experimental salve

Raise your hand if you were never taught to make anything by hand. Yep. Me too. I was recently gifted   a fun book on making home remedies for almost any ailment you can think of. When I got to the page on how to make your own salve (for small burns, cuts and dry skin/lips) I thought, hey, this doesn't look like rocket science. Let's give it a whirl.

So here, ladies and gentlemen, is my first attempt at making my own salve. I'll have you know it was successful and I even documented it.

You should also know that I was a bit of a co-op virgin before this experiment so my time in the "essential oil" isle was prolonged significantly by the fact that I had no idea what the H I was
looking for. Moving on.

Step 1::: grate up some beeswax

Step 2::: Heat it up in a measuring cup in some simmering water and add in grape seed oil and whatever

              essential oil you want.

Step 3::: Once it's all melted and mixed together, stick 'er in the fridge and let it cool to a paste. 

I ended up storing this stuff in a cute glass jar and using it for chapped lips and those tiny cracks in your skin that happen when it's like -23 degrees outside. It's making this winter a little more tolerable. 

Hooray for February! We are making seasonal progress, people.

maracuyá

We love passion fruit. We put it in our shampoos and our fancy hand soaps. I don't know about you but I don't even know if I ever knew what passion fruit even looked like until there were hundreds of them growing on the property. Much to our delight, they were coming in by the barrel full and I think I'm in love.

So this passion fruit, or maracuyá as they call it here {way cooler, don't you think?}, is super crazy inside! How do you even eat that? Well, you don't really. We made juice out of it. It's my favorite juice in the whole  wide world. So if you ever get lucky enough to come across one of these guys, you gotta try this:::

Okay so all that juice is going to make your face scrunch up into some unrecognizable sour form unless you add some lots of water to it and of course, sugaaaaaaaaar. 

I've got no fancy tricks for you, just straight up jungle style passion fruit juice. But it's incredible. And if you had no idea what a passion fruit actually was before you read this, I'm proud to be the individual who informed you.