Happy St. Patrick's Day!

Happy Valentine's Day!

Love is composed of a single soul inhabiting two bodies. ~Aristotle

Top 5 Cleaning Tip Links

My unemployment time has been filled with trying to my business in gear, cleaning, painting trim in my house, and cooking! So you will see a lot of this coming into my posts. This weeks "Top 5" list is filled with cleaning tips that I have come across recently and just love.

1. Rain-x to keep glass shower door soap scrum free! This might also be great to do on the out side of windows. here
2. Spring cleaning tips at a bowl full of lemons. It is almost time to start thinking about this!
3. Non-toxic bathroom cleaning plus links to recipes for making many of your own cleaning solutions at Chiot's Run.
4. I have been trying to get a lot of house painting done before I have to go back to working full-time and cleaning my paint brushes is always a dreaded pain. So this tip from the Creek Line House titled "the Easiest, Laziest Way to Clean Your Paintbrushes" should help!
5. Green cleaning tips using common household items over at cozi.com.

PS. Don't forget to clean the pets!

Okay, I just thought this was too cute and I needed to post it! Meow

The most beautiful flower treasury

My Geranium rose soap has been featured in a beautiful Etsy treasury. Check it out below or here. If you like it, you can comment on the link and it may get to the front page of Etsy! You can pick up some of this pretty soap here. I love having people select my products to go into their treasuries and I feel like they all turn out so beautiful. Have you made a treasury on Etsy? I still have not, but I probably should try to put one together someday.

 

Nemo Attacks! Snow Overload!

Well, the Blizzard Nemo has come and gone and left about 3 ft of snow behind. We have drifts over 6 ft tall and no place to put the snow from our drive way. We spend hours shoveling the sidewalks (note to self never buy a corner lot house again as you have twice as much sidewalk to shovel!) and still need to figure out how to do the driveway. Our road still is not plowed and may not be plowed until tomorrow.  Pretty crazy! Here are some pictures for you all! Enjoy!

Snow Angel!

We have walls leading up to the house.

Dylan action shot.

The only reason you can tell there is a road here is cause the stop sign!

Maybe I should make some soap with the snow! Like a wintery peppermint....

Bulk Whole Wheat Pancake Recipe

I mentioned in my last post that I had plans to mix up some bulk pancake mix. I tend to eat only whole wheat products and most whole wheat pancakes tend to be hard and thin. I found this great recipe in the Martha Stewart magazine (see original here) a few years ago and have been making it since as my only pancake recipe. It produces nice, fluffy pancakes that are thick, soft, and delicious. The wheat germ just helps to round out the flavor perfectly.

Ingredients:
Dry
1.25 cups Whole wheat flour
0.25 cups Wheat germ
2 Tbsp Sugar
1.5 tsp Baking powder
0.5 tsp Baking soda
1 tsp Salt

Wet
1.5 cups Buttermilk
0.25 cups Vegetable oil
2 Eggs, lightly beaten

Recipe:
Combine and mix dry ingredients.
Add wet ingredients to the dry and mix.
All to rest for 10 minutes.
Cook on griddle.

For the bulk batch that I made, I multiplied the dry ingredient volumes by 5 and mixed them together. I then placed the mixed dry ingredients into a storage container. When I go to make pancakes next, all I have to do is measure out 1.5 cups and 3 tbsp of the dry mix and add to it the wet ingredients as listed above. This might make it quick enough that I get back into making them every Sunday! If you are like me and never have buttermilk, you can easily substitute any type of cow's milk (skim-whole) with a bit of lemon or lime juice added. If you make this with low-fat buttermilk the calories, fat, etc should be correct in the photo below.

 

My 5 favorite links of the week

I am spending way too much time on Pinterest, but I am finding so many great projects to do on everyone's boards! I think all of these links come from Pinterest finds. So here is my list of top five links for the week. 

1. Homemade baking mixes at Fake-it-frugal. I plan to make these plus a bulk pancake mix and homemade instant oatmeal! This will save money and time!
2. Make your own microwave popcorn at Frugal Living NW. I spend way too much money on microwave popcorn.
3. Homemade pizza crust at Annies eats. I want to make up a big batch of this and freeze it to have on hand for quick dinners.
4. Homemade chocolate sauce at Small notebook. This looks like it would be good on ice cream and in alcoholic drinks as well as to make chocolate milk.
5. Make your own instant oatmeal at Amy Loves Her Life. I plan to make this and store it in a jar instead of individual bags. I will probably modify it a bit to cut down on the sugar and replace some with stevia (I think they have a brown sugar version!). I'll let you know what I come up with!

Picture from smallnotebook.org

As you can see my mind must be on food! I will be going back to work soon and I really want to get the kitchen prepped for quick homemade dinners. I have really enjoyed cooking good food while I have been at home, but once I start working again it will be hard to find the time. So, I am hoping to stock up my pantry and freezer with prepared or quick to prepare foods so I can continue to eat well!

Ladybug Soapworks blog now available on Kindle!

I am so excited to announce that the Ladybug Soapworks blog is now available on the Kindle store for a monthly subscription cost of $0.99. This allows you to read my blog even when you are not connected to the internet. This is also a great way for you to take my recipes and tutorials with you into your kitchen or soap "lab" and have them easily accessible without printing them out and wasting paper. Want to sign up?  Click here.

Indian Samosa Casserole

If you know me, then you know I LOVE Indian food.  If I could, I would eat it every night! So when I came across this recipe for a Samosa casserole, I just had to make it! The recipe below is based off of the one on the vegetarian times website (see it here). I have modified a few things in my recipe to suit my tastes, but you may prefer to use the original.

Indian Samosa Casserole Recipe

Crust

• ½ cup all-purpose flour
• ½ cup whole-wheat flour
• ¼ tsp. salt
• 2 Tbsp vegetable oil

Filling

• 2 Tbs. yellow mustard seeds
• 2 tsp. curry powder
• 2 tsp. ground ginger
• 1 tsp. ground cumin
• 1/4 tsp. red pepper flakes (optional)
• 5 medium potatoes, peeled and quartered (1 ¼ lb.)--I used closer to 2 lbs
• 1 ½ tsp. vegetable oil
• 1 large onion, diced (~1.5 cup)
• 1 large carrot, diced (~1 cup)
• 3 cloves garlic, minced (1 Tbs.)
• 1 cup frozen peas
• 1 cup low-sodium vegetable broth
• 2 tsp. agave nectar or sugar
• 2 Tbsp milk

1. To make crust: Preheat oven to 375°F. Whisk together flours and salt in bowl. Stir in oil and then add 6 to 10 Tbsp cold water  until dough holds together. Shape into ball, cover with damp towel, and set aside.

Crust dough

2. To make filling: Stir together mustard seeds, curry, ginger, cumin, and red pepper flakes in a small bowl and set aside.

Seasonings

 3. Cook potatoes in boiling salted water for about 15 minutes, or until tender. Drain, return to pot, and mash, leaving small chunks.

Potatoes mashed

4. Heat the oil in a skillet over medium heat. Add onion, carrot, and garlic, and sauté 5 minutes, or until carrot is tender. Move onion mixture to side of pan, and add mustard seed mixture in center. Toast for about 30 seconds.

Toasting seasoning

5. Stir in frozen peas and broth. Fold onion mixture into potato mixture; stir in agave nectar or sugar and season with salt and pepper to taste.
 

Mixing the onions, carrots, and pea mixture into the mashed potatoes.

 6. Spread filling into a 9-inch pie pan and set aside.

Filling spread in pie pan

7. Roll out crust dough to 11-inch circle on a lightly floured work surface. Cover filling with dough and crimp edges with fingers. Cut X in center to vent steam and lightly brush with milk just before baking.

Filling covered with crust dough.

8. Place pie on baking sheet to catch any potential bubbling over and bake 40 to 50 minutes, or until crust is golden. Let stand 5 minutes before serving.

Cooked until the crust was golden brown

 9. I topped it with a tamarind-date sauce I bought from an Indian grocery store.  Yum!

Delicious!

Let me know if you make this and how it turned out!

Adding Social Media Icons to your Blog

As you have probably noticed, I am making a lot of upgrades to both my blog and online store. My newest additions are the pretty social media icons you can see to the right. Adding these icons to my blog took a lot of trial and error, looking at the source code for other sites and trying to figure out how to modify it for my site. Well in the end Dylan helped me and I FINALLY got it to work.  Since I found this process so difficult, I thought others might be going through the same struggles as me and perhaps I could save them some time and hassle. These directions are only for Blogger (Blogspot) blogs. So here we go:

Step 1:
Find some social media icons that you like. A simple Google image search for "social media icon png" will bring up a ton of options. Download the ones you decide to use. For my site, I am using a set called "Minimalist" that was designed by Zee Que at designbolts.com. You can get them here for free.

Step 2:
If you have your own website upload your images to your Public_HTML folder. This will allow you to access the icon at www.YOUR_WEBSITE.com/IMAGE_NAME.png. Obviously, you need to change YOUR_WEBSITE to the name of your site and IMAGE_NAME to the name of the image (likely something like Twitter.png or Pinterest.png).

If you do not have your own site to upload the images you can upload them to a place like Flickr where you can get a link the the specific icon image.

Step 3:
Go to your blog and select the layout tab. Then click on the 'Add a Gadget' in the area of the blog that you would like to place your icons. In the popup, select the "HTML/JavaScript add third-party functionality or other code to your blog" gadget.

Step 4:
Give this gadget a title if desired. Then you will have to type in a modification of the code given  below. You will need to add the text highlighted in gray between <a and </a> into the content box. The first example is for Facebook. In the text below, where it says YOUR_USERNAME you will need to change to text to reflect your Facebook name. You will also have to change/modify the link to access your icon image; replacing YOUR_WEBSITE with the name of the site where the image is stored and ICON_NAME to the exact name of the icon.

<a href="http://www.facebook.com/YOUR_USERNAME">
<img width="60/" title="Follow YOUR_USERNAME on Facebook" alt="Follow  YOUR_USERNAME on Facebook" src="http://www.YOUR_WEBSITE.com/ICON_NAME.png"/>
</a>

Here are the examples for Twitter and Pinterest for my site. Now following the directions above, just change where I have Ladybug Soapworks and my website and image name to the appropriate names for your site.

<a href="http://www.twitter.com/#!/LadybugSoapwork">
<img width="60/" title="Follow Ladybug Soapworks on Twitter" alt="Follow Ladybug Soapworks on Twitter" src="http://www.ladybugsoapworks.net/Twitter2.png" />
</a>

<a href="http://pinterest.com/LadybugSoapwork/">
<img width="60/" title="Follow Ladybug Soapworks Pinterest" alt="Follow Ladybug Soapworks Pinterest" src="http://www.ladybugsoapworks.net/Pinterest.png"/>
</a>

 

I hope this tutorial will help you to get your blog looking a little more professional, too!

Brewing up a storm!

Pouring the malt into the kettle

 This weekend Dylan and I took a trip up to Nashua, NH and met my parents at IncrediBREW for Abe's Brewfest. IncrediBREW is a brewery and winery where customers can go to make their own beer, wine, and soda. There were 6 groups of people at the brewfest and we all made a different type of beer. In two weeks, we will go back to the brewery, bottle the beer, and all six groups will share what they made so that we can try an assortment of recipes. The equipment is more high-tech than what a home brewer would have access to, but it was a great way to learn about what goes into the beer brewing process. My parents (along with a number of my friends) have gotten the beer brewing bug recently and so they convinced Dylan and I to try it out.  Overall, it was an interesting experience but there was a lot of down time where we had to wait (luckily they gave us some snacks and a selection of beers to sample). I would recommend taking along a book or some good company to keep you entertained. We may be heading back in March for the St. Patty's Day brewfest.

The bottle filler

King Arthur Flour Blog...wow!

Can you say yummie? That was the first thought that crossed my mind when I came upon the King Arthur Flour blog. Just check out some of these pictures! I think I need to start baking.

My book list from 2009

So here is my take off of Anne-Marie's recent blog post about her favorite books she read during 2009.

Running the Amazon This is a non-fiction book about the first kayaking trip to navigate the entire length of the amazon river. I am pretty much obsessed with anything amazon, so this was a great book for me.

The Lost Symbol The new Dan Brown book. I admit it, I love his books. I get so captivated that I read this one in about 2.5 consecutive days. I really like that I can sit near my laptop while reading his books and search the places and objects he talks about to learn more.

The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon Another amazon book. This is the adventure of an early 20th century explorer who search the Amazon for a lost advanced civilization. He never returned. In this book, the author retraces Percy Fawcett's path through the amazon to either find out where Fawcett died or if there really is a lost city. This was a large book, but again very captivating so I read it quite fast.

One River Most people probably will not find this book that enjoyable. I, however, really enjoyed it. This book is almost a biography of Richard Evans Shultes and two of his students Wade Davis and Tim Plowman. If you are at all interested in ethnobotany you will like this book. It covers all the rainforest explorations of the three men and their discoveries of unknown plants (their specialty is hallucinogenic plants and the study of how the indigenous people use them in their religions).

Ecotopia This book made me dream of living in the fictional country of Ecotopia. This book details a world where California, Oregon, and Washington secede from the United States and form a country called Ecotopia. This is a good quick read for anyone interested in creating an environmentally responsible society.

Eat, Pray, and Love
I am currently reading this book and I really love it. It is such a good story of growth and finding oneself. I highly recommend this book.

Dreams from My Father This is one of President Obama's books. It is really well written and I am enjoying it, though I keep finding myself picking up other books to read. Thus, I have not finished this book even though I started reading it in 2008! Still for those who have not read this book, it is a great way to learn about the life of the President of the USA.

I also regularly read National Geographic Magazine and Martha Stewart's Living Magazine.

I hope some of you will also enjoy these books!

2 Sketches 4 You

I love making cards, but coming up with ideas can be really difficult sometimes. I have been reading a blog called 2 Sketches 4 You for a while and thought I would share it with everyone. They put up weekly sketches for you to turn into cards. The submissions they receive are just amazing and what is even better is that they pick a winner each week and give them more scrapbooking/cardmaking materials. So go browse your heart out and get some inspirations for your own creations!

Treasury!

My Chocolate espresso shea butter soap has been featured in an Etsy treasury. Check it out here and place a comment so that I have a chance of being featured on the etsy home page.

New Etsy Purchases!

I have been dying to get some new jewelry from Etsy. There are so many talented artists it was hard to choose what I wanted. My cheap Target bangles have started to discolor so I went on the hunt for some new bangles. Check out these beauties that I just picked up from Painted Metal. I can't wait to wear them!An added plus is that all I had to do is tell the seller how I found her store and I got these beautiful earrings for free.I also picked up a very unique necklace from Meetalls. It is copper with beautiful patina. I think I am in jewelry heaven! I love Etsy!

Finally time to relax!

Well it has been a hectic last couple months. We bought a house which was so stressful...I am so glad that the whole process is done. Then we needed to dig a koi pond for our Koi, Biggie, who outgrew his 20 gallon tank a LONG time ago. He is probably between 10-12 inches, way too big for a 20 gallon aquarium. So now he is happy in his pond and he has 4 new koi companions who are much smaller than him so they follow him around like he is the boss. I am sure he must love it! Here is a picture of the pond. I will put up a better one soon.
We have been doing a lot of yard work and I painted the kitchen and hallway. We just got some cool antique furniture for our formal living room so now we just need to furnish the sun porch.

This weekend was really fun we had a 2 day open house for family and friends to come over see the house and hang out. It was really nice to see so many people that I don't get to see that often. A lot of my family travel almost 2 hours or more to get here so I really appreciated them taking the time to come over.

On the soaping front, I have a basic set up for my soaping room, but I still want to paint the floor and walls (some areas still need walls though). I have only made a couple batches of soap since I have been in the new house, but I will have to ramp that up this weekend. My inventory is getting low. I have made a bunch of laundry soap and started selling it the CT Farm Fresh Express. They are a wonderful local food delivery service in Connecticut. I will be listing it soon on my website and etsy. I am selling 16oz and 32oz bags which is enough for 25-50 and 50-100 batches, respectively, depending on the type of washing machine you have.

I have missed you all. I will attempt to update the blog more frequently now that things at home have settled down a bit.
Cheers~
Sarah

We got the house!

The sellers accepted our bid, so now we wait for the home inspection. Considering it was built in 1924, I am expecting him to find some problems. Hopefully, they will not be anything major. I can't wait for the home inspection. It will give us an opportunity to see the house again. I plan to take a ton of pictures and measure the rooms so we can start planing what we will need to buy. Everything has happened so fast. I can't believe that we only started looking at houses on Thursday and are already in contract on a house! So excited, yet so nervous. Ah...let's hope I can stop thinking about the house and get some sleep tonight.

Long time, no blog :(

Well and for good reason. I have been very busy finishing up my research, working on papers for publication, applying for jobs, working on my thesis, and searching for a house. Wowzers...way too much on my mind! Well Dylan and I found an awesome house today and just pit in an offer. We are so excited! We will know tomorrow if they accept or counter offer. We heard there may be another offer going in today so hopefully our offer is good enough. This house is really a gem. It is a beautiful 1920's brick Tudor style home with nice landscaping and a gorgeous slate roof. The owers have really taken such great care of this house and have upgrated the kitchen and bathrooms. I am still a bit shocked that this house was in our price range. Anyways, I have attached some pictures. Wish us luck! Hopefully, they will accept our offer, then I can start thinking about where to set up my soap lab!

Organic Oils---not worth the cost!

After looking at oil prices, it seems that organic is not in my foreseeable future. They are SO expensive. Many are over $200 for a 35lb pail...I think I will stick with conventional oil at this point which is about $50 for 35lb. Maybe when I start making lotions and other leave on products I will use organic oils in them, but for wash off products it is probably not worth it. Thanks for all you helpful comments. :)