Author Archives: Melissa | Growing Green Nutrition

Friday Funday — Meet our new pet

I’m not really a pet person.  I like animals and all, especially baby animals, but I don’t like animal hair or the idea of spending lots of money on vet bills and other expenses.  It just seems like more trouble than it’s worth.  That said, we seem to have found ourselves a pet . . .

. . . a baby bulldog!

Lip protruding, bulldog style

I can’t imagine taking care of a baby and taking care of a puppy.  Fortunately, we don’t need to get a puppy — we got a two-in-one deal.

Baby Bulldog loves to chew

How babies are like puppies:

  1. Diaper-free time = cleaning up lots of puddles
  2. Chewing everything — Baby Bulldog favors slippers (we’re tempted to buy him a rawhide bone)
  3. Needing lots of attention

What do you think?  Any other ways that babies and puppies are similar?

Great eats

“Great eats” sounds a bit more descriptive, or at least more appetizing, than “Food dump” (the working title of this post), wouldn’t you agree?  We pretty much rocked the kitchen last weekend, yielding a week’s worth of delicious food along the way.

Eating well, especially with a baby in the picture, requires time and effort, I’m not gonna lie to you.*  It works, though, because we enjoy spending time cooking and baking — and the results are totally worth it (the resulting food, that is, NOT the resulting state of the kitchen)!

Friday
Anyhow, the great food parade began last Friday, when I whipped up a big pot of Easy Black Bean Soup to share with our special dinner guests — Gabriel’s great-grandparents — who drove all the way from Texas!  We served the soup with a side of wonderful bread.

How easy is “easy,” you ask?  Easy enough for me to make while home alone with The Dude all day and have dinner on the table before five-thirty.**

Saturday

  • Started the day by making some baked oatmeal, a favorite family recipe from my childhood.
  • Soon thereafter, Matthew started in on his almond croissant project.
  • Dinner = a tasty curry, featuring our garden potatoes and cabbage.

Sunday

  • The culmination of the almond croissant project provided our mid-morning snack.  Matthew’s first attempt at making croissants = huge success!  Watch out, Medici Bakery!
  • For lunch, we feasted on our first attempt of Pi-style deep-dish pizza.
  • Dinner brought a protein-packed Pad Thai.
Almond croissants, fresh out of the oven

Obviously I have some more recipes to post.  Look for those soon.  In the meantime, you can check out the current offerings on the updated and reorganized Green Recipes page.

Finally, you have five more days to vote for Her Green Life in the Circle of Moms Top Vegetarian and Vegan Moms, and you can vote once every 24 hours.  Thanks for your support!

*More on our evening/dinner routine in a coming post.
**A good two hours earlier than we usually eat these days, but it allowed Gabriel to sit at the table with us.

Deep freeze

No, I’m not talking about the weather — that’s been relatively warm.  My reply to a recent post by Mama Gone Green got me thinking about our deep freeze (i.e., chest freezer).

From the time we’ve brought it home over three years ago, we’ve maintained a full fifteen cubic foot deep freeze.  Depending on the time of year, exact contents vary, but they include bulk dry goods (flour, nuts, etc.), homemade baked goods (bread, cookies, muffins), and garden- and locally-grown veggies and fruit.

My reply to the afore-mentioned post, where I mentioned our freezer, made me wonder, “How green is our deep freeze?”

Green

  • Freezing garden and local produce helps us eat more local food more of the year.
  • Using the freezer to store bulk dry goods minimizes trips to the store and packaging.
  • Minimizes the potential for food waste if dry goods were stored at room temperature, with the risk of moths or other pests.
  • Allows us to “bake in bulk,” making and freezing multiple loaves of bread and double batches of relatively healthy muffins and cookie snacks as well as yummy desserts.
  • Baking in bulk makes better use of heating the oven and minimizes our use of prepackaged foods.

Not Green

  • Well, the energy needed to run the freezer, though it was NOT the energy hog we first feared.
  • And, although we do a very good job of using/eating everything we freeze, having the freezer can lead to overdoing things, i.e., purchasing/preserving more than we really need, which can lead to food waste.

We picked a chest freezer to minimize the the first item in the “Not Green” list — chest freezers are much more efficient than upright freezers, as relatively little cold is lost in opening and closing them (on the downside, they are a bit trickier to organize and use when it comes to finding a particular item).

So, do the “Greens” outweigh the “Not Greens?”  Objectively, I don’t know, but they present a fairly strong case.  Many of the items on the “Green” list are benefits for us, in-and-of themselves, especially with the garden produce to preserve and our love for cooking and baking.  I don’t see the freezer going anywhere soon, although we are realizing that it’s size may limit some of our housing options :-/

Buying chocolate

It’s no secret that I love chocolate.  Unfortunately, the farming and transport required to produce chocolate in the United States takes a heavy environmental and social toll, including deforestation and unfair labor practices.  So what’s a chocoholic to do?

First, eat less.  I’m not ready to give up chocolate completely (and I may never be ready for that), but reducing consumption is a step in the right direction.  Easier said than done, perhaps, but to help with moderation . . .

Second, buy high quality chocolate that is grown and produced responsibly and sustainably.  Look for Fair Trade-certified products*.  Sure, this will cost more, but that provides built-in incentive to eat less.

In our quest to buy better chocolate, we found Sweet Earth Chocolates.  Not only is their chocolate in line with our values, it also tastes great (taste is key)!  We’ve been ordering chocolate chips and baking chocolate from them for over a year now.

We just placed our third order (we order a large quantity to last several months), this time for 8-9 pounds of chocolate.  The order total gave me pause, but we will stretch that chocolate out in various baked goods over the next ten months.

We’ve also been meaning to talk to Local Harvest Grocery about carrying some of the chocolate chips in bulk to defray the cost and environmental impact of the shipping involved in our relatively small orders, as well as making the product more accessible to others in St. Louis.

*For more sources of Fair Trade chocolate (and other products), check out this list.

Psst, psst: EC at six months

UPDATE: Hello to all BERF readers!  Because of all the interest in EC, I’ve just added a new post that synthesizes what I’ve learned thus far.  Thanks for visiting Her Green Life. 

So, this post originally had a “five” in the title, but five has come and gone.  At this point, we’re actually closer to seven months than six, but who’s counting?

I’ve been sitting on this post, waiting to have a “Dude on the pot” photo to include, but I’m afraid no photo is quite appropriate.  Most potty opportunities in the past weeks ended with him making his body completely rigid and refusing to sit on the pot.  I finally started joking around with it, holding his rigid little body up over the pot, saying, “Light as a feather, stiff as a board,” except more than half the time, I caught myself saying, “Light as a board, stiff as a feather.”

Anyway, when he resists, we’re not forcing it, but our enthusiasm for offering the potty has definitely waned.  We still offer sometimes, but our number of catches is quite low.  Many of the books talk about “potty pauses,” but I assumed those were numbered in days, maybe a week or two, not weeks or months.  We shall see . . . .

**EC stands for Elimination Communication.  If you’re new to the blog, you can read more about it in the “Psst, psst” series: