Thanksgiving is The Green Mommy’s favorite holiday. It takes place during her favorite time of year and she loves that it’s a day when most Americans celebrate together. Even though it’s been 18 years since she’s dined on the main course of turkey, it hasn’t diminished her love for the holiday’s cuisine.
Posted in eco holidays, food
Tagged meatless dishes, vegetarian dishes, Vegetarian Thanksgiving
Friday night is Movie Night at Recycla’s house. Her children put on their pajamas and pick out a good DVD. Recycla’s husband pops popcorn, because who can watch a movie without popcorn? This has been an important tradition for years in Recycla’s household, but a few years ago, it went through a significant change.
What changed and why?
Recycla found out that popcorn makes the Top 10 list of foods most often contaminated with pesticides and other chemicals.
Gulp.
After years of serving her children organic apples, strawberries, grapes, and other produce, it turns out Recycla had actually been serving up bowls of toxic treats.
Luckily, there are plenty of organic popcorn options out there.
For the microwave popcorn fans, Recycla highly recommends Newman’s Own Organics popcorn. This is the best microwave popcorn available, period. Instead of the usual greasy, salty microwave popcorn, NOO microwave popcorn is light, not greasy, and not too salty. NOO does not use partially hydrogenated oils or any trans fatty acids. Available in unsalted, lightly salted, and butter flavors.
For popcorn purists, microwave popcorn is not acceptable. They either pop their popcorn on the stove top or in a popper like the Stir Crazy. Per Enviro Girl’s suggestion, Recycla bought one for her family several years ago and they’ve never gone back to the microwave stuff. The flavor is just so much better than microwave options. Or, pop the corn on your stove.
Tell the Eco Women: Are you a popcorn fan? Do you like yours salty and buttery or some other way?
Posted in food
Coming Soon: October 16 is Blog Action Day, and this year’s topic is FOOD! What a great topic! On that day, bloggers will cover topics including sustainable food production, the availability of food, the cost of food, creative ways to serve food, malnutrition, hunger, becoming vegetarian and favorite foods. As an omnivore, Enviro Girl can’t wait for October 16th!
Speaking of food, Enviro Girl read an interesting piece the other day: How That Food You Throw Out Is Linked to Global Warming. Wasting food resources has significant environmental impact, but people often don’t think about it. The energy spent on food production and transportation could be reduced if we reduced the 55 million tons of food we throw away. Enviro Girl has read other staggering statistics on food waste–and she’s been guilty of throwing away food at her house too. It’s a common thing to find gross stuff in refrigerators, but tossing out a bag of food each month is a waste of money and many other resources as the article explains.
Waste aside, Enviro Girl began really examining her family’s shopping and food consumption habits about two years ago. It bugged her to literally throw out money from her fridge every month. How could she fix this problem? Here are three of the things she did to reduce her family’s food waste:
1. Meal planning. Instead of randomly shopping for food each week, Enviro Girl started writing a list of what she planned to make for meals ahead of her weekly trip to the grocery store. AFTER taking inventory of the necessary ingredients, Enviro Girl would shop for what she needed. By planning meals a week in advance, Enviro Girl saved time, money and threw out less wasted food. This also resulted in less stress–instead of asking “what’s for dinner?” at 5:00 each evening, her family knew chicken casserole was on the menu and every part of the meal was assembled beforehand for fast preparation without any missing ingredients causing delays.
2. Eating down the pantry. Once every few months Enviro Girl skips her weekly shopping trip and makes meals out of what she finds in her pantry, fridge and freezer. This forces her family to eat the frozen half of a lasagna they’ve saved before it succumbs to freezer burn. This keeps Enviro Girl from stockpiling ingredients for meals she didn’t get around to making. By managing her family’s resources by hoarding almost no food, Enviro Girl never throws out bottles of ketchup that expired in 1998 or cans of soup that should’ve been sold in 2002.*
3. Buying less. Sure, there are 5 people in Enviro Girl’s family, but that doesn’t mean she needs to buy 5 pears or 5 oranges. (She’s not sure why she kept doing this for so long, but one way she figured out her family’s consumption habits was by buying less to see what they actually ran short of and what they never really ate.) Enviro Girl began buying less perishable food more often. This meant the food she bought actually got eaten before it became rotten and turned to mush in her produce drawer. Buying less perishable food means throwing out less rotten food.
* Bonus tip: Every time there’s a food drive, Enviro Girl donates every unopened can/box/jar of food she can find in her pantry. This insures that nothing remains beyond its expiration date and when there’s less clutter, Enviro Girl can take better inventory of what her family really needs.
If you don’t have much money, feeding a big family takes talent, creativity and a lot of hard work. One of the ways you can save money is by using leftovers to make new meals. And if you run out of staples, you can always make your own.
For example, if you run out of maple syrup, you can make some homemade almond or vanilla syrup simply by using butter and brown sugar.
Homemade syrup:
INGREDIENTS:
• 1 Cup water
• 1 Cup brown sugar
• ½ cube butter
Heat to a boil, then take off the heat and cool for a couple minutes. Serve over pancakes or waffles
You can also use ½ Cup light corn syrup, if you are out of butter and flavor with 1 tablespoon of vanilla or almond flavoring.
Another easy to make staple is Sweet and Sour sauce.
INGREDIENTS:
¼ cup water
½ cup ketchup
¼ cup vinegar
Heat in a saucepan until mixture comes to a slight boil. Pull off heat and use as a sauce or glaze.
One more easy staple you can make with things you have sitting around the house is BBQ sauce.
INGREDIENTS:
½ Cup water
½ Cup ketchup
¼ Cup brown sugar
(optional: garlic, Tabasco sauce, salt, pepper)
Heat to a boil then let cool – use as a sauce.
These are all easy ways to make some simple staples to help stretch your grocery budget.
Posted in food, living green on a budget
For the past two weeks, the Eco Women have been talking about how to get your children geared up for school. But what about fueling their young bodies? What’s the best thing to feed your junior eco warriors?
As any pediatrician will tell you, skipping breakfast is not an option if you want your child to be healthy. All humans need food for fuel in the morning and growing children really need their nutrients to get their day started. Foods that provide a good balance of protein, fruits, and healthy grains and not too much sugar or saturated fats are the way to go. You also want to make sure your child starts the day well hydrated — a glass of milk, juice, a smoothie, or even water are all good options.
Here in Recycla’s house, one daughter is a morning person who likes a big breakfast before school, while the other one would prefer to sleep in and then skip breakfast, so their preferred breakfasts differ greatly. The girls are middle schoolers, so they’re old enough to help in the kitchen, including making their own breakfast. Recycla keeps the pantry and fridge stocked with a variety of options that are quick and easy to prepare on busy weekday mornings.
Here are some sample breakfasts:
These are just a few ideas. What you don’t see on this list is very many processed foods and definitely no “to go” foods. While the Eco Women recognize that some families are truly on the go, they are loathe to recommend any sort of packaged, processed cereal bars, toaster pastries, or (worse) stopping and buying McFood on your way to school. Not only are these foods bad for your children’s bodies, they’re bad for your family’s budget. It’s actually cheaper to eat green, than it is to eat conventionally.
Tell the Eco Women: What do you and your family like to eat for breakfast?
Posted in eco kids, food, living green on a budget
Enviro Girl had the unique experience of sending two of her sons to public school and one of her sons to parochial school last year. At the large public school hot lunch was mostly reheated food–beans from giant cans heated and served, chicken nuggets from giant freezer bags heated and served, pizza from giant pallets heated and served. The public school serves 800 students, so Enviro Girl understands they labor under constraints. That said, her youngest begged her to pack a cold lunch since he hated the hot lunch.
Meanwhile, Enviro Girl put in service hours at the parochial school’s lunch room since she’s not Catholic and wanted to get to know people at her oldest’s new school. She watched the head cook prepare beans using olive oil and different seasonings, whole chickens roasted on trays, fresh fruit chopped daily for the salad bar offerings. The parochial school serves 120 daily and her son avoided hot lunch when it involved gravy.
A lot of schools are making an effort to serve fresh, local produce in season and reduce the fat and salt kids eat. Changing school cafeteria food is a cumbersome process, as convoluted as congressional budget debates since FDA requirements are completely out of sync with healthy diets and many school cafeterias don’t have the staff trained to prepare food, they have workers trained to operate can openers and ovens.
The best way to insure your kids will eat a healthy meal at school is still, in most cases, to send that lunch with them. Here are a few tips on making that lunch environmentally and kid friendly:
1. The Bag: Reduce your waste by investing in a good lunch box or bag. Enviro Girl’s kids like using their Eco Lunchbox (pictured below). Made from stainless steel, this is heavy duty, resuable and dishwasher safe. Other good lunchbox options include The OOTS! Lunch Box and Land’s End lunch bags. Recycla mentions many great lunchboxes in this post, too.
2. The Wrapping: Ditch the plastic sandwich baggies and cling wrap. There are plenty of plastic-free, reusable ways to wrap your kids’ food in their bag lunch. Dainty Baby has cute reusable sandwich wraps and Enviro Girl found similar ones at a local “green” store. Stainless steel water bottles and containers can be found nearly everywhere now at low cost–it’s ridiculous to shell out for disposable packaging when buying reusable costs about the same. The only trash in her kids’ bag lunch is the napkin and the occasional Twinkie wrapper. It’s a cinch to put a fistful of raw veggies or fruit into a reusable tin and fill a small water bottle with juice or milk. It’s just as simple to toss these containers in dishwasher or wash them up by hand each night. Since she has boys, Enviro Girl really likes the sleek look of these Small Sidekick To-Go tins:
3. The Stuffing: Okay, you’ve acquired a plastic-free lunch bag with PVC-free tins and sandwich wraps. What will you pack in your kid’s lunch? Enviro Girl finds her kids like to keep their lunchtime meal simple and filling, but they require nutrition to keep their brain functioning at full-throttle until the end of the day. This means a good portion of protein and carbohydrates with some crisp and crunchy texture followed up by something sweet. She will pack something from each of the categories below:
* Sandwiches on whole-grain bread–turkey or peanut butter, Nutella or tuna salad, egg salad or roast beef. She’ll sometimes roll up sandwiches using tortillas to create wraps.
* Fresh veggies–carrots, grape tomatoes, celery, broccoli and sweet peppers all go into those tins. Her kids don’t like to dip food, but Enviro Girl suggests adding a light dressing on the side for the reluctant veggie eater.
* Piece of fruit–apple, banana, pear, peach, orange. Grapes, berries, pineapple and kiwi also travel well. For kids requiring sliced food, sliced apples will stay crisp and “white” if you dunk them in saltwater.
* Drinks–100% juice (NO JUICE COCKTAILS–that’s code for “sugar water”), milk, water. A few ice cubes will keep things cold on a hot day.
* Something extra–yogurt, pretzels, trail mix, granola, Goldfish crackers, raisins, nuts, chips, cookie, dessert bar, pudding, cheese or crackers will add some crunch, some sweet, some “different” to the mix. She buys or makes this stuff in bulk and reduces her use of packaging by not buying “single pack” things for her kids’ lunches.
She’s not the most creative cook in the world, but Enviro Girl recommends checking out Two Bears Farm and Cooking Out of the Box for some great kid-friendly recipe ideas.
Posted in 3 Rs, eco kids, food, living green on a budget, school
Tagged eco back to school lunches, eco friendly school lunch, environmentally friendly school lunch, getting kids to eat healthy, green lunch boxes, green school lunch, healthy school lunch boxes, healthy school lunches, how to pack a healthy school lunch, plastic free lunch, plastic free school lunch, reusable school lunch bags, sandwich wraps
A few years ago, Recycla’s family was traveling in England and went to a grocery store to pick up some supplies for a picnic, including peanut butter for their daughters’ sandwiches.
They immediately noticed that it was very different from American peanut butter — not as smooth and definitely not as sweet. A look at the ingredients list showed just two things: peanuts, salt. That was it. The family liked the peanut butter and happily snacked on it with freshly-baked bread every day. But when they got home, they continued buying and eating the Very Well Known (not organic or natural) peanut butter they had been eating for years.
Later that year, they went to Canada and, while there, had peanut butter again. As with its British counterpart, Canadian peanut butter was much simpler than the American version — just peanuts and a little salt. And, again, the family really liked it.
When the family returned home, Recycla did some research. Unlike the British and Canadian peanut butters, the American stuff her family had been eating contained more than just two ingredients, including sugar and hydrogenated oils. While this isn’t horrible, the fact is, peanut butter is already oily, so more oil isn’t needed. And sugar is definitely not necessary, especially since so many people eat jelly on their PB&J’s.
The family decided to make the switch to a peanut butter that contains just two ingredients. They found several options, including the Whole Foods house brand. It’s simple, it’s yummy, and best of all, it’s not expensive.
While conventional vs. organic peanut butter is more of a health thing and isn’t a huge deal in the eco spectrum, Recycla encourages you to try something other than the major brands that contain excess oils and sugars. If you think the new texture and flavor won’t fly with picky palates, try cutting in some of the new stuff with the old stuff, then gradually phase out the old stuff.
If enough people switch away from the extra oily, extra sweet peanut butter, it will send a message to manufacturers that Americans don’t want the extra ingredients. In fact, the Big Peanut Butter Companies appear to have already received the message, as they all now offer “natural” peanut butters. Unfortunately, those versions still contain more than just two ingredients, including sugar and palm oil.
Tell the Eco Women: Do you eat peanut butter? If so, have you tried the organic stuff? And, are you a creamy or chunky peanut butter person?
Posted in food
Enviro Girl read this news piece recently about Kraft adding cauliflower to their trademark macaroni and cheese recipe. Reportedly this move is a response to consumer demand to help kids eat more vegetables–by sneaking them into meals. Apparently the cauliflower gets freeze-dried and then pulverized into powder before it’s added to the pasta flour used to make the noodles.
On one hand, Enviro Girl is a lazy mom who hates hates hates to make dinner and constantly battles to get her kids to eat healthy.
On the other hand, Enviro Girl scoffs at the notion that a half cup of pulverized, freeze-dried vegetables has any significant nutritional value. Especially when combined with the salt, sugar and chemicals included in processed convenience foods like Kraft Macaroni & Cheese. Enviro Girl knows a clever ad campaign will convince well-meaning parents that this is a healthier option to feed their kids. She also knows she’s not buying this line. The best vegetables are plain old vegetables, raw, steamed, seared, pureed, sliced, diced, chopped or mashed. She gets the veggies down her kids’ throats by setting them on the table and on their plates. Hungry before dinner? Eat carrots–they’re sitting right there, easy to grab and munch.
Part of the issue here is the perception about food. Kids can be picky eaters, prone to wanting only grains and sweets when they’re young. Does that mean we don’t provide kids with foods that are good for them? Does that mean we quit putting a serving of vegetables on their plates? Is it possible a kid might try eating cauliflower (or peas or beans or beets) simply because they’re prepared well and look desirable? (Slightly grey and very mushy vegetables dumped out of a can and reheated don’t appeal to most kids, but a bright pile of seasoned steamed squash, peppers and zucchini could coax them into tasting.)
The emphasis in most families is on the main course–the meat and grain served at a meal. Could the perception shift if parents asked “what vegetable should I make for supper tonight?” Could the perception shift if more than one vegetable was offered as a side dish? Would kids eat more vegetables if they weren’t already stuffed full of sugary carbohydrates?
Another issue is cost. It’s amazing that a box of convenience food containing freeze-dried, pulverized cauliflower costs less than an actual head of cauliflower. Consumer demand needs to push food producers to making healthy food an accessible and affordable option for everyone. And if the heavy hitters like Con Agra and Kraft won’t do it, then we can take our business elsewhere–to the farm up the road, to our own back yards.
It’s possible, Enviro Girl thinks, for parents to reclaim healthy eating and affordable food for their tables. But it’ll mean thinking outside of the box.
Tell the Eco Women, what’s your take on this issue?
Now that it’s July and the days are hothothot, the basil in Recycla’s garden is growing like crazy. This makes her very happy, as she loves adding fresh basil to pasta dishes and other Mediterranean-influenced foods.
Recycla is growing more than a dozen basil plants this year, most sweet and Genovese basils. That might like a lot, but she preserves most of her basil for the cold months and thus needs to harvest and preserve as much as she can in the next two months, when the nights start to get cooler and basil stops growing.
Oh sure, Recycla could buy basil at the grocery store, but she thinks that dried basil is an inferior substitute and she flat-out refuses to spend $5 or more on a small bunch of fresh basil when she grows it herself with almost no effort. So every year she plants basil and literally reaps the benefits.
How does Recycla preserve her basil? By making basil paste — here’s how:
See? It couldn’t be any easier.
Tell the Eco Women: What is your favorite recipe with basil?
Recycla has been working on a fun project with her daughters this summer: She’s teaching them how to cook. And by cooking, Recycla means cooking real food from scratch, not assembling pre-packaged ingredients.
While there are plenty of people who default to eating McFood or mixing up boxes of this ‘n’ that because they think it’s quicker or easier or less expensive, Recycla is here to tell that it’s not so. Every day across America, thousands of people make the same choice. They opt for convenience over nutrition, flavor, and cost.
There is a better option — slow food. And that is what Recycla has been teaching her daughters.
Slow food is good food.
Slow food is real food.
Slow food is healthy food.
Slow food is less expensive than fast food.
The Slow Food movement began in Italy over 20 years ago as a reaction to the culinary horrors of fast food and has since spread to nearly all corners of the globe. The objectives of the Slow Food movement include, but are not limited to:
Slow Food is about bringing back traditions that sustained humans for centuries but that are now being lost to the conveniences of fast food.
What can you do?
The most important thing is not to eat McCrap. Instead, prepare your own meals. Easier said than done, right? However, even if you cook only a couple of nights a week, it’s better than nothing. And these don’t have to be lavish, multi-course affairs. Pasta tossed with some chopped tomatoes and freshly-grated Parmesan will take 20-25 minutes. Omelettes and frittatas take 20 minutes. A Greek salad can take 15 minutes.
And that is what Recycla is teaching her daughters. While she has long involved them in the kitchen and the girls already know a lot, this summer the girls are helping her plan meals for the week; they are going with her to the go to the grocery store, farmers’ market, and/or local organic butcher to get the food supplies; and then they are cooking alongside her in the kitchen. So far, the girls have made dinners as simple as pasta tossed with frozen vegetables to the slightly-more-involved baked chicken and mashed potatoes to the even-more-involved spaghetti and meatballs. Each meal has involved simple ingredients — no pre-packaged foods — and nothing has taken inordinate amounts of time to prepare.
Recycla will admit that it’s a bit more work for her to show her girls step-by-step what they need to do than if she just does the cooking herself. However, all humans need to eat; therefore, they need to learn how to cook. Recycla is going beyond just teaching her daughters how to follow a recipe — she’s explaining to them HOW and WHY things are in the kitchen so that they’ll understand the basic processes of cooking. She’s also teaching them basic kitchen skills that everyone should know — for example, how to use a knife properly and safely. (By the way, Recycla highly recommends In the Green Kitchen by Alice Waters, which teaches readers all the necessary basic kitchen skills.)
At this point, Recycla’s pre-teen daughters know how to do a lot, but there’s always more that they can learn.Eventually, she knows that they’ll be able to prepare a meal from start to finish without her input and she knows that day is coming soon.
In the larger scheme of things, Recycla is not only giving her daughters valuable life skills, she’s also creating memories with them — baking a birthday cake for their grandfather, inviting some friends over and working as a team to make ice cream and brownies for their sleepover, making their father’s favorite dinner and listening to him shower them with compliments for a delicious meal, and more. The girls are having a lot of fun, which is important because cooking should not be a burden.
Tell the Eco Women: Do you cook? If so, how much? How old were you when you learned how to cook?
Posted in food, health, issues, living green on a budget
