Mayo-free Tuna Salad (with avocado)

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Everyone in my house loves tuna. Tuna is cheap and easy. But, mayo is gross. Actually, I love the taste of "real" mayonnaise, but there is nothing real about the (yummy) gloopy white stuff that comes in the convenient little jars at the grocery store. I think doing away with store-bought mayo may have been one of the hardest real food conversions for me. Homemade mayo is delicious, but the eggs make me worry about sending it in Little Bear's lunch. My solution has been to make tuna salad with olive oil and a bit of vinegar (plus the typical tuna salad accoutrements). It's ok. But, not great. 

How to make it great... Let's try avocado! {spoiler alert, it was amazing!}

Scoop one avocado into a bowl.

Add a few tablespoons of unrefined olive oil, a good squeeze of lemon or lime, and whatever spices and mix-ins you like in your tuna (today I just did salt, pepper, garlic powder and dill).

Smoosh it all together, making the mixture as smooth as possible.

Add tuna and mix with the avocado mixture while flaking the tuna.

Eat.

Yum!

I measured, but tuna is so dependent on the brand, draining, and type that you'll probably have to play with the proportions to make it just perfect. As a starting point, 1 avocado + 2 tablespoons oil should be good for 2-ish cans of tuna or 4 of the single-serve packets.

Homemade Beeswax Balm {multipurpose}

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I was at a fancy spa last week and fell in love with a line of natural smelly-good body products that they carried: Zents. The smells were fantastic, and their balm, Concreta, was fantastically formulated. Then I flipped the cute little sample boxes over. Holy Cow! $34 for 1.25 ounces of balm! I'm pretty sure I audibly gasped...

Then I read the ingredients: beeswax, shea butter, coconut oil, scented oils. Seriously. That was it.

And, just like that, a new DIY project was born.

I added cypress essential oil for its muscle relaxation properties, rose hip seed oil for its skin regeneration properties, carrot seed oil for its anti-aging and detox properties, and orange oil for an energizing scent. You really can go wild, though, and add in any essential oils for their medicinal properties or their scents!

I think I'll be making another batch with calendula oil, peppermint oil, lavender oil, and tea tree oil and use it as a healing balm (just like All Good Goop!).

Ingredients

• 3 ounces unrefined beeswax (3/4 cup if you get the same size product as me)

Unrefined beeswax is yellow, so your balm will be
yellow. The Zents balm must have used refined
beeswax, since their product is so white.

• 3 1/2 ounces unrefined shea butter (1/2 cup)

• 5 ounces unrefined coconut oil (3/4 cup)

• 1/8 cup olive oil
• 1 teaspoon cypress essential oil
• 2 teaspoons rose hip seed oil
• 1/2 teaspoon carrot seed oil 
• 1 tablespoon orange oil

Directions

1.  Combine the wax, shea, coconut, and olive oil in a small saucepan over medium-low heat. The texture will be weird and soupy, since the coconut oil melts at 76 degrees and the beeswax doesn't melt until 140 degrees.

2.  Stir the mixture until the beeswax starts to break apart. This may take a little white, because you are waiting for the mixture to come up to 140-ish. {Note: do not stick your candy thermometer in the mix, because you will NEVER be able to wash the waxy balm off of it... Still trying...}

3.  When the wax starts to melt, whisk until it all makes one happy pool of clear, yellow liquid. Remove from heat. Dip a spoon into the liquid and then let it cool. Check the texture. If you want it more solid, add more beeswax and put it back on the heat until it melts. If you want it more creamy, add more coconut oil or olive oil.

4.  Add it your essential oils and stir well. If the oils make the mixture re-solidify, just put it back on the heat until its all melted again.

5.  Spoon or pour into jars. I found these adorable 4-ounce jars at Hobby Lobby to use as gifts {teacher appreciation week and Mother's Day!} I filled 6, so you should get about 24 ounces out of this recipe. If you need less, you can half the recipe. 

I ended up spending about what I would have spent on 1.25 ounces of the fancy Zents Concretas on what will make about a lifetime supply of the exact same recipe!

A few hints to make your process a little smoother than my first go at it was:

• Don't use anything that can't go in the dishwasher.
• Be careful not to get the ingredients or the final product on your countertops - they are really hard to get completely cleaned off.
• When you're done, stick the pan and utensils in the dishwasher and wash on hot with vinegar. Then, run it again with dishwasher soap.

Save the Stems & Make Broccoli Slaw!

It's no secret that organic foods are more expensive than their conventional counterparts. I'm usually incredibly frugal and am certainly not easily convinced to spend more money when there are cheaper options. My food and my beauty products are two major exceptions. I invest in my health and the health of my family, even if it means spending more on groceries and body products. In the spirit of frugality, however, I am always looking for ways to stretch my dollar without compromising.

As a great way to get more use out of fresh broccoli (throwing away the stems disposes of over half of what you've paid for!) and to sneak extra veggies into unassuming dishes, I've started grating the stems and stirring them into various meals.

Broccoli stems actually have a killer nutritional profile (check out the full nutrition facts here). They are packed with vitamin C, calcium, protein, folate (important during pregnancy), iron, and tons of other vitamins and minerals. YUM!

Here we go...

Start with fresh broccoli (I realize that these pictures are overkill for such a simple how-to, but I've been working on weaning myself from the automatic settings on my SLR, and broccoli was my food model this week).

Chop off the florets (this is the part we actually like eating).

What was left after the great broccoli massacre of 2013.

Wash the florets and set aside for whatever recipe you're using them in.

Wash the stems. If you will be having broccoli again in the next week or so, you should be able to save these in an air-tight container in the fridge and combine the stems from multiple days to conserve even more time.

Use a cheese grater or a food processor with a grater attachment to grate the stems (the food processor is way faster and easier than the hand grater). I read today that you should peel broccoli stems before using them, but I had no trouble grating them with the stems intact, and I have no desire to add extra, unnecessary steps...

The grated stems can be mixed into almost anything! This time I used them raw in a cold broccoli salad, but I've also stirred them into pasta sauce, stir-fries, garden salads, etc.

Carrot Cake Two Ways

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Back in my baking days (I owned a baking business through law school), I made this carrot cake for a fancypants Dallas steakhouse at least weekly. It wasn't a recipe that I had in my repertoire when the restaurant asked for it, so I started with something that I found online (sorry, it's been so long I'm not sure who to credit for this) and played around with it until it was P-E-R-F-E-C-T!

I was making this cake as payment for my office paint job (wedding singer style!), but I wanted to be able to share it with Little Bear. I know the sugar still isn't ideal, but I made some changes to health it up as much as cake can be healthed. Honestly, if you didn't know that it had been healthified, you probably couldn't even tell that it is entirely unrefined!

I'll go ahead and share the healthy and the original version here, since cake is cake and maybe just shouldn't be healthy sometimes...

Unrefined Carrot Cake (whole wheat, coconut oil, turbinado sugar)

Ingredients

• 2 cups whole wheat pastry flour
• 2 tablespoons vital wheat gluten
• 1 1/1 tablespoons ground cinnamon
• 1 1/2 teaspoons ground allspice
• 1 teaspoon ground nutmeg
• 2 teaspoons ground ginger
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 2 teaspoons baking soda
• 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
• 4 eggs
• 3/4 cup buttermilk (or 3/4 cup whole milk mixed with 1 tablespoon vinegar)
• 1 cup coconut oil, melted
• 1 1/2 cups turbinado sugar
• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
• 3 cups grated carrots (300 grams by weight)
• 2/3 cup chopped pecans
• 1 1/3 cup crushed pineapple

Directions

Do your prep work:  grate the carrots and chop the nuts.

In a large bowl, whisk the dry ingredients together until well combined.

In a medium bowl, whisk the eggs, milk, sugar, and vanilla together until well combined.  If you keep stirring, it will eventually all come together (the eggs act as a great little emulsifier).

Add the dry ingredients to the egg mixture and stir until just combined.

In the large bowl, combine the carrots, pecans, and pineapple.  Mix well.

Add the batter to the carrot mixture and mix until the batter is homogeneous throughout.

Grease two round 8" pans.  Divide batter evenly between the pans.

Bake at 350 for 45 minutes.

Alternatively, bake cupcakes for 30 minutes.  Makes 2 dozen cupcakes.

Frost with cream cheese frosting (sorry, but there is just no way to make cream cheese frosting healthy!).  I make mine with one 8 ounce block of cream cheese, one 4 ounce stick of butter, one bag of powdered sugar, and one tablespoon of vanilla extract.  Let the cream cheese and butter come to just below room temperature.  Beat cream cheese and butter for several minutes, pushing the sides down as needed.  SLOWLY add the powdered sugar, beating well between additions.

Traditional Carrot Cake

Ingredients

• 2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
• 1 1/1 tablespoons ground cinnamon
• 1 1/2 teaspoons ground allspice
• 1 teaspoon ground nutmeg
• 2 teaspoons ground ginger
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 2 teaspoons baking soda
• 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
• 3 eggs
• 3/4 cup buttermilk (or 3/4 cup whole milk mixed with 1 tablespoon vinegar)
• 1 cup vegetable oil
• 1 1/2 cups brown sugar
• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
• 3 cups grated carrots (300 grams by weight)
• 2/3 cup chopped pecans
• 1 cup crushed pineapple

Follow the same directions from above.