To whom it may concern,
I have just purchased 1 U.S. dry pint of Santa Sweets Grape Tomatoes. I noticed that the container specifies, "NEVER REFRIGERATE." Is this true? I am quite accustomed to refrigerating any tomatoes I purchase, so without even realizing it, this package was automatically put in the refrigerator. Should I be concerned about eating these tomatoes that have now been refrigerated? Why is it important to never refrigerate your grape tomatoes?
Thank you,
Meghan
---------------------------------
Meghan,
Thanks for the email! The "NEVER REFRIGERATE" is on the label because tomatoes (in general) begin to loose thier flavor profile at temperatures below 50 degrees. Also, once they get below 50 when you take the tomatoes out and return them to "room temperature" they will have a reduced shelf life.
Ironically the Santa Sweets will have an excellent shelf life when kept in the 'fridge and the change in flavor profile is very sublte over the first 10 days.
You're ok keeping them in the fridge as long as you're aware of the reduced shelf life after they come out of the fridge.
Feel free to contact us with any further questions.
Thanks,
Chris Cunnane
National Sales Director
Santa Sweets
--------------------------------------
Good Morning Meghan,
Thank you for your email. It is safe to eat your tomatoes. The reason why our container has “never refrigerate” is when grape tomatoes are kept at temperatures below 50°F the natural sugars break down and the tomatoes will not be as sweet. We recommend the tomatoes be stored in an open container at room temperature out of direct sunlight. Although refrigeration will extend the shelf life it will never have the same flavor profile as if you were to leave them at room temperature. Please let me know if you have any other questions.
Thank you,
Heather Wladyka
Sales Associate
Santa Sweets, Inc.
Tel: 813-759-0765 ext 1166
Cell: 813-786-0381
Fax: 813-759-8372
Email: hwladyka@santasweets.com
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Thursday, September 24, 2009
My Favorite Smell
I feel like I am one of those people who never has a good answer for any question about my all-time favorite anything (e.g. all time favorite food, all time favorite other thing). Okay, so trying to give examples, makes me think that maybe I am good at having all time favorite things. Like tuesday, for example.
Anyhow.
Today I realized my all-time favorite smell! It is the smell of what I think is a Katsura tree, in the fall when it starts to lose its leaves. It is a Most amazing smell, reminiscent of cotton candy. We are very fortunate to have two directly in front of the physics building. Perhaps I will update this post with a photo soon.
Anyhow.
Today I realized my all-time favorite smell! It is the smell of what I think is a Katsura tree, in the fall when it starts to lose its leaves. It is a Most amazing smell, reminiscent of cotton candy. We are very fortunate to have two directly in front of the physics building. Perhaps I will update this post with a photo soon.
Thursday, September 10, 2009
Peanut Butter Apple Pie
So here I sit, eating a most delicious apple with some most delicious peanut butter.* This most delicious peanut butter:
It occurs to me that the only way this could possibly be more delicious is if it is in a pie. After a slight moment of disappointment that it took me 25 years to discover this. I quickly did some research. Recipes for pies that are potentially the most delicious sort are abundant on the internet. However, I believe there are none of the White Chocolate Peanut Butter Apple Pie variety, so there you go, I just invented something new.
*This statement is a non-truth, as I was unable to stop eating my delicious snack for long enough to do any blogging.
It occurs to me that the only way this could possibly be more delicious is if it is in a pie. After a slight moment of disappointment that it took me 25 years to discover this. I quickly did some research. Recipes for pies that are potentially the most delicious sort are abundant on the internet. However, I believe there are none of the White Chocolate Peanut Butter Apple Pie variety, so there you go, I just invented something new.
*This statement is a non-truth, as I was unable to stop eating my delicious snack for long enough to do any blogging.
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
Great Wide Somewhere
Yesterday I got to go on a field trip for school, and it turned out to be an amazingly great adventure! I still plan to do some blogging about my Boston adventure, but the lab adventure is fresh in my mind so we are going with that one. I'll add some photos at the end of the post.
On Monday I got invited to join the recovery team since they needed two people with ham radio licenses and had only one (KB1RAD at your services). Tuesday morning I left my house at 5:30am in order to meet up with the team, pack up the cars, and hit the road by 6:30. The launch team was delayed with their departure by an hour, due to some equipment failure. So the six of us on the recovery team headed out to Conway and had time for a nice breakfast. Our discussion eventually landed upon the fact that we would be sitting around for several hours before they even launched, so that is when I started playing 20 Questions, which actually was more like Infinite Questions. Then we heard that the launch team's main computer was broken and their backup computer was only capable of tracking and receiving data from one of the two balloons that they planned to launch. So the new plan involved sending three of the recovery team guys to Mt Washington to track and receive data from the balloons. In the meantime I got to hang out with the other two guys in Conway, playing tourister, visiting museums, drinking lemonade.. you know.
So we finally get a call saying they are about to launch. Then they launch and everything is looking good. In the meantime, they had Kristina drive another computer to the airport so that they could track both balloons from the launch site. So all in all things are looking good. The only problem is that there was too much interference at the top of Mt Washington due to all the radio towers, so that team had to quickly rush down the mountain, because it was important for them to track the balloons during the descent so that we would be able to locate and recover them. Now is when things finally started to pick up.
The other half of the recovery team was tracking the balloons as they were driving, so when they came driving by we just pulled out and started following them. Eventually they got the last GPS position for each payload, one at a fairly high altitude and one at a lower altitude. Since they had a better idea of where the lower altitude one was, we headed toward that, and once we got near we were lucky enough to receive one more transmission so we had the GPS coordinates of where it was. It turned out to be less than half a mile from the road, and when we drove up we could see it, two orange spots (one the payload, the other the parachute) in the distance. The balloon did a fine job of landing in a farm where they grow sod, so basically it was in the middle of the biggest lawn ever. Very easy to get to, and very easy to find. So we cut apart the payloads and balloon and parachute (sidenote: none of the guys had a knife on them, but luckily they had a girl along with a pink pocket knife and they were all thankful for that) and packed it away. At this point it was starting to get later in the day and we didn't want to run out of sunlight before we located the other payload.
For the other payload we could not hear the ELT (emergency locator trasmitting) on our radios, and the last GPS point was near a lake, so we suspected it might be in the lake and not functioning, so we headed that way (don't worry we had a kayak along). However, once we got closer, we started to pick up the ELT, and after driving around awhile and trying the direction antenna several times (mostly unsuccessful) we got another GPS position, so once again we had a mostly exact location. At this point it was nearly sunset, so we took a road that got us to 0.6 miles from the payload. It was very buggy and pretty thick brush, so we put on long sleeves, pants, and tons of bug spray and headed in. It turned out we were hiking through a swamp. Soon enough, most of the 6 of us were quite wet (don't worry, my hiking boots were great and kept me dry, since I never stepped in water deeper than my ankle!). It took a long time to hike the short distance in, but once we got to within the uncertainty of the handheld GPS, we brought out the directional antenna, and that time it did actually serve its purpose. Let me just explain here what the directional antenna is: a PVC pipe, with three strips of tape measure of various lengths sticking off of it, hooked up to a small handheld radio receiver. Now imagine me walking around with this thing, pointing it in various directions, listening for my balloon payload. Pretty much it is the nerdiest image of "science" one could come up with. So, there I stand, in the middle of the swamp, being eaten by mosquitos (through my clothes, and two applications of bugspray), waving this antenna around. Luckily it worked and we got the general direction and "fanned" out to the best of our abilities in the swamp. Tim managed to find it up a tree, and by the time I traversed the 20 feet to get to them they pretty much had the tree down (note to self: buy a hatchet). At this point the daylight was fading pretty quickly, so we packed away the payloads, parachute, and balloon, got out our headlamps and headed back toward the cars. We decided that due to the fading light we would take the direct path, which meant walking through the swamp without hesitation. I still managed to have dry feet by the time we got to the car, but we were all quite lucky we didn't fall down due to the thick brush and slippery footing.
All in all it was a most awesome adventure! I wish I could do things like this more often, especially since I never felt like I was holding the group back (which I was worried about), and I managed to be a helpful contributor to the goals.
The recovery team, about to go separate ways.
At the train station in Conway.
Blue train at the round house.
Old railcar.
Model train museum.
The men trying to figure out where our payloads could be. Shortly after this a woman drove by (remember this is on very back roads in Maine) and said to the guys in a mocking voice, "Are you gentlemen lost?" but was quickly corrected and then impressed by our project.
Phil frolicking in the field.
The guys approaching the payload.
A cute cemetery in the backwoods of Maine.
These two photos were taken by Tim, showing the payload stuck in a tree in the swamp in the fading daylight.
On Monday I got invited to join the recovery team since they needed two people with ham radio licenses and had only one (KB1RAD at your services). Tuesday morning I left my house at 5:30am in order to meet up with the team, pack up the cars, and hit the road by 6:30. The launch team was delayed with their departure by an hour, due to some equipment failure. So the six of us on the recovery team headed out to Conway and had time for a nice breakfast. Our discussion eventually landed upon the fact that we would be sitting around for several hours before they even launched, so that is when I started playing 20 Questions, which actually was more like Infinite Questions. Then we heard that the launch team's main computer was broken and their backup computer was only capable of tracking and receiving data from one of the two balloons that they planned to launch. So the new plan involved sending three of the recovery team guys to Mt Washington to track and receive data from the balloons. In the meantime I got to hang out with the other two guys in Conway, playing tourister, visiting museums, drinking lemonade.. you know.
So we finally get a call saying they are about to launch. Then they launch and everything is looking good. In the meantime, they had Kristina drive another computer to the airport so that they could track both balloons from the launch site. So all in all things are looking good. The only problem is that there was too much interference at the top of Mt Washington due to all the radio towers, so that team had to quickly rush down the mountain, because it was important for them to track the balloons during the descent so that we would be able to locate and recover them. Now is when things finally started to pick up.
The other half of the recovery team was tracking the balloons as they were driving, so when they came driving by we just pulled out and started following them. Eventually they got the last GPS position for each payload, one at a fairly high altitude and one at a lower altitude. Since they had a better idea of where the lower altitude one was, we headed toward that, and once we got near we were lucky enough to receive one more transmission so we had the GPS coordinates of where it was. It turned out to be less than half a mile from the road, and when we drove up we could see it, two orange spots (one the payload, the other the parachute) in the distance. The balloon did a fine job of landing in a farm where they grow sod, so basically it was in the middle of the biggest lawn ever. Very easy to get to, and very easy to find. So we cut apart the payloads and balloon and parachute (sidenote: none of the guys had a knife on them, but luckily they had a girl along with a pink pocket knife and they were all thankful for that) and packed it away. At this point it was starting to get later in the day and we didn't want to run out of sunlight before we located the other payload.
For the other payload we could not hear the ELT (emergency locator trasmitting) on our radios, and the last GPS point was near a lake, so we suspected it might be in the lake and not functioning, so we headed that way (don't worry we had a kayak along). However, once we got closer, we started to pick up the ELT, and after driving around awhile and trying the direction antenna several times (mostly unsuccessful) we got another GPS position, so once again we had a mostly exact location. At this point it was nearly sunset, so we took a road that got us to 0.6 miles from the payload. It was very buggy and pretty thick brush, so we put on long sleeves, pants, and tons of bug spray and headed in. It turned out we were hiking through a swamp. Soon enough, most of the 6 of us were quite wet (don't worry, my hiking boots were great and kept me dry, since I never stepped in water deeper than my ankle!). It took a long time to hike the short distance in, but once we got to within the uncertainty of the handheld GPS, we brought out the directional antenna, and that time it did actually serve its purpose. Let me just explain here what the directional antenna is: a PVC pipe, with three strips of tape measure of various lengths sticking off of it, hooked up to a small handheld radio receiver. Now imagine me walking around with this thing, pointing it in various directions, listening for my balloon payload. Pretty much it is the nerdiest image of "science" one could come up with. So, there I stand, in the middle of the swamp, being eaten by mosquitos (through my clothes, and two applications of bugspray), waving this antenna around. Luckily it worked and we got the general direction and "fanned" out to the best of our abilities in the swamp. Tim managed to find it up a tree, and by the time I traversed the 20 feet to get to them they pretty much had the tree down (note to self: buy a hatchet). At this point the daylight was fading pretty quickly, so we packed away the payloads, parachute, and balloon, got out our headlamps and headed back toward the cars. We decided that due to the fading light we would take the direct path, which meant walking through the swamp without hesitation. I still managed to have dry feet by the time we got to the car, but we were all quite lucky we didn't fall down due to the thick brush and slippery footing.
All in all it was a most awesome adventure! I wish I could do things like this more often, especially since I never felt like I was holding the group back (which I was worried about), and I managed to be a helpful contributor to the goals.
The recovery team, about to go separate ways.
At the train station in Conway.
Blue train at the round house.
Old railcar.
Model train museum.
The men trying to figure out where our payloads could be. Shortly after this a woman drove by (remember this is on very back roads in Maine) and said to the guys in a mocking voice, "Are you gentlemen lost?" but was quickly corrected and then impressed by our project.
Phil frolicking in the field.
The guys approaching the payload.
A cute cemetery in the backwoods of Maine.
These two photos were taken by Tim, showing the payload stuck in a tree in the swamp in the fading daylight.
Wednesday, August 12, 2009
Blood Letting
Yesterday I donated blood for the first time in a long time, possibly over a year. Brett went through the initial tests and questions with me, and according to him my temperature (although below 98.6F) was acceptable (luckily, because I didn't really feel like doing jumping jacks to warm myself up), my hemoglobin was good (rare for me, since I don't generally eat a ton of meat or other iron-packed foods), and my blood pressure was just fine. Then he took me to a chair where I sat patiently waiting for Blake to stick me, but while I was waiting Angelina came over and said she could take care of me. So I moved to a different section and had a GREAT blood donating experience. Angelina found my vein right away with no "fishing around" which I hate. And I don't have a bruise today or anything. Also, it was my fastest blood letting ever: 7 minutes and 14 seconds. I am fairly sure it was due to the fact that, on my way over to the donation center, I remembered that drinking a lot of water is supposed to make your blood flow faster, so I stopped by the bubbler and had an EXTRA big drink of water.
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
Old Ladies!
So it has been awhile since I did any blogging, and I'm not quite ready to be in work-mode so I figured blogging would be a good post-lunch exercise. I just got back from CO, where I spent a week at a conference and a long weekend hanging out with Malory and others.
Here are some of the highlights. Maybe I'll add photos too if I am feeling generous.
-I gave my first talk at a conference. It was only two slides, but I think it was a pretty good time. No one asked questions but one of the legitimate scientists (male, white hair, has tons of papers published) commented on how unique and great my data set is.
-I saw a Lazuli Bunting.
-Free gondola rides from the conference center to almost where the condos we lived in were located.
-Listening to the white-nerd version of "For he's a jolly good fellow" when there was a birthday at the conference.
-Double line slacklining! This was SO cool. We found three trees and set up two lines in a V-shape so that we could walk from one to the next, which was tons of fun. There was also juggling on the slackline and much improvement all around.
-The drive from Aspen to Denver was very scenic. Everything is SO green because there has been SO much rain this year.
-On Saturday morning I ran my first 5k with Malory. Originally my goal was to run it in under 30 minutes, but I soon realized that it was way too hot and I either had to slow down or pass out, so I slowed down and changed my goal to continual running with no walking, which I achieved. The 5k was the Undy5000 to raise awareness for colon cancer. There was a giant inflatable colon that you could walk through. Also there were quite a few people running in only underpants.
-Later on Saturday we drove up to Greeley to visit some friends and also to see Big&Rich at the Greeley Stampede. It was the most white trash thing I have seen in awhile but we had tons of fun. And (bonus) the tickets were free since we helped with the clean-up crew.
-Malory was doing some house-sitting in Parker for the week, so we stayed there at night. One night I slept on a trundle bed (which any 4 year old would know how to get excited about) and the cat and dog were chasing each other around all night and the cat shoved a cactus over, right onto my face! Evil cat! I woke up in the morning with a little cactus spike sticking out of my forehead.
-I learned all about how corgis are so great.
-When Malory and I were leaving church these two old ladies were crossing the road slowly in front of us and Malory quietly made a comment about old ladies, and then she said quite loudly "Old Ladies!" I was panicking and laughing all at the same time, because apparently she didn't realize her window was open, but we don't think the old ladies heard. Luckily.
Here is a photo of this old cool building we saw while hiking in the mountains.
Here are some of the highlights. Maybe I'll add photos too if I am feeling generous.
-I gave my first talk at a conference. It was only two slides, but I think it was a pretty good time. No one asked questions but one of the legitimate scientists (male, white hair, has tons of papers published) commented on how unique and great my data set is.
-I saw a Lazuli Bunting.
-Free gondola rides from the conference center to almost where the condos we lived in were located.
-Listening to the white-nerd version of "For he's a jolly good fellow" when there was a birthday at the conference.
-Double line slacklining! This was SO cool. We found three trees and set up two lines in a V-shape so that we could walk from one to the next, which was tons of fun. There was also juggling on the slackline and much improvement all around.
-The drive from Aspen to Denver was very scenic. Everything is SO green because there has been SO much rain this year.
-On Saturday morning I ran my first 5k with Malory. Originally my goal was to run it in under 30 minutes, but I soon realized that it was way too hot and I either had to slow down or pass out, so I slowed down and changed my goal to continual running with no walking, which I achieved. The 5k was the Undy5000 to raise awareness for colon cancer. There was a giant inflatable colon that you could walk through. Also there were quite a few people running in only underpants.
-Later on Saturday we drove up to Greeley to visit some friends and also to see Big&Rich at the Greeley Stampede. It was the most white trash thing I have seen in awhile but we had tons of fun. And (bonus) the tickets were free since we helped with the clean-up crew.
-Malory was doing some house-sitting in Parker for the week, so we stayed there at night. One night I slept on a trundle bed (which any 4 year old would know how to get excited about) and the cat and dog were chasing each other around all night and the cat shoved a cactus over, right onto my face! Evil cat! I woke up in the morning with a little cactus spike sticking out of my forehead.
-I learned all about how corgis are so great.
-When Malory and I were leaving church these two old ladies were crossing the road slowly in front of us and Malory quietly made a comment about old ladies, and then she said quite loudly "Old Ladies!" I was panicking and laughing all at the same time, because apparently she didn't realize her window was open, but we don't think the old ladies heard. Luckily.
Here is a photo of this old cool building we saw while hiking in the mountains.
Monday, June 1, 2009
Sore Muscles
I woke up yesterday morning with very sore back and leg muscles. I am guessing this was due to my gardening experience on saturday. Apparently I decided it would be a good idea to lift these huge bags of wet dirt that weighed about 8 tons each. I know they say "lift with your legs!" but apparently I lift with my legs and my back a little too. Oops!
This morning I woke up and my muscles were possibly MORE sore than the day before. I don't know how this is possible. Unless I am the world's most extreme cleaner/baker. (That was a shameless plug for my domestic skillz.)
This morning I woke up and my muscles were possibly MORE sore than the day before. I don't know how this is possible. Unless I am the world's most extreme cleaner/baker. (That was a shameless plug for my domestic skillz.)
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