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Lavender , lavender ....
Your smell transports me to my imaginary Mediterranean place in the sun! |
The wind, the wind! (I'm trying desperately to not swear in cyberspace.) It's blowing gales outside. I forget each year about these #*$!! buggery winds. They come with such force and vengeance from the weather gods in desperation for losing their hold on winter. Just when all the spring blossoms are showing! One can only watch with helplessness, as myriads of petals take flight and are whipped like confetti around the garden.
Bananas are hardy sub-tropicals which don't like frost but amazingly, always tenaciously spring back to life after a seemingly burnt-out death from winter frosts. The one thing they can't withstand is leaf-shredding high winds, particularly when they are top-heavy with a huge bunch of fruit! So a mercy dash out into the whip-ass wind saw me make a make-shift crutch for leaning against the swaying, toppling banana a few days ago. I took 2 pieces of bamboo, lashed them together with an old bicycle tire inner, slashed in half length-ways, and then secured to the banana pseudo-stem with the other half of tyre inner. I haven't been out to check today as it's blowing gales (again!).
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| Bamboo support |
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| Banana crutches. Does the job. |
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| Worth Saving |
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| The Banana flower at the bottom of the bunch |
I have always made banana ice-cream in the Oscar machine which crushes frozen bananas and creates this amazing super-healthy ice-cream. But of course, I love to experiment and so I have taken banana ice-cream one step further. I created 3 different ice-cream flavours: 1- Banana, Date and Brazil nut ice-cream Yum! 2- Banana, Vanilla, Brazil and Carob and 3- Banana, Double Cocoa, Vanilla and Stevia. Each one unique and interesting. The brazil nut mix gives a great textural nutty-fudge-like flavour. These mixes were achieved by dropping all the ingredients into the blender and mixing them all up, then popping them into containers that are freezer-safe. They are best eaten when you have taken them out the freezer and allowed them to thaw out for half an hour before eating.
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| Step 1: Frozen bananas through the pulverising Oscar machine |
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| Step 2: Throw all the mixes into the blender and buzz till well blended |
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| Step 3: Freeze overnight |
I must remember to feed the bananas with some sheep poos, since they are fruiting, to improve the quality of fruit. Yum, second hand sheep poos! Well, I guess sheep only eat grass, so we can still boast being vegetarian despite eating the sheep poos (just not the sheepie!). Great stuff!
While out enjoying Rotorua, I took these pics at Hell's Gate Geothermal Reserve. The afternoon sun was slicing through the trees and highlighting the orangey moss that grows in this sulphorous wonderland. Beauty!
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| Gnarley roots dotted with mossy lichen |
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| Where are the fairies?? |
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| Stunning lichen/moss growth patterns |
And veering off at right angles to the Geothermal front where there was boiling, steaming water, back home, I've taken our old Vortex machine out of it's dusty storage to re-install in the kitchen. The idea is that the powerful magnet at the bottom creates a vortex and energises and oxygenates the water for 9 minutes, similar to the action of water running down a mountain stream and being energised by all the rocky obstacles in the pathway in a natural vortex movement. This "living water" re-hydrates the body with ease and allows the cells to better utilise the water. We bought this little fancy-pants machine when Mike was ill and used it for about 2 years but grew out of it (just like fashions - they come and go). I am simply re-instating this technology in our drink bottles! Apparently, indoor plants and pets also benefit from this water! I shall have to experiment with our kitty-cat. Watch this space.........
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| Vortex machine to energise water |
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| The miracle of Nature in all it's forms, colours, patterns ............ |
