Easter is 5 days away. The stores are packed with chocolate eggs, and hollow chocolate figures of Bart Simpson, the Transformers and bunnies. Some of you may claim to be too grown up for Easter egg hunts….but we at UeaT encourage all UeaTers to indulge in egg decoration and hunts. Maybe even hold an Easter egg hunt across campus!
Before you set out to buy food colors and dyes for your egg decorating ventures, try out some natural dyes. You probably already have some of the ingredients needed.
Boil your eggs like you usually do, and leave them in the refrigerator overnight. Boil one cup of water with a small amount of your “color ingredient” until the water picks up the color. Strain the mixture, pour it over your eggs and cover for an hour. The longer you leave the eggs in the dye, the darker the color will be (but it will also seep into the egg, so it may not be a good idea to eat them).
The “color ingredients” can be a range of different spices, fruits, berries, vegetables, and teas. We like to use cherries (pink), blueberries (blue), instant coffee (brown), spinach (green), paprika (orange), grape juice (purple), cranberries (pink), powdered turmeric (yellow) and rooibos teas (orange). You can find a larger list here.
Send us your best colored egg pictures and we will add them to this space!
Here’s something you didn’t know: U of T has bee hives on campus! We visited the hives on top of New College this week, and saw how the bees get ready for the winter. Brian Hamlin (bee keeper extraordinaire) let us sample the honey (and it was delicious!)…he also told us some fun facts about bees:
90% of the bees in the hive are female. 10% of them are male, and the males are kicked out (or die) in the autumn.
All the work is done by the female bees. The male bees are simply around to fertilize the Queen.
Bees don’t normally sting, unless they feel threatened.
Bees are not scary. They’re quite nice actually.
New College cafeteria uses the honey from its roof top in its menu. Yumm!
Bees travel within a 3 mile radius to collect pollen for the honey. That means that the honey made and used at New College is from flowers at Queen’s Park and other green spaces in the area!
Contrary to popular opinion, bears don’t love honey, they love bee larvae (rich source of protein).
In Canada, the winter months are dormant for bees. In late winter, the Queen begins laying eggs, and they bees starting working inside the hive. During the summer months, they go out to collect pollen and produce honey.
Honey has antioxidant and antibiotic properties.
In future months, we will pay a visit to the other hives on campus. If you know of a hive we haven’t visited yet, do let us know!
Remember the days when pay phones cost a quarter…and ironically, you never had a quarter when you needed to make a call? A quarter can go a long way…four of them saved and you have a loonie! So for the rest of the year, lug your mug and save yourself many, many loonies.
At participating UeaT locations, when you buy a coffee or tea in your refillable container (mug, thermos, bottle, jar, vase), you save $0.25 off the regular price. That makes you happy. It also makes the employees happy because they have less disposable coffee cups to throw out. And it makes Mother Earth happy because she does not have to process all that plastic, cardboard, ink. And when she’s happy, everybody is happy.
Great news. I have a couple of portable mugs at my desk for just such occasions.
For future planning, I think every food court should have a sink available to the customers, just as the staff must have for board of health reasons.
It would be useful for washing out lugged mugs, hand washing, and dumping unwanted liquids into a real drain instead of into the trash/recycling containers (when recycling any non-lugged drink containers)
sarah.khan
That is a great suggestion Jim! We will definitely keep this in mind for future cafeterias and renovations.
Great news. I have a couple of portable mugs at my desk for just such occasions.
For future planning, I think every food court should have a sink available to the customers, just as the staff must have for board of health reasons.
It would be useful for washing out lugged mugs, hand washing, and dumping unwanted liquids into a real drain instead of into the trash/recycling containers (when recycling any non-lugged drink containers)
That is a great suggestion Jim! We will definitely keep this in mind for future cafeterias and renovations.
Cheers.