Safe Bubbles

Last week I expounded on the benefits of cold process soap. Today I’m climbing back up on my soap box – so to speak – to talk about another chemical you might want to avoid.

Sodium Lauryl Sulfate is used in a ton of cosmetic products – some 90 percent of shampoos, almost all toothpastes, and most body washes. It’s a great foaming agent, and a super-duper detergent cleanser. That’s why it’s also used as an engine degreaser, in car washes, and to clean commercial garage floors.

It’s used as a skin irritant in laboratories in order to assess the healing properties of other products. It cleans by corrosion, stripping away lipids in the skin so it can’t moisturize itself. It’s absorbed into the body through the skin, even at relatively small dosages, and a study at the University of Georgia Medical College indicated that it remains in the tissues of the heart, brain and liver long-term. SLS is also pretty hard on the eyes, corrodes hair follicles which impairs the growth of hair (and it’s in shampoos – hello!). It’s a mutagen that actually changes the DNA of skin cells – that’s one reason it makes skin feel so soft.

Unfortunately, SLS is found in nearly all bubble baths. Now, who takes the most bubble baths? Kids, right? Children.

Kiss My Face makes a lot of SLS-fee products, including shampoo and toothpaste, which can be difficult to find. Plus, they have SLS-free bubble bath for kids. Their products are available in natural food stores and in the natural food-and-beauty departments of many major chain groceries.

It’s also pretty easy to m

ake your own safe bubble bath, if you roll that way. One method is to grate a 3 or 4 ounce bar of cold-process soap and melt it in a quart of hot water. Once it’s melted, add 3 Tablespoons of liquid glycerin (yes, the stuff that’s stripped out of commercial soap) and, if you wish, a few drops of essential oil (make sure you – or your child – isn’t sensitive to whatever you choose). You can find liquid glycerin in many pharmacies, especially compounding pharmacies. Or you can buy it from soap making supply sites like From Nature with Love.

Or go old school and don’t use glycerin at all. Instead add a few drops of essential oil and an egg white to 1/2 cup of liquid, SLS-free soap like Dr. Bronner’s or Kiss My Face liquid soaps, or Burt’s Bees body wash (always check the labels to be sure).

The egg white and glycerin both make the bubbles that form under the tap stronger and longer lasting.

[Climbing back down now] ; )

ARC Contest Winners

Thank you to everyone who entered the giveaway for the Advance Readers Copy of Brownies and Broomsticks! I wish I could give one to everyone, but unfortunately only have the two. And the winners, chosen by a random number generator, are:

Ally Green

and

Kathleen Genia Gray

Congrats to you both! Please email writerbailey@gmail.com with your addresses, and they’ll go out this week.

Ravioli

I’ve wanted to make ravioli for a long time. There are different kinds of ravioli makers, from attachments that fit on pasta rolling machines to trays like this:But last year I bought two hand-stamp ravioli cutters, one larger and square, and one small and round. They cost less than $2 apiece. Until now I hadn’t ever used them.

I’d made up a bunch of sausage and wanted to do something different with it. And there are still several butternut squash in the cellar. Finally, I dug around in the freezer and found a cup of homemade ricotta.

After roasting up the butternut squash, I pureed it in the food processor and combined one cup of the puree, the cup of ricotta, and a cup of the sausage (already browned) along with salt and pepper to taste. Yummy.

I mixed up a batch of pasta dough. After it sat for twenty minutes under a wet towel, I rolled it through my pasta maker going all the way down to the #2 setting. Next time I think I’ll stop at #3 because the pasta was so thin and delicate that it was kind of hard to work with.

Still, it was simply a matter of laying out what was essentially a big noodle (about 5 inches by 9 inches), dropping teaspoons of filling far enough apart (I just eyeballed it), laying another big noodle over the top, and cutting out the ravioli with the hand presses.

I boiled them up and served them with the last jar of tomato sauce from the garden (happened to be from yellow tomatoes – so sweet!) heated with a frozen cube of chopped basil, a dollop of heavy cream, and a bit of freshly grated Parmesan.

Yum!

_______________________

ARC Giveaway Reminder

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I’m giving away two Advance Reader Copies of Brownies and Broomsticks, the first Magical Bakery Mystery I’ve written under the name Bailey Cates. To enter you need to do one of the following (or do more than one and you’ll be entered multiple times). 

• Follow or subscribe to The Lightfoot Chronicles
• Email writerbaileycates@gmail.com if you already subscribe to or follow The Lightfoot Chronicles and want to be entered in the contest
• “Like” Bailey Cates’ page on Facebook and comment on the wall
• Follow @writerbailey on Twitter
• Tweet about The Lightfoot Chronicles and tag @writerbailey so I’ll know

The contest will run until end of day Saturday, February 25, and I’ll announce the winners on Hearth Cricket and The Lightfoot Chronicles on Monday, February 27.

Why Cold Process Soap is Better

The reason the main character of my Home Crafting Mysteries, Sophie Mae, makes her living by selling handmade soaps and bath products is because for a brief time I did just that. I began making my own soap because I learned a few things about the commercial soaps I’d been using on my skin. Things I didn’t like at all.

Most commercial soaps aren’t soaps at all – can’t even be labeled as such. They are detergents. They contain lathering agents to make them act like soap, along with some other nasties best to avoid, and are anything but good for your skin.

When soap making was industrialized, the most efficient way to make it involved heating it to the point where the glycerin that’s naturally formed during the saponification process separated out. That worked out fine for the soap manufacturers, as glycerin is highly profitable by itself and can be sold to other companies to make lotions and moisturizers – which are now desperately needed since our skin is all dried out by washing it with harsh detergents. Glycerin has a ton of other uses, too.

And those lathering agents? Not great for humans or the environment. Antibacterial and antimicrobial soaps sometimes contain a chemical called triclosan, which is also used in some pesticides and is known to cause cancer. The manufacturers claim the active ingredient continues to work up to twelve hours, so once it’s on your skin it’s staying for a while.

Not just on your skin, either. The ol’ epidermis is a breathing, living thing, after all, and what you put on it is absorbed into the body. This is great if you’re using therapeutic body oils, but not so hot if you’re slathering on products that contain things like phthalates (linked to reproductive disorders in animals and humans but often not even listed on soap and cosmetic labels) and/or parabens (preservatives which have been linked to cancer).

Guess what else? Over time these chemicals have started to leak into the water supply, and they aren’t always effectively filtered out.

This is the kind of stuff that made me start making my own soap. That, and my natural freakish inclination to figure out how things work. Of course I went overboard at first, saving ashes from the woodstove and making my own lye (it sort of worked, but was hard to tell how concentrated the resulting alkali was). And I also started when you could simply wander down the supermarket cleaning aisle and pick up a container of Red Devil Lye. Not so any more. Now you have to order it online.

If you’re interested in making your own soap, I’m planning a simple recipe in an upcoming post. If you’re not a soap making sort and still want to use the good stuff, you might spend some serious money. Like Sophie Mae, lots of people sell luxurious, high quality cold-processed soap online (Handcrafted Naturals is a good example). Farmers markets are also good local sources for handmade soap.

However, whenever I run out of my own soap, I confess to heading straight for Dr. Bronner’s products. They’re easy to find, cost effective, smell great (the peppermint is a real wake up!), are made from simple, organic ingredients and still contain that wonderful glycerin.

**********************************

ARC GIVEAWAY REMINDER

Win one of two Advance Readers Copies of Brownies and Broomsticks!

To enter you need to do one of the following (or do more than one and you’ll be entered multiple times). 

• Follow or subscribe to The Lightfoot Chronicles
• Email writerbaileycates@gmail.com if you already subscribe to or follow The Lightfoot Chronicles and want to be entered in the contest
• “Like” Bailey Cates’ page on Facebook and comment on the wall
• Follow @writerbailey on Twitter
• Tweet about The Lightfoot Chronicles and tag @writerbailey so I’ll know

The contest will run until end of day Saturday, February 25, and I’ll announce the winners on Hearth Cricket and The Lightfoot Chronicles on Monday, February 27.

ARC Giveaway

Anyone interested in receiving an Advanced Reader Copy of Brownies and Broomsticks? As you probably know, it’s the first of the Magical Bakery Mysteries, which I’m writing under the name Bailey Cates. The book won’t release until May, but I have a couple spare ARCs in hand that I’d love to give away.

To enter you need to do one of the following (or do more than one and you’ll be entered multiple times). 

• Follow or subscribe to The Lightfoot Chronicles
• Email writerbaileycates@gmail.com if you already subscribe to or follow The Lightfoot Chronicles and want to be entered in the contest
• “Like” Bailey Cates’ page on Facebook and comment on the wall to let me know you did
• Follow @writerbailey on Twitter
• Tweet about The Lightfoot Chronicles and tag @writerbailey so I’ll know

The contest will run until end of day Saturday, February 25, and I’ll announce the winners on Hearth Cricket and The Lightfoot Chronicles on Monday, February 27.

Good Luck!

Making Sausage

Since getting Mr. Ziffel (is it wrong that I named the side of pork in the freezer?) we’ve had all sorts of wonderful meals. However, I didn’t order any pre-made sausage from the butcher, instead getting packages of plain ground pork. I wanted to be able to make my own.

Never mind that I’ve never actually made sausage before. I figured that, like making soap or cheese or butter or bread, it probably isn’t hard once you have an idea of what you’re doing. Making hard cheese, for example, can be somewhat tedious, but it’s not actually difficult if you have the right ingredients and know the method.

So I did some research. Most sources said that I needed to add pork fat of some kind to my ground meat. I have a packet of lard – the real stuff, not the hydrogenated stuff in the blue box you sometimes find on the shelf of the grocery store – but after taking a good look at the ground pork that came from Jodar Farms, it looked like it contained adequate fat. If the result was too dry, I’d add additional lard the next time.

Next: the recipe. There are lots and lots online, but I wanted to keep things pretty simple. For one thing, I didn’t want to go to the trouble of using casings, at least not at first. I remembered that in an episode of The Waltons, Aunt Martha Corinne (married to Grandpa’s brother) scandalized Grandma by putting too much red pepper and sage in the breakfast sausage. So those were two ingredients I wanted to use.

Stop laughing.

Sure enough, that was exactly what the recipe called for in my trusty Fanny Farmer Cookbook I’ve had since I graduated from high school. A bit more trolling through cookbooks I already owned, and some thinking about what kind of flavors I wanted, and I decided to add lots of black pepper, a bit of sage, and a dash of allspice. For breakfast sausage (sizzling above) I also dolloped in a some maple syrup. For a more savory option (used on pizza), I added toasted fennel seeds crushed in a mortar and pestle. For extra moisture I added a bit of cream or wine respectively.

I did it all by feel and instinct, so I can’t really offer a recipe here. So far I’m pretty pleased with the results, and plan to try a few more variations.

Anyone have suggestions?

Deadly Row to Hoe Cover

Here’s the official cover for my sixth Home Crafting Mystery, Deadly Row to Hoe. Yay! I’m really excited about this revamp! The book will release this November.

Looks pretty different from the previous covers in the series, doesn’t it? This is the direction all the covers will be going from now on, and the earlier books will likely change over to this illustrated style in subsequent printings.

Now don’t get me wrong: I absolutely love the wonderful, clean photographed covers put together by Midnight Ink’s Lisa Novak. She captured the clean, spa feel I wanted for a series featuring a woman who makes her living making soap and bath products.

However, the home craft featured in in Deadly Row to Hoe is vegetable gardening, specifically a community supported agriculture farm. Another photographed cover would have probably involved vegetables, and a few people have already commented that the books look a bit like cookbooks – despite the fact that one has soap and bath oil on the cover and another is all about fiber and yarn. Granted, though, a lot of traditional colonial home crafts involve food. ; )

So this illustration captures the whole farm (and even includes a mountain that looks a lot like Mt. Rainier in the background – how cool is that?).

Many thanks to Midnight Ink for making this change, and to Lisa for spearheading the mockup and finding the illustrator!

Change is good.

From Sun to Snow

We arrived home at midnight from a week in Cozumel, Mexico, going from soft tropical air to 11 degrees F and the threat of snow. At least we missed the big storm that caused multiple accidents, closed schools and canceled flights at Denver International Airport.

I awoke at 4 a.m. on the day we were traveling back to the States and wandered out to the balcony to see the full moon setting over the ocean. Half an hour later I went back to bed, but I’m so glad I had the final chance to sit and watch the light play across the water while listening to the waves crash below.

It rained a lot while we were in Cozumel, but mostly at night which meant cooler (and damper) days. I played a round and a half of golf while K played three. The other half of the time he spent on the Nicklaus designed course – also an Audubon sanctuary – I sat on the beach and worked.

Players lose a lot of balls on that course. Some go into the mangrove jungle, and others into the water. You have no hope of finding the ones that go into the jungle, and the crocodiles make it inadvisable to pursue the ones that end up in the water. This guy was about eight feet long.

Right now I’m finishing one book, editing another, and polishing yet a third that I’ve been working on for a long time. I have a proposal in the works that I get to when I have a spare moment, write two blogs and contribute to a third. While in Mexico I read two books people requested blurbs for and and critiqued writing submissions from one of my writing groups.

There is no such thing as a non-working vacation for me right now. That’s okay. I love what I do, and I’m fine with spending some of my time on the beach doing it. I mean who could complain about that? All that water, the constant shooshing of the waves all night long, and freedom from so many of my usual responsibilities made for deep sleep, relaxing days, and the re-energizing I needed in the depth of winter.

Now that we’re back it’s soup and stew and warm bread by the fire, but the memory of all that fresh seafood – shrimp, grouper, red snapper, lobster, conch, squid and octopus ceviche, crab and even shark – lingers on.

Still: Here’s to getting back to the normal routines!

Texas Sheet Cake

Several years ago I asked family members to send me two or three of their favorite, go-to recipes so I could compile a cookbook. Dishes people requested, that they often took to potlucks, proven winners.

The results were better than I could have hoped for. Almost a hundred recipes went into a fifty page book which I had printed and then sent out to all the contributors. Good recipes. Excellent recipes. I use that cookbook a lot, and I’ve already shared some of my favorites on Hearth Cricket.

Here’s another one, from my second cousin’s wife. She originally got it from a San Antonio newspaper. It’s great for a crowd – especially a crowd that loves chocolate. And pecans.

 

Texas Sheet Cake

• 2 sticks butter
• 1 cup water
• 1/2 cup cocoa powder
• 2 cups flour
• 2 cups sugar
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 2 eggs
• 1 cup sour cream
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 teaspoon vanilla

Combine butter, water, and cocoa powder in a medium saucepan. Bring to a boil and cook at a simmer for two minutes. Add flour, sugar, salt, and blend well. Remove pan from heat and beat in eggs, sour cream, baking soda and vanilla until smooth. Pour batter into a greased and floured 10”x15” pan (I use a tall 9”x13” pan) and bake in a preheated 375 degree F oven for 25-30 minutes or until a cake tester can be removed cleanly. (Size of pan and altitude might increase baking time.)

Allow to cool in the pan, on a rack. Spread frosting over the cake in the pan, while still slightly warm.

Frosting

• 1 stick butter
• 1/4 cup cocoa powder
• 6 Tablespoons milk
• 1 pound confectioner’s sugar
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1 cup chopped pecans.

Using the same saucepan as for the cake (don’t even have to wash it), combine butter, cocoa and milk. Bring just to a boil and let simmer one minute. Remove from the heat, add the sugar, vanilla and chopped nuts. Mix well.

Best thing with this cake? Vanilla ice cream, of course!

We Have It Easy

Today is a long travel day, so I’m reposting this from October of 2010.

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I’ve tried many times to explain why I’m so interested in colonial home crafts. Truth is, there are many reasons, but I often cite the increasingly technological world around us as the primary one. Still, I’ve knitted, crocheted, cooked and baked since a very early age. Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House series had a deep impact or me – or did it? Which came first, my interest in how people lived a century or so ago or reading about them?

Two women sharing the housework in the late 1800s 
Photo courtesy Library of Congress

Whatever sparked my interest, do not think I’m trying to romanticize the tasks that, frankly, made life pretty darn hard back then. A typical woman’s life in the late 1800’s consisted of work from dusk ‘til dawn. Work done without modern conveniences like standing mixers, washers and dryers, vacuum cleaners or even refrigeration. In urban areas she might also hire out to do housework, laundry, sewing, or work in a factory. In the country, she not only cared for her home and fed her family meals fixed from scratch every day on a wood-burning stove, but grew much of that food, sewed, knitted, spun and wove to make clothing for her family, cared for children – and livestock – and often helped her husband with other farm chores. She sometimes made a little extra income for the family by selling extra butter or eggs from her flock.

Multitasking? Hardly a recent concept. And not only did she have to work her tail off, she had to perform her tasks really well. Survival might depend on it.

I do, perhaps. romanticize the actual colonial skills. The ability to make your own clothes, grow and cook your own food, or build a piece of furniture from scratch is amazing to me. The idea that these basic abilities might be lost is tragic. But with the resurgence of interest in many different home crafts, that loss is unlikely to occur. In fact, because of the luxury of being able to specialize, some creative souls have taken traditional home crafts like cheese making, quilting, baking and knitting to new heights, offering delectable artisan foodstuffs and beautiful pieces of artwork.

But make no mistake: We are incredibly fortunate to have the technology that we do.

“Part of the family of George Padroni, near Sterling, Colo. They have 9 children and some hired help. Only one child in school …This is 6 yr. old Lena, who works some too. The 8 yr. old boy pulls and piles beets. 9 and 12 yr. old boys run the pulling machine, (the mother said, "We all got to do all we can.") 11 yr. old girl piles and tops and does housework. 13 yr. old girl piles and tops. Says she hasn't hurt herself with the knife this year, but did last year. The whole family begins work from 5 to 6 A.M. and works until 6 P.M. and after, with time off for dinner. Pedroni has been living here for 20 yrs., owns several hundred acres, about 100 in beets. Is said to be well-to-do. Location: Sterling [vicinity], Colorado.”

Photo courtesy Library of Congress

Yesterday I made spaghetti from scratch. I made the noodles from egg-and-flour dough. Made the sauce from garden tomatoes cooked down, pureed, and then cooked down for four more hours with handfuls of herbs, chopped onion and celery, and a bit of brown sugar. The meatballs originated as a tired roast from last year’s beef, ground and added to bread crumbs, egg, garlic and basil.

Still, that was easy peasy compared to a hundred-plus years ago. I used a standing mixer to whip up the pasta dough, and then the pasta attachment to extrude the spaghetti. I used the grinding attachment to grind the meat, a convection oven to brown the meatballs, a blender to puree the tomato sauce, and a gas stovetop to slowly cook that sauce down. Not to mention the dishwasher.

Believe me, I appreciated every hard-worked-for bite of the finished product. But as much as I enjoyed making that meal from scratch, I did it by choice. I also washed and dried four loads of laundry with hardly any effort at all. Vacuumed the house. Watched a football game and still had time to edit two chapters and begin reviewing a friend’s manuscript.

The best of both worlds. Talk about lucky!

When Life Gives You Lemons

Try using them like this:

• As a stain remover. Tea stains in particular respond to a mild soap solution boosted with lemon juice. It also works on stains from coffee, blood, and ketchup, on clothing, plastic, cutting boards and furniture.
• To speed up your metabolism. The acids in a glass of lemonade each day helps stomach acids break down food even better – and faster. Over time it will increase the efficiency of your digestion and increase your metabolic rate.
• To shine china and metal (especially copper). Mix lemon juice with a little soap, scrub and then buff. Much greener than chemical solutions.
• To relax. Studies have indicated that the smell of lemon promotes relaxation and a happier state of mind.
• To disinfect. I recently mentioned running a slice of lemon over a wooden cutting board will sanitize it, but you can use lemon juice to clean counters and even add it to mop water.
• To soothe a sore throat. Mixing the juice of half a roasted lemon with a teaspoon of honey is an old remedy for sore throats.
• Brightening whites. Just as bleach removed stains (sometimes) and sanitizes, so will adding a half cup of lemon juice to a normal-sized load of (white only!) laundry.

Really Local Lasagna

The fact that we try to eat as locally as possible doesn’t come as news. Usually it’s not too tough – I get our meat, eggs and milk products from local farms, hit the farmers markets, Beaver’s Market carries lots of locally produced sauces, cheeses, etc, and I grow many of our vegetables which I “put up” for winter consumption.

Throwing a piece of meat on the grill, roasting a chicken, stewing up a mélange of this ‘n’ that based simply on what’s available in the fridge, pantry and freezer – all that’s pretty low-key. But last weekend I had a craving for lasagna. Gathering the ingredients I was surprised that I could make it with all local, and many handmade ingredients.

There was grass-fed beef in the freezer. That, along with onion from the farmers market, celery from the freezer, garlic and dried basil from the garden, parsley from the pot in the window and two pints of my tomato sauce, made up an approximation of Bette Jane Sauce.

Every two weeks or so I make up some kind of cheese from our dairy deliveries (we get half a gallon of whole milk a week, along with a quart of half-and-half – for coffees and cooking – and a quart of heavy cream that ends up as cultured butter and buttermilk). In the freezer I found a pint of homemade ricotta (in the strawberry container above) and two balls of mozzarella (in the plastic bag).

The bonus was that last time I made pasta I was in a hurry and ended up just slicing big lasagna noodles and allowing them to dry. The eggs and flour in that pasta were both locally sourced.

If I had tried to make all of that from scratch at once, it would have taken all day. Literally, ALL DAY. But because I made the ingredients ahead of time, over time, as part of my regular routines, the lasagna only took about half an hour of prep time once everything was thawed.

We ate it with a fresh farmers market salad. It was the kind of meal that isn’t possible all the time, but when it is, I find myself savoring each bite with unparalleled concentration and appreciation.

Wooden Cutting Boards

I love my wooden cutting boards. Because they were once growing things rather than a slab of plastic made of petrochemicals, I tend to believe the studies that say wood is superior. This is a personal bias, of course. There are pros to using either.

Seriously, though – how cool is this: Wood is porous, so there’s a wicking process which draws bacteria inside the wood, leaving the surface germ free. Then on top of that, wood has natural antimicrobial properties which then self-clean both the interior and exterior of the board. In other words, the wood that was once alive is, in a way, still alive and kicking bacterial ass.

I like that.

However, it needs to be a wood other than white ash or maple. For some reason those particular woods don’t have that anti-microbial thing going on.

Plastic, on the other hand, is dishwasher safe and therefore very easy to thoroughly sanitize. Putting a wooden cutting board into the dishwasher will flat-out ruin it. Restaurant kitchen have to use plastic cutting boards for this reason.

Scrubbing a wooden cutting board with hot, soapy water cleans it very well, but if you’re still worried, slice a lemon in half and swipe it over the surface. The acid in the lemon will kill more germs than bleach. Or if you don’t have a lemon, or don’t want to use it, you can also wipe the board down with cider vinegar.

Do not leave wooden boards soaking in water, though. The porosity that allows the wood to wick away bacteria will also make it soak up water. Soaking it in water will make it dirtier, not cleaner.

And allow your cutting board – wooden or plastic – to dry completely. In the absence of heat and moisture any remaining bacteria will die within a few hours.

Finally, wooden cutting boards need a little love on occasion. I wipe mine down with olive oil, but any edible oil will work. The dry surface soaks it up, knife marks are reduced, and the grain of the wood really pops.

Functional AND gorgeous!