Nutgraf

And lo - a new experiment was born.

I’m still working on the Green Bags, since the matriarchs in my life said I wasn’t giving them a fair shake with the strawberries. “Greens,” they said “are a whole other story.” Mom and Grandma agree that they do a whizbang job of preserving leafy vegetation. And so here is our starting array:

The details:

• On head of lettuce, rendered into four approximately equal pieces.
• Each piece has a bit of the root base, thingy - in case this makes a difference.
• Each piece has had all falling off pieces of the exterior removed.
• One is in a Green Bag.
• One is in a Green Bag with a paper towel to absorb excess moisture (as assorted message boards have recommended).
• One is enjoying the open air.
• One is in a regular plastic bag.
• The whole g’schmear is in the fridge now - all sharing one plate.

Stay tuned…

Well - that was easy. It only took months, right? For me to get some results from one of these experiments?

So, I took the final photos of the strawberry arrays tonight, and have *gasp* declared a result. It’s been 12 days since I started this experiment.

I gotta say, the Green Bags came out ahead.  The bagless set is virtually mummified - shrunken, mushy, and one of them has grown some kind of pelt. The plain plastic bags remained firm, but also furry. The Green Bag set was both firm and nasty, but clearly less fuzzy than the others.But things got interesting when I took a look inside.

Both bagged sets were both brown and oogie (Your tuition dollars at work, Dad) on internal inspection, while the open air group appears less foul. No taste tests were conducted because you people don’t pay me enough.

Next up: Lettuce. I have determined, after much deliberation, to go with one head of iceberg cut into four pieces. Why? Stay tuned. 

Is it just me?

Been out of town for a few days for The Wedding of The Century ™ in Portland, Maine. My most heartfelt Mazel Tovs to Manda and Eric - a stellar couple of ultra-fine individuals. I’d post photos, but the happy couple is offline celebrating for the next couple of weeks, and it’s not my wedding to post.

But let’s get to why you’re really here. Rapidly deteriorating berries.

As you can see, the strawberries are doing about as expected one week in. The unprotected batch is pretty mushy, which is hard to determine from the photo. The two bagged sets are firm, but the non-green bag set is slightly moldier.

Spoke to Mom last night who huffed and asked if the bags were officially sanctioned for strawberry storage, as if I were setting them up to fail. Oh yeah, Mom? Well, they have pictures of strawberries on their Web site. Who’s the loser now?

She suggests (though she’ll deny it) that I try lettuce next, as she’s had great success with greens. Now, to decide whether to do a whole head of lettuce in each array, or just a few leaves from the same head…

The excitement. It overwhelms.

So, the kind people at Washington Post Express decided to give a humble keyboard minion a chance and printed my remark about aging produce in today’s edition. Just think - this morning thousands of DC-area commuters nodded off and gracelessly endured metro delays while clutching this collage of advertising and desperate, last-minute blog gleanings.

No wait, I didn’t mean that to sound snarky and ungrateful. Really, I’m totally tickled.

But back to what’s really important - strawberry longevity.

So what we’ve got here are the same three batches of berries from the other day. The special green and regular clear bags have swapped sides since the very first photo, but we’ll have to just accept that and move on.

Not much change is noticeable from this photo. The open-air batch is slightly the worse for wear, though still edible. Both sets of bagged berries appear to be doing comparably well at this, the 48-hour mark.

The picture, however, is totally freaking crisp and delightful and was a pleasure to work with in photoshop (for the scientists among us, Matt, I habitually adjust light levels and crispness - no airbrushing).

But why does that photo so totally rock, you ask? Because I bought a new camera and it is totally riddled with awesomeness. I may post about it when I get to know it a little better. We’re still getting acquainted.

Within mere hours of carefully swaddling the strawberries in their various protective wrappings, a fine veil of mist was plainly visible on both plastic features of the array.

Carefully following the Green Bag instructions, I meticulously swabbed out both the green and clear bags to ensure that no moisture interferes with the mysterious preserving properties at play.

But it’s got me to thinking: I’m in DC. It’s technically somewhere around squatrillion percent humidity here. Anything when left in a plastic bag is going to create condensate, right? So I figure that if my berries spoil, it’s definitely going to be because I didn’t keep them adequately arid.

Fortunately, however,  this experiment is helping keep me in denial that we are all suddenly terribly poor and that Bank of America now owns my very soul.

So I got that goin’ for me, which is nice.

I do love an infomercial. The worse the economy gets, the more stridently these ads pitch food storage systems to Save You Money. Stop Throwing Your Money Away, they shout. Look at these 3-month-old strawberries! I bought this cheddar during the Clinton administration!

Vacuums bags, vacuum canisters, special polymers, carbonite, whatev. The ones I find really captivating are the green plastic bags. You know the ones - Green Bags. They’re plastic. And green. And kind of trading on this environmental green movement thing, but not so’s you’d notice. And who is this Debbie Meyer person anyway?

Pictured, is the new experimental array. Strawberries are the most volatile fruit known to man. If you don’t sit down and chug the whole batch the instant you get home from the store, they will be wrinkled and moldy within hours.

On the left, we have the official, card-carrying lifesaving Green Bags. In the middle is our fresh air trio. On the right, a plain plastic bag leftover from my last dozen bagels.

Pertinent Details

• The instructions state frequently and in bold face that fruit must be dry before being enveloped in the Green Bags. All pictured berries are dry and unwashed.
• The instructions also suggest that the bags should be folded to “loosely seal out air.” Both bags are so folded.
•  These berries are all on the “thoroughly” end of the ripe spectrum, so we should see results briskly.
• All are now in the fridge, on the same shelf.

What’s Supposed to Make the Green Bags So Damn Special?

The theory behind the bags is that they absorb the ethylene gas released by fruit - whisking it away from your precious produce. The site includes a legend about  some caves in Japan made of a naturally occurring clay which has the same effect, but the site never says explicitly that this clay has come anywhere near the bags.

Ring Update: 

Frankly, the rings aren’t doing much these days. I check them once in a while, take a photo that shows not much new and then decide that they bore me. I should have chosen my first experiment more wisely. Something with more instant gratification. These were supposed to take months. Months, in internet time, is an era.

Apparently my life suffers from a havoc deficiency. Something that Spouse and I set out to remedy today with a very lovely (and very tasty) $12 lasagna from Vace and a reciprocating saw.

Alternate titles for this page included:

• Things God didn’t intend you to do with a lasagna.
• The lasagna owes my brother money.
• Read this post or the lasagna gets it.

For those uninitiated, a Vace lasagna is a very fine thing - beautiful flavor, perfectly prepared, and sold as a frozen brick (spinach or meat) that needs only be chucked into a hot oven for 2-ish hours before being a total treat to eat. One lasagna can tastily and thriftily feed our household for longer than we can maintain interest, so some portion of it usually winds up going to waste. Why spend two hours baking a ginormous lasagna when all you want cooked this evening is, say, enough for two reasonably proportioned adult humans?

During the planning stages, Spouse came into the room where I was e-mailing some very important dress-related information to a friend and announced solemnly, “Let me begin by saying that there isn’t really a wrong way to cut a lasagna with a reciprocating saw.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Spouse got a little surprise in the mail the other day, when a couple of different skin care regimens (Proactiv and Hydroderm, in case you’re wondering) arrived with letters declaring him a proud new monthly subscriber to these life-changing formulations. We thought it was a hint from a well-meaning colleague, but a little research found that his credit card number had been lifted, probably from one of the fine online retail establishments we have been known to frequent. Since we both work with technology, we know that online security is an oxymoron, so I’m mostly just surprised that it took this long to happen in our house.

I kindly suggest that Proactiv and Hydroderm (and yes, I’m linking to them to draw their attention) rethink their affiliate policies. Apparently, one can sign up as an affiliate, subscribe a bunch of strangers with a bunch of stolen credit card numbers, and profit from the transaction. Would be happy to discuss, Proactiv and Hydroderm. Drop me a note in the comments here - they’re moderated, so I won’t post it if you’d like to speak offline.

I’ve decided the next experiment, by the way. There are these green produce storage bags that claim to keep fruit and veg fresh for an unholy amount of time. Going to try those guys out. Hopefully, this won’t take months like these rings.

Speaking of… two pics today because I couldn’t get a good angle in one shot.

Sun above, no sun below. Sun looks a little worse for wear to me. Remember, it’s not going to dissolve. I figure it’ll just look the worse for wear and then fall apart when scrunched (technical term) in the hand. Will give that a try when it looks more likely.  Remember, this is supposed to take a couple of months. Which is still a big improvement over a couple of hundred years.

Just back from a wet and wild weekend in Las Vegas with some of my favorite females for the bachelorette party of one very special lady. Here is the Nutgraf Report:

• MGM Signature Suites are… riddled with awesomeness. Beautiful suites, no casino in the hotel, gated driveway, pools that are a pleasure to lounge at, friendly and charming staff that hands you small complimentary bottles of water at all available times.
• Thunder From Down Under is… very funny. Very very funny. Some of it on purpose. For the love of all things holy, don’t click on that link. It crashed my browser.
• The MGM Grand Pool Complex is… revolting. The pools are totally full of people standing around in three feet of water holding beers. They don’t get out as often as one might wish under the circumstances. The lazy river is riddled with leering frat boys and the occasional startled-looking family.
• The Burger Bar is… pretty darn good.The dessert burger is a must have, whether you saved room or not. Some kind of chocolate patty in a bun that tastes like a Krispy Kreme donut, it’s tantalizing.
• Tao nightclub is… indescribable. Beautiful, but super crazy crowded, no seats if you don’t have bottle service, rigid rules about where you can stand, dance, security on high alert (for good reason, I’m sure), and the most atrocious bar line in captivity. On the other hand, I can’t blame them. The place is apparently one of the hottest things on the strip and they have to be strict if it’s not going to get dangerous. Our friend is a total planning genius and got us super rockstar treatment whereby we totally evaded the line of several hundred people and were presented with drink tickets.

Here is a fairly indicative photo from the trip. Not that we had blurry vision (long bar lines), but this pic is full of energy and golden light. It was a great trip.

Rings

Here’s the report: Nothing is new.
And here is a photo to illustrate this observation.