When Life Hands You Lemons!

Every so often the shops have an offer on lemons that’s just too good to ignore, or you might be lucky enough to be able to grow your own lemons.  If the latter, I’m jealous; while it is warm enough for lemon trees over the summer, it is just a bit too cold during the winter and I don’t have a suitable place to overwinter the trees out of the frost. 

More often than not, I succumb to these offers, using fresh lemon juice at every opportunity but still somehow I’m left with either a couple of wizened specimens at the bottom of the fruit bowl or even worse, one that has gone mouldy and covered all the other fruit with mould spores. 

So now, I don’t take chances and freeze the juice as soon as possible.  I was spurred on by some lovely lemon-shaped silicon ice trays I found; my previous trays were the hard plastic variety and I could never get the cubes out but these are so simple to extract the shape from, it is a real pleasure to use them.

So here we go, making the most of your lemons

First of all I wash and dry the lemons, then I use a julienne cutter I have to remove the zest of the lemon.  I take off the zest in reasonably long strips as it is quite easy to break or chop smaller once it is frozen.  I just pop it into a plastic box and freeze until I need it.

I then halve the lemons, juice them and strain the juice into a small jug.  Straining removes all of the pips, (seeds), which I always find get into the juice no matter how carefully I pour out the juice from the squeezer.

Using the jug, it is then very easy to fill the ice cube trays and before long….
frozen lemon juice!

The first few times I did this, I strained and filled the trays a lemon at a time to enable me to gauge just how much juice one of the ‘cubes’ contained.  With these trays, 4 of the half lemon shapes equalled the juice from one medium, averagely juicy lemon.

But it doesn’t end there, if you want to squeeze even more from your lemons, (sorry about the pun), the squeezed halves can be used to freshen the dishwasher.  In my dishwasher I discovered that occasionally the half lemon skin could jam the lower rotor so I now cut the half in half again so it lies flat on the bottom of the dishwasher.  They last one to two washes after which they head for the compost pile.  I freeze the spare ones so they don’t go off before I use them.

A real lemon rinse!

Homemade Deodorant

 

In an attempt to reduce the cocktail of synthetic chemical I’m enticed to apply to myself I decided to give a more ‘natural’ set of chemicals a go. Chemicals are chemicals but some have been used for longer than others on humans, with no known or suspected side-effects and are a component of the world we’ve evolved in rather than something cooked up in a test tube and that has never existed in the natural world.

Step forward sodium bicarbonate, (bicarb).

A quick search of the Internet for homemade deodorant, came up with this site and I decided to give it a go. I couldn’t be doing with messing about with a 2 part product so I opted to just use the dry part.

An offer in the supermarket, (they do have their uses ), came up with corn flour, (maize flour) on promotion so I had a good supply of that and as for the bicarb well I had previously balked at paying the asking price for the little packets supermarkets sell. At that time I was sourcing bicarb for cleaning purposes and would have used half the packet in one go. I then discovered that the local animal feed suppliers had bicarb in 25 kg bags. The price comparison at the time was around 2.50€ for 400g food grade in the supermarket or 14€ for 25 kg in the feed suppliers – no contest.

The bicarb has got a little lumpy over time but a quick wiz in the liquidiser soon sorted that. It’s something I would have done anyway as one difference I noticed between this bicarb and the food grade one is that the animal one is a little coarser.

 

Then I stirred together 1 cup of bicarb with 1 cup of corn flour and a couple of drops of lavender oil and put into wide mouthed jars.

And as you can see, it makes quite a lot of powder.

I was a bit dubious about relying solely on it so started off only using it on days I was working at home.  I just use my fingers to apply it so it’s a bit dusty but no more so than talcum powder.  I was really pleasantly surprised to find it worked extremely well.  It is a deodorant not an antiperspirant so you do still sweat – essential on really hot days. 

The only thing that I could vaguely be classed as a problem is that the first batch I made, which probably had a little more corn flour in it, did leave a light yellow stain,(from the corn flour) on my underwear.  Nothing dramatic but it was there, but it washed out really easily even in a cool wash.

One unexpected side effect I’ve found is that it also seems to discourage the aoutas, (harvest mites or chiggers), and that is something worth its weight in gold as anyone who has suffered from them will tell you.

Losing Trust in Mega-Organisations.

For a long time I naively believed government and large companies were ethically bound to protect me, the consumer, but experience and the resulting rapidly increasing cynicism, lead me to now think otherwise.

There are just so many scandals; the recent horsemeat as beef for one. The real problem wasn’t so much that horsemeat was being used as that the meat was not traceable and therefore no-one could know what was in the meat or whether it was fit for human consumption.

This struck home here in France because only a year or two before, (I think that’s the correct timescale – time dilates a bit these days!), it was discovered that meat labelled unfit for human consumption was exported to another country where it had been processed, supplied with false origin documents and then sold back to France as food for human consumption. The result was an outbreak of Listeria – I was one of the people who suffered and it was not pleasant. I can only say that my consumption of raw milk and unpasteurised cheeses over my lifetime probably helped me a lot. I have undoubtedly ingested a mild dose of the bacteria over time and would have a slight immunity.

Mega companies are just there to make as much money as they can out of you, the consumer, and as long as you don’t die straight away from using or eating their product they will uses as cheap an ingredient, or labour or processes for that matter, as they can to maximise their profits.

The governments, who you would think are there to protect you, are made up of politicians who are only elected to that office on a very short term. They have no interest in the long term in so far as it effects you the consumer. Added to that, a lot of them are looking to their futures; when they are voted out they will need another job and a nice place on the board of a mega company will do very nicely thank you!

In a similar vein to the food companies are the drugs companies. There are lots of ethical arguments as to whether life-saving drugs should be rationed out depending on your income and ability to pay but I’m not going into that here. I’m more interested in the contrived market of cosmetics and non-essential drugs.

I watched a really interesting programme lately – ‘The men who made us spend’, BBC 2/Open University, where they highlighted the companies ‘dilemma’. If the product they produce cures you, you no longer have a need for it and therefore don’t buy it. So what they needed was something that all of us can get but doesn’t need curing and we can be persuaded to repeatedly purchase an over-the-counter treatment.

Indigestion or heartburn fall nicely into this category; it’s something we are very likely to get sometime, we all eat on the run and in this time of overconsumption we frequently over-indulge and our bodies complain. Enter the treatment, we can now continue with our destructive over-consumption and mask the warning signs given out by our bodies. Added to that, I read somewhere, but sadly can’t remember where, that frequent and regular uses of these anti-acid compounds causes the stomach to over produce acid as it vainly tries to return the acid balance in the stomach to what nature intended. This over production causes more heartburn so we take evermore anti-acid product and the pharmaceutical companies show even higher profits ad infinitum.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to return to a world where a small scratch is likely to turn septic and kill you, (although with our overuse of antibiotics we may be closer to that than we would like to think), but I do really resent being looked at as an object to be milked of money just to fill the wallets of a few others especially as their ‘benign’ treatments can turn out to be anything but that.

Case in point being Radium. After it was discovered by Marie Curie, it was hailed as a cure all and put into everything; the effects of radiation poising not becoming clear until much later. Closer to me is the use of aluminium salts in deodorant/antiperspirants.

I grew up at the time these were placed on the market. The fear of Body Odour (BO) was then instilled in us – OK it’s not pleasant to be near someone with BO – but also the fear of sweating, a perfectly natural process which is essential to our health. Riding to the rescue came the pharmaceutical companies with their perfectly safe product containing high levels of aluminium salts. Now, 40 years down the line these ‘safe’ products are linked to the increase in dementia. Short term they cause no problem but it’s not in a company’s interest to do long term studies. They want instant profits.

So these days I’m sadly far more cynical about what I’m marketed and look at more ways of controlling what I eat or apply to myself.