Published in Healthy Options Magazine July 2009 Tucked away in my memory lies a happy scene which we probably all share: a patch of bright yellow and orange nasturtium flowers surrounded by their round dollar leaves. Squatting down you reach out and pick the long funnel off the back end of the flower and suck [...]
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Rose Hips on the Tree of Life written for Healthy Options Magazine June 2009 –Recipe for Rose Hip Soup– Unlike people, roses probably do not consider themselves as having a purpose in life. But if a rose bush did have a mission, I expect its greatest sense of achievement would come from creating, not just a whole [...]
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Refreshing recipe for Fenugreek and Fennel Salad Fenugreek: (Trigonella foenum-graecum) called methi in the Ayurvedic tradition, has been a trusted friend of mankind for a long time, perhaps even before crops were cultivated. It is widely used in Ayurvedic medicine and cooking, which dates back at least 4,000 years. The Ayurvedic philosophy of life comes down [...]
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Published in the column A Flirtation With Herbs in Healthy Options Magazine, New Zealand, April 2009 I was away for much of the summer, helping my sister with her newest addition to the family. As a result, my balcony garden didn’t do so well. My spaghetti squash died, my nasturtiums were killed in [...]
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I remember the first time I had a chance to get to know wild fennel. It was growing tall and wild behind an empty lot I walked through every day on my way to work at an Italian restaurant in the Viaduct harbour in Auckland, New Zealand. It’s funny to look back [...]
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Golden Spice of a Golden Land I developed a deep respect for turmeric the last time I was in Myanmar (Burma). Not paying close attention to where I was putting my feet, I had stumbled on a hole in the sidewalk while walking the streets of Yangon and sprained my ankle. Several Burmese friends [...]
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Originally published in Healthy Options, July 2004, New Zealand Perhaps the oldest seed utilized by man, sesame has been used for thousands of years as medicine, food and to light lamps. Although the first written record of sesame is 3,000 BC, Assyrian mythology gives sesame a role in the origins of our world. In [...]
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