Live Well with Leonie

These would make great gifts or market-stall products!

How to make your own flavoured salts: 12 recipes to try Salt can be so much more exciting than just your familiar table salt. With so many options to choose from, give your shaker a shake-up and explore new colours, textures and tastes with our inspired selection of flavoured salts you can make at home.

Years ago, I used to make my own yoghurt with an EasyYo yoghurt maker and sachets that would make the yoghurt. I stopped when I realised how much sugar those mixes had - far too much!

I decided to make my own a couple of years ago after a friend mentioned her fave recipe made in my Thermomix of course!

It’s so easy! Mix, pour into pots and then set overnight in my Thermomix Varoma steamer attachment.

Not only is it so quick and easy to do, it’s so much cheaper than buying it. Plus I control the sugar (nil) and, of course, there’s no extra additives.

Just another reason to buy a Thermomix! Pure, natural, real yoghurt.

I need to focus more on eating the rainbow so today I bought some beetroot - so good for me I know. Wanted to roast them along with some other veggies so I have plenty of colours.

First tho, I had to peel them. Now, nobody likes red-stained hands and, while in the past I have peeled them wearing gloves, I don’t like having plastic contact with cut edges, so what to do 🧐?

Thermomix Peeler and Blade Cover to the rescue. 4 minutes tumbling the beetroot and done! Why would you waste time and risk red hands when you have a nifty gadget that does it for you!

Life with a Thermomix - so damn easy!

This month, when you buy your Thermomix, you can add a Peeler and Blade Cover accessory for just $1 extra! Winning!

Like to do some peeling with me?

Isn't Nature amazing!

One plant. Two completely opposite effects on insects — depending on who shows up. Lavender pumps out airborne chemicals around the clock, and what those chemicals do next depends entirely on the nervous system receiving them. Bees follow the signal like a lit runway. Certain pests hit the same signal and short-circuit — legs stop coordinating, navigation collapses, the ability to land simply disappears. Same molecule. Wildly different outcome. That molecule is called linalool, and lavender loads it into its scent at concentrations high enough to cause real neurological disruption in small insect bodies. It does not sting. It does not bite. It just keeps broadcasting, invisibly, in every direction, all season long. Helpful predators that eat garden pests pick up the signal too — lavender essentially calls in backup without making a sound. The plant is not passive. It is running a full-spectrum chemical operation from inside a purple flower. What looks decorative is actually defensive, communicative, and ruthlessly precise all at once. The most dangerous things rarely announce themselves loudly. Nature hides its sharpest weapons in the softest packaging. [AD0ZT]

And guess where our beautiful dōTERRA essential oil comes from!

The leaf was doing this long before the fruit ever showed up. Those tiny clear dots scattered across a lemon leaf are not texture or decoration — they are sealed chambers packed with concentrated oil, waiting. A slight rise in temperature or the brush of a passing breeze is enough to crack them open. The scent hits the air in under a second. Limonene, the molecule responsible for that sharp clean citrus smell, makes up nearly two-thirds of the oil locked inside each leaf. Not just in one pocket. In hundreds of them, across every single leaf on the tree. When the sun heats a lemon canopy on a warm afternoon, all of those chambers are releasing at once — quietly flooding the surrounding air with scent molecules before a single piece of fruit forms. The tree is not just growing. It is broadcasting. Some plants do not wait to be noticed. They announce themselves constantly, in a language the nose understands before the mind does. [MQFPX]

The evolution!