Cleary Fresh Bags Review
A while back…well, a long while back actually….Anne contacted me about reviewing the Clearly Fresh Bags. She was awesome enough to even ship me a sample to Canada. And then even more awesome by being patient while I disappeared to BlogHer and tried to get settled back in.
On the up side, though, I put fruit into the bags before I left for the conference for a week, so I was able to give a legit review of the bags. They worked great! I took some pictures, but they didn’t really turn out that well ‘cause you can’t tell much difference. I’ll show you some from their site, though, and will try to get better pictures from the next attempt with the bags I do. I don’t want to make these guys wait any more than I already have, though.
The video above gives some really good tips on how to use them. It’s kinda sad they can’t really be used more than a few times since you can’t wash them and still keep the BreatheWay patch working, but I don’t feel so bad because each use lasts a couple weeks really.
There’s a lot more information on how the bags work on the site, too. Basically, it let’s the good stuff in and the bad stuff out. :P I don’t know the details of what’s actually in the breathe membrane, but it seems to work.
So far, I’ve only tried them with a couple different types of produce (blueberries and lettuce), but I’m looking forward to trying them out with already cut fruits and things like peaches that seem to either last a while or go bad rather quickly. I’m wondering if they’d work well on mushrooms, too….they’re not on the list and not a fruit or veggie, but still a produce that tends to go bad.
Want to try them out yourself? It looks like you can buy them straight through the site for $4 for 10 bags. Keep in mind that the bags are really big, too, so you’re not buying little rinky-dink ziplocs here.
And if you have any other questions about them, feel free to ask in the comments or email me. I know I didn’t get too detailed here, but their site has a lot of great info and I’ll likely post about them again as I try them out more. :)
Ring, ring, ring, ring, ring, ring ring banana phone! – Er, apples and bananas?
Ding, dong, ding dong, ding, banana phone!
Er.
Actually, here, have some lyrics. Watch the videos. Sing along. Have a blast for a couple minutes. Invite the kids over. Giggle lots.
Here’s the sped up version that you should’ve seen across the webs somewhere in the last few years.
Banana Phone LyricsBoo-ba-doo-ba-doop!Boo-ba-doo-ba-doop!
Ring ring ring ring ring ring ring
Banana phone
Ring ring ring ring ring ring ring
Banana phone
I've got this feeling, so appealing,
for us to get together and sing. Sing!
Ring ring ring ring ring ring ring banana phone
Ding dong ding dong ding dong ding donana phone
It grows in bunches, I've got my hunches,
It's the best! Beats the rest!
Cellular, modular, interactivodular!
Ring ring ring ring ring ring ring banana phone
Boop-boo-ba-doo-ba-doop!
Ping pong ping pong ping pong ping panana phone
It's no baloney, it ain't a p(h)ony
My cellular bananular phone!
Don't need quarters, don't need dimes,
to call a friend of mine!
Don't need computer or TV,
to have a real good time!
I'll call for pizza. I'll call my cat.
I'll call the white house, have a chat!
I'll place a call around the world, operator get me Beijing-jing-jing-jing!
(Soprano Sax Solo)
Yeah!
Play that thing!
(Piano Solo)
Whooo Hooo!
Ring ring ring ring ring ring ring
Banana phone
Boop-boo-ba-doo-ba-doop
Ying yang ying yang ying yang ying yonana phone
It's a real live mama and papa phone,
a brother and sister and a dogaphone,
a grandpa phone and a grammophone too! Oh yeah!
My cellular, bananular phone!
Banana phone, ring ring ring!
(It's a phone with a peel!)
Banana phone, ring ring ring!
(Now you can have your phone and eat it too!)
Banana phone, ring ring ring!
(This song drives me bananas!)
Is Banana Phone not your style? Well then how about Apples and Bananas instead? I like to eat, eat, eat…
Now this brings back memories of Barney. I used to babysit a little girl who loved this song and it wasn’t uncommon for me to slow it down to sing her to sleep with it….or for me to speed it up and catch myself singing it while I worked at the library. Yeah, I was weird back then, too. ><
And you can thank the lovely Meaghan at Edible Eats for featuring Jill’s banana and apple phone picture at the top of this post. I couldn’t help but sing banana phone when I first saw it….and then as I was posting, realized it’s technically an apple *and* banana.
Maybe I could combine the two? *sings* Eat, eat, eat, eat, eat, eat, eat…..apple banana phone!
How to make your own fruit roll-ups or fruit leather
One of my many kitchen-related Christmas gifts (gasp! just realized I didn’t actually post about those either, oops), was a food dehydrator. Now it’s something I’ve wanted to experiment with before, but I never could justify the price for something I would probably only use occasionally and had very specific functions.
But to have one bought for me? Oh yeah, I’m gonna use it like crazy, hehe. And this bad boy came with both a fruit leather tray and jerky settings (also amazing, by the way).
I’m not a huge fruit leather fan, but making my own fruit roll-ups was a huge life saver when I started doing bento boxes and trying to cut out certain kinds of sugars and preservatives for us for a while. The kids loved it because it was like the candy they enjoyed otherwise….and I loved it because I knew I was using fresh or frozen fruit, which while yes, still has sugar, is also natural sugar with nothing extra funky being added. Win-win.
Another of my goodies for Christmas was a juicer attachment for my Kitchen Aid mixer, which was a perfect pair for making fruit leather. All I had to do was prep whatever fruits I was using (or better yet, grab a couple bags of frozen mixed berries and an apple, etc), put it through the juicer (didn’t even thaw the frozen ones), and voila.
See all that kinda chunky stuff on top? The “juice” it produced is all the liquid on the bottom, and the top portion is what I scooped out of the juice that was deemed “skins, pulp, seeds, hard frozen bits, whatever.” I could’ve tossed those out and used just the juice, but it mashed them so small that I opted to mix it all together and not lose any of the goodies for this combo.
Judging by the colors here, I believe this is a combination of two frozen bags of berries and fruits. The one bag would’ve had blueberries, blackberries, and raspberries, while the other would’ve had peaches, mangos, and possibly a bit of pineapple. The only possible stuff I might’ve wanted kept out would’ve been seeds from the berries, but you couldn’t tell in the dehydrated version anyway, so I’m glad I didn’t.
All mixed together, it was an awesome purple-y color.
Okay, bad example. Ew.
How about this one?
See all those little bits of blueberry skins and such? I thought they might pose a problem, but not at all.
As it started drying, the edges shrunk in and it looked moist across the top. I was a little concerned maybe it wouldn’t dry entirely or would end up with holes even if I let it dry too long, but nada!
When it was all done, it wasn’t quite as rich in color and as pretty, but it really did end up tasting just like fruit roll-ups and was gone in no time. I didn’t even bother slicing it and rolling it with plastic wrap like the commercial product because nobody cared….and just wanted more.
I did cut some small chunks and pseudo-roll them for the bento boxes, but they didn’t seem to stick to themselves much anyway.
I’ve made it a few times since with several different variations. I found recipes that called for sugar or corn syrup, but I found that with any combos that were on the bitter side, adding an apple was enough sweetness for a batch.
This is what frozen mangos, strawberries, and peaches look like. It’s obviously too chunky to spread, so I thawed it out until it was easier to mix into a paste-like mixture.
It dried much darker like in the upper right hand corner of this picture:
If you want to make your own, but you don’t have a dehydrator, it’s easy to just use your own. Try out this post from Simply Recipes for some help on doing it that way. She has some great tips on how to use fresh fruit, using lemon juice and various spices, and even a tidbit on straining the juice from grapes for grape juice and then pureeing the rest for fruit leather. Yum.
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