Home Roasted Coffee

If you want to change your life, you should roast your own coffee beans! Ok, I know that may seem a little extreme but it is seriously good stuff. I have been trying to get Carson to like coffee for years and he tried to enjoy it before when he was looking for a caffeine boost, but has never liked it. When we were home for Thanksgiving we had friend bring her supplies and show us how to roast our own coffee beans! It was a pretty easy process and two days later when the beans were ready to grind we were all hooked on the coffee. Even Carson would ask my mom for coffee!

We decided to get the equipment as an anniversary present to each other and we just roasted our first batch yesterday. It turned out a little dark (strong) but it is still delicious!

It's just one more thing that I'm doing from home and once again I love that I know more about the process that my food undergoes. We purchased fair trade organic beans so I know where they are coming from and that my money is going to support small farmers getting paid fair wages. The beans come and they look very light brown, with a greenish tint. We roast them over our camp stove outside in a popcorn popper pot. The whole process takes about 30 minutes and then we have fresh, delicious coffee for the next week!

Homemade Lotion

I am always looking around my house at the products I use to see if there is anything I can make a homemade version of or buy a more natural option. I love slowly watching commercial products disappear from my house!

My latest change has been to make my own lotion. During the winter months my hands get so dry and not only did I not like using commercial lotions, but they didn't really work either. I saw a recipe online on how to make my own lotion bars and decided to give it a try. You might be wondering how it makes sense to have lotion in the form of a hard bar, but when you rub it on your hands, the warmth of your hands allows just enough to "melt" off.

Click here for the tutorial that I used. I just measured out the three ingredients: beeswax, shea butter, and coconut oil and melted them in the microwave. Add your favorite essential oil and pour into any shape mold that you would like. I used plastic containers of different sizes and came up with a variety of different size bars. It is not very time consuming but the bars will last a long time! It's a very simple change to make. My hands are no longer dry and cracked, and even my husband, who hated how greasy lotions made his hands feel, loves it!

I got my coconut oil and shea buttter from Amazon.com and the beeswax from Michaels craft store with a 40% off coupon. My only warning is that the utensils you use to make this become very oily and hard to clean. I found that the glass and porcelain products I used were much easier to clean than the plastics.

Sorry about my absence!

I believe my review of soap nuts is long overdue. A few days after I last posted here, back in August, we got a positive pregnancy test! The morning sickness hit pretty hard shortly after that and I was pretty much out of commission for the rest of the year. Blogging fell very low on my list of priorities as I could hardly handle everyday tasks.

I have, however, still been using my soap nuts and love them! My laundry smells, feels, and looks just as fresh as it did with my commercial detergent. Except for now I feel like it is even cleaner because I know it is not coated in all the chemicals found in commercial detergents. I am looking forward to being able to wash the babies clothes and not worry what it coming in contact with their skin! I plan to purchase more when I run out (I just started into the second bag that came with the deal I posted last time) so these soap nuts are lasting a long time and have been very beneficial to my laundry process.

Other than that, we have not made many other strides in our health journey. In fact, for a while we back tracked a little bit when I was not able to cook or anything. Carson handled most of the cooking so we reverted back to some convenience foods just so we could have something to eat. I am planning a small garden which I will be starting seeds for soon. We grew a tomato plant and some herbs last year and they were so useful. It feels so nice to prepare food from your own back yard!

I'll be back soon to post about the few things I was able to accomplish in the past few months such as making my own lotion bars and baking with fresh ground flour!