Homemade Cleaners - Starting Small

One of the side-effects of having children is being more aware of the ingredients in everything I bring in the house: snacks, cleaners, take-out, etc. The past 6 years have seen a shift in my shopping, and I have begun making my own version of items (see previous posts about Granola and Gummy Snacks). The other side-effect is noticing the cost of everything.

Now I am experimenting with cleaning products.

I found a great online resource in DIY Natural. It has TONS of ideas for creating homemade, natural products (I am not receiving anything for this endorsement; just sharing something awesome that I found).

For my first two experiments, I picked two items that we use very often in our house: Laundry Detergent and Dishwasher Detergent. These detergents touch every item that comes in contact with our food and every item that comes in contact with our skin. I thought that was a great place to start.

The ingredients for the Laundry Detergent are readily available at the grocery store and super easy to mix. I am on my second batch and I love the results so far. My clothing is clean, and I appreciate there is no additional fragrance from additives in other detergents. I have also been using white vinegar with sweet orange oil as the fabric softener; again, a winner. These work well and are inexpensive.

I had a little more difficulty with one of the ingredients for the Dishwasher Detergent: citric acid. I made the detergent without citric acid and noticed the "clouding" problem mentioned in the comments with the recipe. So I made it my mission to get the missing ingredient. Thanks to a tip on the website, I stopped by the local homebrew shop and found the citric acid without having to order online. One week later and the clouding on the plastic is completely gone and the rest of the dishes are shiny again. Lesson learned: follow the recipe exactly until you understand how each ingredient works... this sounds like cooking and baking. I use white vinegar in the rinse aid compartment.

What homemade items are making your life cleaner and less expensive?

The Birth of a New Cookie

I have been eating eggs for breakfast this summer, and to keep it relatively healthy I've been using 1 egg + 2 egg whites... which means I have a bunch of unused egg yolks. I hate just tossing them down the garbage disposal, so I researched methods to store them and recipes to use them. Unfortunately, they do not freeze well, so I can only extend their life by a few days in the fridge, enough to gather yolks and make a recipe of some sort.

First up: Egg Yolk Cookies

I found this recipe on Food.com (Love that site! Been a member since it was Recipezaar.) I started by following the recipe exactly as it is listed (except I did substitute one of the cups of flour with whole wheat flour).

*Pet peeve: I HATE when recipes do not list the ingredients in the order in which you use them. Drives my OCD bonkers!!!

Anyway, as I was mixing and adding and such, my mind wandered and I wondered what else could I do to make these fabulous. How about adding some of my peach preserves I made last summer? What a great idea! But how?

I decided to use my mini-muffin pans and my tart wand. I followed the recipe through to step 7 (form into balls about the size of a walnut) and step 8 (roll balls in sugar) which is when my baking took a detour. I placed each ball in a spot in the pan, used my tart wand to turn them into mini pie shells, and then I filled each with peach preserves. I had no clue how these would turn out. I could be looking at a sticky mess.

I baked them for 15 minutes, cooled for 5 in the pan, then gently twist/pulled to get them out of the pan and onto cooling racks... only about 5 fought me on getting out of the pan.

They are delicious!! If you want to make them, you can use any flavor of jam or jelly you like. I used an entire jar to make the batch, and still had enough dough remaining to make a dozen standard cookies. Enjoy!! And please do not drool on your keyboard as you ogle the photo below :)

I call them: Jam Cup Cookies

Granola Bars

Thanks to Pinterest, I have more recipes I want to try than I have time to actually try them. But it was time for the granola bars recipe. Yet another snack that my boys (including the big boy) inhale faster than I can purchase them. 30 bars gone in a week.

So yet again I used on online recipe to make some bars; no tweaking required... yay!! Well, a little tweaking, but only in the process, not in the ingredients. And it takes slightly longer than 3 minutes... maybe 5, but definitely less than 10.

First tweak, I line my pan with parchment paper. My best baking friend is parchment paper. Whenever you want to be able to lift your item out of the pan to easily slice, use parchment. Oh, yeah. When I tried to "push" the mixture into the pan (by the way, the pictures involved a doubled recipe in my big jelly roll pan), the mixture stuck to the spoon and my fingers. So another sheet of parchment paper, my best baking friend. Now it was super easy to push the mixture really well into the pan.

The hardest part of the recipe: allowing the batch to rest on the counter for 2 hours WITHOUT my boys eating it.

When they are set, I just lift out using the parchment paper and slice. If I had been a little more exact with my sizing, I could have sliced this batch into 36 bars (3 x 12) but instead I only got 3 x 11 with the bars all the way to the left a bit wider than the rest. I place them in a plastic container, using the parchment (hurray for reuse!) to layer between levels, and leave them in the snack drawer to be devoured.

The flavor is reminiscent of rice krispie treats, but so much better since there is no marshmallow; I am not a rice krispie treat fan.

*If you need an invite to Pinterest, let me know :) I will need your email address to send the invite through Pinterest. But be prepared: IT IS AN ADDICTION!! Therapy may be needed in the future.

Gummies

I started a quest a few weeks ago to find a recipe for Gummy Fruit Snacks. My boys LOVE gummies and my budget can not afford to keep up with how quickly they eat through them. So I found this recipe online and began the experiment.

I followed the recipe exactly and used my mini-muffin pan, since I do not have any ice cube trays.

They were... decent. Not nearly enough flavor for me and my boys, but the texture was good. My next thought was to find a good balance of flavored gelatin with unflavored gelatin to get the additional flavor but keep the texture. I went through various experimental versions over the next two weeks.

Some were too jello-y and we needed a spoon to eat them.

Some had the consistency of a bouncy ball and we could not even bite them. No, we did not experiment with how high they could bounce since I did not want to encourage the boys to play with their food.

I'm now very close to what I want.

I use 3 ounces of concentrated juice (thawed), 5 teaspoons of flavored gelatin, and 4 teaspoons of unflavored gelatin. I am able to buy the gelatins in bulk, so that helps lower the cost of production: it comes out to 62 cents per batch! :) I purchased ice cube trays in different shapes to see what will happen; my boys love pirates! What is pictured below is actually three batches based on the 3:5:4 ratio. I placed them in the refrigerator for a while to help them set.

They are still too sticky for my likes, however the boys love them. The fruit and pirate trays worked really well, since they are silicone and I can bend them to get the gummies out. The white tray... not so good. I had to use my fingers to dig our the circles and hearts, and I am not able to get the stars out at all. I think I will just use them make ice cubes and purchase additional silicone trays. The boys really want gummies in super hero shapes :)

If you have any tips for helping them not to stick to the trays and/or for making the gummies a bit less sticky, I would love your suggestions.