Coffee: It's Not Just for Drinking or Mulching or Bug Spray or Pot-scrubbing Anymore

I'm sitting in a comfortable spot, nice and quiet, surrounded by the smell of coffee. No, I'm not at Starbucks. I'm in my own house, and that coffee smell is coming from my skin. Well, what am I supposed to do after reading about how you can make a great scrub from coffee and sugar and coconut oil?

Apparently, I'm way behind on the stuff you can do with coffee and its leftovers. I've known about putting the grounds around growing things since I was a young'un, when my mom would send me sprinting down the rickety back porch stairs in my frayed white Keds with a dented silver metal saucepan full of coffee grounds, with instructions to sprinkle them in a circle around one plant or another. But some of this other stuff is new to me, like mixing it with orange peel to keep bugs and animals away from your garden,  putting them in the refrigerator to absorb odors (hey, if you don't like coffee smell, will the coffee grounds soak that up, too?), to make parchment dye, or to clean out the fireplace (you don't clean with the grounds, you weigh down the ashes with the grounds so they don't fly up...so this one is a little misleading). And there's one more:  to clean pots. Now, this one you DO use the grounds for, as an abrasive. Which makes me wonder what the heck I'm doing to my skin if coffee grounds are scrubby enough to clean a pot.

Anyway, I must say they work pretty well as a skin scrub. Here's the recipe:
2 cups coffee grounds, used or not
1 cup sugar, to taste (Hahaha! I was just kidding. Don't taste this! Your teeth will look like you just ate Oreos and didn't have any milk with them!)
Approximately 1/2 cup coconut oil, liquidated
Mix it all together and put it in a container with a tight lid. Then, when you are taking a shower, scrub yourself with this mixture. Be sure to get it all over your shower curtain, the walls, and the bottom of the tub. Make sure some of it stays underneath your arm, too, and between your toes, and on your head, so that you spend 30 minutes getting rid of all the grounds in your bathroom and on you. Then dry off, put on some cozy clothes, and go sit in your living room. If you feel like a hot beverage, have some tea. Because you're going to be smelling coffee everywhere for a very long time, and you will want a little variety.

© 2014 A Bit of Brie/Anitabrie