09:01 – Colin worked like a dog yesterday to get the house cleaned up and build a new batch of chemistry kits. Just in time, too, because yesterday afternoon someone ordered the last chemistry kit we had in stock. When Barbara got home, she was pleased to see that Colin had cleaned all the science kit stuff out of the den and living room and gotten a good start on cleaning it out of the kitchen and tidying up the workroom. She gave Colin a hug, and he’s now a happy dog again. Oh, and Colin found that partial box of 96-well plates sitting on the kitchen table, so our inventory of those just jumped from the 400 that arrived this week to 427, less the ones that Colin used to make up kits yesterday.
Barbara is having dinner out with friends after work, so Colin and I are on our own. I’m planning to have a dinner made from all shelf-stable ingredients, AKA PB&J sandwiches. Colin is all in favor. He loves PB&J.
The can of Nestle Nido Fortificado dry whole milk arrived from Walmart yesterday, and I need to do some experimenting with it. Unlike most powdered milk, which is no-fat, this stuff is full-fat whole milk. The best-by date is 12 months out, but many people have told me that they’ve drunk this stuff from sealed cans that were stored at room temperature and were three, four, or five years past the best-by date and found it indistinguishable from fresh product. Frozen, this powder would certainly stay good for 30 years or more.
My Spanish isn’t good, but my Latin tells me that the product name translates as something like “Fortified Nest (or Beehive)”, so I assumed the product contains honey. That’s reinforced by a warning on the can that says the product should not be consumed by infants one year or younger. But the ingredients label does not list honey, so I’m not sure what’s going on.
The 3.52 pound (1.6 kilo) can sells for $15.38 and reconstitutes to 3.3 gallons (12.5 liters) of “whole milk”, which I assume means 3.25% butterfat. On that basis, this can would reconstitute to about 5.4 gallons of the 2% milk that Barbara drinks, at a price of about $2.68/gallon. Of course, diluted that way, it’d be lower on milk solids than store-bought 2% milk, but that’d be easy to address by adding a couple quarts worth of non-fat dry milk powder. As I said, some experimenting is needed.