Can you imagine going to your doctor’s appointment and giving earwax instead of blood?
Someone is really thinking out of the box here:
Author: Tina Rice
Max Deserves the Best 🐶
Max is our 15-year-old Chihuahua. We want him to live long and healthy, so a few years ago, we started feeding him “Fresh Pet” dogfood, which is sold in a refrigerator case at the grocery store. It’s kind of expensive.
My husband is a chef, and one day, he decided to try and recreate the recipe. It worked great! Now, we create a big batch every 6 weeks or so and freeze it in sandwich-size baggies. It saves money and guarantees that Max is getting the best food possible.
I thought it might be nice to share this, just in case you’d like to do this for your dog, too. Here’s how:
- In a small pot, cook 2 cups of rice. I’m using organic “Field Day” basmati.
- In a large pot, brown 3 pounds of ground turkey. Add a sprinkling of turmeric and a tiny dash of salt. You could also use ground chicken, beef, lamb, pork… or mix them. Don’t drain the fat.
- Cut 3 or 4 carrots into small bites OR drain and add 1 can of cooked carrots.
- Add a can of pumpkin (stock up in the fall) OR 3 to 4 peeled, diced sweet potatoes.
- Add a can of green peas.
- Add diced butternut squash.
- Chop broccoli into tiny bites and add that, too. (Unless your dog is much larger than Max and has all his teeth!)
Simmer all of these together until the carrots are soft.
Add rice until it looks like a good mix. I ended up adding about 3/4ths of the rice I had cooked to this amount.
After I combined all the elements, we were concerned that the carrots were still too hard, so I added 3 cups of water and let it simmer for a while, maybe an hour.
After most of the water evaporated out, we move the dogfood to baking trays so that it can cool.
Once cooled, we bag it and seal up the bags, stacking them like bricks in the freezer.
Max loves helping with the clean up. 🩷🐕
The bags are easy to thaw … just pull one out and set it in the sink for a couple of hours. I usually put a little warm water over it when I feed him so that it warms up and makes a little “gravy.”
Car T
I haven’t written in for-evah! Just read this article and wanted to park it somewhere useful:
https://www.wfla.com/news/researchers-try-bold-new-approach-in-race-to-treat-autoimmune-diseases/
Now Playing
What’s on my Libby playlist these days? It’s Between Two Kingdoms by Suleika Jaouad.
It’s the story of her college life, young adulthood, and acute myeloid leukemia. A story of survival.
At the moment, I’m in the chapter where she goes through a bone marrow transplant. It is a grueling and isolating process.
Two of my support group friends have gone through this in the past year. 💔
Hand Work
You may have noticed “hand work” on my weekly tracker.
As a person who has worked in an online/virtual format for many years, I long ago recognized the need to balance it out with real, tangible work – work that yields real product you can touch.
Years ago, I read about how grieving women tend to find relief in repetitive tasks such as knitting, crocheting, gardening, saying the rosary, etc. Little movements, over and over, with beautiful and useful results. This repetition helps us process grief and life’s upheavals.
The person doing it is awake, aware, engaged… but the mind can wander too.
It’s a form of meditation.
The mind enters a sort of “dream” state, and in it, ideas and thoughts can pop up. Some good, some bad. The right brainwave environment for a person to sort out their feelings and get comfortable with uncomfortable stuff.
We all need that, right?
I learned how to sew as a kid but didn’t do it too often. But in 2020, suddenly everyone needed a mask. I pulled out the old Kenmore and went to work.
Some of the early ones were sewn really poorly, but to my amazement, people kept asking for them and even paying for them! And I started to see them “out in the wild.” And then my awesome friend Megan sent me a ton of fabric from her studio in Washington. And I kept going.
I gave myself permission to practice and get better. And I also started learning how to crochet, using YouTube as my school.
So anyway, along the way, I made a little patchwork denim bag, and my daughter’s friends went crazy! They each wanted one… and then I got the opportunity to put my bags at Melo Coffee Kitchen as artwork! Whaaaatttt???
And they’ve been selling!
I’m a little bit excited… Can you tell? 😊
Lettuce Be Friends
Knock knock.
Who’s there?
Lettuce.
Lettuce who?
Lettuce be friends.
I think I read that on a Valentine’s Day card… probably in grade school.
Anyway, friends, I wanted to share this awesome organic lettuce we’ve been buying from Aldi.
The box is crammed with organic lettuce varieties like red and green leaf lettuce, red and green oak, red and green chard, Lolla Rosa, tango, spinach, arugula, beet greens, frisee, radicchio, mizuna, kale, red mustard greens, tatsoi, and collards. I’ve never even heard of some of these.
It’s prewashed, and its a full pound.
It’s a good deal, though I can’t tell you the exact price I paid. #worthit
Poopy Love Story (and Another Biome Breakthrough)
This is the most charming love story ❤️. Imagine falling in love with someone who is suffering (and I mean that in the true sense of the word “suffering”) from bipolar disorder and bouts of psychosis, doing research on your own to find a possible solution, experimenting and then finding a durable cure. Imagine that!
And it all comes down to poo 💩.
It is truly fascinating, and I urge you to watch for yourself:
Another Biome Breakthrough!
Check out this amazing research from the University of Florida and Trinity College Dublin:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2025/08/250821004244.htm
Queuosine is a rare micronutrient crucial for brain health, memory, stress response, and cancer defense. It is “a vitamin-like micronutrient that we can’t make ourselves but can only get from food and our gut bacteria.”
“For over 30 years, scientists have suspected that there had to be a transporter for this nutrient, but no one could find it,” said Valérie de Crécy-Lagard, a UF/IFAS microbiology and cell science distinguished professor and department associate chair, as well as one of the study’s principal investigators. “We’ve been hunting for it for a long time. This discovery opens up a whole new chapter in understanding how the microbiome and our diet can influence the translation of our genes.”
Very iteresting! We are starting to map the microbiota.
Sunscreen
Yesterday, my husband and daughter went to an outdoor event during the heat of the day. A conversation about sunscreen popped up, and so I pulled out my Yuka app to check our choices.
Here’s the first choice:
Here’s the second choice. After seeing the score, I threw it in the trash! And that’s a shame because it was pricey.
Here’s the third choice. Winner winner chicken dinner!
CLL brings with it a higher than average risk of skin cancer, so I did the research a while back (that is, I stood in Target and scanned all the choices with Yuka). Native had the best ratings that I could find.
For the record, hats and shirts are my preferred “sunscreen.”
We Can Pickle That!
Just wanted to share. Bubbie’s is a brand of fermented foods, and we have tried a couple of their products. They taste great and are fermented so you get a little probiotic boost.
I was thinking the other day that, if every deli and hamburger joint in America started using Bubbie’s pickles, what an improvement we would have in our overall gut health.
The Cancer Canary 