It's Easy Being Green

Are you looking for a steaming hot cup of chocolate to warm you up and satsify your sweet tooth?  You might want to try some real, homemade hot cocoa then.  The stuff you buy in packets at the store can be good but the homemade stuff can be even better.  Try this recipe out:

2 Tbsp unsweetened cocoa

2 Tbsp honey

2 cups warm milk

1/4 tsp. vanilla

2 Tbsp powdered milk (optional)

Blend cocoa and honey in a cup.  Add a small amount of the warm milk to make a syrup.  Pour that syrup into the rest of the warm milk and add the vanilla.  If you’d like richer cocoa, pour the milk mixture into the blender and add the powdered milk, blending until combined.  Pour the contents back into a pan and heat until warm but not boiling.  Of course you can always top off of your homemade cocoa with another sweet treat like marshmallows or a candy cane!

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So I haven’t really announced to my readers yet that I’m getting ready to make a cross-country trek to a new home. I’m leaving Flagstaff, AZ after so many wonderful years and heading to Evansville, Indiana. I got a new a job there, the cost of living is much lower and I will have a long growing season to spur a quite productive garden. At least that’s my hope anyway! The drive is more than 1500 miles and we obviously can’t take perishable food on the road with us. So we’ve been dwindling down our supplies both in the cupboard and in the freezer. That’s led to some very uninteresting meals but also extremely low grocery bills. I knew we hoarded food for a reason!

Within our stash of food, we had several bags of frozen fruit. Two of those bags were a triple berry mix with raspberries, blueberries and blackberries. The third was a bag of strawberries. I’ve dipped into them on occasion to make one recipe or another but they were mostly unused. Not wanting to waste all those berries or give them away, we decided to whip up some quick batches of no-pectin jam. Pectin is that stuff you buy in the little box at the grocery store that gels up your fruit mix. I didn’t have any to begin with and really didn’t want to waste the gas driving into town for some so I found pectin-free jam recipes online (my canning book was packed away by my very efficient box packer).

My first batch of triple berry jam worked out great. I found a recipe that basically is nothing but 4 cups of fruit and 4 cups of sugar. Boil it until it gets to 220 degrees and then can it in sterilized jars. Pretty simple! But my next batch of strawberry jam wasn’t working out so good. After an hour of rapid boiling I could not get the temperature to climb above 203 degrees. Getting worried I headed to the world wide web to do some SOS searching on what to do. Luckily, I stumbled across Laura and Barb’s blog called My Sisters Kitchen. Their blog post on making jam without any added pectin informed me of a temperature correction formula if you’re above sea level. At 7500 feet, I definitely needed to correct down on a boiling point for my jam!

I quickly rushed back to my kitchen and began putting my strawberry jam into sterilized jars. Those two saved my day! I could have been waiting for strawberries to boil until they absolutely could boil no more and turned into some strange gooey concoction that would have made for a dish washing disaster! Check out their blog. They seem to have a lot of wonderful recipes and life experiences to share. I’m going to add them to my frequent list!

What have you done to avoid wasting food?  Have you found yourself making changes due to rising food prices?  Share your hints and tips with our other readers.  For some time we’ve been using a whole chicken right down to the bones for several meals.  For more on that, read The Art of Resourcefulness.

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Have you ever thought about the environmental impact of all those paper coffee filters you might use to make your pot of coffee every morning?  Our last coffee maker required a special kind of paper filter.  But we tried to make the environmental impact of those as little as possible by purchasing unbleached filters and composting them, complete with the coffee grounds when they were done.

Reducing that impact can be simple and save you money in the long run.  You can buy a reusable hemp or gold coffee filter to fit your coffee maker’s filter basket.  They range from as little as $3 on up to about $15.  You could even to make filterless coffee by picking up a french press, a fun way I’ve found to make an unusual cuppa morning joe!  Do you have a reusable coffee filter?  If so tell us how well it works and any challenges you’ve faced!

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Okay, maybe you’ve decided you want to live a healthier lifestyle but going vegetarian just isn’t looking to good to you right now.  How about going Kosher?  Apparently there is a new movement in the world of Kosher food and people are buying it a lot lately.

You might be asking why would people buy Kosher food if they weren’t Jewish?  The answer is pretty simple.  Kosher food is supposed to be cleaner and more friendly when it comes to killing animals for meat.  Jewish law says pain has to be minimized when the helpless animal arrives for slaughter which is music to those ears who love a good steak but want the cow to be coddled before death.  For those who are trying to wean themselves off meat and maintain a vegetarian diet, look for labels that say “Kosher pareve”.  That label indicates the product was made without any meat products.

If you’re interested in learning more about Kosher food, head over to the Chabad Kosher Guide.  Be on the lookout for those “K” or “parve” symbols on your next trip to the grocery store and go Kosher!  You can join the 75% of the public purchasing Kosher products who aren’t Jewish.

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Scientists are beginning to prove many of the benefits behind eating organically grown produce. Researchers at the University of California, Davis just wrapped up a study that’s lasted 10 years. The group compared flavonoid levels in tomatoes that were grown conventionally and organically. Conventional farming uses fertilizers and insecticides to help the plant grow and maintain production. Organically grown produce zeros in on soil health through composting and manure applications and not using any chemicals. As it turns out, the organically grown tomatoes had a much higher level of flavonoids.

Flavonoids are known to help protect against heart disease, cancer and other age-related diseases like Alzheimer’s and dementia. One of the lead scientists on the project says the way our produce is grown has everything to do with how much good stuff it brings to our dinner table. The study’s authors, Alyson Mitchell and Alexander Chassy theorize that plants grown in an organic way devote more of their energy to producing flavonoids which in turn provide more protection from pests. But, Mitchell says there are some exceptions and not all organic tomatoes will contain the same amounts of flavonoids. She says that’s because soils, stresses and growing methods will widely vary between different organic farms.

This research goes a long way to prove that organically grown produce is much better for your health and in the long run. To read more about Mitchell and Chassy’s research, please click on this link.

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