It's Easy Being Green

Are you egg-nogged out yet?  I can’t seem to get my fill of the drink that is delightfully bad for us!  Sometimes the usual old flavor gets boring though.  So how about this alternative recipe for Homemade Banana Eggnog:

I cup plain or vanilla yogurt

1 banana, cut up

2 Tbsp. honey

2 tsp. vanilla extract

1 egg

Place all the ingredients into a blender and process for 20 seconds or until smooth.  Yum!  The recipe makes 2 servings.  If you’d like to turn it into a winter warmer, your favorite brandy or even a banana brandy would taste pretty good in this one.  Do you have any eggnog recipes that you’d like to share?

Popularity: 2% [?]

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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Now that it’s getting colder outside, we’ve had an influx of fruit flies inside our house.  We’ve always got fresh product around so the little buggers who hitched a ride home constantly find the nourishment they need to reproduce.  We’ve prevented some of the madness by putting produce away in dark cupboards that the flies don’t have access to instead of keeping things in a fruit basket on the counter.  But there are still a pesky few that can breed into dozens of fruit flies and just drive you nuts.

A quick and eco-friendly way to get rid of the fruit flies is to pour red wine into a small container like a bowl or a cup.  Cover the top of the container with saran wrap and then poke a few small holes into the top.  The idea is that the flies will be attracted to the fruity scent of the wine, crawl through the holes in the middle of the saran wrap and not be able to get back out.  My fiance discovered this trick and put it into play and sure enough it works like a charm.  We keep our fruit fly trap by the kitchen sink. So everytime I go to the sink and see some inside, I give the bowl a good swish.  That knocks the fruit flies into the wine where they eventually drown and don’t reproduce.  Also, pour boiling hot water down your drains.  Apparently fruit flies like to lay their eggs and reproduce in the sludge that can buildup in your sink drains.

Do you have a natural and chemical-free way to get rid of pests in your home or garden?

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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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By now, just about everyone has heard about the mysterious dilemma plaguing our world’s pollinators.  Honey bees are dieing off in vast numbers and no one is truly quite sure why they’re vanishing.  Some scientists have started hypothesizing what is behind the drastic decline in bee populations.  Some have speculated cell phone signals, a virulent disease and even pollution as a cause.  Now one group of researchers is looking into the bee dilemma with a unique, grassroots approach:  The Great Sunflower Project.

The project is led by Gretchen LeBuhn, an associate professor at San Francisco State University.  LeBuhn says she’s interested in broad areas of conservation and the bee is one of her most interesting subjects.  If you sign up to help LeBuhn’s research project, they will send you a packet of wild sunflower seeds.  Once you plant them and have sunflowers, the researchers will email you a particular weekend that you are supposed to head out into your garden and watch your sunflowers.  Twice per month you will plant yourself in your yard so you can record how many bees visit your sunflowers within 30 minutes.  Then you record the data and send it back to the researchers.  The goal is to find out where exactly bees are in trouble and what areas don’t seem to be impacted by the mysterious death.

I think the project is a great way for anyone who understands the impacts of bees on our life.  It’s said that one out of every three bites of food has been visited by a native pollinator and if they totally disappear, we’ll be in some major trouble.  Just think about the things you can learn by participating in this research.  If you have children it would make for a great summer project, something for them to focus on come away with a feeling that they’re helping to make a difference too!  If you want to sign up, visit the Great Sunflower Project website and join the research.  Hopefully together we can make a difference!

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Would you believe that it is possible to have a floating greenhouse in New York that actually produces food? Well it is and the full scale greenhouse operation on the Hudson River in New York has once again opened its doors for all to see. The project is called the science barge and is a prototype of a sustainable urban farm. It also serves as an education center. Last year, more than 3,000 school students made their way through the Science Barge.

So what makes the floating greenhouse so special? Inside the greenhouse they grow tomatoes, cucumbers and lettuce with zero emissions and no runoff into the Hudson River. The barge is powered by solar, wind and biofuels and harvests irrigation water by filtering from the Hudson River and catching rainwater. The developers say the Science Barge requires 7 times less land and 4 times less water to grow than conventionally grown crops. In a city like New York, land has skyrocketed to the point that it would be nearly impossible to grow food in town. Riverfront barges could be the answer to the dilemma. Some studies have also suggested that there is enough rooftop space in New York to grown enough food for the entire city.

What are the hopes? The non-profit group New York Sun Works wants to demonstrate that it is possible for cities to reduce their global footprint by looking at ways to provide their own food. They say most land in cities is contaminated and shouldn’t be used to grow food anyway. That’s why they think they’re hydroponic growing system is the best, most sustainable way to grow! If you’d like to learn more about the project or how to visit, head over to The Science Barge website.

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