Popping in to say hello

A wonderful and inspiring video came across my path today, and it made me think of you all. :)
The main point of the message was that I need to remember that I should not only communicate with you guys when I have something big and important to say. Instead, I should remember that this is a relationship between you and me, and it's ok to just say hi and let you in on my regular life.

Truth be told, I have no problem with peeling back the internet layer and letting you in on my regular life. The tricky part is having time to do so! I have had a list of things to share with you here on the blog and in newsletters, and just haven't spent my time that way. (I am trying to get out of the habit of saying "I didn't have time" because I realize I always have time, just make choices about how to spend it!) Between the responsibilities of educating children at home, running the house and businesses, the needs of my family, and dealing with all of the curve balls that life throws my way, sometimes the blogging, newsletters, and communication just don't happen quite as I'd like them to.

Tonite, though, I'm checking in!

We keep having peek-a-boo weather here in central Kentucky. Yesterday we had a beautiful 64 degree day. Today it was in the 40s. I heard that tomorrow we are supposed to get snow. Oy! Thankfully, Kentucky winters are far less brutal than the ones I endured as a child growing up in central New York, but I am still plenty glad to see winter go away when the time comes.

This year my children and I plan to have a BIG garden project. Pumpkins, gourds, corn, and melons are planned for a big space at the top of our hill. Flower gardens are planned for several different areas around our yard. I have an especially exciting plan for sunflowers! :) Most veggies will probably be grown in some self-watering containers that I have my eye on. Oh--and a potato patch is definitely going to happen this year, using the above-the-ground planting method that sounds enticingly easy! (You can laugh at me in August when I am commenting about it not being so easy after all!) I also want to get some sweet onions and some garlic going. And as the seed catalogs keep coming to our mailbox every day, I'm sure our already long list will grow. :)

On the business front, I am extremely excited about a new product line that I am adding! For those of you that have been searching for TRULY safe, organic products for your skin care, you are going to LOVE THIS! I have been extremely impressed with these products for quite some time, and have found no equal to the quality and safety of them anywhere else. I will be telling you more about all of it soon, and I am really looking forward to that!

Later this weekend I'll be sending out a newsletter that will include some nice sale items, so if you haven't already signed up to receive it, be sure to do that right now. The sign up box is to the upper left on this page. :)

A few of my children have been feeling sick this week. The flu is running rampant in our small town. Thankfully, with our arsenal of Berry Well, Ultra Immune, and Winter Breeze, nobody has had any sort of serious illness, and each of them seems to have popped right back into health within a day or so of starting to feel not-so-good. I'm thankful for excellent products that are easy for even the little ones to take!

I am working on a fun surprise for you all that I can hopefully share with you next week. It'll be completely free, and quite inspirational, I think. :)

I'll be in touch with you again soon!

From a class member

Hi Erica,

I just wanted to say thank you again for the conference call last night. I really enjoyed hearing others questions and ideas. Wanted to let you know I made the fudge recipe for our Valentine's Day treat. I sneaked a little bite and it is wonderful!!!!! That would definitely take care of any chocolate cravings. Oh yeah and tomorrow I plan on making some heart shaped pancakes using the recipe in the lesson :-)

Blessings from my home in WV to yours,
Tammy

From a class member--YUMMY!

Erica,

I just want to tell you that I LOVE your healthy lemonade. As we would say in the South, "That is the best THING I have ever put in my MOUTH."

Also, your applesauce bread is evidently wonderful. I made a loaf of it Monday, and it was gone Tuesday. I say evidently, because I think all I got was a teeny tiny going to be sliver. And I live with a husband and three teens that are NOT health food fanciers!

Thanks!

Joetta

When I checked in with Joetta to see if it was ok with her for me to use her comments here, she said:

If you can give me a recipe using whole wheat flour and honey, and my kids scarf it down in less than 24 hours, then the whole world needs to know! There is hope! (LOL)

From a class member

I just wanted to say a special thank you--
the healthier eating class moves slowly enough that I don't get totally frustrated
and it means so much to me that you really are there to help with questions and suggestions. Thank you so very much.
~Peggy

If you haven't joined my 10-week healthy eating class yet, you should! I get emails every day like this one from people that are finding the information encouraging and practical.

You can read more about it and join at a BIG discount here.

Stevia Tabs are In Stock!

Some of you have been waiting for Stevia Tabs to get back in stock. They are here now. Yay!

This product has been reformulated a bit to make it even better, so I'm sure you're going to love it.

Stevia Tabs are great for carrying in your jacket, purse, or bag to sweeten your drinks while out and about. They come in a handy tin and are little round tabs similar in size to an Altoid.

I've hired a personal trainer

She's my 12 year old daughter. I pay her a dollar a day to make me do some exercise. :)

Like a lot of you, I don't particularly like to exercise. For that reason I've always got my antenna up for exercise that I can actually enjoy. (because I know I won't do the stuff that I don't like!) Over the years I have found a few at-home exercise programs that I do enjoy, and the next hurdle was making myself actually use the stuff. I started paying my daughter to motivate me to do my exercise each day awhile back, but we'd kind of fallen off the wagon recently. Now we're back on, and she does a great job of getting me going.

Some of my favorite at-home exercise resources:

Leslie Sansone's walk-at-home DVDs. It's basically marching in place, with some side steps, kicks, and arm work thrown in. Much more challenging than a walk around the block, and doesn't take any special equipment or much space at all. Leslie is a friendly face and a good encourager. A 1 mile walk only takes 15 minutes, and 2 miles takes a half hour. She has longer walks available too, though I don't normally take the time to get into those. I get Leslie's DVDs from Netflix because I can switch it out with a new one when I get tired of the same video after awhile.

Joyce Vedral's weight lifting DVDs are really good. Fast Forward is my favorite. This lady is really an inspiration--in her 60s and able to wear a bikini and look great! Light weight lifting is important for bone health and to keep osteoporosis away.

Rebounding is very fun, feels good, and is easy. It is great for your immune system, brain, and cellulite! (woot!) I've got this rebounding DVD and it is pretty fun, and surprisingly challenging. Needak and Reboundair are considered to be the best rebounders for your health. My friend Evie sells the ReboundAIR at her site here.

Healthified Macaroni Grill Rosemary Bread

The Macaroni Grill is my favorite restaurant, though sadly it went out of business in Lexington awhile back. (sob! NOW where am I supposed to go on my birthday?!) Their Rosemary Bread is absolutely faboo, and a few months ago I went in search of a recipe so that I could duplicate it. Thanks to the internet, source for all info, I found it, and last week I healthified the recipe for our dinner with friends...and it came out goooood. :)

Ingredients:
1 tablespoon rapid rise yeast
1 tablespoon raw honey
1 cup warm water
2.5 cups whole wheat flour (freshly milled if possible)
1 teaspoon sea salt
2 tablespoons fresh organic rosemary
2 tablespoons butter

Instructions:
1. Place yeast, honey, and warm water in a large bowl or food processor and allow to become bubbly.

2. Mix in 1 tablespoon of butter, 2 cups of flour, and the salt.

3. Add 1 tablespoon of chopped fresh rosemary.

4. Knead for about 10 minutes by hand or 5 minutes in your food processor or with kneading mixer.

5. Only add as much dough as needed to make it not stick to the sides of your mixer. (or not be too stick in your hands, if kneading by hand) The key here is to add just enough flour to get the right consistency, and not a bit more past that.

6. Oil a bowl, put dough in it, cover with towel, and let rise in a warm place for one hour or until doubled.

7. Punch down the dough and divide it in half. Form round loaves and place on a cookie sheet that has been sprayed with no-stick spray. Sprinkle the remaining 1 tablespoon of chopped rosemary over the leaves and kind of press it lightly into the surface. Cover and let rise for another 45 minutes.

8. Uncover the loaves and bake in a 375 degree oven for about 15-20 minutes, until lightly browned.

9. When you remove the loaves from the oven, have melted butter ready. Brush the butter over the surface of the loaves, and sprinkle sea salt on it.

10. This is nicely served with saucers of extra virgin olive oil and some fresh pepper to dip it in. Just tear the loaf apart and eat with your hands. :)


I made eight loaves of this bread because of the amount of people we were having over. I arranged each loaf on a small plate, and positioned each one in between two seats at the table, so that those two people could share it. There was a saucer of the EVOO and pepper handy too. This picture gives you a look at how I had it set up:

Before I healthified it, this was a regular recipe that included sugar and white flour. Once you get the hang of healthy eating principles, you will easily see how to make substitutions that can make your food healthier (and yummier!) without any hassle at all. This wasn't one bit harder to make when made the healthy way, and it tasted great.

Super Salad Bar

So way back before the ice storm happened, we had some friends over for dinner. They are the healthy-eating sort, so I did my best to put together a nutritious and yummy meal that would appeal to the adults as well as the 11 kids in attendance. :)

One fun thing I did was this Super Salad Bar. It looked so pretty, but was very easy to do.

In the big bowl I combined organic salad greens and spinach.
In the Tupperware thingy I had cherry tomatoes, Rainbow Salad (basically julienned broccoli, carrots, and so forth), cashews, yummy Salad Sidekick (the carrot stuff you see there), cubed cucumbers, happy yellow sweet peppers, and some dried cranberries.

You could put something like this together with whatever stuff you've got around the house. Other ideas for a salad bar include:

diced chicken or other cooked meat
cheese
sliced or diced hard boiled eggs
olives
pickles (sliced up works well in salads)
any other raw veggies
sunflower seeds

Use your imagination! The more goodies you load into your salad, the more of a meal it becomes. :)

I also had my awesome homemade salsa for the dressing. (I had some store-bought kinds, too, for those that would want that)

The recipes for the salsa and the Salad Sidekick are available in my Super Salads ebook. I'm having a special on my ebooks right now. You can check it out here.

It was a great starter to our meal! (Tomorrow I'll tell you about the fabulous bread I made!)

From a class member

One of the first things I have my class members do is to figure out what their goals are in relation to healthier eating.

Today I got this great email from one of my new class members, and I loved it so much that I asked her if I could share it with you all. She was kind enough to agree, so here it is:

I wrote out a list of positive and negatives for eating healthily:

Positives:
End of arthritis like join pains, asthma, frequent bronchitis, bursitis, heartburn, tendinitis and other dis-ease.
More energy.
Better sleep.
Better overall health.
Increased attractiveness which makes me more marketable professionally and romantically. Longer life.
Money saved by eliminating 3-pepsi a day habit=annual trip to Europe and adopting a starving child from the back of a magazine or whatever my dream my be. 600 less empty Pepsi bottles in the landfill. We can all become healthy, green, and financially wise, loving, and powerful together!

I just love her sense of humor (more marketable romantically!! LOL) and the way she realized how much of her health AND money is being given up by her Pepsi habit. This made me wonder what I might have lurking around that could be turned into doing good for others as well.

You can learn more about the class here.

Stevia and No-Lice Products Back in Stock

Just wanted to let you all know that I have all flavors of liquid stevia in stock now, plus the 4 ounce plain stevia in addition to the 2 ounce. It has all been selling really fast lately, so it has been a challenge to keep it in stock. For the moment everything is caught up. :)

Also, we had a temporary shortage of Supermom's No-Lice products last week, but we are back up to speed on all of that as well. Don't let the cooties get you down!

I've Got The Power! (electricity, that is)

After a little more than 48 hours without power, it came back. Literally *just* as my husband was plugging in a space heater to our new generator. LOL

The house temp was down to 47 on the first day after we left, and down to 38 by the time we broke down and got a generator so that the pipes wouldn't freeze. It took hours for the house to warm up to a modest 66 degrees that we were aiming for.


Power was spotty for awhile but stayed on through the night, and today we got moved back into our home. There was plenty of cleanup to be done from the water in our downstairs, and a mighty pile up of laundry in process. I had boxes of products being delivered and needing to be put away as well. And then there was all of our backpacks and baskets and bags full of the clothes and items we took with us when we left the house. Plenty of work for all of us to do. By now I'm wiped out, so what's left waiting to get done will have to wait until tomorrow.

From the time we left the house on Tuesday until we got back here, I have been constantly reminded about emergency preparedness and all of the things I learned back in 1999 and haven't kept up on since:

-pick up a gallon of bottled water each time I go to the grocery store so that we have plenty in case the water goes out (thankfully, ours didn't go out even though the water dept. said they were going to have to close it down, but we're still on a boil water advisory)

-have plenty of foods on hand that can feed us even without electricity

-I've gotten out of the habit of canning a lot, and have recently preferred freezing both for ease of putting food away for later, and because freezing preserves more of the nutritional value of the foods. This year I plan to can more--maybe half of the stuff I'm putting up. I can tell you that I felt very sad at the thought of losing all of the homemade apple sauce I made this year from our back yard trees!

-I would like to get some emergency backpacks put together so that we could leave the house in 5-10 minutes if needed. I didn't have the house as well organized as would have been ideal, and it took us a pretty long time to get out of here. It was fine this time, but if some other sort of disaster was happening, it took a whole lot longer than it should have. Things I would like to keep in emergency evacuation backpacks include socks, underwear, and a change of clothes for each person, some toothbrushes, individual bottles of water for each person, and some emergency cash. I ran into a situation where bottled water was available at just one store and they could only take cash or check, no debit cards. I only had $5 on hand so wasn't able to get as much bottled water as I would have liked. It turned out ok this time, but I don't want to get caught with only $5 in cash again.

I would love to hear your ideas about other good things to have ready in case of emergency.

We're all enjoying being in our own home, though our wonderful friends and family made it very comfortable to be displaced for a couple of days.

My 16 year old son said that although it's not exactly fun to have this sort of thing happen, he feels like it helps people to slow down, care for one another, and remember what to be thankful for. I agree.

Our street was among the first to get power back in our county, apparently because an important water pump station is on our power line. Most others in our area continue to be without electricity, and apparently it could be many more days or even weeks before it is all fixed. The trees are still icy, we had a little more snow today, and more snow is expected Monday and Tuesday.

Here are some photos of trees in our yard at the time when we were first leaving the house, and then a video taken while I was driving around town the next day.


During this video you just get to see a little of the trees down and snow falling. Also you are treated to me repeating myself because I was having a hard time driving safely and thinking about what I was saying at the same time. :) (Also, I think I may have a tendency to repeat myself anyhow. Might have something to do with having many young children with selective hearing....)

Iced In

We are in the midst of an ice storm here in central KY. Our power went out yesterday afternoon and my husband (who was at work) called to tell me to pack up and get to his parents house. Power wasn't expected back for more than a day, and we have no way to keep the house warm without electricity.

We only got as far as a 3-4 minute drive from our home before we realized that with tons of trees down in the road, power lines down, and more icy rain falling, the 40 minute drive to the in-laws might be too risky. Some friends happened along our path and invited us to stay with them. They still had power plus gas fire places if we needed to use 'em.

We've had a slumber party. I got to go home briefly earlier today to grab some more food out of the fridge and freezer (I hate to see so much stuff going to waste!!) and extra clothes. I found that our downstairs had flooded a little. grrrr.... Just a little extra excitement.

The local water is expected to be turned off, thanks to frozen pump stations. Power still isn't working on my side of the town, and it looks like it could be a few more days.

Needless to say, I don't know how soon I'll be back home, but all orders placed right now will unfortunately have to wait until I can fill them.

I took some pictures of our pretty-and-health dinner with company, plus some pictures and video of the weather here. When I can upload them I'll be sure to share! :)

Company's Coming and Here's What's for Dinner....

We have some friends coming for dinner tonite, so I have been working on making a yummy and delicious AND healthy meal to share with them!

On the menu:

Super Salad Bar

Healthified Macaroni Grill Rosemary Bread

White Bean Chili ~or~ Tomato Bisque Soup (I'm going to make both, I think)

Apple Crisp

I plan to take some pictures and share some recipes later in the week. :)

From a class member

One of my class members sent this to me. I thought that some of you would appreciate knowing how this works for her family:

For my husband who is "diehard" about his southern sweet tea, I've found that using 3/4 cup sugar and 5 dropperfuls of plain stevia to a gallon of tea to be perfect, especially if it sits overnight! This has really cut down on the sugar. Before stevia, I used a lot of splenda or almost 2 cups of sugar to a gallon of tea. ( I tried cutting the sugar back to 1/2 cup and using more stevia, but at that point, it seemed to lose the sugar sweet taste.)

How to choose supplements and vitamins

Today I want to share some advice I often give to people about trying new vitamins and supplements.

First of all, people usually want to know how to tell if a vitamin is a good quality or not.
Low-quality vitamins and supplements usually have a large number of fillers, starches, and often even aspartame. Look at the ingredients first to see what the non-nutrient items are that are included. If you see a lot of them, you might want to keep on looking for something else. You also want to weed out the ones with aspartame right away. (Children's vitamins usually have aspartame in them--horrible and poisonous!) MSG and its various forms are also sometimes in vitamins. I recommend the site MSG Myth to learn more about the many ingredients that are derivatives of MSG.

You want to get a vitamin that is affordable and easily absorbed into your body, and in a form you can easily remember to take. You can have the best vitamins in the world, but if you hate to take them or forget all the time, it isn't going to do you any good.

When it comes to vitamins or supplements that you are expecting to experience a result from (like energy from Bee Strong),
I recommend that people start out with just 1 or maybe 2 items at first and see how you feel after a couple weeks of just using those. That way you know what's working and what's not. Did it give you the energy you were looking for? If yes, do you want to adjust the dose a little higher or lower? I tell people to just take the smallest effective amount that helps them. No need to go overboard.

Now obviously, for something like a calcium supplement (for instance) you probably aren't going to feel any different from taking them, but you know that absorbable calcium is very important for your bone health, so you want to find a good source for it that you can afford and be consistent about, and continue on. Don't *not* take supplements like calcium just because you don't *feel* anything.

However, if you start taking a new calcium supplement and you notice that it makes you feel sick, now you know that maybe you need to try a different one. If you had tried it along with 6 other new vitamins, you won't know which one is the likely culprit. Get it? :)


If someone wants you to buy a whole bunch of stuff at once, it is going to make it hard for you to tell what to attribute any success or problem to a particular item. By taking it slow you can find what truly works well for you, and not waste money on products that aren't going to be a help to you.

Yes, eventually you will probably want to take a good multi-vitamin, a calcium supplement, and possibly several other items to address your unique needs. Just take it one step at a time when getting started, and work your way up to all of the items that you want and need. (Obviously, this is not meant as contradictory advice to something that a health professional may have told you. This is just a general rule of thumb that works for many people.)