Wild Adventures Part 4: Ingredients and Preparation!

Going wild takes preparation.  Ingredients necessary to make various things you’d normally buy at the store must first be prepared before the item can be created.  In the last post, I shared a picture of drying greens, another of an oil infusion simmering away on the stove, etc.  Yesterday, those steps continued.

Backing up to the previous night, I took a jar of old glycerin soaps my kids had made at camp as kids, chopped them up, and made liquid hand soap out of them.  The recipe called for 6 cups of water to every half cup of chopped soap.  I ended up with a full cup, resulting in 12 cups of water in a soup pot.  The soaps had been coloured various shades of blue, green, yellow, clear, red, etc, so as they melted, the water began to take on an aqua-marine colour.  Once everything had melted and the pot had come to a simmering boil, I was to remove the pot from the heat and allow it to sit for up to twelve hours, 24 if necessary, or longer if the soap needed more time to set.

Hardly four hours later, the hand soap had thickened up considerably, gone from translucent to opaque, and taken on a very light aqua-marine colouring.  Yesterday morning I decided to pour it into a container as it was doing just fine.  This step was necessary for various skincare recipes calling for a liquid glycerin or castille soap.  Many such recipes call for the Castile, then also call for the glycerin, so I figure, just replace the castille with the liquid glycerin soap and be done with it.  Whenever this almost 3 litres of liquid soap finally runs out, we’ll have to find more, but for now, this works great!

The shampoo and conditioner recipes call for water.  One of them instructs you to add herbs to boiling water and let steep for over 4 hours.  When I saw that the second recipe didn’t call for this step but still called for water, I went to a list of herbs that help hair in either shampoo or conditioner or both, and decided to make a water infusion for it as well.  I now have two containers sitting on the counter, labelled for which recipe they’ll be going in once the first family member runs out of that item in the shower.  I also have a vinegar infusion prepared that will take up to 6 weeks before it can be used in the shower as a hair rinse.

These infusions required dried, crushed herbs.  The day’s temperatures here in the Okanagan were up in the high 20’s.  Two dandelion plants that we dug up in the morning were thankfully fully dried by late afternoon, allowing me to crush what was needed for the above recipes.

The saddlebags my daughter was working on were fitted to her horse yesterday as well, and they do indeed fit.  The mare also didn’t seem phased whenever Ashley demonstrated going into the bags to fetch or return full water bottles.  This means that the two can now go trail riding and bring home food when they’re done.

The one product I did get made yesterday used some of the oil infusion from the night before to make a facial cleanser/scrub.  It’s been put into a squeeze bottle, but it separates, so it will either need stirring with a tool to reach to the bottom, or flipping on it’s head every now and then to keep the oil filtering through the baking soda.  We’ll see how it goes.  But it was the first complete product to make using one of the prepared ingredients.

EDIT:  The above had to receive minor editing because it is being posted a day AFTER it was written!  As well, more math has been done, and a sheet in my wild greens comparison spreadsheet is now created to track expenses and recouped costs.  So far, expenses involved in this little endeavor have totaled almost $94.  The facial cleanser, wild salad greens, chokecherry salad dressing, and shortly the shampoo and conditioner will have totaled almost $26 in recouped costs so far.  All expenses and recouped costs so far have been for the month of August.  This means I should be paying my VISA that $26 as soon as I am able.  Good to see these numbers so soon!

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