Rachel Bostwick

1. Your smile, though somewhat rare, melts my heart.
2. I love it when you attempt to make me laugh when I am trying to be grumpy…
3. Your first priority is always the happiness of your children.
4. Those times when you are braver than me.
5. Your honesty can always be counted on.
6. Your faithfulness is impeccable and gives me no cause to be afraid or jealous.
7. Gentleness with your children is boundless.
8. Your attempts to make me laugh, especially when I am trying NOT to be grumpy…
9. I love enjoying old black and white movies with you.
10. I love discovering and being engrossed in TV shows with you, from a decade of X-Files and Fringe to Friends to That 70s Show to Bones and everything in between.
11. Your unrelenting cynicism challenges me to be smarter and never a lazy thinker.
12. I love how to refuse to give up even when the odds are against you, accomplishing things that would have daunted a “normal” person.
13. I’m proud to be a geek with you, sharing comic book movies and wacky movie self-references.
14. Your face.
15. Your hands.
16. I love how you would never even think of giving in to peer pressure. You do things because you want to, not because someone else thinks you should.
17. I love how you want to run away and see the world with me.
18. I love how you love to read boring old books.
19. I love how you love to scour flea markets for boring old books (and maps and uniforms and flags and cameras)
20. I love how so many of the things that define me as an adult came from suggestions from you, not because I conform to you (we both know I don’t) but because you understand me on a fundamental level.
21. For giving me the opportunity to stay home with our children.
22. For continuing to love me even though things have been hard sometimes and I am not always lovable.
23. Your love of baseball, hard rock, fart jokes, and other things that make you completely different from me but so very much yourself.
24. Your love of fantasy, sci-fi, travel, the woods, the ocean, our children, video games, and other things that we have so much in common.
25. The way you humor things that I want to give a try even though the odds are that I will fail.
26. Your intelligence.
27. Your physical strength.
28. Your deep, untouchable goodness.
29.
30. Your loyalty to family.

Happy Birthday, Lee. May the next thirty years be rich and filled with good things for you.

A few years ago, my husband and I started making our own simple herbal remedies to be more involved in our family’s health. We like to provide for ourselves, and we like to know exactly what is going into our children’s bodies – who doesn’t??

Apparently we are not the only ones, as in the last few months we have started getting a lots of interest in our herbal recipes, so I’m sharing a new recipe that my husband and I developed this month to get ready for the flu and cold seasons – herbal cough drops, or herbal lozenges. Call them what you like, these are a family friendly, budget-friendly, do it yourself alternative to the little drops you can buy at the store.

My husband LOVES those Ricola brand cough drops, so he wanted to make a recipe that was chock full of herbs like these reputable herbal lozenges.  I, on the other hand, HATE that brand of cough drops. But I love mixing up new recipes.

To the instructions, Batman!

We’re going to make this very simple.

Ingredients:

Herbal Tea
Sugar
Something to grease your candy mold with

Equipment:
Stock pot (soup pot, basically anything you can boil in)
Candy Molds (somewhat optional)
Candy thermometer (somewhat optional)

Can it really be that simple? Well, yes, this is the basic recipe. Of course to get the benefits of the herbs, you need to customize a recipe, adding specific herbs for your situation, other additives with positive healing properties

First Step – Tea

First, take a quantity of water that will be about twice as much as you want to use for your lozenges. In the processing of steepig the tea, you will want to boil off about half of the water. Hubby and I wanted to make a large batch, so we started with 4 cups of water.

If you already have herbal tea on hand that matches what kind of lozenge you want to make – great! You can use regular herbal tea bag to great effect. We used a combination of tea bags from the grocery store and loose leaf herbs from Mountain Rose Herbs. If you want to use loose leaf herbs, you can use a strainer like this one. For some leaves that don’t have sharp pieces, you could just leave the leaves in with the tea – that is what hubby and I did.

One important herb that we added, because we wanted ours to be a throat soothing tea, was Slippery Elm Bark. Slippery Elm Bark is mucilagenous, which is a big word that means goopy (slippery, you know?). When I use Slippery Elm Bark, it makes my throat feel very soothed and takes away itchy dryness. So I use it anytime I am making a mixture for my throat. I’ve heard that it can always be used to soothe the digestive tract in the same way for the same reason – I haven’t tried that yet. I get mine in powdered form here. It’s not very expensive and one bag lasts me for quite a few batches. I do not strain it out, I leave the powder right in my tea.

Another thing that you can add to your tea, which my hubby added to the first recipe is lemon zest or orange zest. I have been told that these are high in vitamin C. Be careful to wash your peels carefully before zesting them (we used the small side of a cheese grater).

After you have boiled down your tea, remove the bags or the strainer, pressing on the leaves to get all the juice out.

Lozenge-ing

Measure out the liquid that you have left. Pour it back into your pan and add an equal amount of sugar. My husband likes to use Raw Sugar and that will work fine. We also added honey. Usually I prefer raw honey for its health benefits, but since we are about to boil the crap out of it, you will lose the health benefits that come from using raw honey. Where we live, raw honey is much more expensive, so for this recipe I just use regular honey.

I know what you’re thinking. A bunch of sugar, really? But a substitute for sugar will not make a lozenge, and you will find that the store bought lozenges are full of sugar and corn syrup. They are essential a hard candy acting as a delivery system for menthol. Yours will be a hard candy acting as a delivery system for healing teas, and you will be controlling everything that goes into them. That feels much better, right? If you dont feel comfortable with sugar, then I would recommend making hot tea instead and add the sweetener you love or none at all.

So bring the sugar-tea  mixture to a boil, stirring until all the sugar is dissolved. Then stop stirring – no more stirring – and put in your candy thermometer. Let the sweet-smelling mixture boil away until it reaches 300 degrees farenheit. It’s going to take awhile. Our burner s pretty weak and it took about 40 minutes. The first time we made the recipe, it felt like it was going to take FOREVER. Just keep your eye on it, and keep in mind that once it gets past a certain point it will start to move fast, so don’t leave it alone.

While its boiling, grease your candy mold. The first time we made them we used a cheap plastic mold we got at A.C. Moore for $1.99. The one we got was shaped like candy bars (as you can see from the picture of the final product.) We stored them as large bars and broke off a piece at a time as we needed it – we actually broke a bar off, then broke the bar in half for a perfect sized lozenge. These have held up OK for now, but the extreme heat of the lozenge mixture is slowly melting the mold and the next batch we do with them will probably be the last – we are going to order one of several small silicone ice cube trays from Amazon and see how that goes. I will update this entry after we’ve actually tried it.  I put a picture here of the tray that had really intrigued me and seems to be perfect for this purpose,

Once it hits 300 degrees, you can begin to spoon it into the greased molds. Once they are cooled (we cooled ours in the fridge) it is advisable to roll them in powdered sugar or something similar – this will keep them from sticking together. I’m sure you can find some very creative ways to package them – Mountain Rose has really gorgeous tins and if you use them, get the largest size, the small ones are very, very small and nice for things like homemade salve or lip balm (I’ll be blogging those recipes VERY soon, my salve is HEAVENLY)  – but we  used small ziploc bags. and kept them cool in the fridge.

Recipes

I will be blogging a few of our favorite recipes soon, but for now I wanted to share the basic recipe that we used for our first few batches.

We used –
3 bags of Lemon-Ginger tea from the grocery store Lemon has always been recommended to me for sore throats, and when I was a girl and used to sing in church, I would always have HOT lemon tea to get my throat ready.
4 Tablespoons of honey – honey is wonderful for soothing a rough throat
3 bag of pure chamomile tea  – chamomile is reputed to have immune boosting benefits and is very calming
Zest and juice from one lemon
Slippery Elm Bark from Mountain Rose Herbs (as explained above)

But remember – you can use any herbal teas you are interested in – browse the tea section at your grocery store or your favorite herb shop online – what benefits would you like to put into your lozenges? What herbs intrigue you? We will post more recipes in the days to come, but I would love to hear about your recipes – drop me a line at rachel@zoomdesignstudios.com (that’s the email for my web design business). If you create a recipe of your own, I would love to link to it from this post!

If you enjoyed this recipe, you might also love to read my simple 3-ingredient house cleaner recipe. All- natural and super easy, I will never buy a chemical cleaner again (now if I could just convince Grandma.)

Here is a recipe for a natural cleaning solution you can start making TODAY. It uses only three ingredients. Here they are:

Water (If you have hard tap water, it might be wise to buy distilled water)
White Vinegar
Rosemary Herb

You can find fresh rosemary with the herbs in the produce section of your grocery store. It should only cost a few dollars and you should be able to get a bunch of it. I love to take a nice deep whiff of it – it smells so good. To learn about the benefits of Rosemary, you can read the entry at Mountain Rose. There are a few health cautions, too.

Take a bunch of rosemary and put it into a sterilized jar with a lid. Pour the white vinegar over the rosemary and put the (sterile) lid over it. Put the vinegar in a dark place and let it sit for a few days, giving the jar a good shake each day.

If you don’t feel like waiting, boil the vinegar before adding it to the herbs, just please take care when pouring. Nobody feels like cleaning with burnt fingers.

After the herbs are infused into the vinegar, you will need to strain them. I use a coffee filter tucked into a colander. Make sure you get all the little pieces out because they will get stuck in your sprayer and you will have to toss it (unless someone knows a great way to unclog a stuck sprayer – learned this the hard way with glitter, don’t ask).

About spray bottles – I know some people don’t like plastic. I’m looking for a good source for nice metal bottles with spray attachments. Right now I just get my plastic spray bottles at Walmart – they are BPA free and they are made in the USA. If anyone can recommend a good source for the metal bottles, let me know.

Funnel the vinegar into a spray bottle. I like to use equal parts vinegar and distilled water. That’s it, you have a fantastic, strong, all natural cleaning solution for your house. The smell of the vinegar will dissipate and the sunshiney smell of the Rosemary will charm your house. So much better than chemical smells and no worries about the kids getting into poison.

Don’t forget to sign up for my email list using the form to the left – I’ll be releasing my e-book, Herbal First Aid Kit, early in December and the subscribers of my newsletter will be getting it exclusively for FREE!

Love making your own house cleaner? You might love making your own baby powder, too! Great baby gift!

Today, Olivia and I made a lovely batch of baby powder. We are preparing for the arrival of baby Gabriel sometime in May.

Why are we making our own baby powder? Of course you can buy baby powder at the dollar store and making it ourselves is not going to be any cheaper than that.

With Julius, we used corn starch for his tender little bum. The only problem with corn starch is that if a baby has a yeast rash or fungal infection – like thrush – corn starch can act as food for the yeast, and the rash can get worse.

Julius and I had a bad case of thrush that nearly disrupted our nursing relationship. The worst part about thrush is that it can be passed from baby’s mouth to mama’s nipples and back and forth, so it can be very difficult to treat, and it can be very, very painful for both mama and baby. It can also make for a very persistently red bum.

So I wanted to make a baby powder that would be natural, drying, soothing, and antifungal to help combat thrush. In the end, it wasn’t very expensive to make, either.

Here are the ingredients I used:

1 oz oatmeal
1 ounce calendula flowers
1 ounces kaolin clay
2 ounces arrowroot powder
5 drops lavender essential oil

Here is my lavender essential oil and one of the shakers I got at the thrift store.

I used my Magic Bullet to grind  yes it is an “as seen on TV” type of product. No, it is not as powerful as a Vitamix or a Blendtec. I don’t use it to do heavy labor, so I don’t need to spend $400 on it. I love it. It scrambles egg for me without making a mess (I’m very messy.) It chops herbs for me and is very easy to clean.  It turns Oatmeal into powder and makes milkshakes without me having to dissect and clean a huge blender. It’s not a be-all-end-all sort of product, it’s a cheap, flexible, if you break it you could buy another without crying about  it sort of product. I broke mine after two years and bought another – I was excited because now I had eight cups instead of four.

I poured the mix into two shaker containers that I bought at my local thrift store for 30 cents each. I had more than enough left over for another batch, and enough ingredients to last until Gabriel is out of diapers!

Olivia is showing off the final product.

I hope this post inspires you to make your own natural creations.

I used:
Purchased from Mountain Rose:

Kaolin Clay
Arrowroot Powder
Calendula Flowers, ground
Lavender Essential Oil

From Amazon:
Magic Bullet – but you old use many other methods to grind your flowers and oatmeal. Some people use a coffee grind or a blender – watch your thrift store again for these kinds of things, and you could keep one especially for use with your herbal creations.

Purchased Locally:
Oatmeal, ground finely (purchased at my supermarket)
Shakers – purchased at my thrift store and sterilized. I personally would also reuse a spice shaker, thoroughly cleaned and sterilized. – remember the greenest product is the one that you are saving from the landfill.

You can find out about the other wonderful uses of lavender here on my blog.