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!