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Toufayan Bakeries: Pita Bread and Tomato Wraps

13-Jun-09

If you’re like me you may have been looking for some tasty, whole grain/high fiber baked goods that won’t break the bank. And, if you’re like me, you may have missed the products from Toufayan Bakeries because, frankly, their merchandisers aren’t doing that great a job getting their product in prime shelf space at the supermarket. I regularly shop at a 24-hour discount market that carries a lot of bulk sizes, staples, big selection of frozen meats, etc. and they have a display of tortillas all from one brand. They occasionally will have a few “low carb” tortillas that achieve their low carb status partly by being smaller. The brand has whole wheat tortillas, but the store almost never has them. And the prices for both are higher than the regular ones.

Last week, I happened to look at their bakery racks, mostly full of bread from their own bakery to see if they had any whole grain rye. They did, but I ended up not buying it when I saw Toufayan’s whole wheat pitas on the next rack for less than $2 for a pack of 5. I bought them and they were fantastic! These were actually the first whole grain pitas I’d seen in the area (Joplin, MO MSA population 172, 933).

After I finished off the pitas, I went back and bought three packages of their wraps - Tomato, Spinach and Whole Wheat. So far, I’ve only tried the tomato, but again - fantastic. They taste great. They have a great texture, definitely not “cardboard,” despite having a decent amount of fiber. And again, the price was right, at less than $1.75 for a pack of 5. And these are big wraps - 10″ - not the baby tortillas.

On the health front, a few comments. I’ve seen two different recommendations on what to look for in baked goods for maximum health benefit. Several sources said that “whole grain,” “whole wheat,” etc. need to be the first ingredient in the list. On this count, only the whole wheat wraps make the grade, though all of them do have whole wheat flour as an ingredient. The spinach and tomato wraps have 12g of whole grain while the whole wheat have 30g, so the difference is clearly refined grain. Not really good, but…all of them have 3 g of fiber per serving (1 wrap). This is the other thing that several sources said to look for. Dr. Arthur Agatston’s The South Beach Diet Super Charged says, “be sure the label says ‘100% whole wheat’ or ‘whole grain,’ and look for breads that contain 3 grams or more of fiber per slice.” If you’re in Phase 2 of the South Beach Diet or similar, the flavored wraps might have to wait. But with plenty of fiber, relatively low calories, no trans fats or cholesterol, 6g of protein per serving and low sugar (1-2g per serving) I’m more than willing to take these as a healthy alternative to bread for making convenient lunches. And again, the whole wheat wraps and whole wheat pitas do have much more whole grain and more fiber.

You can find the products with the store locator on the company website.

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Everex gBook - Linux laptop

14-May-08

This review was written on an Everex gBook.

There are pros and cons to the Everex 15.4″ gBook VA1500V Laptop PC w/ VIA C7-M Processor, but bottom line I’m not sending it back! The biggest pro is the price - $399 at Walmart.com with free “Site to Store” delivery (which took two to three weeks, 40 miles from Wal-Mart’s Bentonville headquarters and distribution center). Total price with sales tax was under $425.

The biggest con is that the hardware isn’t fully supported by the Ubuntu linux distribution or the Everex flavor of Ubuntu “gOS”. When I first got the machine it was loaded with gOS and the screen resolution was set to 1440×900 (it does have a nice crisp, widescreen display). The computer was advertised as having “Additional Preinstalled and Linked Software -
Mozilla Firefox, gMail, Meebo, Skype, Wikipedia, GIMP, Blogger, YouTube, Xing Movie Player, RythemBox, Faqly, Facebook and OpenOffice.org 2.3 (includes WRITER, IMPRESS, DRAW, CALC, BASE.” Skype was important to me, as the main reason I wanted a laptop was to be able to communicate effectively from the road and I’ve got a fully paid up Skype Pro subscription, SkypeIn number, headset and the whole nine yards. Well, the gOS installation didn’t include Skype. Skype was nowhere to be found in the “Add/Remove Programs” or by going directly to the Synaptic Package Manager (too technical already - this is probably not your best bet, but It’s worth noting at this point that Everex has Windows notebooks available for a couple hundred dollars more, such as the Everex 13.3″ StepNote SR5210T Laptop PC w/ Intel Core 2 Duo Processor T5250). The version of Ubuntu that was masquerading as “gOS” was the last version, so an attempt to download Skype for Linux and install it was unsuccessful.

So, I called tech support. The first guy told me I needed to download the gOS OS from the Everex support site, burn a CD and reinstall it. (The computer came with no CDs to reinstall the software.) The site specified that I needed to burn a DVD, not a CD. Since the computer only had a CD-burner and I didn’t want to waste 12 hours downloading, I called back. They assured me a CD would be fine. It wasn’t. The install was too big by over 100 meg. I got an external DVD burner and hooked it up to a different computer and burned the DVD. Reinstalled the OS and found myself stuck with a 640×480 screen resolution that looked horrible. Couldn’t find the correct display driver and have no documentation, so I called tech support again. The guy at tech support didn’t know what the correct driver was. He walked me through a fairly extensive procedure of shell commands that accomplishes nothing.


Everex 15.4″ gBook VA1500V Laptop PC w/ VIA C7-M Processor

Finally he suggested downloading a different version of the OS, one intended for the ultramobile Everex 7″ CloudBook CE1200V Ultra-Portable Laptop w/ VIA C7-M Processor ULV. It didn’t work either. Just for fun, I tried the version of the OS for their “MyMiniPC,” that linked to MySpace, YouTube and lots of other fun stuff. It was fun to play around with, but even after I managed to find and install an opensource display driver, it still didn’t work quite right.

Then the big explosion happened. The automatic update feature told me I should upgrade to the latest version of Ubuntu. I told it okay and a day later, the computer wouldn’t boot. This is the second time I’ve had this problem with an “automatic” upgrade to the latest version of Ubuntu, so it’s a fault in Ubuntu or in my handling of an “automatic” update, not a gBook problem. On the other computer, I just went back to all Windows, all the time. On this one, I wanted to run Linux, so I downloaded a full Ubuntu install from the Ubuntu site, burned a DVD and installed it. It works great. The display drivers still aren’t 100%, though I do have the right screen resolution at least. I can’t take advantage of some of the features of the display or the graphics processor in Ubuntu and as far as I can tell won’t be able to take advantage of them in any OS other than Windows.

So, the big negatives:

  • Doesn’t come with Skype and just won’t run Skype as configured.
  • Linux version packaged with the computer isn’t that great.
  • Almost completely unsupported - the tech support guys at Everex are great, but they don’t have any information at all on this product to refer to.
  • Nice little display, but graphics aren’t fully supported.
  • Minor things aren’t fully compatible, or at least fully enabled, in any version of Linux, which is odd for a laptop marketed with a Linux OS.
  • Could use more memory and the support website and Everex store website don’t even tell what type it takes.
  • Poor battery life. I haven’t fully run it down, but I left it with the screen on and a BitTorrent download running and it ran out 20% of the battery in about 15 minutes. The display icon says that fully charged I have an hour and five minutes run time. That is actually running, though not running hard.
  • The touchpad gets in the way when typing. You hit the space bar and the cursor jumps because you brush it. This is a laptop problem generally. I need to figure out how to disable the touchpad. (I’m using a Logitech USB mouse and it works fine.)
  • Not for the tech challenged.

I do want to note one thing on that last point. A few reviews I saw of this machine complained that it didn’t run Yahoo/MSN/AIM, etc. Seriously, if you can handle doing the Ubuntu install, which is actually really easy if you just go to Ubuntu.org, you can run all of the above using a program called Pidgin, that is included in the basic Ubuntu distribution. There are also plenty of other alternatives. Yes, you can’t go to the Yahoo Messenger home page and download the Windows version and expect it to work, but you can communicate on Yahoo, AIM, ICQ, MySpace IM, Google Talk, MSN, Jabber and a number of other IM networks with very little trouble.

You can also play Second Life, but the download is pretty big. I haven’t tried it out yet, but I’ll update when I do. You can play Second Life, but without extra memory it’s not going to work well. It comes up with a message that it doesn’t meet the minimum requirements. The current drivers for video probably won’t work well with it either, though the extra memory may help with that (the video card shares memory with the system RAM).

And you can run many Windows programs using WinE (Windows Emulator). I tried a couple and they ran fine, but neither my USB mouse nor the touchpad seemed to work right with them. If I had a Windows program I absolutely had to have, I’d research that more. The only Windows programs I can’t replace with completely free software on this machine are Amazon Unbox and Audible Manager. (Skype for Linux won’t do video calls and the IM programs will only do text chat, not voice or video, though.) The computer comes with a full office suite already installed and the new install of Ubuntu that I did included the same suite (OpenOffice).

Pros:

  • Price. At $399, this is the cheapest laptop - period. Ironically, the next cheapest Linux laptop runs $400 more.
  • Security. Linux is much more secure than Windows and the processor on this laptop has features to enhance security further - though I haven’t bothered with the software to enable the features.
  • Quick. The machine runs fast, though that’s as much a feature of Ubuntu compared to Windows as the hardware. That’s why I wanted a Linux laptop.
  • Light. It’s very lightweight. Very portable as long as you have power.
  • It’s green(ish). See the comment about battery life. The CPU is a low power, low heat unit and there is no fan [There is a fan, it’s just exceptionally quiet.] Still, it obviously pulls a bit of power to run the battery down that quick.
  • Cool. Literally, cool temperature. You can actually use this in your lap, unlike most laptops.

Overall, this is a great price on a good product. It’s a good value for the money. The tech challenged would do well to go the extra couple hundred for one of the Windows OS products from Everex. If the display size and full size keyboard aren’t issues, Linux fans might want to go with the Cloudbook which has a little better support and seems to be fully utilized by the OS. But, for a full sized laptop that can be up and running with the latest Ubuntu version in a half hour (if you do it from the start), this is still a great buy.

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Jean Costa’s Blog: Useful, Fun, Varied

12-Jan-08

I’ve been reading Jean Costa’s blog for the last 3 or 4 weeks after finding it through the EntreCard system. As you might expect from someone billing himself as “The Software Expert and Entrepreneur,” he writes an eclectic blend of posts on topics ranging from operating systems to advertising. His latest effort is an offer to other bloggers to review their sites if they will provide a critique of his site. (Yes, I’m hoping to get his insight into one of my sites.)

I’m a bit behind the curve with this review, because I’m going to comment on the appearance of his site and he’s apparently about to launch a new look. That said, his current theme has a couple of points that I really like. First, he has his photo at the very top. Blogging is about putting the writer’s personal stamp on the words. Some of us do this by putting our names in the front of things. Costa does this by putting his name and picture up front. The photo’s also interesting - he’s standing to the side, gesturing to the title and navigational features of the blog. It’s an unusual header and really grabs the attention of the reader, because it’s so different and it says “Take me seriously, I’m putting my face on this.”

And about those navigational features…A menu right at the top of the blog points you to an overview of Costa’s software services complete with contact form, his mission statement and a free tutorials page. These are all outside the main “blog” content, which includes quick tips on software and operating systems, games, news, advertising, WordPress and more. The tips he has up are great, including “How to open Microsoft’s New .docx file” and a post on how to get the look and feel of Windows Vista without downgrading from XP. The content is first rate and the tutorials on subjects including “Dreamweaver, HTML, Javascript, Photoshop, PHP, SQL and Windows Movie Maker” look like a good plan.

Unfortunately this is the downside to the site. I write with experience when I say that it’s far too easy to have great ideas and great intentions for a site and not follow through. The less bold among us avoid putting out those intentions for everyone to see us not follow through. On his “Mission” page, he writes:

One of my biggest goals for this website is to pour all my knowledge into it. Especially in the lessons section. That section will be the heart of the website, which will contain hundreds of lessons, on topics that widely asked about, and those that I know alot of knowledge in.

Hopefully he will follow through, but as of now only the Windows Movie Maker tutorial is live - the others are just text. Likewise the number of blog posts. This is not really a complaint - after all, he’s only been at this since July 2007. I just look forward to seeing lots more posts and actually seeing those tutorials go live in the near future. I just can’t help wanting *more now*.

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Flea Control Products

19-Jul-07

With one adult cat, a litter of kittens (now gone) and one dog living in the house, we developed a flea problem this summer. Kittens generally can’t be treated with any pesticide type product and they end up becoming furry little flea factories, infesting the healthy adult animals that normally don’t have a major flea problem. In trying to get the situation under control, I started with some “natural” products, based on use of herbal essential oils while the kittens were still here. They weren’t very effective with that level of infestation. Here are two products we tried:

Cloud-Nine Herbal Dip 1/2oz (by Halo )

This product is a 1/2 ounce bottle of mixed herbal essential oils to be used in several ways. It can be mixed with shampoo for bathing the animal. It can also be mixed with water and sprayed on. Finally, it can be applied to the color to make a flea repellent collar. The product was successful in taking the fleas on the adult dog from an extremely severe level to a moderate problem. That said, I used a combination of all three methods to achieve this and the shampoo was probably most effective. No big surprise there since any soap will kill fleas if it’s simply left on for several minutes - the fleas get stuck in the soap and essentially drown. If the product was really effective as a repellent, two baths two days apart with the stuff, followed by twice daily spraying and application to the dogs collar should have meant virtually no fleas on the dog. It didn’t. While this product is probably good to have around as part of a program for regular preventive use, it just doesn’t cut it for bringing an established infestation under control. On the plus side, it contains citronella oil which definitely does repel mosquitoes, the carrier of heartworms. Of course, it’s no replacement for a heartworm preventative, but it ought to at least spare the pet the annoyance of mosquito bites.

Nature’s Guardian:

The second natural product was Sergeant’s Nature’s Guardian. This is another essential oils based product, though the oil mix is different and the method of application also differs. It’s applied the same way as many of the commercial pesticide products - cut off the top of the dispenser and apply in a line from between the shoulder blades to the tail. Supposedly the oils will spread throughout all the fur by a process called “wicking”, the same claim made for the pesticide products. Maybe for some pets, but for a pug dog wicking is a myth. The product is claimed to work for “up to one month but can be applied as often as every two weeks.” It also claims to kill and repel ticks and mosquitoes, but this formula doesn’t contain citronella, so I would use Cloud Nine.

The one thing that both Cloud Nine and Nature’s Guardian did was smell really good, because of the spice oils that are their main ingredients. The Cloud Nine was a much milder scent; the Nature’s Guardian would really improve the smell of even a stinky dog.

Another interesting note was that neither of the products contained lavender oil or pennyroyal extract, both of which are reputed to repel, if not outright kill, fleas. I actually found that a few drops of lavender oil is about as effective as either of these products.

Next I tried Hartz 4-in-1 Flea & Tick Drops Plus. This is a pesticide product containing phenothrin, a product to kill adult fleas, and methoprene, an insect growth regulator to prevent flea eggs and larvae from maturing. It works by the shoulder blade to tail “wicking” method. In other words, in our case, it doesn’t work.

So, what did work?

Capstar. This product contains an insecticide, nitenpyram, that is a synthetic nicotine derivative and is actually taken in pill form. Within a couple of hours every flea on the dogs body dies and the dog remains poisonous to fleas for 24 hours.

The downside to Capstar is that at a cost of roughly $3.5 per dose, it would cost over $100 a month to treat a single pet with Capstar alone. It’s recommended to use it with a product like Frontline Plus or Program Flavor Tabs for Dogs and Cats that kills flea eggs and larvae. That’s our next stop in the flea odyssey and I’ll update in a month or two with the final word. In the meantime, I can wholeheartedly recommend treating your pets with Capstar to get things under control and going from there.

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Nokia E62 from AT&T Wireless

18-Jul-07

I can’t say enough good about my new Nokia E62 from the selection of PDA Devices at ATT.com. I had been hesitant to purchase a “smartphone” because all-in-one devices have always had, and generally deserved, a bad reputation. The killer here was what do you do if you’re making an urgent call and the phone’s operating system goes buggy. Then there was just the factor that you’re going to blow your PDA budget and your phone budget and possibly end up with a product that doesn’t do a very good job at either. (Think of the early fax-scanner-copiers low print quality.)
AT&T Camera Phone

Well, the E62 is a great phone and the best PDA I have ever owned bar none. I’ve had PalmOS PDAs and a couple of proprietary operating system PDAs and the E62 functions better than any of them. It’s faster to open programs, has a wider variety of included programs including a complete office suite, and after over a month of use I have yet to crash the operating system. I’ve had it shut off twice because I wasn’t paying attention and let the battery run down and I’ve had individual programs (all third party) crash unexpectedly, but not once have I faced anything like the “blue screen of death”. Every error has been corrected in a matter of seconds without any consequences for other programs or data.

Nokia E62 smartphone cell phone PDA from AT&T Wireless

I was a little leary at first because it had a Symbian operating system instead of the more widely used handheld operating systems PalmOS and Windows Mobile. Fortunately by their nature everything on a PDA is graphical, so from a standpoint of using it, the feel is no different. I knew Symbian enjoyed a good reputation, but was worried that there might be a lack of available software. Guess again. Symbian is the most widely installed phone OS and though this is a very new version there is still a wealth of software available to do everything I’ve thought of. There are even some programs that seem to work better than their desktop counterparts.

The device uses a joystick instead of a stylus. The joystick is vastly preferrable to trackballs, touchpads, etc. in my view and has the feeling of making the whole package more durable than a touchscreen/stylus combo. I’ve had PDAs prematurely die because the touchscreen wore out from a combination of use and zealous cleaning. No worry on that here.

The keyboard is a standard “QWERTY” layout. I can type on a full size keyboard at an easy 60 WPM with good accuracy. I could text on my old cell phone at about 5 WPM with poor accuracy. I can type on the Nokia E62 at about 30 WPM with decent accuracy. My accuracy improves if I remove the plastic cover, but my thumbs are still too big to “type” that way all the time. Still, it is much better than many of the alternatives, especially the touch screen keyboards.

The internet suite that’s included works great and includes several email client options, two web browser options and an IM program that works with Yahoo, MSN and AIM. I also purchased a program called Agile Messenger that lets you use the data plan, instead of the text messaging plan, to send messages by Yahoo, MSN, AIM, Google Talk and ICQ.

The device doesn’t have an included GPS, but it has bluetooth and at the price of this phone, you can buy the Bluetooth GPS receiver (that should work with other devices like your laptop, too) and still be ahead on total price.

And that brings up the final point…price. I went with a refurbished phone at $29.99 (when I purchased - Refurbished Phones from AT&T! here). The new versions were only $20 more when purchased online with a 2-year subscription. The new one is less than half the price I’ve ever paid for a PDA and let me repeat again, this is the best PDA I’ve ever owned bar none!

AT&T Refurb

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Salton 3-Cup Rice Cooker: Save time and money

22-Apr-07

Rice cookers are an unusual appliance in many US households, but I’ve had several Asian friends who had them and the rice always seemed to be fluffier and tastier than any rice I cooked on stovetop or in the microwave. Instant rice turns out the most comparable, but loses some flavor in all the processing. Slow cook rice tends to come out mushy in the microwave or to burn when cooked on stovetop. I’d looked at rice cookers before, but hadn’t purchased because we’re trying to follow some variation on the South Beach Diet and The G.I. Diet and rice doesn’t fit in. On the other hand, slow cook rice is preferred to instant on both diets and a rice cooker makes that much simpler (and tastier).

I bought my Salton RA3 3-Cup Rice Cooker at Amazon during a “one-day sale” event a couple of weeks ago. I’m glad I did and if I had it to do over, I’d have bought it before at the regular price (about $5 more than I paid). Of course, I bought it using Amazon Prime, so I paid zero for two-day shipping.

Salton RA3 3-Cup Rice Cooker

The rice cooker is easy to use and I found both use and cleanup comparable to microwave. You dump the appropriate measure of rice (measuring cup included) into the cooker, then add water to the appropriate fill line right on the bowl. Stick the bowl in the cooker, put on the lid and depress a lever. The cooker automatically shuts off once all the water steams out and, for the fluffiest rice, you wait 15 minutes after shutoff to remove the rice. The bowl is small and a quick soak in the sink loosens up the tiny amount of “rice crust” that forms on the bottom for a less than 1-minute cleanup time. Of course, the big recommendation for this convenience-wise is that it frees up the microwave and stovetop for other uses - very important when rice is a minor side dish in a multicourse feast prepared in a small kitchen.

This item has a lot to recommend it over larger appliances. It’s sufficient to make more than enough rice for our family of three, especially with the smaller rice portions preferred when watching the glycemic load of meals. For a larger family, a larger cooker might be useful.

If you want to make fried rice or if you aren’t serving rice with a meal, the rice cooker can also double as a vegetable steamer. Most fried rice recipes call for cook the rice 8+ hours ahead and refrigerating. In the meantime, you clean the rice cooker and are ready to use the steaming rack (included) to steam vegetables to go with the meal.

A minor plus is that this appliance saves energy. Cooking regular rice, in the microwave takes almost twice the electricity. The rice cooker is a 300-watt appliance and takes 35 minutes to cook basmati rice, for a total energy use of 10,500 watt/minutes (0.175 kw/hours). Cooking the same basmati rice in a 1200-watt microwave takes 10 minutes at full power followed by ten minutes at half power for a total of 18,000 watt/minutes (0.3 kw/hours). In a single use this amounts to about 1 cent saved, but if you could save 42% of every use of electricity think how far that could go to saving your pocketbook, contributing to energy independence and helping the environment.

Pro

  • Low cost
  • Compact for easy storage
  • Compact size frees up counter space during use
  • Produces small batches - great for small family or dieters
  • Easy to use
  • Quick cleanup
  • Frees up the microwave/stove for other uses
  • Doubles as a steamer

Con

  • Batches may be too small for big families (Consider the 7-cup model)
  • Very small portions when steaming veggies
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Motorola C139

05-Apr-07

I purchased the Motorola C139 to use with Cingular’s GoPhone prepaid phone service as a temporary replacement for a damaged Cingular phone. (I needed a phone in the Cingular network to work with the rest of the family without running up bills.) TracFone also offers this model as the Net10 Motorola Prepaid Cellular Phone - Blue (NTGC139). If you want a tiny phone that will fit in the pocket, have great battery life, great call quality, great reception and a low price, this thing can’t be beat. If you want to take pictures, listen to music, play games, check email and get a massage…expect to pay about 10 times as much and forget the massage. It does work quite well as an alarm clock, though. Seriously, of several mobile phones I’ve had, this is my favorite and I have yet to replace that Cingular phone (though paying the bill on it is pressuring me to do so.).

The only downside is that the key layout is such that when I have it in a cheap holster I bought from Wal-Mart the keys flake out. I can still answer calls, but checking some things doesn’t work well.

Truly a great buy.

Net10 Motorola Prepaid Cellular Phone - Blue (NTGC139)

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Crystal Body Deodorant

02-Apr-07

I decided to give the Crystal Body Deodorant a try when I started getting some irritation from “standard” antiperspirants. My experience with antiperspirants and deodorants in the past has been that deodorant alone leaves me smelling of nicely scented BO. Put another way I have always had to use antiperspirant as anything else just covered up odor at best. Before I tried this product, I went through a couple of weeks of just cleaning the pits obsessively and using some essential oils (tea tree and a not too masculine lavender) to kill those odor causing bacteria under the arms. I picked this up at a local natural foods store and gave it a try. Following are some detailed observations, but bottom line is that it works great and doesn’t cause me any irritation.

Deodorant-Body Stick - 4.25 oz. - Stick
Further thoughts:

  • I haven’t used it during the summer, but I have used it in an 80 degree kitchen where I was working hard. I did sweat. I didn’t stink.
  • If it can stop stinking and let you sweat, that may be a good thing. Sweating is a natural body function.
  • The product doesn’t contain aluminum chlorohydrate, a chemical of possible concern for some people. It does contain aluminum salts.
  • The product has no propylene glycol. Many of the “natural” deodorant products out there do use propylene glycol, which is metabolized by the body into lactic acid.
  • The stick is supposed to last a year at a cost under $7. If it lasts half that long, it’s competitive with standard deodorants. If it actually lasts a year, it’s a money saver.
  • It comes in a nice lavender tube, but it is unscented and equally useful for men or women.
  • It doesn’t leave the sticky white stain on clothes like most antiperspirants.

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Lasko Pivoting Ceramic Heater

03-Dec-06

I’m heating my home this year with a high efficiency wood stove. Since the house is a 100 year old home with lots of drafts and the stove has no blower to disperse hot air, the living room is toasty, while the rooms at the north end of the house need some supplemental heat. In two bedrooms and the kitchen I’ve set up LASKO 5965 PIVOTING CERAMIC HEATERS with ELECTRONIC CONTROL. The net result is a big saving over last year when we used a lower efficiency wood stove and two cheaper electric heaters. The electric bill is about $10/month higher and the gas central heat hasn’t kicked on at all - a saving of about $50 in October and $100 in November. The three Lasko heaters are paid for, the life of the furnace should be extended substantially with the lower use and we haven’t even hit the big gas bill months of December-February.

Lasko 5694 Pivoting Ceramic Heater

For those without the woodstove, the Lasko heaters can still be used for supplemental heat in bedrooms at night, allowing the thermostat to be set lower on the central heat and still save considerably over heating the unused rooms in a large house to a comfortable temperature.

Some of the things I like about this heater include the dual heating modes, the pivoting stand and the electronic thermostat. The dual modes allow you to choose between 900 watts (3070BTU) and 1500 watts (5118BTU). The pivoting stand is great for a couple of reasons. It lets you direct the heat toward the floor, which is great for helping to keep feet warm and warms the whole room more effectively since the heat will rise naturally. More importantly, the stand itself doesn’t get hot, so there’s never any contact between the floor or countertop and hot parts of the heater and is extremely stable. It’s theoretically possible that you could somehow kick the unit over on its face, but it would almost have to be on purpose, so it’s just inherently safer than other heaters. One of the best things about this is that the thermostat actually works. I’m not certain that the temperatures are precise, but it does shut the heater down at roughly the intended temperature, which is a big improvement over several other brands which either don’t shut down at all or once shut down don’t kick back on.

There’s only one negative on this unit. It doesn’t have a no-heat fan mode, a common feature in other models. With large box fans selling for $10, this isn’t a huge deal, but there are times when it would be convenient to kick off the heat and still be able to use the fan.

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Fifty50 Fructose Sweetened Chocolate Chip Cookies

03-Dec-06

I don’t have a big sweet tooth, so unsweetened fruit, unsweetened applesauce and fresh fruit satisfy any normal desire I have for sweets, other than the occasional dark chocolate (which isn’t particularly sweet anyway and is supposed to be good for us). When I do fix desserts, I tend to go for rich over sweet - butter, cream cheese, cream, eggs, nuts and fruit. But a chocolate chip cookie is nice every once in a while. So, when I spotted a “low glycemic” chocolate chip cookie sweetened with fructose from Fifty50 I thought I’d give it a try. The name comes, apparently, from the fact that the company donates 50% of its profits to diabetes research.

The cookie is comparable in flavor to other major brand boxed or bagged chocolate chip cookies. It is perhaps a bit more moist, which is a definite plus in my book. That said, it doesn’t compare to fresh and hot homemade chocolate chip cookies or even freshly baked cookies from NESTLÉ® TOLL HOUSE® Refrigerated Cookie dough. Which, since a cookie is a rare enough treat that I’m perfectly willing to wait the fifteen minutes for pre-made dough to bake and get excellent quality, leaves the donation and the health benefit.

The donation gimmick has never really impressed me. If you want to sell to me, take a normal profit, pass on the price savings and if I feel the need to soothe my conscience, I can make my own donation to the American Diabetes Association or other charity of my choice. Which leaves the health benefit…

Unfortunately, the health benefit is probably not that great. The big benefit is the replacement of normal sugar (sucrose) with fruit sugar (fructose). According to Dr. Barry Sears of The Zone Diet, fructose is useful as a sweetener because it doesn’t spike blood sugar levels the way table sugar does. Fructose is also a healthy natural component of fruit, without the baggage of artificial sweeteners reputed to cause disease. So, the fructose is a big plus.

These cookies offer some nutrition information, including diabetic exchange numbers. Oddly, though, they don’t offer any information on the Glycemic Index or Glycemic Load of these “low glycemic” cookies. What these actually are is “reduced glycemic load”, but they are still made with refined flour, which is a high glycemic item. That leaves these cookies better than most chocolate chip cookies, but still with a higher glycemic load than if they were made with whole grain or even part soy flour. They also use partially hydrogenated soybean oil, so this supposedly healthy food has a good dose of trans-fats.

Bottom line for health is that they are still in the category of all other cookies - treats to be eaten only very occasionally and only in moderation (extreme moderation for those with serious healthy issues). I’m not sure it’s worth eating two of these instead of one hot, fresh baked chocolate chip cookie. And for those with the time and ability, substituting fructose in your own chocolate chip cookie recipe (and possibly using a lower glycemic flour substitute, too) can be just as good.

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