Lavender Water: A How To Guide

I was lucky enough to head to Hillside Farmacy with my friend Christine and as we were noshing on lavender French macaroons (my macaroon mission will be posted in a different post completely, this is still a work in progress) she was saying how into lavender she said this summer.  Which reminded me of my attempt to make Honey Lavender Ice Cream last summer.  It turned out quite lovely, but my husband, not being partial to the taste of lavender in his food and my body not really being so good with the processing of glucose as of late, made making that ice cream a bit of a waste of time as far as future batches were concerned.  

My mom got me a thing of lavender hand wash for my kitchen sink and I do like to smell my hands after washing them.  Christine was saying she's been using a lavender spray this summer as a light fragrance.  Our common enjoyment of lavender first caused me to try and pawn off some of the giant bag of culinary lavender I bought on Amazon (see below) to make that ice cream which I will now never use, on her.  My next thought was, other than the obvious (sachets) how can I use it around the house?  

Another gift I got from my mom is lavender linen spray from Crabtree and Evelyn.  I will admit to spritzing our sheets with this stuff rather than changing the sheets once a week to buy us a few more nights until I get around to changing them (or as a stalling tactic until the maid comes and does it for me).  You can also use it in your laundry steamer or to spritz your clothes as you iron them.  But this stuff isn't cheap.  It lasts me a very long time, but it's still around $18 and doesn't solve my lavender surplus issue and it's not really intended to spray on your skin.  

So while I was shopping at Hobby Lobby for another project (painting a rug, whole other blog post) I picked up a spray bottle in the paint supply section for $1.50.  I perused some YouTube videos, I saw some talk about using distilled water or vodka and steeping the lavender in it and it seemed like a waste of vodka/that I would end up smelling like a drunken hobo if I used those approaches.  So with nothing to lose, I threw a handful of the dried lavender into a pint glass, filled it with water, and forgot about it for 2 hours.  

Later that night I came into the kitchen to get a beer and remembered my little experiment.  I strained the lavender out with a strainer and then ran it through a dish cloth to get out any fine particles.  I filled my little bottle using a funnel I keep for cooking purposes.  I think getting the organic matter out of the water is pretty important, otherwise I think it would start to smell rotten.  

So there you have it, my bottle of homemade lavender water.  My only complaint is that it's brown and I'm worried about it staining things, like say, a white blouse.  But I'd use it on my brown sheets or dark colored clothing and came back from yoga this morning and spritzed myself in the sweaty face with it and it was rather refreshing.  I think it would be nice to make up a few of these and put a fancy label on them and give them as hostess gifts, but I'm worried the brown color makes this a fairly undesirable gift.  What do you think?

Other uses for culinary lavender include mixing some with your tea leaves.  In 2007 I was in Sydney, Australia and sat down to tea at a delightful tea room and was served a mix of black tea and lavender.  I've been searching all over for it since and the closest I've come is a blend of Earl Grey and lavender.  I'm not a fan of Earl Grey, so I've been mixing some of the dried lavender in with my loose leaf English Breakfast and achieved a much more favorable result.  

Harper's Birth Announcement

Here is Miss H's birth announcement!  Had so much fun putting this together for our sweet little peanut!

Hostess/Thank You Gifts

To thank many of the friends who did so much for us while we were recovering from H's birth, I made these Cowgirl Cookies in a jar, as featured on Bakerella's blog.

I made them the weekend before I was induced, basically it's a yummy oatmeal, chocolate chip, M&M cookie with the mix all in the jar.  All you add is vanilla, butter, and an egg.  This year I've been really big on hostess and/or thank you gifts because I think it's important to show gratitude to those who have gone out of the way for you. I think it's really classy to share a little something with someone who has taken the time to do you a kindness, so I've started to stock up my house with all sorts of little homemade or relatively inexpensive gifts to have on hand in a pinch, if I've been invited to someone's home for dinner or if someone's agreed to babysit the munchkin for us while we go live it up.

For this recipe, I took advantage of the pastel M&Ms that were on the shelves for Easter.  I even found white chocolate M&Ms for some of the jars, which were AMAZING and paired with the chocolate chips, having two types of chocolate in the cookies really kicked them up a notch.  D has already deemed them the best cookies I've ever made. 

When I made them, I couldn't fit the nuts in most of the jars, I guess I didn't pack them down enough, but I figured better to give them without the nuts in case people have allergies.  I made these as I mentioned, before I gave birth, so I was diabetic and couldn't even taste them.  They make two dozen and since I couldn't have sweets, I formed all the cookies into balls and froze the dough so I could pull a couple cookies out of the freezer and let the dough balls defrost on the counter while I cooked dinner.  Then after dinner I baked them in the toaster oven and served them to D with a glass of milk for dessert.  I did notice (and my mom had the same problem with this recipe) that the balls didn't really spread properly in the oven, so I made sure to squish the cookies down a bit with the back of a wooden spoon before I put them in the oven.

And I calculated that each of these cookies comes out to 4 WW points.  Totally worth it when I have extra points lying around!

My Current Faves

Hey look, a post not about babies or pregnancy or diabetes!  For my birthday D gave me a gift card to Sephora and I finally got around to cashing it in.  Actually, I had to obsess and pour over all the goodies on the website before I finally came to a decision.  The first item is the Naked 2 Palette from Urban Decay.  I actually considered buying this as a hostess gift for my baby shower hostesses, I think it's so great, but I think makeup is such a personal item, I thought that might be a little weird.

So you get all these great neutrals, a double ended brush for shadow and your crease plus a travel size Lip Junkie in Naked.  Using the palette to do my eye makeup is pretty much the highlight of my morning routine, it's so much fun to experiment with the different color combinations, using them as shadows, crease colors, brow bone highlighters, and eye liners.  Playing with makeup should be fun and this is definitely fun coming up with some conservative combinations for work and some bolder combos at night.  The lip gloss looked really dark but it actually is very flattering on.

My other favorite is the Laura Mercier foundation primer in radiance.  I'm not the type of girl that typically wears foundation primer on a daily basis, it just makes my face feel too heavy, but I love this stuff.  I was skeptical about this product.  I mean, radiance?  Really?  But Sephora has a good return policy so I saved the box.  And what do you know, people keep telling me, literally, how radiant I look.  It's happened twice now actually.  They chalk it up to pregnancy.  I disagree, I think pregnancy makes me look like I've been beaten by an ugly stick and left for dead with dark circles under my eyes and crazy lady hair and weird dark spots on my face.  I feel lucky most mornings if I can get enough makeup on my face and my hair done enough to be presentable for work.  But then again 30 consecutive weeks of morning sickness will do that to you, so you know, you do what you can and having makeup toys you're super excited to use helps!

So there you go, if you're looking for some new makeup splurges, check these out!

Diabetus

Am I the only one who remembers Wilford Brimley's diabetes commercials?  It's pretty much the only humor I'm finding in my current predicament.  So we've had some trouble getting my gestational diabetes under control so this week I got to take an an entire afternoon off from work and spend it bouncing between the endocrinologist to the dietitian to the pharmacy. 

As a result:

• I now check my blood sugar 4x a day.  This is actually kind of interesting, learning what I ingest and how it affects my BS levels.  All that finger pricking isn't that bad either, I'm okay with blood.
• I am now on a special diet of low carbs (I mean reallllly low) and high protein (realllly high, I like meat and stuff but DAMN).  It's actually stricter than most regular diabetics adhere to, but then again, I AM answering for another person's blood sugar, so it makes sense.
• I now give myself insulin shots every night.  I thought giving myself a daily injection would be the end of the world, but it's not bad at all.  I did not freak out at all the first time I had to stab myself in the stomach in front of the nurse to prove that I in fact could handle it and not freak out.
• And I pee on a stick every morning to check for ketones.  Which is no small feat considering I can't see ANYTHING under my giant belly. 
• I also learned that I really can't just have 3 bites of a sweet treat and it be okay.  I had literally 3 bites of the brownie D and I made at our cooking class this weekend and my blood sugar was totally out of whack the rest of the day.  Meaning baby girl's blood sugar was too.  Lesson learned.

I'm not excited at all about the diet, I think that's the worst part.  It was okay for the first few days or so, but I'm really getting sick of all that protein.  Pretty much every time I put food in my mouth it has to be accompanied with a serving of protein.  Thank goodness I adore cheese so much, otherwise I'd be miserable. 

Most of all, I'm trying to keep the end in mind, our beautiful baby girl and appreciate all the people who fight this disease every day, who don't have a light at the tunnel 4 weeks away where they know they can devour cupcakes again.  Diabetes is no joke and it's something I totally took for granted until now.  This week I'm looking forward to:

• Interviewing pediatricians
• Infant CPR
• Breastfeeding class
• My first cervical exam, finally time to start the weekly exams!
• A lunch with all the ladies of the office before I potentially go into labor
• Our baby shower!  I have a new dress and an appointment to get my hair did just for the occasion!

Today I Am Grateful For.....

Seems like a lot of people around me have a bit of a bug up their butts lately.  Maybe it's the phase of the moon or the fact that I came back to work after a lovely little weekend (to be recapped later) but since I am uncharacteristically Zen as of late, here's a list of things that I am thankful for:

Pretty light weight cotton dresses and sandals to wear to work in triple digit heat.

A fresh cherry colored pedicure

Snaking on fresh salsa made with tomatoes from our garden.

Fresh watermelon.

A bouquet of peonies sitting on our kitchen table.

What are you grateful for?