Hey, you! Now is the time to break out the products you bought for a special occasion in mind – because that’s now! You deserve the nice thing you bought! Use it NOW! Just a reminder 🙂 On to my July best beauty finds!
July’s theme? (Still) Summer.
A gorgeous shower combo
Two things I put away for later? One is Biotherm’s Shower Oil that I bought when I was looking for a L’Occitane Shower Oil replacement. Forget the ‘oil’ part, it’s straight up a shower gel with a imperceptible amount of oil in it. You will need to follow up with some kind of lotion, at least if you’ve got dry-ish skin like me. Like I said in that post, the biggest selling point here is the uplifting fragrance, which is Fanta/orangeade/orange sherbet. It makes me smile, and for this reason, it went into my shower asap as soon as I found it languishing in my stash recently. (200ml for about 20€ at Sephora.)
The second product is Korres’ Ginger & Lime Body Smoothing Milk. First, it’s not a milk, but has the thick texture of a body butter. Second, it has some nice ingredients and a shit ton of essential oils and fragrance. Third, those smell gorgeous. The thing is, it doesn’t smell like fresh ginger root. It smells like ginger blossoms (and freshly peeled lime), and thus, takes me back to the Botanical Garden in Singapore in about a millisecond. (200ml for 14,45€ at Zalando.)
The combo? Divine. That’ll teach me to leave products unused for years. (Um, possibly not. But it’s a start of using gorgeous things and not to wait for a point when I might feel worthy using them!)
Having a garden is stressful
(You heard it here first.)
In my mind, having a huge balcony filled with flowers and produce was a wonderful, relaxing pastime that would ground me, and, as a nice side effect, gave me wonderful things to eat. I mean, yes, the latter part, sure. But: first, it’s incredibly expensive to BUY all these things. SOIL is expensive! Planters? Ridiculously expensive. Plants? You guessed it, expensive.
And then: while puttering around with your hands in soil is fun (for me, at least, ymmv), you’re then left to agonize over everything. EVERYTHING. Pests? Oh gawd yes, so many. Fungi? Sure. Plants dying for no reasons at all?! Hah! And don’t let me forget the fact that you better water everything morning, noon and evening in hot weather. I already made a pledge to myself that next year, I’ll just plant lavender everywhere and let that run wild. Done.
My fave summer recipe: Parmesan French Toast
Usually, I live off salads in summer, but then, that DOES get old after a while. There’s only so much you can do to spruce up a salad. Here’s my fave recipe for giving your salad a leg up, and is also super quick and easy to do, with minimal time at the stove.
Recipe
- First, make any old salad you fancy.
- For two slices of slightly stale bread, you need one egg (you can, of course, double or triple this). Don’t go for super soft white bread, that’ll fall apart later. Sourdough is great!
- Whisk the egg with about two table spoons of milk, a tea spoon of Dijon mustard, a dash of Worcester or Soy sauce, a dash of paprika powder and a handful of finely grated parmesan cheese.
- Soak the bread slices in this mix – I use a big plate for that, and spoon the mixture over it from time to time for maximum soakage. It depends on your bread how long you should soak it – it should be soaked through, but not falling to pieces.
- Put a pan on the hob with a dash of cooking oil. Fry the bread slices gently on both sides, until golden brown. Enjoy with your salad!
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