Category Archives: Food

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.

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.