Health & Wellness Investigations

Because I am a lovely human being, I decided to spend my evening making mulberry jam for my boyfriend, who is obsessed with mulberries. Look! Mulberry jam! Yes, those are old spice jars. And an old mayo jar. Sue me, I like reusing stuff. Some background information: Boyfriend is obsessed with mulberries. And I mean OBSESSED. We can't walk by a mulberry tree without him wanting to stop and eat as many as possible, or least as many as he can before I pull him away. Although I enjoy mulberries, I like other summer berries - like raspberries, blueberries, and strawberries - much better, so I don't usually eat a lot of them. But Boyfriend loves mulberries. And I love boyfriend. So I decided to go ahead and make him some mulberry preserves for him to have on his pancakes in the winter, during not-mulberry season. What I Did: 1) Gather mulberries. This was the fun part. I picked about 2 cups of berries - I didn't want to make a lot of jam because we have 9 ...

When I was planting my herb garden a couple of weeks ago, there happened to be big rhubarb plant for a good price that I just had  to get. After all, I have fond childhood memories of eating my grandma's strawberry rhubarb cobbler and had visions of making the same cobbler with strawberries and rhubarb fresh from my garden....so I got the rhubarb But alas, you can't harvest rhubarb until it's 2nd year, so it's sitting in my garden sucking up tons of water and tempting me with it's red stalks that I know I'm not supposed to pick until next summer. Thankfully, the local farm market was selling big bundles of rhubarb this past Saturday. Not so thankfully, when I called my mom for the rhubarb cobbler recipe, she informed me that my Grandma hadn't written it down and so - since my Grandma is long passed away - it was lost in family history...which explained why I didn't remember having it since I was a child. Well, crud. I set to comparing a wh...

Hello! May has been incredibly busy, as I am trying to put in my first vegetable garden, work on my kitchen remodel, go to work (SIX WEEKS UNTIL SUMMER BREAK!), and worry about my new kitty who gets into everything, including cupboards and drawers. One thing that has gotten neglected is the whole cutting-the-grass things...which gave the gobs of dandelions plenty of time to flower! I was picking dandelion leaves to go in my salads all spring, and one warm day when I got home to work, I saw a sea of yellow flowers. My yard backs up to an empty field, so most of my neighbors have sort of given up the weed battle - although a few spend hours working on their carpet-like manicured lawns. Personally, I think manicured lawns are boring. They’re pretty enough, I guess, with the lush green grass...but do you know what I think is prettier? A field full of wildflowers. EDIBLE wildflowers, like dandelion, clover, and violets. I probably don’t belong in the suburbs. But for now I’ll ju...