Auction Soaps 11, 12 & 13

Continuing with my marathon of soap I'm making for the auction at my local Unitarian church, we have . . .
(from left to right, starting with the back)

#11 Eucalyptus - solid light green

#12 Rosemary & Lemongrass with poppy seeds - yellow with black specs. I've always wanted to make a rosemary and lemongrass soap and put poppy seeds in it - it reminds me of a lemon muffin with poppy seed, but smells much better!

#13 Rosemary & Peppermint! It smells as lovely as it looks. Light green with dark green swirls.

#'s 14 - 16 are in the freezer until they can pop out of their molds. I'll have pics of them up later today, but I couldn't wait to post on these three - they're too pretty.

New Soaps 8, 9 & 10

Continuing on my soap marathon for one of my donations to the UCBR auction, from left to right:

8. Double Mint - scented w/ both peppermint and spearmint, w/ flecks of ground mint from my garden.
9. Balsam Chocolate - colored w/ cocoa powder and scented w/ Balsam essential oil
10. Garden Rose - scented w/ essential oils of Palamrosa and Rose Geranium, and colored w/ Moroccan red clay powder - beautiful color and scent!!

Since measuring the oils takes up a large part of my prep time, I'm pre-measuring them so that when I go to make it I'm good to go for 3 batches. I have enough containers to pre-measure tonight for 5 batches.

26 New Soaps - New Project

For the last year, I've been part of our local Unitarian Universalist congregation. I love the church; I love the people. It is a welcoming congregation full of diversity.

Sometimes I feel a little guilty for not helping out as much as I want to. One of the side effects of the kids integrating into the community is that we are more busy than I'd like to be. Running to this activity and that activity, time gets nibbled away until there's not much left.

But I would like to help in as many ways as I can, so I'm creating things to donate to the yearly auction, which raises a good amount of the income needed to run the church. So that leads me to my current project and one of my 4 ideas for donations: creating a year's worth of soap, twice.

The final product will be 2 gift baskets, each filled with enough soap to last one person a year. This soap will be vegan soap, scented with 100% essential oils (that's plant oils). I figure that Frank and I go through about a bar week. So 26 to 30 bars should last one person a year.

But I can't just fill a basket with 30 bars of soap. That would be way too easy. Each bar has to be different from the others and unique in at least one way. But I'm not so particular that I won't use soap that I already have made.So far I have (pictured from left to right):

1. Lavender (colored light purple w/ dark purple swirls)
2. Lavender Patchouli (white w/ pink swirls)
3. Lavender Mint (Celtic knot heart w/ green and purple swirls)
4. Patchouli Mint (green w/ dark brown swirls)
5. Sweet Orange
6. Spearmint w/ French green clay
7. Lavender Rosemary (all white)

In order for the soap to have optimum curing time, I need to finish the other 19 to 23 batches in the next 12 days! So now begins the soap marathon. Let's see if I can do it.

Whole Grain Pumpkin Bread

Finally! After several batches, some of which were not good, I perfected my whole grain pumpkin bread! Yeah!

A couple of days ago, I was gathering firewood in the yard, and I suddenly thought, "This whole wheat or whole grain pumpkin bread is not nearly as good as my old all white flour and loads of sugar recipe. But it is much healthier and still tastes good." Eventually I'll forget what that old bad-for-me bread tasted like and come to love my new healthier one just as much.

Plus, this pumpkin bread can't be all bad - my two year old can't get enough.

Pumpkin Bread is very versatile and forgiving, so you can tweak it a good bit to your own tastes.

This recipe is for 2 loaves of Pumpkin Bread. Since it takes an entire large can of pumpkin puree, if you want 1 loaf, freeze or refrigerate half a can of pumpkin. Just remember to bring it back to room temp before making another loaf. (That is really important.)

Whole Grain or Whole Wheat Pumpkin Bread
Yield 2 loaves.

Wet Stuff:
29 oz can pumpkin puree (I use the large can of Libby's 100% Pure Pumpkin)
1 cup vegetable oil (I use canola)
1 1/2 cups white sugar
4 eggs (room temperature)

I keep my flour in recycled containers in the freezer. They keep longer and line up nicely on the side shelf

Flour (if you keep it in the freezer, bring it back to room temp before using):
Flour Option #1 - all Whole Wheat
2 2/3 cups Whole Wheat Flour

Flour Option #2 - mixed grains (found these in the bulk section at Whole Foods)
1 1/3 cup Whole Wheat
2/3 cup Whole Grain Spelt Flour
2/3 cups Oat Flour

You can see the strata of my dry ingredients for my 1/2 test batch.

Other Dry Ingredients:
1/4 cup almond meal or ground almonds (optional, and also found in bulk bins at WF's)
1 TBSP Vital Gluten (WF bulk bins too)
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1 1/2 tsp ground nutmeg
1 1/2 tsp ground ginger
1/2 tsp ground allspice
optional: 1/4 tsp ground cloves, if you like cloves, which I don't!

Mix flour and other dry ingredients. This is how I mix mine. Pour them all in a plastic container that has about twice as much capacity as the total ingredients. Pop on lid and shake. It's pretty mixed up afterwards.

Preheat oven to 340 degrees F. Grease two 9x5 loaf pans.

In a large mixing bowl, add pumpkin, oil, sugar and eggs. Mix on low speed until blended, about 30 seconds. It'll look like this:




Next, add the mixed up dry ingredients a little at a time until blended (on low speed). Then mix with hand mixer on medium speed for 2 minutes.

Divide the batter up between the two pans. Each should be about this full:

Place in preheated oven on top middle shelf. On the bottom shelf, place a pan filled 1" with very hot water. The water keeps the oven steamy, which prevents the bread from getting too dry.

Bake in preheated oven for 1hr to 1 hr 15 min until the center is done. The top of loaf should spring back when lightly pressed.

Some changes:
Not sweet enough: increase the sugar to 2 cups.
Too gritty: leave out the almonds. Plus make sure that all of your ingredients are room temp.

I hope you enjoy this as much as we have. 5 loaves of pumpkin bread in 5 days hasn't been such a hardship!

Diet Changes

I haven't blogged in weeks - busy holidays, being sick, yadda, yadda, yadda (that should sum it up).

Every year I make two or three dietary changes in my efforts to get my family to eat healthier. Sometimes we regress, but over time these changes work their way into our lives.

Part of my eating philosophy is never to make dietary changes that you can't or aren't willing to live with for the rest of your life. Otherwise whatever weight you lose or health you gain will be negated when you fall back on bad habits. Extreme diets never work in the long run. They are generally not healthy, for one, and impossible to maintain for years on end. Therefore I make changes a couple a year - healthy changes we can live with.

This year's diet resolutions:

Change #1: To add more whole grains to our mostly white flour life. Although I used unbleached flour, it's still white and without that whole grain, wheat germy goodness.

Change #2: Decrease the amount of sugar we consume. I cut out most corn syrup products over the last few years. Barely does corn syrup cross our threshold - barely a soda, less than a few packaged snacks, and fewer canned or boxed meals. But our sugar consumption - good grief. It's mostly from homemade lemonade and my cooking, but I'm going through 5 pounds of sugar a week!

Change #3: Canned tomatoes. But aren't tomatoes healthy? Yes, but canned tomatoes are not.

A few weeks ago I read an article: 7 Common Foods The Experts Avoid . Most of it I knew.

• We rarely eat red meat - maybe once a month or less.
  
• Haven't had microwave popcorn in years! (Okay, that's a lie. I bought a box last year when it was on sale, but that's it! I swear!) I used a big sauce pan and a bit of coconut oil on the stove-top like I did when I was a kid until a friend bought an "Atom Pop" off eBay for me.
  
• Non-organic potatoes - that one I hadn't heard before, and I admit I was shocked at what they put on potatoes. But changing from conventional to organic doesn't require anything more than buying my potatoes at Whole Foods rather than Albertsons.
• Farmed Salmon - I've know about the evils of farming salmon for years, and much to my husband's discontent, we don't eat it!!! If you want a shock at some of the disturbing things people do to our oceans that directly involve what you eat, read about salmon farming.
• Milk Produced with Artificial Hormones - that one is so easy to live without. You can even find generic milk without hormones. We only drink non-homogenized milk. Homogenizing milk is usually done by forcing the liquid through a very small orifice until the fat molecules are very tiny and disperse easily in the milk. The drawback to homogenized milk: the fat molecules enter the blood stream much more easily. Not good, not good at all.
  

Now to the tomatoes. I used canned tomatoes all of the time. Put in homemade chilli. Add it to pasta sauce. Put it on fresh pizza. Tomatoes are one of those wonder foods with so much goodness, you can't get enough. Even when my 5 y.o. eats 3 pounds in one day, which has interesting side-effects I'd rather not mention when talking about cooking, I encourage everyone to eat more tomatoes.

My change, I'll have to use fresh tomatoes and dice them myself. If I use pre-prepared sauce, buy jarred rather than canned. It's not such a big change, I admit. But I would never have thought of a tomato as bad for us.

Let's see how the year progresses with these changes! I'm excited.

The best Apple Pie I've ever had

Hubby and I were browsing through Whole Foods yesterday afternoon. He fully admitted that he tagged along only to snag a pie of some kind. Looking through the pie isle, I kept thinking, "I can make a better pie than that." So with a 1/2 gallon of vanilla ice cream added to our list, I looked for an apple pie recipe - not at all satisfied with the ones I've used before.

The recipe I found and used was the weirdest Apple Pie Recipe I've seen. Most AP recipes have you slice the apples, mix them with some sugar, corn starch and spices, place in crust, and then bake. This little recipe had me place the sliced apples in the crust by themselves. I then made a praline base (boiling sugar and butter together until about soft ball stage), and finally pour the praline base over the sliced apples. It baked up nicely with a lattice crust.

Even though I used Red Delicious instead of Granny Smith, it was very, very good. Especially with the vanilla ice cream. It was like pralines and apples and a crispy golden crust.

The pie recipe I used: Grandma Ople's Apple Pie from All Recipe
My crust recipe: Classic Crisco Pie Crust, using Butter Flavored Crisco rather than regular

Pie Baking tip: place pie dish on a cookie sheet or pizza pan when baking. It keeps the heat from directly touching the pan.

Crust tip: Wrap the edge in tin foil. Remove the wrapping the last 10 to 15 minutes you are baking. This keeps the edge of pie crust from burning or getting overly crispy.

A note on Crisco: Yeah, I hate using Crisco too, but it makes the best pie crust. If you buy a pre-made crust, they've used something like Crisco. I reserve it for the occasions when only it will do. You can sub butter for it, but it never comes out quite the same. Using 1/2 butter and 1/2 Crisco isn't too bad. Use your judgment.

Enjoy!!

Raising Megalomanics

I'm in charge of reading bedtime stories at night, which with 2 active boys isn't as easy and peaceful as it sounds. At story time it looks more like the Federation of Wrestling than the typical kids cuddled up in bed listening attentively to a story.

Out of desperation to get the attention of my wild animals, a few nights ago in the middle of a story "Aunt Isabel Tells a Good One," I changed the name of a main character to that of the most rambunctious boy. Prince BooBoy was then saved by the Princess.

Little did I know what I was starting. Now every book is about them. Sure, they've settled down and now listen to the story, but after having to read "Where the Wild Things Are" twice every night (once for "The night when E. wore his wolf suit and made mischief of one kind . . ." and once for "The night Booboy wore his wolf suit and . . ." - complete with them saying "I'll eat you up" and "Let the wild rumpus start") one starts to wonder.

Some stories aren't so bad. We have "Booboy and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day." But when we get to "Farmer E Sheers His Sheep," and his older brother insists that the sheep are his sisters, it starts to loose something.