Creations in the kitchen

With all those flower petals I made Oat and flower petal slice.  There are 7 different flower petals in this photo: Stock (maroon red), calendula (orange), herb robert (pink), scented geranium (pink), mizuna (yellow), Oxeye daisy (white petals), red clover (slender pink).  Recipe here.

The November 3-9 edition of the NZ Listener has a very interesting article  "Something in the Water".  It talks about optimising our fluid intake rather than drinking so much. Our sedentary lifestyles and the foods and medications people take all lead to dehydration.  But the answer isn't drinking more and more water. That just flash floods our bodies and is not absorbed by the system, resulting in electrolytes and nutrients being depleted.  It turns out that desert dwelling people who don't drink 8 glasses of water per day, use water locked in plants and foods to provide water.  The researchers Dana Cohen and Gina Bria have devised a Quench plan which hydrates the body using water rich plant foods like cucumber, celery, apples, watermelon, iceburg lettuce, leafy greens and fruits, soups, bone broths, soaked or ground chia seeds (these swell up forming a gell that hydrates us more slowly), coconut water and salt.  The Cohen further says it is more effective to hydrate with a green smoothie every day.  This is naturally music to my ears and so good to have green smoothies proven to not only provide excellent nutrition but that they also give a slow release of fluid. So drink up your smoothies knowing how amazing they are for you!

We're bombarded with the problem of waste and what to do with the mountain of plastic.  Here is some GREAT NEWS.  In case you hadn’t heard, soft plastic recycling is now available in Tauranga at Countdown and in many, many other towns around NZ. Check this website: https://www.recycling.kiwi.nz/solutions/soft-plastics/store-locator1/

I love finding and listening to inspiring talks. This Ted talk is a goody. Entitled 'What animals are thinking and feeling and why it should matter'. Carl Safina takes us inside the lives and minds of animals around the world, witnessing their profound capacity for perception, thought and emotion. He says "we are the most extreme, most compassionate, most violent, most creative, most destructive animals to ever appear on this planet.  We are not the only ones who love each other."  Carl is talking about animals, but this concept also applies to plants and our respect and care for them.  I hope you find this 16 minute talk as amazing as I did.

I garden for a couple who had a dead cabbage tree (Cordyline australis) cut down.  I was given the very, wet logs. One day I went in the wood shed and couldn't believe my eyes. Mushrooms growing out of the tops of the logs.  They looked like oyster mushrooms and sure enough Billy Mushroom confirmed them as edible.  The slugs were after them - that's how delicious they thought they were!  While waiting to identify them properly they dried and I can eat them at my leisure.

I don't like killing anything, but I have a huge population of slugs and this yeast, sugar, salt recipe really worked to attract them and some other insects.  I also see an earwig in the liquid.

I received an email with a photo of this plant which had me stumped.  Finally I identified it as Ranunculus parviflorus.  My identification book 'Common weeds of NZ'  says it is a sprawling, hairy annual buttercup with almost circular leaves (Like Doves Foot geranium and that is why I thought it could be a geranium) and tiny yellow flowers, 3-6mm, many per inflorescence, in grassland, scrub and waste places. Scattered throughout NZ. Though non edible it is still good to identify the weeds growing around us.