Bean Boon Pill

For the last three and a half years, Beano has been a boon. You just measure a few drops of it on your beans or cabbage at the beginning of the meal and presto, no gas. (In effect, it corrects our bodies’ inability to digest the complex sugars that cause gas.) The problem, for some people, is the inconvenience of hauling out a bottle and a dropper, so it’s now available in chewable tablet form. It’s at Sav-On, Payless and Thrifty stores, as well as many pharmacies and health food stores. For more information about where to get it, plus free tablet samples, call the Beano Hotline, (800) 257-8650 or (800) GET BEAN between 5:30 a.m. and 5 p.m.

Thanks, Mom

A couple of years ago an athlete named Patrick Johannes married a Californian, left his home state of Minnesota, settled down in Los Angeles and started raising a family. The problem is that Johannes is America’s fifth-ranked Greco-Roman wrestler, and training for the ’96 Olympics costs money. So his wife came up with an unusual fund-raising idea: selling her Irish mother’s salad dressing. Hence the brand name, My Mother’s Dressing.

It’s what Americans would call French dressing (to the French it would be a garlicky vinaigrette dosed with catsup and horseradish). You can see why Deborah Johannes thought that selling it would be a good idea, because it really is an outstanding example of the style, with a clean and vivid flavor. At the moment it’s for sale in exactly two stores--the country store in Pine Mountain, Calif., a minuscule town near Gorman, and Hot Hot Hot in Pasadena--at $5 a bottle, but you can also get My Mother’s Dressing directly from the Johanneses. They’ll mail it for $7; call (818) 790-4847. By the way, this might be the only salad dressing in the country that’s tax-deductible.