Nous faisons le BBQ de temps en temps mais toujours la meme chose. Avec ce livre nous pensons avoir envie de le faire plus souvent car maintenant nous aurons beaucoup d'idees nouvelles a essayer et nous pourrons tre l'envie de nos amis. Et surtout nous n'allons plus acheter des viandes marinees au supermarche. Les recettes sont simples mais beaucoup vaulent la peine d'essayer. Le seule bemol est le fait que ce livre est une traduction et il utilise des ingredients qu'on ne peut pas trouver dans le marche comme la sauce aux prunes asiatique, le Chester, la gelee au citron, le jus de limette, creme aigre, babeurre, etc. Je trouve que quand on traduit un livre de recettes on devrait toujours donner des remplacements pour des produits difficile a procurer ou qui n'existent pas! Sinon un tres bon livre!

I have just finished reading this book and have only tried a few recipes but I am sure that I will use it a lot in the future. Most recipes are very straight forward to make with ingredients we all have at home. I have other books on the same subject but I was forever trying to find ingredients you can only buy on the Internet and the postage here to France is outrageously expensive. Not with this one as for most recipes I don't even need to go to the shops! Just before I started writing this review I put some pineapple on my face (it did sting a bit but Raisa does say that it does, so I suppose this is ok). This morning I tried a bit of tomato juice on my face and a few days ago my husband and I tried the conditioner with honey and apple cider vinegar.

The downside of this book is that the author is not always very accurate. For example, there are a few recipes with aspirin but she never says the strength. Does she mean just any aspirin? My husband tried the recipe against dandruff, shampoo with aspirin. She mentions two but for how much shampoo? As his hair is very short I advised him to use only one. Canola oil, no idea what that is but I suppose it is no something we have here in Europe so I will probably use sunflower oil instead. 2 tablespoons of Aloe Vera, does she mean gel or juice? Also the tip to combine champagne with your regular shampoo was a bit lost on me. Does she mean that one should combine the shampoo and the champagne in a bottle and use it over a period of time? And why shampoo again afterwards? The idea is interesting but she should be a bit more precise! Also, lavender oil, does she mean essential oil or some other kind of lavender oil? 1 teaspoon of essential oil seems a bit much as usually one only uses a few drops. She sometimes doesn't precise how long one should leave a product in the hair or skin or how long one can keep a mixture. I have no idea whether there is a way to contact her.... I also wonder whether it is a good idea to use beer to keep your eyebrows in shape as she says that if use it in your hair and then go in the sun you will get highlights. Will it highlight the eyebrows too?

The stories about the grandmother failed to impress me because all the documentaries I have seen about older women in Eastern Europe show that beauty was very far removed from their everyday reality! Maybe the stories are true, I don't know or maybe they were made up in order to enhance the book. The whole appearance of the book is rather old-fashioned but... it does what it says on the tin so I am happy enough! All in all this is maybe the best book on natural beauty treatments I have bought so far. Not that the others are bad but the difficult to find, expensive ingredients make them less appealing!

J'ai acheté ce petit livre très bon marché car les recettes me semblaient très bonnes et j'adore les terrines. Je n'ai pas encore essayé les recettes mais je l'ai lu et je veux essayer la plupart ! J'adore les terrines pendant l'été et ces recettes me semblent très simples ! Je l'ai acheté surtout pour la recette du foie gras en terrine (mon autre livre de terrines et foi gras n'en a pas) et le fois gras confit. Aussi la technique est importante. Ce livre donne des conseils de congélation, la fraîcheur, les ingrédients de base mais surtout comment dénerver le fois gras !

I bought this old book very cheap but I am glad I did because it contains very easy to make, mostly cheap recipes of natural beauty products. I still have to find some of the ingredients but many of the recipes will be made with what I have in my pantry. There are recipes for Cleansers and Skin Tonics, Problem Solvers and Skin Savers, Moisturizers and Skin Creams, Anti-agers, Bath and Body Care, Hand and Food care, Herbal Hair Care, a Glossary, a reasonably good Index, a chapter about Essential Oils (could be a bit more comprehensive as Liz gives hints about what you can use them for but doesn't really explain how you should use them). In the beginning there is also a chapter about the ingredients you will need so that you know what the author is talking about without having to Google every less usual ingredient, how you can test for allergies and a bit of history of natural beauty. The chapter where she describes all the herbs is also very interesting!

There are a few things I am not sure of like the use of lanolin, which doesn't seem to be that good for the skin but we have to remember that this book was written in 1993. Her dislike of the sun can also be traced to the 90's. Now we know how important the sun if for our health, back then we thought that we should avoid it at all cost, which lead to many people, especially children, to get all kinds of health problems, sometimes very severe. The ozone layer, which back then seemed to be depleted, seems to have greatly regenerated itself. Advising people to use a sun block is not at all a good thing but then we should read this book keeping in mind that it was written quite a while ago.

Other than that it is a really interesting book and I can't wait to start putting some of these recipes in practice! In fact I will start today and maybe update this review in a while including some of my favorite recipes! And I might even buy the new edition in the hope that Liz has included new tips and recipes! If she reads this review maybe she wouldn't mind getting in touch with me?

I think that we all know too little about what goes on the world of the pharmaceutical industry and if we were better informed maybe we would look at our doctor and what he prescribes us with very different eyes! We still want to believe that the world is, if not perfect quite good and that no one would hurt us on purpose and surely not only in order to make money but well.... The truth is that we live in a capitalist society where profits go above everything else and yes... people do hurt us, if not on purpose at least knowingly, others hurt us because they don't really care about anything else but they own financial well being, etc. We are now responsible for our own health and think otherwise is put ourselves and our families in danger! Either we want to get informed and try to protect ourselves as well as we possibly can, either we don't and then we are responsible for what happens to us. We can't wait for strangers to take the responsibility! The era of the nice village doctor who really cared if gone maybe forever! Now you have people who will make a lot of money because of the fact that you are ill, a lot more than if you were healthy and trying to keep you healthy is not an option for them. Sometimes making you more ill it is! Ben Goldacre is a doctor and therefore is somehow biased on some subjects but he is not afraid to say what he thinks and to dig till he gets a lot of dirt out. A dangerous business if you ask me.... But well, he is not afraid to do it!

As I said I don't agree with everything he says. His distrust of homeopathy is shared by many within the allopathic establishment and I am sure that there are some quacks around in the natural medicine, of course there are, but there are a lot of good therapies as well! I have had very good results with homeopathy, even with my children when they were tiny and saw them get better when allopathic medicine had no idea how to treat them so, anybody who tells me that it is all rubbish needs maybe to think again. He is also against vitamins and minerals. Of course this market has also been taken over by Big Pharma big time and no one can stop that! I have just noticed that the vitamins I am taking at this moment are manufactured by Merck, not good news..... but to say that anyone who advises patients to take vitamins and minerals are quacks.... Well, that is showing very little knowledge on the subject! Maybe Dr. Goldacre would like to read a bit about Linus Pauling?

That said.... What goes on in the pharmaceutical world is bordering criminal and the amount of money they often pay to settle cases shows exactly that. Ben Goldacre also gives suggestions of how this all could be changed but I don't hold my breath.... It won't change any time soon! The book can get a bit repetitive at times but all in all is very much worth reading! Read it and then make up your mind, don't read it and you might regret it!

J'ai trouvé ce petit livre dans un magasin de jardin à un très bon prix (c'est intéressant que le prix imprimé sur le livre est de 3, moins cher que sur Amazon) et je dois dire qu'il semble avoir de très bonnes recettes quelques unes pas très connus comme la Confiture Banane-Chocolat,Citron-Cannelle, Violettes, Aubergines au Miel, Abricots à la Noix de Coco et des autres! Aussi les liqueurs mon séduits comme la liqueur de Sapin, Romarin ou de Thym. Aujourd'hui j'ai essayé la Liqueur de Fleurs de Pissenlit car j'en avais au jardin. Il faut attendre un petit moment comme avec touts les liqueurs mais on va voir! Dommage qu'ils n'indiquent pas comment préparer les fleurs de pissenlit car je les ai mises entières dans le bocal mais après j'ai trouvé une recette pour gelée de pissenlit où ils disent qu'il faut enlever la partie verte qui est amère.

Ils parlent aussi de sucre à confiture ce que n'est pas correct car il y a des versions différentes de sucre à confiture ! Il faut toujours préciser si c'est du sucre 1 :1 ou 2 :1 ou de quel sucre il s'agit ! Aussi j'aimerais bien avoir l'option pour le sucre gélifié 2 :1 car je n'aime pas les confitures trop sucrés et il ne vaut pas la peine de manger trop de sucre non plus. Bien sur que je comprends qu'on utilise 50% de sucre mais je ne sais pas comment ça marche quand il y a du jus, de l'eau, etc.

J'ai déjà plusieurs livre sur ce sujet mais il vaut toujours la peine d'en acheter un autre car comme ça on peut comparer les recettes et faire essayer la meilleure !

I have had this book for quite a while now and I have made a few recipes. I found a few of them to be too sweet for my taste but then I don't really like very sweet cakes or other desserts. But others are really wonderful and the photos are very inspiring. I still have a lot of recipes to go but among my favorites are the Cherry and Marzipan Cake, the Devonshire Honey Cake, the Cinnamon Nutela Cake, the Carrot, Apple and Raisin Cake and the Yummy Scrummy Carrot Cake. The Olive Cake was the only one that didn't quite work out. I tried it several times as the olive oil escaped through the bottom of my tin the first time I made it but I think that there is too much olive oil in this recipe. Other than that this is a little book that contains such a lot of recipes (101, so they say, I haven't counted them!) and each of them seems to be worth trying out! I really recommend it!

I bought this book after reading some very positive comments and because it was very cheap at the time. It didn't disappoint although some of the advice is quite basic but then.... It caters for beginners, maybe very young people and people like me who are a bit older and know all the basic stuff! There is a quite a good index which is useful if you want to find an ingredient or a condition. This book caters for everything from health problems to beauty products, massage oils, natural tips for house and garden, pet care (less interesting for me as I don't have any pets but which will interest a lot of people) and at the end it has a list with plants names showing the common name and the Latin one. There is so much information in it that I will have to keep referring back to it as it is quite impossible to remember even a fraction of it. Too bad some of the ingredients can be quite expensive as natural products often are anyway!

There are a few things I think are not considered correct anymore though but those are only small details like ingesting fibers in order to relieve constipation. Many doctors think now that too much fiber can actually irritate the intestine and therefore cause more constipation. Eating soy is also something not all the experts advise and it does seems that one needs to be careful with the kind of soy one eats, especially if it is not fermented. Milk products to prevent osteoporosis... the jury is not out on that either but it used to be an old belief. The chapter on cholesterol is maybe not accurate either as more and more experts are starting to back off the theory that cholesterol is bad for you and that there is bad and good cholesterol. Anyway, the women who live the longest seem to be the ones with the higher cholesterol levels. After having read quite a lot on this subject I think that this cholesterol hysteria is something invented in our lifetime and which will have damaged the health of a lot of people needlessly! Eating ten servings a day of fruit and vegetables???? Wow, that is a lot of fruit and vegetables..... and there are a few more things I can't agree with but this is a book worth buying anyway, reason why I still gave it 4 stars!

Après avoir lu le commentaire d'Aristide j'avais dit que je n'achèterai pas ce livre mais comme je l'ai trouvé très bon marché je l'ai acheté ! Je voulais voir par moi-même que la recette n'était pas là et non.... Elle n'est vraiment pas là !
Sinon il y a beaucoup de recettes que ne sont peut-être pas mal mais beaucoup sont des versions les unes des autres. Il n'y a que la moitié des photos et ça c'est dommage. Il y a même des recettes dont je ne sais pas si elles vont tenir et être servis comme terrine ou comme mousse sans forme, je vais voir ! Le goût est très français, beaucoup de fromage frais et crème fraîche, pas vraiment mon goût mais peut-être que je vais substituer le fromage blanc dans quelques recettes par la crème car je la préfère (l'idée que la crème est mauvaise pour la santé est un peu ridicule, au moins pas quand on utilise da la bonne crème) ! Mais... la recette de la belle photo de la couverture n'est pas là et les éditeurs ne la donnent pas non plus ! Je crois que la photo est seulement placée pour que les gens s'animent à acheter le livre ! Pour moi un livre comme ça ne vaut même pas 3 étoiles !

J'ai acheté ce livre il y a quelques années et j'ai fait pas mal de recettes. Tout est très bien expliqué avec des petites photos qui montrent ce qu'il a à faire dans une page et dans l'autre une grande photo de la confiture ou la compote finies. Il y a des idées vraiment magnifiques comme a confiture d'Ananas aux Citrons Verts et au Girofle ou la confiture d'Agrumes à la Vanille et à la Lavande mais.... Il y a un problème car pour moi on ne devrait plus faire des confitures avec tant de sucre mais utiliser le sucre gélifié 2 :1 ce qui permet d'utiliser seulement 50% de sucre sinon c'est un très beau livre !