Healthy living

My count of health foods, having been zero for most of my life, has now crept up to two. First from the blocks was manuka honey which I have been consuming by mouth but which I perhaps ought to be applying externally. Smeared on wounds sort of stuff? The first pot tasted more or less like honey, so one could have it on toast and that sort of thing - so got through that pot in reasonably good order. But the honey has a number, a bit like sun tan potions, and with the honey in the second pot having moved onto a higher number (and a correspondingly higher price), the honey taste seems to have retreated to a lower number. Might take a bit longer to get through this second pot. See http://www.manukahoney.co.uk/ or http://manukahealth.co.nz/ for more than you are likely to want to know about the stuff.

Second from the blocks was peppermint tea, said to be helpful for a certain abdominal complaint. Comes in the form of tea bags and is entirely drinkable, although not perhaps the sort of thing that one would want on waking up in the morning. We shall see how I get on.

To provide a bit of balance, knocked up a bit of pork soup yesterday. 5 ounces of pearl barley, 0.5 of a tenderloin (coarsely chopped), 1.5 onions (coarsely chopped) and 5 ounces of white cabbage (finely slivered). Bring barley to the boil in around 3.5 pints of water and stand for a bit. Add the pork and onion and simmer for about an hour. Add the cabbage and simmer for a further 5 minutes. Button mushrooms are entirely addable if available, which they were not on this occasion. 4 good portions, good gear for cold and frosty weather.

Cold and frosty weather which has brought lots of derelict and not so derelict spiders' webs out of hiding, particularly on the sort of railings made from plastic coated tubular steel. Maybe the spiders like living inside the tubes. It also resulted in very pretty holly the the bottom of the garden with all the holly leaves being edged with frost. Which didn't seem to happen on such other leaves as still happen to be about.

I close with some factoids about avocado pears, having being moved yesterday to a tea-time debate about whether they are really apples, pears, plums or cherries. Now sometimes google disappoints at this particular sort of slightly specialised thing, but on this occasion the second or third hit was a helpful paper about the taxonomy of avocado pears from the Department of Botany and Plant Sciences of the University of California, Riverside Outlet. It turns out that avocados are a member of the large laurel family which also includes things like cinnamon and camphor and that one sort of avocado is one of the many fruits and vegetables which we owe to Mexico. Lots of laurels go in for interesting smells, smells which have been designed by the great architect in the sky to deter various kinds of attack by various organic agents. It also turns out that the laurels are quite an old family, originally from Gondwana, with the result that there are all sorts of fossil populations on odd islands dotted around the southern hemisphere. So now you know.