Today was the first time I ever tried blowing an egg. It was a fun & grubby experience.
Firstly, I gently stuck a pin in the top and bottom of a fresh egg.
Then I blew, and blew & blew
Until all the white & the yolk had come out of the egg.
I wanted to dye my egg naturally, so I chopped half a red cabbage & boiled, then drained off the liquid.
Then, I put a sticker onto the egg shell to identify where the dye had taken more easily. After trying this, it is obvious that this could work making any kind of pattern you wanted on your egg.
How to get the dye to cover all of the egg? :- Well, an empty egg shell floats doesn’t it.
So…….. I put the cooled down red cabbage water into an empty jam jar, filled to the very top, put the egg in and screwed the top on. This was left for a couple of hours.
When I took the egg out of the jar, I was happy to see how well the dye had taken. I peeled of the sticker to reveal the true colour of the egg in it’s original form , pre dye.
If you use a sticker to keep some of the egg undyed, you can write on the space that is not dyed & use these for place settings at a dinner party. If it is a drunken party, you can always have a fun food fight after by throwing these at each other!
All in all, I was happy with this experiment. And no explosions or accidents.
My blue eggs turned out o.k 1st attempt.
The red cabbage was not wasted either. Some was mixed into cous cous & the rest went on top of my compost bin.
On a recent journey, on a cold, cold day, I got off a bus after 13 hours travelling & entered a small cafe for a hot drink to warm me up.
When given the menu it took just a few seconds to decide what to order.
Hot milk, with honey & Cinamon.
The glass of hot milk with plenty of cinamon grated on the top of the froth was served with a small jar of honey on the saucer. I was delighted & it was just what I needed to start my day after such a long time sitting on a bus & a great way to start an adventure outdoors on a wintery day.
Hardly a day has passed since, when I have not prepared this drink at home.
It is the hot drink equivallent of shepherds pie.
I love it. And although it is now April, there has been snow & gale force winds to contend with over the last few days. Hence making this comfort drink my recipe of the week.
The article below was on Yahoo news last week. It is not the first time I have come across the theory of seaweed being added to foods to aid weight loss. Apart from the fact that seaweed is a highly nutritious natural ingredient to add to your diet anyway.
As this report below has said that scientists have tested the effectiveness of 60 different natural fibres with an ” artificial gut “, I decided to try it on myself.
I sourced a supplier of dried bladderwrack & I have been adding 2 teaspoons of this + 1 teaspoon of lemon pepper to my basic bread mix.
It is thorougly delicious & all friends that have tasted it so far are in total agreement with me regarding how good it tastes.
As from today:-
I will be eating 1-2 slices of this bread every day for 1 month & sharing my results on this blog. I do not own bathroom scales, as I do not think it is healthy to weigh yourself too regularly.
I weighed in at 150 kilo, at my friends house on Sunday evening & I had been eating seaweed bread then for 4 days.
One observation that I have made so far on this, is that if you are constipated. eating seaweed bread may help to wake up the bowels. Nothing extreme you understand. But if you are an irregular person, eating a slice a day may make you function on a daily basis.
Researchers found seaweed fibre could reduce the body’s fat uptake by more than 75%.
A fibrous material in Sea Kelp called alginate was better at preventing fat absorption than most over-the-counter slimming treatments, laboratory tests showed.
Dr Iain Brownlee, who co-led the University of Newcastle team, said: “This suggests that if we can add the natural fibre to products commonly eaten daily - such as bread, biscuits and yoghurts - up to three quarters of the fat contained in that meal could simply pass through the body.
“We have already added the alginate to bread and initial taste tests have been extremely encouraging. Now the next step is to carry out clinical trials to find out how effective it is when eaten as part of a normal diet.”
The scientists used an “artificial gut” to test the effectiveness of 60 different natural fibres by measuring the extent to which they affected the digestion of fat.
They presented their findings at the American Chemical Society’s spring meeting in San Francisco, US.
Dr Brownlee said the aim was to see if the same effects modelled in the laboratory could be reproduced in living volunteers.
“Our initial findings are that alginates significantly reduce fat digestion,” he said.
The research is part of a three-year project funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC).
This is an actual advert from the Soda Pop Board of America.
It looks a bit shocking now, but soda companies have not improved on their ugly marketing techniques. There just not quite so blatant about how they push their products on kids, to get them hooked for life.
Below is the text on the poster.
How soon to start?
Not soon enough. Laboratory tests over the last few years have proven that babies who start drinking soda during that early formative period have a much higher chance of gaining acceptance and “fitting in” during those awkward pre-teen and teen years. So, do yourself a favor. Do your child a favor. Start them on a strict regimen of sodas and other sugary carbonated beverages right now, for a lifetime of guaranteed happiness.
Food that fight stress, more like food that makes my blood boil !!!!!!!!!
I just finished my last post on here a couple of minutes ago & then opened an email that I got along with the email showing me the Greenpeace Kit Kat ad.
The link was about stress free foods & thought my brother had sent it, in case I needed inspiration for subject matter to write about.
Argh!!! It takes you to a page of 8 foods that fight stress. The second on the list is kit kat chocolate bars & if you click on it you see annother kit kat advert, showing it to be this thing that will make you feel all cozy & at peace with the world.
Well, it sure had an effect on my mood. But it was not soothing!
Nestlé is singled out for boycott action as monitoring shows it to be responsible for more violations of the requirements than any other company. ( Copied from Baby milk action.org )
Last night a friend had put a comment on facebook ” Why have a break with a Kit Kat, when you can have a break with a pint for 8 less calories”. Fair point. But I commented on liking his rationale, & that Nestle should be boycotted anyway & it is far better to support your local brewery.
My brother sent me a link today to a CNN report. “Greenpeace, Nestle battle in kit kat viral”.
(CNN) — A video clip which shows an office worker opening a Kit Kat chocolate bar and finding an orangutan’s finger has been re-posted on video-sharing Web site YouTube, a day after it was removed at the request of food giant Nestlé.
The viral campaign, which parodies a Kit Kat television commercial, was intended by Greenpeace to highlight how Nestlé buys palm oil — a key ingredient in many of its products — produced from the destroyed rainforest homes of the last orangutans in Indonesia.
Here is the video:
“The Greenpeace campaign will continue until Nestle has cut the Sinar Mas group from its supply chain. –John Sauven, Greenpeace UK
After watching this video & noticing that the Kit Kat on the video had a FAIR TRADE logo on the wrapper, I went to my nearest outlet for said confectionery, I found that YES INDEED, Kit Kat wrappers do display a FAIR TRADE LOGO. ABSOLUTELY SHOCKING!!!!!!!
I do of course intend to find out how & why they can get away with this. Perhaps Kit Kats are made using fair trade chocolate ( or some similar thing that would qualify them for the logo useage ),? but using palm oil from grossly deforested area’s is o.k. then?
I will do a seperate blog post on this when I have investigated this issue on what the rulings are for qualifying something to proudly boast an item as being fair trade.
You can’t really blame people for thinking that a Kit Kat, was perhaps an ethically o.k. chocolate snack to buy as bearing the fair trade logo, would OR SHOULD make you think that the ingredients were ethically sourced. Unfortunately, this is not the case, and people will consider the logo & probably see how many calories it contains to help them decide if that should be their snack of choice that they want to buy.
The 60-second clip ends with a play on Kit Kat’s famous slogan: “Have a break? Give orangutans a break.”
Give us a break as well. Give us decent laws on food labelling & advertising & let us then, be able to make an educated & informed choice on what we eat, what is in it & where it comes it come from.
I recently watched a BBC documentary called, Mischief: who made me fat?
Although this programme was excellently presented & well researched, it made me pretty angry ( especially the part about the olympic games, that I shall go into in a minute.
The programme was presented by Becca Wilcox & I have to admire her control during interviews & whilst being accosted by security guards.
One of the opening statements on the programme went something like this: fat people are a bigger threat to the economy than terrorism or global warming.
Well, The NHS spends 4.2 million on obesity & the ministry for health spends 75 million on tv & advertising campaigns such as their “change for life campaign”.
One example of the cost of tackling obesity was given about the fire brigade needing to get a fat man out of his house. They needed to build a ramp & close the road & the procedure took 5 hours to get him out.
Now to the bit that really annoyed me:
Olympic games:
Apparently, the only companies giving money to the 2012 London Olympic games are
Cadburys
McDonalds
& Coca-cola
Yep! healthy choices indeed. A diet consiting of that lot will surely turn you into a mean, lean olympic machiene!
Here are a couple of McDonalds olympic’s adverts:
The companies derive a “halo effect” by sponsoring such events ( not to mention making a huge amount of money & getting more kid’s hooked on the junk they call food ).
The ethos that has always been behind the olympic games since they begun is ” physical excellence “.
Becca Wilcox portrayed this well, with gathering a few less pysically excellent specimens and parading around the Olympic commitee offices as team GBB ( Great Big Britain ) and said ” Don’t take food from an athelete, they may be feeding you junk “.
Personally, I think that any athlete that helps these types of “junk food feeder” companies, should be disqualified for any olympic games.
Becca also sent a cracking letter to Lord Sebastian Coe about the sponsorship & in his reply he said that, The Olympic Commitee ” was proud to be associated with ” said companies. Well any respect I may have had for Sebastian Coe is gone.
Now, on the sponsorship front……………………….
Burger king sponsors NHS:
Yes, sad & hard to believe isn’t it. But enter your nearest NHS hospital and do not be too surprised if you see a Burger King in the foyer. I sadly have noticed this myself in the past, but apparently one of the best known hospitals in the UK, which is renown for it’s heart surgery ( I think it was Brookes Hopsital in Cambridge, but did not take enough notes at the time, probably due to shock! ) Has actually got printed in it’s directions on how to get to the heart surgery department ( I think it was ) turn left after the Burger King in the foyer. It was certainly something like that. The point is, how can they even consider printing such a thing, let alone allow a fast food chain within the hospital grounds.
Below is copied from a web page about the NHS Reading walk in centre, It doesn’t say much about Burger King but they do seem to like to name drop BK when they can.
Slough NHS walk in centre.
Reading Walk-in Health Centre is located on the first floor of the Broad Street Mall in Reading town centre and offers a wide range of GP-led services.
Reading Walk-in Health Centre is an 8am to 8pm service, open to registered and unregistered patients with or without an appointment, 365 days per year. Please note that after 5.00pm on Sundays when the Broad Street Mall is closed, entrance to the Centre is only possible using the door near to Burger King.
( I wonder how much longer it will be a walk- in centre rather than a roll- in centre , or being hoisted by a crane-in centre )
The NHS seem to be obsessed with promoting burgers.
And from the British Heart Foudations website:
12/02/2010
Responsible approach to portion size needed
In response to an enquiry regarding a new ‘double Angus three cheese burger’ being sold at Burger King restaurants Victoria Taylor, Senior Heart Health Dietitian at the British Heart Foundation (BHF) said:
“A responsible approach to portion size is vital to the promotion of healthier diets and never more so than in meals that are high in saturated fat.
“Although both the standard and double versions of this burger are high in saturated fat, going for the double Angus three cheese burger would provide an adult woman with her entire daily saturated fat allowance and half her daily calorie limit, and that’s without adding in chips and a sugary fizzy drink.
“Consumers need to use nutritional information available to them to help make healthier choices and be wary of going large – as they could get more than they bargained for.”
Is it just me, or is that an increadibly lame response. No mention of home cooked meals, eating fruit & vegetables & that junk food should not really be eaten at all.
No wonder, chairs are being made ( & there is demand for them ) to accomodate people of 70 stone!
A good friend who shares seeds with me & who turns the fruit from my trees at the end of the summer into fabulous chutneys, pickles & jams, sent this link to me earlier.
A whole host of pdf vegetable growing cards can be grabbed by clicking on this link
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.
