Lynn's changes & observations | Green me up, Scotty!

Reduce plastic consumer waste

Sun, 28 Nov 2010 23:46:29 -0500

So today I only have a link for you. The ideas/initiatives are great. Here in Toronto, only #1 is in effect, but all City of Toronto functions do not use bottled water (although I'm not sure how long that initiative will stick around with our new mayor) which is a step in the right direction.

Anywho, onto the link... I actually saw it retweeted from @Inhabitat on twitter. It's a list of Good magazine's 10 favourite innovations for reducing plastic consumer waste.

I love all of the ideas, with…

Recent Dinners

Tue, 23 Nov 2010 23:15:27 -0500

So I ended up making a soup with the remaining celeriac/celery root. A friend in Holland sent me a simple recipe for a "Knolselderij Soep" (onion, celeriac/knolselderij, chicken stock, chicken, salt, pepper) but I jazzed it up a little because... well, I'm like that. Truly the best foods I've eaten have the least ingredients in them but I couldn't resist. Besides, I feel like if there's one thing that can be meat-free, it's soup. It was pretty darn good for a first go. Here's the first-try…

Seasonal Recipes: Celeriac

Sun, 21 Nov 2010 22:39:07 -0500

This week in our local fall CSA share we got:

Potatoes, onions, butternut squash, garlic, tomatoes, boston lettuce, apples, collards, shiitake mushrooms, broccoli, carrots, and a couple of celery roots (celeriac).

To be honest, my husband and I looked at these two strange looking root veggies and blanked. Happily, I had noticed an email from Plan B Organics (our CSA) in my inbox earlier that day and I quickly looked it up. (Phew.)

That's actually one of the things that I like about doing the…

72. Reusable gift wrap

Tue, 09 Nov 2010 23:13:14 -0500

Having kids puts the fun into birthdays again.

Tomorrow is my youngest son's birthday and we bought and made gifts for him, but I didn't really think about how they would be presented to him until tonight. I thought about bags, but there is something fun about unwrapping gifts, isn't there?

Then I remembered that I have a bin of freecycled fabric scraps that come in handy for small projects and patching. So I rifled through the bin and found a bunch of scraps that would fit various gifts in…

Clean Bin Project

Thu, 04 Nov 2010 21:51:46 -0400

I don't know much about this project/film, but it looks intriguing. Give the trailer a watch below, or read their blog here.

Seasonal Recipes: Carrots

Thu, 04 Nov 2010 21:23:32 -0400

I'm eyeing the carrots in this week's CSA share and thinking that it might be time to make our favourite carrot soup, which comes from a cookbook called Diabetic Cooking but is also posted online here on TLC's website. It's called Indian Carrot Soup and you can substitute squash for the carrot if that's what you have around. Either is delicious but we always go back to the carrot. From the description:

"Vitamin-rich and inexpensive, carrots star in this rich and spicy soup without the addition…

Local Off-Season CSA Share

Thu, 04 Nov 2010 18:14:14 -0400

I've been meaning to do this for a long time and today I actually remembered before I put the produce away.

In case anyone was curious as to what a sample of a regular winter (fall) local only share from Plan B Organic Farms looks like, I thought I'd post a photo.

This week's share includes local organic:

potatoes
garlic
carrots
kale
boston lettuce
mixed lettuce
flat-leaf parsley
shiitaki mushrooms
tomatoes
squash (spaghetti?)
leek
arugula
red onions
apples (empires - my favourite!)

It's looking like a…

71. Let the kids go wild

Wed, 03 Nov 2010 23:20:55 -0400

I just read about a study from Cornell University that suggests "If you want your children to grow up to actively care about the environment, give them plenty of time to play in the "wild" before they're 11 years old."

I was lucky enough to spend time every summer at a cottage in northern (no, not the Muskokas - think a couple of hours past North Bay) Ontario where we could explore the water and woods adult-free from a very young age. Maybe that's got something to do with this...

My family was…

Re-purposed Hallowe'en Costumes

Mon, 01 Nov 2010 11:35:52 -0400

Yesterday was Hallowe'en! My eldest son has said for weeks that he wanted to be a ghost, so I was pretty sure that I could make that costume. I still had an old white sheet that I had bought at Goodwill a couple of years ago for another purpose and I cut it to size and added eye and mouth holes.

However, at noon yesterday my youngest decided that he wanted to be a dog, not a pumpkin after all. Not wanting to disappoint (and frankly, he was a pumpkin last year so I don't blame him), I set to…

A word on dried beans

Fri, 29 Oct 2010 14:37:23 -0400

I mentioned that I don't use canned beans anymore. Most of you will groan at that and say you don't have time for dried beans. But I ran out of my stash of frozen chickpeas yesterday and I just want to mention that it actually doesn't take that much of your time. Here's the deal:

1. I rinsed and put the dried chickpeas in a large bowl and covered them (with an couple of inches to spare) with water last night just before I went to bed (2 minutes)

2. In the morning I drained them and put them in…

70. If it says 40, do 40

Wed, 27 Oct 2010 20:20:32 -0400

This isn't really a "green" change, but I'm posting it anyway because after I read it a couple of years ago , it just stuck in my head and has impacted my driving ever since. I have this book called Change the World for Ten Bucks and in it, Action 12, actually, it says just that "If it says 40, do 40". The reason? If you're doing 50 km/h (about 31 mph) you are twice as likely to kill someone you hit than if you're doing 40 km/h (about 25 mph). 40 zones are usually near schools and in small…

Full Review!

Sat, 23 Oct 2010 15:00:22 -0400

Just updating the full review since the last time I did it was in 2009.

Why review? To let you know how it's going, what's easy, what's not as easy, etc.

I figure a table with a 1(hard)/2(medium)/3(easy) star (*) system (x means failure and there is one n/a not applicable) with a comment might be easiest to peruse, but sorry about the scrolling...

#	Description	***	Comment
1	Mow lawn every week	*	I am always a slacker by the end of summer, but I just let it grow - I don't bother with the…