This month’s Five Favorites topics focus on garden safety, properly washing produce, the many uses of cinnamon, new uses for pasta, and threats to 10 foods with climate change.
Pet Safe Garden – We all want to keep our pets safe year round, however, with summer gardens in full swing, this blog has some very important information you need to know if you have pets.
How to Wash Vegetables – Washing the produce we eat (whether from the grocery store, farmer’s market, or backyard) is a must! The link is a short video with several tips on washing vegetables. Good reminder!
Cinnamon – Many people know that cinnamon has benefits other than adding flavor to a recipe. Check out these 10 Benefits. And then there are gardening tip using cinnamon. The link takes you to six reasons to use cinnamon in your garden to repel bugs, defeat fungus, heal sick plants, and more!
Pasta Straws – Pasta saves the day! Restaurants are trying to cut down on plastic and waste materials and are turning to pasta. The short video is quite revealing.
10 Foods That Might Disappear if Temperatures Keep Rising (climate change) – Kill me now if the first three on this list are eliminated!!
If this is your first visit to the Five Favorites here’s the backstory and a few prior posts to check out that may be of interest:
If you are Italian or know Italians, you may be familiar with an “Italian minute,” which typically is nothing that resembles a minute, it’s more like 20 minutes or maybe even up to an hour. I remember as a kid whenever we visited relatives the “goodbyes” could last an hour and that was only saying goodbye to a few people.
When in Rome a few years ago we stopped at a quaint sidewalk Trattoria for lunch. We had ordered a liter of wine and the waiter wanted to take our order before we had our first sip. (I’m sure he thought we were “typical Americans.”) I asked him in my best Italian to come back in cinque minuti (five minutes). He asked if that was an Italian five minutes. I said yes! Well, he went into a whole dialogue about how he would have time to go home, take a shower, watch a little soccer, and then come back to the restaurant and take our order. I agreed – which made him laugh. After all, we wanted time to sit, relax, drink our wine, and people watch before enjoying a wonderful Italian lunch. We enjoyed Mimo (the waiter) so much, we had several more meals at that Trattoria while in Rome.
I often fondly think of the Italian cinque minuti experiences I’ve had and decided to create my Five Favorites in Five Minutes (Italian: cinque minuti) was born and incorporated into this blog. One of the first posts: A Few Favorite Things. Eventually, I had a logo created and around the first of every month I post a very random list of five favorites. Today is my monthly post of five things I like to share that I think will interest you as much as they did me. If you missed the tips and favorite things from past blogs, here are a few of the first posts: Fiddler On The Roof, Handy Dandy Tips & Resources, A Little Bit of This.