Continuing Progress

We've made some huge strides this week. The most visible change is the new blackout curtains in the large living room window which is blocking out enough of the heat from outside that we've actually been able to turn off the central a/c altogether. We are now able to keep the apartment perfectly comfortable with just a box fan, and occasionally opening windows when it cools off after dark. I suspect that this will dramatically lower our power bill, and we are using less resources.

We're continuing to cook fresh, and from scratch. Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking continues to be an amazing resource. In the past week, we've made our own bbq sauce, a tex-mex inspired taco casserole, some great oriental inspired dishes featuring rice, chicken and steamed veggies, and an amazing baked spaghetti. An experiment with making fruit tarts before the strawberries in the fridge went bad was amazingly successful, and will probably start being a somewhat regular treat.

We attempted to freecycle a chair that we needed to get rid of, but ended up having to just put it out at the curb, unfortunately. The moderator of our local freecycle group apparently only approves new posts something like every 10 days. We're going to have to keep that in mind in the future and only freecycle if we don't mind holding on to whatever we are trying to get rid of for at least a couple of weeks.

Cooking Fresh

Our cooking fresh experiments continue to go well. Last night's dinner featured brown rice, snow peas cooked in with caramelized onions, chicken, and broccoli, zuchinni and squash stir fry. It all worked very well together. We produced almost no waste for this meal, throwing away only the outer skin of the onion and the stem ends of the veggies. No cans, no paper, no packaging. Even washing up was minimal as we used the same pan for all of the cooking, and as we all cleaned our plates there was very little water usage to wash dishes. All dish soap used was eco-friendly Clorox Green Works Natural Dishwashing Liquid Simply Lemon -- 22 Fl Oz. All surfaces were cleaned with eco-friendly cleaning products - Clorox Green Works Natural All Purpose Cleaner 32 oz (946 ml). Both products are made with 99% natural ingredients and are fully biodegradable. We are slowly trying to switch over to using entirely Green Works products, or possibly making our own cleaning products with various combinations of water, white vinegar, baking soda, castille soap, and borax.

Lunch today was white pizza with broccoli, chicken and onions. The dough was entirely handmade with only flour, water and yeast. I had to give JT a bit of a lesson on working that type of dough, but I think he enjoyed the lesson. The pizza was amazing. By making this entirely from fresh ingredients, and using veggies that we had already prepared for use in food, we created no waste for this meal. One pan and one mixing bowl needed to be washed, but we again used just warm water and the green works cleaner.

I don't think we've actually had to throw anything away other than the unusable portions of veggies in a couple of days. We're actively working on reducing the amount of resources such as water and electricity that we are using as well. The apartment had already been switched to entirely GE 26 Watt Energy Smart CFL - 6 Pack - 100 Watt Replacement bulbs, but we are also getting better about turn off lights when not in use.

Sooo... so far so good. :)

Intro

My roomate and I started this experiment out of the twin desires to save money, and to lessen our environmental footprint. We've definitely got the saving money part of it down. We're cooking all of our own food at home, and almost entirely from scratch. We've gone from eating more prepared food than I care to admit, and adding that much waste to landfills to eating all of our meals from a combination of brown rice or brown rice noodles, chicken or ground turkey, fresh veggies including broccoli, zucchini, squash, onions, and snow peas, soy sauce, and a wide variety of spices. If we decide that we want some sort of bread product, we make it ourselves. We haven't bought bread in quite awhile, and have actually had to throw out some of the last of the store bought bread that we got before we started trying to go sustainable because what we make for ourselves is so much better.

Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking is one of our main weapons for cooking. It's not really a cookbook as you've ever seen it before. It teaches you how to cook virtually anything by following some key ratios for ingredients, and provides some excellent, practical, every day tips.

We've also switched to using (almost) only reusable bags. We do occasionally slip up and catch ourselves in a store and needing to buy something and not having one of the bags with us, but we are working on it. We're also starting to seriously look for places to buy locally grown food. That's surprisingly difficult here. I think you'd actually have an easier time finding such in a large city, but in our relatively isolated small city it is a bit of a chore.

We are also starting to take some tips from The Lazy Environmentalist on a Budget: Save Money. Save Time. Save the Planet. We haven't been able to do much so far, but it's cool seeing how living greener can actually save both your wallet and the planet.