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2 bananas, sliced
2 green apples, cored and chopped
2 red apples, cored and chopped
3 king-size Snickers bars, chopped
1/3 cup honey
8 ounces whipped topping
Mix together fruit, Snickers, and honey. Fold in whipped topping. Refrigerate until ready to serve.
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| Nancy Frawley’s award-winning Web site, www.healthyeating.net, is a useful site to bookmark, a great resource for any food-related subject. Hundreds of links to other sites take you to restaurants, sport medicine experts, food magazines, conversion charts for kitchen measurements, food pyramids, recipes, cookbooks, cooking tips, and more. Continually updated and expanded, the site is worth a frequent look. |
| It’s hard to have a favorite flower, since so many are ravishingly beautiful. (Such as peonies, with their heady fragrance and their impossibly heavy, silken blossoms; or poppies, with their translucent, papery petals. Is anything more magical than a backlit poppy?)
Anyway, to return from a flowered reverie — CALENDULAS belong in every garden. They are a modest, sunny little flower, a hardy annual that willingly reseeds itself. Known as Merrybud (Shakespeare) or pot marigold (do not confuse it with French or African marigolds, which are Tagetes, Calendula officinalis is as useful as it is beautiful, and vice versa.
Cooks starting with the ancient Greeks garnished and flavored foods with their golden petals. Calendulas colored butter and cheese, and were added to rice as "poor man’s saffron." The petals may be sprinkled into salads and omelets, or steeped as tea.
Herbalists consider calendula a rejuvenating herb. In fact, the flowers contain antiseptic, anti-fungal, and antibacterial properties that promote healing. A compress of the petals takes down the pain and swelling from insect stings and sunburn.
I’ve grown calendulas for years, and my garden is full of sturdy volunteers in shades of yellow, gold, and russet. I love to cut the flowers and combine them with anything lavender or purple. Last year I packed calendula blossoms into a canning jar, covered them with olive oil, and let them steep for a month. I strained out the blossoms and used the healing oil over the winter to soothe dry skin, especially hands and cuticles.
This spring a friend gave me seeds from an unusual calendula called ‘Geisha’, a lush, pale-gold double. Soon ‘Geisha’ will be mingling with seventh- or eighth-generation ‘Prince’ and ‘Déjà Vu’ volunteers in our garden, adding an exotic gene to the calendula pool.
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