Cooking Lab - Sukkot 5770

2009-10-04T13:17:00.009+02:00

This year we had filled peppers and courgettes for our festive Sukkot supper.

Helping me prepare our supper wasn't only a fun experience for Lizzy, but also counted as a cooking lab for her Health and Nutrition course.

Lizzy is becoming quite the expert on peeling and chopping onions and garlic.

To me fell the task of hollowing out the courgettes and peppers.

Of course, if you don't want to leave your kitchen looking like a warzone after the cooking's done, you'll have no choice but to clean up as you go along.

Yes, it was a lot of work, but the results were well worth our efforts. We had a delicious Sukkot supper.

Chag Sameach!

PS: I just posted the recipe of my Filled peppers and courgettes, and Fausia's potatoes to my vegan recipe blog.
You'll also find a older recipe for garlic dressing out there.

Homeschooling Pictures

2009-05-31T15:27:00.004+02:00

Home Education makes learning fun.

Physical education is a very important part of the homeschooling curriculum.

A mouse in the house. Our cat Shimi "gave" it to us on Mother's Day.

Post Mortem

2009-03-22T21:40:00.012+01:00

Warning: Not for the faint hearted! (I'm NOT kidding.)

Below are the pictures of the post mortem our vet performed on our three-year old cat, who died of kidney failure.

My apologies for the bad quality of some of the pictures. My camera decided to give me real hard time.
(Well, OK, I'm just a lousy photographer.)

Preparing for the post mortem, or necropsy, as it's called in animals.

Not the nicest sight, to see your own beloved pet lying there like that, but we did want to be there during the necropsy. I guess scientific interest won over emotion.

As can be seen here, Tika still had quite a bit of belly-fat left, despite all the vomiting she'd been doing and her refusal to eat during what turned out to be the final stages of her illness

Marleen (the vet) is pointing at one of Tika's kidneys, which sadly cannot be seen on this picture. Clearly visible on this picture: the bladder (front left) and greater omentum (top right).

The spleen.

Abdominal cavity with greater omentum, colon, small intestines and bladder.

Abdominal cavity

Tika's liver was quite diseased. Due to her severe lack of appetite and frequent vomiting, she had developed Feline Hepatic Lipidosis. The yellow discolouration of the liver is clearly visible in these pictures.

I forgot what this was... sorry.

Pancreas

Kidney. There was severe nephritis in both kidneys and they had shrunk to about one third of their original size.

Marleen is showing us how big the kidneys should have been.
Clearly visible (not to me, but to the medically educated) is the scar tissue in both kidneys. To put it simple, they consisted mainly of scar tissue, and hardly any functional kidney tissue had been left.

Renal pelvis

Renal cortex

Ah, well... we're opening the thorax.

Heart

Heart, lung and ribs

the heart once more

Not sure about this. Gall bladder?

Aorta

And still more pictures of the heart

Right ventricle

trachea

trachea and larynx

My personal favourite: larynx with vocal folds.
Simply beautiful!

Vocal folds

Appendix and colon

Thank you, Marleen, for everything you did for us and our sweet little Tika.
Thank you too, for the great learning experience you provided us with by performing the necropsy, allowing us to be there with you, and the way you explained everything to us.

Home-Ed Picture Blog

Cooking Lab - Sukkot 5770

Homeschooling Pictures

Post Mortem