Well,

It has been a shameful amount of time since my last post on this site. This has been due to a few things out with my control, such as neighbours from hell living above me, making sleep & normal everyday function in my home more than a bit difficult. They have now left & I have peace in my home again.

Also, I recently changed my work life & worked for the last 3 months in a care home, which I really enjoyed & although I was promised a full time contract ( as they were well aware that I am registered disabled with spinal damage ) It never transpired, so I was unfairly dismissed last week from a job that I believed would be ethical.

So much can be out with our control in this world, but consumer supply & demand is shamefully misleading & I am now going to be concentrating on adding regular content to this site as we all have the right to know what we are consuming.

Apologies for the long absence to anyone who may have wondered why my blog had stopped. I intend to post 2-3 times a week as from today.

I  don’t know how exactly this works but that’s nature for you. Perfect. And there is something in nature to heal or cure anything. Some we don’t know about yet & others we have tried to make a man made substitute for.

I have heard this many times before & have spoken to infection control nurses who agree that this is fact. If you are in a hospital and have any broken skin or wounds if you apply a layer of ACTIVE manuka honey to the skin it acts as a barrier against infection to the likes of MRSA. Worth packing with your bed clothes if your aware of a looming stay in a hospital bed.

This article was on Yahoo news today http://uk.cars.yahoo.com/01052009/36/world-s-first-chocolate-powered-racer-0.html    This is the worlds first formula 3 race car, which has been made with sustainable products such as, carrots, potatoes,  & cashew nut shells and runs on chocolate!

Recently there has been plenty of talk & debate on the subject of carbon emmissions, electric cars e.t.c, & all the positive aspects being outweighed by negatives. Electric sounds o.k. at first, but how much extra electricity woud your household bills incurr by charging your car battery & if the battery will only get yo 50 miles or so, would you consider changing your car to an electric at this time. Not me.

Could this car be a role model for future thinking in car manufacturing?

See the full Yahoo news on this Formula 3 car http://uk.cars.yahoo.com/01052009/36/world-s-first-chocolate-powered-racer-0.html

Tonight I really feel the need to rewind & de-stress.

Here is a great way to prepare a very de-stressing bath using oats & honey.

Put some oats into a muslin, clean sock, or any type of cloth bag & tie this to the hot tap, so the hot water runs through the bag as the bath fills. Oats are fantastic for the nervous system & great for combating stress.

Then put some milk,  maybe about 1/2 cup, into a saucepan & warm on the stove ( don’t allow to boil). When the milk is warm pour in some honey, about half the amount of the milk that you used.

When this is warm pour it into your bath & enjoy a relaxing soak. You can scrub your skin with the cloth bag of oats too, this is really good if you have dry conditions such as exczema.

If you have any achy muscles add some rosemary too. Either add a few drops of essential oil into your milk & honey, or you can put fresh or dried rosemary into your oat bag. The milk helps to disperse essential oils throughout the bath. I would use 4-6 drops in a bath.

I’m off to run my bath, warm my milk, light some candles, turn off my computer & switch off my phone & have a long relaxing soak with a nice cup of camomile tea.

Good night

Sweet dreams

Tx

Comments on this bath, the day after:-

Well it definately was relaxing & de-stessing. It is a little mucky though, but I decided not to have a shower after so I could see how good the skin felt from the benefit from the honey & milk & oat soak. ( yeah I didn’t use soap either ) Well the whole point of this bath was for deep relaxation, I was already clean!

The best thing about this bath was squeezing the oat bag, extracting the  glupy hot, white, starchy juice and rubbing that on my skin. It was like a warm wax or dead sea mud treatment & it felt great. I lay on a towel on the bed to air-dry my skin & for the rest of the night my skin was literally glowing. I have had milk in the bath before & used oats in the bath but, this must have been more oaty & hotter as the gloop was great. I think next time though, I will put an oat bag & warm milk & honey in the sink to do a hot wax on my face or feet then have a soak in a slightly cleaner bath after. Boy, did I sleep well though. Very relaxed.

I read an interview last night with Dr. Batmanghelidj on naturalnews.com .  Dr. Batmanghelidj was a student of Sir Alexander Fleming, who discovered penicillin.

I found this conversation between Dr. Batmanghelidj & Mike Adams very interesting.

We all know that water is the most important thing that we need to put into our bodies each day, but some of the things mentioned in this conversation really made me stop & think. Most people probably recognise some of the more obvious signs of dehydration e.g. yellow urine or maybe a headache & then drink a couple  of glasses of water, but with asthma or severe stomach cramps is water the first thing we try to relieve our symptoms?

Does the body manifest dehydration in the form of pain?

Dr, Batmanghelidj mentioned a situation that made him look deeply into the answer to this question. He said that he gave 2 glasses of water to a patient who was doubled up with abdominal pain, as he had no other medication to give at the time. Within 3 minutes the pain had diminished & within 8 minutes the pain had totaly gone. He then tested this on 3,000 patients with similar conditions and the water worked as a pain reliever every time. He notes that the pharmaceutial industry  would give  antihistamines for this type of condition and histamine is a regulator of water, but water is free & drugs are big business. He had created an organization called National Association for Honesty in Medicine & his website is http://www.watercure.com

 To read the full conversation on the water cure go to http://www.naturalnews.com/Report_water_cure_0.html

Simply add some salt to warm water, let the salt dissolve & when the water is cool, dip your toothbrush in and brush your teeth as normal. A good, simple yet effective way to give your teeth a brighten up.

A few weeks ago I was cycling from Vietnam to Cambodia.

One of the things I really, really wanted to fit into this trip was swallowing a beating snakes heart.

Unfortunately I did not get the chance as I started cycling from Saigon & was told that I would need to head north to Hanoi or other northerly regions of the country to have the full snake eating experience. There was one hotel in Saigon that I was told  of that had snake on the menu, but not prepared in the way that I was looking forward too. I have been to Hanoi before, briefly, and on a previous cycle from Danang to Saigon I did buy, consume & bring home some snake wine. It does not exactly taste pleasant but is said to be exceptionally benificial to people who have problems with their backs & I do fall into that catagory so drunk it dispite the petty awful taste. The bottles of wine contain several dead cobras & the more you drink, the more the snakes are exposed to air & the worse it gets. I ended up having the last few drinks of the bottle added to blackcurrant & raspberry teas to enhance / discuise the flavour.

Earlier this year there was a television programme called ” could you eat an elephant? ”

In this show two of the UK’s top chefs showed us & tried to stomach some of the worlds most taboo foods.

The chefs were Fergus Henderson & Jeremy Lee who both believe & promote ” nose to tail eating “.

In Fergus Hendersons restaurant  ( St, John ) you are likely to see dishes with pigs trotters, or marrowbone on the menu as the main ingredient of a dish. TV chefs such as Jamie Oliver are really promoting offal & the cheaper ( & sometimes most versitile & tasty ) cuts of meat. I wholeheartedly agree with this & feel that if an animal is killed to eat we should use as much of that animal as we possibly can in the dishes made from them.

On ” Could you eat an elephant? ” Fergus & Jeremy travel to Tuscany to eat dishes made from birds that are native & commonly seen in Italian gardens. This is fairly hard core as they are served whole & the brains sucked out by the participating diners. I actually found this personally the least likely thing on the show that I would be able to consume within my own comfort zone. Also in Italy they sampled Marcetto, a maggot infested cheese. Sounds awful but the maggots themselves are almost 100% cheese themselves once the cheese has matured, so that I possibly would try. Their travels gave them the chance to experience locals eating rats, monkeys, horse, elephant, dog & a paste made from jewel beetles. They declined both the ras & the monkey as the rats were from sewers & the monkeys just too human like. In Hanoi though, they did partake in and really enjoy the experience of eating snake. Below is a clip from youtube on that section of the show, but the clip does not include the first part that was televised & that is when the live snake is cut lengthwise and the beating heart put into a glass along with the blood and drunk, and the next part of the snake eating ceremony being a glass of the snake bile, which according to those who have tried it is surprisingly palletable. The rest of the snake is then prepared into 13 different dishes in 7 minutes. I must do this if lucky enough to return to Hanoi. Here is the clip http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0FVG3awKq8

 This clip shows tourists consuming a beating snake heart which is sometimes added just to rice wine or in this clip vodka, or just in a glass of the blood or both. Bottles of the snake wine with the dead cobras in the bottles are also in this clip http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ml3W62bQj9A&NR=1

If you want to buy some snake wine & are not travelling to Asia, you can purchase bottles from www.asiansnakewine.com

I remembered one of my favorite stories earlier, and as it is about a rabbit, and a rabbit can be food, so I saw no reason not to share this story in my blog.

It is a true story, told to me by an ex work collegue.

My friend James went to visit his sister in Lake Tahoe.

One night when he was there, he was in the pub and a bunch of guys invited him to go hunting with them in the bush the following day.

James accepted the offer and in the morning met up with the 5 men.  They headed off on a long drive into the middle of nowhere, then eventually stopped at a cicular clearing surrounded by bush.

James got on well with the other 4 passengers, but did not take so well to the fat, obnoctious driver.

The driver got out of his landrover & said to the other guys ” wouldn’t it be funny to strap a stick of dynamite to a rabbit & blow it up”.

The other guys were all appauled at the comment & suggested that it would be a really sick thing to do & ” please don’t ”

The driver ignored them & got a stick of dynamite from the back of the veich. He then went around the edge of the bush & soon went back to the other 4 men with a rabbit in his hands.

He proceeded to tape the stick of dynamite to the poor rabbits back, then lit the fuse & put the rabit on the ground.

The rabbit went hop, hop, hop, hop, hop went underneath the landrover & blew it to pieces.

Ha, Ha,  got to love that bunnies style.  I’m going to die but i’m going to stuff you first!

Ryvita archway

I have always instigated that children should play with their food. How many times did your mother have to arrange your dinner in such a way that you found it fun to eat. My mum used to do us ” wigwams”.  That was a mound of mash potato with sausages for the poles and the peas were the ground it was pitched on. “Volcanoes” was a favorite of mine, this was just like a wigwam but with gravy poured over the top for the lava.

“Birds nests” was a nest made by moulding the mash with a fork so it had a straw like image then a poached egg in the centre.

Most of the favorites I remember had mash as it is so malable, but who hasn’t made a face or image with their food to encourage a clean plate. And how good is a food fight!

I have never grown out of this way of behaving with my food  as a chef staff often commented on me making cowboys out of the aubergines before chopping them up or making jewlery out of spaghetti e.t.c.

I took this a step further one night after being in a pub that had wonderful arched nooks in the walls.

I wanted to replicate this when I got home, so in my happy drunken state I began sticking Jacobs cream crackers to the walls with tile grout. When I woke up and saw my wall I decided it was going to stay & friends that visited did not realise it was crackers until it was pointed out. I the experimented with a few more using Ryvitas &  mini toast and when I have the time I have ideas for a few more using shreddies.

Mini toasts

When I went to put my house on the market 3 solicitors came to give a valuation. 2 said to remove the biscuits and paint the whole place with a fresh coat of white paint. The last one said ” this place is a little different, lets see what happens”. I left things as they were and had 5 people trying to outbid each other at the last day. Who say’s unconventional is a bad thing.

Jammy Dodger flowers.

We can alter our bloods by what we eat. If we have high blood cholesterol it can be lessened by adding some kelp to your diet for example. ( see yesterdays post on Seaweeds ).

We can alter our bloods but we cannot change its type.

Whoever we are, we will live with the same blood type that we were born with until we die. Even if a body requires at some stage a blood transfusion the transfused blood needs to be of the type you originally had or it just won’t do.

I have been under the belief since I was a child that my blood belongs to the rarest blood group but, as I am unsure of this I am keen to find out when my donors card comes through the post in a few weeks time. I was finally allowed to give blood for the first time in 6 years this week. I have tried frequently but when I have attended any donor sessions it has either been too soon after a tattoo or too soon after returning from travels, the last being Vietnam, so a years gap was needed before any chance of my blood being taken. I asked if they could confirm my blood group for me & was told a card with your blood type is sent to you after about 4 weeks so I will find out then if my childhood memory serves me well.

Today is the first day of The Olympic Games in Beijing and that reminded me of something I was told by a friend a few years ago but I had not checked this out until tonight but it does seem wholly viable to be fact. I was told that if you were AB- and you were travelling to China ( when I was told this they meant not nowadays but in the past ) you needed to take a bag of your own blood with you as there was no AB- in the country.

Remebering this tonight I have looked online and found chart showing the most common and the rarest blood types in different countries around the world. To view the chart go to http://the-red-thread.net/blood.html

Below is a fantastic post that I read on the above site.

Posted Monday, Mar. 18, 1985

There is no coat of arms on the flask, but somewhere in one of Britain’s hospitals a convalescent patient has some of the world’s most exclusive blood flowing through his or her veins. The regal donor of the precious stuff was Prince Charles, 36, who has become the first member of the royal family ever to give blood, in his case, O Rh-negative. The unprecedented puncturing of royalty was to reassure Britons after a nationwide scare about AIDS caused a drop in donations. At the North London Transfusion Center, the Prince was asked whether he was homosexual, injected drugs into his veins or had had sex with anyone in those two groups. After those regulation indignities (and his negative answers), he had an apprehensive question of his own: “Is it going to hurt?” When the pint was finally drawn, Charles pretended to apologize because his blood was not blue: “I’m afraid it’s red like anyone else’s.” Fancy that.