I stumbled upon many more than five great ideas this past week, but felt I better limit myself. (I should limit my time on social media as well.)
self reliance
Beet Kvass
Updated 10/02/17 I can’t remember which company, touting its latest chemical- and sugar-laden beverage, described water as a “yawn in a glass,” but that irresponsible yet effective marketing message stuck with me. You have to admire Big Food’s audacity and creativity. Well, maybe not admire. Acknowledge? (I just watched Fed Up last night, so I may sound […]
How to Make Plastic-Free Dish Soap
Click here to go straight to the recipe. If you run a zero-waste or plastic-free kitchen, I can safely assume that you cook and that you generate the sinks full of dirty dishes to prove it. But if you don’t want to buy plastic bottles—and I’ve never seen dish soap in anything but—how can you […]
How to Make Easy and Free No-Waste Bone Broth
Click here to go straight to the recipe. I used to buy broth. I would use half a container, put the rest in the fridge and a couple of weeks later, empty the remains down the drain. The packaging waste is also excessive. At Safeway, you can choose from Tetra-Paks or cans for liquid broth; or plastic jars or paper […]
Bread (Crumb) Labor
Click here to go straight to the recipe. I began baking bread after my daughter MK was born in 1994. You may think I’ve been merely nourishing my children—or perhaps poisoning them depending on your bread stance—but I like to think of myself as a revolutionary in the kitchen. The concept of bread labor played a key […]
No-Cook Rice Milk
Click here to go straight to the recipe. Some brands of rice milk contain microscopic bits of metal. I had been planning on writing a post on homemade rice milk at some point, but after reading an article last week in Mother Jones about this latest non-food food additive, I decided I better whip up […]
I Eat Food Unfit for Human Consumption
I live in Silicon Valley, high-tech central. Almost everyone I know is an engineer, married to an engineer or divorced from an engineer. I see more Teslas here than minivans. When the tech-heavy NASDAQ has a really, really bad day, stores like Fry’s Electronics (geek central where you buy parts to build your own computer) have […]
Easy, Quick-Start, Overnight Irish Oatmeal
I stopped eating cereal after visiting an organic farm in the Caribbean in 2011. We ate organic homemade granola for breakfast every morning, topped with freshly harvested coconut milk and tropical fruit. After that, I purged store-bought cereal from our diet. You can’t make out some of the prices in the pic of the Safeway […]
How to Pit and Freeze Fresh Cherries
My kids love smoothies. They make them with yogurt, milk, bananas and frozen fruit. The other day, when I looked in the freezer, I found a plastic bag of frozen fruit from the grocery store. Ugh! I don’t have all that many rules here. But no plastic is one of them. So, no drugs in plastic baggies. […]