15 Surprising Uses for Butter

Yep, we know, butter is fattening. It’s something that should be consumed sparingly. But, it’s such a staple in the pantry that it’s hard not to have around. So, instead of using it in food, how about using it around the house instead?! Check out some of the fantastic ways to use butter.

Household

Stop Doors From Squeaking Generously grease the hinges with butter and voila — squeak no more!

Cut Down on Snow Shoveling Ah, one of the least fun winter activities. Cut your shoveling time down by greasing the shovel with butter, it’ll help prevent snow from sticking.

Get Rid of Ink Stains on Plastic Rub butter on the stain and let it sit out in the sun. After a few days of soaking up the rays, wipe clean with soap and water.

Get Rid of Pesky Watermarks on Wood Have a family member who’s allergic to coasters? Rub butter into the affected area and let it sit overnight. Wipe it with a towel in the morning.

 

Cooking

Make Cheese Last Longer Coat the cut edge of a hard cheese with butter. It will prevent the molding process that comes all too quickly otherwise.

Make Onions Last Longer Only using half of an onion and don’t want to waste it? Nix the plastic baggy — spread some butter on it and wrap it in aluminum foil.

Stop Water From Boiling Over Drop a tablespoon of butter into a pot that’s boiling over.

Cut Sticky Foods Pies and brownies stick to the knife all too often. Remedy this by coating the knife in butter before you dish out dessert.

Health & Body

Swallow Pills Can’t handle the horse pills? Lightly coat the pill in butter and wash it down with a big gulp of water. It takes the edge off that terrible feeling of the pill going down your throat.

Get Sticky Stuff Off Your Skin Can’t stand the feeling of sap or glue on your hands? Rub butter on the sticky part before you wash your hands. Rub hands with a towel, and then use water.

Remove Gum From Hair Rub butter into the affected area and let it absorb. Gently wipe away with a cloth.

Prevent Bruising If you’ve ever thought, “that’s gonna leave a mark,” this one’s for you. The phosphates in butter help prevent bruising, much like a raw steak does.

Beauty & Fashion

Detangle Jewelry Lessen the frustration of detangling necklaces and bracelets by rubbing butter on the entwined areas. Use a small pointy object to detangle.

Strengthen Your Nails Do you have weak, brittle & dry nails? Before bedtime, Rub butter on the nail beds and put on some cotton gloves. In the morning, you should see improvements in your nail strength.

Get A Tight Ring Off No need to rush to the jeweler if your ring won’t budge — apply butter to the area and it’ll (hopefully) slip right off.

Soothe Dry Skin If you’re in a pinch, butter is a great substitute for creams and lotions. You can even use it as a shaving cream.

Read more: http://www.care2.com/greenliving/15-surprising-uses-for-butter.html#ixzz1szTCafM6

4 Natural Sweeteners to Try

Susan Melgren

Americans consume way too much sugar. Although the American Heart Association recommends no more than 3 tablespoons of sugar per day for children and no more than 5 to 8 tablespoons for teens and adults, most of us consume way more than that. In fact, the average American consumes about 130 pounds of sugar a year, which has led, in part, to health problems such as childhood obesity, type II diabetes, hypertension and heart disease.

Cutting sugar from your life isn’t as easy as it sounds. Although it’s easy to eliminate the obvious foods like desserts and sodas, many everyday foods are made with sugar—and sneakily labeled, too. If you’re trying to cut sugar from your life, you’ll have to look closely at the ingredients label on common foods before buying. Terms like barley malt, high fructose corn syrup, dextrose, fructose, sucrose, maltodextrin, and even fruit juice can signify sugar content in a product.

If you don’t want to give up sweets but want to cut refined sugar from your life, check out these natural sweeteners and alternatives to sugar.

Honey: Rich in antioxidants, this common sweetener contains essential minerals, amino acids and B vitamins. When substituting honey for sugar in recipes, use about half as much honey as you would sugar. (Not all honey is made equally though. Read about the health and safety issues concerning imported honey—and why you should buy local.)

Stevia: Unlike other natural sweeteners, zero-calorie stevia doesn’t affect blood sugar levels. Heat stable, stevia is an ideal sweetener for baking with. Because it’s overly sweet and concentrated, a little goes a long way. You can replace one cup of refined white sugar with just one teaspoon of stevia. (Learn how to grow your own stevia plants.)

Agave: This southwestern succulent produces a nectar that is sweet, low in calories and contains small amounts of calcium, potassium and magnesium. Because agave nectar has a high fructose-to-glucose ratio, it ranks low on the glycemic index, meaning consuming it won’t produce dramatic spikes in blood sugar like eating refined sugar does.

Maple syrup: Like agave and honey, pure, unrefined maple syrup is rich in vitamins, minerals, amino acids and antioxidants. And like other natural sweeteners, maple syrup is low in calories—one cup contains just 80 calories. Substitute one and a half cups of maple syrup for one cup of granulated sugar. (Learn more about the health benefits of maple syrup as a natural sweetener, as well as how to cook and bake with it.)

For more on baking with natural sweeteners—and for some scrumptious recipes—check out the article “Smarter Sweets” from Natural Home & Garden magazine. For more on cutting sugar from your life, check out the post “4 Ways to Reduce Sugar Consumption.”

Image: dusk / Fotolia

Read more: Desserts, Diabetes, Food, General Health, Health, agave nectar, honey, maple syrup, natural sweeteners, stevia

Read more: http://www.care2.com/greenliving/cut-the-sugar-try-natural-sweeteners.html#ixzz1rIPRihtP

Dye Easter Eggs Naturally

Jessica Kellner

It’s almost Easter weekend, which means it’s time for Easter egg hunting! One of my favorite Easter activities as a child and as an adult is dyeing Easter eggs, a fun holiday craft project the whole family can easily do together. But rather than buying those store-bought kits with chemical dyes and packaging to dispose of, consider dyeing your eggs with herbs and foods this year. It’s surprisingly easy, fun and interesting, will help connect kids with the wonders of nature, and doesn’t rely on chemicals. Read more about naturally dyeing eggs.

Here are the best foods to use for dyeing various colors. Please share other foods and herbs you’ve tried with success!

Gold: Handful of yellow onion skins
Yellow: 2 tablespoons turmeric or a handful of carrot tops
Green: Handful of coltsfoot
Blue: 2 cups chopped red cabbage (for best results, add cabbage to water while hard-boiling eggs)
Pink: 2 cups chopped beets
Purple: 1 cup frozen blueberries
Brown: 2 tablespoons coffee grounds or 4 black tea bags

Here are instructions for dyeing the eggs:
1. Hard-boil eggs. My favorite method: Place eggs in enough cold water to cover them and place over high heat. As soon as water comes to a boil, cover pot and turn off heat. Allow to cook for about 15 minutes, then remove from heat and soak in ice water to stop cooking.

2. Bring each dye ingredient to a boil with 2 cups of water; strain the dyes into cups and allow to cool. If you’re using cabbage to dye eggs blue, hard-boil those eggs separately and place cabbage in water before boiling.

3. Add 2 tablespoons of vinegar to each cup of dye.

4. Dip eggs into cups of dye, submerging completely and leaving until they reach the desired color.
Read one blogger’s personal experiences dyeing eggs.

Note: Don’t waste your dyed eggs! Make sure to eat up those hard-boiled eggs sliced in salad, converted into deviled eggs (here’s a great recipe) or egg salad (here’s a great recipe), or plain with salt and pepper. To that end, I highly recommend choosing locally raised farm eggs. They deliver much better flavor and nutrition than their factory-farmed counterparts. To find locally raised eggs in your area, visit Local Harvest. Buying in the store? Learn about egg carton labeling.

Happy dyeing!

Read more: http://www.care2.com/greenliving/dye-easter-eggs-naturally.html#ixzz1r5staoJJ

Your Heart is a Key to a Better Night’s Sleep – 3 Tip

http://www.care2.com/greenliving/your-heart-is-a-key-to-a-better-nights-sleep-3-tips.html

Using Color to Empower your Life

http://www.care2.com/greenliving/using-color-to-empower-your-life.html

9-essential-oils-with-huge-health-benefits

http://www.care2.com/greenliving/9-essential-oils-with-huge-health-benefits.html

7 Ways to Make Your Living Space Smell Nice

By Yumi Sakugawa, Intent.com

Rather than spraying chemical-laden air fresheners, choose one of these seven natural ways to make your living space smell a little nicer.

1. Invest in houseplants. Have your favorite plants and herbs growing in your kitchen, living room and bathroom in small pots. The presence of green plants will help reduce indoor air pollution and keep clean air circulating in your space.

2. Save your citrus fruit skins. Save the peels of oranges, lemons, limes and other citrus- fruits. You can place them in boiling water to have a fresh scent in the kitchen, or run them in your garbage disposal with boiling water. Lastly, put some citrus skins in your vacuum bag the next time you vacuum your carpet.

3. Dilute essential oil with water in a spray bottle. You can spray your furniture and carpet to make the whole room smell a specific scent. To diversify, you can have different scents for different areas of your home. For example: lavender for the living room, sandalwood for your bedroom and peppermint for the bathroom.

4. Place bowls of white vinegar in corners of the room. The vinegar will neutralize and absorb any offending odors.

5. Place fabric softener in your shoes and closet. It will take away any stale clothing smells. For another closet air freshener, place a cedar block at the bottom of your closet. Use sandpaper for a new layer once a year.

6. Light soy candles instead of regular candles. Soy candles are longer-lasting, better for the environment and have a more robust smell. (They are also safer than carcinogen-emitting candles.)

7. Bake bread or cook your own meals. Few things are as welcoming as the smell of freshly baked bread or the herbs of a home-cooked dinner.

Eastern is around the corner, how about homemade Easter Egg Dyes

Homemade Easter Egg Dyes
posted by Melissa Breyer Apr 19, 2011 5:01 pm
filed under: crafts & hobbies, diet & nutrition, easter, green kitchen tips, holidays
By Melissa Breyer, Senior Producer, Care2 Green Living

The year the Easter Bunny brought my kids organic, all-natural, yogurt-covered raisins didn’t go over very well–but at least my daughters are gung-ho for dying Easter eggs with homemade, plant-based dyes. We rummage and smoosh and boil, and they are amazed and delighted by the colors we create with a bunch of oddball ingredients from the kitchen. They love the messy magic, and my simmering neurosis about synthetic food dyes is quelled.

Certified food dyes approved by the FDA include colors synthesized from petroleum derivatives and even coal tar. While some food dyes based on natural ingredients come from things that, although natural, you still may not care to ingest: Have you heard about carminic acid? It is a commonly used red food coloring which comes from the dried, crushed bodies of pregnant female scale insects called cochineal. I have an adventurous palate, but that’s just not for me.

By using plant-based dyes for coloring Easter eggs, not only do you know exactly what you’re getting (no bugs, thanks) but the colors are far lovelier than their synthetic counterparts. They are muted yet vibrant, and knowing their source is gratifying on a deeper aesthetic level. Children seem to find that mashing food is also much more fun that simply dropping a tablet in a cup. As well, it is a great lesson in exploration—kids get to experiment with which plant materials work in which way, and can get creative with items in the refrigerator or pantry.

Some of these materials work best when they are boiled with the eggs (they will be noted below), and some work well made ahead and used by dipping or soaking the eggs. If you are using juice, just use it straight. Bulky materials will be boiled with the eggs or boiled and allowed to cool for dipping. The longer you let the eggs soak, the more intense the color will be (for the boiled versions, you can remove them from the heat and allow to cool in the dye bath).

You can use your favorite egg-dying tricks here as well: Like crayons for a batik effect or rubber bands for a tie-dye effect. If you like a glossy egg, you can rub the dyed eggs with vegetable oil when they are dry.

Red
Red onion skins, use a lot (boil with eggs)
Pomegranate juice

Orange
Yellow onion skins (boil with eggs)

Yellow
Lemon or orange peel (boil with eggs)
Carrot tops (boil with eggs)
Celery seed (boil with eggs)
Ground cumin (boil with eggs)
Ground turmeric (boil with eggs)

Yellow Brown
Dill seeds (boil with eggs)

Brown
Strong coffee
Instant coffee
Black walnut shells (boil with eggs)

Yellow Green
Bright green apple peels (boil with eggs)

Green
Spinach leaves (boil with eggs)

Blue
Canned blueberries and their juice
Red cabbage leaves (boil with eggs)
Purple grape juice

Violet Blue
Violet blossoms
Red onion skins, less amount than you need to make red (boil with eggs)

Lavender
Diluted purple grape juice
Violet blossoms plus squeeze of lemon (boil with eggs)

Pink
Beets, fresh or canned
Cranberries or cranberry juice
Raspberries
Red grape juice

Can Houseplants Make You Smarter?

By Colleen Vanderlinden, Planet Green

Houseplants clean the air and brighten a room. Occasionally, they drive us mad as we wonder how exactly we managed to kill yet another “unkillable” houseplant. (In that way, they provide great lessons in perseverance as well!) But it looks like there’s one more great reason to grow houseplants: their presence in your workspace might actually make you smarter.

According to a recent study published in The Journal of Environmental Psychology, just having plants in your work space is enough to increase your attention span. An increase in attention span means that we’re able to remember more of what we read. To test the hypotheses, the study’s authors gave subjects a Reading Span Task, which requires reading sentences aloud, then remembering the last word in each sentence. This requires reading, memorization, and recall abilities, and switching between the three.

The researchers had their entire test pool complete Reading Span Tasks to get a baseline reading. Then they moved some of the people to a room with no plants, and others to a room that had four plants around the desk. They were all asked to repeat the Reading Span Tasks, and the people who worked near a plant improved overall, while those without plants stayed roughly the same.

Beauty, fresh air, the joy of caring for another living thing — all great reasons to have a few houseplants around. If they help increase attention spans, all the better!

Read more: http://www.care2.com/greenliving/can-houseplants-make-you-smarter.html#ixzz1IZtyxaGC

We do love flowers but can we keep them alive as they keep us alive

We use toiletries based on natural organic ingredients

Scary Beauty Product Ingredients – Book Giveaway!
posted by Healthy & Green Living Editors Mar 19, 2011 5:08 am
filed under: Contests & Giveaways, Health & Wellness, Healthy Beauty Basics, Skin Care, True Beauty, Women’s Health, beauty ingredients, beauty products, book giveaway, hair dye, sunscreen, talcum powder

Add to FavoritesTell a FriendSharePrint
DiggRedditCare2StumbleUponmore
94 comments
Trying to decipher an ingredients list or figure out which personal care products are safe can be overwhelming. But as the author of Healthy Beauty points out, “conventional cosmetics and personal-care products contain many frank and hidden carcinogens, making them the most important and still unrecognized class of avoidable carcinogen exposure for the overwhelming majority of consumers in major industrialized nations.” In his book, Samuel Epstein arms you with the knowledge to avoid those toxic ingredients and find safer products, including everything from toothpaste and deodorant to nail polish and anti-aging cream.

We are giving away a copy of Healthy Beauty: Your Guide to Ingredients to Avoid and Products You Can Trust by Samuel S. Epstein, MD with Randall Fitzgerald. Check out this excerpt and don’t forget to leave a comment for your chance to win the book!

Four Deadly but Avoidable Killers

The details in this book are a lot to remember, especially when they involve so many long, unfamiliar chemical names. But if you only avoid four ingredients or categories of ingredients described in this book, make it these four: talc, powdered titanium dioxide, sunscreens, and certain dark hair dyes.

Talc, or talcum powder, has been strongly linked to ovarian cancer, which has become the fourth most common fatal cancer in women (after breast, colon, and lung). Yet one out of five premenopausal women continues to use it as a dusting powder or on tampons.

Titanium dioxide powder, which often appears as a whitening agent in women’s cosmetics powders, has been shown in rodent testing to be a source of respiratory tract cancer if inhaled. Numerous studies have demonstrated this effect, yet its use remains widespread, even in products otherwise billing themselves as safe and natural.

Sunscreens, either alone or used in cosmetics or lotions, give users an illusion of safety that encourages them to stay out in the sun longer, exposing them to greater amounts of dangerous long-wave ultraviolet radiation. Sunscreens also contain chemicals linked in laboratory experiments to hormone disruption.

Hair dyes, specifically black and dark brown permanent and semi-permanent dyes, contain many frank and hidden carcinogens. Frequent and prolonged use of these dyes has been linked to leukemia, multiple myeloma, Hodgkin’s lymphoma, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and bladder and breast cancers. While the European Union has banned many hair dye ingredients, United States manufacturers and regulatory agencies remain stubbornly blind to the dangers.

Excerpted from Healthy Beauty: Your Guide to Ingredients to Avoid and Products You Can Trust by Samuel S. Epstein, MD with Randall Fitzgerald. Published by BenBella Books, Inc.

WIN THE BOOK! Leave a comment below for your chance to win a copy of Healthy Beauty. Winner will be announced April 5. Good luck!

Related:
15 Toxic Ingredients in Personal Care Products
Hair Do or Dye: Toxic Hair Color
Risks of Sunscreen

More on Contests & Giveaways (62 articles available)
More from Healthy & Green Living Editors (319 articles available)

Read more: http://www.care2.com/greenliving/scary-beauty-products-book-giveaway.html#ixzz1HAMYXq8y