Rocky Mountain News columnist Janet Simons is offering to pass on consumer requests to Whole Foods regarding which Wild Oats private label products to keep.
If you have a favorite Wild Oats brand product, be sure to leave a comment for Janet so she can pass it along to the Whole Foods people!
Hi all – I’m Lacy’s friend, Cate, the minx who sent her a copy of The Omnivore’s Dilemma in order to have some company, raging at the world. A couple of weeks ago, Lacy and I had the following conversation:
Lacy: You should guest blog!
Cate: . . . about what?
Lacy: I dunno! . . . stuff!
Cate: . . . uh . . . .
And here I am!
Since I, like Lacy, am trying to go green(er) and to think more constructively about what I eat, I thought I’d keep a photo log of little things I’ve been doing to be more green:
Green Thing #1: Supplies! I bought green supplies at the store this morning – washable dishcloths so that I can stop using paper towels, and clothes pegs so that I can hang my laundry outside. Today was the first warm day we’ve had in forever in my corner of the midwest, so I was crazy excited to hang laundry. I know, I know, the things that amuse . . .
Green Thing #2: Biodegradable laundry detergent. Not only are there fewer bad chemicals in Method products, the detergent is concentrated, so this one bottle has lasted me three months. It’s still going strong. (Please ignore the fact that my washer is in the basement and apparently quite mucky when exposed to the light of my camera’s flash. *scrubs with all new dishcloth*)
Green Thing #3: Air-dried laundry! As a kid I loved the smell of sheets dried in the open air, but then I grew up and discovered dryers and thought they were the greatest invention known to humankind. Now I’ve come full circle, with my washing line, my cooperative midwestern spring, and my brand new clothes pegs.
Green Thing #4: Organic, unprocessed food, like this tasty pear and handful of walnuts . . .
. . . eaten with plain, unsweetened yogurt. By eating organic I avoid supporting the pollution of the environment with fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides, and by eating unprocessed food, I avoid supporting industry that uses massive amounts of fossil fuel to make my snack food of choice.
For the same reasons, I’ve taken to making a lot more of my own food. These are the raw ingredients for the muffin of the day – apple raisin. I’m slowly replacing my old groceries with organic versions, and I’m nearly all the way there – only the butter and raisins aren’t organic in this set up. Wanna see me make muffins?
Here are all my ingredients, ready to be mixed up into:
. . . this. Yeah, it looks a little suspect, huh? But! . . .
. . . in the muffin cups it looks far tastier.
And they’re tastier still when they come out of the oven. These whole twelve muffins only use 1 cup of sugar and 1 stick of butter. Compare that to how much fat and sugar you’ll find in the muffins at a chain coffeeshop – these are WAY better.
And the last Green Thing of the Day: refilling water bottles. I used to buy water bottles by the crate (quite literally) but then realized I was being horrible wasteful, even when I recycled. So now, I refill one of my old bottles with water that’s gone through my Brita filter. Less wasteful, and a lot cheaper than buying bottles at the store.
So, the Husband and I took off and went to the Mile High Flea Market this morning and we weren’t disappointed; they had more stuff than you could shake a stick at, but nothing I particularly wanted to buy. I was surprised to see quite a few people selling fruits and vegetables––strawberries, mangoes, papayas, pineapples, avocados, and fresh roasted green chile, despite the fact that none of those things are in season. We didn’t buy any, because they must have traveled a LONG way to reach Denver.
The smell of the roasting chile brought back sense memories of late summer days in Santa Fe, and a powerful craving for green chile and chile rellenos drove us to a little Mexican restaurant we discovered on our first trip to Denver when we were looking for a place to rent. Called La Estrallita, we were excited to discover they had Mexican food similar to the kind we had come to know and love in Santa Fe.
Unbeknownst to us until we arrived, they were having a buffet special––all-you-can-eat for $7.50. It made good financial sense, but poor health sense. My hubby nearly made himself sick––all-you-can-eat mini sopapillas will do that to you. I didn’t eat as much, but the sheer amount and quality of the food (lots of fat) eventually made my tum a little uneasy.
We’re not having dinner.
But the real question is, did we really “save” anything by getting the buffet and stuffing ourselves silly?
[via Ready Made Blog]
This looks like so much fun! And you can hardly beat the estimated price of $0.02 per wash!
However, if you’re not the DIY type, check out Method detergents, which are biodegradable and contain no phosphates.
[via Writer Unboxed and Lifehacker]
Hacking Knowledge: 77 Ways to Learn Faster, Deeper, and Better––a great list of ways to improve your brain.
Since going organic, I’ve been a little disappointed in the number of coupons offered in the newspaper that are for things I actually want to BUY now. Being a great lover of the calming Sunday morning ritual of clipping coupons, I dutifully go through my circulars every week, but usually only turn up a few lonely coupons for organic products.
If you too are saddened by your lack of coupons, never fear! Mambo Sprouts Marketing offers free coupons––by mail and printable e-coupons––at their website for organic and green products! Coupon booklets are also available periodically at Whole Foods and Wild Oats Markets.
[NOTE: Be aware, the website asks for your zip code, but only requires the first three digits––I got a bit flustered when I couldn’t enter all five digits! Also, the e-coupons are not available with Firefox; use IE or Safari to find and print them.]
I intended to start integrating yoga into my days last week, but after coming down with an infection that made bending––or indeed, moving much at all––unpleasant, I put it off until yesterday afternoon.
I had downloaded a class from Yoga Today, a web site that provides a new, free, one-hour yoga class every day for beginning and intermediate yoga practice. If you have iTunes, you can just go to the iTunes store and search for Yoga Today; from there, you can download a single episode, or subscribe to them and receive them automatically every day.
I was really impressed with the class. The poses were hard, but not too hard (though we did stop when the instructor said, “And now we’ll move into some head stands,”) for beginners, the instructor was clear and concise and offered suggestions for modifying the poses if they became too difficult. There are some commercials at the beginning of the video, which, I assume, is how they can offer the classes for free, but the class itself is offered without interruption.
Today, I feel pleasantly aware of my muscles––not sore, exactly, but aware when I move certain ways that those muscles received a work out. I also kind of liked the positive affirmations that the instructor gave as we practiced. They may have been a little touchy-feely for my husband, but I found them positive and they made me want to keep working.
The classes change daily, and you can download them in different formats if iTunes is not for you. Also, the site archives about a week’s worth of classes, so if you miss a day, or the day’s offering is not to your liking, you can always download a different class.
Frankly, this is one of the best free-content sites for fitness I’ve found. Any other suggestions for free online fitness solutions? Let me know in the comments.
Last night, I found a very exciting deal at the bookstore — Nigella Lawson’s cookbook, Forever Summer was in the bargain section––for eight dollars! I have no idea why it was marked so far down, but I snatched it up.
I have to admit, ever since watching her show “Nigella Bites” on the Style Network when I had cable in college, I have had a bit of a girl-crush on Ms. Lawson. She’s just so fabulous. She’s a great chef, she’s incredibly stylish, she’s British (I’m a terrible Anglophile) and she eats the most ridiculous food, but manages to remain lovely and slim, but not waifish. She also has two adorable British children and an amazing kitchen.
ANYWAY! I got home and I was looking through my new cookbook and I realized that, although I have a copy of her Nigella Bites cookbook––but I’ve never made anything out of it! Tragedy!
So, looking through it this afternoon, I decided to make a batch of orange muffins. I had everything on hand except self-rising flour. I pulled out my bible––The Joy of Cooking–– and saw that I could substitute regular flour and 1 1/2 teaspoons of baking soda. Lovely! Mixed them up, they smelled lovely, popped them in the oven, they baked up lovely, broke one open, slathered it in butter and––
BLEH!
Not Nigella’s fault. I double checked the recipe, I double checked Joy and––oh dear. I was supposed to add baking POWDER, and instead nearly TRIPLED the amount of baking SODA.
Bleh.
So. A dozen muffins that are inedible, and no more oranges to try again. I am crushed.
But there’s a lovely looking stovetop rice pudding that I might try later this week… Hopefully with better results.
Becoming. Beautiful. Healing from binge eating disorder. 