It’s Easy Being Green

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.

A World Naked Bike Ride Event

I’m having a good chuckle while waking up to my first cup of coffee this morning.  Heads were apparently turning in St. Louis Saturday night, while hundreds of mostly nude bicyclists protested society’s dependence on oil.  It was all part of the “World Naked Bike Ride” which stretched for 10 miles through the city.  So far 70 cities across the globe have unknowingly been host to one of these political rides.  Officers with the St. Louis Police Department checked to make sure the bike riders were within the decency laws, wearing minimums like pasties, body paint, loin cloths and thongs.

For more information about organizing your own World Naked Bike Ride, check out their website.  There is also an entertaining video of what the rides look like.  You can also Google search for pictures using the ride’s name.  It’s quite entertaining.  I’d really like to see one of those come to Flagstaff!

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!

Can you believe we’re already sliding into mid-July?  As we hit the hottest part of the year for many locations, the amount of electricity you’re using to cool your home is going to surge through the roof.  With energy costs on the rise right along with gas, it’s going to cost you more this year than it probably has in the past.  But you can put a stop to the waste of energy and the cash flowing right out of your pockets.

For every degree you raise your thermostat in the summer, you can slash a minimum of 3% off your total bill.  Experts recommend that you don’t cool your home below 72 degrees, the point at which things get insanely expensive and wasteful.  When you’re away from the house, they say you can set your thermostat between 80 and 85.  To make it even more simple, buy a programable thermostate from your local home improvement or hardware store.  They don’t cost much (between $30-$100) and can save you oodles of money by automatically maintaining your temerature settings.  We had one at a previous home we lived in and it was great at helping to control our bills.

You might also want to think about installing some ceiling fans if you don’t already have some.  According to Consumer Reports, they cost very little to run and can help you feel up to 7 degrees cooler than the ambient air temperature.  Just think, if you have your thermostat set at 80 the fans could help you feel like it’s 73 in your home.

Here in Flagstaff, daytime temperatures rarely climb above the 90 degree mark.  Most homes here don’t have A/C, so to compensate and keep your home cool you have to get creative.  At night, we open all the windows in our house and use two box fans to blow in the cool, nighttime air.  In the morning, we shut the fans off and begin to close windows on the sunny, warm side of the house to prevent having warm in flowing in.  We also shut the blinds on the sunny side.  But, we keep the shady side open to allow for the continuous exchange of air.  Once the sun shifts, so do the opened and closed windows.  While it may be chilly in the morning when you first wake up (about 68 degrees), we can prevent the temperature in the house from going above 78 degrees during the hottest point of the day.

Do you have any creative tips to cut down on your cooling bill?  Let us know!

As noted in the report, solar power has been expanding rapidly in the past eight years, growing at an average pace of 40 percent per year. The cost per kilowatt-hour of solar photovoltaic systems has also been dropping, while electricity generated from fossil fuels is becoming more expensive. As a result, the report projects that solar power will reach cost parity with conventional power sources in many U.S. markets by 2015. But to reach the 10 percent goal, solar photovoltaic companies will also need to streamline installations and make solar power a “plug-and-play” technology, that is, it must be simple and straightforward to buy the components of the system, connect them together, and connect the system to the power grid.

The report also places some of the responsibility with electric utilities, which will need to take advantage of the benefits of solar power, incorporate it into future “smart grid” technologies, and create new business models for building solar power capacity. The report also calls for establishing long-term extensions of today’s investment and production tax credits, creating open standards for connecting solar power systems to the grid, and giving utilities the ability to include solar power in their rate base. See the Clean Edge press release and the full report.

Reprinted from EERE Network News, a free newsletter of the U.S. Department of Energy.

The University of Arizona has unveiled their new, completely solar powered car for an upcoming competition.  Apparently it is completely street-legal.  Check out the link below:

UofA Solar Powered Car

Last week, Arizona’s newest renewable energy project went online and started generating enough electricity to supply about 9,000 homes.  Renegy’s Biomass Power Plant is located near Snowflake, AZ.  The plant takes forest waste generated from thinning projects, chips it up, dries it and then burns it in a boiler more than 10 stories tall.  Renegy claims that the process is 98% cleaner burning then if forest crews just burned the slash piles like they normally do.  Plus, we’re getting electrcity out of it.  Some of the first fuel that came to the plant is actually being cleaned out of the devastating Rodeo-Chediski burn area in Arizona’s eastern White Mountain region.  The plant has about a 2 year supply of wood chips already spread across 120 acres of land and expects there will be plenty more fuel coming from forest waste over the years.

The plant actually sits next to the old Abitibi pulp paper mill.  The plant takes all of the recycled paper from the Phoenix area and turns it into new paper.  Some of the recycled paper pulp can’t be reused again so that is normally sorted out and dumped into a landfill in the area.  But now, that waste paper that can’t be used again is dried into chips and burned along with the wood chips.  It creates another steady fuel supply that would normally just go to waste.  Both APS and SRP are purchasing power from the Snowflake Biomass Power Plant which I think is a great demonstration of renewable energy ideas we need to pursue full speed right now.

To read more about Renegy or their new plant in Snowflake, AZ head to their website.