Inside Projects

The end of the semester brought snow our way, nearly six inches. The boys were unhappy the snow began falling Friday evening and continued overnight, into Saturday. They'd like to see a snow day happen soon. I'm happy to see it. Puts me in the holiday spirit and gives me an excuse to stay inside to work on projects for the house. Like infused salts. And a sugar scrub.

Sugar scrub, dried thyme, infused salts
I have lots of herbs from my garden, so I did some research and found making infused salts is actually quite easy. Why go buy a jar when I can do it myself? I went the route of citrus infused salt and rosemary infused salt. My plan is to combine some rosemary and thyme for another batch sometime this week. I'm out of the little jars with cork stoppers, so I'll have to get a few more of those, maybe see if the thrift store has any on its shelves.

The jelly jar is my sugar scrub. I'm looking forward to using it in the shower today. I read lots of articles about making sugar scrubs and how they make the skin feel really soft. With our dry air right now, my skin is begging for some moisture. I used olive oil for this scrub, hoping the oil will be just the moisture I need. I'm thinking I might try other oils to see how they work, just for giggles.

The only dilemma I ran into while making the salts was how to get the citrus zest in smaller pieces and how to grind the rosemary. I tried the food processor. Epic fail. I tried the blender. Fail. Then it occurred to me that I still had the coffee grinder in the garage. Since I no longer drink coffee, I had set it out there for our garage sale we had in August. While I was sitting at said garage sale, I was reading an article online about using a coffee grinder to blend together herbs. I quickly grabbed the coffee grinder and set it aside, thinking I would be able to use it for other things besides grinding coffee beans. Turns out, it works great for herbs. Problem solved.

Now I'm trying to find a recipe for dinner tonight, one that I can use one of my infused salts in. I'm definitely going to do mashed cauliflower. I'm thinking the rosemary infused salt will work great with the mashed cauliflower.

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