Quote from ladybrasa
Well, those are things I'd like to do, but don't really! Ahh, time ...
I've rode a little, but definitely don't know anything about anything of horses. All the tack terms, proper care, etc. Maybe one day ... on that farm I'm dreaming about ... with a milk goat for cheese ...
I haven't made shampoo yet. What do you use as a base? I made basic bar soap twice, out of tallow I rendered from fat scrap (from Whole Foods). I didn't put any essential oils in it, though.
So if anyone reads the ingredients on a bar of soap (like Ivory) and it says "Sodium Tallowate", that just a fancified word for saponifed animal fat. You get soap by mixing tallow and sodium hydroxide. You might also see stuff like Sodium palm kernelate or sodium cocoate, and thats just the same thing, except a plant oil was used instead of tallow (Palm kernel oil and coconut oil, respectively).
You know, in case you all haven't gotten much sleep, I thought I'd bore you to it dead
And I like reading fantasy, too, though its been rather occluded by manga for a while now (shojo fantasy is awesome!). Have you read Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern? I love that series, though its technically Sci Fi, not fantasy.
And any tips on getting affordable Japanese ingredients? They're so expensive and limited choice, at least here. And what can I do with seaweed? I went nuts and bought like two bags of dried seaweed when I actually found some and you need a little for miso soup
I read the Pern cycle three or four times over the past ten years, it appeals to the most romantic part of me so much. But right now I'm more into Steven Erickson's "Malazan book of the fallen" and George R.R. Martin's "Song of ice and Fire" . Both are terrific (but it's such a long wait between the volumes
). Between those and manga, I sometimes try to go back to classical french literature and 19th to 20th centuries american authors (but my taste has changed since college and i find them harder to read than before).
As for shampoo, I didn't made it from scratch, I bought a pre-made base to which I added vegetable oils and essential oils. This
http://www.aroma-zone.com/ is the site I'm purchasing from. It's not the only one but it's the main one (although I don't know if it will help you much as the english version of the site is rather lacking in detailed information and it doesn't offer all of the products available on the french version
). Else than that, I find what I need in trade fairs. There's one every two month here solely devoted to organic products, I must admit living in a big city helps sometimes.
Same goes for japanese goods. I'm lucky enough to live near the "chinese" area so even if I have to be stubborn when looking for something specific and search through 4 to 5 different stores, I can almost always get what I want. There's this one online store I buy a few things from
http://www.japancentre.com/ but as the delivery cost is based on weight, it's only good for dried products like furikake, kombu, or katsuo. I sometime buy korean products instead of true japanese ones, some are very similar but they're really cheaper.
And I do have recipes to use seaweed in salad in one of my books but I will need some time to translate then type them as they're in french. I prepare this sometimes for myself (my husband absolutely refuses to touch it
) but i must admit that the smell isn't one of my favourite. Basically it's lightly blanched seaweed, lettuce or cucumber with shrimps or salmon (smoked or raw) with a dressing made of rice vinegar, soy sauce, sugar and ginger.
Hope this will help.
And to all of those who don't share the same interests, sorry for the long boring post
