Blog - Our Heritage of Health

4 Times When It’s Best NOT to DIY

DIY projects have become increasingly popular the past few years (as anyone who has visited Pinterest lately is well aware of), and there are lots of great reasons to give them a try.

They are a great way to customize things exactly the way you like them, and when you’re making things yourself, you can use simple and natural ingredients and avoid the harmful chemicals in many store bought products – especially for personal care and household products. DIY products can also often allow you to save a decent amount of money compared to what you would spend buying a similar product at the store.

There are a few situations, though, when DIY projects aren’t the best option. In the natural health and simple living world, we can sometimes end up feeling like we have to make things ourselves if we truly want good quality products that are the best for our health.

Dark Chocolate Chip Zucchini Bread Recipe

One of my favorite ways to use up an abundance of zucchini is to make this dark chocolate chip zucchini bread recipe.

The zucchini and the coconut oil in the bread make the texture rich and moist, and the chocolate is so decadent and delicious that is seems more like a chocolate bread than a zucchini bread, so it’s a great recipe for converting vegetable-haters and picky eaters too!

I decided to call this recipe a dark chocolate chip zucchini bread because it doesn’t really look like your typical zucchini bread recipe. You can’t see the zucchini at all (even though there are two cups of it in there), and the color is dark like the color of chocolate cake.

I found this recipe in with my grandmother’s collection of old recipes, and I believe it was one of my great aunt’s recipes. The original recipe calls for raisins and nuts, so you could certainly use those in the recipe if you like, but my mother and I have always substituted chocolate chips in the recipe due to our incurable chocolate addiction 🙂

How to Blend Your Own Custom Perfume Scent

Making your own natural DIY perfume is a great way to avoid the chemicals in many store bought perfumes, and it’s a great way for people who have sensitivities to the synthetic scents in regular perfumes to still be able …

12 Ways to Hygge in the Spring

The art of hygge is something that has become more and more popular in recent years. Hygge is usually associated with the cold, dark winter months, but hygge isn’t something that needs to be limited to just the cold months of the year. Practicing hygge in the spring can be just as enjoyable and as rewarding.

Hygge (usually pronounced “hoo-gah” or “hue-gah”) is a Danish word that doesn’t have a direct translation into English. Some of the connotations associated with hygge include the ideas of creating an atmosphere of warmth, light, comfort, and connection; an awareness and appreciation for the beauty and joy around us; enjoying simple pleasures; and the feelings of coziness and well-being.

How to Start a Compost Pile for Your Garden

One of the best ways to help add nutrients back into your soil is to start a compost pile to create your own homemade fertilizer. This is simple to do, and it’s also a great way to be able to reduce waste while improving your soil at the same time.

Building your own compost pile is the cheapest way to add nutrients to your soil, but it does take time for materials in the pile to break down enough that you can use the compost in your garden. Depending on how late in the season you start creating your compost, you might not be able to use your own compost for your first planting season, but if you start building a compost pile now, you’ll have wonderful nutrient-rich compost to add to your garden for next year.

Scarborough Fair Maple-Glazed Carrots

Everything is better with maple syrup, and these maple-glazed carrots are no exception!

These carrots are rich and buttery with savory herbs and caramelized in plenty of maple syrup to bring out their natural sweetness.

I decided to call these carrots Scarborough Fair carrots because this recipe uses all of the herbs mentioned in the song “Are You Going to Scarborough Fair?” – parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme.

6 Simple Tips to Help You Meet Your Healthy Living Goals This Year

Whenever we set any type of healthy living goal, whether it’s New Year’s resolutions or any other type of goal, it’s pretty easy to stay excited and motivated at the very beginning. But it usually doesn’t take very long until the excitement starts to wear off and keeping those goals starts to seem more and more challenging and eventually we lose motivation altogether.

There have been plenty of times that I’ve found myself falling into this pattern, but over the years I’ve found a few things that have helped me to stay on track and keep making progress toward accomplishing my goals (at least most of them anyways!)

So, whether you’re trying to eat healthier this year, or get more exercise, or live a more natural lifestyle, or whatever else, hopefully some of these six tips can help you to stay motivated to meet your healthy living goals.