Grab Bag Portion Control:
Celebrate=Good, Over-Celebrate=Bad. Here’s the perfect way to draw the line. These little goodies are little spherical cake bites (chocolate, vanilla, strawberry, lemon cake), covered in various toppings, picked on skewers. A bouquet of 12 will set you back $25. A great birthday gift… or… Easter’s just a month away. These need a 2-week lead time on orders.
Just don’t down the whole dozen alone…. at midnight…. the day before the party đ
And below ….. same yum, different vibe… 6 for $16.50… ships in 48 hours…. will do custom flavor pairings, but standard are:
⢠Decadent Chocolate/ with chocolate buttercream
⢠Tangy Lemon/ with cream cheese frosting
⢠Velvety Vanilla with/ white buttercream frosting
⢠“The Bomb Diggedy” Banana with/ cream cheese frosting
Grab Bag Wallet Diet (the GOOD kind):
For anyone who carries “reward cards” for a variety of stores, the Key Ring app for the iPhone or Android phones will collect all the info needed for your rewards accounts and keep them on your phone, ready to be scanned in the store to get you your deserved rewards. You can get coupons and promos for your specified stores pushed to your phone as well.
Get the cards into your phone and leave the plastic versions at home.
iPhone 3Gs and later, you can scan the barcodes of your cards to enter them… earlier iPhones will need to be =.
See Key Ring in Action â
Get the KEY RING app here
Grab Bag Food Saver Tips:
⢠To keep herbs tasting fresh for up to a month, store whole bunches, washed and sealed in plastic bags, in the freezer. When you need them, theyâll be easier to chop, and theyâll defrost the minute they hit a hot pan.
⢠ When radishes, celery, or carrots have lost their crunch, simply pop them in a bowl of iced water along with a slice of raw potato and watch the limp vegetables freshen up right before your eyes.
⢠Put rice in your salt shaker to stop the salt from hardening. The rice absorbs condensation that can cause clumps.
⢠In order to make cottage cheese or sour cream last longer, place the container upside down in the fridge. Inverting the tub creates a vacuum that inhibits the growth of bacteria that causes food to spoil.
⢠Prevent extra cooked pasta from hardening by stashing it in a sealed plastic bag and refrigerating. When youâre ready to serve, throw the pasta in boiling water for a few seconds to heat and restore moisture.
⢠Keeping brown sugar in the freezer will stop it from hardening. But if you already have hardened sugar on your shelf, soften it by sealing in a bag with a slice of bread â or by microwaving on high for 30 seconds.
⢠If you only need a few drops of lemon juice, avoid cutting the lemon in half â it will dry out quickly. Instead, puncture the fruit with a metal skewer and squeeze out exactly what you require.
Grab Bag Weather Master:
The coolest site EVER for weather prediction, weather history, current weather, global weather… you name it.
Grab Bag It’s About Time:
Make time personal…. unique… one-of-a-kind. Battery operated clock mechanics and hands can be picked up at a craft store for a few bucks. The fun part is thinking how you want to frame your time. Here’s some inspiration from Countryliving.com:
Grab Bag Brain Game:
It’s not Thanksgiving, but let’s pretend this is an Easter Sunday dinner… and the real-life quandaries of whom to place where is amusingly showcased in this little cartoony game.
You get points for seating people near the foods and folks they like best, and away from those they don’t.
Geez…. can’t we all just get along?? đ
Grab Bag Not-So-Funny, Funny Stuff:
The Everyman’s Guide to the current economic woes:
Heidi is the proprietor of a bar in Detroit. She realizes that virtually all of her customers are unemployed alcoholics and, as such, can no longer afford to patronize her bar. To solve this problem, she comes up with a new marketing plan that allows her customers to drink now, but pay later.
Heidi keeps track of the drinks consumed on a ledger (thereby granting the customers loans). Word gets around about Heidi’s “drink now, pay later” marketing strategy and, as a result, increasing numbers of customers flood into Heidi’s bar. Soon she has the largest sales volume for any bar in Detroit .
By providing her customers freedom from immediate payment demands, Heidi gets no resistance when, at regular intervals, she substantially increases her prices for wine and beer, the most consumed beverages. Consequently, Heidi’s gross sales volume increases massively.
A young and dynamic vice-president at the local bank recognizes that these customer debts constitute valuable future assets and increases Heidi’s borrowing limit. He sees no reason for any undue concern, since he has the debts of the unemployed alcoholics as collateral!!!
At the bank’s corporate headquarters, expert traders figure a way to make huge commissions, and transform these customer loans into “DRINK BONDS“. These “securities” then are bundled and traded on international securities markets. Naive investors don’t really understand that the securities being sold to them as “AAA Secured Bonds” really are debts of unemployed alcoholics. Nevertheless, the bond prices continuously climb!!!, and the securities soon become the hottest-selling items for some of the nation’s leading brokerage houses.
One day, even though the bond prices still are climbing, a risk manager at the original local bank decides that the time has come to demand payment on the debts incurred by the drinkers at Heidi’s bar. He so informs Heidi.
Heidi then demands payment from her alcoholic patrons, but being unemployed alcoholics, they cannot pay back their drinking debts. Since Heidi cannot fulfill her loan obligations she is forced into bankruptcy. The bar closes and Heidi’s 11 employees lose their jobs. Overnight, DRINK BOND prices drop by 90%.
The collapsed bond asset value destroys the bank’s liquidity and prevents it from issuing new loans, thus freezing credit and economic activity in the community. The suppliers of Heidi’s bar had granted her generous payment extensions and had invested their firms’ pension funds (!) in the BOND securities.
They find they are now faced with having to write off her bad debt and with losing over 90% of the presumed value of the bonds. Her wine supplier also claims bankruptcy, closing the doors on a family business that had endured for three generations, her beer supplier is taken over by a competitor, who immediately closes the local plant and lays off 150 workers.
Fortunately though, the bank, the brokerage houses and their respective executives are saved and bailed out by a multibillion dollar, no-strings attached cash infusion from the government. The funds required for this bailout are obtained by new taxes levied on employed, middle-class, nondrinkers who have never been in Heidi’s bar.
Now do you understand?
LK's Grab Bag 