Daddy's Home!

Another frustrating shopping experience

My youngest daughter has decided to be a vegan. She has been an ovo-lacto vegetarian for 10 years. Anyway, I’m trying to be supportive and keep food on hand that she can quickly eat without much preparation due to her busy school schedule. I’ve been experimenting with new vegan recipes and have been looking for spring roll wrappers, I found them today at a small local grocery store. Unfortunately they are heavily packaged in plastic and are imported from Viet Nam! My reason for going to this store in the first place is they have locally grown fruit and vegetables at a very reasonable price and then I buy the Vietnamese wrappers. I will keep looking for a more local alternative. We have a large Asian community nearby so the next time I’m in that area I will check their stores.

One more impact lowering behavior: start using a French press again for making coffee. No filters to buy or throw away or compost.

I am researching homemade laundry soap recipes as well as shampoo and conditioner.

Hooray for rain! except for the driving part

Yes we do get rain here on occasion. Our poor landscaping really needs it too. We made the mistake of putting in a large lawn in our investment property. It is about 8 miles further inland and up on a hill, the lawn has a southern exposure so gets lots and lots of sun. In other words it needs a lot of water and is not in keeping with my eco-friendly lifestyle.

Lola is just not feeling the love

Homemade cat treats! What a great idea, Greenies cost about a buck an ounce and I figured i could make a pound and a half for about $3 so that comes to about 12 1/2 cents an ounce. Not too shabby! Tuna, cornmeal, flour, canola oil what's not to love? Well these little tidbits were not readily chowed down by my lovely Lola. She gave them a quick lick and then showed a complete lack of interest. Drat, i may need to up the tuna ratio-- I won't give up that easily.

Pondering

Today I'm thinking about packaging in general not just plastic. I bought a box of pretzels and some cereal hoping that the contents would be in something other than plastic like maybe a waxed paper bag. But no, it was not so, definitely in plastic bags. So then I was thinking how I would have been better off just buying the plastic bag of pretzels in the first place cuz at least then there'd only be one package. In an effort to avoid plastic i ended up with double the packaging definitely not my intention. Then I started thinking of what exactly is the best package as far as the earth's impact. We've all heard how paper bags use way more energy to make than plastic bags, but wildlife aren't choking and dying with hundreds of paper bag bits in their guts. My first choice is no package so that will be my ultimate goal. Second will be reusable packaging like a plastic container of cheese that can be used to store leftovers or as a portable food container for meals away from home. My third choice is the least packaging available if i can't find the product without packaging or in something reusable. Unless i decide to go without.

Looks like i'm going to have to try making my own pretzels.

So I'm out of Sequence

This was supposed to be included in my February 1 post.
I made homemade dog biscuits last month but I didn’t determine the yield so I will make again. Today has been a struggle not to go anywhere! The Super Bowl is on and I’m not a fan of either team so I’m not interested in watching. My husband is still in Brazil so normally I would go to a shopping center and look around but I decided to stay home and do some yard work instead. It was a beautiful day so I didn’t mind at all. Besides tomorrow I have a Starbucks meetup and have to take Michael to school and back so I can combine trips to stay with my plan of conserving energy. Still there were several times I was tempted to jump in the car and had to control my urge!

I am not a consumer of bottled water so that is a vice I don’t have to worry about but I did give up soft drinks partly because of the aluminum cans used.

Animals products today: milk in coffee, butter in homemade World Peace Cookies and a little cheese on top of my tofu chili. Not bad! I should mention that I do not expect to be perfect in my goals so I’m sure there will be occasions when I “fall off the wagon” so to speak.

Plastic, plastic everywhere!

Wow what a different experience it is to go grocery shopping with a conscious mind to avoid plastic. It was bizarre to stand in a far corner of the store and do a 180 degree look around and feel like I was in plastic land! I figure today I used 5 less bags of plastic than I normally would have. 3 produce bags -- I just plopped the food into my cart bare naked. and eliminated 2 plastic shopping bags cuz I brought my handy dandy canvas bag that is extra large and went without a bag for the 2 kinds of flour that I bought. Arrowhead mills organic whole wheat pastry flour on sale for $3.29 for a 5 pound bag! Same price for the organic unbleached all purpose. Woo hooo tasty treats are on the way! I seem to use a lot of exclamation points.

Look no plastic! Packaging made for a compost bin...perfection