do you have allergies?  i started having really bad allergy problems when we moved to Austin.

the news gave a daily allergy forecast, which was new to me.  i had days and days where i couldn’t function, my head was so stuffy and congested, my eyes were constantly watering as though i had spent the morning watching “The Notebook” over and over and over.  i hate taking medicine, but i took Benadryl like it was my daily vitamin, and still, nothing helped.

when we moved to Des Moines, i was curious as to how my allergies would be affected, and at first all was great.  it was still cold here in April (it even snowed 2 days after we arrived, which was our first snowfall of the year!) so everything was great until the trees started to bloom and drop pollen all over my car.  i had a few pretty bad days, and since then i’ve been fine.

now the flowers have bloomed, the grass is high, everything SHOULD be making me feel horrible, but I don’t.  I realized this week, that I noticed a change when we started purchasing local honey!

Dustin has always told me that we should buy local honey to help with our allergies, but it’s so expensive!  Especially when you can get a little bottle of that honey bear honey for about a dollar.  plus, i don’t really like honey, so it really wasn’t a priority to me.

But one day in early May, I found a bottle of local honey in a grocery store, and it was really inexpensive.  I thought I would give it a shot, mostly for Dustin and the kids, but one day Julian and I had made homemade biscuits, and I tried a little honey and i was hooked!  It tasted SO great, and I started *needing* it almost every day.  I found a new favorite breakfast, and I really think that making a small amount of local honey a part of my (almost) daily diet, is really what has helped with my allergies.  And in the end, local honey is WAY cheaper than Benadryl, so I’m happy

my favorite, no-cook breakfast:

1-2 pieces of toasted Ezekiel sprouted grain bread OR whole wheat bread  (the Ezekiel bread is fairly expensive, but with the rising costs of flour, it is only about $1 more than our usual whole wheat bread from the store)

1 Tbsp. of natural peanut butter (see note at bottom)

1/2 -1 tsp. local honey

raspberries (if i don’t have raspberries, i usually have apples or strawberries instead)

walnuts

a note about natural peanut butter:

there are a lot of natural peanut butter’s on the market now.  you can find peanut butter made from peanuts only (and even mix your own peanuts into butter at stores like Whole Foods), some contain salt, a few contain “natural sugars”, some contain palm oil.

here is an informative/funny article about natural peanut butter that explains why your good peanut butter has a lot of oil formed on top.   if you’ve ever bought Smucker’s natural peanut butter, which is one of the easiest natural pb’s to find on grocery store shelves, you opened the lid to find about 2 Tbsp. of oil just sitting on top.

the first time my mom saw this, she promptly poured the oil into the trash can!  (i was tempted to do the same)   of course, by the time you get to the middle of the jar, the peanut butter is too dried out to spread onto the sidewalk, much less a delicate piece of bread!

after several years of buying this stuff and trying to mix it up with a butter knife, i had an “aha!” moment.  i got my hand mixer, with one blade only, and inserted it deeply into the jar, blending on low, speeding up to medium, and then back to low until it is very smooth and evenly distributed.   this method allows us to use the entire jar, with no dry pb 

so if you’ve given up on natural peanut butter, maybe try one more time.  you might grow to love it!  (but don’t love it TOO much, it is still a high calorie food, and one of my worst weaknesses.  if given the chance, I DEFINITELY would have invented the Reese’s cup)

disclaimer: if you have very bad allergies, be careful experimenting with local honey.  this article gives some good advice for using local honey to help with allergies.

as much as it pains me to use the word “balls” in a blog title, there’s really nothing else to call them.

here’s a great tip for watermelon, honeydew melon, cantaloupe, pretty much any melon.

so during the summer when melon is REALLY cheap, or if you’ve got leftover watermelon from your 4th of July picnic and don’t want to throw it out, try this.  i bet you (and your kids) will love it.

take a melon baller.  i don’t have one, so i used a little teaspoon sized measuring spoon.

my make-shift melon baller

scoop several balls of melon, and place them on a cookie sheet or plate or cutting board, and freeze.  (this step is important, because if you freeze the melon balls in a large clump, they’ll stay that way, and be more of a melon “mass” than a melon “ball”.

(i’m having serious issues with some of the odd words that i am having to use to describe this process.)

after frozen, place in big ziploc bags or freezable containers and now you have these little frozen treats that make great healthy snacks, year round.

frozen watermelon balls

i haven’t tried it  yet, but I want to try mixing up some frozen watermelon in the blender or food processor to see if it comes out a little sorbet-ish.  i’ll keep you posted if it works