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Tag: rainbow chard

Everyday Shea lotion

Shea butter is one of my favorite moisturizers, and I like how my skin feels after applying Everyday Shea Moisturizing Body Lotion for daily moisturizing after bathing.

Everyday Shea pours a bit thinner than you might expect if you’ve played around with shea butter before, but once you get used to that you might find that you like the way it spreads. As with all shea butter products, it absorbs best when you slather it on freshly-bathed, still-moist skin.everyday shea moisturizing body lotion

The healing and moisturizing properties of shea butter have been extolled for aeons in Africa where it is used for everything from healing sprains to hair and skin care, a cooking oil, and even as a decongestant.

Everyday Shae uses pure, unrefined shea butter that has not been treated with chemical agents to be refined, bleached, and deodorized. It’s free of parabens and synthetic fragrances and is not tested on animals. Everyday Shea is also a Fair Trade company created to help support cooperatives that empower women in Togo, West Africa.

While Everyday Shea does not appear in the Environmental Working Groups’ “Skin Deep” database that rates cosmetics for safety, the primary ingredient of shea butter warrants a hazard factor of 0 (yes, that’s a zero) for toxicity and adverse effects. It looks like shea butter is in fact one of the safest moisturizers available to hydrate your skin.

Everyday Shea Moisturizing Body Lotion comes in three scents: unscented, lavender (made with pure French lavender essential oil), and vanilla (scented with pure, natural vanilla extract from Madagascar’s Malagasy vanilla beans). I’m partial to the vanilla (always!), but like to mix it with some of the lavender, too.

Note: Unless otherwise noted, my reviews are always unbiased and uncompensated.

Rainbow Chard Sauteed with Mushrooms

One of my goals with my garden this year is to use the gardening experience to get my kids excited about eating green leafy vegetables.

They helped me select the seedlings, prepare the soil, and set the plants. They’ve helped me with the watering and have been excited to check the progress of growth. So far so good, even if my son called gardening a “chore” this weekend, when I asked who wanted to help me plant a few latecomers in my herb garden.Rainbow chard

Not a chore, I corrected him, a privilege. We get to help start new life and watch it grow. We are so lucky! And then we get to eat it!

I noticed my plot of rainbow chard was shining brilliantly so I decided we must harvest our first chard leaves for dinner that night.

I stripped the leaves from the stems and minced the stems separately. I rough chopped the leaves and set them aside.

I heated up some olive oil mixed with some macadamia nut oil (why not? I have it and it adds a little bit of a nutty flavor) in a deep skillet and sauteed the stems with 3 cloves of minced garlic. After a few minutes, I added some thickly sliced baby portobello mushrooms. Then, toward the end, I tossed in the chopped chard leaves and grated some fresh nutmeg and then some Parmesan cheese into it all.Chard with mushrooms

I served it topped with more Parmesan alongside an easy entree of Ian’s Fish Sticks, which I like because they don’t have any fillers or other artificial stuff. I cooked them on the back patio in my large toaster oven.

The whole meal was a delicious end to a hot summer day. And the kids ate the chard, which thrilled me!