Welcome Fall

First full moon of fall...the Harvest Moon over our little part of Oklahoma.

I grew this:
It comes

back every

year all

by itself,

bigger and

more

beautiful.

Hello

darling.

I Love Fall...everything about it, totally, emotionally, physically. I want to collect the days in a jar in my kitchen, taste each one slowly, handle them like fine wine. I want to wear the day's colors in my hair, put them on like my favorite jeans. I want the cool, crisp mornings to make piles on my front porch...

Fall rides in on a chestnut horse every year, my champion, to save me from the tower of August exhaustion. Fall is splendid with the promise of rest from gardens and grass and flowers, which I am truly grateful for, but tired of right now. Fall brings pumpkins and family and respite. Fall brings my kind of poetry.

Magic

You can do magic...you know darn well when you cast your spell a heart of stone can turn to clay…doodedoodoodoo

Well, or something like that. The song is driving me crazy today! It's the doodedoodoo part that keeps playing in my head. I think I am trying to drown out my screams after seeing Lady GaGa in her meat dress this morning. They should warn innocent coffee drinkers that stuff is about to flash across their morning TV. Sheesh. The soap-making mess I create in my kitchen is all the madness I can face that early in the morning.

Anyway. The lumps in my soap pot got me thinking about that dress again. So I want to make perfectly clear right here and now that I do not put meat fat in my soaps. All those white blobs in the pot are hard palm oils, shea butter, and palm kernel flakes. Vegetable and plant oils only--the kind that are extra nourishing and attract moisture to our skin.

But the magic part--now that's the part that just tickles me silly. Seriously. How is it possible that a huge pot of greasy oil (and that is all that is in this pot, I swear) mixed with a little water and lye can produce soap? It's a chemical process called saponification, but who understands that stuff? Other than scientists and probably my husband, and maybe lots of folks. But to me it is magic.

Poof!! I stir this simple brew (a lot.) And then I blend in some secret ingredients when it starts to get nice and thick, but those things are for aesthetic purposes only. It will be soap with or without my extra attention. But I can't live without those special touches! It's when I get to make my own magic: Calendula petals, ground oats or rosemary, mesquite bean flour, exotic fragrances, and for color, maybe some saffron or cinnamon. It doesn't always turn out like I think it will, but I like a good mystery.

And I promise any mention of "eye of newt and toe of frog" will only occur when I'm reading MacBeth.

Things are getting complicated.

It's not the soap making part that's causing me to come violently awake in the middle of the night wondering if I put lye water in the coffee pot or used that lump of shea butter to fry chicken. It's the paperwork and the marketing strategies. Yesterday I spent two hours downloading and then READING 24 pages of "stuff" from the state of Oklahoma on getting a tax license. A tax license! I don't want a tax license! Now I am pretty sure the state will be interested in what I fixed for supper, or maybe that I didn't fix anything at all for my sweet husband who works so hard

everyday teaching and farming. Somehow they'll know that I made soap and not pork chops...and there will be a tax on it. And then there's a lingering (and I know, irrational) fear that they will tax me if I don't generate enough taxes. After all, I did sign a whole bunch of stuff, then I got it all notarized, and then I even mailed it off to Oklahoma City.

I have managed to find my soap a first home, though. There is a brand new little shop on the square in Altus called "Dora Lou's Place." Inside there are lots of smaller "businesses" with many different themes. It is darling. It is gonna be trendy. It has an old fashioned tin ceiling and wonderful wooden floor. It has character, and it will be the first place I market Two Peacocks Soaps.

Keith is going to help me make a beautiful display cabinet; I am waiting patiently for my business cards to come in so I can wrap the soaps in a cute and, hopefully, irresistible manner; I am trying desperately to stay on top of ordering supplies and keep good records on both recipes and expenses; I need to get a website going soon, and I think I need to make a little more soap. Help me, Henry.

Sad Situation

At least I think parts of it are sad...

Most of you know about our peacocks. I did a nest cam update on Facebook all through the spring and summer months showcasing Lil Momma and her brood of eggs and then her growing peachicks. Now don't panic...after the first early loss of one tiny baby to what was most likely a resident cat, she has managed to keep the other five healthy, or mostly healthy.

That leads me to the sad part. Several weeks ago, one of the chicks was injured somehow. We never really figured out how this happened. The cats had given up noticing them,

so raccoons, coyotes, owls, self-inflicted flight lessons, marauding dogs from across the border? Who knows. But one little dude/dudette was limping and dragging a wing--desperately trying to keep up with the bunch and failing miserably. Lil Momma tried, sort of, to keep up with four rambunctious children while calling this other one to stay close, but in the end, we had to put the injured chick in a small enclosure to heal.

We even put the whole family in there for a day or two, but Lil Momma added to everyone's trouble by pacing up and down the fence, stomping small bodies as she went. We eventually had to resign the little cripple to solitary confinement for the benefit of all.

Flash forward a couple of weeks, and recovery complete, we set the captive free. I just knew all would be well, and the baby would take right up where he/she left off. After all, it had only been two weeks, maybe a little more. I lost count.

Apparently Lil Momma lost count, too. FOUR babies were the right number now, and it didn't matter to her that there wasn't another peacock in the whole county who could have dropped off a child and then forgot to return for it. The "new" baby was persona non grata, a little vagrant bent on stealing the food right out of her family's beaks. The newly-recovered chick has tried every tactic to fit in, but is constantly chased, pecked, and ostracized by its former mother.

The saddest episode happened the first night he/she got paroled. Still a little rusty from confinement, it worked diligently to get on the high crossbar where the family still sleeps. I was so excited that it could actually fly that far (you see I was hiding out behind the shed watching what would happen). I'm like that: nosy, concerned, wanting to help, interfering, etc.

Just as I was breathing a little easier, outcast baby worked its way over to the little group bedded down next to momma. SHE immediately took notice of the interloper and smoothly reached across the two chicks by her side, grabbed the little thing by its wing and flung it to the ground.

Totally stunned, I watched the whole scene play out AGAIN. After the second face-in-the-dirt landing, outcast limped over to the chicken enclosure and spent the night near the hens and roosting guineas.

Keith called the baby "Cast," and it has stuck. Now I watch for Cast every morning; I am anxious to see that he/she has made it through another night outside its family's protection. Lil Momma brings her kids to the yard every morning a little after sunrise to sit them down under the bug whacker for an easy breakfast. Cast is always bringing up the rear--just beyond mom's relentless attacks, but not far enough to be without a small bit of company.

I can't help it, but my heart breaks for him or her daily. And yes, I know I am assigning human traits to a species with a very tiny brain when I see it as that child on the edge of the playground who doesn't quite fit in, who maybe isn't good at sports, or speaks a different language, or is handicapped. But Mother Nature has a lot to teach us, if we will only see it. As sad as the situation seems to be, little Cast is a fighter. I don't see him/her doing much whining. Cast hangs in there, moving with a careful eye, getting stronger, growing, and living the best possible life in this new reality.

Technical but True

Did you know that ALL soap is lye soap? Not only that, but much of it contains a ton of plain old lard. Go get a bar of the soap you use now and read the ingredient list. It might scare you just a little. I’m going to go a bit technical on you now, but please keep reading, and then do some research of your own.

Soap is basically foaming salt that is formed by mixing fat and or oil with an alkali, lye. Lye has many pseudonyms: caustic soda, sodium hydroxide or soda lye, potassium hydroxide or potash lye.

Most liquid soaps are made with potassium hydroxide while most bar soaps are produced with sodium hydroxide, but none the less, lye it is. Lye is usually described on your soap label as sodium tallowate. Sodium tallowate is a naturally occurring result of combining sodium hydroxide (lye) with beef fat, and it is VERY common in commercially available soap. That means when you use a bar of soap containing sodium tallowate, you are washing your face with beef fat and other hard to pronounce elements.

I found a bar of "Irish Spring Original" in my cabinet. Here’s the run down:
"Sodium tallowate, sodium cocoate, and or sodium Palm Kernelate, water, Hydrogenated Tallow acid, Coconut Acid, Glycerin, Fragrance, Sodium Chloride, Pentasodium Pentetate, Pentaerythrityl Tetra-di-t-butyl Hydroxyhydrocinnamate, Titanium Dioxide, D&C Green No. 8, FD&C Green No. 3."

My eyes crossed just trying to read it all. Literally. I had to take a break and look at something else for a minute before I could continue typing it here.

Sodium tallowate is lye and beef fat, but what about Sodium cocoate?
It is lye and coconut oil, which is a better, but who wants Pentaerythrityl Tetra-di-t-butyl Hydroxyhydrocinnamate on their face? It has been flagged as a suspected persistent, bioaccumulative toxicant by the European Chemicals Bureau PBT working group. And Titanium Dioxide? Look it up.

So for the most part, when you are using a commercial soap, you are washing with lard and irritating chemicals. I decided against doing that10 years ago.

The lack of chemicals and being able to use vegetable oils instead of animal fat are the reasons I started making my own soap— and it sounded kind of revolutionary and off the beaten track.

WOW—how did that happen, this dependence on the huge industrial monster for all our needs? But that’s another whole blog isn’t it?

Here’s the list of ingredients in the batch I made today, and my house smells so nice right now!!

I started with LYE and water—now you know it’s the only thing that makes soap—and I’ll go into what happens to completely neutralize it in a later post (hint: it's a chemical reaction called saponification.)

Then I added soybean oil, coconut oil, palm kernel oil, sunflower oil, olive oil, and castor oil. (Nothing against all the cows we have grazing on our place—but not a pinch of tallow in sight.)

To finish it all off, I tossed in some French Green Clay, Calendula petals and a fragrance oil called “Waterfall.” I’ll have to wait six weeks for that chemical reaction to fully take place. It’s what we called “curing” the soap, but it is well worth the time and trouble.