Whew! My fever broke during the night. Woke up twice with my t-shirt soaked with sweat, but no fever. Finally woke up this morning starving. Nurse Nancy (Chef Nancy?) made me a delicious omelet, with avocado, tomato and cheese, better than you could get at any restaurant. Got to go to the lab today to get my numbers checked, just in case.
I meant to write yesterday about the shea butter cream I made Wednesday. Both Nancy and I have very dry skin, especially in winter. She has always used shea butter cream as her therapy of choice, and a few years ago introduced me to it. It works great, but is way too expensive for my taste. And it's always scented. Yuk. Why stink, sorry, scent, has to be added to every sort of personal product I just don't know. The smells make me sick, and I suspect I'm not alone. But back to price. We have a 3.5 ounce tube of the stuff (scented of course) that costs about $18. Which comes to about $82.29 per pound! The one pound tub Nancy buys online, also scented, costs about $35 with shipping. A little better, but could I do much better? So, given that I have a lot of time on my hands and have always been an inveterate tinkerer, I took a look online to see if maybe I could make my own, at a much more reasonable price, and without the stink. It didn't take long to find what I needed. It was a candle making site, but they had an easy looking recipe for shea butter cream, just three ingredients and about a half hour of work. So I ordered four pounds of raw shea butter and 10 ounces of rice bran oil. Cost about $40 with shipping. With another bottle of the oil ($2.95 + shipping) I can make eight pounds of cream. It works out to about $6 per pound for the finished product.
So how did it turn out? I made the first batch minus stink, for me. It came out pretty well. It's a little greasy. I probably didn't get the proportions just right, will have to tinker with that on future batches. But it passed the fussy wife test. So I'm going to get some stinky fragrance oil and make the next three batches for Nancy and our girls. (But I've been told I have to get nicer containers. Personally, I don't see anything wrong with the Tupperware tubs.) Below are some pictures of the raw ingredients and the finished product. First, the raw ingredients:
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| Only three ingredients |
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| Raw shea butter from West Africa |
And the finished product:
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| What's wrong with the container, and why do I have to hide it? |
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| The finished product |
And finally, the expensive, smelly stuff (note it is only 10% shea butter; mine is 62.5% shea butter):
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| The expensive stuff |
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