It Cures What Ails Ya!

My little Peanut has been feeling under the weather the last few days. I hate it when he's sick, but a teeny tiny part of me kind of likes it because it gives me an excuse to make a big ole batch of chicken noodle soup! I know I could make it any time I want....but I tend to save it for when someone is sick. It always makes you feel so much better when you are feeling under the weather. Some research says the effects of chicken noodle soup is really just psychosomatic. Whether it actually works or it's all in your head, if it makes you feel better then it doesn't matter. All I know is that when Peanut isn't feeling good, he asks for me to make him some soup!

I'm sure buying a can of chicken noodle soup, heating it up for a few minutes over the stove, and eating it might work. My theory is that anything made from scratch is waaaaaaay better than store bought. I have become a chicken noodle soup snob in the last few years and scoured Pinterest trying to find a recipe that I liked. I finally came across one that I have made enough times that I know exactly what I need from the store without having to consult the recipe (which was also good enough for me to actually write down the recipe!!!). The recipe comes from a post shared on the yummymummyclub website. There's very little prep work and it cooks in the crockpot! Throw it together, go to work, and come home to a great dinner!

Crockpot Chicken Noodle Soup

Ingredients:

• 1/2 cup chopped carrots
• 2 ribs of celery, chopped
• 1 medium onion, peeled and sliced (I slice mine in large pieces so that my picky onion eater Woodman can pick them out)
• 2-3 sprigs of fresh rosemary (I love that I can just go pick a few off of my plant on the back porch!)
• 2 slices of ginger (about 1/4" thick each), peeled
• 8 boneless, skinless chicken thighs (I only used 6 this time because that's the package I bought...when I do 8, it tends to make it more stew-y than soup-y)
• 1 container low sodium chicken broth (usually about 4 cups...add an extra cup of broth if you choose not to use the wine)
• 1 cup white wine (Optional, but HIGHLY recommended)
• salt and pepper to taste
• 2 cups egg noodles

Spray your crockpot with nonstick spray. Add your carrots, celery, onion, ginger, and rosemary.

While I chop the veggies, I always throw the scraps into a bowl to put into the freezer to save to make my own chicken stock.

Arrange your chicken pieces on top of the veggies.

Ignore my chunk of frozen chicken broth. I feel like using homemade broth makes this soup that much more healing! It's SOUPer easy to make!

Add broth, wine (if you are using it), salt, and pepper. Cook on low for 8 hours.

Remove the chicken, shred with two forks, and put back into the pot. Let it continue to cook about 20 more minutes.

Here's where my recipe changes from the original. They say to throw the egg noodles in the crockpot when you shred the chicken and let them cook for 20-30 minutes. Every time I've done this, they turn into a big, mushy mess! After you shred your chicken, cook the egg noodles in a separate pot. You can even cook them in chicken broth to enhance their nutritional value. When they are finished cooking, rinse them with cold water and store in a separate container (especially since you'll probably have leftovers). A little extra work, but it's worth it.

Put some noodles in your bowl, add some soup, and enjoy! I really like how the wine and rosemary really flavor the soup.

If you give this recipe a try, let me know what you think!!!

Oil Pulling

It seems like everybody and their momma is blogging about oil pulling. There is so much information about it out on the interwebz. I'm not going to go into too much detail about it because you can research it yourself. I'm just going to tell what I've found when I began to oil pull regularly.

In a post I wrote last March about an at home spa night, I mentioned that I did some oil pulling but wasn't going to write about it until I tried it for a two week period. Well, that never happened....until recently! I don't know why I got back into doing it. But, I've consistently done it 5-6 times a week for 4 weeks now and feel like I can give pretty good feedback on the topic.

When you google oil pulling, you'll find that it's an ancient Ayurvedic practice. You are basically swishing oil around your mouth for a certain amount of time. In theory, all parts of your body and it's healing systems are connected and the thought it that your mouth is the central hub, if you will. If you have good mouth health, then all other problems will work themselves out. Some people claim that it cures everything from your head to your toes. Others say it's a bunch of malarky. When you oil pull, it's supposed to pull bacteria and toxins out from your mouth, which then cures EVERYTHING! *again....do your research. I am not saying this is an end all, cure all.*

When I oil pull, I use coconut oil. You can use other oils, like sesame oil, but I usually have a ginormous tub of the stuff at all times (and it also leaves an aftertaste like you've noshed on a bunch of Girl Scout Samoas cookies...yum!). You take a tablespoon of oil, put it in your mouth, and gently swish and pull the oil through your teeth for about 20 minutes. I've read some people start out with smaller amounts of oil and do it for smaller amounts of time and work their way up to the tablespoon for 20 minutes. Coconut oil is a solid unless it's really warm out, so if putting a glob of it in your mouth triggers your gag reflex, melt it first. If, while you are swishing, you find your jaw getting cramped and tired, that means you're swishing too hard. It needs to be a slow and relaxing thing. And if you don't think you have 20 minutes to devote to oil pulling, you can do it while pretty much doing anything else (except talking or maybe jogging). Get started and then shower, or wash dishes, or do whatever else needs to be done! Multitask!!!

Once your 20 minutes are up, get to your nearest trashcan and spit it out. Do not spit it into your sink or toilet because it'll clog your drains. Also, do not swallow it. If it's supposed to be pulling bacteria and toxins out of your mouth, you don't want to go back and ingest it! I then rinse my mouth with warm water and then throughly brush my teeth. I try to not eat or drink anything for about an hour after I've oil pulled.

So, after a month of doing this consistently, here's what I've encountered. Am I saying it's a direct result of the oil pulling? Maybe, maybe not.

• Teeth and gums- The first few times I did this, my gums felt a lot tighter. Also, after I do the oil pulling and then brush my teeth, my teeth feel like I've just had a cleaning at the dentist.  I get that dentist fresh clean every morning and it lasts all day, no matter what I eat!

• Allergies- When Springtime hits the north Georgia area, I am miserable. My allergies usually get so bad that they turn into a sinus infection each year. My daily routine from mid-February to the end of May always includes popping a Claritin. This year, I have not had any*** allergy issues and have not had to take any allergy medications. Could it be that the pollen just isn't that bad this year? Perhaps...but my husband and son have suffered pretty badly.  ***I have had one or two days of mild sinus discomfort, but it was on days where I didn't oil pull. Hmmmm....

• Halitosis- It is said that oil pulling helps curb halitosis. Now, I don't think I suffer from nasty breath, but usually when I wake up in the morning (no matter how many times I brush my teeth the day before), it tastes like I've sucked on a day old, sweaty gym sock. I've found I don't wake up with that taste in my mouth when I oil pull the morning before. But, on the days that I have skipped oil pulling, the sock taste is back.

• Eczema or other skin conditions- For the past 3-4 years, I have started having this red, flaky, splotchy rash pop up on my face right along the crease of my nose, along my eyebrows, and along my hairline on my forehead. I've never had it diagnosed by a dermatologist, but I'm guessing it's a mild type of eczema. It looks super pretty when I put makeup on....the flakiness sure does stand out! I started just foregoing makeup because it made the flareups worse and more noticeable. After about a week and a half of the consistent oil pulling, all of the sudden I noticed that it was all gone. My skin was smooth. Absolutely no red, splotchy spots. No skin flakes. All gone! I haven't changed anything else recently that would contribute to the disappearance of the skin condition. I have been using honey to wash my face for quite some time now, so it wasn't like I had been having a reaction to chemicals in a face wash. I decided to lay off on the oil pulling for a few days to investigate the correlation further. Guess what happened? The rash flared up again! This is when I started having a bit of sinus discomfort too. Went back to oil pulling and within a week, the rash was gone. 

• Hangovers- According to many websites devoted to the topic, oil pulling is supposed to help alleviate hangover symptoms. We had gone out to eat with a friend and her sons last Friday night to celebrate the end of Peanut's baseball season and decided to split a pitcher of margaritas. The friend splurged and got the Texas margaritas, which was waaaaay stronger than the regular margaritas. The world was spinning when I went to bed that night and SHOCKER....I woke up with a hangover. I felt quite puny- Nauseated, headache, just overall blah. I did my oil pulling, mainly because it is habit now, and afterwards I realized I felt 95% better. I didn't realize that alleviating hangover symptoms were attributed to oil pulling, so after feeling like crap and then feeling almost normal within 20 minutes, I got online to research it. Lo and behold, it was another "cure" associated with oil pulling. I guess this makes sense if the oil pulling is supposed to be detoxing your body.

Now, do I think that oil pulling is some miracle practice? No. Could all of my findings be purely coincidental or just a placebo effect? Perhaps. But, the benefits that I have found while doing it for the last month make me want to keep it up. It doesn't seem to be hurting anything!

Do you oil pull regularly, or have you tried it in the past? What are your thoughts on the whole practice?

Button Down Shirt Pillowcases

Wow.... has it seriously been 4 months since I've posted something crafty? I guess I haven't really been in a cutesy, crafty mindset lately. Even the craft in this post was actually done back in December. I just came across the pictures and realized that I hadn't blogged about this project. Well, time to fix that!

My grandfather passed away back in November (the same grandfather I mentioned in my Apple Pie Moonshine post). He was a very quiet and simple man. You hardly ever saw him in anything other than flannel shirts and overalls, even at fancier occasions. Before he died, he requested that his pallbearers (which consisted of my male cousins and the husbands of my female cousins) wear flannel shirts. Each pallbearer was given one of Papaw's shirts to wear and to keep afterwards.

The day after the funeral, while I was perusing Facebook, a friend of mine shared a link to a pillowcase made from a shirt that belonged to a loved one. The timing and subject matter was kismet! The link never led to any directions on how to make the shirt into a pillowcase though. After some investigating on Pinterest, I felt I was ready to try this on my own.

Now, if you are a professional seamstress, please don't be offended by my directions. I didn't measure a single thing for these pillowcases. Everything was eyeballed. Also, in hindsight, I recommend getting a cheap shirt from Goodwill to experiment on first. I didn't think of that when I started and was scared to death that I was going to screw up my grandfather's shirt. Granted, he had a lot more I could have had, but this was the one my husband wore in the funeral.

How to Make a Pillowcase Out of a Button Down Shirt

First you need to iron your shirt. Don't worry about the collar and the sleeves because you'll be cutting those off in just a minute.

When the hot iron touched the shirt, it released the smell of a wood burning stove- a smell I'll always associate with my grandfather.

Place a pillow insert into your shirt to see how you'd like your pillowcase to look. For this tutorial, I was using either medium to large shirts and a 16" x 16" pillow insert.

Cut off the collar and the sleeves.

Cut off the excess fabric along the waist. I wanted to have a straight-ish edge to work with.

Turn the shirt inside out and then place pins along the stripe that you want to use as a guideline for your first seam. Using plaid flannels made sewing straight lines so easy! Sew your bottom seam.

Unbutton the shirt and put the pillow insert inside. Nestle the pillow down along the bottom seam and eyeball which plaid line you'll be using to create the top of the pillowcase. Remove pillow insert, button the shirt up, and place pins along your guideline. Sew the top seam. Trim off excess material along your top and bottom seams to 1/4". Make sure you don't actually cut the seams off though!

Put the pillow back into the shirt, and follow the step above to create your two side seams. Make sure you have the buttons centered in the middle of your pillowcase.

Unbutton your shirt, turn the shirt right side out, push out the corners, replace the pillow insert, and button your shirt up! You're done!

The best part about these pillowcases? If you ever need to wash them, unbutton them, remove the insert, and throw the shirt in the washing machine! Easy peasy!

Like I said before, if it scares you to try this on a loved one's shirt, hit up Goodwill and get a plaid shirt to practice with. If you feel better about it, you can actually measure everything out....but it turns out perfectly without doing so! With my frequent stops to take pictures of each step, I was able to finish one pillowcase in 15 minutes.

A simple way to remember a loved one! Every time I see my pillow on the couch, it makes me remember Papaw. My son also loves laying on it and tells people who visit that it's his great-Papaw's shirt. :)

Good luck turning a favorite shirt into a treasured item!

DIY Chicken Stock

Soup weather is upon us! There may not be much better than a warm bowl of soup on a cold, winter day. All of my favorites start with a chicken broth/stock base (Sausage and Sweet Potato Soup and Buffalo Chicken Chili). If you make a lot of soups, you will probably be going to the grocery store to buy the ingredients- especially veggies and broth/stock. (NOTE- Broth is made from meat and stock is made from bones. I usually use stock for everything, even if it calls for broth.) Why not skip the expensive chicken stock purchase and use the scraps of your veggies to make your own chicken stock? Besides saving money, you actually know what is in your stock AND you can control the sodium.

It is souper super easy to make your own chicken stock. When I'm eating healthy (which will be now more than ever), I usually buy one or two of those rotisserie chickens that the grocery store has cooked on Sunday. I pick all the meat off the bones and set aside for salads, wraps, snacks, etc. Then I take the rest of the carcass and put it into a gallon sized ziplock baggie and put it in the freezer. I will usually make chicken stock once I have three or four carcasses saved up.

Besides the meat bones, you will need veggies, herbs, and spices. Whenever I'm cooking, I take all my scrap pieces of the veggies- bottoms and the skin peelings of carrots, leafy parts of celery, tops of peppers, papery skins of onions and garlic- and throw those in a gallon sized ziplock baggie. If I buy a whole onion but the recipe only calls for half, I chop up the remaining half in large pieces and into the baggie it goes. Do you have old frozen veggies that have developed freezer burn? Throw those into the baggie. Have fresh herbs or produce that needs to be used before they go bad? Into the baggie! I even throw pulp from juicing carrots and celery into the baggie. Keep these bags of scraps in your freezer until you have two full gallon bags. I've read to steer clear of freezing starchy veggie scraps like potatoes because they will make your stock cloudy. You can do a quick internet search to find out what types of veggies to NOT use when making broth....

A bunch of veggie scraps waiting to be frozen.

Freezer burned veggies? Perfect for making chicken stock!

Once you have a gallon baggie of bones (3-4 chickens) and two baggies of veggie scraps, it's STOCK MAKING DAY! Get the biggest pot you have. I use my 12 quart stock pot for this. Mine has a giant colander in it, which helps when it's time to strain all your bones and veggies out of the stock. Start by throwing in the chicken bones.

This is only one chicken. I knew I was going to the grocery store after I got the stock going. I added the other two carcasses after I got back.

Then throw in your veggies. Add enough water to cover everything!

I ended up only using two bags of scraps this time. The other went back into the freezer for next time!

I then throw in a handful of peppercorns and a handful of salt. ***If you don't add salt now, don't forget to add it later when using the stock for soup recipes. I went through a whole meal trying to figure out why my soup didn't taste like it normally did before I remembered the salt!***

I added about this much salt as well.

Have a few bay leaves? Throw them in! I didn't have any for this batch. The last item you need is 1/4 cup apple cider vinegar. Chicken bones (or bones in general) have a lot of beneficial minerals stored up in them. These are what help you feel better when you are sick and eat chicken noodle soup. The vinegar helps to leech the minerals out of the bones. Trust me....you won't taste the vinegar once the stock is made.

So once all your ingredients are in the pot, heat on high until it just starts to boil and then kick the heat all the way down to the lowest setting you have. Cover the pot and let this cook anywhere from 12-24 hours. From what I've read, you need to let it go at least 12 hours to infuse the flavor, but once you go longer than 24 hours, you start getting funky tastes. When I make stock, I let it go for 12 hours. 

After you've finished cooking your stock, let cool for awhile (I usually wait 30 minutes to an hour) and then strain all the solids from your stock (here's where that colander insert is handy). If you don't get all the little bits out at this point, that's ok. Put the stock in the fridge and let cool over night. 

The next morning, you'll find that all of the fat has congealed at the top of the stock.

Yummy.... 

Skim off the biggest globs of fat and then pour the stock through a cheese cloth to catch the rest (and to catch the little bits that you didn't get out the night before). At this point you can reheat your stock and then can it using a pressure canner. If you don't have all of that equipment, it freezes beautifully!

Use this method to make turkey stock after the holidays (you'll probably only need one turkey carcass)! It'll smell like Thanksgiving every time you open a new jar! Are you a vegetarian? Save your veggie scraps, omit the meat and vinegar, and simmer for 5-6 hours instead!

Reinventing Myself

I've always heard that you should never set New Years' Resolutions because more often than not, you will fail. Maybe that's because many people keep their resolutions to themselves. My thinking behind this post is that if I throw my goals out there into the interwebz, somebody can help keep me accountable. I have no idea who actually reads this, as I don't get much feedback. I do know that from time to time I'll get comments from friends on Facebook. I do know that others read this too...at the time that I'm writing this, my 32 posts have over 2,500 page views coming from all over the world. Hopefully this post will inspire someone to take this journey with me.

This year, I'm planning on reinventing myself. Probably not a terribly original resolution. I want to make my home and life less stressful (which, if you know me, I don't stress much....but right now home and life is adding grey hairs). I also want to work on my physical appearance (again....how original). Lastly, I want to work on inner self. I am not adding in spiritually, because my family has already begun working on this in the last few months. Plus, I haven't really looked into that aspect on Pinterest. Considering that's the whole concept behind my blog, I'll address the items that I can help conquer via Pinterest.

First I want to start with making my home and life less stressful. To me, that means keeping the house cleaner and decluttered. For the past couple of years, I've been a stay at home mom. I have all the time in the world to keep up with the housework, cooking, and cleaning. But I don't. The house looks like the Wood-Man and I work full time. I stumbled across a pretty feasible housecleaning and laundry schedule that works for me now, when I have all the time in the world, and that will work for me when I do start working again (anyone out there hiring???). However, for whatever reason, I didn't pin it. At the time I came across it, our printer wasn't working so I copied the cleaning chart by hand, stuck it on the fridge, and got to work. Each day's cleaning takes about 15 minutes (weekdays only!), and includes one load of laundry. I always dread cleaning and laundry day because it lasts all darn day. Usually by the end of it, I have stacks of clean clothes around the house that we never put away, which then adds to the clutter situation. BUT....I can handle putting away one load of clothes a day, and cleaning for 15 minutes! Here is my copy. If you know where this came from, let me know and I'll give credit. Also, I'm not super blog savvy so if you want a copy of this to alter for yourself, give me your email address in a comment and I'll send it to you.

Another new project the Woodman and I are tackling is a year-long declutter program. The best part of this program is that it gives you daily tasks in a calendar format that should only take about 15 minutes a day.

I first came across this calendar on a friend's Facebook page, but have also seen it on Pinterest. It comes from the Home Storage Solutions 101 website. This link takes you to a printable version of the January calendar (to get the rest of the year, you just have to subscribe to her email list). As seen in the picture above, most tasks have a link to further explain each task and/or offer suggestions.  Wood-Man and I easily completed today's task in about 3 minutes!

Task 1: Set up a donation and selling collection station

For the physical appearance, obviously I want to eat better and lose weight. We are going to start cutting out processed foods. I came across this 14 week program that slowly eases you in to clean eating.

A friend shared a blog post recently that also talked about losing weight. It basically said that most people focus on the outcome of pounds or inches lost. The author points out that its much easier to instead of focusing on an outcome, focus on the process of getting there. She listed three numbers. The first number was her pants size. The second was weight. The third was the amount of miles she ran in the past year. I'm going to take this approach. With the hope of focusing on the healthier eating and the increasing of mileage (mine will be walking instead of running), my first two numbers will shrink. 

So, I've sat here for about 10 minutes contemplating on actually listing my numbers. I physically feel sick to my stomach throwing out there what they are. If you know me, you know that I'm very overweight. I think for the moment, I'm just going to say that my mileage goal is 180 miles for the year. At the end of the year, I'll revisit this post and will post what my numbers were on Jan. 1, 2015 and what they ended up being on Dec. 31, 2015. You can hold me to that. 

Lastly, in order to improve my inner self, I am going to start a gratitude jar for our family. During the last half of the year, we have been really swamped with dealing with my broken ankle and the subsequent medical bills. For me, it has been a bit depressing and I'm struggling to remember the good stuff that happened (which I know we had a lot of good things occur). At this moment, when I think about 2014, my thoughts are, "Damn, that year sucked." Anyway, this jar will sit in the kitchen and as something good happens, we will jot down what it was and drop it in the jar. It can be something funny, something unexpected, something really awesome - basically anything good. On December 31, 2015, we can all sit down and read the slips of paper.