Cooking with Coconut Milk

 I have really enjoyed having more time to cook since I retired.   The past few days I have tried several new recipes including my mother’s pound cake recipe.  I’ve never been one to make cakes or baked goodies, so this was something new for me.  I made a couple of mistakes, but tried correcting them as I went, and the cake turned out pretty good.  It was a learning experience, so next time I’ll remember these mistakes and try not to make them again.

I recently ran across an article about coconut milk, and it intrigued me enough to buy a whole case of Thai Kitchen Coconut Milk.  After opening the first can, I learned that the coconut milk separates, with the thick cream being at the top of the can and the liquid watery part at the bottom.  I did try shaking it first but found that it still needs to be stirred together after opening.  The first way I tried this new addition to my diet was to put a spoonful in my morning coffee, and oh wow!   It tasted wonderful!

I have now used the coconut milk in two recipes I found online.  I love Red Curry Chicken at a local Thai restaurant, so I found a recipe called Thai Chicken Coconut Curry.  I had to purchase a couple of items at the grocery store that are not normally in my kitchen.  The dish was delicious and even my husband tried it.  He had never tried Thai food.  I will make this one again.  The other recipe using coconut milk was Easy Tom Kha Soup.  I did my best on it but did not stick completely to the recipe.  I enjoyed the soup, and my husband tolerated it, but it was a little too spicy for his taste.

My favorite thing I have done with the coconut milk is to use it for a smoothie.  I have started slicing and freezing bananas when they get too ripe and then I use them in smoothies.  I made this one up myself:  1/3 cup of cold coconut milk, some frozen banana slices, 1/3 cup unsweetened almond milk, 1 tablespoon of plain yogurt – blend together in a blender and it’s delicious just like this.  Sometimes I add a tiny bit of peanut butter and a tiny bit of spirulina which turns it green.  I bought the spirulina to use as a natural colorant for soap making, and then realized it’s also a very nutritious food.  But it smells like seaweed, so I have started out with just a tad in my smoothie and I can’t even taste it.  I don’t think I’d like using more than a tad if it tastes like it smells!

Recipes:

Thai Chicken Coconut Curry

Easy Tom Kha Soup

My First Hobby – Soap Making

 As I mentioned in my previous post, one of my retirement goals was to learn how to make soap from scratch.  If you have an interest in making soap, I would suggest going to YouTube and search “beginner soap making.”  Even if you don’t care to try it, you might enjoy just watching some of the videos.  I’m not really sure why, but I find it relaxing to watch the process of making the soap and then all the different techniques soap makers use with color and other additives.  (As a side note, I also enjoy watching tie-dye videos and I find them very relaxing).

I am only a beginner, and I certainly cannot speak to this subject as an expert.  I do hope to become an expert as I continue to learn and try new techniques.

So far, since I retired in January, I have made five different batches of soap. The recipe I used for the first batch turned out to be more than my soap mold would hold, but thankfully I had another mold and a small mold to use for the excess.  I waited 24-48 hours before unmolding my new soap and I realized it was way too soft.  It seemed something had gone wrong because on the videos I had watched, the soap should be hard enough to unmold and cut after 48 hours.  I still don’t know for sure what I did wrong, but I think that maybe I measured some of the ingredients incorrectly.  However, I was eventually able to get the soap out of the mold and cut it into bars and now, I love using this soap as a facial bar.  It has a lot of olive oil in it, and it makes my skin feel great.

On my next attempt, I adjusted the percentages of oils to make sure the next batch didn’t end up being too soft.  I also added some nice essential oil scents.  It turned out wonderful and my husband and I are using this Lavender-Orange scented soap now.

Experimenting with color was my next challenge.  In an effort to keep the soap as natural as possible, I researched natural colorants for soap and found some items I already had in my kitchen. For my third batch, I infused some olive oil with paprika and then used the infused oil in the soap.  It turned out a nice coral-orange color. I strayed from the “all-natural” by using some Sandalwood fragrance oil I already had on hand.  I have a bar of this one next to my kitchen sink and I like a lot.

On my fourth batch, I experimented with another natural colorant (cocoa powder) to do some swirls and it turned out pretty good.  This batch is still curing so I have not been tested it yet.  And my fifth batch was a complete failure.  I was trying to use almond milk, but I think I was too ambitious and tried some other additives too.  My best guess on what I did wrong is that maybe I didn’t mix the oils and lye water enough before pouring it into the mold.  But that’s okay.  Right now, everything is a learning experience, and the best lessons are learned from our failures.  My next experiment will be goat milk soap!

Swirled soap and Sandalwood/Paprika soap

I am truly enjoying this season of life and learning some new hobbies.  

With spring nearly here, I’m getting ready for my next learning experience……. gardening.    

Homemade Soap

 

For anyone who remembers the good ole Beverly Hillbillies television show, I’m sure you will remember Granny Clampett making her lye soap and stirring it in a big barrel out by the “cement pond.”  Well, that show never inspired me to want to make or use homemade lye soap.

However, several years ago, after trying out some beautiful soaps from crafters who made it themselves, I was hooked.  I wanted to use homemade soap all the time.  But they were so expensive.  That’s when the idea to make soap myself was born.  I began watching videos, reading blogs and I even bought a book on how to make all-natural soap.  But with many other things going on in my life, I was never able to find the time to gather all the equipment and supplies and make the soap.  So, I settled for making melt and pour soap.  That was okay for a while, but I determined in my mind and heart that when I retired, I would make soap from scratch.

And that’s exactly what I have started doing as the first hobby in my retirement.  I now understand why crafters have to charge $6 or more for one bar of homemade soap!  It is not a cheap hobby.  But I really enjoy making the soap and so far, everything is just experimental for me.  I have watched every soap making video I can find, and I have learned to use a soap calculator which is free and can be found online.   I have learned a lot, too. 

Here is brief summary of a few things I have learned about soap making:  soap cannot be made without lye; lye can be very dangerous, so the first step is to learn about lye safety; soap is created through a chemical reaction from mixing lye water and oils; different oils used in the process can give soap different qualities such as hardness, cleansing, conditioning, bubbly or creamy; in soap making if you are low on one of the oils in your recipe, you can’t just replace it with a different oil – you need to run everything through the soap calculator in order to get all the measurements exactly correct (soapcalc.net).

I plan to explain more about soap making next time. 

I thought it would be fun to share what t-shirt and tennis shoes I’m wearing today since the name of my blog is T-shirts & Tennis Shoes. Today I am wearing my favorite, well-worn shirt, Standing on the Corner in Winslow Arizona. I got it when we stopped in Arizona on our cross-country trip to California a few years ago.  I’m wearing my always comfortable Sketchers Go Walk slip-on navy blue shoes.

Officially Retired (the first couple of weeks)

 As I prepared for my retirement and made plans with the HR department, it was decided that my official date of retirement would be January 2, 2023.  I had so many plans for how I wanted to spend my time when I no longer had to be going to work every day.   I wanted to spend more time with my grandchildren, exercise, pursue some hobbies, read and cook more, but one of the main plans I had was to spend more time visiting my sweet mother in the nursing home. 

The morning of January 2, I started my retirement by going very early to the nursing home to be there when my mother had her breakfast. She’d suffered a stroke a month before that had paralyzed her left side and she needed to be fed.  However, that morning I was unable to get my mother to wake up when her breakfast was delivered to her room.  I did not realize at that time, but it was the beginning of the process of “actively dying.” My sisters and I spent the next couple of days beside her bed.  Then on January 4 my precious mother’s life on this earth ended.  It was heartbreaking to watch the process.

I am thankful that I no longer had the pressure of needing to be at work and having to choose between my job and being with my mother in her last hours.  This was not the way I had planned to start my retirement, but as we all know, some things in life are completely out of our control and we just have to do our best to accept the changes and continue to live.

Grief was definitely a part of the beginning of my retirement, but it was not a grief of hopelessness.  I am grateful for the inner peace I have and strong family support.  It has made losing the most wonderful mother a little bit easier.

T-shirts and Tennis Shoes

 

As a recent retiree, I am amazed at just how quickly my change in wardrobe style has become more normal to me than my previous office attire was.  My normal daily attire is now t-shirts and tennis shoes with the stretchiest  jeans I can find.  It wasn’t until I had to get “dressed up” one day that I realized how much I love wearing t-shirts and tennis shoes, and just how comfortable they are.

I am only two months into my new world of retirement and still trying to figure out how to navigate this wonderful adventure.  The most frequent question I heard from co-workers, friends and family before I retired was, “So, what are you going to do after you retire?”  And even now, people ask me what I’m doing since retirement – in other words, how am I spending my time?  And I have to admit that those questions were always at the top of my list, right along with wondering if we can make it financially without my income.   I have to say that I am staying busy with a variety of activities, so my hope for this blog is to share some of the interesting ways I am spending my time, new things I am learning, and to maybe help other people along the way in their retirement journey.

During the years leading up to the decision of when to retire, my thoughts were to leave the workforce at the end of the year I turned 62. I knew that I would be able to draw Social Security at that point if needed, and I felt that I would be ready to retire.  The year I turned 62 just happened to be 2020, and we all know what happened that year…..COVID-19.  The pandemic turned our world upside down and changed the workplace, possibly permanently.  For a while, my workplace had more people working from home than actually in the office.  But due to the nature of my job, I was one of the few who was never sent home to work and remained in the office.  So retirement was put on the back burner and I had to re-evaluate when would be the best time to end my career.

After much thought and prayer, I made the decision to retire at the end of 2022. I gave my boss a one year notice at the end of December 2021, and I worked through December of 2022. I felt complete peace about my decision and never wavered as I finished my last year of being employed.

It is good to make plans and have goals for how we want to spend retirement, but sometimes life-changing events will happen and it can rock our world.  And it happened to me.  I will save that story for next time…