Coconut oil- dandruff cure?

My last blog post mentioned how I've been having an issue with my hands drying out in the wintertime. Well, another related issue is how my dandruff acts up a bit during the winter as well. Seeing as I'm required to wear black quite often for my job, this is a real problem. After a bit of poking around, I decided to do an oil treatment for my hair. Both coconut oil and tea tree oil are suppose to be good for getting rid of dandruff, so I heated up some coconut oil, put a few drops of tea tree in it, and slather it all over my scalp. An oil treatment is supposed to be good for the hair as well, so I made sure to spread a bit of the oil out to the ends of my hair. I looked like quite a crazy person though because I then proceeded to put a shower cap on over my hair and sit on the couch for an hour (with a Mozzie pig of course). It took two shampoos to get it all out and I honestly can't tell if it did much yet. We'll see. Another suggestion was to put some tea tree into your normal shampoo, which I think I will do.

Tomorrow I'm going to dye my hair so that I'm a red head again. Woohoo!

Lotion Bars- finally revealed!

This post has been a long time coming. A really, really long time. In the past few years, I've had trouble keeping my hands moisturized. Part of the problem was that I was dog grooming, and this year I spent the entire month of December doing 2+ loads of laundry a day. But the other part of the problem is that winter, and the forced heat that comes with it, just makes everything very dry. Last year on my quest to find moisturization, I found Bubble and Bee's Lotion Sticks (the link is to the Coconut Lime one, but they have all sorts of fun scents, like the Chai Guy). I just could never justify the expense (and shipping). Well, I began to find all sorts of links on how to make your own. Notably, on One Good Thing and a different variation on Made On. The most useful site by far was on Crunchy Betty, however. Her explanation and pictures were incredibly helpful. So hers was the ratio I used, as well as her directions. I did use slightly different ingredients though. To wit:

Lotion Bar in it's mini loaf pan.

Lotion Bar
1 part (3 oz.) beeswax
1 part (3 oz.) cocoa butter
1 part (3 oz.) coconut oil
form/mold

You can substitute pretty much any oil for the coconut oil and shea butter for the cocoa butter. You can also add essential oils and the like in order to give it a particular scent, but I chose to go very simple for my first try. I was going to type out directions, but really, you should just follow the ones on Crunchy Betty.

I had thought about getting a fun, fancy mold, but couldn't really find any I loved, so I decided just to make a large bar and cut it into smaller, more convenient sized pieces. I then had to find little containers to put them in.

Lotion Bars in their tiny containers.

I was really excited when I found these tiny rectangular containers at the dollar store. I got eight of them for just a dollar, which was just about perfect for the amount I'd made. I gave one to Mum, Sir, Thomas, and Lilly for Christmas. This shows how long ago I made these- before Christmas! I had to wait until after Christmas to blog it, though, and then procrastinated forever. I know Lilly and Mum are definitely enjoying theirs. :) Personally, I've been keeping one in my purse at all times. It's great as a moisturizer because it has a light chocolaty scent, moisturizes amazingly, and soaks into the skin fairly quickly without being too greasy. I'm thoroughly pleased with the result. The most important benefit of solid lotions/lotion bars (which I realize I forgot to mention) is that it doesn't wash off your hands like a regular lotion will, because there is no added water. Pretty much everything in the bars is an oil/moisturizer which actually repels the water and simply soaks into ones hands better. If you've never tried solid lotion before, you should!

Pumpkin Granola

Crunchy, yummy granola all ready to go places!

You know how I said I was going to make these No-Bake Energy Bites? Well, I ended up changing them a bit. First off, I used the remaining pumpkin butter in place of the peanut butter. I also added oatmeal and coconut to make up for the wheat germ. I then tasted it. It was okay, but the apple cider from the pumpkin butter was really strong. So I decided to toss it in the oven (which was already on) and bake it a bit. I just left it in the oven til it was nice and crunchy. This got rid of the overwhelming apple cider flavor as well.

The result was that I basically made really tasty pumpkin granola. The only sad thing was that I forgot to bring it to rehearsal today. :(

Nook

I wanted to introduce you to my new best friend: my Nook. For many reasons, I finally decided to cave and buy an e-reader. I did a lot of research and finally settled on Barnes and Noble's Nook, partly because it seemed to be the most library friendly. I also know a few people with the Nook and they all really love it. It is definitely my new favorite thing. The first two days I owned it, I stayed up really late reading an entire book (as in one book each night). I've been able to find lots of free YA fantasy books and, after a little difficulty, I figured out how to get library books onto it.

Case closed with the Nook inside.

When I bought it, I did cave and buy both the extended protection for it (so now I have two years to harm it and it will still be replaced) as well as the screen protector. I just finally put the screen protector on today and it was annoying as ever to get it on right. It's slightly wonky on the top right corner, but I couldn't get it up to fix it, so I'm just gonna live with it. I didn't, however, buy one of the super fancy, rather expensive cases for it. They're cool and all, but I didn't want to spend a ton of money on it right now. So instead, I found a knitting pattern for a sleeve to put it in. It doesn't protect it as much as a hard case would, but it does mean there are two layers of padding between the screen and anything else. I'm planning on keeping it in my purse between two flat objects, so it should be more than sufficient.

The pattern I used was one I found through Ravelry, from someone's blog. I thought about tweaking the pattern a bit, but seeing as it's the first project I've completed in the round, I decided to make life easier and just follow the pattern. The end result is not without mistakes, but it looks good enough to me. At some point, I may make another and make some adjustments based on how this one turned out. The thing that bothers me the most is that the front flap doesn't seem wide enough. This may entirely be because of how I knit, but if I do it again, I'll make it a bit wider to compensate. It looks good when closed though, so it doesn't bother me too much.

Anyways, there it is. My new Nook and it's new cover. Now I have to go and do paperwork as I have rehearsal in a few hours. (I'm apparently ASMing an opera.)

Pumpkin Butter Bread

A few months ago, I heard about Trader Joe's Pumpkin Butter. It sounded like some of the most delicious stuff in the entire universe. However, I wasn't sure I could justify spending $2.29 on only 10oz of the stuff. So I did a quick internet search and found several recipes (and when I say several I mean everyone seems to make the stuff) for how to make it. I ended up cobbling together my own recipe (which I foolishly did not write down) to make a small batch. It turned out pretty well. The apple cider I used in it meant that it had a very particular aroma when warm, but it was still delicious. Unfortunately, like so many of the new things I make that Mike won't eat, I forgot about it. And it sat in the refrigerator for a very, very long time.

I finally took pity on it a couple days ago and took it out of the fridge to see if it was still good. There was no mold and it smelt fine, so I figured it was probably okay. I decided that since I wasn't very good at remembering to put it on toast or in oatmeal, I should use it to bake something. I toyed with the idea of making Pumpkin Soup, but that's apparently cream/milk based, so that was out. In the end I decided to make Pumpkin Butter Bread, since I love the Pumpkin Bread I normally make. I almost just substituted the Pumpkin Butter into the recipe I usually make, but I decided I should maybe find a recipe specifically for it. So here it is! (I apologize for some of the wonky measurements. I halved the original recipe so it was only one loaf.)

So...I forgot to take a picture until after I'd already eaten some.

Pumpkin Butter Bread
1 3/4 cup flour
1 tsp baking soda
3/4 tsp salt
1/2 tsp baking powder
1 cup pumpkin butter
1/2 cup + 2 Tbsp sugar
1/2 cup canola oil
2 eggs (room temp)
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
1/2 cup walnuts
1/2 cup raisins (my own addition)



1) Preheat oven to 350F. Grease and flour a 9x5x3 loaf pan (as you could a cake pan).

2) Mix flour, baking soda, salt, and baking powder in a small bowl. Stir in raisins. In a large bowl, mix pumpkin butter, sugar, oil, eggs, vanilla, and 1/4 cup water. Stir in walnuts. A bit at a time, add the flour mix to the pumpkin mix. Pour into loaf pan.

3) Bake 45-50 minutes until toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean. (For some reason, it took much longer for me to get mine to set all the way.) Let cool in pan on a wire rack for ten minutes. Remove from loaf pan and cool completely on wire rack.

As I mentioned, I had to keep mine in the oven quite a bit longer than it said for it to bake completely through. This seems to happen more often than not with sweet bread I've noticed, especially ones like pumpkin and banana that have a puree in them. The result was that the loaf turned out a bit darker than normal, but it is still delicious! I honestly don't taste much of a difference between this an my normal Pumpkin Bread, but at least I used up a lot of the Pumpkin Butter. I think I'm going to make a riff on these No-Bake Energy Bites with the rest of it.

In a galaxy far, far away...

Mike and I went up to the Nashua, NH mall today to try and exchange his hat. I got him a new black fedora for Christmas, but it was too small so we needed to return it. Unfortunately, they didn't have any that were big enough for him. Which was really sad. We decided to just get the money back for it instead. Then we popped over to Newbury Comics to browse there. And we got:

We'd been talking about getting the original Star Wars Trilogy maybe with our Target money, but it was a really good deal so we got it. It was a bit more than the hat, but we have Christmas money from other people too.

We also went into Target and found a DVD book for all of our dvds. We don't really have space in the new apartment for all the dvds, cds, and video games we have, so this was a good way to organize and maximize our space. I put all the blu-rays, dvds, and play station games in it. The cds are in our old, small books and we left the computer games in their cases. The media stand looks MUCH better now and you can actually get to everything now.

And now we're watching our new movies while Mike hangs out and I clean the boys cage. :)

Your Local Library

I made a trip today to my local library so I could get my library card! Turns out, the library is quite close (like, in nice weather maybe I'd walk close). It's a cool building too. Now, the one closest to me is the Powell-Lowell Memorial Library. It's part of the Merrimack Valley Library Consortium, which is like the sharing system that Hawaii and Rhode Island have, but because Massachusetts is so big, they don't just have one for the whole state.

Me and my new library card!

My reasons for finally going and getting a library card were two-fold. I, of course, wanted to get one because I like being able to check out books in the state where I reside. But also, I wanted to be able to access their e-books for when I get my e-reader (it's only a matter of time!). I have access to the Rhode Island e-book site until my card comes up for renewal, but I figured two is better than one when it comes to places to check out books and that way it will already be set up when I can't use the RI site anymore. So now I have two working library cards!