Trail mix musings

The best trail mix I'd ever had had to be Sherri's bowl of insanity at Karma Kids NYC while training for teaching yoga to kids. It might have been effected slightly by the amazing mind set I was in in those times...all healthy and om and centered and whatnot.

The second best trail mix might be the one I mixed tonight in my Turkish kitchen. All full of delights that I collected over the course of one night and two..count 'em...TWO shops! Malatya Pazaar and Koylu Peynircilik, both found in my amazing neighborhood within walking distance of my apartment.

I started out small...

...but ran short of space and I had only added about half the goodness.
So I enlisted the otherwise rarely used soup bowl.
Yum. Now it's all in there.

Dried bananas, pineapples, papaya, apricots (Wizard's dad's own), cranberries (yaban mersin in Turkish FYI), and kiwi. Hazelnuts, cashews and peanuts cover the nutty department while shelled sunflower seeds add a band or at least a pretty heavy pattering of vitamin E.

What yummy goodness would be in your dream trail mix?

Got Milk?

Sure, I have some recent unforgettable moments too, like the one with Wizard's sister in law showed me her milk cabinet filled to the brim with packaged milk. I naively asked her "Won't it all go bad? Why isn't it in the fridge?" As if I've never seen UHT treated milk before. *Sigh* It was becoming a fad as I left Pakistan in the fall of 2003 and we did prefer it over unpasteurized milk because our milk man kept trying to keep the traveling milk cool by melting ice blocks in the milk cans....ice blocks that had been sitting next to horses and their copious dung!

(Side bar: When we moved to Lahore from Karachi in the summer of 1997, my brother wondered why his hair was turning a slight shade of green by each evening. A kind cousin explained it was the dried horse dung hanging in the air over Mall Road.)

http://www.calstatela.edu/faculty/hsingh2/articles/milk.research.pdf

To be honest, I'm not convinced that UHT treated milk is good for human consumption. I'm of the times when unpasteurized milk was boiled twice and cooled before drinking and that was that. We never got sick, and certainly were not lactose intolerant. I do remember the first few times we started drinking Haleeb Milk (Pakistan's UHT treated milk brand), yes, it caused a number of issues with too many bathroom trips afterwards. I never really connected the two.

All I know is, you can't make yogurt with UHT treated milk and that is cause for concern hahaha.

Edit: Since I started writing this post, I have discovered the existence of unpasteurized milk in Istanbul as well. I'm seriously contemplating switching us all back to that.

I'm curious to what my few readers think. Please share your experience with unpasteurized, pasteurized, and/or UHT treated milk.