We be Jammin'!

We had fun picking strawberries on Wednesday.  We picked 53 lbs with our friends the Moylon's since we had to get as much as we could before we leave on vacation or all the strawberries will be gone by the time we got back.  We then had fun cleaning the berries and then froze most of them.

 Then we made a batch of Strawberry Jam made with honey, brown sugar and grated apples for a natural pectin.  I had some for breakfast this morning, OH YUMMY!  These ripe from the vine strawberries make all the difference!  For 8 lbs of strawberries I only used 1.5 cups honey and 1.5 cups brown sugar with 2 grated apples and 2 tablespoons of lemon juice.  That's it!

Pumpkin Spice and everything nice!

I made homemade Pumpkin Spice coffee creamer today!  Yum!  It is so great to know that there are not a bunch of chemicals in this creamer, so much cheaper and it tastes so much better.  I used Almond Milk along with the pumpkin puree, pumpkin spice, cinnamon and vanilla.  I didn't use any extra sugar since the Almond Milk was already sweetened.  Super easy to make, just put the ingredients in a pan and heat up a little to incorporate.  I let it cool a bit and then poured the creamer into a washed out creamer container.  Perfect!  My morning coffee just got that much better!

You can Be your own Barista and make your own homemade flavored creamers too!  I was so excited to find this post and how many different flavor creamer recipes I could make homemade.  I am sure there will be one you will like too.  The Pumpkin Spice I had to try first, but there are so many others I would like to try as well.  I would love to hear if you made any of these flavors and how you like them.  

Fun "not-to-eat" recipes

I made some Homemade dish soap & Tea Tree and Lavender Whipped Body Butter in the last couple days.  Both of these recipes are from this great blog called Sustain, Create and Flow.  I love finding blog sites that help me with new recipes and challenge me to change the things that I can in my life.  These 2 recipes I have been wanting to try so I finally had all the supplies and the time!  

Here is a picture of all the supplies needed for the dish soap.  Just heat water to melt the shaved soap add castle liquid soap and washing soda and any essential oils if you like.  I used Dr. Bronner's Lavender castle soap so I used Lavender essential oil to go along with that. 

I then poured it into a cleaned out dish soap container.  I was waiting to finish off this last bottle so I can replace it with homemade dish soap.  Wow, so easy to make and no chemicals!  No more store bought dish soap for me! :)

Yesterday I made Tea Tree & Lavender Whipped Body Butter.  Even though I have only my 3 lotion recipes, I have decided I LOVE to make lotions!  I love to watch how the oils change from liquid to lotion!  Of course its no surprise, I also love to make lots of things like soap, food recipes, cleaning supplies, basically anything that smells good; but lotions are just amazing!  :)

This recipe is so easy and it looks so good you could eat it!  I mean look at this:

 Doesn't that look like frosting?!

Wow!  After making this recipe I now know how to whip lotion!  I quickly had to take this picture and put the overflowing lotion into another container and get it into the frig, since it was pretty warm yesterday it was starting to melt.  No biggy, it just won't be whipped anymore if it melts, but the frig keeps it in the whipped form until you are ready to use it.  

Let me know if you try these recipes, I would love to hear from you.