Ginger Apps and Mains

Ginger is our ingredient of the season. You can find our archive of ginger recipes here.

Um, it’s Valentine’s Day. The heart balloons, roses, and piles of chocolate in the grocery store warned you this was coming. And now it’s here.

Our plans for the evening? Prepare and eat at a delicious f-ing meal. Because that’s what love is.

We hope your plans are just as awesome. And if you’re looking to add a bit of fiery spice to your evening, here are four dishes from our archives with a delicious touch of ginger.

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Chicken with Preserved Lemons

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Vegetarian Spring Rolls

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Pumpkin Curry

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Moroccan Spiced Shepherd’s Pie

Put a Heart on It.

Still looking for a last minute DIY gift? We have a variety of ideas here.

With Valentine’s Day right around the corner, we wanted to share this simple embroidered pillow as a bit of DIY inspiration. While this isn’t made from the softest of materials (more info below), it’s meant to add a punch of color and design rather than as a place to lay your head.

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I made this pillow at least four years ago, and it’s still going strong! Through multiple moves and many moments being sat upon, it’s holding up well. And fortunately, it has remained an enjoyable bit of decor. Seeing that big red heart makes me smile.

The combination of materials for decorative pillow cover and the embroidering adds a textural element that can make a room feel richer and more creative than if all upholstery in a room uses the same fabrics.

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As I mentioned, this is a DIY inspiration post. We aren’t giving you step-by-step photographs and instructions because I made this pillow with bits of material and reused items in my craft room.

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Materials

*The face of my pillow is made from an old burlap coffee sack with the heart embroidered using red acrylic roving. Those blue stripes that you see on the front were on the coffee sack. If you don’t have access to a coffee roaster (that’s where I get my sacks), then you can easily substitute a burlap; look for a tighter weave if you don’t want to see the pillow insert between the burlap fibers.

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  • Option – before you start the embroidery, cut your burlap to the size of your pillow (making sure to leave at least an extra inch of length in both directions for hemming), and if you’d like, you could sew along each edge to stop the burlap from fraying while you sew.
  • Cross-stitch a heart onto the burlap material being used for your pillow face. You can follow the pattern below or customize a heart to the size you want. Cross stitching is as simple as sewing little x’s on your fabric to match the red squares in the heart below. A quick tip to make your cross-stitching look more pro is to always keep the over and under stitches of your x’s consistent. For example, if you sew the line that goes from the upper left to the lower right first (it’s on the bottom), and the other line of the x second (it’s on the top), then you should use that pattern for all of the other x’s in your design.

 

heart_patternIf you don’t want to go through the effort of making a pillow. I think it would also be super cute to cross stitch a little red heart onto a piece of aida cloth (the typical cross-stitch fabric) using embroidery floss. Then you can hang it on the wall framed with the embroidery hoop. Super simple, but super cute.

Seasoned View Vol. 30

Each month we share our Seasoned View.  Snapshots of nature taken by the Seasoned sisters.

Happy last day of the first month 🙂 Hopefully, 2018 came about gently, without too much hesitation. I find I can become overwhelmed at the beginning of each year. So many possibilities and dreams and wants, where to start, ya know? I only had a few days like that this January, but each time I felt overwhelmed I turned to my meditation practice. Meditation allows me to put some space in between my thoughts and emotions and myself. It’s my mental health medicine and I cannot thrive without it. If you’d like to join, I send out a Meditative Monday email each week with a guided meditation. Sign up here. But, back to the images…

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You can upload one or all of these photos to use as your desktop background or even as phone and tablet wallpapers.  Katie captured all of these in Colorado this past month. To use the images, simply right-click on the photo, save it, and set it as your background.  Enjoy!

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Teachable Moments : Flower Dissection

Teachable Moments is an ongoing series where we share simple ideas for exciting and encouraging learning anytime and everywhere. You can see previous posts here.

Today we’re popping in with a super simple science activity : flower dissections!

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Flowers aren’t often the first thing that comes to mind when someone mentions a dissection (maybe you’re thinking about that frog or shark from high school biology?). Read on to see why we think flowers are the perfect specimen for preschool dissections.

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Activated Charcoal Deodorant

When feasible, we like to experiment with our own beauty potions. You can find a bunch here, from lip balms to face masks to foot scrubs!

We like our deodorants simple and effective. With their long ingredient lists, it can be hard to find simple deodorants in the beauty section. And when we do find something that’s simple and often “natural” it’s often not as effective as we want it to be. Admittedly, that goes for our own DIY blends too.

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But we aren’t throwing in the towel yet, and today we have a new blend that we’re excited to share!

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Solid Perfume Necklace

We love crafting with essential oils. You can see some previous projects here.

One of the homemade gifts that I gave this year were these necklaces. Each contained an adorable acorn locket filled with solid perfume.

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Read on for the simple DIY and an amazing woodsy essential oil blend.

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Ginger Liqueur & Mule

Ginger is our ingredient of the season, you can find more ginger recipes here and more drink recipes here.

We’re popping in with a homemade ginger liqueur recipe and using it in a ginger mule cocktail. Just getting ready for the weekend.

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This liqueur has a quick turn-around. No long steeping period like our hazelnut liqueur or limoncello (oh hey, old blog!). Instead, it’s much similar in wait to something like our rosemary vodka.

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Ginger Tisane

Ginger is our ingredient of the season. You can find a variety of drink, main dish, and dessert ginger recipes here. If you like teas, you may like browsing these posts.
On Tuesday Sarah introduced you to a beautiful made-up word. Today I’m popping in to share a lovely but rarely used word: tisane.
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ti·sane
təˈzan/
noun
plural noun: tisanes
  1. an herbal tea.
    • archaic
      a medicinal drink or infusion, originally one made with barley.

To review, the true definition of a tea is any drink made by brewing the leaves from Camilla sinensis. As we discuss in this post, there are many varieties of teas. They differ based upon the type and quality of the tea leaves and how they were processed after being harvested.  My understanding is that everything else, would be an herbal tea, and thereby considered a tisane.

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And now, let’s turn to the fiery ginger tisanes. They are lovely any time of year, but particularly perfect during the long cold winter months. They’ll warm you up from the inside out and may even help to sooth some of those nasty winter blahs.

When writing posts like this, I would love to tell you all of the claims made about an ingredient or exercise, but the scientist in me can’t bear to make a claim without citing the primary literature… so I’ll just leave it at this, I believe that some cultures and practices carry with them an ancient wisdom.

In Ayurvedic medicine, ginger is believed to be a “universal great medicine” and an Indian proverb says that “everything good is found in ginger”. 

Pictured in this post are two ginger tisanes that I love. Ginger Soother by Ginger People can be opened and drunk hot or cold. I always drink it cold and usually on the go. It’s delicious and not too fiery if you’re still warming up to ginger (puns!).

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My other go-to are the dehydrated honey ginger crystals in single serving pouches by Prince of Peace. I’ve found them in grocery stores, Asian markets, and online. I always drink this one hot – just boil water and pour of the crystals – it creates an immediate ginger tisane that has a bit more of a ginger kick than the Ginger Soother. These are awesome because they’re easy to pack for camping and other travel. 

If you’re looking for a new habit this winter, start drinking a mug of ginger tisane in the evenings (and definitely during your Monday meditations).  xo