Hot Cocoa

When one of my favorite green blogs dedicates an article to hot chocolate, I have to sit up and pay attention.  In this case, though, it seems that the “eco” options for cocoa mixes they tried were either yucky or expensive or both.

Makes me just wonder…why?  It’s so easy to make your own custom hot chocolate mix. And you can pick your own cocoa (fair trade and organic baking cocoa from Whole Foods is what I tend to gravitate toward) and sugar, and if you want to go the “just add water” route you can also decide where you want to get your powdered milk from…you can add cinnamon, or instant coffee, you can increase the cocoa or decrease the sugar or whatever the heck you want.

I totally don’t get why people would spend an arm and a leg for something that’s so easy to make yourself…

The “Smoking Corn Cob”: High Fructose Corn Syrup really does make us fatter

Check out this article over at the EcoSalon:

How Sweet It Isn’t:

High Fructose Corn Syrup Proven to Cause Human Obesity

Copenhagen

There was this little international climate summit thing happening for a couple of weeks in Copenhagen while the rest of us were Christmas shopping and stuffing our faces with way more food than our footprints would bear…Some call it a failure, some call it the best that could have been hoped for, and some say “okay, it sounds good to say only two degrees Celsius temperature rise, but no one is really saying how they’re going to pull this off…”

About seven gajillion bloggers have written seventy gajillion words about it, so I’m not going to say much…but check out Grist, which has really good coverage, articles, and overviews…

‘Twas the day before Christmas…

…and I finally finished making and wrapping stuff for my kids.

My son and daughter each got a quilt–my son from squares of old mangled jeans, my daughter from felted wool sweaters cut into squares. (I need to go at hers with yarn and an embroidery needle, when I find one–the jeans quilt lies very nicely even without quilting the corners, but the wool one is too weirdly stretchy to quite pull that off.  Fortunately, I live with her, so I’ll be able to continue working on it a little even after she opens it.  I can’t find an embroidery needle anywhere, and NO WAY am I braving Joanne’s today to buy one…

They also each got new Christmas jammies–I’ll photograph them wearing them tonight or tomorrow morning, if I remember…but they are wrapped in “furoshiki” type wrapping, re-usable fabric wrap, instead of throwaway paper wrappings.

Christmas (or the holidays in general!) are a tough time to be green, for me…too much freneticism, even in my “simplify the mess” efforts, and sometimes I just throw up my hands in the moment and do things the easy way.  In fact, if I’ve learned nothing else in the past year or two of trying to decrease my and my family’s footprint a bit, it’s that the key is not about huge effort, it’s about early effort, it’s about keeping an eye on the big temporal picture, and taking the couple of minutes in advance to do things right, rather than taking the same couple of minutes at the last minute, to just say “oh what the hell.”  I have a lot more “what the hell” moments these days than I would like, but on the other hand this is a day when I’m enjoying the fruit of the things I did take time in weeks past to do, and in fact a day when I have a few minutes to drop a blog entry into the blogosphere….rare for me on Christmas Eve.

The next twenty four hours will be insane beyond insanity, and at least 24 hours after that I will probably be comatose, so I’m planning on disappearing from this blog for a few more days.

But in the meantime, hear me exclaim e’er I drop out of sight, “Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night!’

Jenn

So granola I make my own granola (recipe!)

Do a Google search for “best granola recipe ever” and you’ll get an insane number of hits.  They all look pretty good, too…

So I figure, why not throw my hat into the ring too?  I’ll probably be making up a batch or two of my favorite granola recipe for a few more gifts this year; what doesn’t get given will easily be eaten, so it’s hard to go wrong.

I cobbled this recipe together from a whole bunch of others and a lot of trial and error, so I think it probably counts as “mine” without needing to credit anyone else…even if I should, I’ve had this in my computer for about 4 years, and I have no idea where I cobbled it from, so oh well!

JENN’S GRANOLA RECIPE (doubles easily!)

• 4  cups regular oats
• 1-1 ½ cups nuts (pecans and/or almonds and/or whatever you like)
• 1 ½ tsp. ground cinnamon
• ½  tsp. Nutmeg
• ¼ tsp ground cloves
• ½  tsp salt

(mix in bowl)

Boil in small saucepan:

• 1/3 cup orange juice
• 1/3 cup maple syrup
• 1/3 cup honey
• 2 tbs brown sugar
• 2 tbs vegetable oil

Pour over dry stuff, mix well.

Spread on foil-covered, greased baking sheet. Bake 30-35 minutes at 325, stirring every 10 minutes, till golden brown. (possible will “clump” better if one waits 20 minutes for the first stir?)

When completely cooled, mix in ¾ – 1 cup each dried cranberries, golden raisins, and currants or blueberries. Makes about 8 cups.

(Update: okay, I made this as gifts for several people, and I have to admit this is FABULOUS granola.  Low in fat, sweet, flavorful, crunchy, and just plain YUM.  And thinking back, I developed this recipe during a period when I was obsessed with making my own granola, so I tried literally about a dozen different recipes before settling on this one.  I honestly feel safe calling this “the best granola I’ve ever had.”)

Pet care post at Green Phone Booth

Hey, come over to the Green Phone Booth–I posted there today about some chemical-free pet care ideas!

Pet Care without Toxic Chemicals (and rescue organizations!)

Happy Friday!

Carnivores, Vegetarians, and dilemmas

Okay, up front I admit that we all like reading stuff that tells us what we want to hear.  I don’t want to be a vegetarian.  I tried it for six months a few years ago, and I wasn’t happy or healthy on it. And that was plain old veggie-ness; I still did dairy and cheese.  So anything that says “Yes! You can eat meat and not be an environmentally irresponsible person!” is something I’ll read and enjoy rationalizing.

But these are two interesting articles: Nicolette Hahn Niman’s op-ed piece in the Times entitled “The Carnivore’s Dilemma,” and David Friedlander’s “Vegetarian’s Rebuttal to ‘The Carnivore’s Dilemma,” on Tree Hugger.

In the former, Hahn proposes a moderate approach to meat-eating–eat a little, eat it occasionally, and when you do, make sure you select meat that’s ethically and responsibly produced. (Er…okay, as much as I love my free range chicken or occasional burger, one has to question the whole “raising living things to eat them” thing when talking about being “ethical,” but that’s an old argument I don’t want to go into.  There will be no winners.) (Though when looking for local grass-fed meat, I was a little creeped out by one farm which proclaimed “we treat our animals like our own children!”–eeg. Think about that. Shades of a bad John Carpenter flick.)  Hahn is a rancher who raises cattle, goats, and turkeys the right way–grass-fed and pastured.   And she points out–rightly–that given the problems with plant products transported all over the world (emissions) and the soy industry’s propensity for deforesting croplands, and it’s becoming harder and harder to guarantee onesself “ethically grown” soy (But not impossible.) , it’s not a given that eschewing meat will necessarily make one more environmentally responsible. 

Friedlander’s rebuttal is exactly on target, although it doesn’t seem to me to be much of  a rebuttal: he says the problem with Hahn’s article is that she compares industrial vegetarianism to small-farm omnivorism, saying that the latter has less impact on the planet than the former.  I personally don’t see why that’s a problem at all–people who give up meat to save the planet, assuming that giving up meat will help the environment, need to know that’s not necessarily true.  On the other hand, he has a point when he says that conscious veganism will always and forever have less of a carbon footprint than the most conscious meat-eating could ever hope for.  True enough.

I know I say it again and again and again–it’s not about adopting some sweeping lifestyle change. It’s about paying attention.  It’s about knowing what you’re eating, where it comes from, and what it costs–not just your wallet, but the planet and the community of humanity as a whole.  Read the labels.  Read the green blogs.  Eat locally. 

Oh, and don’t forget to see Food, Inc.

How I got here (APLS Green Journeys)

It’s sort of funny; you don’t always think about how much what you did and learned as a kid impacts who you grow up to be–the very template from which you operate on every level.

I started thinking about this “green journeys” question, and I thought about when our kids’ school went to waste-free lunches and I had to suddenly make that happen, and I thought about when I learned that I could make blankets and hats and mittens out of old felted sweaters without exercising the industry to actually knit them, and I thought about how Goodwill never wants my used shoes because by the time I’m done with them they are so battered as to be nearly useless…I thought about how I realized how much money we could save diapering my son in cloth for the last year or so of diaper use, how easy baby slings were to make, how the lotion I made myself made my skin behave better than the expensive store-bought stuff, and how proud I felt the first time I successfully grew my own tomatoes. But none of that is really the beginning.

I think if we’re going to talk beginning, we have to talk about the garden.  The front yard suburban garden at the house where I grew up.

It was pretty typical suburbia, all things considered.  Three different home designs in the whole big subdivision designed (unsuccessfully) to make it look like they weren’t cookie cutter houses. (It just looked like the baker had three different cookie cutters.)  Pretty trees, most fairly good-sized, since the area was pretty well established. Green manicured lawns. Except for our house.

My parents had torn up the whole front yard and turned it into a fairly large vegetable garden.  Not an elegant classy-looking one, either–this was rows and chicken wire fencing and big leggy plants all over the place, zucchini and yellow squash and tomatoes and raspberries (which the squirrels always seemed to eat) and God knows what-all else, since I didn’t eat vegetables much at all.  To my parents’ credit, we didn’t have enough of a backyard to have a garden there, so the front was the only place. 

All summer my mom tried to get us to eat zucchini and tomatoes.  (I remember this one particularly ubiquitous casserole; I think she basically just cut up a bunch of zucchini and tomatoes and threw them into a baking dish with some garlic and oregano, sprinkled grated cheese on it, and baked it.  It was really good the first, second, and third times she served it…but it got a little old after a while…)  My folks took care of that garden, with very little help from the kids, all year round.  My dad rented the rototiller every spring to turn the soil, hanging onto the thing for dear life, with his Mother Earth News baseball cap on his head.  They weeded.  They picked out seeds and planted and harvested and made us eat the vegetables, which we didn’t like at all.

There was always a compost jar in the corner of the kitchen. Dad would periodically empty it onto the big pile in the backyard.  And somewhere he’d get a load of cow manure every spring and dump it into the garden with some compost. That Mother Earth News hat wasn’t just a nod; he actually read the thing. (Now I read it too.) 

When our clothes no longer fit, or we stopped playing with any given toy, if there was still life in it, we gave it away; the idea of “throwing away” something that someone somewhere might eventually use was not in our vocabulary.  We never had the biggest coolest noisiest toys, but we had books.  Our family drove cars till they literally died: As of the mid-1980′s when I graduated from high school, we had three cars: a 1964 Volkswagen Beetle my mom had rescued from a trip to the junkyard and rebuilt herself, a 1982 Chevy Suburban, and a 1972 Dodge Polara–when people talk about a “land yacht,” they are talking about that old green Dodge.  ( The Dodge became mine; I christened her “Olivia Neutron Bomb.”)  My dad still has that Suburban, though the others have long since bitten the dust.

When we vacationed, we drove, we packed our own lunches to eat at picnic areas along the way (however longingly we kids might have looked at every McDonalds or Burger King sign we passed), and we camped and visited national and state parks.  I always assumed it was to save money (in which case the apple hasn’t fallen far from the tree), but I now realize that our whole way of traveling was as low-impact, low-consumption, and low-garbage as we could possibly manage.  My brother used to comb the campground looking for discarded returnable bottles; he made an amazing amount of money one summer…

In a thousand little ways, my parents’ way of living–and thus teaching us how to live–set me firmly on the path to being someone who tries to pay attention to how my life and my family’s lives interact with and impact the world around us. 

And sometimes I wonder…what are my children learning from me?

Copenhagen–a beautiful article

This is a beautiful article…I highly recommend it. (Found at http://www.grist.org/article/2009-12-13-no-time-for-tears-in-copenhagen/)

*********

NO TIME FOR TEARS IN COPENHAGEN

by Bill McKibben

COPENHAGEN—I’ve spent the last few years working more than fulltime to organize the first big global grassroots climate change campaign. That’s meant shutting off my emotions most of the time—this crisis is so terrifying that when you let yourself feel too deeply it can be paralyzing. Hence, much gallows humor, irony, and sheer work.

This afternoon I sobbed for an hour, and I’m still choking a little. I got to Copenhagen’s main Lutheran Cathedral just before the start of a special service designed to mark the conference underway for the next week. It was jammed, but I squeezed into a chair near the corner. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, gave the sermon; Desmond Tutu read the Psalm. Both were wonderful.

But my tears started before anyone said a word. As the service started dozens of choristers from around the world carried three things down the aisle and to the altar: pieces of dead coral bleached by hot ocean temperatures; stones uncovered by retreating glaciers; and small, shriveled ears of corn from drought-stricken parts of Africa.

As I watched them go by, all I could think of was the people I’ve met in the last couple of years traveling the world: the people living in the valleys where those glaciers are disappearing, and the people downstream who have no backup plan for where their water is going to come from. The people who live on the islands surrounded by that coral, who depend on the reefs for the fish they eat, and to protect their homes from the waves. And the people, on every corner of the world, dealing with drought and flood, already unable to earn their daily bread in the places where their ancestors farmed for generations.

Those damned shriveled ears of corn. I’ve done everything I can think of, and millions of people around the world have joined us at 350.org in the most international campaign there ever was. But I just sat there thinking: it’s not enough. We didn’t do enough. I should have started earlier.

People are dying already. People are sitting tonight in their small homes trying to figure out how they’re going to make the maize meal they have stretch far enough to fill the tummies of the kids sitting there waiting for dinner. And that’s with 390 parts per million CO2 in the atmosphere. The latest numbers from the computer jockeys at Climate Interactive – A collaboration of Sustainability Institute, Sloan School of Management at MIT, and Ventana Systems, indicate that if all the national plans now on the table were adopted the planet in 2100 would have an atmosphere with 770 parts per million CO2. What then for coral, for glaciers, for corn? I didn’t do enough.

I cried all the harder a few minutes later when the great cathedral bell began slowly tolling 350 times. At the same moment, thousands of churches across Europe began ringing their bells the same 350 times. And in other parts of the world—from the bottom of New Zealand to the top of Greenland, Christendom sounded the alarm. And not just Christendom. In New York rabbis were blowing the shofar 350 times. We had pictures rolling in from the weekend’s vigil, from places like Dhahran in Saudi Arabia, where girls in burkas were forming human 350s, and from Bahrain, and from Amman.

And these tears were now sweet as well as bitter—at the thought that all over the world (not metaphorically all over the world, but literally all over the world) people had proven themselves this year. Proven their ability to understand the science and the stakes. Proven their ability to come together on their own—in October, when we organized what CNN called “the most widespread day of political action in the planet’s history,” there wasn’t a movie star or rock idol in sight—just people rallying around a scientific data point. Now the world’s religious leaders were adding their voice.

On one side: scientists. And archbishops, Nobelists, and most of all ordinary people in ordinary places. Reason and faith. On the other side, power—the kind of power that will be assembling in the Bella Center all week to hammer out some kind of agreement. The kind of power, exemplified by the American delegation, that so far has decided it’s not worth making the kind of leap that the science demands. The kind of power that’s willing to do what’s politically pretty easy, but not what’s necessary. The kind that would condemn the planet to 770 ppm rather than take the hard steps we need.

So no more tears. Not now, not while there’s work to be done. Pass the Diet Coke, fire up the laptop, grab the cellphone. To work. We may not have done enough, but we’re going to do all we can.

Spread the news on what the føck is going on in Copenhagen with friends via email, Facebook, Twitter, or smoke signals.

Melt and Pour Soap Adventures

My “day job,” though it’s as much about evenings as days, is as a full time church musician.  (I work in a church big enough to pay me a living wage at it. (However, if you check out this article on CNNmoney.com, at number 4, that should tell you something…)  This time of year is incredibly intense, and everyone is overworked and a little crabby, and there’s generally very little time for pleasant little holiday family rituals. For that matter, there’s very little time for family, period.  Every year somewhere in the first week of December,  my husband and I give each other a kiss and say, only semi-jokingly,  ”good night, honey, see you on the 26th or so.”

Today is sort of the last hurrah.  It’s a Saturday, I have no morning meetings, I have no weddings to play, I just have to show up at about 4pm and I have nothing on the calendar prior to that.  So even though it is nearly 11:00am, the kids and I are still in our jammies.  We are watching “The Nutcracker” while the second batch of melt-and-pour soap is melting over the double boiler.  This morning is the last shot at regaining any sense of serenity and holiday peace before the insanity hits full force on Monday, when the final shove of choir rehearsals and booklet printing and making sure the cast of thousands knows what it’s supposed to be up to…

I discovered melt-and-pour soaps a couple Christmases ago at teacher gift time; there was a bit of a learning curve, but we’re much better at it now.  And both kids have different teachers from last year,  so I feel okay about doing it again. Since the early experiments I’ve bought soap molds and experienced a lot of trial and error, and I have something like six pounds of unmelted soap block sitting in the closet.  It’s a great project for kids, as long as the adult does the melting, because they can pour and stir and color and blend themselves.

So…off we go.  
 
This is a really good site for basic instructions, and here’s my own experiences:

Melt and pour soap base is available in a lot of places, but if you get it from, say, Michaels, it is a lot more expensive. (I’m still glad I did that for my first pound–it was a good way to ease into the process.) I think I paid about $10 for a pound-size soap block, which makes maybe 4 bars of soap depending on the size you use, which isn’t that much less than buying nice glycerin soap somewhere else. 

I honestly can’t remember where I bought the 6 lbs I have in my closet, but any internet search for “melt and pour soap” will give more hits than anyone can possibly need. www.goplanetearth.com/index.html has some good-looking prices and products; I’ll probably try them next. 

Just a few hints, after one has read the basic falling-off-a-log instructions:

Color: I bought three little bottles of soap coloring from Michaels, in the three primary colors, and I’ve managed to work within that palette so far.  One would think there’s a whole lot of variety to be found from mixing red, blue, and yellow, but somehow in practice…not so much. Probably with better colors I could get better results, but our first few bars of soap looked a bit like radioactive waste…

This batch, for 12 ounces of soap, we used 3 drops of red and 4 drops of yellow, which gave a fairly nice coral-pink.  The next batch Bear wants to be green, which unfortunately was the hue we never managed last time and wound up with the radioactive waste look, but we’ll give it a try…

Fragrance: Some websites have suggested about 1.5 tsp of essential oil per pound of soap, but in reality that’s going to depend a lot on what oils you use.  Peppermint overpowers almost anything, as does Tea tree…Lavender blends too quickly into the background, as does Clary, but Geranium Rose leaps to the forefront. They seem, to me, to be behaving differently in soaps than they do in ordinary aromatherapy blends, but that could be just my own impression.   Also, as nice as the spices and citruses may smell, it’s not a good idea to use them in skin care products, because they are sensitizing. (Sweet Orange in small amounts I admit i do use…but I also want to be clear when I say that that I know I’m going against other advice, and no way would I advise anyone else in that direction.)

For this batch, I went the easy route and am trying to use up some of a much too old bottle of “Peace and Calming” from Young Living Oils. (Note: the Young Living company has been at the center of a lot of controversy in the aromatherapy community, regarding questionable business practices and irresponsible medical advice that flies in the face of the research of the aromatherapy community at large–advice which, incidentally, involves the use of way larger amounts of the oils than is widely deemed safe. Every shopper must make his or her own choice, but I have chosen not to continue purchasing their oils and once what I have is gone I won’t be buying any more.)  I don’t know about its theraputic value, but this blend does smell very nice and ought to make a lovely soap.

Molds: Pretty much anywhere you can get soap base, you can probably also get molds.  but molds aren’t absolutely necessary, especially if you want to really go for the “natural handmade” look.  A loaf pan or square baking dish can work just as well, although you’ll want to test out quantity to make sure you have the right container for whatever amount of soap you’re using. (If you melt your soap in a Pyrex measuring container, you can then use a different cup to measure that same amount of water into the container you want to use and find out exactly how high your soap will come and thus how thick your bars will be.)

I swear by silicone baking dishes, and using silicone for soap molds is just as easy and wonderful.  Sometimes in hard containers the soap gets stuck and is hard to unmold (though usually a quick immersion of the mold part into hot water loosens it enough to get it out), but silicone is really easy.

Additives: One word; beware.  I had this lovely idea of bars of soap with lavender blossoms scattered through it, or oatmeal, or whatever…but unless one gets the soap base that’s designed to suspend things in it, it all falls to the bottom of the mold.  Which, actually, gives a very nice exfoliating thing on one side, but not the effect I was looking for. 

Final product:

My oval mold holds 3 4oz bars, so we made 4 different batches:
1. coral-colored shea butter soap base with “Peace and Calming”
2. green goats-milk soap base (sort of a nice green this time!) with lavender and roman chamomile
3. lavender goats-milk soap base with lavender and just a touch of sweet orange
4. yellow clear glycerin with lemongrass and a teeny bit of lemon and orange (I know, the citrus thing, but I couldn’t resist)
5. orange clear glycerin with bergamot mint and sweet orange

Our final experiment, made in a loaf pan, is single layers of the 6 (okay, yes, I know there are seven, but whatever) colors of the rainbow each with a different scent; you put in one layer, let it harden, then go to the second layer, and so forth.  Takes a while, but it should be very cool…

This makes for a really fun kid project–I love giving teachers things that the kids can actually participate in.  Plus we always make a couple extra bars for us, and the kids like washing with the soap they helped make.  So it’s a win-win all around.