1st August!

Yeah, the day dawned with sunshine!  I feel so much better today than I have the last couple of days.  Yes it is very hot, but I do so much better when I can see blue skies and the sun.

Today I started my getting back on track food and health wise.  I want to lose all the excess weight I put on while on medication and now I am feeling so much better I feel I can now tackle the juicing and raw foods again.  The first three days will be just juice as I work on de-toxing my body.

The main juice for the day is made up of:

2 apples

1 carrot

1 slice of lemon with rind left on

1/4 yellow bell pepper

1 inch slice of cucumber

1/2 piece of celery

1 inch broccoli stem

1 inch slice of raw beetroot (I actually used more than this)

Another juice I have made up to have during the day is:

1/2 pineapple,

2 apples

1 carrot

1/4 raw beetroot

handful of spinach

1 inch slice of courgette

We went out this morning to take my Mother in Law to the Butterfly World which we are now members of.

Inside the butterfly house we saw:

Inside the Ant House:

Leaf Cutter ants hard at work.

Locusts

Inside the Insect handling house there were opportunities to hold:

A Giant Cockroach

A land snail

A stick insect.

Outside we enjoyed wandering round the wild life gardens.

Bumble Bee on Echinacea

Beautiful Peacock butterfly

Small White butterfly

Dragonflies

Tadpoles

Green-veined White butterfly

Six-spot Burnett Moth & Bumble Bees

Daily Doodles & Life

The last couple of days have been rough, and I still feel pretty bad this morning, although perhaps a little less nauseas. Time will tell it is still very early in the morning.

Yesterday was a rather a mix of days, from wonderful surprises....

A huge box of flowers arrived for me as a thank you gift from a friend for some clothes I had made for a special little doll companion of hers.

So wonderfully thoughtful and unexpected!  Brought tears of joy to my eyes.  I have emotions again that is for sure!

To try and get me going yesterday morning I made a juice/smoothie

1/2 a pineapple

3 apples

A large handful of spinach

3 celery stalks

1/2 a mango

1/2 an avocado

1 banana

some acai berry juice.

I was back in bed by early morning, but I am sure eventually the benefits of the juice will kick in.

This morning (having got some manuka honey yesterday)

The other 1/2 a pineapple

4 apples

4 sticks of celery

large handful of spinach

a tub of blueberries,

large tablespoon of manuka honey

1 banana

1/2 an avocado

some acai berry juice.

Packed full of goodness!

The other elements of yesterday were not so good...

Getting dragged out by Mark in the afternoon to get some groceries...resulted me ending up back in bed!

Discovering that I had lost two more of my lovely piggies during the night.

Alexander

Popcorn.

Alexander was most unexpected especially as the night before he had come up to take the food out of my hand as per usual.  Popcorn had been looking 'old' for a while.

Will miss these cute guys.  So hard as they are all 'older' than average now.  I don't suppose the freezing cold we had helped either, although they had plenty of hay and each other to snuggle up with.

Blueberry Pie

With plenty of blueberries available at the moment I thought I would try another Raw Foods desert/treat recipe, this time of course Blueberry Pie. Again I would like to point out that this recipe isn't mine and came from the website From Grey to Green.

Ingredients:

For the base:

2 cups coconut flakes (couldn't find flakes so used 'shreddings' from the health food shop)

1 cup macadamias

1 tsp vanilla extract

1 tsp Himalayan crystal salt

1 big handful of dry dates

There were no instructions, but I figured you had turn these ingredients into a bread crumb consistency so into my food processor the went and then I lined the base of a flan tin with them.

For the filling:

2 bananas,

flesh from one young coconut (again couldn't get a coconut so used the same coconut shreds from above

2 cups of blueberries

1/2 cup agave syrup

1/2 cup coconut oil

pinch of Himalayan salt

1 tbsp of lemon juice

Blend all of these ingredients in a blender and then pour into crumbed base. Leave to set in fridge for a couple of hours of so.

The result:

Looks great, perfectly set.

The verdict:

The first slice (yes I had more than one!) tasted good, nice consistency, a bit like a cheesecake.

The second slice, needed to confirm a particular taste...yes I could taste the salt...so perhaps the recipe calls for too much for my tastes.

The third slice - had after dinner in the evening - I wish I hadn't had. Whether it just wasn't good to have after my lovely meal, or whether by this time I'd decided I really wasn't that keen on it I'm not sure.

The coconut taste is very strong...perhaps if you are a real coconut fan this wouldn't be an issue.

A little too sweet for my liking.

The salt taste is quite obvious.

Will I make it again? Possibly, will try it without so much coconut, although I'm guessing that the coconut oil is what helps it set so well.

Give me a piece of fruit, or the blueberries on their own any day!

I'm thinking my tastes are changing.