Reflections, A new year, and new experiments

Sitting here listening to the rain pitter-patter on the sun room roof, wrapped up in a blanket, with a kitten snuggled on my feet, with a wonderful cup of hot tea, felt like the perfect time to sit and reflect on the past year, all the ups, downs, successes and failures. I won't bore you with the bad, but some of the goods from last year were getting closer to some of my friends and family through planning my wedding, I was able to leave my job where I was overly stressed (and also on a contrasting schedule with hubby) so that I could spend more time with him, and with my mom who needed three surgeries. Had THE MOST PERFECT WEDDING I could have ever wished for. Sadly for our bank account, I always wanted the fairy tale, over the top, royal type of wedding, but we did it. Got to meet many of my new family on my husband's side at the wedding. Traveled for the first time out of the country, to the UK. Went to the ocean for the first time IN SCOTLAND, went dolphin watching, again in Scotland, slept in a castle, played ping pong in a throne room, washed laundry in the castle, and hung it to dry in front of a fireplace (I know, I'm different), flew in a propeller plane, and spent hours driving through Scottish and Irish countryside. The final day of our trip, we spent hours at Guinness brew house, fell in love with the drink, and the people of both countries all over again. My mom made it through surgeries on both her shoulders, now we are working on getting things lined up for her back, and my mother-in-law was able to move closer to us and the rest of the family. Made some new friends, and reconnected with long lost friends. Learned how to make several things that we use on a regular basis, and have been able to spend more time with my husband, and our family.

My bouquet from the wedding.

Just like so many people, I've decided to set some resolutions. Not specifically new year's resolutions, just goals I want to accomplish this year in my ongoing quest to live a healthier, happier life.

1. Experiment more in the kitchen with healthy foods
2. Reduce use of chemicals in our lives by making more cleaning products (this should also help reduce plastic we use since we won't be buying the stuff in the plastic)
3. Allow myself to be happier by accepting that I can't do everything, and what I do, doesn't have to be perfect. Accept that I'm allowed to make mistakes. Yes I'm a perfectionist. 
4. Grow and can more of our own vegetables
5. Get my craft projects organized, cataloged, and down to a more manageable number

So, in an effort to to complete the craft project resolution, I'm finishing up pairs of socks that I had previously started. I got a pair of dark green socks, and 1 out of a pair of light green socks, both for my hubby, and working on the second of a pair of socks for myself. I know I've covered this in a previous post, but it's nice to get everything down in one spot.

My first self designed sock!

Light green sock for hubby

Start of the toe of the second sock.

As for experimenting more in the kitchen, the other night I tried making foil packet lime pepper chicken, with mashed rutabaga, and steamed broccoli. Turned out pretty well, even with the calamity of the rutabaga eating the knife. 

I started to peel the rutabaga, which was tricky because of the waxy coating, but muscled through it. Sliced a little off the bottom so it wouldn't roll when I'm cutting it, and started to cut it in half. This is about as far as I got the knife through and I couldn't get it to go any more. When I went to pull the knife out it just didn't budge! This is our sharpest knife, and since hubby was a chef for many years, he keeps them pretty sharp. I tried everything I could think of to get the knife out, but no luck. I even (shame on me) grabbed a hold of the knife with both hands and shook it to try to dislodge it. About half way through I realized what a sight I must be. Shaking this knife with a giant rutabaga on it, my hair coming undone, yelling (more growling I think) in frustration. This is the point I started laughing uncontrollably  and ended up kneeling on the kitchen floor, knife still in hand, laughing so hard I was holding my stomach and crying! An adventure indeed! By time I collected myself I simply had to share this moment with a few of my friends and proceeded to text/email them. The modern age of sharing EVERYTHING! 

I ended up leaving the monster on the cutting board and went to preparing the chicken.

Lime Pepper Chicken:

2 Cleaned, and skinless chicken breast

Pinch of Kosher Salt

2 tsp Lime Pepper herb mix

1 tsp onion powder

1 tsp dill

sliced onion (these are like half onion, half chives we found at the farmer's market), they are sweet onions

Olive oil

2 Radishes, sliced

lime juice

2 TBSP chicken broth

2 Pats of butter

2 Squares foil to wrap chicken in

Take 2 tsp lime pepper, 1 tsp onion powder, and dill and mix them all together, breaking up any clumps. 

Sprinkle a little salt on the chicken, then coat both sides with the herb mix.

Drizzle some olive oil over the chicken, then turn it to get the oil on the foil, then turn it again so the oiled side is back up. 

Drizzle a little lime juice over the chicken
Sprinkle sliced onions over chicken
Lay a few slices of radish on top, then top with a pat of butter
Put 1 TBSP broth on top of each chicken, then fold foil in half over chicken, fold and crimp the three open sides shut so nothing leaks out.

Put in 350 degree oven for 30 minutes. Check to make sure chicken is fully cooked before eating please!

Hubby came home, and managed to get the rutabaga chopped and we got that boiled and mashed just like it was potato. Steamed up some broccoli, which was then tossed with butter and a little garlic powder.

So yummy! I didn't realize it, but the lime pepper mix I bought had chili peppers in it, so it was a bit spicy for me, but moist and tender, and full of flavor! The rutabaga tastes kind of like a potato, but is slightly sweeter, with a very light carrot type of flavor. I ended up using the left overs to make something like potato pancakes in the morning with chives and garlic. That was amazing! I think we'll be buying rutabagas more often.

Not too shabby for my first time with a new vegetable!!

Well that's it for now, off to do some laundry so I can use up the store bought stuff, and plan dinner for tonight, baked ginger and lemongrass salmon and asparagus with a creamy dill sauce I think. Maybe work on my fair isle double knit hot pad some more since it's almost finished.

Take care, and happy creating!

Christmas, New Years, and Life

Ok, I know I said I would get a post up a few days after Christmas, but I kinda forgot about the crazy cleaning that takes place between Christmas and New Years, and then forgot about the mess we always make for sauerkraut and pork. Especially when we get to have a bunch of people over! I loved every second of it too. Well except for when my lemon meringue pie didn't set up, and I had to run to the store to get a dessert while everyone was still sitting at the house :(. I'm putting off the cleaning from New Year's Day to work on this (shame on me, I'm being a bad housewife)

Christmas went well, we missed a few people due to colds, and work, but most of us were there. We had Christmas dinner at my mother-in-laws house, and OH MY GOD that ham was delicious!! I ate way more than I should have, but it was all so tasty!! I have to get the recipe from her for these cookies called Angel Squares I think. I like them better than rum balls and coconut macaroons, and if you know me...well that's saying something.

So now let's back track a little to the Saturday before Christmas, and Katie's birthday bowling bash! I made Lemon Curd Coconut Cupcakes and they seemed to be quite a hit. Of course I forgot to take my usual gazillion pictures until after they were half gone....

Lemon Curd Coconut Cupcakes

nothing to fancy about these, but here's the recipe.
Basic vanilla cake recipe
2 1/2 Cups AP flour
2 tsp baking powder
1 2/3 cup sugar
3/4 cup unsalted butter, softened
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
4 large eggs
3/4 cup whole milk

Mix the flour and baking powder in a bowl. In another bowl, beat sugar, butter, and vanilla until smooth and fluffy (it's very important to make sure there are no chunks of butter, as that will make a gooey under-baked mess). Add eggs one at a time, beating until well combined. Add flour and milk alternately in two additions, beating until just blended. Pour into cupcake tins line with paper, and bake at 325º about 20 minutes, or until toothpick comes out clean.

Let cool, then fill a pastry bag with Lemon Curd. You can buy some at the store, or make it yourself. If you make it yourself, I find that the Lemon filling for a lemon meringue pie works beautifully. If you don't know how to make that, check out Betty Crocker Classic Lemon Meringue for the filling. Using a large tip (or the one made for filling), squeeze lemon curd into the center of each cupcake until you start to feel the cupcake swell. If some oozes out, just spread it on top and let it air dry so the icing will stick.

For the icing:
1 1/2 cup coconut flakes
3 TBsp butter, softened
8 oz marscapone cheese
2 2/3 cup powdered sugar
1 tsp Vanilla

Combine and beat all ingredients until smooth. This icing is too soft to really do anything fancy with, so just glop it on top and try not to eat it all before it makes it to the cupcakes.

A big part of our Christmas gifts to everyone this year were cookies! On top of traditional chocolate chip cookies, I made these three

Almond Sugar Cookies

I didn't get any pictures, but I put them in these cute little clear baggies with red stripes and tied them up with ribbon. 

Checkerboard Shortbread Cookies

For the checkerboard cookies, I'll have to do the recipe with lots of pictures showing how to make the cookies at a later time. This post is already going to be ginormous.

Apple-Cinnamon-Raisin-Oatmeal Cookies with Maple Icing

These are by far the most amazing oatmeal cookies I have ever had, and I will be making these again, if I can remember how I did it.







I also made some peppermint fudge, and peppermint bark to give out this year. It was my first time making peppermint bark, and that was an experience in and of itself. I had tried to melt white chocolate for some other cookies I had made, but ended up throwing it all out cause I couldn't get it to melt well, it just seized up. So for peppermint bark I chopped up those Hershey's mint kisses, and spread them on top of milk chocolate I had already melted and poured onto a cookie sheet. In my research for how to melt the white chocolate successfully, I found a video that showed a French Chocolatier using a heat gun during the tempering process. This sparked my imagination, and I pulled out our heat gun. Well, this melted the chopped pieces on top, but to get warm enough to let the top stick to the bottom, the top was browning. So I popped it in the oven for about 10 minutes, and viola! We have peppermint bark!

Melted, and cooled milk chocolate

Chopping an entire bag of Kisses

I also made Peppermint Chocolate Fudge!!

2 pkg semi-sweet Bakers Chocolate squares
1 14oz can sweetened condensed milk
1 tsp peppermint extract

Melt chocolate and milk in double boiler, add peppermint, pour into foil lined pan, cool, cut ENJOY! I sprinkled a little sea salt on which made it absolutely delectable.

I also ended up making coupon name tags for everyone this year. Thanks to Microsoft having all sorts of templates out there, I found some really pretty Christmas themed ones, and printed them out of heavy paper.

Here are a few more things I made for Christmas but won't go too far into detail. 

Lotion Squares (more in my post from 12/1

Body Scrub

Crochet doily for my MIL

Lotion that worked!

Name tags for the sweet treat bags

Vanilla Peppermint Chapstick

Book tote bag for Pam

Tote for Melinda

Tote for Dd

Peppermint swirl cheesecake!

Well that's it for now, I need to get to cleaning so I stop stressing about how bad the house looks. I'll be back later with a post on mess free soy candles, so stay tuned.

Hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas, and a Happy New Year.

Lotion Bonanza

Lotion is really expensive right? You know the best all natural beeswax and essential oil ones that are kinda thick and come in a jar? The ones that smell absolutely heavenly and leave your skin so soft you would think you've never done dishes/gardening/cleaning a day in your life? I thought I can make that at home! It's only got like 5 ingredients. YEAH RIGHT!

I've spent the past 3 hours getting failure after failure. Hubby even gave it a try and it didn't work. Every time I tried to do this, I would ended getting excited, and it looked good, no separated liquid, not chunky, OK good, pour it into a little tin and 5 minutes later I had a chunky lotion with a lot of water squishing out every time I touched it.

See the dark spots? That's the water that separated.

I started off with The Whip from Root Simple, but I must be doing something wrong. For her it works, for me it breaks. Every time. The first go round, I tried squeezing and kneading the lotion to work the water out, but I ended up pulling out almost all the water I put in, so that got tossed. My first batch was uncolored so it wasn't as pretty looking, but man did it smell great! We tried blending the first batch in a big beer stein I picked up for hubby about 5 years ago as a gag gift (it holds nearly 30oz of beer!) so at least we had a lot of fun with that.

The second batch same story. Looks great, smells great, managed to tint this one, and FLOP! Scraped that one into the trash too.

I pulled out my jar of beeswax lotion that I absolutely covet because it is the most amazing stuff EVER! Read the ingredients, and the only thing I wasn't adding was some sort of stabilizer  Hubby decided to try his hand at lotion making, and tried Epsom salts and a bit of borax. When he was all done blending, we had a measuring cup of foamy purple something, floating on top of gray brackish looking water. It didn't mix at all!!! Into the trash. But hey, at least my trash is going to smell like sweet honey lavender for a while.

OK, OK, I'm grumping to myself at this point. There has GOT to be something I"m missing. Handy old inter-webs told me that beeswax won't naturally emulsify with water like the oil does. The whole time I'm going about this thinking it'll work like making mayonnaise right? So start Googling beeswax lotion stabilizers. The two most common I found were glycerin, and borax. Well I didn't have any glycerin, but I have big old box of borax from making laundry detergent. A couple sites suggested mineral oil instead of olive oil, which for some reason I have that on hand too. It's a lot cheaper, and I've already used up about 3 cups of olive oil in the endeavor.

This was almost full when I started.

So finally I mashed together a few different recipes I've read, and at this point I have no idea which ones. So far it seems to have worked. 

My kitchen after my lotion making explosion. I still have to bake cookies!!

What I tried that finally seems to have worked (verdict is still out but no obvious signs of breakage yet *knock on wood*)

• 1/4 cup distilled water
• 1/8 tsp Borax
• .75 oz beeswax, plus a pinch more, I think I may have used closer to 1 oz
• 1/2 cup mineral oil
• 1 tsp coconut oil
• Lavender oil
• 2 drops blue soap dye, and 4 drops red soap dye (it looks really dark, but turns out well when mixed.)

1. Mix water and borax and heat until almost simmering and borax is dissolved. If your soap dye is water based, add it to the water after borax is dissolved
2. Heat the oils and beeswax in a double boiler until melted. 
3. Add Lavender oil a few drops at a time until the desired scent is reached, then add a few more drops because it will be diluted when the water is added. If your soap dye is oil based, add it now to the wax/oil mix.
4. Pour the oil/wax into a warm mason pint jar, using either a whisk, or a stick blender, add the hot water a few drops at a time, blending until the water is fully combined before adding more, again only a few drops at a time. 
5. Once all the water has been incorporated pour the lotion into the container you're going to use to store it. Let it cool uncovered. 

Now to clean up the kitchen and get some cookie dough started for tomorrow. Not to mention make about 5 more scents of lotion. Rose, tea tree, honeysuckle, lilac, and vanilla, and I REALLY hope I'm not forgetting a scent. I'll need to make a run to the store for more mineral oil, and beeswax.

Aww, my hubby is cleaning up my lotion making mess for me! I love him! Better go help, since after all, it is my mess. Happy Crafting!

Christmas Crafting Countdown

OK, it's been an interesting week, both good and bad.

The weekend.

I'm still not sure if the weekends are a glorious invention for the work weary, or just a horrible tease for those wanting a vacation. Either way, we spent a quiet, relaxing weekend at home, each working on our own pet projects (of which I have too many), and watching movies together. I put all the cookies I had managed to make in ziploc baggies to go into work on Monday with the hubby. He also decided to make cottage pie to take in, which of course we had practically nothing for it. So off to the store.

Those that know me, know my loathing of driving this time of year. Not because of the weather, but because everyone else seems to forget how to drive, on top of forgetting politeness, kindness, and generosity, you know, all those things this time of year is about. An turn signals become Christmas lights, and completely optional. Yeah. Please people, if you go to the store, park in the flipping parking spaces! That's what they're there for, USE THEM! Please. But anywho, we got in, got what we needed, and got out.

It was a particularly sleepy weekend at that, and we almost forgot to make the food, we were so warm and snuggled under the blankets watching a movie. ::Sigh:: can't wait to do that again. The cottage pie turned out really yummy, although he added bacon, which really through me off since I don't expect that flavor, but it was still great. Sorry, I didn't get any pictures, but I will share my recipe for Cottage Pie (Shepherd's pie, but with beef instead of lamb)

Shepherd's Pie (Or Cottage Pie)
Left over mashed potatoes abour 2 cups
1 onion, chopped
1 bag frozen veggies of choice thawed, I use the peas, corn, carrots, green beans blend
1 lb ground meat (beef, turkey, lamb, etc)
3 TBS flour
Salt, pepper, garlic powder, rosemary, and thyme to taste
2 cups broth

Sautee the onions and veggies until tender, I toss in a little butter for extra flavor. In another pan, brown the meat, and drain excess fat. combine into large skillet, and add flour, seasonings, and broth. Bring to simmer and simmer about 3 minutes, or until thickened.
Put the meat mixture in a casserole pan, and stop with mashed potatoes. Bake at 400ºF for about 30 minutes or until potatoes are slightly golden and hot and bubbly.

Monday rolled around with it's usual fan fare. Grumpy mornings, lots of coffee, and trying to convince myself not to tell hubby to call off work so we can snuggle and sleep more (I think I always ask at least once). But up and away and off went the cookies and cottage pie. Both were a hit. Apparently several people asked for the recipes too! Got the house all tidied up for the day, and spent a nice evening relaxing.

Wednesday I finally got to crafting!! I made more lotion bars. Well I attempted to. I mixed everything like I have for the past few batches, but somehow I managed to melt my mold! So instead of pretty little bars I ended up with wonky shaped pieces all interconnected. I also somehow ended up with almost 2 oz more at the end than I did the first time around...still haven't figure that one out! On top of melting my favorite mold, I also think I managed to burn every finger at some point. My poor aloe plant can't be happy with me.

Mom and I ended up going hunting at the local craft store for unsuspecting little goodies to work with. Mom found some really cute little mini ornaments, and I found the magnet sheets I needed to make some fridge toys for my girlfriends little girl, the Monkey. She LOVES Madagascar, and a while ago I found some little wooden animals of lion, zebra, giraffe, and hippo. I think I let out a little squeal at the store :). Since I found those, I also found patterns to make the penguins in crochet from that movie, on Wolf Dreamer that I want to try out.

Thursday mom had her shoulder surgery, so I dropped her off at about 10, and went about my day. I got the magnets on the animals, and got them sealed so no worries about splinters or paint chipping off as kids that age always manage to put everything in their mouth at some point. Don't worry I put another coat on top of the modge podge of beeswax to make it mouth safe. I know modge podge is non-toxic, but I feel better knowing there's a layer of natural between the Monkey and her new fridge pets.

I made a cute little present for my sister, but, because a certain someone has a REALLY hard time keeping a  secret, I'm not going to say what or post a picture until after she gets it :) I also started and ripped out probably about 5 patterns for my mother-in-law, trying to find something nice, but quick enough that I'll actually have it done in time for Christmas.

When I went back to pick up mom around 4, they couldn't discharge her, because for some reason she wasn't able to keep her oxygen saturation up high enough. After trying several different things, they finally decided to keep her overnight. Today she was fine, and the Dr's can only suggest that it was simply that her body took a little longer than normal to get back up to speed after the surgery. Spent the better part of the day with mom today, had to get her to the pharmacy to get a script filled, and she needed a few things at the store, which going shopping with mom is never a quick job, but today was even longer than normal because of how much pain she was in. Finally got her home and settled, and fed, and medication in her, and she was heading to sleep when I left.

One good thing about the hours at the hospital, I managed to settle on a pattern and get about 1/4 of it done. Now I have to wait for my wrist to stop aching before I can work any more! Perhaps tonight I can try to make lotion in a mason jar instead. I have some rose oil, and since that is probably my favorite scent, I'm excited to try. If I get to make it, I'll take some pics, and share. Hopefully this will turn out better than my last batch!

Count so far - 1 present completely finished, 7 presents mostly finished, 1 present slightly finished, and 1 present I still have no clue on....yikes!