Be sure and read the recipe first, or the following won’t make much sense to you.

The one step that takes the longest is getting your Fels Naphta bar melted.  The recipe I came up with utilizes a crock pot, which is much easier than using your stove top.  Remembering that you should never bring the soap to a boil, it generally takes 6-8 hours in a crock pot to fully melt the soap.

So here’s sort of a “preemptive strike” type of solution to make it easier.  After you have your first batch of soap done and are using it, let’s go ahead and get our fels naphta bar ready for the next batch.

What you need:

• Crock pot
• metal mixing bowl that fits in the crock (optional)
• fels naphta bar
• 1.5 quarts of water

I use a metal mixing bowl that fits into my crock pot.  I find it easier to manipulate the soap, but this is optional.

First pour 1.5 quarts of water into your crock pot and set the bar of fels naphta into it.

If your crock pot has a “keep warm” setting, use this setting.  Let it sit overnight.  NEVER use the high setting or allow the mixture to boil.  You’ll have a nice yellow, bubbly mess if you do!

After the bar is completely melted, stir the mixture up really well.

Allow to cool completely, preferrably overnight.

The mixture will gel just like jello only a little thicker (see the spoon sticking up by itself?)

Now take a butter knife and slice the gelled up soap into even slices or squares or circles, however you feel at the moment.  Place them into a gallon-sized plastic storage bag:

Store in a cool, dry place.  The next time you are ready to make more laundry soap, it will only take you about five minutes to melt your fels naphta bar instead of 6 hours!

Ta da….

One of my coworkers and I have discussed several times that I was really born in the wrong century.  One of my odd habits is collecting and (after carefully and correctly identifying), eating wild foods.  One of my hobbies of late has been reading up and researching various wild and edible plants.

Some of my favorites are chickweed, dandelions, mulberries, and as the title of the post indicates, Lamb’s Quarters or “goose foot”.   Earlier in the spring, I had tons of chickweed growing around the edges of my fence row.  I was out randomly looking for some more when I ran across a very small specimen of Lamb’s Quarters.  Thrilled to death, I immediately transplanted the poor thing over by my green bean patch to see if I could get it to thrive.  Alas, the first few days, I was worried.  It got all withered up and was drooping to the ground.  However, today (see picture below), it has come back to life and has brand new leaf sprouts on it.  Can you say salad?  I’ve seen lamb’s quarters all over Tulsa.  In fact, there was one growing out of a crack in the parking lot where I work.  There are also two mulberry trees very close to where I work.  And on the way home I noticed an elderberry bush growing next to a creek.

Anyway.. here’s my poor little goose foot:

I suspect it will really take off in a couple of days.  It’ll probably get to around 2 to 3 foot tall and will provide great leaves for a delicious salad.  (Tastes like spinach).

One of my favorite resources online for wild foods is a fellow who calls himself Green Dean.   He also has a youtube page with a large collection of videos showing you many of the wild foods nature has to offer.  He offers identification tips, cooking methods, etc.  Here’s his video footage on goose foot.

A buddy of mine gave me some tobacco seeds he got from an “old indian feller o’er yonder”.  Said it smoked like Marlboro.

So, I took some and started them in little styrofoam cups.

In about a week, these sprouts will be large enough to transplant outside in my large planters.  Then I will transfer them to a larger, tilled area.  I hear they get very large and have beautiful flowers.

I’ll keep you guys updated all the way until I roll my first one in celebration of not paying taxes on tobacco.

In the mean time…  bite me federal government.  Raise my taxes on a consumer good?  Guess what, I’ll just make it myself and you will get nothing now.  It is my choice to smoke.  I like to smoke.  Smoking is bad for me, yes.  It is my choice.  Not yours.

Remember:  home-canning meat or low-acid vegetables requires a pressure cooker and specific techniques to be sure you don’t home-can your own version of botulism.  If you’re interested in learning how to home-can almost anything, get the Ball Blue Book of Preserving and learn how!

If you like to be thrifty and save money, you’ll save a bundle by canning your own chicken.

In hindsight, I probably should have bought two of these 10-lb bags of leg quarters so I could have done a full canning load of about 6 quarts.

As with all my canning recipes, I spread out the steps over a few days, sometimes even weeks.  I do this mostly, because I don’t like to spend 4 or 5 straight hours getting a “canning session” completed.

So, after I bought the bag above, it sat in my freezer for about a week.  Two days before I planned on canning the chicken I placed the bag in the fridge so it would be reasonably thawed out.

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Day 1

Place the 10lbs of leg quarters into your giant crock pot.  I was barely able to get all the chicken into my crock pot.

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Turn on the crock on the high setting and fill with water to within 1/4 inch of the top of the crock.  Keep an eye on the liquid level.  My chicken was still frozen in the middle and the liquid level rose a little after an hour and I had to take a little liquid out.

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After cooking on high for about an hour, I set the crock pot on low and cook for another 2 hours.  The goal here is to not cook it all the way, but only about 3/4 of the way.  The canning process will cook the meat fully.  After the two hours is up, I place the chicken into a large plastic bowl and let cool for about 10 minutes.

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Place bowl into freezer for about 10 minutes to cool it down.

(Yes, those are dandelion flowers… but that’s another post)  

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After the chicken has cooled significantly, take it out and cut/pull the skin off the leg quarters.

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I’m done for the day, so I place the 3/4 cooked chicken into the fridge.

(yes, the jar to the left is homemade strawberry jam and the jars in the back are canned milk)

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Day 2

Pull all the meat off of the leg quarters and place them into a large pot and fill with water.

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Add salt and bring meat just to a boil and simmer for about 5 minutes

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Get your jars, caps, and lids ready.  Place product into jars, fill to within 1 inch of top of jar with broth from pot.

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Get rid of any air bubbles

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Note I got three full jars of boneless chicken and one jar I put in the rest of the broth for use in another recipe

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Place jars into pressure cooker and cook at 10psi for 1 hour and 30 minutes.

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tada!

Well, great, you say, what do I do with all this chicken now?  Use it as you would any other canned chicken product.  You can put it into chicken helper, make your own chicken noodle soup, make chicken sandwiches, put into chicken salads, etc..   Or you can just store it until you need it.

Seeing as yesterday was the perfect day to stay inside and do something worthwhile, I decided to finish preserving, in this case home-canning 6 lbs of carrots I recently bought for a good price at Warehouse Market.

A lot of people shy away from home-canning as it involves a lot of time and work.  Indeed, it does, but the savings in preserving your own food can be significant, especially when your dad gives you half the bounty of his green bean crop every year. 

I’ve done this home-canning thing for several years now and have come up with a system that takes out the headache of getting your food inside that jar where it will be preserved for years and come out as fresh as when you cooked it.

Here are the steps I had to go through to get these 6 lbs of carrots into 4 1-quart jars.

WARNING:  Use directions at your own risk.  Low-acid vegetables MUST be canned with a pressure cooker at 10-psi.  Otherwise you run the risk of growing your own canned version of botulism, which can easily kill you.  While the risk is remote, you should still be careful.  If you are interested in home-canning, go get the Ball Blue Book of Preserving.  Read it, understand it, use proper cooking and preparation methods.  Don’t just blindly jump into something like this without first learning how to do it.  I’m just writing this mostly to illustrate it doesn’t have to be hard and that it can be done over several days or even weeks.

First Day
Peeled the carrots. Put them into a gallon sized bag and placed in fridge.

Second Day
Cut the carrots up.  Put them back into the same gallon bag.  Put in fridge.

Third Day
After three days of sitting in the fridge, I realize it will be about a week before I can get to the carrots.  Place gallon bag into freezer to keep them fresh.

Fourth Day
Ok, have time to complete the process seeing as there’s about 6 inches of snow outside, kids aren’t here and I’m bored out of my mind.

Preparation time: about 20 minutes.

I place the carrots into a large pot to defrost and heat them up at the same time.  I also place about 2 inches of water into my giant pressure cooker and get it warming up.

Wash your quart jars, lids, and rings.  For the amount of carrots I have, I estimate about 5 jars.

Place 1 tsp salt into each jar.  Don’t have to, but I think it gives a much better flavor right out of the jar.

Carrots are defrosted and ready to rumble.  Use a canning funnel and ladle to get the carrots into their jars:

Fill jars with cooking water from the large pot you used to boil the carrots up to 1 inch from the top.  I save the remaining carrot “water” for another project I have tomorrow.  Wipe the glass rims and put on the lids and rings.

I always have the jar rack that goes into the pressure cooker set on the top of the cooker using the special grooves in the rack handles.  Makes it easier to get them into the pressure cooker.  Notice I only got 4 full 1-quart jars this go-around.  I used the rest for dinner that same evening.  About a pint was left over.

Set jars into water of pressure cooker, which should be near-boiling by now.

Put on your pressure cooker’s lid and use whatever mechanism it provides to lock it down good and tight.  My particular pressure cooker has a small weight that sits on top of a nipple in the locking lid.  I leave this weight off of the lid and let the cooker come to a boil until steam comes steadily streaming out of the small hole.

Soon the cooker boils sending steam streaming out of the weight holder thingee.  I set the weight on top of the nipple.  Pressure begins to build.

After about 4 minutes the weight lifts up enough from the built up pressure and begins to vent steam.  I turn the heat down to low and allow the weight to “bubble” for thirty minutes, thereby cooking the vegetables inside and setting the stage for sealing the jars.

I go read a book, do some vacuuming, read some email, smoke some crack, you know.. that sort of thing.

Buzzer goes off, telling me I need to turn off the fire.  I do so.

I allow the pressure cooker to sit for about two hours, then remove the weight. You might be able to barely see in the picture below that even after two hours, the jar on the left is still slightly boiling.  Amazing how much heat sits inside of these things.

Remove the jars with a jar holder grasper thing, and put them on towel on a table to cool down.

Allow to cool overnight.

I remove the rings and check the seals in the morning.  If all is well, I wash the jars with warm soap and water at the same time I do dishes.  I suppose this is optional, but I’m anal like that.

And there you go.  A gallon of carrots for about half the price (probably more) than if I bought them in commercial tin cans from the store.  Really not that hard.  And they last forever.

Remember the carrot “water” I saved?  I’m using that water tomorrow as the water in a crock pot that will be cooking 10 lbs of chicken to be canned.    Waste not, want not.

I’ve probably written a post about homemade laundry soap three times already.  Since I sorta started with a clean slate on this blog again, I figured I’d rewrite another, but this time with pictures.

Laundry soap is expensive.  I mean, seriously.  Have you looked at the prices lately?  Even the cheap stuff (which doesn’t work worth a flip) is expensive.  And the stuff has so much gunk in it, it is no wonder it makes you itch so much.  Plus, when you make your own, you know it’s not harmful to the environment, and it is so hypoallergenic you can use it on most anything, even baby clothes.  This is a giant plus to me, because my oldest has pretty bad eczema and keeping the clothes itch-free is a very high priority for me.

So if you follow these directions which I’ve tweaked over the last two years, you will end up with a laundry detergent that outperforms the best commercial product you can buy, plus it will only cost you pennies per load to use.  An unbelievable savings.  For those of you with massive amounts of laundry to do, you will notice the savings very quickly.

This article will be pretty long, because I’m assuming you’ve never tried this before.  If you have used this method before and are just looking for a reader’s digest version, here you go.

WARNING:  USE THIS RECIPE AND METHODS DESCRIBED HEREIN AT YOUR OWN RISK.
It’s not my fault you thought this was a cookie recipe and tried to bake it and feed it to your kids.
USE COMMON SENSE!  This is for laundry and some of the materials used in concentrated form can irritate you .  Read all labels and use personal safety equipment where recommended by manufacturer.

Hardware you need:

• 5 gallon bucket with sealing lid (Walmart has them for cheap, or find a used one and clean it out well)
• Sturdy stirring spoon
• Large Crock pot
• 2-3 quart metal mixing bowl (optional)
• Empty plastic coffee can with lid (optional)
• Measuring cup(s)
• Gallon-sized container

Ingredients you need:

• 20 Mule Team Borax natural laundry booster
• Arm and Hammer Super Washing Soda (this is NOT baking soda you put into cookies!)
• Fels Naphta laundry soap bar
• water
• bits and pieces of leftover bar hand soap (optional)

The Reasor’s at 15th and Lewis in Tulsa has all three ingredients you need for cheap.  I’ve found the Borax at Walmart for cheaper, but they don’t carry the Super Washing soda or the Fels Naphta bar soap.

Ok, you ready?  To save yourself some sanity, make this a three day process.

Day 1

Do day 1 in the evening.  Prep time is about, oh…  5 minutes.  Try to time it just before you go to bed.

A lot of recipes similar to this one tell you to grate the fels naphta bar, as if it is a chunk of cheese.  This is so cumbersome and annoying, not to mention that my fingers are shredded by the time I actually get it done.  The soap bar is very thick, clogs up your cheese grater, and took me an hour once just to get a bar done.  The following method is so much easier and saves a lot of pain.

Put one and one half quarts of hot tap water in large crock pot.  Lately, I’ve been using a metal mixing bowl I found at goodwill.  I put the hot tap water in this and place the metal bowl in the crock pot.  Do it however is comfortable for you.  I find it saves me a lot of clean up time.

Simply place the Fels Naphta bar into the crock pot.  If you’re really anal about not wasting stuff, this is also where you can put in those random bits and pieces of hand soap that get left over from hand washing at the sink.  I only use Ivory bar soap for this, so only Ivory soap ends up in my laundry soap.  Ivory doesn’t have any dyes or fragrances, so I’m safe there.  I wouldn’t recommend bits of soap that are full of dyes, fragrances, or harsh abrasives.  This step is optional, but I figured I’d throw it in for you hard-core folks.

Turn your crock pot on the lowest setting.  If your crock pot has a “keep warm” setting, this is the best setting to use.  Do not use the high setting, ever. This is VERY important!  DO NOT ALLOW THIS MIXTURE TO BOIL! It makes a god-awful mess.  It won’t hurt anything, but you’ll be cleaning up for awhile.  (can you say yellow bubbles everywhere!)

Stir the water and soap around a little, cover, and go to sleep.  You’re done for the night.  (Note:  your house might start to smell like a meth lab after a few hours, so if you don’t want this to happen, set your crock in the garage or outside on a covered porch during good weather.)

This is what my crock looks like just before I go to bed (without the crock cover on, of course):

You can’t see the yellow fels naphta bar.  Thing is so thick, it sinks to the bottom.

Nite, nite, sleep tight!  Don’t forget to check your crock pot first thing in the morning.  If you let it sit there forever, all the water will evaporate and you’ll end up with fried soap and a nasty smell that stays with you for a LONG time.

Day 2

In the morning, when you wake up, go to your meth lab crock pot and carefully stir until the mixture is a nice yellow color.  (At first it might look white if you used white soap pieces.  Ivory is lighter than fels naphta and so floats to the top)  The fels naphta bar should be completely melted.  It should look something like this:

If a lot of water has evaporated overnight (shouldn’t if you have the lid on), add a little water.  Turn crock on high and heat it up, but don’t let it boil.

Pour the mixture into your five gallon bucket.

If you’ve prepared, you will already have 2 cups of borax and 2 cups of Super Washing soda ready to go: (I use a four-cup measuring cup so I can dump it all in at once)

Dump the Borax/Super Washing Soda into your five gallon bucket.

(It’s like making cookies, isn’t it?)  After you’ve added the mixtures together, stir, stir, stir, stir, stir.  It might clump a little, but keep stirring until you have all the Borax and Washing soda dissolved.  For good measure, I usually stir for five minutes:

Now add two gallons of hot water to the mix.  I use a 1 gallon drink dispenser to pour in two loads of hot water totaling two gallons:  (did I mention the water should be hot?)

After pouring in two gallons of hot water, guess what you do?  Stir, stir, stir, stir, stir….  until your hands fall off.  After a lot of stirring the mixture will be an off-white color.

It is NORMAL to have a 1-2 inch layer of thick bubbles at the top of the mixture.  Don’t worry about it.
This first image is hard to see, but here’s what my mixture looks like.  I followed it up with a modified image to show the texture:

The modified image to see the texture:

As described in many places on the internet with recipes like this, the texture is like “soupy mashed potatoes”.

The next part is easy.  Put the lid on the bucket and let it sit throughout the day and overnight until completely cooled.

Day 3

Still with me?  Time to go check out your creation.

Take off the lid and look at your new laundry detergent.  Don’t panic.  It’s supposed to gel up like that.  In fact, you may have 2 to 3 inches of a coarser gel-like mixture on top and underneath it will probably be a smoother gel-like mixture.  If it’s not exactly like this, don’t worry, your soap will still work:

Note how the yellow spoon sticks straight up with no support.

Guess what?  Do some more stirring.  Stir, stir, stir.  It might be hard at first.  This is why you need a really sturdy spoon.  My yellow spoon up there is my dedicated “laundry detergent” spoon.  It might take you several minutes to get everything stirred up really well.  Keep at it.  Once your soap reaches that lumpy, soupy mashed potato look, you’re good to go.  Simply seal until ready to use.

Final product:  good to go for another four months:

Note, I stopped using the metal coffee can and reverted to a plastic one, because the metal started corroding badly causing the soap to discolor. 

How to use:

Stir soap well before each use.

For regular loads without a lot of dirt involved, I use 1/4 cup of this stuff.  Yes, you heard me.  One quarter of a cup!  That’s it!  Beginning to see the economy of this yet?

For loads that are very dirty, I use 1/2 a cup.

For best results, fill your washer up a bit with warm water and toss in your soap.  Stir it up a little until it’s dispersed well.  Add clothes and wash as usual.

For really fresh clothes, add 1/4 cup baking soda (yes, the actual baking stuff this time) to the wash water.

Tips

If the 5 gallon bucket is too much for you to handle all the time, do what I do.  Stir the mixture VERY WELL.  Now transfer some of the soap into a washed-out, plastic coffee can with lid.   Use the coffee can now, instead of the bucket.

Need an alternative fabric softener?  Add 1/4 cup distilled, white vinegar to the rinse cycle.  Does the same exact thing for much cheaper.
OR
Soak a wash rag in a bowl of vinegar, wring out and toss in with the dryer.  Doesn’t work as well, but still gets good results.

Need hand dish detergent in a pinch?  Use 1 tablespoon of your laundry detergent and 1/4 cup white distilled vinegar in the sink.  It won’t bubble up like regular dish detergent, but it cleans like h311!  Might use rubber washing gloves, though.  The borax and super washing soda is pretty rough on hands.  Be careful if you have a shiny aluminum sink though.  The washing soda could slightly discolor it.  (I know…  I speak from experience!)

Want to make your fels naphta bar melting process quicker?  Try this method.

If you’ve used this recipe or have another or want to share your experiences about it, please let me know in the comments section.