Little notes from Heather and Martin

I rather like sauerkraut and enjoy making it from time to time.  The other day, someone wanted to know how to do it.  Here's what I told them :-)
Chop cabbage quite finely (I use the grater function on my food processor, but otherwise cut it as fine as you can by hand).  Measure it by packing it down tightly into some kind of measuring cup/bowl, then put it into a bowl that fits it with lots of room to spare.  Add one dessert spoon salt per 2 cups (packed) of cabbage and toss to mix it well.

Pack it tightly into wide-mouthed jars.  I use 1L glass jars (like mason jars) and one big cabbage fills 3-4 of them.  Put something into the mouth of each jar that's fairly rigid and goes right across the surface of the cabbage.  I use lids from honey pots - the kind of lid that's a bit flexible and kind of peels off the container that it comes on.  Here in NZ you get that kind of lid on containers of honey, yoghurt and icecream.  You want something a bit flexible so you can poke it t…

This is a super-long post: in no way a 'little note'!  However, if you do have time to read it through and comment on it I'd be very appreciative: this is stuff I'm trying to think through and I value the contributions of my community in helping me do that :-)
[Updated 19/7/2014 to say most Christians are pro-life, not pro-choice.  It's good to know that at least one reader got far enough through to be surprised at that statement.]

The Green Party recently released its policy on abortion, which basically consists of wanting abortion to be available to any woman who wants it.  You can read the full text towards the bottom of this page.

My initial response was twofold:
'Good on them'.  Our current abortion system is a huge mess.  Nominally you can only get an abortion if the pregnancy causes serious danger to the woman's life, mental health or physical health; if there is a foetal abnormality; if the pregnancy was as the result of incest by a parent or gu…

My PhD supervisor was interviewed on Nine to Noon yesterday.  If you'd like an idea of what I was working on back then, listen here.  It's about half an hour.

Someone I know who eats a fairly standard Kiwi diet has been advised to lose some weight.  I have found eating low GI food has been really helpful for stabilising my weight.  This is because the sugar in low GI food is released to your bloodstream much slower than that in high GI food, so a low GI food will sustain you for longer than an high GI food that contains the same amount of calories.  I thought this person might find low GI eating helpful in achieving their weight-loss goal, but I didn't want to advise them to simply eat the way I do: my low GI eating occurs within the parameters of my preferred pseudo Asian/Indian diet, rather than a more 'normal' Kiwi diet.  Here is the background information on low GI eating I came up with, along with the pointers I came up with on how to lower the GI of a fairly standard Kiwi diet.  Maybe you'll find it helpful, too!
The GI of a food is a measure of how quickly your body breaks it down to get at the sugar.  The bigge…