Countdown

Its hard to believe that this week is Christmas and next week will be the end of 2013 and in about 7 ish weeks we will have a new little person living in our house. I'm not ready, like at all. We have spend the last week cooking and cooking and prepping food for February in the hopes that having lots of food ready or close to ready will make the transition easier.

  I also started pattering and cutting out my mama cloth stash and getting the supplies prepped for making fitted diapers, wet bags, and mesh produce bags. I would have had a lot sewn if my machine hadn't died and the machine I borrowed hadn't died three inches into sewing after I borrowed it.  I did however find machine on craigslist that looks like it will be a good back up machine and let me get theses projects done before the Rutabaga gets here. 

Hopefully I'll get my new machine and go on a sewing kick and get a bunch done and will post pictures when I do soon.

DIY Sunflower Butter

C is addicted to sunflower butter and at 6 dollars a pound we can't let him have it as often or give him as much as he would like. I stumbled across a diy make your own recipe and figured it had to be worth a try right?
I'm kicking myself we didn't try this sooner.  So easy less than 2 dollars and you control exsactly what goes in it. It didn't take any time at all either.

I roasted 3 cups of raw sunflower seeds in a pan. Apparently you want to roast them yourself so you don't lose the oils that are released in the roasting process and you get a nice nutty flavor.  Don't over roast them, watch them closely and stir constantly.
Transfer the seeds to the food processor (leave the vent open to let out the steam) and turn it on and let it go. Every once in a while stop the machine and scrape down the sides of the processor so it keeps chopping the seeds up. It takes a while but eventually you get something that is sort of butter like. I think it was around 20 minutes or so till we hit that stage. We added a pinch of sea salt and then add a little extra virgin olive oil to make it creamy start with a little let it run till you reach a consistency you like, same goes with sweeter (honey, maple syrup both work well) start with a little until its the right amount sweet.
Here is a guess for the add ins but its just a rough guide.

• 2-4 tablespoons light tasting oil (I prefer coconut oil or light olive oil)
• ¼ teaspoon honey (optional)
• ½ teaspoon salt (to taste, or omit entirely…depends on your taste buds)

That's it your done. So Easy.  store in a jar in the fridge.

Sewing Projects

This pretty fabric is for wet bags and produce bags.

I've finished up the winter markets, we did really well. We are reworking out website to make the online shop work better and look nicer it will be great once we get it done. For the most part I can take a break from Roxy Roodle to work on all the baby projects I have that need to get done in the next 8 weeks.

I'm hoping to make a good start of mama cloth, produce bags, and wet bags today.  I have the wool prepped for making infant diaper covers. Menu planning for my postpartum freezer fill is under way.

Tutorials on the sewing project and other projects are in the works.Please leave a comment below if you are really interested in seeing one of the projects more than the others and I'll try to get that one written up first.  I'll post our organization and prep for hopefully making the transition to a two child house easier and then update them at some point with how well our plans worked after the baby has been here a while.

I'm totally excited to get C down for a nap and start cutting out fabric and figuring out just what prints I want to use for what and to write out a master sewing/ project list to try and keep myself on task.

lots of little changes... Big impact.

I've been thinking a lot about how to make our eating habits better. We eat better than most people but we are far far from where I would like us to be. I'm going to attempt to start making lots of little changes and hopefully by this time next year our eating habits and food budget will be looking much much better.

A lovely friend of mine stumbled across this cool website were a mom is attempting to actually feed her family of 4 real foods, organic, all that good stuff for 400 dollars a month. Lots of blogs have written about doing a "Food stamp challenge" but the majority missed the point and had lovely stuffed stocks of healthy food they "shopped for free" also rules about how they got a certain number of meals that didn't count each month, totally cheating and not really helpful. This mom made her rules much stricter and as close to real life working family who might be on food stamps like as she could. You can check it out here 

Anyway, I'm hoping to pick up a few tips on how to add more organic goodness into our diet and eat better without breaking the bank. I'm hoping to get a little better at going after manufacture coupons for natural stuff we actually use and figuring out how to combined them if possible with store sales to save a little

The 1st little change I want to is give up canned beans and make the switch to only using dried beans preferably local when we can get them and by 2015 100% organic.  We use a lot of beans mostly black, pinto, and garbanzo. We also do a lot of lentils and I want to work on making sure we are getting those as organic and local as we possibly can as well (shouldn't be to hard I wouldn't think we do live in the lentil capital of the world.) 

My hope is that, while we might not save money switching from convectional canned beans to organic bulk that they will at least come out the same cost wise, health wise the switch is a huge improvement, since it would basically cut out 60% of our canned foods usage (tomatoes and coconut milk are all that's left)

The second little change is switching from using oil in baking to only using cold-pressed coconut oil (occasionally I'm still not a big fan of it in baking) or using organic applesauce.  I'll still use real EVOO in cooking and things but my hope is to seriously minimize the amount of oil we consume.  

Coconut oil whipped lotion

Today I had a good amount of coconut oil that needed to be turned into lotion. Coconut oil is amazing stuff but if its cold it turns into a hard block of oil that can be tricky to spread all over you skin. I'd read online that you could put it in the kitchen aid mixer and whip it and that would keep it from being a block and it would stay in a nice fluffy whipped consistency.

 Turns out it does, we added a little honey to part of the whipped oil and it was a little difficult to convince a certain two year old to stop eating it. It made a really nice lotion.
 I added some melted bees wax to another batch and made a lip balm, hand cream for Rob his hands get so chapped in the winter they bleed its no fun. I'm hoping that it will help keep his skin hydrated and from cracking.

 C boy has had some dry skin and peeling skin so I added a little Epsom salt to a little oil to make a body scrub (I would have used sugar but we seem to be out.) and we scrubbed down his elbows, knees, and baby bum to get rid of the dry skin and then slathered him in lotion after his bath. He smells like a soft little coconut. He helped put lotion on my growing baby bump too which was pretty cute.

 I put most of our new lotions into small glass mason jars, the lip balm got separated into little batches and put in plastic baby food freezer containers that just hold a few ounces and the lotion for the shower ended up in a travel silicon reusable container since glass and showers don't mix. 

This was such an easy, fast, and cheap way to make a bunch of safe body products. I would write up a tutorial but there really isn't anything to write, it was that easy. I didn't measure anything or need to add anything to the oil, all the extras I added in where done on a whim. You can add essential oils to make scented oil too but I didn't have any that I wanted to smell like so I chose to leave them unscented.