Salt Scrub

Let's flashback to the holidays, which btw, seem like light years ago (and yes, I know light years are a measure of distance not time, but you know what? I don't really care at the moment). But really it's been like two months. Crazy, right? Anyways, back around the holiday season, I was looking for a fun gift to make for some folks, that would be useful, hopefully not sit around collecting dust until the fateful day when it was finally disposed of. The twist to all this is that if I were to make something topical or in the realm of jewelry then I would be severely limited as to what could be involved, since my mom's skin is allergic to a grand slew of things. So after browsing many sites and pages with homemade gift ideas, I came across a page that linked me to this, and by george Martha Stewart, you've done it again! (Speaking of Martha Stewart, I miss the show, Whatever Martha, where her daughter and her daughter's friend made fun of Martha Stewart Living. I'll put a clip from Whatever Martha at the end of this post!)

So for my scrub I used epsom salt, not sugar, chose tea tree since my mom isn't allergic to it for my essential oil, and then used half olive oil and half vitamin E oil for the carrier. Per suggested by the comments on the page I used way less carrier oil, a quart cup of each of my carriers, for a total of half a cup, which is half of what Martha suggests, which is still plenty. I did not color it with food coloring. The making of it was super easy, I just put it all in a mixing bowl and stirred. It should've also been a wicked clean project, but I made a total mess, cause I spilt the olive oil while measuring it. Typical. Lilly was none to happy (or amused) with me that night :/

One of the tricky things was finding cut jars to put it in. I ended up finding cute little (and some slightly bigger matching) jars at WalMart, but it seemed that as soon as christmas was over there were canning jars everywhere again (like the one pictured above on the left). I also, for myself and a couple other people put it in some cleaned out baby food jars, which worked perfectly well, but is tricky to open with wet hands since it's hard to get a grip on the lid. Now personally, I've used this more as a bath salt, dissolved in the water while taking a bath and it was quite lovely. My mom really enjoys it as a scrub for washing her hands, especially since she can't use Gojo or anything like that anymore since she's allergic to the fragrances in it. All in all, not a bad project if you're in the market for that sort of thing :) ...And as promised, if you've never seen this show it's worth a quick check out:

Mac 'n' Cheese

The other day I made Lilly and I homemade mac 'n' cheese for dinner, and. it. was. great! (which is good, cause we may have some left overs!) Basically we had a ton of cheese in the fridge, and we love mac 'n' cheese, so it was only a matter of time before this came to fruition. I more or less kind of followed this recipe. 

As previously stated in other posts, for some reason rectangle and square pans aren't really something we have, so I used two circular casserole dishes.

I didn't really measure the pasta, I just cooked up a whole box. ( It should be noted I have a near unhealthy addiction to noodles).

Also, didn't really measure the cheese, just eye balled it. I used slices of american cheese and then grated a few different cheddars. Finished off a little hunk of extra sharp cheddar we had, used some normal cheddar, and then for a little flavor I decided some garlic & herb cheddar would taste good. And it did! Also, I did not use an onion, which is surprising, I love onion. Who knows. Also didn't use salt and pepper, yay.

I topped it off with some stuffing mix. (Cause who doesn't love stuffing, and why didn't this recipe call for some sort of bread crumbs on it! sheesh).

I poured the white sauce over it and into the oven it went. Now when it came out the white sauce was still on the top, I had kind of expected it to seep down into the macaroni, and was a little worried it didn't. But guess what? I had no need to worry.

Yum, yum, yum. I love me some mac 'n' cheese. Seriously. You should make some. Until next time, have a great week!

The time has come for Lilly and I to go off and do another very stereotypical lesbian thing: we have adopted a cat! :) Her name is Gabby, and she is very shy, but very sweet. She has yet to leave our bedroom and explore the rest of the apartment. The first couple nights she was home with us she mewed through most of the night keeping us up, but the last couple of nights she's stopped doing that , and we've actually gotten a full night's sleep (yay!). To be fair the first night she was up in our room was the night of the blizzard, so there was lots of wind and weird weather and noises. 

So precious! See you next Tuesday!

Mint 'Oreo' Stuffed Brownies

So yesterday while I was on tumblr (I know, I know) I saw a picture of Oreos in brownies that looked divine.  I showed Lilly, which inevitably meant that after she cooked dinner she oh-so-subtly hinted that  the candy cane 'oreos' we had from Trader Joe's would probably taste good in brownies...which really means 'will you bake them, pleeeease?'. So seeing as we don't have any brownie mix in our pantry we had to find a recipe for brownies. This was the one we ended up going with. 

Oddly enough we also don't really have any square or rectangular pans (aside from our cookie sheets and bread pans). So I awkwardly lined a circular silicon pan with parchment paper. 

Also, instead of using a heatproof bowl in a skillet I used a double boiler, which seemed to work out pretty well. 

I swear I mean to take a picture before I started to pour the batter over the oreos...but I got ahead of myself and forgot. But for the record, I poured a fairly thin layer of batter over the bottom of the pan, arranged as many oreos as I could in a single layer on top of that and then covered them with more batter. 

These are the 'oreos' we used. They're a seasonal offering from Trader Joe's that are delicious! (I'm not sure if they're still on the shelves, or if it's too far past the holiday season to get them though :/ )

Here's what the first one looked like when I haphazardly cut it out of the pan while still warm. And of course since we had some vanilla ice cream in the house these were topped with a scoop of it.

Verdict: I personally have had a love hate relationship with all things mint my whole life. In this instance, I wish that we had had and used regular oreos. While I love the mint joe-joe's by themselves, in the brownies (and with the ice cream) it was just too much for me. Lilly on the other had was a fan of them :)