Cooked Lettuce And Snails

Garden, Recipes, , , , ,

DSC02226 I found this 1/2 inch wide snail on some lettuce.  I vaguely remembered having heard of some rather devastating parasites that can be present in snails in some alternate forms.

DSC02225 Snails are a common gardening problem, and so I decided to cook my lettuce, to be 100% sure that we do not catch any theoretical  parasitic beasties.  I have not seen that snails eat parsley, cilantro, oregano, or marjoram.  In fact these seem to discourage creepy crawlies on nearby plants.  I could find that snails are very common in Texas gardens, and I’ve seen them myself.  I could find no place where snails in Texas gardens are stated to be dangerous online.  Until I find otherwise, I am going to be careful and cook or at least peal raw vegetables from our garden.

The other reason that I cooked the lettuce, is that most of it is old and bitter, even if not bolted.

Here are the keywords I googled to find  the link to the recipe which I used for our Stir Fry Lettuce:  Chinese Stir-Fry Lettuce With Garlic  Recipe .  Rhonda Parkinson, recipe author, tells us that the Chinese always cook their vegetables.  When I think about it, this seems to be my experience.  This five star recipe worked even with our bitter old lettuce!

 

 

Lettuce, Bolting and Bitterness

Garden, , ,

DSC02215 I was surprised to see a new lettuce bolted.  I brought it in, and found that it was not really the newly planted lettuce seed which had bolted, but rather it was an offshoot of an earlier harvested plant put into the ground last fall.  You can see the tall bolted lettuce is an offshoot of a cut off plant.  Right next to it is a shorter, more condensed, normal, newly seeded lettuce plant.  It is not an offshoot of the cut off plant.

This clearly showed that the older lettuce, which had been exposed to cold bolted.  In another set of harvested lettuces (not shown), it was clear that last fall’s plants which survived and are growing in early April, are bitter, whereas the fresh, spring planted lettuce that is now growing, is not bitter.  THe truly new, spring planted lettuce has not bolted yet.  It was new shoots from last fall’s lettuce which bolted!

Growing any garden utilizes energy from the sun.  Homegrown saves trips to the store, if not money.   It is good to learn what one can do with one’s seeds, soil, water, and sunshine!

Autism

Health, ,

DSC02237  You have probably heard of autism, a neurodevelpmental disorder in which children have impaired social interactions, is now closer to being understood. This report in the the March 8, 2014 issue of Science News  relays the Feb 7 Science  information that the diuretic bumetamide, already reported to help at least some autistic children, prevented autism from developing in rodent models of the disease, when pregnant rodents were given the diuretic one day before the rodent pups were born.

Here is the sequence of preventive events as elucidated in the rodent models:

  1. The diuretic reduces prenatal pup brain chloride.
  2. The lower chloride levels permit a  a GABA functional reversal.  Prenatally, GABA is an excitatory  neurotransmitter, whereas after birth, GABA is a calming neurotransmitter.
  3. Too much chloride prevents the GABA functional switch from happening during birth, and leaves the rodent pup brain in a hyper-excitable, immature condition.
  4. It is way to early to try this on people.   However, this is a very promising result, which will hasten forward progress in the areas of autism prevention and treatment.

Any way to personally or societally become more efficient,  including ways to prevent and offset any health issues ultimately saves all of us energy and fossil fuel use.