Like a Cold Drink on a Hot Summer’s Day

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The facts are such:

  • It’s summer.
  • I’m in Saint Louis.
  • I wait until my kids are in danger of evaporating  right before my eyes before I turn on the AC.
  • The kids and I spend a lot of time outside.
The logical conclusion to these facts: Cold Drinks Required. In Abundance. All Day.
No Exceptions.

There are some great insulated bottles and thermoses out there that promise to do just that: keep your drink cold all day long. If I had a whole bunch of different ones, I would do a side-by-side comparison test for you, but since I only have one, I went ahead and tested that one (because how disappointing would it be if you thought you were going to have a cold drink in the middle of a hot afternoon in the park and instead you got a mouthful of steam?).

The Trial

At 9:00 am, I mixed up some icewater, poured it into my Ecococoon bottle, and took the temperature with my instant-read thermometer: 33.3, a nice, cold number.

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Then I put the lid on and abandoned my Ecococoon in my van, sitting in the sun, on a hot Saint Louis day. Not the hottest day ever, but I figured low 90s was an adequate proving ground for the test.

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Bye bye, Ecococoon… I hope you make it.

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At 3pm, I took my thermometer outside, released the steam from my van, took the top off the bottle, and took the temperature again: 37.8.

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A rise of 4.5 degrees in six hours – not bad! I took a little taste test as well (carefully, because the outside of the bottle was wicked hot); a 37.8 degree drink is still delightfully cold.

I locked my Ecococoon in the van again and let it languish there for the remainder of the day. At 9 pm (ok, a little past 9 pm as my 9-month-old failed to cooperate about bed time), I rescued the bottle from my van, brought it into the house and took the temperature again: 48.6.

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That’s a total rise of 15.3 degrees in 12 hours. Now, 48.6 is definitely not as cold as 33.3, but a 48.6 degree drink at the end of a day in the Saint Louis inferno is worlds better than a 90 degree drink at the end of said day. Also, I took a drink, and it was still delightfully cool.

And just to wrap things up nicely, I left my Ecococoon on the counter in my house (which, because I had refused to turn on the AC, was now hotter than my van that was cooling down more quickly after the sun set) and took the temperature at (approximately) 9 am the next morning: 56.2, a rise of 22.9 degrees in 24 hours.

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I don’t think 56.2 really qualifies as a cold drink, but seeing as how it barely went below 80 in my house that night (I know, my poor family), I’m still impressed. Also, I did not put any ice in the bottle in the beginning, only ice-temperature water, so this was strictly the bottle insulation doing the work here.

Conclusion

The Ecococoon bottle really did keep a cold drink cold for a whole waking day (12 hours), and mostly cool for a real whole day (24 hours). Since it’s stainless steel, there was no leaching of whatever-plastic-is-made-of while it sat in the heat, and compared to buying drinks for my kids wherever we happen to be when they get thirsty, the price is a steal. Now I have to give my kids each one of their own so they stop fighting over mine!

Disclaimer: As you can see from this page, I am a local distributor of Ecococoon stainless steel cups and bottles, so you could say I sponsored this post. :) But the reason I became involved with Ecococoon in the first place is because I love their products, and the bottles really are that great; no temperatures were photoshopped in the making of this post, promise!

A Mother’s Day List

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TenThingsFromMyMom

Ten Things (among many) I Learned From My Mom:

  1. how to love the outdoors
  2. how to love challenges
  3. how to love chocolate
  4. how to love quiet
  5. how to love widows and orphans
  6. how to love adventure
  7. how to love learning
  8. how to love what you have
  9. how to love my kids
  10. how to love, regardless

Thanks, Mom (from me, and everyone who has to live with me).

Lemon Poppy Bread

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Since we had to cut grains from the family diet about a year ago, it’s been 1001 Attempts at Grain-Free Baking around here. The obvious go-to flours are almond flour and coconut flour, and of the two, I much prefer the taste and texture of almond flour.

Then we had to greatly reduce our intake of nuts (even soaked/dehydrated), and since your average almond flour recipe has about a million almonds, that left coconut flour.

Thirsty, dry, takes-forever-to-bake, uses-a-dozen-eggs, sticks-your-tongue-to-the-roof-of-your-mouth, makes-everything-taste-vaguely-of-a-tropical-island-you’ll-never-get-t0, coconut flour.

Can you tell I’m not that enamored with it?

Trial and error has gained me a few lessons, the most important being to use coconut flour in recipes with *strong flavors* – coconut flour white sandwich bread is never going to cut it for me. I need spices.

Or, as it turns out, citrus.

This recipe is an adaptation of Lemon Poppy Seed Muffins from Comfy Belly. I made her recipe as written on her site and really liked it, but it was a touch too sweet for us, and I wanted to highlight the lemon flavor even more. I also almost never make muffins anymore because parchment paper muffin liners are rather expensive, and my number two lesson learned about coconut flour is ***always*** use parchment paper (unless you like attempting to dislodge whatever glue seems to form between coconut flour and regular muffin papers). So I doubled the recipe for a 9×13 pan, easily lined with parchment.

A great variation of this is to replace the poppy seeds with small wild blueberries (frozen is fine) for a delightful lemon blueberry bread.
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Lemon Poppy Bread

  • 1 cup coconut flour
  • 1 teaspoon sea salt
  • 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
  • 1/3 cup coconut oil
  • 1/3 cup unsalted butter
  • 8 eggs (room temperature is best, but I’ve made this with cold eggs and it’s fine, just harder to mix)
  • 1/2 cup of honey (or more to taste – if it’s breakfast I use less, a treat I use more.)
  • 2 tablespoons vanilla
  • zest from one or two lemons (I love a microplane for this)
  • juice from one or two lemons (about 1/4 cup – probably use those same lemons you just zested)
  • a few drops lemon essential oil (optional)
  • 2 tablespoons poppy seeds (chia seeds make a good substitute)

Preheat oven to 350. Line a 9×13 pan with parchment; it helps to put a little dab of butter or oil in the corners of the pan first to keep the parchment in place.

Sift coconut flour, salt, and baking soda together in a large bowl.

Combine coconut oil and butter in a saucepan over medium heat until just melted. Add melted oil/butter, eggs, honey, vanilla, lemon zest, and lemon juice to dry ingredients and whisk (or use a hand mixer or stick blender) until no lumps of coconut flour remain. Mix in poppy seeds and lemon essential oil (optional, but really brightens up the lemon flavor) with a whisk or spatula.

Pour or scrape thick batter into prepared 9×13, using a spatula to even out the batter and smooth the top.

Bake in a 350 degree oven until top and edges are just beginning to brown, about 30 – 40 minutes. You can probably cut the recipe in half and bake in an 8×8; cooking time would be similar.

For some reason, cutting bread like this into “bars” instead of squares makes it that much more appealing to my kids. They now request “lemon poppy bread” for breakfast all the time and have deemed it their “favorite bread ever” (except the older ones, who remember real pizza crust from the old days…).

Reduce, Reuse, Repair!

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I’m pretty sure it’s Earth Day today, but that and this post are a complete coincidence. I don’t spend much time on a Save The Earth soapbox, because you’d think it would be common sense to realize that it’s a good idea to take care of your home, the source of your food, and the air and water that you require to stay alive. Or maybe that’s just me; common sense doesn’t seem to be very popular lately.

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And we can’t blame it all on big business. We as the consumer feed the madness with the “upgrade” mentality, and the manufacturers are more than happy to oblige. They’ve been obliging us for so long, in fact, that they know it would be a waste of effort to make anything that can last more than a few years (and perhaps their gizmo life spans are getting shorter and shorter to *encourage* our rate of upgrading – the vicious cycle).

This is nothing new to you. We all know that a lot of money is flying around while a lot of junk is being bought and sold and retired to the landfills at record pace. And as much as I don’t like to throw things away, sometimes I feel like I don’t have a choice because we also live in a time when most of us know absolutely nothing about how our machines were made or how they work. So when the stick in the middle of my washing machine starts making squeaking/scratching noises and not spinning so much, leaving the clothes to languish in some soapy water instead of getting the dirt swished out, I can either call a repair man (which will likely cost more than the washer is worth), or push it down the stairs and start scouring sales and Craigslist for a replacement. But let me tell you, I helped wrestle that machine up the stairs when we moved in and I am in no way interested in seeing it from that angle again, let alone tossing some of our budget at a new or used washer.

But wait, there’s another option: I could fix it! Just maybe, I can fix it, and even if I can’t, it’s already broken so why not try?

My mom is the queen of this mentality, incidentally; she will attempt to fix anything, regardless of her level of knowledge of said thing at the start, and she very often succeeds (and even if she doesn’t, she most definitely learned something new). In her fix-it wisdom, she directed me to RepairClinic.

Armed with my washer’s model number, I quickly found that I needed to replace the cam because the dogs (short for directional cogs) had worn down and were no longer spinning the top half of the agitator (the stick that spins the clothes around). I ordered the part, got the correct one on the first try thanks to the search that limits the results to parts for my make/model, and with the help of the video on RepairClinic that even told me what size socket to grab from the tool box, my washer is running like new!

Now, as I said, I grew up in a house where my mom would fearlessly attempt to fix anything and my dad probably can fix anything, so I’m not a complete stranger to tools, but I have to admit that I don’t put them to good use very often (shhh – don’t tell my dad). And obviously, not everything can be fixed, and not everything that can be fixed, can be fixed by an amateur. But with the help of RepairClinic, only $26 and 15 minutes on a Saturday afternoon (with my 8-month-old “helping”) saved my washer from the dump.

I think that is an Earth Day success.

[Side Note: I have no affiliation with RepairClinic; I just used their site to help fix my washer and thought that was nifty.]

[Important Side Note: Please use common sense and do not, encouraged by this post, go electrocute yourself attempting to fix something.]

Let Us Begin

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Do you know what I find overwhelming sometimes? Everything. Some days, I think about everything, and everything is much too much for one day.

Keeping the house picked up (“dusted” doesn’t even enter into the equation), the laundry folded, the dishes clean, the bills paid, and food on the table… overwhelming.

Decisions about what to feed my kids, their medical care, their discipline, their education… overwhelming.

And that’s just inside my home. What about outside my walls,  the kids in our city, in every city around the world, who don’t have food to eat, or medical care, or discipline, or education (or even parents to worry about those things)? Every minute there are lives being lost to hunger, exposure, violence, even loneliness. Every minute there are lives being destroyed by wars, drugs, and human trafficking. Human trafficking?! Have we stopped teaching the Golden Rule in kindergarten?

There are people, children, all around us, who believe they are unloved.

This is the tragedy of our time, and just thinking about it enough to type that paragraph is overwhelming, because me sitting here thinking about it isn’t helping anyone, and yet the problems are so vast and the pain is so prevalent that I am paralyzed from action. What, truly, could I possibly do to make a difference?

This is a common mindset, and very often the reason, or perhaps the excuse, we have for doing nothing. Because what would it matter, the little we can do? It is but a drop in the ocean.

Mother Teresa had similar thoughts, but she found the solution:

“I never look at the masses as my responsibility; I look at the individual. I can only love one person at a time – just one, one, one. So you begin. I began – I picked up one person. Maybe if I didn’t pick up that one person, I wouldn’t have picked up forty-two thousand….The same thing goes for you, the same thing in your family, the same thing in your church, your community. Just begin – one, one, one.”

No, there is a very good chance that today, you will not be able to tell a desolate orphan child that you love her and hand her a piece of bread and a cup of water and secure for her a home and a future. But perhaps that is not the place that you and I are to begin. We begin by making sure that when our own children wake up, the first thing they hear is that we love them. So we’ve begun.

Often we are discouraged because we want to help but we simply don’t know what to do, and we don’t know what to do because we don’t know what the people near us need. So let’s begin by actually getting to know our families or our neighbors well enough to recognize their needs. We don’t have to travel the world to save it.

Most people in the modern world have heard of Mother Teresa, and if they know nothing else about her, they probably know that she helped a lot people. She is now famous for taking care of people, and she helped thousands upon thousands of people by not being overwhelmed by the masses, by not being paralyzed by the enormity of the job, but by seeing and helping one individual. She began with one.

LetUsBegin
You and I can each find one person to love and to help today. Maybe it is only a drop in the ocean, but it is enough that we begin.