I just heard that one of my friend’s kids was down with the H1N1 virus. My god! Is that bug still around?

It IS! So, recently, I find myself slacking when it comes to absolute hygiene. Not to say I’m a dirty person, but when the first H1N1 wave came in, I was pretty anal about bringing my kids out, washing hands 10 times a day, stuff like that. I was pretty alarm to say the least, and at that time, my kids were ill all the time, so I was deathly afraid their weak bodies would not be able to cope with something so dangerous.

Anyways, no prizes for telling me that we should all still be really careful.

Here’s what Kristen Suzanne, (a raw food chef) from Kristen’s Raw blog (who by the way is happily pregnant) tips on keeping oneself healthy. Those below and chugging green juice like there’s no tomorrow.

…After scouring the Internet for information on pregnant women and the seasonal / swine flus, I came have a list of things to do (I came up with most of these from Mothering.com’s forum):

Wash hands for 30 seconds with soap OFTEN (avoiding anti-bacterial gels). A good trick is to hum the “Happy Birthday” song three times while hand washing.
PLENTY OF REST!
Don’t touch face
Get Vitamin D!!! (I get mine from the sun, 15-25 minutes daily or every other day)
Gargle with warm salt water twice a day
Take warm salt water and dip a q-tip into it and swab the inside of nostrils daily (or use a neti pot)
Eat fresh, organic, raw garlic
Drink warm liquids
Consume plenty of vitamin C-rich foods
Stay hydrated
Avoid crowded places

Apparently, there’s a new strain of rice that does not need to be cooked at all. Super duper crazy stuff for all you lazy cooks out there! Downside is, you gotta wait for the agri scientists in India to sell it to ya! This soft rice is called the Agihoni Bora rice.

Apparently, it just requires a long soak (45 minutes), and that’s it!

Can you imagine? Finally, we are able to eat raw rice that has not lost all the great enzymes that might have been destroyed during the cooking process. Also, it’s definitely environmentally safer because we don’t have to use any fuel to cook it. It’s a boon to the poor who can’t afford to buy fuel, that is if the Indian farmers decide to price the rice grains within the reach of the poor.

Image taken from http:/macrocosm-magbook.blogspot.com/2010/02/rice-grains-that-need-no-cooking.html

Yesterday, I came across SheChive.com that showed some really awesome images of what we can do with food. It’s too fabulous, really. The ones below are all raw food.

My personal favorite is the orange skin carrying the orange segments to the food processor.

What do you like?

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More on raw food

• Jason Mraz’s Travel Tip #3: Bring a Big Fucking Knife
• What would you bring to a pot luck party?
• Raw, full of enzyme fruit jam
• Easy, easy raw Coriander Coconut Chutney

I was thinking of Big Bird an hour ago, and then thinking of all sorts of yellow type food. I’m silly today I know.

So what are some the types of yellow raw food that’s good for you? They are here, shown right below.

More orangy than yellow, but still good enough to eat!

I Love You, Man movie was one of the inspirations.

My kids’ favorite fruit of the moment. My almost 2 year old Ethan says “Nummy, nummy” when he takes a

huge bite into a bananaas he can’t pronounce “yummy” as yet

That’s Ethan with his yellow Ultraman T-shirt, trying on a very pink polka dot pair of Mickey Mouse sunglasses!!

Another yellow image from the I Love You, Man movie. Don’t they just look so cute in those yellow dresses!

Hubby and I were having lunch at a Japanese restaurant yesterday afternoon.

He was served his favorite Salmon sashimi (raw food) in what looked like frosted glass bowl. Halfway through the meal, he realized that the bowl was not frosted glass but was actually a bowl made of ice.

How cool is that? (Pardon the pun! LOL)

It’s definitely something I would like to make sometime to serve to guests.

Here’s a video of how to make one.

Make An Ice Bowl ! – Funny bloopers R us

Often times, we want kids to play with finger paints but we don’t want them to eat the paint. Know what I mean? Besides I noticed that food grade colors purchased at baking stores  stain my kids fingers, clothes and everywhere else like mad.  Not only do I not want  artificial coloring away from my children’s mouths, body and stuff, just think how a Barney the Purple Dinosaur color will look stuck all over a 2 year old for a couple of hours? How would you explain that to people who stare?

So, what to do?

Make our own, with food.

One lady in a forum I’m a member of says she gives her kids the pulp of vegetable after juicing. That’s a really great recycling idea. And good for the environment too.

I make my own colors.

First, I make a simple glue paste by cooking corn starch and water. You can use other types of flour like arrowroot or rice starch (not plain rice flour) if you are allergic to corn.

Then, I add vegetable juices as coloring. Spinach is green. Carrots is orange. Beet is red. I live in Malaysia now, and they have this beautiful edible bright blue flower which we use as safe blue coloring.  You can easily google for other vegetable color choices.

It’s not Play-Doh, but it’s equally fun. It was what my mum made for me and my brothers to finger paint on paper when we were in preschool, way back then.

My kids splashing about, out in the sunshine after a particularly fun but dirty episode.
Mummy doesn’t want them in until they are nice and clean.

I just hate cleaning up after my kids, especially when they dirty up the living room, so what I do is strip them down and let them go wild in the bathroom with the colored pastes. I let them finger paint the tiled walls to their hearts content. Inevitably, everything gets colored. Hair, body, everything. *horrors*  When it’s time to come out, I just hose my kids and wash them. Meanwhile, I’d grab a sponge and wash the bathroom as I go ( a perfect excuse to clean the bathroom, ya know). My mum used to let us out of the house. She’d set up a large table and place some large papers on the tables for us to finger paint. I can’t remember, but we probably were washed outside before we were allowed to walk into the house, clean!