Essential Oils – The Basics
What is an Essential Oil? Plants are essentially chemical factories, and a most important middle-man between sun and earth. Essential oils are the high-grade fuel of plants. Essential oils come from certain varieties of trees, shrubs, herbs, grasses, and flowers. Depending on the variety, it could have been extracted from the roots, leaves, stalks, seeds, stems, resins, peels, beans, barks, needles, or twigs. Each essential oil consists of hundreds of complex and unique chemical compounds. Their use can be traced back thousands of years. Because they smell no nice, many people mistakenly...
Read MoreAir
When the topic of air pollution comes up, we tend to think of crowded cities with lots of traffic and smoke-stack factories. What we rarely consider is the fact that indoor air pollution is by far, a much bigger problem. Couple that with the fact that most people living in industrialized societies spend about 90% of their time indoors, and it becomes a topic worthy of consideration. __________________________________________________________________________ WHAT ARE THE SOURCES OF INDOOR AIR POLLUTION? A partial list….. ~ cleaning products ~ dry cleaned clothing ~ permanent press or...
Read MoreChocolate Covered Bananas
3 or 4 bananas 1 3.5 oz [dark] chocolate bar chopped walnuts (or topping of choice) Melt chocolate by boiling water in a small pot, and adding chocolate to a separate pot, securely sitting on top of the small one. The steam will melt the chocolate (chocolate will burn if you put it in a pot directly on the burner). Pour melted chocolate into a shallow bowl. Peel bananas & roll them around in the chocolate until covered (or you can put the bananas in the bowl first & pour the chocolate right over them). Place chocolate covered bananas on a wax paper covered cookie sheet &...
Read MoreOops – Eggs left at room temp?
The other night, I was trying to make room for something in the fridge, and in the process, accidentally left a carton of eggs out on the counter overnight. I assumed 8 hours at room temp was ok, but wasn’t quite sure, so turned to our awesome CSA farmer, Nancy Grove, who responded with a very thorough answer that started off with “We never refrigerate our eggs.” She went on…. Eggs only go “bad” when they dehydrate. At room temperature, they dehydrate more quickly than they do in the fridge. So, refrigeration of eggs only came into play with large-scale...
Read MoreYogurt & Granola
3/4 cup plain, whole milk yogurt 1 TBSP honey (or one mashed speckled banana, or 3 drops liquid stevia) 1/2 cup granola Mix together yogurt and honey (or mashed banana). Add granola. ______________________________________________________________________________________ SIDE NOTES: ~ This is another tasty yogurt combination my kids like. Sometimes it’s breakfast, sometimes lunch, & sometimes a snack. ~ Careful choosing packaged granola. Some are gluten free, others aren’t. They all contain sugar – some a little, some a lot. Some companies use natural sugar, others,...
Read MoreToo many bananas sitting around?
If you find yourself with an excess of bananas, [if you have a food processor or vitamix) cut them into small chunks and freeze for later use in this recipe: ~ 1-minute-ice-cream Or…. Use them up with one or more of these yummy food combinations: ~ Slice them over your favorite-pancakes instead of using syrup ~ yogurt-banana-cinnamon ~ grown-up-pbj ~ chocolate-covered-bananas ~ apple-(or banana)-cinnamon-walnut-pancakes ~ chocolate-y-oatmeal ~ buckwheat-porridge ~ banana-cinnamon-ice-pops ~ banana-almond-milk-smoothie ~ coffee-smoothie ~ hemp-milk-smoothie ~...
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