Christmas Candy with Meaning?

Almost time for Easter. Not a good thing for health. I wonder if I can make some treats that won't be so bad. Maybe sugar cookies in the shape of Easter eggs, colored by the kids (instead of dying eggs which is just a waste since we don't like eating boiled eggs that much), but made of wheat that has had the phyctic acid neutralized. Maybe sweetened with Stevia? Or at least honey and maple syrup. Wonder if there is a candy I can make in a healthier way, too.

All the pro-life facts about hormonal contraception (that you probably don’t want to hear)

All the pro-life facts about hormonal contraception (that you probably don’t want to hear) - Part I | Blogs | LifeSite


The fact is that all hormonal methods of birth control abort babies. That is just fact.


The real problem is that Christian couples have bought the world's idea that children are a curse, pregnancy a disease to be avoided at all costs. The Bible very much says differently.

Low-risk pregnant women urged to avoid hospital births

Low-risk pregnant women urged to avoid hospital births | Life and style | The Guardian


Hospitals are not safer than out of hospital births and never have been. The first and simplest reason is that there are germs in hospitals that don't exist anywhere else on the planet. Infections are much higher in hospitals and, by the way, are the leading cause of death among new moms in the US.

Toxicfree kitchen- part 2

Last Wednesday we took a tour of a toxic-free kitchen and discussed getting rid of mixes for bread products. This time: cleaners.

Chemistry

Yeah, I know. This is supposed to be about homemaking, not science. The truth is, though, it's the same thing. 

Do you remember the alkaline-to-acid scale? Water is neutral and everything else falls somewhere along the line from 1 (acid) to 14 (alkaline). Opposite ends of the scale render each other neutral and ineffective, easy to rinse off.

Most dirt (body oils, food, grease) is, in fact, mildly acidic. So most cleaners are mildly alkaline or neutral (detergents and soaps). 

Hard water deposits, toilet stains, coffee, tea, and rust are alkaline, requiring an acidic cleaner.

So basically, you need a neutral-mildly alkaline cleaner and an acid ("heavy-duty") cleaner of some sort to do the cleaning in your house. 

Now what you buy all bottled up in the store has all sorts of perfumes and colors added to make you like them better than the competitor. Unfortunately, many people (including some of my children) are allergic to these.

No problem! The manufacturers make hypo-allergenic versions just for us (which they charge extra for for not putting those chemicals in, of course). 

They also use what amounts to very close to the same chemicals with a minor variation in strength/dilutions and perfumes and slap different labels on them (bathroom, all-purpose, kitchen, disinfectant, etc). They all really boil down to that acid-alkaline scale, though.

So let's come up with our own versions that are cheaper, safer, and less toxic to our families.

Scaly Placements

Acids

• Vinegar
• Lemon Juice
• Body fluids
• Grease
• Most Foods
• Most Dirt

Alkalines

• Bath soap
• Baking soda
• Washing soda
• Borax 
• Coffee
• Tea
• Hard water

Use opposites to neutralize each other and them you can just wash them off.

Alkaline Cleaner

I am starting by dissolving a bar of Ivory soap in a quart jar. I have always had to be careful about soaps we use for Hubby (He is where the kids inherit their allergies from.) We have never used anything but Ivory (a pretty pure soap. Few perfumes and no colors) in the bath and I know none of us are allergic to it. From this I will make some basic, All Purpose Cleaners (theoretically);

• Dish soap
• Window cleaner
• Laundry soap
• Cleaner for fingerprints, etc.
• Shampoo

I'll work on these first.
Someday, I intend to try to make my own soap from scratch, but I'm not waiting to get around to that before changing our harsher, more toxic cleaners.

Eventually, I'll need some sort of acid cleaner (vinegar +?), but one thing at a time:-)

12 Things to do with 1 bar of soap

ToxicFree Kitchen 3

And let the chemistry begin! :-D

I began to feel overwhelmed with all the different cleaners that needed to be figured out and made, so I decided to just change one room at a time. The Laundry room was the natural first step, since

1. I've used vinegar instead of fabric softener for years. Hubby is allergic to fabric softeners. Vinegar is on the opposite side of the PH scale from the detergents we use, so it neutralizes them and they rinse out. (Static cling and gray clothes are generally caused by the soaps/detergents not rinsing.) Fabric softeners work by coating the fibers with a thin coat of wax. This is NOT a good thing for towels and cloth diapers!
2. I have just used plain ole' detergent for my spotter for some time, so that's already gone.
3. I don't iron, so no need for the products associated with that.

This really just left the laundry soap itself.

I looked around and realized I had nearly everything on the "Buy 5" list at MomsAware already. A little research told me it might work OK to substitute baking soda for washing soda if I triple the amount in the recipe. So I used:

• 1 cup Borax
• 3 cups baking soda
• 1 bar grated Ivory soap (which I found last week at the case sale at our local grocery store for about $.30 a bar:-). This is one soap I KNOW we aren't allergic to.

I added 3 Tablespoons to each load of laundry (to account for the increased volume of the baking soda.) Just finished up the first batch of soap yesterday. Results:

1. Clothes look just as clean.
2. Clothes are softer! A little looking at facebook tells me this is a normal result. Seems it's the detergents not washing out that make the clothes stiff in the first place, which we "fix" by adding fabric softeners. Two products that have to be bought.
3. I think it will be cheaper. Mom's Aware say they did the math and detergents cost $.23-25 per load (plus FS), while this mix costs about $.11. Now, I think I have seen generic detergents for $.11 a load (according to the stores shelf label), but that was not HE soap for high efficiency machines. 

(Yes, we have a HE machine. Our septic is a bit overwhelmed due to the size of our family combined with clay soil, so we really need the lower-water machines. I LOVE this type of machine. I HATE the Bosch brand mine is. The minute it wears out enough I can, I am getting a Whirlpool Duet!

Our dryer of 10 odd years just wore out. It is only the second dryer we have had in 28 years of marriage. These Whirlpools have been total workhorses! [and, no, the Whirlpool company isn't paying me:-D] So I recently got a brand-new dryer. I did a lot of research and settled on the cheapest Whirlpool Duet [about $700]. This was the cheapest type of dryer with the lowest operating costs. It has a sensor in the drum that tells when the clothes are dry, so there is no over or under drying. It is taking about half the time my old dryer took. And the alarms are musical to boot!) 

Anyway, the laundry experiment seems to be a success! I will order some washing soda from Amazon, since I can't find it at any stores here. A whole $10/3 lb box, free shipping. Not bad at all.

Have any of you experimented with natural cleaners of any type? I am thinking of tackling the shower next (shampoo and conditioner are WAY too expensive, but we have 6 heads of long blonde hair in our house, so it's kind of scary). Any ideas?

The Toxic-Free Kitchen

Fascinating! And certainly something to aim for, especially in these homes where we are dealing with allergies.

I have known for a long time that our modern kitchens need way more storage than our ancestor's kitchens. The reason is simple: we buy everything already mixed up while they only bought the base ingredients.

For example, most kitchens today have pancake mix, Bisquick, cake mixes, cookie mixes, brownie mixes, muffin mixes, and maybe even bread mixes (especially if they own a bread machine), plus flour, sugar, baking soda, baking powder, salt, corn starch, and flavorings. The truth is, all of these different mixes are 95% the same ingredients;

• Flour
• Baking Powder
• Baking Soda
• Salt
• Sugar

They might also contain powdered butter and/or eggs and/or milk (which aren't nearly as healthy as the fresh versions in your fridge).

Oh, and of course, preservatives and artificial colors and flavors that aren't needed in the raw ingredients but are necessary to keep the mixes from going bad before they are used.

The only real differences are in the flavorings and the proportions (and that doesn't really vary much. If it is a desert it has more sugar:flour is about it.)

So if you get a good cookbook (or Google) and just practice you should be able to do away with all the mixes and only have the basics, which you probably have on hand anyway. I only have cake mixes and my Hubby's favorite muffin mixes. All the rest (pancakes, muffins for the rest of us, cookies, bread, etc) we make totally from scratch, usually with 100% whole wheat flour.

A couple of weeks ago I even began making the buns for our Sunday Morning hamburgers from scratch (I get them ready the night before and just put them in the fridge on a cookie sheet, all ready for the oven first thing in the morning. By the time the patties are done, so are the buns.)

I am working on a cake recipe to replace those mixes now.
 
This reduces the need for storage, is cheaper (you pay to have someone else put the ingredients together for you), has less preservatives and colorings, and gives you greater control of the health of the product (allergies? learn to substitute. You can use healthier sweeteners such as honey or maple syrup instead of sugar. And you can replace up to about half the flour with whole wheat without affecting the flavor of the product much, greatly increasing the vitamin and fiber content of your food).

Next time I'll cover cleaners.

Homemade Bread for the Holidays

Make some Good Bread for this Thanksgiving!

 We make our own bread for meals as well as for potlucks at church on Sundays and holidays. This is our favorite recipe.

3 Cups of water. Since we store our yeast in the freezer, we use hot water from the tap. If your yeast is room temperature, use room temperature water. You can also replace the water with 2 eggs and enough milk to equal 3 cups, or even use fruit juice for a unique flavor.


1 Tablespoon Yeast 
Give it a minute to dissolve.








2-4 Tablespoons of butter (optional, but it helps the loaf hold together better through cutting. We like the taste as well.)

2-4 Tablespoons of honey (optional. We like the taste. You could use sugar, maple syrup, or whatever sweet you want, or leave it out all together.)

1 Tablespoon salt. Trust me. You need this for the flavor. Helps the yeast to grow at the right pace, too.

We use our Kitchen Aid mixer, but you can do this all by hand.



3 Cups fresh-ground whole wheat. One reason I love my Kitchen Aid is because of all the attachments you can get for it; makes it a food processor, juicer, wheat grinder, meat slicer, pasta maker, etc (and no, I didn't get paid to say that). 

3-5 cups of white flour. We use All natural, unbleached white flour. The bleach they use to make flour pure white is also one of the chemicals they use to give rats diabetes in labs so they can find a cure for the disease. We'll just avoid that all together, thank you very much.

Honestly, this flour looks white unless you put it next to bleached flour. Than it looks creamy.
 

The amount you need depends on the brand of flour you are using and the humidity in the air. Just add it 1/2 cup by 1/2 cup (while mixing and kneading) until you get the right texture. If you are doing it by hand, it will get too stiff to stir in a bowl. When that happens, turn it out onto a clean, flour covered counter and knead the rest 
 
It is done when it is cleaning the sides of the bowl. By hand, it will have the texture of playdough or a hacky-sack.

Let it rise in a draft-free, warm place until it doubles in size (about 1-2 hours). The dough in these two pictures is the same dough, pictures taken 1 1/2 hours apart.

 

It is doubles when it looks like it or when you poke your finger in and it looks like this:





You can go ahead and put it in the pans after the first rising, but the crust and flavor will be a bit nicer if you let it rise and double a second time. The second rising will be quicker.


Then divide the dough in half and shape like loaves (or divide into balls and shape like rolls:-) Let it rise again. This should only take half an hour. 

Bake at 450 for twenty minutes, then lower the temperature to 400 and bake for another 10-20 minutes. Rolls will bake a bit faster. It's done when it's golden on top (see picture), or when you tap it and it sounds hallow.
Rub the top with butter and let it cool for at least 20 minutes before slicing (it will slice neater if you wait).

Eat and Enjoy!