Adventures in other cultures:

I'm volunteering for a youth group that is run by two women who are of British-Caribbean heritage - it's a treat.  Today, I was in the kitchen making Indian food with one of them, M, along with another volunteer, an Indian woman.  We were talking about food that we still make from our countries of origin and M mentioned two things I had never heard of.  One was Ackee, a fruit that they scramble like eggs for breakfast.  It looks like this:

(source)

...and it is prepared like this:

(source)

And also apparently you can only get it canned in the UK but you just pluck it off of a tree in whatever part of the Caribbean my co-worker is from.  

And the second thing: Guinness Punch.  Which sounds wonderful!!

12 oz. Guinness

170 g sweetened condensed milk

1 tsp vanilla essence

pinch nutmeg

pinch cinnamon

milk to taste

60 ml white rum (optional)

(modified from this source)

It sounds lethal and great!!

Also, my Indian co-worker was talking about a big natural beauty brand in India called Shahnaz Hussain.  Specifically she has a cream for the face that involves Turmeric!  As in, the super-yellow spice!  A friend of my co-worker spread it on her face and had a yellow face for 12 hours afterwards but she said she had great results (?).  And my coworker also said that (which wikipedia agrees) "Staining oneself with turmeric is believed to improve the skin tone and tan." And wikipedia also says, "Some research shows compounds in turmeric to have anti-fungal and anti-bacterial properties, however, curcumin is not one of them.^[18]"