Author Archives: Melissa | Growing Green Nutrition

Lotion potion

About this time last year, I whipped up my first batch of body butter, hoping to combat dry, itchy winter skin as well as stretch marks* on my growing body.  Looking back, I realize I only wrote about my intention to make homemade body butter, not the results.

The rest of the story . . .
After failing to find local sources for cocoa butter and shea butter, I went online and purchased those two items, as well as jojoba oil and sweet almond oil.  For my first recipe, I basically followed the “body butter cream” recipe here.

The results were pretty good, and once I used my first batch, I made a second batch, with a few tweaks [that I failed to record].  The second batch lasted until The Dude came along, after which point I didn’t have time to apply body butter, much less make it.

With the relatively mild temps so far, my skin is faring well this winter (knock on wood!), but I still have my dry spots.  After lots of good intentions, and much perusing recipes, I finally got around to trying my hand at lotion.Continue reading “Lotion potion”

Top 25 Vegan and Vegetarian Moms

HerGreenLife is in the running for Circle of Moms’ Top 25 Vegan and Vegetarian Moms.  To support HerGreenLife,  just follow the link and scroll through the candidates to vote.  (You can vote once every 24 hours, and voting closes on February 14th.)

I’ve been vegetarian for just over seven years now. I know a good bit about nutrition (I have enough college credits in nutrition to be considered a “nutritionist,” though not a dietitian, by most employers), and that foundation makes me confident in my dietary choices.

Though I don’t need outside validation, the last 15+ months provide some satisfactory evidence that my diet is not lacking.  Over nine months, I grew a big, healthy baby on a vegetarian diet*, and for the last 6 1/2 months, he’s thrived on nothing other than mama’s milk 🙂

As I wrote earlier this week, the time has come to expand The Dude’s one-item food menu, and we look forward to introducing him to our way of eating, meals filled with flavor, variety, and lots of nutrients, striving to eat in a way that is good for the body and gentle on the planet.

*In the interest of full disclosure, I took a high-quality fish oil supplement while pregnant, so I wasn’t quite vegetarian, technically speaking.

Read more about my thoughts on a vegetarian diet:
Vegetarian I
Vegetarian II

Chocolate cherry bread

I spent the summer between my sophomore and junior years of college in Ann Arbor, Michigan.  I have lots of great memories from that summer, including the chocolate cherry bread from Zingerman’s Bakehouse:

Yes, you really can bake a chocolate-based bread. And yes, it’s as good (or better) than your imagination.  A chocolate lover’s fantasy come true . . . .

However, at $17 + shipping per loaf, my chances of enjoying this deliciousness anytime soon were very slim, unless . . . I made it myself!  I hunted down some likely recipes and sent them to Matthew, requesting the bread as a Christmas present.

Luckily for me, he created a delicious loaf on his first try!

Luckily for you, he’s sharing the recipe 🙂Continue reading “Chocolate cherry bread”

Fun with food: Baby-led weaning

We started letting The Dude experiment with solid foods in mid-December, when we handed him a stick of either rutabaga or turnip (we don’t remember which anymore, but either way, it was from our garden).  He enjoyed it as an alternative teether as much as anything.

Since the beginning of the month, we’ve been making a more concerted effort to let him sit at the table and try some solid food at least once a day.  After reading the eponymous book, I decided Baby-led Weaning made a lot of sense:

Baby-led weaning is a way of introducing solid foods that allows babies to feed themselves – there’s no spoon feeding and no purées. The baby sits with the family at mealtimes and joins in when she is ready, feeding herself first with her fingers and later with cutlery (from the BLW leaflet).

So far, he’s tried rutabaga/turnip, carrot, sweet potato, rice cake, broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, pear, apple, pumpkin, oatmeal, and homemade bread.  Many of his first foods came from our garden.

Yum, broccoli!

As this photo (and later, his diaper) attests, he was pretty into the broccoli.  Actually at one point during this “Fun With Cruciferous Veggies” meal, he was double-fisting broccoli and cauliflower.  At another point, he put the cauliflower in his mouth, leaving his hands free, one to hold broccoli, the other to hold cabbage.

Squash facial mask

Although this picture might look more like conventional puree spoon-feeding, the difference is that The Dude is “feeding” himself.  Also, we did not cook and puree this squash for him, we just happened to have extra from a big batch we prepared for pumpkin bread.

In addition to the website link above, you can read more about Baby-led Weaning here.  So far, we’re taking it slowly and having fun introducing the delicious, wholesome foods that make up a regular part of our diets.

Black ice and bikes

I recently did a guest interview for Simply Bike’s “Biking While Pregnant” series — you can read it here.

People often express surprise at the weather conditions we bike in, which include some pretty extreme temps (hot and cold),  rain, wind, and snow.  For us (though much less so for me, at the moment), these conditions are just part of using a bicycle for transportation.

As a general rule, there are two conditions in which we don’t bike: ice on the road and lightning storms.  Late Friday afternoon, freezing rain coated area roads just in time for rush hour.  After a failed attempt to fit his bike in a coworker’s car, followed by narrowly missing a bus, Matthew decided to chance the icy streets rather than wait 20-30 minutes for the next bus.

He made it to within a few blocks of our apartment and then went down on some black ice on a side street.  Fortunately, he escaped with just a few bruises and aches.  (His bike is also fine.)  After making it to the sidewalk (he said the street was so slippery he could barely stand up!), he opted to walk the remaining blocks.

The next day, when I suggested biking to an afternoon apartment appointment, he was understandably hesitant.  With the roads still icy in the morning, I reluctantly agreed to the car.  When the time came, I walked outside and proclaimed, “We totally could have biked.”

Our destination was less than two miles away, the kind of trip that can really almost be reached by bicycle as fast as by car, and we had fifteen minutes, so we headed to the basement for the bikes, quickly donned cold weather riding gear, and pedaled down the road.

As it turned out, the apartment was a total flop.  I would have been really annoyed if we had driven, but the bike ride turned it into a nice afternoon outing — so glad we reassessed road conditions, and that Matthew was willing to get back in the [bike] saddle.