Green your cleaning supplies: giveaway from MightyNest

As many of you already know, I don’t think you need a bunch of products to keep your house clean. In fact, some bubble, baking soda, vinegar and/or enzymes, and a bit of extra friction is really all you need. There’s nothing in your house so dirty as to warrant the use of toxic chemicals (yes, even the bathroom). Cleaning house is supposed to leave your space, well, clean, not emanating with fumes, vapors, VOCs, aka the bad kind of chemical cocktails. I grew up under the belief system that included the smell of bleach as a signal of clean, and unlearning that and converting my mom by showing how bleach and products that contain it, leaves residues, organochlorides that are residual and serve as neurotoxins. To learn more about why ditching the other heavy hitters in your cleaning supplies cabinet, read chapter 5 in my home book.

I’m happy to partner with MightyNest again this year to spread the word on their green cleaning brands and great products that help get the job done. Mighty Nest is generously offering up $100 worth of green cleaning supplies + $100 cash donation to the winner’s school of choice (selected via your entry using the widget). Support your local school and ditch the chemical cocktail in your spring air, yes please!

I selected a prize pack this year for my home based on my simple-is-best guideline and general versatility of products in making additional cleaning supplies. Check out my post from last year for a few great DIY cleaning formulas plus my staple cleaning supplies (all of which you can find at MightyNest). This post has some great, simple formulas for DIY laundry and non-toxic disinfecting.

These are my own personal picks; the winner will be able to select their own personal array of up to $100 in green cleaning products from MightyNest.

Dish zone just got a makeover! You already know how much I love the Full Circle Dishcloths, I order a new set every few months and cycle the hole-y ones to the rag bin. This is a new brand of dishsoap for us and the Bubble Up Dispenser and Brush was a hit over Easter when my dad, a serial soap user, was able to get suds over and over again from the same squirt of soap with a little water added to the base.

I’m a vinegar/water spray bottle kind of gal for my all-purpose cleaning, so this Branch Basics all-purpose concentrate is an upgrade for sure. I rarely take the time any more to make a power-packed all purpose cleaner from a pure soap (like castile) and my homemade citrus enzyme, and this concentrate makes a zillion spraybottles’ worth of a powerful pure soap + enzymes that you can use safely on your face or to clean your baby, or a gunky table.

Our house is full of wood, from floors to shelves) and though I have a few notes of DIY wood cleaners to try, I haven’t made any of them yet. (I’m a lazy DIY cleaner and usually just use water or a vinegar water spray for dusting the wood; to my credit, I do use oil on the cutting boards once a month.) I’m happy to report that I love the ease and simplicity of this Cinnamon & Lavender Wood Polish. My house full o’ wood is looking very pleased by my switch from just dusting to actually polishing, and, recalling my last time actually polishing, this is such a nice change from the lemon’y Pledge aerosol bottle of my youth chore list.

My love affair with powdery scrubs and brushes that get the job done continues. I feel like it’s a soothing bath soak (vs. choretime) when using this Sink into your Bliss scrub. This brush, another Full Circle product, is a gem, perfect fit in the hand and dries out easily.

Entries accepted until April 24, enter via the widget below.

Disclosures: MightyNest sent me this kit for review free of charge. I was not paid to say anything nice about this stuff. Opinions are my own. There are affiliate links above when I refer to my book, where I may make a small commission if you purchase the book via those links.

Risotto: Dinner party dish favorite

This is a sponsored post, which means Roth sent me complimentary cheese to work with and also paid me to develop a recipe and share it here. These types of sponsorships allow me to continue to work via the blog as a free avenue for sharing recipes and ideas with readers.

One of our go-to dinner party dishes is risotto, both for economy and richness. I’ve partnered on this series of posts (including my pork belly omelette post last month) with Wisconsin cheesemaker, Roth Grand Cru. The Grand Cru is an Alpine-style cheese, which means Roth follows Swiss tradition and crafting, but uses Wisconsin dairy. When this style of cheese is made in Switzerland, it is called Gruyere, and the name remains regionally specific and tied to Switzerland dairying, like with champagne and other things that got their names from the region in which they started. For this recipe, I used Roth’s Grand Cru Reserve, which is aged for 6-9 months and has a deeper, more mature flavor than the 4-month aged version.

My relationship with risotto began when I chose (and then married) an Italian. From my station in another family’s kitchen during my Brooklyn nanny days, charged with making dinner that 3 pre-teens would eat, I would regularly call my now wife and ask her the proportions of risotto components since random crisper drawer veggies and arborio rice were the what I usually had to work with.

After a few frenzied calls I started to get the hang of this creamy and filling dish and now make it by feel. I’m sharing with you a recipe that will get you started, but please feel free to substitute different veggies to match what’s in season this spring around you (or whatever season it may be).

Spring Vegetable Risotto featuring Roth Grand Cru Reserve

Serves 6

Attention: This is a must-be-present to cook project; once you add the rice to the pan, there’s no stepping away to do anything else. Pour yourself a glass of the wine and plan to hang out and stir for about 20 minutes.

1. Bring 4 cups vegetable or chicken stock to a boil in a small saucepan. Reduce heat to a simmer.

2. Cut up any combination of onions, carrots, broccoli, pea shoots, radishes, mustard greens, mushrooms or whatever firm vegetables you have on hand to yield 1–2 cups of chopped veggies.

3. Sauté veggies in a large saucepan or French oven for 3–5 minutes in a combination of 2 tablespoons olive oil plus 1 tablespoon butter.

4. Add 1½ cup dry rice to the pan and stir to combine with the sautéed veggies. Let rice soak up the oil; sauté the mixture for two more minutes.

5. (optional) Add ½ cup dry white wine to the pan and stir frequently to allow the rice to absorb the wine.

6. Add 1 cup of the simmering broth to the pan and stir frequently to allow the rice to absorb the liquid. Add more of the simmering stock in ½-cup increments as the risotto continues to thicken and absorb the moisture. Continue this process until you don’t have any more stock.

7. Add ½ cup grated Roth Grand Cru cheese (or the traditional parmesan) to the pan and stir to combine. Garnish plates with some extra grated cheese.

Makers and shakers: Carolyn Kimball from Kimball Prints

I’m starting a new series here focusing on inspiring makers. Who better to start with than Kimball Prints! I’ve drooled over Carolyn Kimball’s work for the past few years, adding kitchen towels to my collection stealthily so as to not overwhelm the drawer stuffed to the gills with my existing stash.

I sat down with Carolyn earlier this month to see how she does what she does.

The Basics: Carolyn is trained in fine art printmaking. She grew up in Louisville, Kentucky. She started designing and printing home decor items in a spurt of under-employment, where she joined forces with a friend (also under-employed) who specialized in wholesale account representation. They’ve grown their business over the past 3 years from a first run of 300 towels at the Blue Genie Art Bazaar, to now selling them all over the country. Visit Carolyn’s home decor website to see all the great designs and products there, her woodcuts (that’s another project I’d love to spy on), her bio and retail information.

The Process: Carolyn starts all her designs from the watercolor palette pictured above. From watercolor sketches, she then scans the sketches and hand traces them using Adobe Illustrator. She prints that design out on a transparency sheet then coats a mesh screen with photo sensitive emulsion and burns it on a light table in her screenprinting cooperative’s darkroom. The light table cooks the emulsion into the mesh everywhere but on the design, so, after rinsing off the emulsion that didn’t cook, she ends up with a screen that corrals the ink into the confines of the design she drew, a super-cool stencil.

Inspired by her fine art background, Carolyn individually mixes inks to create unique and distinctive colors for the towel designs. I had a vague idea of how screen-printing works, but getting to watch Carolyn in action was a treat and quite enlightening surrounding the printing work that goes into my own screenprinted goods.

Carolyn dragging ink over the screen.

This ink needs to reach a certain temperature to set, so the conveyor belt oven cooks up the towels.

Check out this video of Carolyn in action!

Carolyn was kind to toss in two of her recent designs, prickly pear and poppy, for HGGH readers. I’ll give them away separately, so the first winner to respond to my winner notification email gets first choice of design. Enter via the widget below. I’m shipping these towels myself and want to spread the love to readers far and wide, no shipping restrictions!

Enter here