EDon

Eating my way through the NYTimes list of The 11 Best Foods You Aren’t Eating.

Day 2: Dried Plums/Prunes

I was actually pretty stoked about this one. When I was in college I took a marketing class wherein one of my favorite case studies was the National Prune Council’s attempts to re-brand their product to a younger audience. And that’s how the “dried plum” was born. That the NYT felt confident enough in their lingering unpopularity to list them as A Food We Know You’re Not Eating demonstrates there are limits to what even the best of marketing can do.

The NYT piece will concede these are not the tastiest item on the list, but insist that their cancer-fighting anti-oxidants make them worth it. Okay, but then they advise eating them by wrapping them in prosciutto and baking them up in a concoction I officially dub Yuppies in a Blanket.

But hold up, the prosciutto I purchased from Trader Joes has nitrates listed as an actual ingredient. Question, if you simply avoid food items that are widely considered to be carcinogenic do you still have to gag down anti-oxidant-rich prunes?

Aside from the questionable net nutritional effect of this item, this is the kind of recipe I never feel like I’m doing correctly. I cut prosciutto strips in half length-wise, put them on a tea plate coated with olive oil and baked them at 400 degrees for 10-15 minutes until the prosciutto was crispy. It’s a nice balance of salty and sweet but in truth, prunes aren’t so gross that I wouldn’t consider eating them plain once in a while. Whereas the next time my arm goes numb or I can’t shake a cough I will experience brief moments of conviction that I have a prosciutto/nitrate-borne fatal disease.