The New Green

This is the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center as I saw it last week. It fits in oddly well into its New York City surroundings. Actually it reminds me of a Buddhist temple in a weird way.

I hope everyone had a lovely Thanksgiving. We chose to stay in Brooklyn this year and celebrate with friends who invited us over. We didn’t have to get into a car because they live a few blocks away from us. On Saturday morning we were going for a walk and noticed how relaxed everyone on the street looked. And then it dawned on us that these were the folks who didn’t pack into their cars and drive a zillion hours to visit relatives. We had the relaxed glow all weekend as we ambled around our neighborhood going to the movies (Where the Wild Things Are) and the playground.

After we bought our movie tickets, we still had some time so we decided to go for a walk to a nearby toy store. We are in the midst of figuring out what to get Lindsay for Hanukkah, Christmas and her birthday. It’s a tough time of year that can easily turn into a feeding frenzy of gift giving and opening. We want the gifts to be meaningful and useful, instead of the kind that get 1 hour of play and then forgotten (and worse, thrown out). While we were looking around I noticed these stickers. No, they aren’t a joke! They are made by Dover, who usually publishes wonderful, and often educational, books and coloring books. I think I need to write them a letter. What are we teaching here?? And no, there aren’t overweight kid stickers included in the book.

We also watched the movie Food, Inc. over the weekend (actually the night before Thanksgiving!), but that will be another post.

Here’s hoping you have a wonderful holiday with time to reflect on all the things you are thankful for.

Today’s tip is about saving some energy and energy dollars by hanging your clothes up to dry. Clothes dryers are one of the biggest energy suckers in the home. A typical dryer can use somewhere between 1800-5000 watts, which is about 2-3 times more than a dishwasher, or vacuum cleaner. You can figure out how much energy your home appliances are using here.

Laundry that has dried outside has a wonderful fresh smell you never get with the dryer. But it isn’t always practical or possible to hang your clothes outside. I have a very short clothes line outside, so I choose the heaviest items to hang out there. You know the towels or the mattress pads that tumble endlessly in the dryer? They dry in almost the same time outside and save a bundle of energy that way. Sometimes the towels can dry a little stiff, but you can toss them in the dryer for a couple of minutes to soften them up.

If you don’t have outdoor space, you can get a bit creative in where to hang your laundry. Before buying a house, my sister used to have a line outside her apartment window. I often hang jeans up on our baby gates. In our laundry room (which used to be our darkroom when I first moved into this apartment) I hang a lot of shirts and other items up to dry. The fabric lasts a whole lot longer than if it was run through the hot dryer and it dries overnight without a care or practically a wrinkle. Some people hang lingerie to dry on their shower curtain rod.

Get creative! The less clothing that goes in the dryer, the less energy you will be using. Your clothes will last longer, so it’s a win-win situation.

Check out my sister’s insanely pretty clotheslines!

Back in July, my husband gave me a KitchenAid stand mixer for our 10th anniversary. I know most people get one of these when they first get married, but back then I couldn’t imagine having such a huge appliance in my tiny Brooklyn kitchen.

I really love baking, so I’ve been having fun kneading bread dough and mixing batter for cupcakes. We decided to get a pasta rolling/cutting attachment, which has turned out to be a lot of fun. There is something so satisfying about feeding dough into a machine and having flattened sheets come out. Then you feed the sheets in and long strings drip out. I pretend I’m very sophisticated making pasta, but the reality is that I’m just playing with the grown-up version of a playdoh extruder.

Although I’ve been really swamped with work for the past 2 weeks getting ready for a photo shoot, I decided that I absolutely had to make ravioli. We had some extra ground beef/ground turkey mix from dinner, so I flipped through my book The Complete Book of Pasta and Noodles for a recipe. I chose to make meat and ricotta with basil filling.

Meat and Ricotta with Basil Filling based on recipe from The Complete Book of Pasta and Noodles by The Editors of Cook’s Illustrated Magazine.

1 T olive oil (evoo)

2 minced garlic cloves

1/2 lb of ground meat. You can use different combos such as ground beef with pork. I had beef/turkey mix on hand.

1 c. ricotta

1/3 c. grated parmesan cheese

1 large egg yolk

1/2 c. minced basil leaves (I used the last basil I had growing in a pot)

1/2 t salt

freshly ground pepper

Heat the garlic in olive oil until fragrant. Add the meat and cook on med-high until the meat browns and the liquid evaporates. Break up the pieces as it cooks. Drain off the fat and let cool a bit.

In a medium mixing bowl, add the cooled meat and the rest of the ingredients. You can keep the mixture in the fridge overnight if you like.

I made a basic pasta dough of 3 large eggs mixed into 2 cups of flour. I always try and sneak some whole wheat flour into my cooking. I only added about 1/4 cup because I didn’t want the dough to get too heavy. You can  mix your dough in a food processor, by hand, or with the dough hook of your stand mixer. If the dough looks crumbly, add water 1 T at a time until it comes together. You don’t want to add too much in case it gets sticky. I made the dough before the filling because it needs to rest for about 1/2 hour before you start rolling it out.

Now comes the fun part. When the dough is ready, you roll it out in thin sheets. Drop teaspoonfuls of the filling about an 1-1 1/4″ apart on the dough, fold over and seal. It took me a couple of tries to get my technique down. At first I was getting a lot of air trapped in with the filling, but then figured out how to press it out before I completely sealed the raviolis. I trimmed them into squares using a pizza wheel. I’m pretty darn happy with how they turned out. I’m going to experiment with different fillings, because really, how can anything surrounded by dough be anything but tasty and satisfying?

I’ve been thinking a lot about the small things we can do that add up to a big impact. That is what has made me want to post some ideas hopefully once a week. In any case, I’ve chosen tuesday as my day. The idea of these tips is to spark awareness and not guilt. I think we sometimes get caught up in how bad so many different things are that it’s hard to think of the small things we can do to chip away at the problem.

So, these are my guilt-free tips. If you have any ideas of your own *please* email them to me and I will post them when I can.

Today’s tip is to lower the water usage in your toilet. A family of 4 typically uses 100 gallons of water a day, and the toilet is the biggest factor in the water consumption.

Ideally we would all have low-flow toilets, or the cool dual-flush ones that have a different amount of water to flush #1 and #2. If that’s not an option (remember, don’t feel guilty!) you can reduce the amount of water in your tank. This reduces the amount of water used per flush, which adds up pretty quickly.

When I was a kid, a lot of people put a brick in their toilet tank. The mass of the brick would reduce a brick-size mass of water in your tank. That’s the idea I’m working with today. The only problem with using a brick is that it begins to deteriorate in the water, which can cause problems with your pipes.

Instead of a brick, you can use a number of different objects. I love to go on hikes and nature walks, so my objective was to find a river rock. When we stayed with friends up in Woodstock, NY there were plenty of beautiful, smooth river rocks near their house. River rocks are great because their surface has been smoothed over by years of water flowing. They won’t deteriorate in your tank and cause problems.

If you can’t find a nice river rock, another solution is to take a plastic bottle or jug that is about 1 liter in size. Fill it with pebbles and seal it. The pebbles weigh it down, so it doesn’t float around and interfere with the workings of the toilet.

Of course, there’s the old saying, “If it’s yellow, let it mellow. If it’s brown, flush it down.” If you and your family are up for this (mine is not), you can save a lot of water by just not flushing as often.

Why is Portland light years ahead of New York City when it comes to just about every green initiative? With the population density that we have here it would make so much sense to have recycling cans on the street corners for all those darn water bottles, and to collect compost along with garbage. Not only don’t we have that, but now we don’t even have leaf pick up for all the fall leaves. But I digress…

This video was part of a Huffington Post article about Bijou restaurant in Portland and how they started composting all of their kitchen waste. Turns out Portland has a program called Portland Composts that connects businesses who want to compost, with haulers who specifically deal with compostables.

I live right by a huge restaurant row here in Brooklyn. With the restaurants came rodents, then hawks dining on the rodents and now raccoons dining on everything in sight, including attempts at eating my chickens. I’ve seen the amount of food that gets tossed by the restaurants and fantasize about opening a composting facility and stopping off at each restaurant to pick up the compost w/ a horse and cart. I doubt that fantasy will ever amount to anything, but it is nice to imagine.

Here’s a nice video showing a man and his son building a coop out of a lot of re-purposed materials. I can’t tell from the video, but my only suggestion would be to make sure the whole thing is sealed. It looks as though the back wall has an opening under the roof, which could allow raccoons in.

Neil is in our yard right now trying to figure out how to secure our coop to keep marauding raccoon claws out.

My chickens are in the final stages of their molt. At least all signs point to that. Chickens begin the molt on their heads and kind of work their way down to their tail and wing feathers. Edie looks gorgeous and fluffy instead of mangey like she did after her bout with mites. I’m not walking into their coop to find loads of feathers these days. I think they should be well insulated for winter with all their new feathers.

However, when I check their nest box all I find are little fluffy feathers. No eggs. It’s been about 2 months with NO EGGS. I have to buy eggs from the store, which doesn’t suit me at all anymore. So instead of staring at an empty egg holder, I have decided to fill it with the gorgeous grape tomatoes that are still coming out of my garden. They are getting smaller and smaller as the days get shorter and cooler, but they are still coming. Winter is a mourning time for me when I don’t have tomatoes that taste like tomatoes, so I’m enjoying each and every one of these little treasures.

The other day I did some work in my garden to prepare for the winter. I cut back and pruned a few bushes and cut down many of my tomato plants. I didn’t cut down my grape tomato plants because they are still producing. Fall is in full swing here in Brooklyn, so I took out my trusty Toro leaf vac/shredder and sucked up a bunch of leaves. The act of shredding the leaves makes them take up much less space than traditionally raked leaves. One bag of shredded leaves could be as much as 5-8 bags of un-shredded leaves.

I dug shovelfuls of beautiful compost that’s been cooking all summer and spread them out on my flower and vegetable beds. The soil looks so dark and rich, which is in contrast to the dry, lifeless, glass-filled soil that mostly exists in my yard. I still have straw and hay from fall scavenging, so I decided to add all of the shredded leaves to my compost bin. This is the one time of year when I have an abundance of “browns” in my compost bin. They will break down quickly though with the help of the amazing chicken poo. I swear that stuff is like steroids for the compost bin. I showed a friend my compost bin and she just kept saying, “Yeah, but where’s all the stuff?” She couldn’t believe she wasn’t looking at a bin filled with egg shells and broccoli stems.

I am not a compost maniac. I think that everything will break down on its own without a lot of fuss that many people suggest (shredding everything before adding to the bin, frequent watering, no cooked food, etc.) and my bumper crop of compost was evidence of my success. You can read my previous post about having an easy and successful compost bin.

My plants will be happy to have the added nutrients from the compost. I know my chickens were happy digging through the compost for bugs and worms!