What's all the fuss about Young Living Essential Oils?

Wanna know something cool? I haven’t used a single over-the-counter or prescription drug in at least three years. My kids (1 and 2) have never taken so much as a Tylenol. It hasn’t always been this way. I used to be the proverbial lab rat for allergy medications, used OTC pills to shoot down everything from headaches to colds, took several prescription drugs, was a regular flu-shot consumer, and visited the doctor at least three times a year for chronic bronchitis. And of course, I was the one who experienced EVERY symptom announced in the product commercial by the chipmunk-voiced narrator. I was miserable! Then last year during a family move, after realizing I hadn’t used any of it in almost two years, I cleaned out my medicine cabinet straight into the garbage can. Every single last pill was either tossed or flushed, and I haven’t looked back. Why the drastic change? And more importantly, how?

If you follow any natural-health blogs or websites (and even if you don’t!), then you’ve almost definitely heard the buzz about essential oils being the “new” big trend in natural & alternative health care.  You’ve seen posts in your newsfeed of friends raving about how their lavender essential oil helped their allergies and helps them sleep at night, and how their kids’ stomach bug was vamoosed in mere hours with just a few drops of Thieves oil.  You may have even posted about your headache and had it suggested to try this or that oil to relieve it.  So what’s all the fuss about? Is there really something to it, or is it just a “crunchy” fad?  I’m here to tell you that YES! There IS something to it!

 

First of all, essential oils are nothing new under the sun. There are 1035 references to essential oils in the Bible. The Ebers Payprus (the oldest and most important ancient Egyptian medical document, written ca. 1550 BC) contains over 800 herbal recipes, including essential oils, that were used for the health and healing of the people. Ancient people groups have been able to find relief for their ailments in the plants indigenous to their habitat. Essential oils are the lifeblood of the very plants that have existed from the dawn of time, the substance inside the plant that circulates the nutrients, enzymes, vitamins, minerals, etc., to the cells of the plants in order to survive and thrive. That’s what your blood does inside your body, too. And when we apply essential oils to our body, we benefit from the healing properties of the plants as well.  This is part of the science behind using herbal remedies, except that EOs are 50 to 70 times more potent than dried herbs.

Every plant, tree, flower, leaf, fruit, and root has an essential oil that keeps it alive. When you walk by a rose bush and smell the beautiful fragrance from the flowers, you are smelling the essential oil of the roses. When you brush your hand against a rosemary or basil plant in your herb garden, and your hand carries the scent of the herb, that is the essential oil that has been transferred to your skin. When you squeeze the rind of a lemon and observe the beads of moisture that pop up through the surface, that is the essential oil of the lemon (different from the juice that is squeezed from the fruit).  To extract the oils from the plant, a very specific amount of heat and pressure is applied to the plant for a precise length of time (called steam distillation) that results in the plant releasing the oils so that it can be bottled.  Some oils are easy to extract in great quantity. Other plants yield only one drop of oil from the entire plant, which tends to influence the cost of the oil.

Are all essential oils created equally? NO! Be warned!! If you walk into a health food store and pull a bottle of “pure” essential oil from their shelf, by industry standard those oils are allowed to contain up to 95% of additives, fillers, and preservatives, and only 5% of the ACTUAL essential oil. You don’t want to spend your hard-earned dollars on an adulterated oil that actually cause harm. Not only that, but they won’t work properly. Only 2% of all of the essential oils produced are 100% therapeutic grade oils.

So which essential oils are worthy of your trust? My favorite brand (and the ONLY company I trust!) is Young Living Essential Oils. I know without a shadow of a doubt that they have been carefully and scientifically distilled so as to retain every one of the naturally occurring chemicals in the plant that bring healing, with NO additives or preservatives. YLEOs are made using “first distillation” (basically, distilled for the minimum amount of time, heat, and pressure so as to preserve the molecule compounds), not “complete distillation,” (this involves chemicals and lots of heat) as some companies advertise. No other essential oil company puts the amount of time and resources into growing, harvesting, and distilling their oils or operate with such integrity that rather than sell a sub-standard oil, they would rather a product be out of stock until a solution can be found. They are the ONLY essential oils company with a true international third-party testing system, and that hold their products to international standards for essential oils (much higher than the US standard). And, they are the ONLY company with a Seed-to-Seal Guarantee. I know that every bottle of YLEO that I invest in is going to give me the results I am expecting and looking for, every time.  (For more information on Young Living’s Seed-to-Seal guarantee, please see www.youngliving.com )

And that, my friends, is how I threw away my entire collection of pharmaceutical drugs and never regretted it. There is an oil for just about everything, and I have invested and learned to use them to address the myriad of issues I was up against, from chronic allergies to annual acute bronchitis. The result of using Young Living Essential Oils has been a much healthier (and much happier) me, who traded awful and debilitating side effects of medications for amazing side benefits and healing of essential oils.

Stay tuned for future articles featuring specific Young Living oils and how they can benefit your health and your family. Young Living has some great starter kit options for beginning oilers.  For questions or more information about how to get started with Young Living Essential Oils, please find me on my new oily Facebook page, Oil for my Lamp or send me a message! You can also find me on the Heritage Living YLEO team website on the OilAmbassadors directory.

Young Living Independent Distributor #1397834

Sour Cream Enchiladas - my version

I've been asked for this recipe countless times but just got around to actually writing it down.  It's just one of those that I've done so many times that I took the basic recipe that I first learned to make and changed it (a lot) til I liked it.  It's a little different every time because I kinda eyeball ingredients and don't really measure anything, but I think these measurements would be pretty close!

 

 

Sour Cream Enchiladas

 

 

1 lb chicken breast, diced or shredded

1 medium onion, diced

2-3 Tbsp butter (for cooking)

1 Tbsp Taco seasoning  (I use a homemade mix but any will do)

1 or 2 green onions, chopped

¼ cup salsa

½ tsp ground cumin (optional)

1 big bag of shredded Mexican cheese

8-10 tortillas

 

Sauce:
¼ cup flour

¼ cup butter

15oz chicken broth (half the carton)

1 cup sour cream

1-4oz. can diced green chiles (these are not spicy)

Black pepper to taste

 

 

Chicken:  You can do this one of two ways. You can dice it up and cook it in butter with the onions until the chicken is cooked through and the onions are transparent. Or, you can be lazy like me and stick your frozen chicken breast in the crockpot with ¼ c of water, on high for 3 hours and then put it straight into your KitchenAid mixer and shred it using the paddle attachment (or shred it with two forks).  Easy peasy. 

 

If you cooked your chicken in the crockpot and shredded it like I did (if you didn’t, you’re on your own!), then melt 2-3 Tbsp butter in a large skillet over Med-high heat and cook the onions in it until tender and transparent (about 4 mins).  Add onions to mixer bowl, along with your taco seasoning, green onions, and salsa.  Mix it up until it looks good. Taste test. Add more seasoning if you prefer. (This is where I might add that ½ tsp of cumin).

 

Start your sauce.  Melt ¼ cup butter in a saucepan over med heat. Stir in flour to make a roux and let it cook for 30 seconds or a minute or so.  Pour in the chicken broth.  Bring to a boil until it starts to thicken, whisking occasionally, usually about 10 minutes. (In the meantime, assemble your enchiladas).  When it is nice and thick, remove from heat and stir in the sour cream and green chiles, taste test and sprinkle in some black pepper to taste.

 

To assemble, use a spoon to put 2-3 scoops of the chicken mixture in the center of a tortilla. Top with a handful of cheese (real precise, right?).  Fold in the sides of the tortilla and then roll it, and place it seam-side down in a greased 9x13 baking dish. I squish ‘em in there and generally fit 8 or 9 in the pan, with one or two laying lengthways down one side.  Pour sour cream sauce over the top and use a spatula to separate them a little to let the sauce run in between them.  Sprinkle about a cup of cheese over the top.

 

Bake in the oven, uncovered, at 400F for about 20 minutes or until hot and bubbly.  Watch toward the end so you don’t burn the cheese. ( Ahem. Not that I’d know anything about that…)   Enjoy!!

Sound Check! Testing, one…two…three

 

Well hello there, long lost blog. (I’m amazed I even remembered the password!)  Just came by to blow the dust off this thing and see if I can crank ‘er up again.  See, I’ve got two little hooligans running the show on my Facebook page, and their antics sort of just get lost in Facebookland and require some digging to find again. They’re pretty special to me, so I think they deserve their own corner of cyberspace.  Then there’s me, and I’m always up to something…experimenting in the kitchen, teaching myself to sew, discovering a crafty side of myself that I never knew existed, learning about essential oils and natural health, and generally loving life as a busy Mama to these adorable little girls who live in my house. 

I’m not sure how long it will take to get back in the swing of things, and I’m definitely not promising any daily digressions here or anything, but bear with me while I give this thing a wee bit of a kick and a shove and help the writing bug find somewhere to let loose.  I realize the current format of this page is WAY cheesy and needs some major renovation…but give me some time to write a few posts and see how it goes before I start tearing down any walls for remodeling.  But I have to admit…I’m feeling a little excited by the prospect.

So…anybody out there who wants to read??