Why DID the turtle cross the road?

As my weekend draws to a close and most of your weekend’s begin (remember here in Saudi Arabia our weekends are Thursday and Friday) I am mad busy preparing for my first ever Tasting Night which is getting closer by the minute.

Most of the weekend has been spent purchasing supplies, planning the menu, co-ordinating guests, ordering hire equipment and basically counting down until next Wednesday evening. I have had to cap the guest number to ensure the highest quality experience for my guests, and to my surprise, tickets sold out on the first day! Great to see the level of interest in raw food cuisine is at a high here.

Yesterday, on the compound, we found what we initially thought was a tortoise (but was later confirmed to be a turtle) trying tocross a main road. We had to swerve not to hit her. We insisted on turning the car around to rescue her before she was squashed by oncoming traffic. Not sure if turtles/tortoises were really native to the area, we took “Tommo” the turtle to the vet.

It was really sad to see, but close to where we found her were 2 other dead turtles and 2 dead fish, so it did appear that someone had dumped their unwanted pets in the gutter. This kind of irresponsible pet owner behaviour makes me mad.

And no we weren’t going to eat her, like some people asked on facebook, although we did have to hold her like a hamburger We were asked to look after her until a known turtle loving family on camp were contacted to see if they would take her, which they agreed. All ends happily.

Afterwards we went to a gathering to ‘wet the babies head’ for a friend’s new baby girl. Has anyone ever heard of that saying before? I think it must be purely an Australian thing as it was lost on quite a few of non Aussie friends when I mentioned it yesterday. Then afterwards to a Ma’salama (Arabic for goodbye) for a long term employee here.

Why don’t you?:

• check out my Top 10 Favourite Foods on he Top 10 Blog here. You guessed it. They are RAW.
• hop on over to one of my favourite bloggers, Gena, from Choosing Raw where she has written a great post here on how to ‘beef’ up your salads so you aren’t longing for a burger shortly after one.
• take a look at this 4 minute TED video on being a Weekday Vegetarian that Dhru shared on We Like it Raw. Definitely something in it for all my non veggie readers and friends.

I have a flight tomorrow, so I’ll be back with you  soon with more updates on the Tasting Night preparations and I might just have some yummy food pictures to share with you plus some recipes hopefully this week! Oh and if you haven’t already, you should sign up to my new Email Club Newsletter on the right!