INCABERRIES

 

Yesterday, as we were going about our daily business, I purchased a packet of " healthy snack mix "

 

You know the type - almonds, pistachios, dried paw paw, hazelnuts, cranberries and what I took at first glance ( without my glasses !! ) as sultanas.

 

 

But when I tasted the "sultanas" I knew I had made a mistake so I put on my glasses and had a good look at them.

 

Here's a close up of one.

See, it has lots of little seeds inside it and the taste starts off sweet and ends on a tart taste.

 

 

I looked on the contents of the packet ( with my glasses on !!) and saw that the mystery ingredient was an Incaberry.

 

Never heard of them !

 

 

 

I took this photo so you can see the size of them.

 

I wondered if they might have been some type of gooseberry because of all the seeds and the tart taste so I looked them up.

 

This is what I found:

 

 

"Similar to a Cape Gooseberry, the Incaberry is a small fruit with a glossy orange-yellow skin that is surrounded by papery leaves. Once the fruit is dried it has a distinctive bronze orange colour. Organic Incaberries are an amazing taste sensation - sweet with a fine and delicate sour finish. The taste is so unique, you just have to try them.

 

 

"Organic Incaberries are more commonly consumed as a dried fruit. Incaberries can be enjoyed alone or mixed with other fruits in salads. Try them in muesli and cereals for an antioxidant boost.

Or simply add this South American twist to the classic cheese platter.

 

 

 ( hey , that looks good! )

"Incaberries to have an antioxidant capacity higher than Gojiberries and other major dried fruits.
Dried Incaberries are very high in fibre with 19g fibre per 100g or 8g in a ¼ cup (45g). This is more fibre than 1 cup of a high fibre breakfast cereal or a salad sandwich on wholegrain bread.

But more importantly Incaberries contain soluble fibre necessary for controlling appetite and reducing cholesterol re-absorption in the intestine....."

 

So it seems I have stumbled onto a new wonder food that has not had much publicity here.... or at least not in the circles I move around in.

.

Heck, I've only just heard of goji berries !

 

I have to say I liked them and can see that I could find ways to include them in our diet.

 I especially like the look  ( and taste ) of them in a cheese platter.

 

Now I'll keep a look out for them. Perhaps a Health Food store.

 

Have you heard of them?

 

Cheers.

TAKING PRECAUTIONS

 

 

This should solve the problem in the future !

 

 

Automatically saves everything from your computer as you go.

 

Cheers.



PHOTOS

Losing all the photos on my computer recently has set me to thinking about all the photos we take.

Many of us use photography as a sort of memory bank for the daily doings of our lives.

Special occasions,

Family milestones,

Holiday snaps.

Digital photography has meant that many of us now have hundreds, possibly thousands of these photos stored on cameras or our computers.

Many of the photos are poor. Digital photography makes it easy to snap away until we get the photo we are happy with but how many of us then delete all the ones that aren't so good?

But what do you do with the photos next?

Do you print them out and put them in Family Albums ?

 

I'm afraid I don't any more.

 

They just sit there on the computer or perhaps spend some time rolling through the digital photo frame.
Yet I know the pleasure that we get from flicking through old albums and looking back at our parents' photos.

When it comes to holiday photos we usually use them to make slide shows using Movie Maker.
I hasten to say these slide shows are for US to view, not to bore our friends with !!!
We have lots of photos and we put most of them in, along with some text to remind us where and when and try to fit the music to the country ( we usually buy special CDs ). They usually go for about 20 minutes and cover about a week of our holiday at a time.

Very often, on a Saturday, when we come home from buying our fruit and vegies at the market we settle down with a late breakfast and watch a couple of holidays. .... and I think it is because we do this, we remember them so well.

But this not all we do with those holiday snaps.

I have begun a tradition of making an album on the computer. You know the sort that you have printed up as a lovely glossy book. I've made two of these so far.

The first one I made when we holidayed in England for 14 weeks in 2008.

 

 The book has 224 pages and is a lovely chronicle of a wonderful holiday and I thoroughly enjoyed the process of making it  too.

I used my daily holiday diary for the text, enjoying re-living the holiday as I went.

The second one is about our month in France in 2010 and is just about as long as the other book !!

I used a program called Momento - a free download and fairly simple to use - and the albums were around $200 each. Not cheap, but something to treasure and paid for in part by gift vouchers so even better.
I'm just starting on a third - about our holiday in England last year - and this time I'm trying another program called Blurb. It's another free download and much less expensive so we'll see how the end product compares with the others.

                                               ******       *******       *******
Of course some people take photos for other reasons - photography is a great hobby.
Tony is one of these people and he enjoys experimenting with all sorts of effects, manipulating his photos with different camera settings and lenses. He is really becoming very good

 

We have several of his "masterpieces" printed on canvas or framed and hanging on our walls

 

 

 

 

So now I have a whole lot of photos that I have specially taken for this post.

Will I delete them... or just leave them sitting there?

What do you think?

 

 

Cheers.

 

REFLECTION

As you will imagine my recent computer disaster knocked me for six.

 

I've lost my file of recipes.

 

Not the end of the world because I have most of them printed up in a recipe folder that I made for each of my kids for Christmas last year.

 

 

All our family favourites recorded with photos taken while I've cooked them

 

 

  or occasionally while Tony was at the helm cooking his specialties,

 printed out for them ... and a copy for me too !

Any new ones I've collected I can find again ...

and anyway I need to stop cooking and start eating salads !!

I've lost a lot of photos I've taken over the last year.

 

Not the end of the world because a lot of them have made their way onto my blog.

In many ways this blog has become a bit of a diary of my life.

It's full of lots of little inconsequential moments and thoughts

but also has a snippet of the big things too.

 

So .... not lost forever.

 

Lots of times photos were taken with the blog specifically in mind and there were rather a lot of photos sitting there un-needed, unnecessary, unused.... infact unwanted.

 I just didn't have the heart to delete them.

Just in case , you know ?

 

Most family occasions have been recorded by Tony's superior skills and camera

so they are not lost either.

 

So I'm looking on the bright side... or trying to.

 

Cheers.

 

PS. Thank Heavens for blogging !

DISASTER

Yep, there's only one word for it and that's
disaster !
Despite having full protection and firewalls by Norton my computer has been attacked by a new virus and the end result is that I have lost everything.

Yes, everything is gone!

#@#&** ( or words to that effect !)

And do you think I had it all backed up?
Of course not !!

So I've been spending my time reloading programs,
Loading photos off Tony's computer - I can't stand not having some photos there to use,
Re-establishing links and emailing friends for links that I have sent them in the past
and generally trying to get it back working again.

And tomorrow I'm off to buy an external hard drive that automatically backs everything up as you do it !

Cheers.

BOOK REVIEW

Here's an interesting one for you.

I don't think I've ever found a book so difficult to read but I persevered anyway.

It may have had something to do with the fact that I only read in bed, late at night when I'm tired.

It's a book about a child who has Asperger Syndrome ( I think !) - written sometimes by the child himself, sometimes by others like the boy's father and grandfather - whose father was killed in the tragic event that has come to be called simply 9/11.

It's quite difficult to know who is telling the story sometimes and it soon becomes clear that the Asperger's/ Autism is something that has been handed down through the family.

One of the reasons it is hard to read is the way it is written.

I have tried to scan some pages to show you but I'm afraid the book is quite thick so it was difficult to keep out the light and this has made the scans poor quality and difficult to see. (but clicking on them to enlarge them will improve your view tremendously ).

Do you see what I mean?

The punctuation is altered so there are no paragraphs and no new lines for a new speaker in conversations so the reader has to sort it out for themselves.

Then there are pages like the ones below.

or like this

and this.

So you can see that it a very different book but worth the challenge of reading it.

I don't know if I understood it completely.

It helps to discuss it with someone else who has read it and perhaps seeing the movie of the same name would be interesting too ( and make it easier to understand - as long as the movie stays true to the book )

but although rereading it would also probably help, it's not something I want to do.

Not exactly light entertainment but worthwhile.

I'd be very interested in your thoughts if you have read it too.

Cheers.

A POEM

Today, I came upon a lovely poem on this fantastic blog and I couldn't resist reproducing it here because it rings so true.

I Have Found Such Joy in Simple Things

I have found such joy in simple things;

A plain clean room, a nut brown loaf of bread

A cup of milk, a kettle as it sings,

The shelter of a roof above my head,

And in a leaf-laced square along the floor,

Where yellow sunlight glimmers through a door.

I have found such joy in things that fill

My quiet days : a curtain's blowing grace,

A potted plant upon the window sill,

A rose , fresh cut and placed within a vase;

A table cleared, a lamp beside a chair,

And books I long have loved beside me there.

Oh, I have found such joys I wish I might

Tell every woman who goes seeking far

For some elusive, feverish delight

That very close to home the great joys are:

The elemental things -- old as the race,

Yet never, through the ages , commonplace. 

Grace Noll Crowell

 

CRAFTY UPDATE

Sigh......

Now that Mum's birthday and Dad's hospital tests are over it is nice to get back into a bit of crafty stuff.
I've finished the rug that's all the wrong colours.
It's warm and snuggly with only all those awful ends to deal with now.



I wanted to try a new edging.

Thought I'd try a picot but I have a big problem following a pattern.

I figured that as long as I repeat what I am doing I have an edge of sorts.
I may have invented my own picot edging !!!!!

.........

Today I learnt how to join the four reversible-quilt-as-you-go-log cabin blocks that I have been working on.

The Christmas side ...

............ and the every day side.

Just some binding and then I'm done.

Cheers.

LOOKING AFTER OUR OLD SOLDIERS

At the moment Dad is in hospital having tests to see if he is a good candidate for a revolutionary new treatment to replace the aortic valve in his 90 year old heart.

When open heart surgery was suggested to replace his badly clogged aortic valve I was horrified at the thought of putting him through an operation of this magnitude at his age.

So was he !

When the doctors explained that there was a new procedure ( first done world-wide in 2011) being trialed at the moment that might suit him, we were immediately interested. At the present time the doctor has performed about 120 of these procedures.

You see, this procedure is non-invasive - there is no opening of chests, spreading of ribs, being placed on a heart bypass machine while your heart is cut open to replace the valve that doesn't work.

It is meant for people who would be in too much danger of stroke and other side effects of anaesthetics ( and to me my 90 year old is one of these people ).

During the new procedure a biological valve ( usually from a pig !) is inserted through a catheter and implanted within a diseased aortic valve. The procedure allows for valve replacement without traditional open-heart surgery and while the heart is beating, therefore avoiding cardiopulmonary bypass.

Of course, at the moment, it is a clinical trial and therefore the procedure is completely unfunded which means that the patient has to pay for the whole cost of the procedure - hospital stay, doctors, anaesthetist plus the gadget itself is worth about $30 000 - and medical insurance which many Aussies have does not cover experimental treatments (and this includes trials ).

Only 3 or 4 of these procedures are done each month so even if you have the money and are a suitable candidate there is a waiting list of 6 to 8 months.

And this is where this card comes in.

If you have served in any Australian Defence force in a war zone, you are entitled to one of these.

(In some cases widows/widowers and children are also entitled ).

They're called Gold Cards and believe me they are pure gold to their recipients.

As a member of the Australian Air Force who served in New Guinea during WWII my Dad holds one of these and they will pay for everything if he is seen to be a candidate for this fantastic new procedure.

Isn't it wonderful to see that all the veterans are being looked after into their old age by a grateful country?

 Fingers crossed. I'll keep you posted.

Cheers.