced P14 (you can buy it for P10 in fruit stalls) while the yogurt is P29. Adding that up makes P43, P12 less than our budget!
3. This apple I bought was crispy on the outside and juicy on the inside. In fact, I wasn't able to eat it all because my brother took a slice for himself! Haha. The yogurt was creamy and the fruit bits tasted like the real thing.
4. I again consulted my new good friend, My Fitness Pal.Com and made a table of comparison.

 Our Snack Sub won 12 is to 1! This means that you get at lot more for paying less. What a deal!
Yay for a healthier snack!
Certified Snack Subbing Success!

Mani Mondays: Summer Nostalgia

With the rains starting to pour every few days or so, I can't help but feel nostalgic for summer. This summer has been filled with a lot of new adventures, fun thrills, heartbreaks and realizations. I just don't want it to end yet!

So this week's Mani Monday is all about summer.

I used Caronia Sweet Surprise, Caronia Stellar, Caronia Sunkissed and Caress Mango.

For the yellow base, I brushed alternate layers of Caronia Sweet Surprise and Caress Mango. It gave my nails a very sunny look. I then dotted the tips with Caronia Sunkissed in the center surrounded by three dots of Caronia Stellar. Here is the end product:

It is pretty simple to make. Perfect for a quick summer fix.

Copying Tables in PDF to Excel

I am currently scouting for population data of species for our market study. All was going well (meaning all the data can be exported directly to Excel for easy tabulation and counting). Until I found this file on the list of registered horses from the Philippine Racing Commission.

It was in PDF file and whenever I try to save it to text, it saves in one column.

If you are like me who is lazy enough to fix the file manually in Excel (and who is optimistic that there is a better alternative *wink!), you will thank Ray Kurzweil, inventor of the Optical Character Recognition or OCR. What it does basically is recognize typewritten, printed or even handwritten text in images and convert it to a digital form that is searchable and editable. No more manual encoding!

Now, this may sound like an expensive software but it surprisingly isn't. In fact, there are OCR online sites that will let you convert your image for free! The most dependable one for me in terms of recognition accuracy  is OnlineOCR.net.

Here is the screenshot of the converted registered horses file.

Cool right?

But this site has its limitations also (don't we all?).

• You can only convert one page of image a time (The image above is only the first page out the 42 pages in the PDF file).
• You can convert at most 20 pages if you create an account because they will give you free credits

 However, beyond that you have to purchase credits.

But who needs to purchase if you can just snip your files into separate files, right?

And, like all other OCR's there is no perfect tool for recognition (at least not yet) so it is still better to double check the recognition before you hand it to your boss. At least, you can now use Spelling and Grammar to help you with that.

Now that Ray saved you a lot of encoding time, you should utilize that saved time properly. Smile for the whole time you should have been encoding. You may look silly but you will feel a lot better.

KFC Mini Bucket Of Fries With Cheese And Salsa

I came across the KFC Mini Bucket of Fries with Cheese and Salsa as I was looking for merienda today. I was intrigued. By the sound of it, I thought "lasagna"!

I excitedly ordered and paid P69. Expensive, I know but how will I know if it's worth it if I don't try?

Well, it isn't worth it. For starters, the cheese shaved on top was not melted. So in order to eat it, you have to coat the fries in salsa so the cheese will stick to it. The salsa is drizzled on the fries itself so you have to eat fast or else your fries will be somewhat soggy.



I found myself constantly drinking water while eating to push the fries down. Major case of "umay."

I have always loved KFC's fries because it's thick and crispy and chewy at the same time. But this serving did not really sit well with me.

Maybe if they served this with melted cheese on top and a separate salsa dip, it would be a hit.

So, although it was filling and heavy, I still need something else to satisfy my tummy. (A decent excuse to have merienda no.2 *wink)