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.