How can I possibly work Orange Essential Oil into my cooking?

Dear Oily,

I love all the citrus oils. I put Lemon Essential Oil in my Ningxia Red, I take Grapefruit Essential Oil in a capsule daily, and I diffuse Citrus Fresh like it is going out of style. But my favorite citrus essential oil has got to be Orange! Yum!

I want to cook with my Orange Essential Oil but don’t know where to start. I love a drop in my Chamomile tea but I haven’t moved beyond the beverage stage of cooking with EOs.

When searching online, I’m just finding complicated recipes. Do you know any simple recipes using Orange Essential Oil that will not have me running for the hills?

Signed,

Orange you glad I asked?

Dear Orange,

Ask Oily here! I’m going to let my good friend Darlene from Sitting for Carrots answer this one. She’s awesome at using essential oils for cooking. While she answers your question, I am going to take a nap. Cold and flu season has totally caught up with me!

Darlene says: You have no idea how happy this question makes me! I too am obsessed with Young Living Orange Essential Oil!

I totally understand where you are, trying to crossover to actually cooking with oils and graduating from the “I put them in my beverages sometimes” phase. Even though I love to cook I was in this beverage phase for almost a year!

I’ve got THREE super simple recipes that will knock your socks off and impress family and friends!

How do I make bath salts?

Dear Oily,

I just had a new soaking tub installed in my house, and I’d love to put it to good use. Unfortunately, I just saw this really scary article about a woman who used some store-bought bath fizz thing and it turned her skin purple!

I want a relaxing bath but I don’t want to be soaking in some chemical concoction that will turn my skin purple. I also want something easy to make.

Got any ideas?

Soak It Up

Dear Soak,

Are you sure you don’t want purple skin? You’d probably look really cool. I always wanted purple hair when I was younger. Sigh!

Annnnnyway, you’re very wise to stay away from store bought bath fizzies and salts and bombs and torpedoes and bazookas… yeah. Whatever they’re called, they can contain artificial fragrance (yuck!) and chemical dyes and coloring.

Don’t ingredients like Yellow 5 & 10 + Blue 1 + Red 28 sound like they’ll give you that lovely purple skin you never wanted?

Fortunately, you can avoid the chemical-colorful-cocktail and get a relaxing soak in the tub all without too much work. All you need is bath salts! Yep, homemade bath salts. I’ve made them many times, and they are one of the easiest and best DIYs ever! Seriously.. so easy.

How can I make sexy massage oil?

Dear Oily,

This weekend, our kids were away so my husband thought he’d treat me to a sensual massage. Unfortunately, the massage oil he bought from the store was awful! It smelled terrible and I had a horrible reaction to it.. everywhere!

Can I use essential oils to make a sexy massage oil?

Sincerely,

Chemical Reaction

Dear Reaction,

Yikes! It does not seem like you had a good weekend at all!

I can understand why your body had a reaction though. If you check out the back of the massage oil (if it even has a list of ingredients!), it may contain some gems like parabens and fragrance.

Fragrance can be a crazy concoction of thousands of different artificial/chemical/synthetic components. That doesn't sound sexy at all!

Fortunately, you can absolutely use quality essential oils (I would only ever use these) to make a natural, sexy, massage oil. You'll know exactly what's in it, and it’s really easy to whip up!