I’ve found myself in Chiang Mai, Thailand for a three week conference. With my husband’s new job comes a short course learning about how to live in  a different culture, balance work and family, deal with expectations, conflict resolution and a host of other useful topics.

One thing I had determined to do was a Thai cooking course. The deal I found? $30 (1000 baht) for pick up and drop off at your hotel, a tour of a local market, cook 6 different dishes of your choice at an organic farm in the country side, tour of the farm and a cookbook. The distance the dollar goes here is unreal. It was amazing value for an amazing day.

Here’s my day in pictures…

 Fong was our lovely host, driver and instructor. Here she is explaining different types of noodles. This one she explained feels like an alien. The yellow tofu is coloured using turmeric. It’s not for the flavour, just for looks.

 

Fong then gave us all hats to wear and we started our tour of the farm. We walked along a cute path and stopped in some shade as Fong told us about the ingredients she had in her basket. Most of the ingredients I already knew of, but I now know what fresh ginseng looks like (also know as Root Fingers). 

For the first time I was able to see what rice looked like close up. Much like wheat really, it just grows  in water.   After the tour we started the cooking course. All of the dishes started with preparation, then cooking on the wok, and then eating. 

 The flavours were incredible. I can’t recommend this course highly enough. Common comments among the group was that it was so quick, easy and obviously delicious (I’ll add extremely delicious).

 I highly recommend this course! You will come away with a repertoire of Thai recipes to impress your family and friends with, and the confidence to cook it to perfection. 

I popped by the markets yesterday and practically squealed when I saw some mamas selling flowers. There were so many to choose from, but I settled on a bunch of lotus flowers. The aroma was distinct, rich and fruity.

Mark asked where I was going to put them (as we’re still living out of a suitcase until our container arrives). I already knew!

Mark found a bombshell in our backyard – most likely dating back to WWII when the US had a base here at Vanuatu. Fortunately for the Ni Vatus, while fighting was fierce in the South Pacific, it didn’t reach the shores of Vanuatu.

I didn’t mention that the bunch of flowers cost $2 – another reason to visit the world’s happiest country!

I was stressed as I walking through Bon Marche (the supermarket near our house). The prices were extortionate to say the least! A 2kg bottle of sun dried tomatoes was about $60. My only hope was that the famous Port Vila markets I had stalked as well as I could on Google before I moved here last Sunday were as good and as cheap as they looked.

We landed on Sunday, the only day the 24-hours markets are closed. Monday was a public holiday. Finally Tuesday came and so did the amazing markets that sent my head into a whirl! Imagine walking into an organic market, with fresh fruits and vegetables and walking out with as much produce as you can carry for less than the cost of a foot-long sub. Imagine no longer – this market is this place!

I didn’t take my camera to the markets, but here’s some of the product that I brought home.

In my bag: 1 bunch of mint, 1 bunch of basil, bag of passionfruit (granadilla), bunch of peanuts, spring onion, galanga, bag of limes, 1 coconut for juice, 1 decent size bag of green beans and 1 pomelo.

Pomelo and passionfruit.

I didn’t really know what kind of coconut I was buying – as in, there are different uses depending on how old they are. This one that I bought for 60c was full of coconut water! I attempted to make some coconut milk by blending the water and flesh, but it didn’t really go milky. Next time I’ll get some older coconut that have the harder thicker flesh and blend it with the coconut water. One of my aims out here is to also concoct an awesome coconut ice cream recipe – so watch this space.

Watering some mint and basil in the hope that some roots will shoot and thus be the beginning of my herb garden.

I have no need to buy any bananas. We have about 6 huge bunches of bananas like these in our backyard.

It’s a strange event when you look out the window and see a cruise boat sailing past. I wonder if it will always be so novel. (I hear prices go up when a cruise boat is in town, so perhaps the novelty will wear off). 

p.s. Mark and I moved to Vanuatu last Sunday. We’re here for at least 4 years as he works as country director for ADRA – which is a humanitarian organisation. Out here they specialise in water retention, sanitation and are exploring the implementation of permaculture. I’m looking forward to sharing some of ADRA’s fine work out here.

In keeping with my new years resolution to be more practical this year, I’m sharing one of the best tips for home printing (ever!).

Today’s post doesn’t solve all your printing woes, but boy does this take care of a biggy – the supply and cost of ink.

Imagine having big tanks of ink sitting outside your printer with tubes feeding your cartridges an (almost) endless supply of ink. Sound like printing bliss?? Well that’s what CISS is.

How much is it? Well, for the price of a kit you’re probably looking at the cost of purchasing a set of the original brand cartridges. One website calculated I should expect to save $1200. We actually bought a DIY kit from a store in Thailand for $15 including 5 bottles of ink (about 100ml each). They were hesitant for us to buy it as it was rather tricky to set up, but Mark was insistent that he could – and he did. But it took the better half of the day (he could have saved a lot of time buying a kit that was already set up – and we wished we did).

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Before you order a CISS kit, read my tips below to save yourself some time and money:

• Make sure you buy a kit that is compatible with your printer. Not all printers can use CISS, so if you’re going to buy a printer for this purpose do your research first.
• I strongly encourage you to buy replacement ink cartridges with a compatible chip. It must have a chip otherwise you’re expected to pull if off the chip from your old cartridge and put it on the new one. (Our big mistake starting out was that we used Canon’s cartridges. It works, but the cartridges are too high so the lid doesn’t shut fully (we have shorter cartridges coming in the mail). We also have the problem that the chip is telling us the cartridge is empty – when it’s not. So we had to overwrite this by holding down the cancel button.
• Watch Youtube videos with the CISS system being installed on your printer. I have a very handy husband who I could fully trust to do this. With our printer we needed to cut some parts of the plastic inside the printer with a soldering iron – you may also have to do this with yours.
• Buy the kit assembled. You will find online lot of gear for CISS now. Buy something where you just need to put the ink in the tubs and put the new cartridges in the printer. If you buy the kit unassembled, like us, you might find there is a small opening at one of the joints which means there isn’t a vacuum anymore and ink will start leaking rapidly from your cartridge (this happened to us). We sealed the tubes using a hot glue gun which was a very tricky experience. (Plus I had no idea what was going on with the vacuum, suction, height on things, I was just an assistant doing what I was told!)

I stumbled across CISS when I was looking for “cheap ink” online. This lead me to a forum where one person mentioned CISS. Now that I’ve been using CISS for four months, I’m completely sold on the idea, and can’t ever see myself going back!

Have you been using the continuous ink supply system? What do you think? Or are you now ready to jump on board?!

☆☆☆☆ Find a CISS system for your printer on Amazon here ☆☆☆☆

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Now that you aren’t stressing about your ink supply, check out some of these awesome printables:

Mini Cake Pennant Bunting  from karaspartyideas.com

Birthday Calendar from theprettyblog.com

Alphabetical Decor from thehandmadehome.net/

& one from my archives Recipe Cards from moi.

Truth is there are over 10,000 searches on Google a month for information on how to hack an RFID cards.

RFID stands for  Radio-Frequency IDentification. While RFID is convenient, this convenience doesn’t come without a compromise to personal security. If you have a RFID bank card in your wallet, as I do, you are susceptible out in public where a scammer can simply walk past you with a scanning device in their bag and get private information to sell or use to steal your money or identity. I once read a terrible story about a lady who had her identity stolen after losing her wallet. It was unbelievable how hard it was to prove who she was, to access money, and it got to the point where she couldn’t pay rent or even buy food. This was earlier on when identity theft was new and there wasn’t any support in place for victims.

So, you could either buy a RFID wallet which cost anything from a few dollars to $40, or you could make one with some very cheap supplies you’re most likely to have at home!

The following DIY is to create a pretty case for your bank or ID RFID card. This can fit into most wallet card pockets. An alternative is to just fold aluminium to size and insert in your wallet making sure it covers the cards from either side when it’s closed. Pretty simply hey? We know this works because we’ve tried it ourselves in the supermarket and bank. When the aluminium foil is around the card – hey presto, no reading!

Download the free PDF template for the RFID case here!

Update: Just had to say, check out the first comment below to see how serious this scamming business is! 

As though the coming of Christmas took us all by surprise, guess what? Next month is February. I have some blogging goals. I make no commitments, but goals nonetheless!

What are your goals for 2013?

(Well, just a little…)

It feels like many moons ago I received an email from Popular Science asking for permission to reuse this tutorial of mine. This Christmas I received a complimentary copy of The Big Book of Hacks! It’s probably the most simple hack in the books with only half a page to show it off, but I’m still pretty chuffed that my name in printed in a glossy book!

If you’re a new mummy or expecting I highly recommend you listen to I Get to Be The One by JJ Heller. I’ve gifted this song to some new mummy friends of mine and they’ve been in tears. The song is sweet, sentimental and most of all true.

Go to “I get to be the one” on iTunes here. 

Note: To gift this song to a friend simple go to you iTunes, and click the drop down arrow next to buy, then the first option should be “Gift this Song”. $1.69 is a small price to pay to give a hug to a friend without being there. (Or an even smaller price on Amazon at .99c!)

While living in a bamboo hut surrounded by tropical diseases, germs my body wasn’t use to, and very unhygienic situations, I kept thinking, I have to write about Propolis. (What is Propolis? Patience my friend.) If you’re planning on travelling overseas where the hygiene conditions will challenge you immune system, then keep reading.

You see, I never got diarrhoea. (Which is a complete lie. I was away for 98 days living in the jungle in Thailand, and on my 4th last day I ate spaghetti that some WESTERNERS cooked, and I got the runs – ONCE!! Which is why I like to say I never got diarrhoea. Also, towards the end of the trip we were becoming more relaxed and we weren’t taking Popolis daily like we use to).

So, you see, I “never” got diarrhoea

Let me explain our situation. My husband and I decided we would help an American family that runs a school and children’s home for Karen (ku-ren) children along the border of Burma and Thailand. The family had to return to America for visas reasons and needed a couple to look after their home – which was also a children’s home. To start with we had three babies (10-months old), 2 toddlers, 3 children between 5-8 years old and 9 teenagers – all in a rotting bamboo hut. I’m not joking, this place was falling apart.

There’s just so much to say to describe the place, and even with pictures it’s hard to imagine without being there. The children are not use to washing their hands with soap after going to the toilet, they readily eat with their hands (even if it’s a curry), it is very normal for one household to share the same drinking cup (Gasp away! I still can’t get my head around that. Actually, if you want to read a newsletter I wrote on the lack of knowledge see a newsletter I wrote here). I haven’t even touched base with washing dishes or cleaning food.. I don’t want to write a novel here, and I already feel like I’m waffling big style!

During our time there, we were literally surrounded by (deep breath); diarrhoea (and I mean lots of people had it, even the locals), colds and flus (all the infants had fevers at least once while we were there – very scary), malaria, dengi fever (makes malaria look like a small itch), staph infection (scary!), worms, lice, infections on any part of the body you can imagine, children in our home with hepatitis and there’s probably more I can’t think of right now.

Now not all of these things are contagious, some are, and some come from a lack of knowledge and hygiene. We were very concerned that we would have diarrhoea while out there. We heard of other volunteers practically living on charcoal water and having sicknesses that they couldn’t shake months after returning home. We were told if you eat the food from the school cafeteria, you can expect diarrhoea for 3 months until your body gets use to it. Problem is, we weren’t long-term volunteers, we were only there for three months and didn’t have time to get use to the germs.

Our plan was simple, stay clean, cook our own food, and here’s the secret (which I can vouch for from personal experience).

Take Propolis!!

We are sure that Propolis saw us through without getting sick.

[Exception: One morning we both woke up with extremely sore throats, nothing came of it. We were at the point of exhaustion. We had sick babies and toddlers waking all through the night, and being even needier during the day. Plus cooking, cleaning, washing, and much much more.]

At the start of the trip we did eat a handful of times from the cafeteria out of necessity. We took Propolis daily, and we didn’t get sick. Other volunteers came, they ate the food from the cafeteria and guess what?? They got the runs! Not only the runs, but one of them was constantly sick with something the whole time we were there.

So, what is Propolis? My little summary of it goes something like this, “Propolis is what bees use to cocoon an intruder that dies in their hives to protect the hive from being infected, or to seal gaps in the hives from wind. It acts as a natural antibiotic.” I read somewhere that a mouse had been found in a hive cocooned in Propolis. There’s more information online, just take a look, but be very careful if you already have allergies to bees.

We hesitated to buy Propolis before we left as we just spent almost $1000 on getting shots, anti-malaria medication, and other vitamins that we needed for the trip. We decided to bite the bullet because we really didn’t want to be crippled by bad diarrhoea while we were out there.

I don’t think I’ve done a good enough job in describing our situation. So some more in point form:

• The hut had a dog. The first month was the rainy season. This dog would jump inside with its muddy feet and shake itself everywhere. So that’s normal I guess? Well, there were other dogs in this village. Who knows what dead things, or other dogs butts this dog was sniffing and transferring to me whenever it decided to lick me after rudely entering the hut.
• The toddlers had been potty trained before we got there. Their routine was taking their pants off in the hut, climbing over the rails that stop the babies from falling outside, rubbing their butts and whatever else all over these rails that people touch with their hands and sit on (yes me too, I sat on these often, but on the other end). And of course, after going to the toilet that routine was played in reverse.
• Plates that were apparently washed by the children sometimes had a small swam of fruit flies – now how clean do you think they were?
• Children would go to the toilet with no toilet paper and no soap.
• About three times I saw a tape worm on the kitchen floor. Cringe.
• Rats! Oh my, I almost forgot to mention the fresh droppings that were EVERYWHERE each morning. Every surface in the kitchen had to be wiped down before there was even room to put anything on. It wasn’t just the rats, there were spiders, ghekos, moths, and ants eating everything the previous critters left behind after their midnight snack.
• Going to the toilet. So my routine went like: sneak toilet paper in my bra, go to the squatting toilet outside (if I was really unfortunate I had to go at night, at which point my face was attacked by anything that can fly because of your head torch), do my business (hopefully I haven’t had to touch anything like the bucket to clean the toilet first because the previous customer was not so considerate – this makes getting the toilet paper out of my bra with clean hands very tricky business), use the bucket to get water out of a small tank which has a lovely wide ledge to put the bucket on. But no, for some reason the bucket is put in the water!! So you have to go fishing to get the bucket.. Flush, and even though you want to get out of there asap, you must do it slowly to avoid splatter, then step over some nasty water to leave the toilets. Such an ordeal. I became very dehydrated there, and don’t think I ever saw my pee come out clear.
• There was a lot, and so much more, but it’s starting to sound like complaints – I’m just doing my best to paint a picture. I also want to mention that all water except drinking and cooking water came from the river. When there was heavy rain the water came out brown.

With all that and more we didn’t get sick. And we should have. We constantly had toddlers and babies snotting, drooling and occasionally vomiting all over us. We were physically covered in the potential to get sick – and we didn’t!!

I highly recommend Propolis if you decide to travel. I know from past travels that I do not have a strong stomach. Even going to developed Asia countries like Singapore or Hong Kong, I still have upset tummies (actually some of the worst I think is humanly possible!). One bottle of 200 Propolis capsules cost us around $40 I think – I can’t remember for sure.

Why don’t they just teach them about hygiene,” first walk a mile, or three years in their shoes, and you’ll see how far they’ve come. Just incase the thought popped into your mind, it also popped into ours. Slowly we realised what an uphill battle it is to teach new things, to encourage the consistency when there are so many children (200), and also to fund luxuries such as toilet paper when there are more pressing needs – such as food.

I did some research and compelled a list of some quite humorous nicknames for what I call Traveller’s Diarrhoea.

Bali belly, Montezuma’s revenge, Tourista, Delhi belly, the Jamaican runs, Gandhi’s Revenge, The Rangoon Runs, Bombay Belly, Gyppy Tummy, The Cairo Two-step, Pharaoh’s Revenge, Mummy’s Tummy, Hershey Squirts (USA), Down Under Butt Chunder (Australia), Suryavarman’s Revenge, Kathmandu quickstep and Beaver fever (Canada).

My friend’s mum who highly recommended Propolis says she takes it when she goes to Europe. Even though the conditions aren’t as bad, but in some ways the food is different, and she never gets sick.

I would love to know if someone has had a similar experience with Propolis?

p.s Even with the conditions listed above, we can’t wait to go back!

You put what in where??

Have you ever come across some recipes that just seemed a little odd, but looked oh so yummy and you knew it was worth a try? On my recent hunt for healthy recipes around the internet I’ve been coming across some strange ingredients for some quite ordinary desserts we’re all familiar with. Check out my sample below and see what you think?!

Beet + Raspbeery Soft Serve. Recipe found here from The Heathy Foodie.

Toffee Pumpkin Squares. Recipe found here from Including Cake! 

Sweet Potato Brownies. Recipe found here from The Healthy Foodie.

Black Bean Chocolate Cupcakes. Recipe found here from Trials in Food.