Those who know me well, know that I should have been born somewhere with coconut palms. Not only do I love coconuts, but I also love the tropical climate that coconut palms need to survive. Sadly, while I have moved a bit closer to the tropics than where I was when living in Michigan, I don't live in a climate that allows for coconut palm trees; nor do I live in a place where it is easy to find coconut butter or coconut flour. I can find coconut milk in a can, but it costs an overpriced three and a half euros, and is likely laced with BPA. Why deal with that when it is so easy to make your own for much cheaper? Ingredients:
-Unsweetened Shredded Coconut
-Water
You will also need a food processor and/or blender, a cheesecloth or food safe cloth for straining the coconut milk, and an oven for drying out the coconut flour
I have decided to group these together because they are so easy to do. Plus, you need to make the coconut milk first to be able to make the coconut flour. The coconut butter is made independently, but I decided to add it in the end anyway because it follows the same theme.
To make it, you only need two ingredients: one part shredded coconut and two parts water.Decide how much coconut milk you want to make. I was making some to invent myself a coconut flan recipe, but I made more than I needed for that so that I could use the leftovers for making kefir and smoothies. (My son loves smoothies, and it's a great way to sneak him foods that he won't normally eat!)
So, to make around 4 cups of coconut milk, I took two cups of shredded, unsweetened coconut and soaked it in 4 cups of warm water for a couple of hours. I let mine soak in my blender jar because I'll be using it in the next step anyway.
If you're looking for an easy way to remove stickers from plastics and furniture without resorting to harsh gunk removing chemicals, all you need is a little coconut oil and baking soda. Equal parts mashed together will give you a slightly abrasive paste, perfect for removing residue or glue from almost any surface.Over at Rosy Blu Handmade, Michelle notes that this worked like a charm to get an old stubborn sticker off of a plastic vacuum cleaner that had been there for years. I actually tried this myself, and I found that one teaspoon of coconut oil and one teaspoon (or a little less) of baking soda worked wonders on already-soft residue, but the tougher stuff required me to drag out the Goo Gone anyway. Keep that in mind, your mileage may vary.A number of the commenters at the original article (link below) noted that you could do the same with other types of oil, like tea tree oil (which is a bit more astringent and may cut through more, but is as expensive as coconut oil) or even baby oil, if you don't want to use coconut oil for cleaning. One of the benefits of coconut oil in this case is that it forms a paste as room temperature, so you don't have a liquid with baking soda at the bottom. In that way, it works really well.You still may need a firm edge to scrape away the sticker after applying your homemade goop remover, but give it a try—you may have the ingredients at home already, and a quick Google search shows that coconut oil and baking soda together are great for a lot of other things, too.DIY Gunk Remover: Non-Toxic Recipe to Remove Sticky Adhesive Residue | Rosy Blu Handmade