We eat salads just about every day.  That means we go through a lot of salad dressing.  I’ve found that salad dressing is usually either really expensive or a dietary nightmare.  The organic stuff made of good ingredients without a bunch of preservatives and crud mixed in, is usually at least four dollars for a little bottle.  The cheaper stuff is usually a complex mixture of high fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated oils, and a whole bunch of synthetic junk.  I stopped buying the latter years ago, but I had continued to buy (grudgingly) the really expensive stuff until recently.

A few months ago, I started making my own salad dressing.  I had always done the vinegar and oil thing, but my husband prefers creamy dressings, and I like to mix it up a bit too.  I got this book as a gift, and my favorite thing about it has been the salad dressings.  My favorite is made of nutritional yeast, celery, hemp seeds, herbs, miso, lemon juice, and some flaxseed oil, and I always add some apple cider vinegar.  It’s so tasty that I usually eat the leftovers with a spoon, straight from the blender.  It’s nutritious, made entirely of ingredients that I have on hand in my kitchen (no mystery stuff), and so much less expensive than the dressings I used to buy.  I can change the flavor by switching the herbs (cilantro instead of basil, for example), and I can make just enough for one or two meals so that it’s always fresh.  It usually takes about five minutes to make a great dressing.

I’ve started experimenting, and have had lots of luck with adding and subtracting ingredients – most of my dressing attempts have been successful, even though I’m usually winging it, just using whatever I have on hand and tossing it in the blender, using lemon juice and/or apple cider vinegar as a base.  An added bonus is that there’s no salad dressing jars to recycle or reuse afterwards – just a blender to clean.

Do any of you make your own salad dressings?  Any favorite recipes or secret ingredients to share?

I’ve written before about how I’m trying to buy less plastic.  I just read a really inspiring interview with Beth Terry from Fake Plastic Fish, and I’m ashamed to admit that on the rare occasions when we eat out, I’ve never thought to ask the waiter to bring my water without a straw.  Around the house, I’m doing pretty well, but we still have a long way to go.  Just about all of my food storage containers are glass now – I have a bunch of glass bowls and casserole dishes with lids that I use in the fridge, and I’ve been recycling jars into food storage for a while now.  Jars that once held olives, artichoke hearts, and almond butter now hold dried lentils, sesame seeds and walnuts.  I soak them in hot water until their labels peel off, and then glue on new labels for whatever I’m putting in them.  Jars like that used to end up in my recycling bin, but I figure this is an even more effective way of recycling them.

Once we get our garden going this summer, I’m hoping to dry a lot of food and my repurposed jars will be perfect for storing it all.  I can picture a whole shelf full of mis-matched jars filled with various garden goodies, and it makes me smile.

I try to avoid plastic quite a bit, and when I do buy it, it tends to be secondhand.  For the most part, I’d rather have things made of wood or glass or metal, and that’s pretty much what I see when I look around our house.  But the bulk food at the health food store where I shop comes pre-packaged in little plastic bags with twist ties at the top (there are no bins).  And when I look in our recycling bin each week, there are always several plastic containers that somehow made their way in there.

A month or so ago, I started dumping the contents of our indoor trash can into our outdoor trash can, without removing the bag from the indoor can.  We compost all of our food scraps and use cloth diapers, so there is never anything wet or disgusting in our trash can, and there’s usually not much in it at all.  I had noticed that each week we were removing the big plastic bag from the trash can and taking it out to be picked up with only a little bit of stuff in the bottom.  It started to seem like a huge waste of a big plastic bag.  I think it’s been about five or six weeks now that we’ve been using the same trash bag, and it’s working great.  I imagine that eventually it will get holes in it and I’ll have to start with a fresh one, but at this rate our huge box of garbage bags should last until we retire!

Beth’s Fake Plastic Fish site is a good read for anyone looking for inspiration to reduce consumption in general and consumption of plastic in particular.  Reducing consumption is the ultimate in frugal living, since it translates to not spending money.  And if there’s a greater purpose to it, that’s even better.

Hello all, and Happy Sunday!  I wanted to share a couple of links with you, to sites that I’ve been using a lot lately.

I’ve mentioned that we’ve been transitioning to a mostly vegan diet, and I’m focusing a lot on raw food.  It makes sense, given that the vast majority of what we eat is veggies, fruits, and seeds.  When I shop, just about everything in my cart is from the produce department (which makes me really excited for the summer, when we will hopefully be growing most of it ourselves), and recipes for simple raw foods fit very well into our lives.  The Sunny Raw Kitchen has become a standby for me.  I love that there are so many recipes available on the site, for free, and categorized nicely in an index.  I also love that so many of them don’t require a dehydrator.  We are planning to get a dehydrator  in the summer, once we are ready to start preserving our produce, but for now, we don’t have one and I love that so many of the recipes on The Sunny Raw Kitchen don’t need one.  The “where’s the beef?” carrot mixture quickly became a staple around here, and I’ve been making it every few days for the last month or so.  It’s much more interesting than plain carrots, very inexpensive to make, and a great addition to salads and tacos.  Both my husband and my son love it, and it only takes about 3 minutes to make using a food processor.

I’m also loving Debra’s List, which is an amazing resource of eco-friendliness.  Debra has been green since long before it was cool, and her site is a wealth of information.  I especially like the section where she explains a lot of the things that she does around her own home.  It inspired me to spend a lot of today deep cleaning our house.  We can’t afford to spend thousands of dollars on mattresses and furniture without toxic chemicals in them, but I can spend a few hours vacuuming all the nooks and crannies of our house (including the mattresses, an idea I got from Debra’s site) and washing our rugs and bedding.  In general, everything I’ve done to rid our house of toxins has been inexpensive or free.  The cupboard under our sink is full of bags of baking soda and jugs of vinegar that I use to clean pretty much everything, but I’m not going to spend $5000 on a new couch made of organic hemp.  I love that Debra’s site has ideas you can put into practice regardless of how much money you have.

I hope you can find something useful on one or both of these sites – they’ve both been fantastic resources for me, and I thought I’d share.

We have three homemade cold frames in our backyard now, where we are growing our greens.  We’ve already had about three feet of snow so far this season, but our greens are doing great.  Here’s a picture of one of the coldframes, and a close-up shot of the greens inside it.

The glass is just old double-pane doors that we found at the Habitat for Humanity store.  The frames are made from 2×4s (we bought the long ones, and salvaged the short ones from a lumber yard that was giving them away).  They have some foam insulation in the end walls, and weather stripping around the doors, but the insulation is pretty minimal overall, and they aren’t heated at all.  On sunny days, it’s often over 100 degrees inside the cold frames, even when it’s in the 30s outside.  During the night, the temperature inside drops to about the same as the outside temperature, so these sort of frames will really only work for things like greens that are pretty cold hardy.

I make green smoothies for us everyday, and before we were growing our own greens I would spend at least $15/week on organic greens.  During the summer, the greens in our local store come from farms in the area, but when I look at them now, I see labels from farms on the other side of the country (places where they haven’t had three feet of snow so far this year).  So if I were buying our greens, not only would I be spending at least $15/week, but I would also be contributing to the pollution that goes along with trucking food halfway across the country. 

Our cold frames were very inexpensive because most of the materials were used.  My husband came up with a pretty simple design, and it works perfectly if you get a decent amount of sunshine during the day – regardless of how cold it is outside.  As long as there is sun hitting the glass, the greenhouse effect will heat things up.

If you have a decent amount of sunny days in the winter, see if you can grow some cold-hardy plants.  It’s such a welcome sight to see bright green leaves growing in the middle of a brown (and white) landscape this time of year.

This is a bathroom-themed post, so if that’s tmi, here’s your fair warning to mosey along now. 

For some time, we’ve been on a mission to reduce the amount of disposable stuff we use.  It’s cheaper and far more environmentally sound to go with reusable products, and we’ve found that it’s a lot easier than it seems.  Our son has been in homemade cloth diapers since he was born, and I barely even notice the extra loads of laundry.  Amy at Crunchy Domestic Goddess has a challenge on her site about ditching disposables – check it out if you’re looking for inspiration.

Anyway, I started thinking…  Why not make myself cloth wipes that I can use instead of toilet paper when I pee?  I wash diapers all the time – how hard would it be to toss in some little squares of cloth along with the diapers?  So I got out my sewing stuff and my recycled fabric.  Remember the flannel sheets that I got at a thrift store before our son was born?  Those sheets have definitely earned their keep around here.  Diapers, a sling, more diapers, and they’re still going strong.

I cut little rectangles of fabric from one of the sheets, about eight inches by four inches.  Then I folded them in half and sewed around the open edges, leaving a little space to turn them inside out.  Then I stitched up the open space… done and done.  It took me about 45 minutes to cut out and sew 20 little squares.  Now I have nice soft flannel double-thick squares of fabric, instead of toilet paper.  And I’m the only girl in the house, so they’re all mine.  I toss them in the diaper pail, and they use no extra resources at all, since I’m running the washing machine anyway, with or without them.  By the way, I’m a very well-hydrated girl, so those 20 squares last me two days – I was going through a lot of toilet paper.

(I should note that this is not an original idea.  My parents did this when I was a kid, long before “green” was the buzz word of the decade.)

That got me on a roll, and I started thinking again about all the tampons I’ve thrown away over the years.  I checked out some of the websites that sell cloth pads, and considered buying some.  But then I thought about what an awesome sense of satisfaction I get from making stuff myself.  And even though my sewing skills are nothing to brag about, I figured that if I could manage to make diapers, I could make a pad.  I read through the directions on the Tiny Birds Organic website (I got that link from Alissa, who sews beautifully and makes amazing-looking pads and diapers and all sorts of other stuff), and then I sat down to give it a try.  I’ve found that with diapers, I prefer pockets and inserts rather than having the soaker layer built into the diaper.  So I skipped the extra layer, and just cut out the front and back of the pad (the back is made of two overlapping pieces).  Other than that, I followed all the steps listed.  Then I made an insert using a layer of flannel from the sheet, a middle layer cut from an old towel, and a backing layer made from an old fleece sweatshirt that I had been using to make diaper liners.  The fleece provides some waterproofing, but you can also use wool.  I’m thrilled with how well it turned out, given that it’s my first try.  Here’s a picture of the pad and the liner:

And a picture of everything all put together, with the wings folded underneath:

I still need to figure out a snap.  I’m going into town tomorrow, so I’ll browse around at the craft store and see what they have in the way of snaps.  This project took me about 30 minutes, from start to finish.  My sewing machine is quite old and before I started making diapers last year, my previous sewing experience was limited to home ec class in 1990.  So trust me, if I can do this, anyone can.

Remember last year, when we built a little greenhouse to go in our side yard? 

When we moved, we had to cut it in half, and we just got it put back together this week.  Here it is in our new yard, protecting one of our garden beds:

See why we had to move?

That green patch around the patio is a lawn that my husband planted from seed a month ago.  He rented a tiller ($36) and spent about $20 on grass seed.  The rest of the yard is really nasty weeds, and he wanted a little area off of the patio where our son could play without getting poked by gnarly weeds.  So now we have a little patch of lawn.  It’s only taking up a small area of our yard – it looks bigger in the picture than it really is.  Most of our yard is devoted to fruit trees and berry bushes, but the area that you can see beyond the grass in the picture will eventually be filled in with garden beds.  For now, there are only three, but there are many more to come!

I promised a long time ago that I’d post a picture of the orchard we planted.  Here it is, under a rainbow:

It’s hard to see all of the trees, because they are still pretty small.  Check back in a few years and it should be a more impressive sight!  In all, we have 14 fruit trees in our orchard.  We’re expecting a bit of trial and error with this process.  We’re only going to let about half the trees fruit next year, leaving the other half to focus on growing strong roots.  The following year we’ll switch it up, and let the ones that already fruited work on their roots.  Getting fruit will depend on when we get our last frost too, so I expect that some years will be better than others.  But we’re really excited about having fruit trees – it’s something we’ve wanted to do for a long time.

I also wanted to share a picture of the pepper plants we’re growing on our patio in a container my husband built:

And, better late than never… check out the Festival of Frugality that Green Panda Treehouse hosted last week.  I had an article in the FOF, and enjoyed many of the other articles too. 

Since my foray into baking bread has worked out well, I thought I’d try tortillas.  I don’t know why I never thought of this before.  Seriously, they are about as easy as baking powder biscuits, which I’ve been making for years.  I stopped buying big name-brand tortillas years ago, because of the large number of ingredients on the label.  We don’t eat tortillas all that often, but when we do, I always buy organic, preservative-free tortillas at the health food store.  They are not cheap.

Yesterday, I found this recipe online, and decided to give it a try.  You know me – I can’t ever follow a recipe without tweaking it a bit.  So I swapped out some of the white flour for whole wheat flour, and used Smart Balance instead of lard.  It took about five minutes to get everything mixed up and 12 little dough balls made.  I let them sit for a while and then rolled them out with my rolling pin (first time I ever used my rolling pin!  Guess my son can’t have it as a toy afterall).  I cooked them for about 10 – 15 seconds per side in a hot frying pan (no oil needed), and that was all it took.  They were fabulous.  We may or may not have eaten all twelve of them already.

So not only will I not be buying bread anymore, I also won’t be buying tortillas.  I don’t remember the exact price of the tortillas that I used to buy, but I’m thinking it was around $4 for a dozen.  I’m estimating that the ingredients I used yesterday cost less than a dollar (including organic flour).  The tortillas took very little time to make, and required almost no cooking skills.  I can definitely do that again.

Yesterday I baked a loaf of whole wheat bread in our sun oven.  Then I decided to make eggplant sandwiches.  I had a fresh farmers market eggplant, which I sliced up and drizzled with fresh garlic, olive oil, salt, and pepper.  Then I put the eggplant slices in the sun oven and left them there for about an hour.  Halfway through their cooking, I added a bell pepper from our garden to the sun oven, and roasted it along with the eggplant.

I assembled the sandwiches with tomatoes (from the farmers market – ours aren’t ready yet), lettuce from our garden, mustard, and vegan mayo, along with the eggplant and roasted pepper.  They were amazingly tasty, and I love that all the cooking was done for free.  As a bonus, it was done without heating up my already warm kitchen, and while I was able to get other stuff done in the house.  Here’s a picture (I’m not a food photographer by any stretch, so please ignore the glare):

We also installed a clothesline yesterday, which I’m very excited about.  Actually we just installed the poles – we still have to add the lines, which we’re going to do tomorrow.  My husband found the poles at a scrap metal place he’s been frequenting lately.  They had been cut off at ground level, so they’re a bit shorter than normal.  Once we got them embedded in concrete they’re only about four and a half feet high.  But they will work perfectly… after all, I’ve been using folding clothes racks that are about four feet high for the last two years.  The best part about the poles was that they were scrap metal, sold for 25 cents a pound.  He bought a bunch of other stuff with them; we don’t know exactly how much they cost, but we’re guessing it was probably around ten bucks.  One of the T-bars was broken, so my husband snagged another piece of pole scrap and welded on a new T-bar.

We commented on the fact that our new clothesline area takes up as much space as we had in our entire backyard at our old house.  Here, it’s only taking up a tiny little area of yard to the side of our house.  Reason number 742 that we’re glad we moved!

Our new patio is the perfect spot for our solar oven.  At our old house, we had to move the oven from the back yard to the front yard as the day went by (sometimes in the middle of cooking something) because the yard was so small and the house next door was so close that we didn’t get constant sun in any one spot for long.  But our new backyard is like a gigantic sun deck.  It gets sun all day long, and the patio extends far enough back from the house that it doesn’t get shaded by the house until evening.  Not only is this good news for our garden, but it’s also great for the sun oven. 

Yesterday, I picked a bell pepper from the potted pepper plants we brought with us from the old house (they were in our hydroponic garden, and now live in pots in the back yard).  Then I stuck it in the sun oven for half an hour or so, and ended up with a perfectly roasted pepper.  I wanted to make veggie sandwiches, and figured a roasted bell pepper would be perfect.  It was.  We had great sandwiches, and I loved the fact that the pepper grew on our patio, and was then moved all of about three feet to the sun oven where it roasted.  About as local and energy-efficient as possible.

Today I decided to try making a loaf of bread in the sun oven.  My husband has done this before, but I hadn’t.  For some reason, I’m always hesitant to tackle any baking project that uses yeast.  I’ll make baking powder biscuits, and all sorts of fantastic raw desserts that I find over at Kristen’s site, but not things like bread.  I think I’ve used dead yeast in the past, and had loaves of bread turn out flat, and that’s what was discouraging me.  But no more.  This morning I decided that a loaf of bread was not going to outsmart me.  I found a recipe online, sort of followed the instructions, and this is what I just pulled out of the sun oven:

I can’t wait for lunchtime so that we can break into it.  It smells amazing, looks great, rose up just like it’s supposed to, and in general boosted my confidence when it comes to baking bread.  All without heating up my kitchen or using any electricity.