This past weekend was a crochet fest at our house. I don’t know what came over me. I just suddenly got this urge to find my crochet needles and yarns and make amigurumi, tiny crocheted toys.
I had a skein of Stitch Nation wool to use up. This yarn is so buttery. I love it!
I made a swampbogger, one of those American mythological creatures my husband grew up hearing stories about and now as an adult making toys of.
Pretty soon my 9-year-old daughter was crocheting a white rabbit from a pattern in the book, Kyuuto! Japanese Crafts Amigurumi by Tomoko Takamori. I had to stop every so often to help her. She learned to do the chain stitch at 6 years old, and once in a while pick it up again, learning more along the way. Working with patterns was a really great way to practice her multiplication table.
I love making amigirumi because of how small these projects are. They’re little one-sitting projects that bring so much joy so instantly. Perfect for kids and busy parents.
Ingredients:
2 cups raw organic whole milk
1 cup raw organic heavy cream
4 large organic egg yolks
3/4 cup organic sugar, separated
1/2 teaspoon peppermint extract
candy cane, crushed
Pour milk and cream in a medium saucepan over medium-low heat, stirring occasionally so a skin doesn’t form until tiny bubbles form around the edge and the mixture reaches 170°F.
In the meantime, whisk egg yolks until smooth. Slowly whisk in 1/2 cup sugar until it becomes a thick pale yellow paste. Slowly pour in the hot milk mixture while whisking continuously. This is important: The milk should not be poured into the egg mixture quickly or you will get scrambled eggs.
Return the custard to the saucepan and cook over low heat. Stir frequently with a wooden spoon until the custard is thick enough to coat the back of the spoon. Temperature of the custard should reach 185°F. Do not allow the custard to boil.
Pour the custard through a fine mesh strainer into a clean bowl and let it cool to room temperature. Stir the peppermint extract into the custard, then stir every five minutes until cooled completely. Cover and refrigerate overnight.
Prepare ice cream maker according to manufacturer’s instructions. Churn until thickened into a soft serve consistency. Transfer to an airtight container and freeze until firm.
My 9 year old daughter is a duck tape artist! Here she is demonstrating how to make homemade gift ribbons using duck tape. Top off your Christmas presents with one of these babies. Mama loves them!
Every year I revisit this recipe, from Dr. Aviva Jill Romm’s book, Vaccinations: A Thoughtful Parent’s Guide: How to Make Safe, Sensible Decisions about the Risks, Benefits, and Alternatives. The recipe is listed as Garlic Lemonade, but I call it Honey Lemon Garlic Tea. Sounds sweeter (trying to just sneak in the “garlic” in there, so it doesn’t turn off my vampire husband and garlic-squeamish kid).
My daughter has been spending a lot of time outdoors. Recess everyday consists of sled rides down the snowy slope. Last night I heard the beginning of a cough. It sounds dry right now, but I want to nip this cough in the bud. If the cough gets any worse I will have to give her minced half a clove of garlic in honey syrup. Blech! She knows the Honey Lemon Garlic Tea is a more palatable option.
All three ingredients: honey, lemon and garlic are known to boost the immune system and are particularly awesome at taking care of the respiratory system. Here’s the recipe:
Garlic Lemonade
3 medium-sized garlic cloves, chopped (blogger’s note: instead of chopping, I pounded the garlic in a mortar and pestle)
Juice of 1 lemon
Raw honey to taste.
Place the garlic in a 1-quart jar and fill the jar with boiling water. Let the garlic steep for 20 minutes and then strain it out. Add the lemon juice and sweeten with raw honey.
Give 1/2 to 2 cups daily, the lower dose to prevent illness and for younger children and the greater quantity for older kids who feel like they are coming down with a cold.
Don’t give the lemonade every day; just use it as needed.
It’s fine to serve it cold in the summertime. But since it’s winter I heat it up to just when it steams (not boiling) and serve warm.
After many years of cooking a whole Thanksgiving dinner and getting my pace and timing down just right, I am taking a break. Tonight will be the first Thanksgiving dinner I will not be cooking. We are going to spend Thanksgiving with my husband’s side of the family, and Aunt Faye will be making us a fantastic old-fashioned Thanksgiving meal.
Of course, I’m not coming empty-handed. I made these Cranberry Tarts at my daughter’s birthday party recently and they were a hit with everyone. The recipe is gluten-free and nut-free, very important since we have people with gluten and nut sensitivities in the family. I use Namaste Foods Gluten Free Flour Blend.
My daughter helped me make these, and it was all we could do to keep ourselves from eating them all up before it’s time to go to Thanksgiving dinner.
Before beginning, make sure you have the following kitchen tools:
2 mixing bowls, small or medium
measuring cups and measuring spoons
whisk
wooden spoon
mini muffin pan
colander
oven
Here we go…
Cranberry Mini Tarts
Ingredients for Crust:
1 1/2 cups Gluten-Free Flour Blend
3/4 cups organic butter
6 oz. organic cream cheese
Ingredients for Filling:
1/2 cup organic sugar
1 organic egg
1/4 cup organic butter
1 teaspoon organic vanilla extract
8 oz. fresh cranberries
Beat together gluten-free flour, butter and cream cheese until it forms a ball of dough. I don’t have an electric mixer, so I just use a wooden spoon to combine the ingredients, then knead it by hand until it’s a nice smooth consistency.
Pinch small portions, roll them up in balls, flatten and press evenly into the bottom and sides of mini muffin cups.
Now we’re ready for the filling. Whisk together sugar, egg, butter and vanilla.
Wash the fresh cranberries in a colander. Put about 5 cranberries in each mini muffin cup crust. This was like playing mancala.
Pour a small spoonful of filling over the cranberries in each mini muffin cup crust.
Bake for 25 minutes, or until the tarts are golden. Let it cool completely then remove from pan.
The family that zaps together stays healthy together.
And that includes our dear dog, Cosmo.
We all know how many parasites our pets can bring into the home. Taking care of the littlest ones in our family is the secret to keeping everyone healthy in the household.
One way to zap our furry family members is to hold the copper handles up against our pet’s skin, getting the fur out of the way. Cosmo has pits that have very little fur, so I put the copper handles there. For other pets, it may be their belly area. Just find spots that will make the most contact with the copper handles.
The second, more effective, way to zap pets is by setting up a Zappicator. A Zappicator is created by the combination of a Hulda Clark Zapper set to 1 kHz connected to a North Pole Speaker. I set up the North Pole Speaker Box under Cosmo’s bed and he can relax while zapping.
There are no real solutions being presented to us by government or medical establishment. They are either dragging their feet to protect their industries’ profit margin, or are stumped as to what to do.
The problem is threefold: people’s overuse of antibiotics, livestock overuse of antibiotics, and now in environment and wildlife.
Big Pharma is putting millions of dollars into research for stronger and better antibiotics, but sooner or later we will be faced with the same question: How long before bacteria develops resistance to those?
It’s really troubling if you have no plan of action on how to protect yourself and your family from this “Superbug.” Let me share my plans of action with you. I hope my ideas can be of use to you and your family.
1. By any means, avoid going to a hospital. Hospitals are teeming with infections, and you increase your likelihood of encountering antibiotic-resistant bacteria there. (See PBS Eight Ways to Protect Yourself from Superbugs.)
2. Wash your hands. With water. Wash with water as long as you can sing the “Happy birthday” song twice to make sure you are thoroughly washed. Scrub fingers and under the fingernails. Dump the hand sanitizers, especially the ones that are antibacterial. They contribute to the creation of superbugs. Keep vodka in a spray bottle for those times when you have no access to running water.
3. Zap. According to the books written by Dr. Hulda Clark, the Zapper is a device that emits a positive offset square wave frequency that shatters parasites, bacteria and viruses. Frequency medicine was pioneered by Nikola Tesla in the 1900s and followed up by Georges Lakhovsky, Royal Rife and most recently, Hulda Clark. Hulda Clark developed a zapper for direct use, and another one she called a zappicator for zapping foods and beverages. She published the schematics public domain in her books so anyone can build them. There are many for sale on the internet, and some that are not up to specs, so choose wisely. *The Hulda Clark Zapper is in the public domain and therefore has not been evaluated by the FDA. Not surprisingly it has been discredited by Big Pharma and their minions.
4. Eat organic. Find small local farms that raise their livestock with no antibiotics, no hormones, no pesticides in feed. If they have organic certification, great. If not, visit their farm and see how they raise their animals. Eat certified organic fruits and vegetables. Use the Hulda Clark Food Zappicator on your food before eating.
5. Colloidal silver can be purchased at your local health food store. It was used widely by physicians in the early 20th century but was discontinued in the 1940s when antibiotics became more popular. Now is a good time to get back to this effective solution to simple infections. NASA astronauts use it to keep their water source free of bacteria while in space. (For more info, see Colloidal Silver Wikipedia page.)
As we enter the end of the Antibiotic Era, it is time to think outside the box. Pharmaceuticals have not provided us with sustainable answers. They worked, for some time, but increased side-effects and vested financial interests have rendered them a dead end for us. Worse comes to worst, doctors employ surgery to remove infection. But that’s another nightmare altogether.
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
(Disclosure: I am owner/manager of NaturalHealthSupply.com and we sell zappers. My husband and I have been zapping since 1997, and in 1999 we began selling zappers because we believe it has dramatically improved our family’s health. I feel really lucky to have found the zapper as a solution to many of my family’s health problems. I’ve spoken openly about zapping long before we started selling them. Recommendations above are my own personal opinion and are not intended as medical advice.)
Something terrifying happened! My husband was helping his uncle put away wood in their basement and found a deer tick on him. He showed it to me and flushed it down the toilet. The next morning he found that he missed another deer tick that had overnight lodged itself into his skin.
What followed was horrifying. My husband had to pull the tick off him with tweezers, taking care not to leave any tick parts in his skin.
After he pulled it out, we drowned it in a little bottle cap of vodka.
I’m glad he noticed the tick on his body right away. The less amount of time a tick is lodged into one’s skin, the less likely to develop lyme disease.
The usual course of action if one suspects lyme disease is to go through several rounds of antibiotics. A woman who has been living with lyme disease for over a decade told me that she had a few rounds of antibiotics after she got bitten by a tick, and that she stopped taking antibiotics as soon as her lyme disease symptoms ended, only to have relapses many years later. She said in retrospect she should have continued on the antibiotics well past when her symptoms ended.
Karen Allen, actress well known for her appearance on the movie Indiana Jones, talked about her bout with lyme disease and how she found relief in the Hulda Clark Zapper.
Another reason to feel lucky that we have the Hulda Clark Zapper in our home. Every home should have one!
Here’s Jay’s Countdown to 50 this month, in which he talks about using the Hulda Clark Zapper after he pulled the deer tick off his skin.
We’ve had a really fun weekend with friends, carving pumpkins and roasting marshmallows on a fire outdoors. Then suddenly last night my daughter woke up crying and clutching her ear.
My first response is to set her up with a Hulda Clark Zapper. She zapped, holding it close to her ear and under her jaw. I also gave her some echinacea and brought her a warm washcloth to comfort the ear that hurts. Pretty soon my husband was up too and set her up with a hot water bottle to replace the washcloth. Within half an hour she was asleep again.
I tried to imagine the same situation if I didn’t have a Hulda Clark Zapper.
I grew up in the tropics. I never had an earache as a child. I once had a mosquito enter my ear, but that’s a whole different story. My husband grew up here in Maine, and told me he constantly had earaches. He remembers staying up all night, 6 to 7 hours of crying in pain, with only a hot water bottle for comfort.
A while back in conversation with a dad at a playground, he told me how glad he was he had health insurance because of how often he had to take his children to the emergency room for fevers and ear infections. Getting a crying child bundled up and in the car to go to the emergency room, where she has to wait to get treated with antibiotics is pretty extreme for something as common as an ear infection. Antibiotics also do not provide immediate relief. According to most medical websites I consulted, doctors prescribe ear drops and recommend an over-the-counter pain reliever for kids.
Personally I would hate to do this to my kid. First off I think hospitals are a good source of secondary infection. You come in with one problem and leave with more. Next, I don’t like drugs. Even the ones doctors prescribe have a level of toxicity. That’s why doctors have to control them with a prescription. Then of course, there is the threat of antibiotic-resistant pathogens we cannot anymore ignore. And finally, going to the ER is so stressful at a time when a child most needs to rest.
The Hulda Clark Zapper has allowed me to take care of my family in the comfort of our home, quickly, painlessly and effectively. I am so grateful to have it in my life.
(Disclosure: I am owner/manager of NaturalHealthSupply.com and we sell zappers. My husband and I have been zapping since 1997, and in 1999 we began selling zappers because we believe in its benefits. I feel really lucky to have found the zapper as a solution to many of my family’s health problems. I’ve spoken openly about zapping long before we started selling them. My testimonial above is my own personal experience with the zapper, and is not intended as a medical claim.)
It has been so hot here in the Central Valley of California. The little tree in front of our house cracked right in two. It’s the tree the Chipmunks in our latest Time Brats movie perched up on. (Boy, am I glad it didn’t crack while the kids were up on it!)
according to manufacturer’s instructions. Churn until thickened into a soft serve consistency. Transfer to an airtight container and freeze until firm.
