For the Fellas......

This may seem like a horrible sexist generalization but I find it a lot easier to give DIY gifts to my female friends and family members than to the men in my life.  I don't know any gal who doesn't appreciate a hand knit scarf, a lightly scented moisturizing lotion, or a tin of home made lip balm.  I find men a bit trickier but no less deserving of my DIY love so I was thrilled when I found a blog post from Mountain Rose Herbs on Herbal Gifts for Dad.  While no one around here has much need for the Fancy Man 'Stache Wax,  I thought my sweetie might be interested in an upgrade from plain old shaving soap.  With his May birthday it seemed a perfect time to try my hand at making shaving cream which turned out to be dead simple.

I used apricot kernel oil, aloe vera gel, shea butter, white clay, baking soda, unscented Castile soap, and a few drops of cedarwood and bay essential oils for a pleasant, manly scent.  It took maybe 5 minutes to melt the shea butter with the oil, another minute or two to mix in the remaining ingredients, and a couple of minutes of with the stick blender to whip everything into a lovely, fluffy, mousse-like texture.   After the first use he tells me it makes for a fantastic shave and he loves it-not bad for 10 minutes work!

 

The Mountain Rose blog post also included a recipe for aftershave.  I made a batch of Bay Rum aftershave last year which included a lot of rum, bay essential oil, and not a whole lot else and I thought he might be interested in a change so I threw this new recipe together last night as well:  witch hazel, aloe vera gel, orange peel, a cinnamon stick, crushed allspice, a few cloves, an ounce of rum, and a few drops of bay rum essential oil.  This will take 4 weeks before it matures and I can strain it into a bottle so no verdict as yet but I can't resist opening the jar for a sniff every now and again.  In addition to its lovely scent, the orange peel, witch hazel, and aloe should all provide beneficial antibacterial and skin-soothing elements and I expect it to make a nice final product.

Father's Day isn't that far off but you still have plenty of time to throw together a lovingly crafted DIY shaving set for the man in your life should you feel so inspired.  And if you are (or know) a razor-using woman I'm sure the shaving cream would be a treat for the legs as well--no need to be exclusionary!

Basic Salve...and variations

 There are so many benefits to learning to make your own body care products.  You can save boatloads of money.  Although the initial investment in ingredients may seem scary, most will last you for many, many batches of products.  You can have fun with basic science.  You will learn exactly which ingredients do what and can have all kinds of fun experimenting and coming up with custom blends to meet your exact specifications. You will know exactly what is going on (or in) your body--no more mystery chemicals with potentially troublesome side effects.  And, if you're like me, there's that little "I did it!" thrill which is priceless as far as I'm concerned.

Basic salves couldn't be easier and once you have the process down you can make lotion bars, lip balms, deodorants, and more.  The basic formula is 1 part oil/1 part butter/1 part beeswax.  Depending on my end product I might use olive, coconut, or apricot kernel oil along with shea or cocoa butter.  Vitamin E oil is both nourishing for the skin and a good preservative so I always add a bit to just about everything I make. You can certainly use some of the more exotic oils like argan, avocado, macadamia nut, rose hip seed, or jojoba but these are quite expensive.  Including a small amount in your total is an affordable way to add a little luxury.  Once you start adding essential oils (and you should, both for their healing properties and their delicious aromas) your basic moisturizing salve technically becomes a balm.  

A family member asked me to attempt to duplicate a product she loves from a small local producer who appears to have gone out of business. I looked at the ingredient list and saw the following:  Calendula infused olive oil, beeswax, shea butter, Vitamin E oil and essential oils of rosemary, tea tree, lavender, and peppermint. I filled a jar with dried calendula blossoms, topped them with olive oil, and put the jar in water in a double boiler over very low heat for a few hours to infuse the oil with the anti-inflammatory and skin healing properties of calendula.  After straining it a few times to remove all traces of solid matter, I added one ounce to a glass canning jar along with an ounce of shea butter and and ounce of beeswax pellets. I used my kitchen scale for accurate measuring, resetting to zero after I added each ingredient.   Two notes here:  use a designated jar for melting beeswax--you'll never get it clean again so you may as well hand it over for the cause.  And, if at all possible, buy natural beeswax in pellet or pastille form.  Yes, you can use blocks, but then you have to grate the wax.  It takes forever and it makes a mess and you then need a dedicated grater.  Pellets are no more expensive than blocks of beeswax and are so much easier to work with--I highly recommend them.

Put your jar of wax/oils in a pan of simmering water and stir until everything is liquid.  Again, due to the tenacity of beeswax, I use bamboo skewers for mixing and stirring.  They are cheap and can go in the compost when you are done--one less thing to try and clean.    Once everything is melted, remove from the heat and pour into the container of your choice, and add vitamin e oil and essential oils.   Quickly and gently stir to blend (use that bamboo skewer or a toothpick) and then leave to cool completely.  Once the salve is semi solid you can carefully transfer it to the refrigerator to cool completely if you are in a hurry. 

For this particular balm, I used 2 drops of rosemary essential oil and 10 drops each of tea tree, lavender, and peppermint.  If you are interested in exploring essential oils further, please take a look at this simple Essential Oil Guide I wrote for one of my classes.  

I purchased my containers at The Portland Homestead Supply Co.

For printable directions for making a basic salve/balm, click here.  

Please let me know in the comments if you make this salve and how it turns out for you.  Once you see how easy it is, I hope you'll make lots!

Problem Solved

I'm not sure if it's a sign of spring or my energy returning after my bout with endocrinologist-induced hypothyroidism but lately I have been in a frenzy of cleaning, decluttering, organizing, and rearranging. A lot of things that I have ignored for years are suddenly making me crazy and I am trying to tackle a million little problems around the house. In the midst of big stuff (moving furniture, repainting, cleaning out long neglected cupboards) there have been some smaller, simpler solutions including this one which just makes me happy.

I am a scarf lover, big time. I rarely leave the house without something draped around my neck. Not only do I like the extra bit of color, but that extra bit of warmth is welcome, too. The only problem is once I come home I tend to fling my scarves off and drape them over the backs of chairs or pile them in baskets which means they quickly become cat beds. I have never been able to figure out a good way to store them until the other day when I was looking for a new shower curtain at IKEA and I had a brilliant flash of insight when I noticed a simple package of shower curtain rings. I tossed the package in my basket, came home and slipped them on to a wooden hanger and suddenly one irritatiting problem was solved, just like that. Don't you love cheap, easy, functional solutions? No, it's not a cure for cancer or an end to global warming, but it's a problem solved and that makes me happy.

Some Like It Hot

No doubt you are familiar with the ubiquitous hot sauce known as sriracha or, more familiarly, "rooster sauce". Although made in California, it claims to be a Thai-style sauce and yet it goes well with just about anything. Yes, it's delicious in SE Asian style soups and noodle dishes but it also perks up eggs, macaroni and cheese, grilled cheese sandwiches, and Mexican-style tortilla-based dishes as well. It's also cheap and easily found in just about any grocery store around here so why bother making it from scratch?

As you've probably guessed, I just like making things from scratch. That's my #1 reason. I also like avoiding preservatives like potassium sorbate. As it turns out, when you ditch the preservatives, you end up with a much fresher tasting end result. While it can cost more to make your own rooster sauce than to buy it, your end result will be brighter and more interesting than the store bought variety. Also, making it yourself gives you the chance to adjust to your taste. Maybe you like a bit more garlic? A touch more vinegar? Less salt? You can even dial down the heat with the addition of red bell pepper if that's how you roll.

The hardest part about making your own sriracha is finding appropriate chiles. The first time I made this, I used a mix of hot chiles from a local organic farmer. My resulting sauce was good, but the flavor wasn't very distinctive and the color was muddy from all the different chile varieties. It was still a good hot sauce, and the technique and quantities work well with any variety of chile but if you are aiming for rooster sauce, you want bright red, fleshy chiles along the lines of a red jalapeños or Fresno chiles shown below. I have the best luck finding appropriate chiles in markets catering either to Mexican or SE Asian customers. For my most recent batch I started with 1.5 lb of fresh Fresno chiles.

The only other exotic ingreient you will need is palm sugar which usually comes in 2-3 ounce cakes. If you are lucky, you will find a soft palm sugar but sometimes it is hard as a rock. Most recipes direct you to grate the palm sugar but this can be rather like grating concrete so my workaround if I have super hard palm sugar is to bring the vinegar and water to a boil, drop in the palm sugar, and dissolve it, breaking it up as it softens with a sharp knife, before adding the chiles and garlic. That way the sugar has time to break down without cooking the chiles to death. You may be lucky and find granulated palm sugar. Another option is light brown sugar although I haven't tried this myself.

I generally follow this recipe for fresh chile sauce and it has never failed me. It's a simple matter of stemming the chiles, chopping them up, and then briefly simmering them in water and vinegar along with with garlic, palm sugar, and salt. Once cooled down, you run everything in the blender until smooth (or use a stick blender as I did) and then press through a fine mesh sieve to remove seeds and skin.

The end result is a beautiful bright red sauce that you can bottle up and use to brighten just about anything.

The Lazy Gardener

While I absolutely love a lush, well tended garden I'll be the first to admit that I am one lazy gardener. I don't mind digging and hauling and bending and lifting in moderation but if it's too much work I am likely to wander off and find something that requires less energy like, say, sitting in my hammock with a cool drink. I start off every spring with the best of intentions and a flurry of horticultural activity which I am rarely able to sustain throughout our growing season. When my inherent laziness is combined with a tiny yard and very little space for growing I tend to choose my plants carefully and I do a lot of container gardening so I can haul my pots around as needed to provide them with the best growing conditions. I don't plant much from seed because I am impatient and I try stick with edibles I know we'll enjoy.


I recently learned about growing scallions not from seed but from old scallions and this seemed like a plan I could get behind. I have grown scallions from seed in the past and found this to be a painfully slow endeavor with a very poor yield. On the other hand, I get sick of buying scallions by the bunch only to have the majority of them go slimy my refrigerator. I predict an end to slimy scallions now that I've learned this little trick. You can cut the greens off your scallions and use them however you like but if you save the bulbs at the end and poke them into some soil they start to regrow almost immediately which is about as close to magic as it gets in a garden.

The shoots you see below started showing themselves within 3 days of planting and had been in the dirt for about 10 days when I snapped the photo.

Any day now I'll be able to start snipping greens off my recycled scallions but I'll leave the bulbs in the dirt where, rumor has it, they will continue to send up new shoots. How great is that? I hear you can do the same thing with celery so that will be my next recycled vegetable project. Meanwhile here are some more lazy gardener tips which I hope you'll enjoy.

Good to Go

I don't know about you, but I am always on the lookout for handy, nutritious, on-the-go snacks. One of the things I learned when I went gluten free was that this type of quick bite nearly always includes bread of some sort. Those of you who can eat sandwiches, pizza, bagels, wraps, and burritos don't realize how easy things are for you. If I'd forgotten to plan well, I used to find myself crazy with hunger and desperate for an appropriate snack on days when I was out of the house all day. Then I discovered a certain nut and dried fruit bar that had it all. These bars are nutritious, tasty, convenient, widely available and they come in a variety of flavors. They don't have any scary ingredients and they will keep forever in backpack or in the glovebox. The only problem? At $1.25-1.75 apiece, they can add up, especially when I am feeding kids.

I'm not sure why it took me so long to try making my own. I think I was convinced my DIY version wouldn't measure up. As it turns out I hit a home run on my first try. After doing a little research I learned that others had had good luck making their own custom bars. It's a simple enough formula: if you put equal parts nuts, dates, and dried fruits in the food processor and let it run until your ingredients change from crumbs to paste to a big sticky ball you're good to go. You can press the mixture into a baking pan, chill, and cut bars to any size you like or, if you have some type of mold you can try that. I used a silicone mini loaf mold and my perfectly sized bars popped right out after spending the night in the 'fridge.

For these bars I used 1.5 cups of nuts (almonds and hazelnuts) which I roasted in the oven to bring out the nutty flavor but this step isn't strictly necessary. I tossed the roasted nuts in the food processor with 1.5 cups of pitted dates and 3/4 cup dried cranberries and 3/4 cup unsulfured dried apricots. I also added a couple of tablespoons of unsweetened shredded dried coconut and a couple of tablespoons of chia seeds. I purchased my ingredients in bulk and ended up with 10 good sized bars at approximately .60 cents apiece so a considerable savings over the original. The bars travel pretty well wrapped in waxed paper secured with a rubber band. I know I shouldn't have been surprised but these homemade bars, like so many things, taste fresher and just a bit more delicious than their store bought counterparts and I'm looking forward to experimenting with other flavor combinations.

The Best Kind of Project

Long, involved projects can be deeply satisfying. I have a couple things I've made which took months of work and which I absolutely love wearing including my reverse appliqué skirt and my February Lady sweater. But there's something to be said for the low investment, high impact project, too. I enjoy embroidery because it's such a simple way to add charm and color to an otherwise drab garment although I appreciate more intricate work as well as you can see from my collection of embroidery pins.

I found this cotton knit skirt for a few dollars at a thrift store. The fabric was of good quality and the cut was flattering but all that grey just wasn't doing it for me. It needed work so after I washed it I pulled out my embroidery threads and added a few free form flowers to brighten things up and now I love it. Total investment:$4 for the skirt and 90 minutes of my time. I may continue to add flowers...or I might just move on to a new project. But chances are good that whatever I work on next, I'll be wearing this skirt.