Nothing says “classic green smoothie” to me like good ol’ strawberry and banana.

This recipe is straight out of my book 40 Days of Green Smoothies, and it’s one of my favorites to whip up in a hurry!

Parsley in a smoothie might sound a little strange, but it’s actually super delicious! I recommend going with flat leaf parsley, if you have the choice, since it has a milder flavor. It gives a refreshing edge to any green smoothie. Parsley’s also chock full of healthy vitamins, minerals, and micronutrients – it adds just as much of a health boost as any other raw green.

This recipe also calls for frozen banana instead of fresh. You can use the same amount of fresh banana for this recipe, but there’s something about frozen banana in a smoothie that adds a richness that you just don’t get with fresh. If you like how the frozen banana changes the texture of your smoothies, you can buy a bunch of fresh bananas, slice them up, and freeze them, so you’ll always have banana on hand.

Want even more green smoothie recipes? Check out my e-book 40 Days of Green Smoothies! You can snag a copy from how until June 21, 2013 and pay whatever price you think is fair as part of my Spring Clean(sing) Sale.

Typography is super hip right now, so of course I wanted Darrol to have one of those cute graphic wall letters for his nursery. I’d been looking at those cardboard letter that you can buy and paint or decoupage but decided that I’d rather create something from scratch using what’s in my stash instead. This plush letter fit the bill perfectly!

Obviously, not everyone is going to make a letter D, so I didn’t create a template this time around. A D is trickier than, say, a letter L. If your letter has a hole in the middle, you’ll need to finagle like I did, so you can flip it right side out. For letters without a hole, this is even quicker and simpler!

DIY Plush Letters

Materials

• 1 sheet of recycled felt
• pen or Sharpie
• 1 piece of scrap fabric – I used some of the Harmony Art organic cotton yardage from my stash
• lots of tiny fabric and thread scraps or polyfill
• sewing machine, iron, thread, scissors
• embroidery thread and needle
• hammer and nail

Directions

1. Draw your letter onto your felt, and cut it out. Cut the same shape out of your fabric. Iron everything, and pin your felt and your fabric wrong sides together.

2. This is where you need to do a little critical thinking. To sew my letter D so I could also flip it right side out, I sewed all the way around the outer portion but left the center totally unsewn. Play with your letter to make sure you don’t have to rip out seams to get it to flip.

3. Flip your letter right side out, and press. If you have an unsewn center part like mine you’ll now need to fold those unfinished edges under, press them, and top stitch around them. Make sure you leave a 2-3″ opening, so you can stuff your letter!

4. Time to stuff! Use your scraps or your polyfill to stuff your letter. You want this to be pretty firm, so really cram that stuffing in there.

5. Use a whip stitch or ladder stitch to close the opening you left. Here’s a great video showing how to do a ladder stitch:

6. Create your hanging apparatus with your embroidery thread. Sew one stitch with your thread, and tie a knot then leave a big loop of thread and sew another stitch opposite the first one, like this:

Now you just need to hammer a nail into the wall, and you’re ready to hang!

Is there anything better than chocolate and peanut butter? YES! Add some ginger, and you are in business, y’all!

I’ve been seeing photos all over the place of homemade peanut butter cups, and they’ve been making me so hungry! I wanted to make my own batch but mix things up a little bit, and then I remembered that I had some candied ginger left over from making that ginger trail mix. Ginger goes with pretty much anything in my estimation so I chopped some up and gave this a go!

Aside from making peanut butter cups with a twist, I wanted these to be easy. The recipes I was seeing all called for a double boiler, but let’s be honest kids: how many of you have one of those? Even if you do, how likely are you to whip it out? This recipe melts the chips in the microwave, and I tried two different approaches, one of which was an utter failure. This recipe uses approach #2, which was messy, but worked beautifully!

Gingered Peanut Butter Cups

Ingredients and Supplies

• 1/4 cup candied ginger, chopped
• 1/2 cup unsweetened, natural peanut butter
• 3 tablespoons coconut oil
• 1/4 cup powdered sugar
• 2 1/2 cups dark chocolate chips
• microwave safe glass bowl
• mini (1 1/4″) cupcake liners

Directions

1. Use a fork to mix ginger, peanut butter, coconut oil, and powdered sugar in a small bowl.
2. Fill your cupcake liners halfway with the peanut butter mixture.
3. Melt the chocolate chips in a heatproof bowl at 50% power I the microwave at 30 second intervals, stirring in between rounds. The chocolate chips won’t look like they are melting, and stirring will help you see when they’re ready before you overdo it and burn them.
4. Spoon the chocolate over the peanut butter, and set the cups in the fridge to chill for 2 hours. Pull the cups out for another hour or so before serving. Store them at room temperature.

This raspberry green smoothie has a coconut twist!

Ever since fixing that coconut oil coffee, I have been obsessed with coconut oil. It makes everything 100x more delicious! The other morning, I was fixing a green breakfast smoothie – shocker, I know! – and when I opened the pantry to look for interesting add-ins, my jar of coconut oil called to me. I’m so glad it piped up!

The coconut oil made this smoothie taste a little bit like a macaroon, and the extra fat also made this much more filling than my usual green smoothie. Usually I need a mid-morning snack, but with this smoothie I didn’t get hungry until lunch time!

The glass in this photo is a super rad to-go smoothie tumbler that I got from Moxie Glass. She sent it along with a bunch of her glass straws for me to review over at GreenUpgrader, and I made this smoothie to put her smoothie straw to the test! It’s wider than her regular glass straws, which makes drinking a smoothie from it a breeze.

Want even more green smoothie recipes? Check out my e-book 40 Days of Green Smoothies! You can snag a copy from how until June 21, 2013 and pay whatever price you think is fair as part of my Spring Clean(sing) Sale.

The Virtual Vegan Potluck is back! This go-round, I’m bringing another side dish, and these olive oil drop biscuits are perfect alongside basically anything.

Want to see the side I made for the last Virtual Vegan Potluck? Check out my recipe for Curried Lentil Hummus!

Making biscuits from scratch might seem like more trouble than it’s worth. After all, so many of those brands that sell biscuit dough in the tube are already vegan. Tube biscuits are definitely easy, but they’re also full of processed and genetically modified ingredients. Boo!

Drop biscuits are great because they come together super quickly. They’re really no harder to make than cookies, they don’t take much longer than those tube biscuits, and they’re so much healthier. Just mix the dry ingredients, add the wet, form into balls, and bake. Boom!

The texture of these is a little different from tube biscuits. They’re a bit crunchier on the outside and slightly more dense. Drop biscuits great for breakfast or passed alongside a potluck meal to sop up the sauce on your plate.

These reusable wet wipes take less time to make than a trip to the store for more disposable ones!

When I found out I was pregnant, my super generous mom offered to pay for a diaper service for us. Talk about decadent! Twice a week, someone takes the bag of soiled diapers from our front porch and leaves a bag of clean diapers and cloth wipes in their place. It’s like magic, and it makes cloth diapering so much easier.

The diapers are amazing, but I wasn’t mad about the wipes. Dry cloth wipes don’t really do the trick, but wrangling a spray bottle on top of changing a diaper was just not happening. Instead, I decided to make those dry wipes into DIY wet wipes, and it’s so easy!

I originally posted this tutorial over at Crafting a Green World, and it included instructions for actually making the wipes. If you’ve got your own wipes and just need the wet wipe solution recipe, it’s right here!

How to Make DIY Wet Wipes

1. In a bowl large enough to hold your whole stack of wipes, combine:

• 3 cups water
• 1 tablespoon olive oil
• 2-3 squirts of natural baby soap

2. Make sure all of the wipes get saturated in the solution, then wring them out. You want these things to be damp, not soaked.

3. Store your wet wipes in a plastic bag or some other sealed container.

We keep ours in a Wipe Warmer, which might seem like a silly thing to buy, but those cold wipes made him cry every time we changed his diaper. Poor little babe!

Whip out that chalkboard paint and make a DIY chalkboard pot for your container garden!

Whether you have a huge backyard or a tiny balcony, it’s super fun to grow some smaller food plants in containers! If you don’t have a yard, you’re basically doing all of your gardening in containers, but even if you have a yard, containers add a little interest to your landscape, and with containers you don’t have to worry about bad soil or weeds, since you’re using potting soil. Bonus!

Just like planting food in the ground, it’s sometimes hard to remember what’s in which pots when you’re container gardening. Chalkboard pots to the rescue! The great thing about the chalkboard is that you can re-label your pots season after season easily. Just wipe off the old chalk writing, and you’re ready to update to reflect what you’re planting now!

DIY Chalkboard Pot

Materials

• terracotta or other natural pot
• damp rag
• chalkboard paint
• paint brush
• painters tape
• chalk

Directions

1. Wipe down your pot with your rag, and let it dry completely. You need a clean surface for the paint to adhere well.

2. When your pot is dry, tape off your design. Since terracotta pots usually taper, you’ll need to take a little extra time to make sure everything is taped evenly. You may need to do some finagling. You can also use stencils to make fun designs if you want something more graphic than a stripe of chalkboard.

3. Time to paint! You’ll need to do 2-3 thin coats, letting the paint dry for 15-20 minutes in between. It’s better to do a few thin coats than one thick one. You’ll get a more even painted surface that way.

4. Remove the tape. This seems obvious, but it’s important to remove it before the last coat of paint is totally dry, but not immediately, because you don’t want to smudge your paint job! Pull the tape up slowly about 5 minutes after you finish that last coat.

5. Prime your surface. Chalkboard painted surfaces work best if you “prime” them with chalk. It’s easy! Just rub chalk all over your surface and wipe it away. Once that’s done, you’re ready to label your pot and get planting!

Happy (almost) Cinco de Mayo!

I made these Mexican hot chocolate milkshakes for my friend Jeanee‘s birthday, and they’d be perfect for celebrating the fifth of May this weekend! Check out how happy this shake made her on her special day:

Mexican chocolate is more than just spicy. It’s got a lovely blend of nuttiness, vanilla, and cocoa that makes it really special. It’s also kind of hard to find, though, and I’ve never seen vegan Mexican chocolate. Luckily, with something like a milkshake you can create your own blend of these flavors to get the depth of Mexican chocolate without having to actually track down the real deal.

Back when I was selling my crafts, these felt cupcakes pins were some of my best sellers!

I loved making big batches of these little guys! It was so much fun to arrange them all on a big tray, and it was one of the few couch crafts that I did for my business. They were also a great way to use up smaller felt scraps.

I used quite a bit of felt in my crafty biz, so I was happy that there’s a felt option made from recycled plastic bottles. It’s called Eco Fi, and unlike some green craft supplies, this one was pretty easy to find! Create For Less sells it at pretty good prices, if you need lots, and you can often even find sheets of it at craft stores, too.

Since I’m not selling these anymore, I thought I’d share a tutorial so you guys can make your own, if you like!

DIY Felt Cupcake Pin

Materials

• 2″x3″ piece of recycled felt in your “frosting” color
• 2″x3″ piece of recycled felt in your “cake” color
• 3.5″x3.5″ piece of recycled felt in your “frosting” color
• tiny piece of felt in red or pink for the cherry
• embroidery needle and thread
• safety pin or pin back
• fabric glue

Directions

1. Create your cupcake top! I made a little collage of the steps below. The trick is to fold your 2″x3″ piece of felt in half, so your frosting comes out symmetrical:

2. Cut your base using the same fold-in-half method with the 2″x3″ piece of cake-colored felt. Fold in half, then cut at an angle to get your base piece. Once you’re done cutting, you should have this:

3. It’s time to add those sprinkles! Place your cupcake frosting piece on top of the base (the base is upside-down in the photo above for some reason), then use your embroidery thread to sew on sprinkles! The sprinkles will also help hold the frosting to the base, but don’t worry – you’ll be adding glue later, so you don’t have to worry about getting this super duper secure.

4. Grab the 3.5″x3.5″ piece of felt and your pin, and use your embroidery thread to sew the pin onto the back, about 1/3 of the way from the top. You want your pin to line up with the widest part of the frosting, so the pin doesn’t stick out on either side.

5. You’re ready to glue! On the back of the cupcake, outline the whole thing with fabric glue, then stick the cupcake to the felt with the pin backing wrong-sides-together. Press down and give the glue some time to set.

6. When the glue is pretty dry, trim off the excess felt from the backing, so you’re left with just the cupcake shape. The backing and glue make the pin nice and sturdy! Now, all that’s left to do is top the whole thing with a cherry! Grab your tiny piece of red or pink felt, cut out a little circle, and glue it to the top:

This ginger trail mix is based on one that I bought pre-made, but I changed it up to include only my favorite things!

My quest for satisfying, healthy snack foods that I can eat with one hand continues! The co-op near my house started selling a ginger trail mix recently, and I picked up a bag to try out, because I love anything gingery. Since they weren’t making trail mix just for me, though, it had some things in it that I don’t really like, and I felt like the ginger pieces were a little bit too big. Instead of every bite being gingery delicious, you’d randomly grab a huge piece of candied ginger. Still delicious, but not totally what I was after.

Obviously, the only solution was to make my own!

This recipe makes two pints of mix, which was perfect! I kept one pint for myself and made a recipe card to include with the second pint, so I could give it to a girlfriend for her birthday. If you want to make some as a gift, too, you can click here to download a printable recipe card to include with your trail mix!