Recipe Day! Lemon Crepes with What??

Lemon Crepes with Lemongrass-Lemon Cream Cheese Filling and NingXia Red Drizzle

A friend of mine created this amazing-looking recipe and shared it on her Essentially Pampered FaceBook Page today. You really should check it out for more Yummy, oil-infused recipes! She plans to set up a blog soon too, but until she does, FaceBook is where it's at!

Enjoy! (I'm drooling here!)

Psssttt!! Head over to my shared Three Friends Fitness Blog to see the recipe itself, along with important notes about the essential oils used! Doesn't that look SOOOO good?? I can''t wait to make them myself!

NingXia Red - a supplement every BODY could use!

I've finally finished a NingXia Red post over on the Three Friends Fitness blog I share with two of my nearest and dearest friends. They are more into the running scene than I am and so I stick with posts about food choices, essential oils, and other such wacky crunchy topics. I hope you'll head over, get some running love in there, get some longer-winded posts by me (you know I can't keep it short, no matter how much I try), and leave a note to show us that you dropped in!

I have a pretty Crunchy Life. There are degrees of crunchy and holistic, and my latest forays into the Crunchy world involve the supplement side of Young Living Essential Oils.I've been using Essential Oils for about 3 years now, and have stayed away from the supplements because I just don't. do. vitamins. But in 2014, the Crunchy Skeptic (AKA: my husband), was training for his first full marathon - the Air Force Marathon. Now, as you've seen with other posts done by me, I am not the runner of our trio. I leave all that to Slick and Spinster Beth, but the Crunchy Skeptic is on board with it. He needed something that wasn't chock full of all of the chemicals to train for the long endurance runs that a marathon requires. He tried several energy drinks on the market and found they all either tasted awful, were full of sugar and additives, or just didn't work for his needs.  So he asked me to see if there was something that Young Living might have to help. Enter NingXia Red and NingXia Nitro.

Click here to find out what NingXia Red is, why it works the way it does, and what happened to the Crunchy Skeptic on his first-ever marathon!

Featured Product Friday: NingXia Nitro and NingXia Red - Energy for the Win!

This is sort of a Featured Friday and Testimonial Tuesday rolled into one post. I'm all over the place this week, but I'm so excited that my White Knight Crunchy Skeptic has given the nod of credit to this that I have to share! 

NINGXIA RED and NINGXIA NITRO

You've seen me mention before that the White Knight Crunchy Skeptic guzzles NingXia Red after a long run. WELL, he has been marathon training and been looking to add a mile a week average to his runs to get ready for his first attempts at a full. AFTER each of these long runs, he has come home to drink at least 8 oz. of NR (a healthy person would drink 2-4 oz. a day optimally). It may even be more than 8 oz - he drinks it straight from the bottle.

Several Aspects to Young Living

This is a tiny bit long (when am I not long-winded about something I'm excited over??) but please read and bear with me!

I got thrown into a bit of a cold-water bath the other day. I had a friend call me up to tell me that a woman I had only recently met (and that my friend had met only once or twice as well), had said something about me. This woman was someone I had spent several hours talking to about a wide variety of topics, including Essential Oils. She had even come to my most recent Essential Oil 101 class, and that is where her comments stemmed from.

Recipe Day: Eggplant Roulade

I was away in Scotland for  a week and was wonderfully proven wrong by my White Knight. He did not go out to eat every night with the kids nor did he resort to sandwiches or eggs all week. In fact, he came up with a truly delicious way to make the eggplant that came in our CSA/Farm basket that week that even the kids inhaled! (I'd say his cooking was one of the top reasons I married him, but we both lived in a military barracks and so there was no way to test his cooking skills until later - at any rate, he is a fantastic, if messy, chef and I benefit greatly from that!)

The thin eggplant slices are not overpowering in flavor and even come out tasting a bit like lasagna noodles. Put a thin stripe of marinara sauce on top and they might not even know the difference! So, now that I have this fairly simple, mildly time-consuming recipe down, I'm sharing it here for Try a New Recipe Tuesday over at Home to 4 Kiddos, or Encourage One Another Wednesday at Deep Roots at Home - make sure you head over to see what other folks are talking about today!

What ARE Essential Oils, Anyway??

This is a guest post written by Stacy McDonald. It gives good information about what essential oils are. If you'd like to know more, I am happy to send a FREE information booklet for those who follow my blog. Just leave a note in the comments that you're following now or e-mail me with your address. Do you already follow my blog, and would like the booklet anyway? Let me know - I'll send one your way. Head here if you'd like to see more about what Young Living can do for your health and well-being, or to order (as a customer or for wholesale discounts), go here. I'm happy to walk you thrugh the process!

Therapeutic grade essential oils are much more than some sort of glorified perfume. They are healing, soothing, stress-reducing, health inducing, and downright powerful gift from God. Many oils have properties that are anti-bacterial, anti-viral, anti-fungal, anti-microbial, and the list goes on. Some are known to help coagulate blood, stimulate circulation, relieve congestion, constrict blood vessels, calm nerves, balance hormones, or reduce nausea.

“His divine power has given to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of Him who called us by glory and virtue…” (2 Peter 1:3)

Encouragement in Getting Healthy

No pictures on this post for now, I just don't have a good one yet. This post is a little out of my normal realm but I hope readers will forgive me. I am feeling really pressed lately to start working on posts that are encouraging and helpful in this area of life. I hope to make this only the beginning.

Like so many others in our society right now, there is someone that I love that is clinically labeled "morbidly obese." I have watched her for many years as she struggled to get healthy and get fit... again, and again, and again. I saw her during the "Phen-Fen" years, where she dropped more weight than I remember her ever losing; I watched all that come back after the medication was no longer available. In truth, I'll take the "larger her" than the scary medicine. I've known this person all my life and love her deeply and want to see her succeed in her quest to be healthier and to regain  herself in the process.

Let's be clear, this person is, in so many ways, amazing - and she is wonderful, but this is an area of struggle for her. She is at the end of raising six children. Of those six, all of them talk to her pretty frequently, and only one lives farther than two hours away from her. She has worked two jobs at a time to make ends meet for years and years. She is wonderful with babies and newborns - they adore her (and sleep for her, God bless them!) I'd say that makes for a lot of positives in life!

Up to now, I have watched people in society make nasty, jeering comments; laughing when they thought she was not aware that they were looking; whispering to one another over what food, or how much, was on her plate... Though she puts on a pretty good face of self-confidence, I know from other events that have taken place in her life that she struggles with that. Her weight is one symptom of that. The number of negative, snarky, unsupportive people she surrounds herself with is another: She doesn't feel worthy of being loved or of being fit and healthy. And she is absolutely worthy of both.

Super-Healthy Pancake Recipe

In getting up this morning, I was reminded by my bare cupboards and condiment-only refrigerator that we need to hit the grocery store. With that on my mind, finding breakfast for four kids was no easy feat. There were other things to consider that complicated the matter by quite a bit.

Additional requirements for breakfast this morning:

• Portable
• Not too messy
• Not something we've had a whole lot of recently
• All the ingredients are in the kitchen
• Must be filling without requiring too many ingredients
• Must be quick to make
• Kid-friendly, from the oldest 10 year old, to the youngest 20 month old and through the picky 5 and 8 year olds in between

That left out all of our "standard" breakfast options: eggs and (faux) bacon, cereal and milk, oatmeal...

So on the way out the door to meet up with friends for bowling, I pulled the overripe, saved-for-bread bananas from the freezer (they freeze well, by the way!), flour and walnuts for ...

Super-Healthy, Portable Walnut Pancakes (syrup optional!)

Makes about 4 small or 2 large pancakes

Ingredients:

1 c. flour (I use unbleached "better for bread" flour for just about everything)

1 tsp. baking powder

1/4 tsp. salt

1/8 tsp. cinnamon (I used a little more - I prefer to eyeball cinnamon a bit, it's so tasty and healthy, just don't overdo it and end up with little fire balls)

1 banana

1 c. milk/smilk

1 Tbsp. Vanilla

1/2 c. chopped walnuts, pecans or almonds (I used walnuts to great success)

Optional Ingredients:

a splash of syrup (this will be explained in the recipe)

1 Tbsp. ground flax seed

1 Tbsp. wheat germ

1 Tbsp. wheat bran

Recipe:

1. Mix the dry ingredients, including flax, wheat bran and wheat germ, if using, in a mixing bowl. I add the extras because they increase the overall health value and do not affect the texture or flavor of the pancakes. (These are staple ingredients in my house because I also use them to make sandwich bread, as you can see in this recipe: Sandwich Bread)
2. (If using syrup in your ingredients, check out instruction #5 before doing this step!) Mix the bananas, s/milk, and vanilla together in a blender, or mash them up by hand.
3. Add the liquids to the dry ingredients and mix together until just blended.
4. Fold in the chopped nuts.
5. In our case, the pancakes needed to be slightly sweetened because we were taking them on-the-go, so taking a tip from McDonald's, I reduced the amount of milk slightly (I do this anyway because I like my pancakes to be a little thicker than most recipes call for) and added my syrup directly to the batter - about 1/4 c. does it for my family, but yours might like them a little sweeter even.
6. Using olive oil or vegetable oil (we use olive for everything just about), cook the pancakes as usual over medium heat. Watch how long they stay on the fire though - banana sugars tend to burn quickly!

These pancakes met all of my initial criterion and have the added benefit of being vegan (no dairy/no eggs) so I can make them regardless of whether my egg holder is bare! Pictures will follow when I upload them from my camera, but for now, enjoy!

You will find protein, potassium, magnesium, sodium, iron, vitamins A, B1, B2, B6, C, E, K, Niacin, Folate, Selanese, Manganese, Copper, Zinc (and that's just in the banana!), Omega 3's, Lignans, and all in a little pancake. These are low-fat and freeze well too so make extra and keep'em in the freezer.

Here is a great little chart to show you what vitamins and minerals different fruits have: Fruit Nutrient Chart

Info on Flax seeds (I am not endorsing the company - I buy mine in the grocery store, sold by a Washington state company called Bob's Red Mill): Flax info

Info on Wheat Germ and Bran: Wheat Germ info