White Bean Pesto Hummus

My husband is back on the South Beach Diet, which means I have to get creative in the kitchen. This evening he was planning on herbed chicken bits with asparagus. He was just going to pile some canned black beans on top of his chicken, so I decided to get a little more creative. 

I had a can of cannellini beans in the cupboard and some leftover homemade pesto so I decided to bust out the blender. What I came up with was a smooth and flavorful dip perfect for topping his chicken bits with. I cleaned up the rest of the dip with pretzel chips. Divine!

Ingredients:

One can of white beans

1 clove of garlic

juice of 1/4 lemon

3 or so tablespoons olive oil

2 tablespoons pesto

Directions:

Drain the beans and toss them into a blender. Add a couple of tablespoons of olive oil, the lemon juice, garlic and pesto. Turn on the blender. If your mixture is struggling to mix, add a little more oil while the machine is running. Once it loosens up, let it run for a few more seconds.

Serve with pita chips or spread on a chicken sandwich. Be creative!

Homemade Cloth Baby Wipes

All right, apparently it's been a full month since my last post, and boy, did that month fly by! Here's the reason I've been so absent:

His name is Jack Oliver and he is a month old. It's been an exciting month and I'm finally settling into a new normal, so let's get back to craftin'!

We have already purchased a Costco-sized box of wet wipes and I'm realizing how we're fast becoming a wasteful family. We are doing a combo of cloth diapers and disposables, so I thought I'd give cloth wipes a try.

Today was the first big garage sale day and for once I'm actually stoked when all a garage sale has is baby stuff. I found some nice clothes for Jack but I snagged several flannel receiving blankets to craft out with.

Homemade wipes are super easy. Since I'm washing cloth diapers anyway, I figured a few scraps of flannel added to the wash wouldn't make a big difference.

Here's what you need to make 32 or so wipes:

2-3 flannel receiving blankets, or a yard of flannel fabric
An empty wet wipes box (sometimes thrift stores have these)
Sewing machine with zig zag stitch

Photo by Amber Telling

Cut your blankets into 7-inch squares. No need to be precise. You'll end up with about 16 squares per blanket.

Using a wide zig-zag (or a serger machine is even better!) sew a border around any unfinished edges. I just incorporated the finished edges into each square.

Fill up your empty wet wipes box. If you have time (and I doubt I'll find myself doing this often) overlap each wipe so that when you pull out a wipe, then next one will come out.

I plan on wetting each wipe as I use it with a spray bottle of water with a small amount of baby oil and baby soap in it. I suppose you could prewet the wipes by pouring some water into the wet wipes box after it's filled. I'm not sure how that works, but I'm sure it's fine.

Once a wipe is used, place it in your designated dirty cloth diapers receptacle. When it's time to wash the wipes and diapers, here's what I do (this is after hours of online research on washing cloth diapers using homemade detergent). I use a combination of equal parts Borax, Arm & Hammer Soda Wash (found next to Borax in grocery store) and Oxy Clean. I have a front loading HE machine and I run it through two cycles. The first cycle I run on cold and add one tablespoon of detergent. The next load I select an extra rinse cycle, add another tablespoon of detergent and run the load on hot.

Either line dry or dry on hot for more than an hour.