Sopalotta Zero Added Fragrance, Zero Artificial Colorants Sudzy Soaps

Extra Stout--All the color and fragrance in this soap comes from the dark beer in the recipe.  Smells grainy and earthy.  Made with a cocoa butter superfat.

Extra Stout

Harvest Moon Hand Soap--Smells like grandma's kitchen at Thanksgiving.  Made with ground spices and real pumpkin. Smells great!  Tastes really bad!  Available in fall and winter.

Harvest Moon

Kitchen Sink Hand Soap--Made with brewed coffee and has some ground coffee for texture.  Smells nutty and wonderful.  Cleans your hands so you can make a safe and healthy meal.

Kitchen Sink Hand Soap

Mellow Yellow--This is a fragrance free buttermilk bastile-type recipe with olive and coconut oils.  Contains pureed carrots.  Great soap for a young child.

Mellow Yellow

Nothin' Fancy--The soap that started it all!  Nothin' Fancy is a basic bastile soap made with over 90% olive oil plus a touch of castor oil to provide hardness to the bar.  This recipe serves as the basis for most of my bastile soaps.

Nothin' Fancy.  Ugh!  Ever try to take a good picture of something white?

Plain & Simple--Made with olive oil, coconut oil, and sweet almond oil superfat.  No fragrances.  No added colors.  No preservatives.  No nothing but plain & simple soap.  This recipe serves as a basis for many of my other soaps.

Plain & Simple

Reggae--Believe it or not this soap has no added colors or fragrances.  It's made with red, red wine (Merlot in this instance) which gives it a sweet and earthy fragrance and deep, deep rusty red color.  Superfatted with cocoa butter.

Reggae

 

Sowing the Wild--A bastile bar made with oats and honey.  I've made this soap many times and because of the nature of the honey I add, it never comes out looking the same way twice.  In this particular batch, the honey caramelized to produce a rich, dark brown color and it smells divinely of honey caramel.

Sowing the Wild

Next up:  My Fancy Pants line of good smelling soaps with essential oils, fragrance oils, and/or colorants.

Take Your Canning Outside and Beat the Heat!

I saw something on facebook the other day that stopped me in my tracks.  Normally, I flip through the status updates and shared photos rather absently.  But this.  This was a deal changer.  Once I saw it, I knew I had to have it.  Yeah.

HOLY CRAP how did I never think of this myself?

Not a week ago I was dreading canning season.  It's running late this year like everything else and I just wasn't looking forward to heating up the house with simmering and blanching and processing endless batches of salsa and sauce and etc. 

So.  I bought a propane camp stove.  I should say up front that I'm not a camper.  I don't enjoy sleeping on the ground with the bugs and the rocks.  Cooking outdoors really is limited to burgers on the grill for me.  Until this morning.

I got a Camp Chef double burner propane stove from Amazon.com.  No.  They did not give it to me to test.  I bought it myownself after spending a couple of evenings reviewing reviews.

I fired that puppy up first thing this morning after getting my first batch EVER of ketchup going in the kitchen.  I used the crock pot for the actual cooking which might be another post altogether.

So this is what it looks like with the water bath canner going full tilt on a sunny Tuesday morning in September.  I processed thirty-two, 4 ounce jars of ketchup.

Since I didn't feel right about leaving this set up to run on its own, I spent my time waiting for the processing to finish sitting in the shade with a good book and a cup of coffee.

I admit there might have been more than one cup of coffee.  It took 40 minutes per batch of jars. There were 3 batches.



Alton Brown is so much fun.

And that might be my favorite coffee cup.

Here's a nice, close shot of some of those jars.  We have really, really hard water in our little town so the jars are covered with a haze of calcium and magnesium salts.  Fortunately, the haze will wipe away with a damp cloth.  I've been told that adding a little vinegar to the water bath helps keep the salts from collecting on the jars.  So far, all it has done for me is make everything smell like pickles.

So that's my new set up.  I could not be happier with this arrangement.  The best part is that I did not heat up the whole house and crank up the electric bill.

I have ketchup.  I have a cool canning set up.  I have an excuse to sit out in the shade and read a book.  What's next?  Next I get out my pressure canner and give it a go.  After I process the pizza sauce I have cooking up right now.