Also, I wanted to write about oats right. Maybe not from a food perspective, although I like eating oats( which most people find strange) You can sneak in some oats into any form of pastry if you bake it yourself, or even substitute flour altogether with ground oats which is both good to control your cholesterol and has low GI (and might minus some guilt if your pastry recipe involves more than 50% of it's weight in sugar, 2 bars of chocolate, 4 egg yolks and about a bottle of oil). Or you can boil oats by itself and top with anything you can think of although Westerners prefer sweet toppings and Asians prefer salty and we both think each other are weird.

Besides being a good form of food, turns out that oats is quite a common ingredient for making homemade spa formulas. It's exfoliating and absorbs oil, so that's good if you have oily skin like me. Cooked oats can be put on your face as a mask just to absorb oil, or if you want something a little less basic, you can blend oats and mix it with yogurt, add lemon juice for oily skin, or honey for dry skin, and use as an exfoliating mask. Also, one recipe that I tried out recently is a body mask, and that felt pampering, or maybe just because I haven't tried body masks before? *shrug* But either way, there's something satisfying about wasting food by slathering it all over your body (don't start thinking about starving people in war torn countries though). Anyway, the body mask is made by mixing oats with brown sugar, honey and some hot water to form a paste. You could add crushed almonds too, though that's a little expensive and I dunno if it's too harsh to the skin. Leaving it on for 10 minutes and enjoy the smell, try not to lick yourself clean. When you wash it off, it does tend to look like someone puked in your shower, still smells nice though. But I reckon I could feel my skin getting softer after using that formula.

Another spa formula for soft skin is milk baths, which you can buy as a shower gel in supermarkets. Apparently it works because of the lactic acid in milk or something like that. You can have a homemade milk bath too, by just adding milk to your bath tub water, although I don't know if that's practical. Maybe if you have a couple of pet cows at home and are lactose intolerant or something. As a side note today, I heard from a documentary that a cow can carry 20kgs of milk in it's body. Is it just me or does this sound painful?