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Creating Routines: Handcrafts

Amber on April 11, 2013 1 Comment

Crafting my Life Creating Routines Before I decided to close Crafting my Life, I was running a monthly series on the site that was all about creating positive routines. I was enjoying it quite a lot, so I decided to move it over here and re-jig it a little. Each month I’m setting one goal towards creating a more purpose-filled life. If you’d like to join in and take some steps to create better rhythms and routines in your own life, I’d love to hear how you’re doing it.

Last Month’s Recap

In March, I committed to taking time every day to list five things I love about my husband. And, I’m sad to say, I didn’t even come close to doing it every day. Between a trip to Disneyland and my own forgetfulness, I hit more like 12 days out of the 31 days in March. Even so, I feel that I noticed a difference. I’m keeping the spreadsheet, and when I’m feeling annoyed at my husband or just kind of down in the dumps I open it up, add five things, and start to feel better. So, I could be more disciplined, but on the whole it had the desired effect.

Creating a Routine for April

For April, I want to get back in touch with my crafty side. I put together a baby blanket for my new nephew last month, which I enjoyed immensely. It reminded me how much I like sewing. There’s something very satisfying, and even empowering, about creating something useful with your own two hands. Also, I find that when I’m watching TV I like to have something to do with my hands, and since I don’t have any knitting projects on the go, I often play iPhone games instead. (Bejeweled, anyone?) The result is way too much electronic stimulation. Plus, I often miss key points in the show since I’m distracted. I’d like to stop that, so this month I’m setting two goals:

Start a new knitting project, and work on it while I’m watching TV. I’m thinking maybe a simple shawl. If you have any pattern suggestions, I’m all ears.
Sew myself a new tunic. I already have the pattern (Amy Butler’s Anna Tunic) and the fabric (Valori Wells’ Mamma Birds – Gypsy), so I just need to make the time. I’m thinking playing fewer video games would be a good place to start.

Start With Small Changes

One thing I’ve learned on my journey towards a more purpose-driven life is that change happens best in small, bite-sized pieces. That’s why I’m once again choosing smaller projects. The knitting has no time frame, and the sewing project should take me a few hours, at most, if things go well. I invite you to take on some small changes as well. What could you do to improve your daily rhythm or overall mood? And, what’s holding you back from doing it? Create a new routine, and leave a comment so that we can cheer each other on!

Filed Under: Crafting my Life, Making Things Tagged With: Crafting my Life, Crafts, Creating Routines, Knitting, Navel Gazing, Sewing

Adventures in Homemade Deodorant

Amber on February 28, 2013 10 Comments

My One Green Thing for February is trying homemade deodorant. Never one to do today what I can put off ’til tomorrow, I just mixed up my first batch last night. While I experiment with it, I thought I’d share the process with you.

I did my research a few weeks ago, and found two recipes that looked promising: this one and this one. Because I like to complicate things, I combined them and improvised a little bit to create my own recipe. Here’s what I used:

4 Tbsp coconut oil
1 Tbsp beeswax
4 Tbsp arrowroot flour
2 Tbsp baking soda
10 drops tea tree oil
10 drops grapefruit seed extract
10 drops lavender essential oil
5 drops peppermint essential oil
1 old, clean deodorant tube

First, I put the coconut oil and beeswax in a small saucepan over low heat to melt. While that did its thing, I combined the arrowroot and baking soda in a glass bowl.

Once the oils were melted and combined, I mixed the whole thing together and added the oils and grapefruit seed extract. Then I mixed it together as well as I could, because lumpy deodorant does not seem like a good thing. Finally, I poured as much as I could into the deodorant tube, which is sitting in my fridge hardening right now. The rest went into a glass jar, that I put upstairs in my room. The theory is that the beeswax should make it hard at room temperature, but we’ll have to see.

The whole process took about 10 minutes or so, and the cost of the materials was pretty small. I bought my stick of beeswax at the farmers’ market for $2. I already had the tea tree oil, arrowroot, coconut oil, and baking soda on hand. I bought the grapefruit seed extract and essential oils, and they weren’t cheap, but I used a really small amount. I would say that my DIY deodorant is quite a lot cheaper than the real thing. Now, the only question is: will it work? I’ll report back next week and let you know.

Filed Under: Enviro-Mama, Making Things Tagged With: DIY, Enviro-Mama, One Green Thing

Candy Cane Ice Cream

Amber on December 12, 2012 4 Comments

I am someone who believes that ice cream is a year-round food. While other people opt for something slightly less frozen in the dead of winter, I just put on another sweater. However, I do make seasonal adjustments when it comes to my ice cream consumption. Fresh raspberry ice cream, for instance, is for the summer. Pumpkin ice cream is for the fall. And when Christmas rolls around, that can mean only one thing: candy cane ice cream.

I adapted this recipe from my vanilla ice cream recipe, which I adapted from the vanilla ice cream recipe that came with my ice cream maker. I’ve made adjustments to suit my personal taste – adding slightly more vanilla, throwing in some peppermint extract for the candy cane flavour, and changing the milk-to-cream ratio. This ice cream doesn’t just contain bits of candy cane, it also contains chocolate chips. My daughter refers to it as “peppermint bark ice cream”, and I can see where she’s coming from. I use mini chocolate chips because I find the regular ones get a little too hard when they’re frozen. Breaking a tooth is not festive.

Amber’s Candy Cane Ice Cream

* This recipe is always gluten-free!

Ingredients:
2 1/2 cups cream
2 cups milk
1 cup sugar
1 1/2 Tbsp vanilla
1 Tbsp peppermint extract
4 standard size candy canes
1/2 cup mini chocolate chips

Preparation:
Mix the cream, milk, sugar, vanilla and peppermint extract together. Whisk for two or three minutes, until the sugar is dissolved. This keeps your ice cream from being gritty.

Prepare the ice cream following the directions on your ice cream maker. In mine, which is a counter top electrical machine with a freezer bowl, it takes about 25 minutes. While that’s happening, crush the candy canes by bashing them with a rolling pin. This is a great way to work out any holiday stress you’re experiencing.

When the ice cream is starting to gel nicely, and it’s within a few minutes of being finished, add the crushed candy canes and mini chocolate chips. Let it go for a few minutes longer until it’s the desired consistency. Serve it up and freeze the rest.

Yield: Approximately 2 quarts of ice cream.

Happy holidays, and happy ice cream making!

Filed Under: Making Things Tagged With: Christmas, Food, Recipes

Experimenting with Homemade Sushi

Amber on November 19, 2012 16 Comments

When I was doing my regular weekly grocery shop on Tuesday, I had a flash of brilliance. Why not try to make sushi myself? It would be cheaper, possibly healthier, and I wouldn’t have to feel guilty about all of those styrofoam takeout containers that normally come with my sushi. What’s not to love?

Now, I have fallen victim to my own brilliant ideas before, so before I dove in headfirst I took to Twitter to ask my friends. Several of them confirmed that preparing homemade sushi was surprisingly easy. Buoyed by their reassurance, and all stocked-up with ingredients, on Thursday evening I Googled how to make sushi rice and got started. Here’s how it went:

1. I cooked the rice, being careful to rinse it thoroughly and following the instructions as well as I could. While the rice cooked, I also heated the rice vinegar, sugar and salt together. As often happens to me, I tried really hard not to let it boil as instructed, but it might have boiled a little. Or a lot. I was doing my best here, people.

2. While the rice cooled, my daughter and I chopped the veggies. This part was easy. I rocked it.

3. Still waiting for the rice to cool, I mixed up the wasabi. It smelled wasabi-like. I was feeling confident. I should not have, because like they say, pride cometh before the fall.

Making Homemade Sushi: Putting it Together

4. I didn’t take many pictures of spreading out the sushi rice. This is because I was too busy swearing. They call it sticky rice for a reason. However, some cool water on my hands did help, and I mostly managed to get the rice laid out. When I tasted a few errant grains, it didn’t exactly taste exactly like I thought it should. It may have been slightly undercooked. However, at that point, there wasn’t much I could do about it, so I rolled with it. (Get it? Rolled with it. Sushi. Sushi rolls. I slay me.)

5. Rolling was the part I was most worried about, but it turned out not to be that bad. I had a vague memory of one of my university roommates making sushi, and I recalled that she had dabbed water on the edge of the nori to hold it together, and that worked well. The finished roll was fine. However, you can’t eat a finished roll.

6. Slicing the sushi was the hard part for me. It’s probably a sign I need a better knife, but I had a hard time cutting through the nori on the bottom, which made the rolls fall apart a little. Still, not bad for a first effort, I say.

7. Finally, it was time for the verdict. My children, who adore sushi, were excited. But upon taking his first taste, my son promptly spat it out. The canned crab I used tasted different than the crab we normally get from a sushi restaurant. The rice, like I said, was slightly undercooked, and my seasoning sauce wasn’t exactly the same as the sushi restaurant’s seasoning. Jacob skipped the sushi and ate all the leftover nori, which is one of his favourite treats. My daughter bravely ate a few pieces, because she wanted dessert and she knew she couldn’t have it if she hadn’t had any healthy food. And then, when my husband got home late, he announced that he’d had sushi for lunch. All in all, it was a bust.

Would I make sushi again? The answer is definitely a no. It wasn’t super-hard, but it wasn’t all that easy, either. It requires planning and prep work, and while I’m sure that I could get better at it, I’m not sure it’s worth it. The truth is that sushi is what we eat when we don’t feel like cooking, and the people who make it professionally are much better at it than I am. I think I’ll leave it to them, and use my leftover wasabi and rice vinegar in other recipes.

Have you ever made your own sushi? How did it go? Do you have any tips that I should use if I forget how annoyed I was to be composting all my sushi and dare to try it again? I’d love to hear!

Filed Under: Making Things Tagged With: Food, Navel Gazing

Trying Homemade (Soda) Pop and a Giveaway!

Amber on September 19, 2012 15 Comments

Sometime a couple of years ago my sister gifted me with a Soda Stream soda maker. I didn’t use it much, partly because I didn’t really know what to do with it, and partly because my kids both hate fizzy drinks. While the latter fact works out for me in that I don’t have to work to keep them away from pop, it also means that my plans to make fizzy orange juice as an exciting treat haven’t panned out.

Recently, however, I was offered the chance to review The Artisan Soda Workshop, a book that offers 70 recipes to help you make your own pop at home. Some of them are fountain classics, some of them are very exotic, and some are even alcoholic. Unlike store bought, all the recipes use natural ingredients like fruits, herbs, and actual sugar. Thinking that I would finally have a chance to figure out what to do with the Soda Stream, I seized the opportunity.

I have spent the past few weeks sampling six different soda recipes, so that I could give you a thorough review. Here’s what I tried:

Sparkling Rosemary Lemonade
Blackberry Lavender
Cream Soda
Concord Grape
Chocolate
Egg Cream

On the whole, the syrups were easy to make, and they kept well in my fridge. It takes a little bit of planning because you have to cook and cool them before you use them, but it’s something you can easily do in the afternoon to have pop with dinner. I also found that the homemade sodas were, by and large, less sweet than store-bought. This could be good or bad depending on your point of view, and you could always adjust the sugar to taste.

As for the sodas themselves, I was a big fan of the cream soda (so easy, so tasty), the blackberry lavender and the concord grape. I was sort of mixed on the sparkling rosemary lemonade, but once I added a little bit of gin it was quite delightful. As for the chocolate soda and the egg cream, which are quite similar, I was not a fan. However, this is really a matter of personal taste, and your mileage may vary, for sure.

I do enjoy sharing the love, as you know, so I thought I’d give you a chance to try making your own homemade soda. If you don’t have a Soda Stream, you can either see if my sister is willing to give you one too (unlikely) or you can just buy seltzer water to mix it up with. I’m giving away my copy of the book, as soon as I finish writing down a few of my favourite recipes. I’m also throwing in a copy of Mommy Mixology: A Cocktail for Every Calamity. You can find out more about that book by listening to my podcast with author Janet Frongillo.

If you’d like to win The Artisan Soda Workshop and Mommy Mixology, leave a comment on this post on or before September 30, 2012. I’ll draw a name at random and pop the books in the mail.

Filed Under: Making Things Tagged With: Bloggy McBloggerson, Books, Food, Giveaways

Ice Cream: The Pinnacle of Food Preservation

Amber on July 12, 2012 6 Comments

I am far from a strict locavore, but I do a lot of local eating, especially at this time of year. In fact, doing more local eating is my One Green Thing for July. In my quest to reduce my food miles I grow a garden, I belong to a local CSA program, I shop at my farmers’ market and I eat seasonally. I also preserve the harvest when it comes in. Each year I freeze, can and dry food to eat all year long.

While I enjoy all of the foods that I preserve, there’s one item that trumps them all, and that’s ice cream. In my mind homemade ice cream using local milk, cream and fruit is the height of local eating. If you ignore the sugar, it’s pretty much a health food, packed full of fresh berries (antioxidants!) and dairy (calcium!). While strawberry ice cream is probably the most classic flavour involving fruit I’ve also made raspberry, cherry (tip: get a cherry pitter) and blackberry ice cream with great results.

To make my own homemade fruit ice cream I started with a generic strawberry ice cream recipe and tweaked it to suit my tastes. The result is an all-purpose formula that you can use with pretty much any kind of fruit. Once you’ve got it in your freezer it should last you for several months. So if you have a bumper crop of strawberries, make a couple of batches of ice cream and enjoy it all summer long. And if you need something to bring to a summer BBQ or pot luck, you can’t go wrong with a frozen dessert.

If you’d like to make your own ice cream this summer, I’m sharing my all-purpose recipe.

Amber’s All Purpose Fruit Ice Cream Recipe

* This recipe is always gluten-free!

Ingredients:
3 cups fruit
1 1/4 – 1 3/4 cups sugar, to taste (the more tart the fruit, the more sugar I use)
2 cups heavy cream
2 cups milk
1 tablespoon vanilla

Preparation:
Wash your fruit, and slice it if required (I don’t slice raspberries or blackberries, I do slice cherries and strawberries). Add the sugar and stir well, then let it sit for 20 minutes. This will draw out the juices, and allow the sugar to dissolve nicely. Once the fruit and sugar have had a chance to sit together and make friends, mash it or run it quickly through a blender or food processor. Add the milk, cream and vanilla, stir well, and freeze in your ice cream maker according to the manufacturer’s instructions.

Yield: Approximately 2 quarts of ice cream.

Do you preserve any food? What’s your favourite method?

I was inspired to write this post by Abbie of Farmer’s Daughter, who is hosting this month’s Green Moms Carnival on food independence. If you want lots of other ideas for local eating, visit her site on July 17.

Filed Under: Enviro-Mama, Making Things Tagged With: Enviro-Mama, Food, Gluten-Free, Recipes

Cinnamon Ice Cream

Amber on March 12, 2012 6 Comments

When I was in Victoria for my weekend escape with Amanda, I sampled some cinnamon ice cream. It was delicious, and I wanted more. This is when it occurred to me that I own an ice cream maker. I decided that it couldn’t be that hard to make cinnamon ice cream, so I set about searching for a recipe. I found turned several, but they all contained eggs. I have this thing against custard ice creams. They require planning, because you need to cook up the recipe in advance, and let it cool. Plus, I prefer the cleaner taste that you get without eggs. So I decided to improvise a little bit, and create my own recipe.

I have a standard ice cream base recipe that I use, so I prepared that then reverted to the tried-and-true method of adding a little bit of cinnamon and tasting it, then adding a little more and tasting it again. My result has a hint of heat, but not too much. Both of my kids refuse to eat anything spicy, and they enjoyed it. The creamy coolness of the ice cream creates a nice juxtaposition. I’m a fan, and this is my new favourite flavour. Plus, it’s totally gluten-free, so there’s that.

Amber’s Cinnamon Ice Cream

* This recipe is always gluten-free!

Ingredients:
2 1/2 c cream
2 c milk
1 c sugar
3 t cinnamon, or to taste
1 t vanilla

Preparation:
Mix all ingredients together in a big bowl, and stir with a whisk for two or three minutes, until the sugar is dissolved. This keeps your ice cream from being gritty.

Prepare the ice cream following the directions on your ice cream maker. In mine, which is a counter top electrical machine with a freezer bowl, it took about 25 minutes. Once it’s reached the desired consistency, serve it up and freeze the rest.

Yield: Approximately 2 quarts of ice cream.

This past weekend I updated my recipes, which you can find on my Making Stuff page. I added gluten-free adaptions for most of the recipes listed there. If you have a hankering for some homemade chocolate chip cookies or macaroni and cheese, gluten-free or not, I’ve hooked you up. It’s comfort food for the masses, whatever your stance on wheat.

Have you ever sampled a food on vacation that was so good you had to try to make it yourself at home? How did it go? Tell me all about it!

Filed Under: Making Things, Random Awesomeness Tagged With: Food, Gluten-Free, Ice Cream, Recipes