Yes, another tomato post. Think of it as my way of reminding you of the time of year. When we first kicked processed food, we struggled to replace canned tomatoes—whole tomatoes, tomato sauce and tomato paste. I used to cook vats of chili and also vats of bolognese sauce to serve with pasta one night […]
farmer’s market
August Is the Reddest Month
If you live in the Northern Hemisphere and have planted a garden, you may have begun to experience what-am-I-going-to-do-with-this-glut-of-tomatoes syndrome. Mild symptoms often begin in early August and quickly intensify to the critical stage. The following ideas will help alleviate and, in some instances, depending on the harvest and the number of plants you have, cure […]
How to Store Produce Without Plastic
Read aloud in a Brad Pitt drawl: The first rule of food waste is: you do not buy too much food. The second rule of food waste is: you do not buy too much food. In an ideal world—one in which you have time to shop a few times a week at a local farmer’s […]
How to Make Eggshell Calcium Powder
My daughter MK made me some homemade toothpaste a couple of years ago that I really liked. It was very similar to this recipe but she added calcium powder to it. She bought calcium supplements and emptied the contents of the gelatin capsules into her toothpaste concoction. I have wanted to make her toothpaste recipe […]
Vodka Sauce
We ate tomato-based dishes every night last week: pizza, chana masala and this vodka sauce with pasta. I have yet to tire of tomatoes though. I eat lots of them while they’re in season and roast and freeze a bunch to get through most of the winter. For me, part of the joy of eating […]
Good, Better, Best Zero-Waste Shopping
Every time I post pictures on Instagram or Facebook of my bulk shopping or farmer’s market hauls, I get lots of questions: Do you bring your food home in bags and transfer it to jars? (No, I bring the jars shopping and fill them directly.) Doesn’t your food cost more because the jars weigh so […]
12 Months of Seasonal Eating
Find your local farmer’s market in the US through Local Harvest. I first took pics of my farmer’s market hauls back when I started my blog in March 2014, with the idea that I would one day create a post featuring 12 months of seasonal produce in pictures. Then I forgot… We spoiled Northern Californians can shop […]
Cauliflower “Couscous”
Click here to jump to the recipe I need to eat more vegetables. Going zero-waste certainly forced me to clean up my diet—I cut the POP (processed and over-packaged) “food”—but I do love sugar and I can buy that in bulk where I live 😉 My older daughter first made this cauliflower dish last year, almost […]
Use ’em or Lose ’em Roasted Vegetables
My kids and I went away for a few days last week and when we returned, I found some vegetables I needed to use up, some more quickly than others, such as a head of Romanesco broccoli (bottom right in the pic below) and a wrinkled orange bell pepper (pictured in the middle). I decided […]
6 Self-Centered Reasons to Reduce Your Waste
A zero-waste lifestyle may conjure up images like the Albrecht Dürer woodcut below, The Penitent, with plenty of self-flagellation, a diet consisting of mere bread and water (when not fasting), hair shirts, medieval dregs—basically a wretched life of perpetual self-denial. When I decided to go plastic-free, I merely wanted to avoid contributing to the colossal plastic pollution problem in our oceans. I […]
How to Rescue Vegetables Past Their Prime and Avoid Food Waste
For the holidays, my younger daughter and I drove to my brother Paul’s in North Bend, Washington. At the end of our visit, before we left, I went through Paul’s refrigerator and pulled out some of the produce I had bought up there since he said he wouldn’t eat it (Paul doesn’t cook much). After […]