isn't nature abundant - free food and herbal recipe

Been major busy since the last post and doing that busy stuff has meant I have lost 4 lbs of weight.  As I said in my previous post I am not doing the diet thing but it is nice to occasionally get on the scales and find that some weight has disappeared whatever.  My 6 weeks of elimination diet has actually finished but I am not rushing back to wheat and diary any time soon.  I did eat a piece of swiss roll the other day and woke at 3am in the morning with a gurgly tummy and couldn't get back to sleep so not sure if that is a coincidence or the wheat.  Got my appointment with the nutritionalist on Monday so will see what they say about everything.  Definitely going to cut back on wheat though and probably try and eat a lot less dairy as I haven't missed it as much as I thought I would.  How long this idea will last we will see!!!  

Well went to an event on Wednesday and learnt some interesting stuff about herbal medicine and foraging.  Here is a mindmap of the info I learnt.

Here is one of the recipes we learnt when we were there:  onion syrup for coughs or colds.  Here goes ->  sterilise a jam jar and lid; layer chopped onion at the bottom of the jar; then layer sugar (or honey if you want more expensive/posh stuff LOL); then layer onion; then sugar all the way to near the top ending with a layer of sugar; seal the jar and leave for 24 hours.  You can start getting syrup off and using after 12 hours but after 24 hours strain the onions off and start using.  It will keep in the fridge for a few weeks.  You can add other things like ginger, cloves, etc but the basic recipe is just onion and sugar and who doesn't have those ingredients lying around?  The lady doing the workshop managed to cram alot into an hour - I was very impressed.

Today we went out for the day and this is what we came back with for free - result!!  How awesome - you have to love food for free.   So Dave is going to be making pie, cake and crumble all weekend!!

The only sad-ish news recently is that I am not doing my Open University (OU) course starting tomorrow as I feel it is the wrong time to start more stuff.  I am looking to do something more general and more fun maybe in February depending upon what else I am doing at the time.  My choice though and I do have a tendency to overdo stuff and therefore end up getting overwhelmed.  Also I could just get a computing book and learn from that rather than waste money on another OU course.  I am however helping a few people set up websites so that will keep my hand in computer wise so...all is good