All things sweet and gloopy.....

Wow, what a productive day today! I blame the rain we've had for the past few days. Terrific for the garden and the few seeds I have germinating, but lousy for kids on school holidays. Oh well, make the most of indoors time and get productive!

First up I juiced a huge basket full of lemon/limes I was kindly given from a friend. I call them lemon/limes (or 'lime-ons' as my kids have named them) as my friend said they were limes from her mother-in-laws tree, but they are bright yellow and lemony inside. Thin skin and no seeds like a lime, but look and smell like a lemon. Taste? well, they taste like a lemony-lime. Whatever, they were free, need to be used and taste great.

So I decided to make the majority of the juice into cordial, using Linda Cockburns recipe from the latest Organic Gardener mag which landed at my door last week. Sensational Linda- and great timing!

With 1 litre of juice, 1 kilo of sugar (EEK!) and 750ml water, I made 3 bottles of delicious cordial. It is diluted 1 part cordial to 4 or 5 parts water, so this will go a long way.

Looks plain-but tastes incredible!

Sterilising the bottles was the hardest part- I've never done it before and tried the drying-in-the-oven method. That was ok, apart from the bit where I melted the plastic bottle stoppers onto the racks :-(  OOPS! Oh well, maybe my foil makeshift tops will do for us!

After that I made liquid soap, using a recipe from Daharja you can find HERE. I used half the amounts as I thought that would be enough (it was). It worked amazingly well, even setting in a couple of hours instead of overnight. I wanted to add some pretty colour, and let my daughter choose from the food colourings, she chose pink, no surprise there! Just one drop of red colour in almost 2 litres of soap made this totally gorgeous pale pink. I ended up filling a 500ml pump, and almost filled 2 x 250ml pumps. One for the bathroom, laundry and kitchen.

yes, I even made a label!

It is a bit similar to the laundry gloop I make, though that uses washing soda instead of glycerine. I made a new bucket of that yesterday too. It is so easy and cheap to make, and much kinder to sensitive skins. If you haven't tried it, you can find the recipe on my original post HERE.

After all that, I then made playdoh for the kids. Yes, the gas company just loved me today! I did the cooked one, the recipe is on the cream of tartar box, and since Miss A got to choose the soap colour, Master A got to choose the playdoh colour. 'Alien Green.' Eeeuukkk! Well, they loved it anyway, and I love making playdoh that is so cheap, non-toxic and the past batches I've made have lasted over a year, no kidding. Wrap in cling film, pop in the fridge.

Oh, and the last thing I made (apart from minestrone soup for dinner, but that is neither sweet nor gloopy!) was a big tray of brownies. YUM. And that is my next task, after my very productive day ....... a sticky brownie. With some lemon-lime cordial of course :)

why do brownies always look a wreck but taste amazing?

(if you want more details about the cordial or playdoh recipe, let me know. I have a brownie waiting right now though, so I'll get to it later!)

:-)

Homemade Laundry Detergent

Thought I'd share this - I found this recipe for homemade laundry detergent quite a while ago on ALS, and finally decided to give it a go.

My motivaton is that I don't like the chemical cocktail that goes into commercial powders, for any of us, but our son especially gets skin irritations from some of them, and the couple that are OK for sensitive skin cost a fortune.

So here is the recipe for my 'gloop' - makes 10 litres ----

1 cup Lux pure soap flakes

1/2 cup washing soda

Water

Melt the soap flakes in 1 1/2 litres water, in a big pot over medium heat.

When dissolved add the soda, mix until thickens.

Remove from heat and pour into a bucket (normal 9-10 litre size) and top up with hot tap water.

Can add essential oils at this stage if you wish.

Leave overnight to thicken and it should come out as a thick gel consistency (called 'gloop' in our house!)

I have been using it for a couple of weeks now and it is great! I use 1-2 scoops in our top-loader for a full load, and considering we have 2 active 3 year-olds I am very impressed with the results.

The equivalent amount of laundry liquid (10 litres) would cost us around $50. These ingredients cost around $2 to make the same amount, and cleans at least as well without the nasties.

The only thing I would change next time is I will look for non-perfumed soap, as lux smells very 'soapy', (though less when its made up) and I will add eucalyptus oil which also acts a softener. Oh, and a bucket with a lid would be better!