Spoon Butter

Well, I'm dusting off the ol' blog. I warned you from the beginning that I wasn't good at keeping up with these things.

Anyway, so in bloggable news, for Lent this year I have decided to give up meat. (Other than seafood...can't live without seafood.) I've considered going veggie before, but it seems like such a hassle if I ever left the house since the American way is generally to devour meat in large quantities. In the spirit of Lent, however,  I've gone 4 meatless days so far, and I've actually been enjoying it. Eating outside of the house is a bit of a challenge, but I'm learning. More on that to come.

Also, today I had my first experience working with beeswax. I'd recommend reading up on beeswax before trying to mess with it, because bees know what they are doing. It's tough stuff. I bought a 1lb block thinking that it would be easy to slice as needed. No such luck. If you ever work with beeswax, I recommend getting the pellet form (that was recommended by most of the blogs I read....advice I ignored) since I ended up having to grate mine. It's also tricky to clean up, but boiling water and vinegar can take care of most of the mess.

The reason why I was experimenting with beeswax was because of a recent blog post I read about a nifty little mixture known as Spoon Butter. Spoon Butter is a mix of beeswax and mineral oil that acts as an all-natural food-safe conditioner for wooden kitchen utensils like spoons, rolling pins, cutting boards, and knife handles. A little bit of Spoon Butter polishes up your wooden kitchen tools and keeps them from drying, warping, and cracking. The recipe I found online seemed easy enough, so I decided to give it a try.

The cast of characters:

• 16oz bottle of mineral oil (you can find it in the pharmacy section)
• 4 oz of beeswax
• 2 8 oz jars or 1 16oz jar (I'm sending a jar to Mom, so I divided the recipe)

Had to grate the beeswax, like I said. That stuff does not cut easily.

To melt the beeswax, heat a pot of water, and place the beeswax-filled jars in the water. The hot water will cause the beeswax to melt while minimizing the mess. After the wax melts, add the mineral oil and make sure that the combination is well-mixed.

After it cools, use just a dab to polish your wooden kitchen tools.

 Happy spoons!