Category Archives: Green Ideas

Pasta! Pasta!

When I requested pasta with pesto as an easy weeknight meal (extra easy because we made the pesto earlier in the week), I certainly wasn’t expecting to come home to this.

Homemade whole wheat pasta made from locally grown wheat!

We’ve been talking about making our own pasta for awhile now but feared that we would not be able to get the dough thin enough without some fancy pasta maker.  The full pasta-making kit attachment for our stand mixer costs about as much as the mixer itself, not to mention that you’d be buying some tools that do just one thing — make pasta.

So Matthew found a recipe for whole wheat pasta, pulled out our lovely made-in-Missouri rolling pin, and got to work.

No pasta maker?  No problem.  Matt still wants to tweak some things, but I thoroughly enjoyed our first homemade pasta venture — whole wheat fettuccine.

Green features:

  • 99% local ingredients (flour, water, and eggs) — only the salt was non-local
  • Avoids packaging of store bought pasta

One month too late

We’ve been enjoying the fall flowers brightening up our apartment these last few weeks.  When we planned our wedding, I had the delusion that maybe, if we had a very nice, mild fall, I could carry a homegrown (or at least locally grown) bouquet down the aisle in mid-November.  Turns out, not so much.

My MIL made some beautiful dried flower (and other natural product) arrangements to decorate the altar and pews, but for the bouquets and boutonnieres, I reluctantly resorted to conventionally grown flowers (with  all the chemical nastiness and poor working conditions for people in other countries 😦 ), but in an unconventional way.

See, just like many grocery stores and restaurants throw away unconscionable amounts of food every day, large florists do the same thing — but with flowers.  Dumpsters full of perfectly good flowers!  Or almost perfect flowers that just need a little TLC.

With a little A LOT of help from our personal floral guru, we created some beautiful arrangements from flowers (including lots of roses) that would have otherwise taken up space in a landfill.  Not a bad compromise!

Still, I would have preferred to walk down the aisle with flowers (and greens — like basil!) from my own garden, and if this is a priority for you or anyone you know who will be planning a wedding soon, I encourage you to consider local flower availability when setting your wedding date.

Taking the Challenge!

Several weeks ago, I wrote this post about plastic and how we can (and must) reduce the plastic waste we generate.  In that post, I provided a link to some useful information on Beth Terry’s blog Fake Plastic Fish.

Today I committed to doing Beth’s “Show Your Plastic Challenge,” where I will collect, photograph, and catalog all the plastic trash (including recyclables) that I produce in one week.  This particular week I’ve chosen has a few twists that will keep things interesting and challenging.

The idea for the first week is to “live normally” in terms of your plastic waste and use that week as a guide for how you might begin to reduce.  Anyone else out there want to join me?

Granny behind the wheel

I’m a fairly assertive and aggressive cyclist, but I drive like a ninety year-old woman.  Sure, I generally get up to, and sometimes surpass, posted speed limits, but I go to great lengths to avoid sudden starts and stops.

In practice, this means I accelerate VERY SLOWLY — my goal is to stay ≤ 2000 rpm when accelerating.  I’m always on the lookout for things that will require stopping (car in front of me stopped waiting to make a left turn, red lights, etc.).  When I spot said situations, I start slowing down far in advance, in the hope that by the time I reach the light, it will be green, thus avoiding the gas intensive start from a complete stop.

Turns out that there are lots of impatient people behind the wheel out there who don’t appreciate my laid back, gas conserving, driving style.  I love nothing quite so much as an impatient driver who blows by me in the other lane, clearly annoyed that I am “slowing her down,” and speeds on toward the red light, only to sit and watch as I, at my slow, steady pace, flow right on by when the light turns green because I maintained 15 mph while she had to come to a complete stop.  Ha!

(Okay, I lied about “loving nothing quite so much” in the above paragraph, because I really would love nothing quite so much as biking to work instead of driving.)

Anyway, I’m cruising along on my way home from work yesterday, maintaining a nice, steady pace in the left lane of  a 4-lane, 35 mph street (Kingshighway, for all you StL folks), approaching a red light with cars already stopped in front of me, and the guy behind me pulls out and passes me on the right.  As he passes, he yells, “Lay off the brakes!”  (Followed by some nice, mature name calling, for good measure — this did not further his case with me.)

Which, what? Really?  You’re suggesting that I “lay off the brakes” as I approach these stopped cars in front of me?  Just drive right into them?

Seriously, where do these people come from?!?

Despite the sometimes negative reactions of fellow drivers, I highly recommend a more laid back approach to driving.  Fewer starts and stops, and gentler acceleration, mean less wasted gas.  If you have to drive, you can take steps to make your driving at least a bit greener, not to mention more relaxed.

Neti on the road

Though there are ceramic neti pots available, I chose plastic because  I wanted to be able to travel with my neti pot.  I premix pickling salt and baking powder for however long I’ll be gone.

Strangely enough, small plastic bags filled with white powder may arouse suspicion at airport security checks.  This occurred to me as I packed for my trip to D.C. back in March.  Sure enough, after scanning my carry-on, they pulled it off of the belt and asked for “the owner of this bag” to step to the side.

When the TSA officer opened my bag and held up the little baggy, I prepared for the worst.  Granted, the baggie was WITH my neti pot, and I had halfway been expecting this, so I calmly explained the whole thing.  The officer swabbed my bag (not sure whether she was ruling out drugs or just explosives) and sent me on my way, neti salts intact, no drug dogs involved.

Maintaining the neti routine on the road can be tricky.  When I was in Chattanooga last month, my hotel room did not have a microwave.  The only way to get warm water was to use it straight from the tap, without giving it time to dechlorinate.  Ouch!  Did that ever burn!  It was bad enough that I skipped one day (despite the high ragweed levels), then went crawling back for more when the congestion got too unbearable.

While nasal irrigation is not the perfect cure, it works at least as well as prescription nasal inhalants (i.e., Flonase) for the allergies, at a fraction of the cost, and no drugs involved.  Neither method is perfect — with both I get/got occasional sinus headaches when allergen levels are crazy high.  However, regular neti-ing  provides the added bonus of removing other invaders, like bacteria and viruses, giving me a leg-up on staying healthy — works for me!