The bloggers at enviromom did a great series on reducing the amount of household waste we produce. They have a challenge to reduce your waste to only one can a month. Actually, Saul and I are pretty close already, but there's only two of us. We end up putting out a can every other week, so there's room for improvement still.
Anyway, what's really nice is that they've gone room-by-room in a typical house, listing ways to reduce waste in each room.
http://www.enviromom.com/getting-to-one-garbage-can.html
I'm thinking about requesting that Edgewood borough put this in their monthly newsletter. Besides the environmental effects, our taxes could be much lower if people didn't produce so much waste. Two of my neighbors, both just couples, somehow produce four trashcans of waste every week. How they do that, I'm not sure. I hear one of the couples has all of their dogs paper-trained, so they toss out lots of no-longer-recyclable paper. Not sure what's up with the other couple though.
Thursday, September 11, 2008
Reducing waste
Friday, September 5, 2008
Preserving herbs
Maja asked me about preserving herbs, specifically, freezing v. drying. So, a little late, here's what I figured out.
Last year, I tried freezing some herbs. There seems to be two methods for doing this:
1) Chop and freeze in a bag
2) Place in water and freeze in an ice-cube tray.
I tried both. #2 was pretty bad. Basically, the herbs float to the surface before they freeze, and then they get freezer burned. #1 was ok, but you can't measure it out. Basically, as soon as they thaw, they turn to mush, so you have to put them directly into the soup or whatever.
So, I'm just drying this year. However, I think it works best if you dry the leaves whole, and then crush them later as needed. I think it preserves the scent better.
Unfortunately, you can't smell how amazing my dried parsley is, but here's the photo comparison of the store-bought parsley with my parsley.
Store bought parsley smells faintly of parsley, but mostly of "dried plant". Home grown parsley is the second strongest herb we grow. Saul put some in soup yesterday, and when I walked in the kitchen, that was all I could smell.
Monday, September 1, 2008
Sustainable cleaning
This book lists home-made cleaning products and a few safe store brands. They've got a cost comparison to the name brand cleaners, and they rate the effectiveness compared to the name brand. My favorite so far is the window cleaner. She suggests club soda, with a little blue food dye so that the house cleaner will actually use it. It works well, leaves no streaks, and doesn't smell like vinegar.
Clean House, Clean Planet
I've found a few other, more recently published books, but this one still seems to be the most comprehensive.
Thursday, August 14, 2008
Well, hello there
We found this in the garden.
That is a very LARGE tobacco hornworm. This explains why I kept finding half-eaten green tomatoes on the top of my plants. I think this one guy was doing all the damage. As big as he is, he was really hard to see. I only found him because he was ON the tomato I intended to pick.
I scoured the tomatoes, but found no others. We did have one last year, but it was smaller and covered in wasp eggs (yay for companion gardening!) I planted flowers that attract a particular wasp that kills these worms, and with the exception of this guy, it seems to be working.
He's nearly ready to become a moth, so I didn't have the heart to kill him. I just put him on the other end of the yard with a pile of fallen green tomatoes that he could eat for a day or two.
Tuesday, August 5, 2008
The danag
So, I'm not even sure how to transliterate "danag" properly, but pronounce it how it sounds. It's an Armenian word (actually, it might be Turkish, or just some random word my grandmother made up. See story about this below.). It means, loosely, washcloth. Specifically, during my childhood, it refers to the reusable washcloths that are usually pink, blue, or yellow, are very thin, but soak up lots of water. Refer to picture. Danag:
Anyway, I love these things. First, they are immensely resuable. They're ideal for soaking up large amounts of liquid or wiping down the table and counters. They're also great for dusting and general cleaning. Unfortunately, they're hard to find. Rite-Aid seems to stock them, and sometimes Giant Eagle has them in strange places.
I do sometimes still grab for a paper towel when I should use these. To help get me in the habit, I've made the paper towels harder to access. I've Put the paper towels a cabinet and put a couple reusable wipes in an easy-to grab place. One on the kitchen sink, and one hanging over the stove bar maybe. I've only once thrown them out because they ripped. Most of the time, they get tossed because I used it to clean up something really dirty. I haven't tried throwing them in the wash yet though, so I might try that sometime and see if I can get more out of them.
Random story about danags
One day in my apartment in SLO, my roomie was cooking dinner, and I was in the kitchen clearing the table. We had been doing projects on it, so it was a little dirty. I decided to wipe it down for dinner. So, I turn to my roommate, who is near the sink, and say "Hey Jen, can you hand me the da-" and it hits me. She's not going to know what a danag is. Danag is Armenian. No problem. English. Jen, hand me the what-the-hell-is-that-thing. Thingy. Cleaning thing. Washing thingy. Wipey-downy-thingy. Meanwhile my mouth is open and my roommate is staring at me and my brain basically just seg faults right there. Nothing except my mouth slowly opening and closing.
Anyway, after my brain rebooted, my ego recovered, and I recovered the item in question, I had to ask my roommate what it was called. She looked at me like I was nuts. "Uh, washcloth? What the hell is wrong with you?"
It occurred to me that for 18 years, my mom had been saying "Ciera, take the danag and wash down the table", "Ciera, hand me the danag", and "Ciera, wipe down the patio chairs; I left the danag outside". My dad even uses the word since it wasn't an item he grew up with, so he adopted my mom's vocabulary.
Worst brain fault ever.
Thursday, July 31, 2008
Petroleum-based chemicals in cleaners
Something I learned recently: most detergents contain ingredients based on petroleum. This includes most laundry detergent, dishwashing detergent, and fabric softener. Of course, the companies aren't required to list ingredients, so it's not like you'd notice easily. The other ingredients are also toxic and not bio-degradable. More info here.
So, here's the breakdown of alternatives:
Laundry detergent: There are non-petroleum brands out there. We use Seventh Generation, and I've found it to be pretty good. I haven't noticed any difference at least. Giant Eagle also carries it, so it's easy to get. Watch out though. Tide is marketing something called "Pure Essentials" that is still petroleum based. It sits next to Seventh Gen on the shelf. Clever marketing by Tide....
Fabric softener: From what I can tell, there are no alternatives here. Both sheets and liquid are made from petroleum. We just stopped using it entirely when the last bottle ran out. Honestly, I don't notice any major difference.
Dishwashing detergent: There are non-petroleum options. We tried them. Unfortunately, if you have really hard water, they don't work so well. They somehow left the dishes dirty. Apparently they work best with soft water. They probably would also work better if you pre-rinse, but we don't. So, we went back to the old stuff for now. I'm not totally happy about it, but one step at a time I suppose.
Monday, July 28, 2008
Apartment composting
Let it be well understood that I have not tried any of the following mechanisms myself...
So, without your own happy compost pile, this seems like a pretty hard problem. From what I understand, throwing food scraps in the garbage does not allow them to degrade. They get put in a rather toxic dump where any insects can't really survive well, and there may not be enough oxygen or water to support the bacteria needed.
I've heard of two things you could try if you can't have a compost pile or a fancy compost bin:
In-ground composting
Under this method, you use a kitchen container (like this one) to store scraps for a few days. Then you go outside, anywhere, and dig a hole. Dump in your scraps, cover back over with dirt, and let it be. Bugs will do the rest.
This is supposed to be ideal for people with small yards, bad soil, or home associations that don't allow composting. It's also a great way to make the soil better with little work. If you're in a small apartment building, I bet you could just do this on the property and no one would care.
If raccoons become a problem, apparently covering over the space with a brick for a week works. Then you just move the brick each week when you dig the new hole.
Vermicomposting
This is worm-based composting. As in, you have a box, and you keep pet worms. You feed them all your food scraps and you provide them with a nice "bedding" material. If done properly, there isn't supposed to be any smell, and the resulting soil is extremely fertile and would be good for houseplants. More info about doing this in an apartment!
Honestly, I'd get too busy and forget about them. Maybe they aren't much work, but given how the litterbox smells right now, I don't think I could handle a box of worms...if someone tries this out, let me know! I'm curious whether this is actually doable and reasonable. Given the number of sites that turn up when I search for "worm bin", I suppose quite a few people are going for it, so maybe it's easier than I'm expecting.
Composting
Lizzi asked about composting. I'll post first about what we do, and then about some things I've heard you can do in an apartment situation. So here's my compost mechanism:
What do you mean you don't have a 120 gallon aquarium with a 5 pound garbage disposal with claws and a fondness for biting fingers?
Ok, in reality, Terabyte gets first pick of the veggie scraps, but the rest go into the compost pile. We have a little can in the kitchen which stores the scraps up for a few days, then we dump it outside. This is particularly handy in winter when we don't want to go outside everyday to add scraps.
You'll notice we're pretty lazy composters. No fancy rotating bins for us. No adding worms, no thermometers and water gauges. We dump stuff on, and fancy that, it composts. My neighbor seemed kinda surprised by this concept. :) Once in a while, we turn it, and when we water the garden, we add some water to the pile. Based on the size of our worms, we're doing ok.
To prevent it from smelling, we just add only veggie scraps and yard waste. As long as you don't add any meat or sauces or anything beyond plant matter, it's fine. There's a fair amount of dirt in there, and we turn it every couple of weeks to get the scraps to the inside of the pile and bring the dirt on the top.
We also try to keep a 50-50 mix of greens(fresh plant matter) to browns(dried leaves). Supposedly this is a good balance for soil, but I think it also prevents it from smelling.
Sunday, July 27, 2008
Disappearing zucchini orzo
I got this recipe from Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver. I hate zucchini, but I love this dish and make it every week throughout summer.
3 large zucchini
12 oz. of orzo pasta
3 T. olive oil
4 cloves of garlic, minced
several sprigs of oregano, minced
Parmesan cheese, shredded
- Grate zucchini and put in large pan with olive oil, garlic, and oregano. Put on high.
- Fill pot with water, put on high to boil.
- Continue to stir zucchini. Supposedly, you "saute until golden". In reality it turns into a mushy mess. Just keep stirring until most of the water is out.
- While zucchini cooks, add orzo to boiling water, cook and drain.
- Mix zucchini into orzo.
- Serve topped with parmesan cheese to taste.
Notes:
The zucchini is a pain to shred. I highly suggest using a food processor. I am a big fan of my grating attachment for my KitchenAid mixer, which does this in no time.
This dish is also super-cheap. The zucchini costs 75 cents for a large zucchini from the farmer's market. Continue reading ...
Thursday, July 24, 2008
Our house cleaners
Saul and I hired a cleaning company to do the basic house cleaning for us. (Hey, we're not cleaning 3 toilets and 4 bedrooms). They just do the basics every other week.
We used to have an eco-friendly company come, but they started charging a high price, so we switched to a normal cleaning company. I explained my issue with harsh cleaning chemicals and asked that they please use only the cleaners that I provide.
I don't know what it is with these people though. They can't just do as I ask. The guy who owns the place keeps asking about using a different floor cleaner because the one I provide isn't "disinfecting". I don't want it to be "disinfecting" dammit, I want it to remove the grease and grime! What I don't get is why he apparently feels compelled to discuss this. It really is as though he is as morally opposed to bacteria as I am to dumping ammonia on the floor.
Thinking of...he suggested that he use his own concoction which he "adds disinfectant too". I doubt he got an A in high school chem. Cause if he did, he might know that mixing bleach and ammonia causes chloramine gas.
Info on combining cleaners
Oh well, I might be firing them soon anyway since they haven't come for over almost four weeks.
Monday, July 21, 2008
Roast potatoes and carrots
Woo hoo! Just made this the other night. All the ingredients were from my garden, except the garlic and olive oil. Next year, the garlic will be from my garden too!
8 new potatoes
10 carrots
10 boiler onions (1-2 inch onions)
4 sprigs of rosemary
2 T. olive oil
3 cloves of garlic
- Preheat oven to 450
- Quarter potatoes and onions, mince garlic, slice carrots, strip rosemary leaves
- Mix together and bake for 40 minutes
I used purple and orange carrots for extra color.
Since this recipe is all root veggies, it's particularly good for fall and winter. However, I really wanted to make it now since everything was from the garden. :)
Continue reading ...
Locavore Reading
Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is one of my favorite new books. It's a narrative about one year in her family where they try to eat only local food, with extremely few exceptions (I think they allowed coffee and sugar). She's an extremely accomplished writer, and while I'm not about to try anything like what her family did, it's a wonderful read and full of good information.
If you do decided to eat more local produce, I've found this cookbook to be pretty good.
Awesome herbs
As I mentioned, herbs are everything. Based on the results from my garden, here is the "top list" of herbs that produce well, taste good, and are easy to grow (especially in PA).
Oregano
This is a great herb. It has taken over the pot we planted it in. It makes pretty white flowers. We use it in everything from salad to pasta. It comes back every March, and it grows prolifically until the first hard frost. It also dries well so we have enough for the winter. I have started adding oregano to everything I cook.
Chives
Chives are another plant that come back every March with a vengeance. These things put up shoots when there's still snow on the ground. I started 6 chive plants from seed. Now I have 9 large plants that are 18 inches tall and 6 inches in diameter. They just keep growing. They also put up lovely flowers which are also edible (I have blue, pink, purple, and white). Again, this tastes good in everything from salad to pasta to potatoes. You can harvest pretty hard, and they just come right back. They thrive on neglect. They even flowered when they were in full shade and clay soil.
Parsley
Good old Italian parsley. Unfortunately, it's an annual, but it does produce a lot of leaves. There is a clear difference between home-grown and store-bought parsley. It is extremely strong when grown at home. Be careful with how much you use.
Rosemary
I couldn't start rosemary from seed, and it definitely does better in sun. Not as prolific in PA, but it is a woody perennial and gets bigger every year. We discovered (by accident) that if you pile it over with leaves in November, the plant will remain green underneath. Just uncover it again in April.
Basil
Another annual. This one needs full sun. It's definitely the most finicky of those I've lsited, but hey, everyone can use basil. We also learned that they don't like too much water. Ours nearly drowned this year.
Cinnamon Basil
What's better than basil? Cinnamon basil. Nice spicy scent. Smaller leaves, but the plant is bushier and tolerates part-shade.
Mint
Mint thrives on neglect. At our house, it grows in a bed with terrible soil, and we never water it. Do NOT plant this in a garden, as it will take over! Pot it or put it in a bed by itself (ours grows under the privet hedge). I don't really use it that often, beyond adding it to water, but it does grow well.
We also have lemon thyme, dill, cilantro, and sage at home, but these haven't done quite as well as the above plants.
Rediscovering how to cook
When I was young, we cooked a lot in my family. My mother was a home economics major in college, so cooking is a hobby for her. I remember her trying out a new recipes frequently when I was growing up, and my brother and I both learned to cook from her.
We always ate meals that were well balanced, had at least two sides, and went together well as a menu. Of course, my mother loves to do this, and since this was her major in college, for her, doing this is a matter of keeping up in her field. However, I have another field, and I don't have the patience to do this. Additionally, we only have two people to feed, so making a 3 course meal seems over-the-top for us (though I suspect my mom always cooked like this, even when living by herself). So, when faced with make-a-big-meal-with-an-hour-of-prep or cook-pasta-and-dump-in-sauce, Saul and I always go for the later.
When I decided we should start eating only local produce and meat at home, I was really concerned about the cooking. I mean, then we'd have to prepare big meals, and that kind scared me. Somehow in my head, the only options were gourmet meal or packaged meal. Kind of ridiculous, but looking back, that's what we ate at my house. (Unless my dad cooked, then it was always "Dave's Surprise"). I really need to get over the fact that I'm not my mother. I think I've made progress, at least in the cooking realm.
I started trying to find seasonal recipes, but they all looked rather frightening. I think the problem is that if the recipe is simple, people don't write it down because it seems obvious. Except that, if you're one of us who don't cook gourmet meals, it isn't obvious. :)
Here's what I've rediscovered about cooking:
I think the most important thing was that I actually attempted, on several occasions, to make something based upon a pile of veggies in my fridge and some herbs in the garden. The first few attempts were just steamed veggies. Then saute veggies. Then saute veggies with sauce. Finally, roasted veggies. If they are fresh and local, there really is no need to do anything fancy with them. They'll just taste good on their own.
I think it still takes a few recipes to get going (I sure needed them). So I'm going to post my recipes, even the simple ones, as I make them at home when veggies come in season. I'm going to back-date a few posts to spring to fill in for next year. Since what I can make changes every month, I tend to forget myself what recipes are good, even the simple ones.
Sunday, July 20, 2008
Welcome to the garden
I've been thinking about starting this blog for a while. My "liberal guilt" has been causing me to change how I live over the last several years, and looking back, I've changed my lifestyle quite a bit in little ways. It's been hard to find information though about living more ecologically. I mean, we all know to change out the lightbulbs and that organic food is good (though expensive). And yeah, we should take public transit. We've changed the lightbulbs, we own a Prius, and while I'll pay an extra $1 for organic at Giant Eagle, I'm not paying 4x the price for the same thing at Whole Foods.
There's actually a lot of info about living ecologically online. However, a lot of it seems to be focused on families with babies. This makes sense really; parents are naturally going to be more concerned about what goes in Junior's mouth. But it's a lot about diapers and bottles and baby food and rattles, and for those of us that are DINKS (Dual-Income No Kids), a good 50% of these blogs don't really apply. They also seem very "mommy-centric", which I just feel odd about (are there any daddies out there?)
Maja reminded me last night that I really should start this blog. I've got huge lists of recipes for eating locally, random tips for cleaning the house in without harsh chemicals, and other random resources. If you're a busy young professional (or grad student), it's hard to find the info that actually applies your life and is reasonably practical (ie: I don't shop at Whole Foods). So, hopefully this helps people out, and also helps me remember things (like what I can eat in January if I'm only eating local food!)
Thursday, July 10, 2008
Peanut Butter Pasta
Fettucini
1-2 broccoli, cut into florets
2-3 garlic cloves, minced
3-6 carrots, sliced
2 T. olive oil
Peanut sauce (see below)
- Start heating water for pasta and make the peanut sauce.
- Start cooking pasta and saute vegetables in the olive oil. They should still retain a little crunch when done.
- Pasta and veggies should be done around the same time. Drain pasta and dump the two together.
- Serve pasta and veggies and pour sauce on top.
Notes:
I've also used red bell pepper or peas, depending on what's in season.
This seems to work best in leftovers if you keep the sauce separate until you eat it. Otherwise the sauce dries out.
Peanut sauce
1/2 c. peanut butter
3 T. sesame oil
3 T. soy sauce
3 T. rice vinegar
1/2 c. chicken broth
1 T. cilantro
1 T. red pepper flakes
- Mix peanut butter with sesame oil
- Mix in soy sauce. Mixture will turn brown and change consistency to be thicker.
- Mix in vinegar. Mixture will lighten and change consistency again, this time thinner.
- Slowly mix in chicken broth. If you do it too fast, you get chunky sauce. Add only a little at a time.
- Mix in cilantro and pepper flakes.
Notes:
For spicier sauce, add more sesame oil and more pepper flakes.
This recipe assumes non-natural peanut butter (like Jiff or Giant Eagle brand). Honestly, I haven't quite got the consistency right using natural peanut butter yet. I'd make it with the bad stuff the first time so you can get the idea how it should taste. Once I get the recipe right using natural peanut butter, I'll post it. So far, I've had luck by using less vinegar, less soy, and a lot of sesame oil. I also have to add more broth to thin it down properly. I suspect it will work better still if I add some peanut oil.
Continue reading ...
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