Since I started sharing recipes for my aroma melts, people have asked me for a beeswax-free version. I was initially reluctant because the vegan wax alternatives can be a bit finicky, and I have always had great luck with beeswax. I finally decided to accept the challenge and took a retreat to my creative space to formulate a vegan wax melt recipe. After a few dozen rounds of trial and error, I discovered that carnauba wax is my preferred beeswax alternative. It has no aroma and is a much harder wax, so I don’t have to use as much of it as I would in a typical wax melt.

I recently spent a night at a hotel with an outdoor saltwater soaking pool. I didn’t see much of the hotel itself because I could not convince my body that there was even one good reason to leave the buoyant 102°F saltwater paradise. I braided my hair ahead of time with the—in hindsight ridiculous—idea that maybe I could keep it dry, but by the time I finally conceded I needed to go to bed, it was thoroughly wet. So I toweled it dry-ish, ran a brush through it, and fell into bed for a deep, restful sleep. I woke up in the morning to voluminous hair that had fabulous waves. As I stood in front of the mirror blinking in confusion, it dawned on me that I had inadvertently given my hair a sea salt treatment… which reminded me that I could do this at home for significantly less money with DIY sea salt hair spray!

If there are three things that I love, they are sweets, botanicals, and Star Trek. Did I ever think I would be party to a recipe that would marry those things together? Not really, and to be fair, the Star Trek involvement in this recipe is pretty nonexistent. (However, if any Next Generation fans are reading this, I think you will appreciate the reference.) In all seriousness, we already know that sweets and botanicals go hand in hand, and we are always trying to find creative ways to combine the two. We recently stumbled upon this classic Mountain Rose Herbs caramel sauce recipe and could not resist bringing it back. Earl Grey fans to the front of the class, please! This recipe is for you.

This year, I set out to create a natural skin care treatment for my dull and dry winter skin. So I took to my crafting space to work on a mask and scrub that was brightening and cleansing. After several iterations, I created one that I’m quite excited about, and I think you all are going to enjoy it, too.

I love a good Irish coffee. The conundrum, however, is that I generally limit my daily caffeine consumption to a morning espresso and I don’t want whiskey for breakfast, so it’s hard to figure out when to have said Irish coffee. St. Patricks Day is almost here and I'll be getting together in the afternoon with my coffee-loving friends and family, which will include traditional, festive Irish coffee. Happily, my talented mixologist of a husband recently got inspired by a tin of Mountain Rose Herbs herbal coffee. I wasn’t sure what he was up to tinkering away in the kitchen, and then he came out with this creamy glass of pure ambrosia. Although I am not generally an all-caps kind of woman, this herbal Irish coffee recipe is, OMG SO GOOD. Bonus: I can drink a glass in the evening and still get a good night’s sleep.

There has been a lot of buzz lately around DIY and natural hair care. In the previous weeks, we've shared no-poo recipes, DIY hair rinses, and fermented rice water treatments. A perfect pairing to all those homemade hair care products is having a dry shampoo to get you in between "washes."

It’s the time of year when I’m working my way through the last of our stored root vegetables and winter squash looking for ways to extend their lifespan and nutrition. With this in mind, I spent an afternoon last weekend hasselbacking. In its simplest form, hasselbacking is a special cutting method for raw vegetables (also some fruits and even bread) before roasting. The most common version is Hasselback potatoes: the Potato à la Hasselbacken or, in Swedish, hasselbackspotatis. The glory of this cutting/cooking method is that it allows you to get flavorful fats and your favorite herbs and spices down inside the food so all that deliciousness gets roasted in. Plus, hasselbacking makes your food so pretty!

Whether your unique mane coils into bouncy ringlets, twists into wild waves, or cascades down as straight as a pin, you’ve undoubtably experienced bad hair days. On too many occasions to count in my life, I’ve stumbled out of bed in the morning and glanced into the mirror to find a sight only explainable by a bird crafting a nest out of my frazzled locks overnight. After reaching for every fancy spritz and spray buried in my cabinets, I’d more often than not be left with relatively tamed frizz, greasy roots, and a wafting heavy perfume fragrance that was less than desirable. Inevitably, I would succumb to the classic slicked-back ponytail or throwing my mop of hair under a big hat on days such as these.

Eating sprouted seeds is a relatively recent culinary trend in the U.S., even though they are ridiculously easy to grow and can be an excellent source of potassium, magnesium, folate, beta-carotene, calcium, vitamin C, and vitamin K. These days, bean sprouts, grain sprouts, and salad sprouts are readily available at farmers markets, natural foods stores, and in the produce section of many grocery stores. But I grow my own because it’s easy to do, saves me money, and I like to keep control over the process to ensure that the sprouts I feed my family are safe and at the peak of flavor and nutrition.

Have you heard of "no 'poo" and scratched your head in wonder about what this means? While the term is definitely not my favorite, the philosophy behind it is worth exploring. It refers to moving away from using expensive commercial shampoos and conditioners, which often contain harsh synthetic fragrances, sodium laureth sulfate, propylene glycol, and other creepy ingredients from mystery labs around the world. Because we trust that such products will make our hair gorgeous, we drench ourselves in weird chemicals without knowing how they affect our overall health. Plus, think of the millions of plastic bottles from all the hair care products we use that end up in recycling bins or landfills.

But we HAVE to use shampoo, right?—Wrong!

I am a firm believer in broths for their gut-supporting, extremely tasty, and nourishing qualities. You can pack so much nutrition in each little sip. Adding a myriad of herbs to our broth base is the perfect vehicle for incorporating wellness into our modern lives.