Cooling off the old fashioned way

We don't have air conditioning in this little house we are renting, which seemed like a fine idea when we first moved in because 1) we live in Northern Michigan so one would think it would not get too hot, and 2) we were planning to have moved on to more permanent digs by now. It turns out that this house is not the most efficient, and it gets hot pretty quickly. So imagine our discomfort when it reached 94 degrees this week, and 89 degrees inside the house.

Instead of running out and buying an air conditioner, I ran out and got us an inflatable pool. We put the pool on the deck, filled it with ice cold water from the hose, and within minutes two overheated boys (and one overheated mama) were happy as could be splashing on the back deck. We have repeated this ritual every day as the heat spikes in the afternoon. And it is lovely.

Not having central air is definitely the green thing to do. It saves 33 gallons of gas each month, not to mention saving us $500 each year. But there is also something to be said for feeling the heat of summer. It's something I want my children to experience. I don't mean that I want them to suffer and feel uncomfortable. Rather, I want them to know the pleasure of splashing around in a kiddie pool. I want them to seek the cool wind off the lake to escape the heat, rather than closing themselves up indoors. I want them to know the sweet relief of the first cool breeze in the evening, and to hear the crickets at night outside our open windows. I want them to be a part of their world, their environment, and not trying to escape it. That is worth it to me, even when it is 89 degrees inside.

Green Cuisine: Mexican Quinoa Salad

Photo credit: net_efekt on Flickr

My friend Kyna has been somewhat of a food inspiration to me recently. After a delicious vegetarian dinner at her house in the fall, I decided to take the plunge and cook vegetarian at home. This week, she whipped up a nice little quinoa salad for lunch and I was hooked. So tonight, I made this:

Mexican Quinoa Salad
-3 cups cooked quinoa
-1 can black beans, rinsed
-1 cup corn
-2 tomatoes, diced
-1 small red onion, diced
-1 avocado, diced
-Salt to taste

I also tossed together some local organic greens with locally made Natalie Robyn's cherry vinegarette dressing.

Quinoa took less than 15 minutes to cook. I usually make this dish with rice, which takes 45 minutes. Not only did this save time, that's a lot of cooktop energy saved. Another great thing about quinoa, it's a complete protein, making it a great addition to vegetarian dishes. I'm going to try to soak the seeds in water (for just 2-4 hours apparently) and let it sprout, boosting its nutritional value even more. Am I gushing about quinoa? Yes, it's true. And you will too.

It was a delicious meal, very satisfying and so easy. And it was completely plant based (and all organic). It feels good to feed my family something so pure. And with the oil spill weighing so heavily on my mind, it feels good to eat in a low impact way.

Here is what dinner looked like. Mmmgood.

Week 4: Cold water laundry

Photo credit: Average Jane on Flickr

Washing laundry in cold water seems easy enough. It saves energy and supposedly cold water gets the clothes just as clean as warm. But on some level it is just hard to turn the dial from warm to cold, especially with things like soiled cloth diapers and guest room sheets.

Ultimately though, I'm a numbers girl. I searched around and found that TreeHugger had done all the math for me here.

According to that article, 90 percent of the energy used in washing machines is to heat the water. With an electric washer, using hot water instead of cold is the equivalent of driving 9 miles for each load of laundry and releases nearly 9 pounds of CO2 with each load.

In one year, washing in cold water instead of hot:

-Saves 3360 pounds of CO2

-Is equivalent to driving your car 3431 miles less

That is big energy savings and greenhouse gas reductions for such a simple step. It also saves you money. I learned here that washing in cold water also can save you $400 annually (with an electric water heater) and more than $300 (with a gas water heater).

There are detergents made especially for cold water, I may experiment with those if necessary, but for now I'll use my Ecos detergent and see how it goes.

As for the instinct we have to wash our most soiled things in hot water, there is something to this. A CBS News report found that hot water is better at killing dust mites, dog dander, and pollen than is cold water. So for those with allergies, it may be harder to give up the hot water.

Composting takes off

This afternoon we took the boys to the annual BBQ at Northern Michigan College here in Traverse City. It was a simple buffet style meal of veggies, potato salad, cole slaw, and either a Buffalo meat burger or hot dog. The remarkable thing about the meal was that we composted almost everything - the paper plates and cups, plastic forks (the compostable kind), napkins, and all the food scraps. To make sure these things did not end up in the garbage, a student volunteer was stationed at each trash area telling people what to compost. I was so intrigued I started asking the volunteer about who was doing this, was this a NMC program? She didn't know the answers. Hmm...

As we were leaving, we took a short-cut that took us right by the garbage truck. We lingered briefly because we have a three-year-old boy and, well, garbage trucks are fascinating. There was a man working, and I casually asked him about the composting that day. He said that all of the scraps are going to his farm, Food for Thought, where he has an industrial composting facility. He also said that usually the BBQ generates hundreds of trash cans full of trash, but this day they had only brought back trash about a dozen times. The rest was compost.

It turns out that I had just read about this man, Timothy Young, and his farm in the latest Traverse Magazine. They are doing a lot more than compost, but the composting blew me away. Northern Michigan is such a fertile place for green innovation. It's exciting to be here.

Week 3: Meat free meals

Photo credit:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/32599519@N02/ / CC BY 2.0

In November I stopped cooking meat at home. I had been wanting to reduce our meat consumption for a while, but it just seemed so hard to change all of my regular recipes for new vegetarian ones. It turned out that it wasn't as hard as I had feared to kick the meat habit.

I started with a one-month commitment, figuring we could go without until the Thanksgiving turkey. I don't keep secrets from my husband, but I made an exception and didn't tell him we about eating meat for the first week. I wanted to make sure this commitment was going to stick, and I figured once I got a few tasty meatless meals in him he would not protest.

It turns out I had nothing to fear. I had to step out of my recipe comfort zone (some may refer to as a rut) and find new ones, but I discovered many easy, delicious, and satisfying meals that my husband and three-year old both love. I even made lasagna for my in-laws with vegetarian sausage that they raved about. Now we've been doing this for 6 months and it has just become our routine.

There is a wonderful effort called the PB&J Campaign, a campaign to reduce the amount of animal products people eat by encouraging people to eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich instead of meat and dairy. Really, any plant-based meal will do, but a PB&J is something pretty familiar to even the biggest meat-lovers, and tasty too. It is a fun way to think about reducing your footprint, but the impact is quite significant. According to their website:

-Each time you have a plant-based meal like a PB&J sandwich you reduce your carbon dioxide emissions over an animal-based meal by 2.5 pounds for lunch.

-If you have a PB&J instead of red meat, you reduce your carbon footprint by 3.5 pounds.

-You also save a whopping 133 gallons of water at lunch, and 24 square feet of land from deforestation and pollution.

Holy cow!

The numbers don't work out perfectly, as my family does eat dairy and eggs, but on average my family is saving:
-22.5 pounds of carbon each day, 540 pounds each month, and about 7000 pounds per year;
-7128 gallons of water per week, or 373,000 per year; and
-1296 square feet of land each week.

That's nothing to shake a stick at.

I'm thoroughly convinced that anybody can do this. You get to make rules that work for your family, whether you want to remove meat at one meal per week or avoid all animal products each July. In our family, we don't eat meat at home, but we eat whatever we want at restaurants (we eat out about once a week). We also occasionally cook meat for visitors and on special occasions, like that Thanksgiving turkey. We also happen to really like peanut butter and jelly.