Living Homegrown Podcast Episode 35 Last Minute Holiday Gifts

Living Homegrown Podcast Episode 35 Last Minute Holiday Gifts Show Notes: www.livinghomegrown.com/35 This is the Living Homegrown Podcast, episode #35. Announcer: Welcome to the Living Homegrown Podcast, where it s all about how to live farm fresh, without the farm. To help guide the way to a more flavorful and sustainable lifestyle is your host, national PBS TV producer and canning expert Theresa Loe. Theresa: Hey there everybody and welcome to another episode of the Living Homegrown Podcast. I m your host Theresa Loe. And if you re new around here, this podcast is where we talk about living farm fresh without farm. And that s through artisan food crafts (like canning and preserving), growing your own organic at home (no matter how big or how small your garden space) and just living a more sustainable lifestyle. If you d like to learn more about any of these topics, or my online canning courses just visit my website LivingHomegrown.com. Alright, so today s topic is last minute holiday gifts. As I was thinking about what topics I thought I d like to cover towards the end of this year I knew I wanted to cover last minute gifts because if you re like me you get busy and you end up just needing a few simple things that could be handed out on the fly. Maybe you have a neighbor you suddenly decided you d like to give something to, or you have to get a last minute hostess gift, or something for your kids teacher. You might end up needing something on the fly and

that s what I m going to outline here. These are really simple gifts that are perfect for that and if you end up not using they re great to have for yourself. So what I suggest that you do is you pick one of the gifts that I m going to outline and make up a few to have on hand just in case. And if you end up not using them, keep them and use them for yourself so it s a winwin. And these are not expensive gifts and they can be made up really quickly and easily. And yet they re still a nice gift to get. So the two things I m going to talk about today are first a natural home fragrance kit. And I know that sounds a little odd but it s really cool. And the second thing is a bath salt. So both are super simple, simple useful and not expensive to make. So the first one I m going to cover is the home fragrance kit. Now creating natural fragrance for the home is something that I do for myself all year long. And this year I decided to create a kit and give it as a gift. So I m sorry if any of my friends are listening right now you just found out what you re getting for Christmas, I just ruined the surprise! So that is what I m giving for gifts this year. And here s where the concept comes from. You know when you bring home the Christmas tree and it makes the whole house smell awesome? Well I LOVE natural fragrances like that. Like the smell of apple pie cooking. Or a Christmas tree. Or gingerbread cookies baking. Things like that. And they say that fragrance has a stronger tie to our memories than any other stimulus. And that s why when you smell something like apple pie it can trigger a memory you had growing up. You know like your mom baking while you were growing up. Fragrance is really, really powerful. And it s nice at Christmas time or actually any time of the year to make your house smell wonderful. And by using natural fragrances it can actually have some therapeutic benefits as well. So the way I do this is pretty easy. I just make the whole house smell wonderful by using steam. And here s what I mean. You simply take a pan of water and you add something fragrant to the water. Either botanicals or spices or sometimes even an essential oil. And then you boil it. And what happens is the steam will

release the fragrance into the room and eventually into the whole house and make everything smell wonderful. So what are some examples of what I boil? Well at Christmas time I save the pine needles off the floor under the Christmas tree. So in other words when we clean up that Christmas tree I save all of those pine needles and I dry them and save them to use for fragrance for the rest of the winter. Another thing that you can boil for fragrance is to boil citrus peels. So if you just eat an orange or if I m using the lemon for cooking I will toss that into a pan with some spices like cinnamon and all spice and boil that and it will make the house smell wonderful. Or you can use fresh sprigs of an herb like rosemary or in the springtime I use rose petals. If I m cooking and I have a piece of vanilla that I ve already used every bit of flavor for and I really have no other use for it other than to throw it away or to make vanilla sugar I might toss that little piece of vanilla bean into a pot of water and boil that. Another thing that you could boil would be apple peelings when you make an apple pie. Toss up the peelings with a little bit of cinnamon and you can really extend that apple pie fragrance for a little bit longer. If you don t have any botanicals or spices to use you can always just boil a few drops of an essential oil like lavender or rosemary or whatever you like. And in just a few minutes the steam will release that essential oil into the room and make everything smell great. Now two things I want to tell you before I tell you how to make a kit for a gift. And the first one is if you decide to use an essential oil in your kit or whenever you re making this for just yourself at home always use a pure essential oil. And not a fragrance oil. There s a big difference. A pure essential oil is actually made from the actual botanical or plant or spice. And a fragrance oil is a chemical representation. In other words it s a fake essential oil or it has very little pure oil in it. And the rest of it is a chemical make up. So you always want to use pure essential oils and the

reason is that pure oils you ll have less likely of an allergic reaction if you re making like some kind of hand soap or any kind of cosmetic you always want to use pure oils. And also if you re using it to add fragrance to a room you re less likely to get a headache if you use pure oil over a fragrance oil. They also smell much better because they re made with the real thing. And they also have therapeutic benefits through aromatherapy. So you can google and research which particular essential oils you would like to use to get the benefits of let s say stress reduction. And fragrance oils because they re artificial they re made with all kinds of chemicals so it s not something you would normally want to use for any of your homemade products. You want to go with pure essential oils. Now true or pure essential oils cost a lot more but you only need a few drops at a time and they last a long time. And you can purchase pure essential oils both online and at the health food store. Now my favourite oil to use during holiday time is either rosemary, pine or a cedar essential oil because they just smell like Christmas to me. But during the rest of the year I love to use lavender. Lavender is very relaxing and stress relieving and that is kind of my go-to for the rest of the year. You could also use something like mint or sweet orange or something like that. But just remember that for the project that I m talking about right now, you do not need any essential oil at all. I just wanted to explain about oils in case you decide you want to use them later or you re just going to use water and an oil that s what you want to use is a pure essential oil. But for today s project you don t have to use any oil at all. Now the second thing that I wanted to tell you about when you re using steam to add fragrance to the home is a little trick I do where I add glass marbles to the pan. And I never hear anyone talk about this but I always do it and here s why. When you are boiling water on the stove it s very easy to get distracted and forget that that water is sitting there. And even though you only need about 10 or 15 or 20 minutes of that water steaming on the stove you could totally forget and before you know it several hours have

gone by and if you steam down all the water in your pan you re going to ruin your pan. The pan will boil dry and you ll end up ruining it. So what I do is I always put a few glass marbles in the pan and I set a timer. So I ll set the timer for 10 minutes or 20 minutes or however long I think I want this to be steaming. But if I forget, or the timer doesn t go off, what happens is when the water level drops down to the level of the marbles or about a 1/2 inch to a 1/4 inch of water, those marbles start rattling around in the pan and making a whole heck of a lot of noise and that is your cue to go turn off the pan. So by adding marbles it gives you kind of like a little safety feature so you don t forget about this pan simmering on the stove. Okay so when I make up these kits I adjust it to whatever fragrances I like or that I have on hand and I like to package them up in glassine bags, those clear see-through plastic bags with a ribbon and printed card that explains how to use it. Or you could use mason jars or any kind of a cute jar or a box that you want and even paper bags work. It can be really, really inexpensive and simple. So the recipe I m going to spell out there is for just one kit. And you ll have an idea of how much to include for just one. But to make more than one, just multiply approximately this amount to however many you need to make and adjust it however you wish. There s no set recipe here. It s just kind of a handful of botanicals tossed into a small sauce pan of water. I normally use my own dried herbs for this project but if I don t have any on hand I would just go to a discount store and buy dried herbs and spices in bulk. And when you do that you can make many, many kits for very little cost. So, for example, one kit would be: 1 whole cinnamon stick 6 whole all spice 1 teaspoon whole cloves A few spoonfuls of either dried pine needles or dried rosemary

And that s it! Then what you do is you take all of those dried spices, the cinnamon stick, all spice and cloves and you first crush them so that they will release their fragrance. So what I do is I take the dried spices, I place them in a baggie and I use a hammer to smash them before I bag them up into the gift. And that just releases all of their fragrances, gives more surface area and they re more like freshly ground spices. Once you have your ground spices and your dried botanicals, then you toss all of those into a bag and you add a few marbles. You could either add the marbles separately or have them included with the bag of botanicals. And package it up as your gift. Now a large bag of glass marbles is not expensive. You may be thinking where am I going to get marbles? You can buy them at the toy store or you can even buy them where you buy flower arranging supplies. So craft stores have glass marbles. You just want them to be round and glass, that s all that matters. And be sure to explain in the instructions why the marbles are there. Because otherwise it s a little weird when they open it up and are wondering why the marbles are there. Also if you want to give this a little extra punch of fragrance, include like a small, fresh tangerine or a fresh orange with the kit. And just tell them to eat the citrus and then toss the peels into the pot with the water when they use the kit and it will add fragrance to their house for the holidays. So it s pretty awesome. It s pretty simple. And it s something they can use anytime during the next few weeks and it will make their house smell wonderful. I m going to have all the instructions in the show notes for this episode so if you want to know exactly what kind of things you can include and how to put this all together, I ll have it in the show notes and you just go to LivingHomegrown.com/35 and you can just print it out and you ll be ready for when you want to make it. So now let s move onto the second project which is bath salts. If you go to any gift store and pick up bath salts, they are usually pretty expensive. And they come in pretty packaging. Well let me tell you the money is in the

packaging because it costs pennies to make it yourself. Same ingredients, works the same, but costs pennies per gift. The easiest way to make bath salts is to use epsom salts. And a pure essential oil. So you will need an essential oil for this one if you want to make the bath salts. But remember, you can buy one bottle of essential oil at the health food store and you only need a few drops at a time so it will last you a very long time. Now I should say there are a couple different ways you can make bath salts but epsom salts is one of the simplest and epsom salt is not actually a salt. It s instead a mineral compound of magnesium and sulphate. And it s been used as a bath salt for a long time because it has therapeutic qualities of reducing muscle aches and inflammation and a whole lot of other things. You can buy just plain epsom salts at the pharmacy and it s usually in the section where they have muscle pain relievers things like that. A big three pound box is about $6-8 and it makes a whole lot of gifts. And sometimes you can even find it a lot cheaper it just kind of depends on your area. Just be sure you re buying plain epsom salts, not one that already has essential oil added or it will be a lot more expensive. And remember, the pure essential oils can be found at the health food store or online and I ll be sure to have sources in the show notes for you so that you have some options of where to go. Now here is how I make bath salts directly into half pint mason jars. But keep in mind that if you don t want to give one of your jars away as part of the gift you can make up a larger batch of bath salts and just let it sit for a few days in a large glass container so that the fragrance is infused into the salts and then you can package up those salts into either glassine bags, those clear gift bags, or into paper bags or into something else. But what I m going to talk about here is how I make up the bath salts directly into half pint mason jars because it goes a lot faster, it s a lot simpler and I actually give the jar as part of the gift.

So what you do is you fill half pint jars about 2/3 full with epsom salts. You re leaving about a one inch head space and that s so when you put on the lid you can shake the jar. And to each of those jars you re going to add 4-5 drops of pure essential oil into each jar. then you re going to put on the lid and your e going to shake the jar so that oil gets distracted throughout all of the salt. That 2/3 full equates to about a half a cup of epsom salt. Now after you have put on the lid and you ve shake it up your e going to set it aside and create the labels with instructions on how to use. And the instructions are to pour the entire jar half a cup of epsom salt into a warm bath and soak! The essential oils make it smell wonderful and the epsom salts immediately dissolve into the water and it s a really nice bath for anybody without being oily or greasy or anything like that. So be sure to put into the label that these are bath salts and not cooking salts that s really important! And other than that it s a matter of whatever ribbons, or packaging or tags that you want to add to make it look cute. And that s it! So there you have two fast and easy gifts that you could make up on the fly and have on hand for the holidays and what you don t end up giving away will really come in handy for yourself over the next few months. Now to get the full instructions on both of these projects be sure to visit LivingHomegrown.com/35 And that s it for this week! Until next time, keep working towards living just a little bit more local, seasonal and homegrown. Take care! Announcer: That s all for this episode of the Living Homegrown podcast. Visit LivingHomegrown.com to download Theresa s free canning resource guide and find more tips on how to live farm fresh, without the farm. Be sure to join Theresa Loe next time on the Living Homegrown podcast.