Papaya Juice - Cure for Dengue

My Mum has just sent me an email with testimonies on how Papaya Juice can help to ease the sufferings of dengue patients. It is amazing but true.

The recipe

Ingredient:

1. Raw Papaya Leaves

Method:

1. Clean 2 pieces of raw papaya leaves.


2. Pound and squeeze the juice out with a filter cloth.

You will only get one tablespoon per leaf. So, take two tablespoons per serving once a day. Do not boil or cook or rinse with hot water, it will lose its strength. Use only the leafy part and no stem or sap. It is very bitter and you have to swallow it like Wong Low Kat.

Within few days, the platelet count of the dengue patient will start to increase, and the fever will subside.

It seems that the papaya juice is also good when one is having sore throat.

Blend them and squeeze the juice! It's simple and miraculously effective!!

Cooking disaster

(Slightly overdue…)

Tuesday, 30 October 2007
I took leave to take care of Jordan because the babysitter was away. I decided to cook porridge for him – brown rice with carrot, potato and tomato. I used a different pot which is smaller than the one I normally use.

While he was sleeping, I cut everything and started to boil the porridge. I didn’t really stir much in between. Later, I stirred hard so that the porridge would not stick to the pot. I didn’t realize that the porridge is already burnt. When I wanted to serve to Jordan, I realized that there’s a lot of black stuff. No matter where I scoop, the black stuff was there. When I scooped the bottom, I realized the damage – the porridge is burnt!

I scooped as careful as I can and eventually managed to get a bowl for Jordan with no black charcoal. Unfortunately, Cheeky boy rejected the porridge.

I tried to cook again for dinner but this time with potato only because I ran out of the rest of the ingredients. Cheeky boy refused to eat as well.

What a disaster!


Saturday, 3 November 2007
For lunch, I cooked tuna pasta.

Ingredients:
1 packet of Pasta
2 cans of Ayam Brand Tuna Chunks in water
1 can of Tesco Healthy Living Spaghetti sauce (recommended by Selvi through Aunty Sue)

Method:
Boil the pasta for about 10 minutes with a bit of salt
(Unfortunately, no olive oil to keep the pasta from sticking)
Mix the tuna and sauce together and cook

Serving:
Add sauce to pasta.

It tasted ok. Seng Chor even had 3 servings. Why was it a disaster? Everyone except Jordan ate. How sad! He ate only a few scoops. Sob! Sob!


Saturday, 24 November 2007
Once again, I cooked lunch for the family. It was a very simple meal – ABC soup and rice. According to the babysitter, Jordan takes rice and soup everyday. He loved the soup that my mum cooked for him when we were in KK. He drank quite a lot soup, and ate soupy rice. That gives me the confidence to cook the ABC soup for him. Coincidentally, my sister was craving for ABC soup the previous day.

Early in the morning, before 7:30 am, Seng Chor got up and went to the market at Section 17. I asked my sister to write a shopping list for him. My creative sister even drew pictures of the vegetable next to the name.

The shopping list:
- Carrot
- Potato
- Tomato
- Big onion
- Drumsticks

Seng Chor bought 4 carrots, 3 potatoes, 4 tomatoes, 3 big onions and 6 drumsticks.

I prepared the chicken first. I removed the skin, and then boiled all 6 drumsticks in a big pot for about half an hour.

Next, I cut everything except 1 potato (3 is probably too many), and added them to the pot. The whole process took about 2 hours – from cutting until the soup was ready. Thankfully, Jordan was still asleep and I could prepare the food peacefully.

At about 10:45 am, I cooked the rice.

Jordan woke up before 12 noon. So, I scooped some rice into his bowl and mix it with the soup and some carrot. It was still hot. I was too anxious to feed him that I didn’t allow the soup to cool down completely. So, the first spoon was too hot for him and he cried a bit. Poor boy! He didn’t even want to taste the second spoon anymore. Even after it was cooled down, he still refused to eat. Eventually, he ate only 3 scoops, and at night, drank a bit of soup. How disappointing!

Well, once again, the rest of the family enjoyed the soup very much. The whole pot was finished. So, I will be cooking the same thing again this weekend but I am going to add fresh corn. Jordan enjoyed fresh corn at the buffet steamboat lunch. He held one and ate the whole thing happily. Hopefully, he will eat this weekend.

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Whenever I cook, I always have Jordan in mind. I want to cook for him and see him finishing up the food. Even though all the rest of the family enjoyed the food, it’s not satisfying. When he was younger, he used to eat whatever I cooked even though it was tasteless but not anymore nowadays. Hopefully, one day, I can see him finish up the food that I cooked for him again.

Simplest Recipe for ORAL REHYDRATION SOLUTION

(Extracted from the Time magazine, Oct 16, 2006)

Simplest Recipe for ORAL REHYDRATION SOLUTION (ORS)

A fistful of sugar + A large pinch of salt + (dissolved in) a jug of clear water and administered gradually

(Eight teaspoons of sugar + one teaspoon of salt + one litre of water)


SURVIVING DIARRHEA

1. Oral Rehydration treatment can reverse dehydration in more than 90% of patients, even in cases of the sever diarrhea caused by bugs like rotavirus and cholera.



2. When the solution reaches the small intestine, the sodium-glucose co-transport pathway moves sugar from the hollow part of the intestine (lumen) into its mucosal lining (epithelium) through the villi, small fingerlike projections on the intestinal wall. "It's like having a chemical needle in the intestinal tract," says William Greenough, a professor of medicine at John Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland, and a former director of ICDDR (INTERNATIONAL CENTRE for DIARRHOEAL DISEASE RESEARCH).



3. Sugar's chemical properties allow salt to be absorbed more efficiently. The salt then promotes the absorption of water into the capillaries within the intestinal walls, which carry the water and electrolytes to other parts of the body and restore fluid balance.

(Please note ready-mixed sugar-salt packets are sold at pharmacies. A retired nurse told my Mum that a few years back, some friends who climbed Mt. Kinabalu took several packets with them in cases of leg cramps.)