Homemade Laundry Detergent 2.0

About a year ago I wrote a post about how to make laundry detergent at home.  I have used this recipe for over a year, and it works great!  I never did get around to trying Fels Naptha over the Ivory soap (that's what happens when you buy a 16 pack of soap) but I also never felt like there was much reason to mess with a recipe that works.

That being said, I appreciate the value of time, and 24 hours to make a batch of laundry soap (even if that's mostly "curing" time) seems a little silly.  And funneling the detergent into containers can get messy.  So I did some Googling, and found many websites and forums where people said you could just make the powder and not bother with the water and it would work just fine.  I figured this was worth a shot!

The ingredients are the same as in the original detergent recipe, except for the water.  If you have a food processor, it Really comes in handy (especially if you have a grating blade for it).

The Process:
Grate your soap (use 1 bar of ivory or 1/2 bar of Fels Naptha)
Put grated soap in food processor, pulse a few times.
Add 1/2 cup washing soda and 1/2 cut borax to the food processor
Pulse a few times until everything is well mixed.

This recipe easily doubles, so if you like it you can easily make more, less often.

To Use:
Use 1-2 teaspoons for an HE washer, or 2-3 teaspoons for a regular washer.

The Results:
This detergent works just as well as the liquid/gel, and is Much faster/easier to make!  I do, however, recommend keeping some of the liquid/gel on hand and using it for cold water washes, reserving the powder for warm and hot washes since it may not fully dissolve in cold water.  Depending on your washer this may be totally unnecessary.  I store my powder in a clean plastic peanut butter jar.  I threw in a silica pack to help keep the powder from clumping from moisture and that seems to work just fine.

Also, the cost breakdown is the same, since the amount of powder you use per load is equivalent to the gel.  This means each batch of laundry detergent, enough for 32-64 loads (depending on the type/efficiency of your washer and soil level of your clothes), costs only $1.90.

Re-Growing and Storing Green Onions

Green onions were one of those ingredients I usually just left out of recipes. At $1.99 for a small bundle (usually 7-9 onions), green onions are deceptively expensive.  Right now at my local grocery store yellow onions are 89¢/lb, or a little over 5.5¢/oz.  A bundle of green onions is $1.99 for about 1.5 ounces of green stalk.  That's a whopping $21/lb!  If you use the root ends as well that helps make them a little more cost effective, but by weight green onions are Super expensive!

Furthermore, if you're like me, you'll buy them for a recipe that only calls for half the onions.  Then, with every intention of finding a use the for other half, we put them in the fridge and forget them until they've gone bad.  This effectively doubles the cost of those little green onions, because we've now paid $1.99 to use 1/2 that bundle. 

After some Googling, I found that green onions freeze really well.  You just cut them up into small pieces like you normally would for most recipes, put them in a plastic bag, and throw them in the freezer.  That's definitely helpful, but I still shudder at the cost of those onions.  After some More Googling, and then some home experimentation, it seems there is a simple solution!

When you chop your green onions, don't go too close to the root, just get the green stalks.  Then put the root ends in a small glass (tall shot glasses work well) with some water, and place in a window.  Your onions will grow new stalks that you can trim and add them your freezer bag, and keep growing more after you trim them!  I hesitate to say this will make unlimited onions, but so far I've harvested nearly a 1/2 of a sandwich size Ziplock bag's worth of onions and they're still going strong.  I just keep the water topped off in the glass, and every time I trim the onions I change the water completely and give the roots a rinse under fresh running water for a few seconds.

I'm looking forward to being able to use green onions in recipes in the future without having to worry about how expensive they are!  Enjoy!

Wine Cubes - Freezing Wine for Future Use

"I love cooking with wine. Sometimes I even put it in the food."

- Julia Child (Attributed)

I'm a lot less picky about the wine that I use for cooking than I am about the wine I drink.  And, on occasion, I open a bottle of wine I've never tried, take a sip, and immediately move that particular wine to my "don't buy again" list.  But I hate letting it go to waste since around our house wine is a luxury, and I also don't like scrambling for a recipe that I hadn't previously planned on preparing that week.  So, what to do?  It turns out you can freeze it!

The Supplies:

Wine

Ice cube trays

A freezer

The Process:

Pour wine into ice cube trays, put in freezer, let sit at Least 24 hours.  

It's a lot less messy to leave them in the trays, but if you need the trays for other projects you can pop the wine cubes out and put them in a ziplock bag and return them to the freezer.  They will be a little slushy because alcohol has a lower freezing temp than water, but they'll hold their shape well enough.  This is super convenient for the next time you have a recipe that requires wine and you don't want to use the good stuff.  They may lose alcohol content over time, but most recipes cook the alcohol out of the wine anyway, so it's just a flavoring agent. 

What an easy way to keep something from going to waste!