Anyway, just last night, my hubbie was talking about a discussion the “Green Committee” at work had last week regarding steps they can take to make their workplace a better, more eco-friendly place. Among other things, they wanted to find a biodegradable, organic, cost-effective hand wash for their bathrooms. Apparently there aren’t a lot of choices from their vendor for office supplies. Being the big fans of Dr Bronner soaps that we are, my husband recommended using Dr Bronner soaps in the bathrooms. His suggestion was dismissed because Dr Bronner’s is too concentrated to work well (and cost-effectively) as a hand soap.

Upon hearing the reason for Dr Bronner’s losing out in the bathroom soap race, I informed my husband that we’ve been using Dr Bronner’s soaps in our bathrooms for about the past year. I simply dilute the flavor of choice (usually lavender or citrus) and put it in a foaming bottle. Viola! Organic, biodegradable and cost-effective! Not to mention our hand soaps are nice smelling, easy, and very kid-friendly.

Here’s how I do it: use 1/3 Dr Bronner’s soap with 2/3 water. I use foaming Method hand soap containers I saved, though I’ve heard you can buy similar foaming bottles at Target. Of course you can play with the proportions, just be careful not to use too much soap as you won’t get good, foamy soap. Plus, you’ll have to go out and buy another bottle if you clog up the bottle’s foaming mechanism.

Try it. You’ll love it! One less thing to worry about – as long as you have some Dr Bronner’s on hand, you don’t have to worry about running out of hand soap.

Despite all their marketing, planning, training and conniving, the Disney corporation doesn’t hold a candle to the honest-to-goodness, happiest place on earth: the Kingdom of Bhutan.

While I’ve known about Bhutan and it’s amazing culture since I did research on the country in the 80s, I was recently reminded of this magical place by Michael J Fox himself. Well, not in person, but on his TV special modeled after his book, “Always Looking Up: The Adventures of an Incurable Optimist“.

Michael’s segment (we’re on a first name basis, you know) on Bhutan was incredible. He personally went to Bhutan to investigate exactly why Bhutan is such a happy, lovely place and to determine what, exactly, the phrase Gross National Happiness means. Like I said, the segment was fantastic. But, I’m not going into detail on that right now.

What the segment really made me think about is how truly important happiness is. I think the importance of happiness in our lives, for our health, for our longevity is pretty much overlooked or ignored by “official” papers and reports focusing on our physical well being. Admittedly, the medicial establishment is coming around, but not very fast.

I think Buddhists have it right. It’s all about happiness. Happiness is why we are here, it’s what we work toward every day of our lives and with every fiber of our being. It’s really the only thing. We just sometimes lose sight of it’s importance when we get caught up in all the other stuff. So, I guess I owe Michael a “thank you” for reminding me to be happy.

I love the saying: Peace, Love and Happiness. But really, isn’t it redundant?

BTW – Wikipedia says Bhutan is only the eighth happiest place on earth. Different view, different reasons.

As if they could read my mind, my friends at TheDailyGreen came up with a handy-dandy list of the top 15 fruits and vegetables that it’s “okay” to buy non-organic. Not only do they provide the list, but they also provide us with the reasons these 15 fruits and veggies are safe in their non-organic form and they provide some yummy recipes.

The Clean 15, as they call them, are:

Onion, Avocado, Sweet Corn, Pineapple, Mango, Asparagus, Sweet Peas, Kiwi, Cabbage, Eggplant, Papaya, Watermelon, Broccoli, Tomato, and Sweet Potato.

On the flip side, TheDailyGreen also has the list of the Dirty Dozen - the top foods you need to buy organic. No big surprises here, but if you’re like me, I like being reminded and I particularly like lists.

The Dirty Dozen are:

Meat, Milk, Coffee, Peaches, Apples, Sweet Bell Peppers, Celery, Nectarines, Strawberries, Cherries, Kale, Leafy Greens, Grapes, Carrots, Pears, Potatoes, and Tomatoes.

OK. So that’s way more than 12 foods. I think they couldn’t find a snappy name for a list of 17 items, at least not a name as good as the Dirty Dozen.

With all the green talk these days, the pressure to DO something BIG on Earth Day is almost unbearable. While I agree with the urgency to get the message out there and to move beyond just talking about changing our ways, I don’t believe wringing the celebration and joy out of doing good or going green is helping anything. In fact, I believe that if you can find a way to celebrate Earth Day, no matter how minor your celebration, that actually brings a smile your face, you’re more likely to make that celebration an integral part of your regular routine instead of a one time deal that ends when Earth Day ends.

For me, I’m taking my first grader to OB Peoples Co-op to check out all their organic fare and explore their Earth Day specials. We’ve been talking about our “special trip” for several days now, and she’s as excited to go to the co-op as she was to go to the Earth Fair at Balboa Park the other day. (She’s been to the co-op several times, but there just seems to be something special about going on Earth Day.)

How will/did you commemorate our glorious home?

As I’ve stated in past blogs, I love all things eco and green. Unfortunately, I’m a bit of a hypocrite. I don’t always live totally eco and green. I try, but it’s hard. Really, no one can honestly tell me that they can’t taste the difference between tempeh bacon and good ole polluting, green-house-gas-emitting real pig bacon. Fried fat from another living creature is disgusting, but oh sooooooo good when the cravings hit you.

Really, my weakness for things like bacon is the whole reason I can’t be a vegetarian. That, plus the fact that everything vegetarian from my formative years tasted like cardboard and I can’t seem to get past that bias even though there are fabulously delicious and, yes, decadent vegetarian dishes being dreamed up by chefs far more creative and daring than me these days.

Best example of something totally creative and wildly delicious that I could have never come up with on my own… Chocolate Mousse made from avocados. I’ve only had this crazy sounding dish at one place, but I’m willing to say that this place makes THE BEST, THE RICHEST, THE MOST TO-DIE-FOR healthy chocolate mousse in the whole world. What’s the name of this mystery place you ask? Let me tell you…

ROOTS in the Ocean Beach neighborhood of San Diego. Even their motto makes you want to be nicer to the earth and everyone on it – “Kind Food for Kind Folks”. For everyone planning a trip to SD to visit the zoo, Sea World, or Convention Center, the short trip to Ocean Beach is absolutely worth the extra effort. Especially for those of you coming from places where vegan delicacies are harder to find.

Apparently, chocolate mousse made with avocados is no secret. There are plenty of recipes for it if you google it, but it sure was a surprise to me! A lovely surprise.

While you’re at Roots, you should go ahead and plan on having some non-dessert food as well. They have incredible wraps and salads (with edible flowers!). For the wraps, my favorite is the Thai Peanut Wrap. And yes, you can get the stereotypical bowl of granola as well.

In the spirit of starting 2009 the right way, I’m going to share my top secret list of eco-friendly, yet very effective, cures. I’ve worked very hard over the years to compile this list, so I hope it brings you as much relief as its brought me.

1. Young Coconut Water – preferably ice cold, straight out of the coconut, sipped while sitting on the beach, safely out of the direct sunlight. Brings back memories of sitting on the beach in Copacabana (Rio de Janero) during Carnival. And, I’m telling you that anything that can get rid of a Carnival hangover can can rid of a simple New Year’s hangover! If you don’t have access to a supply of cold, green, young coconuts, the tetra packed version from O.N.E. does a nice job as well. DO NOT think you’ll get the same goodness from any of those other coconut water/juice drinks that have all the extra sugar added. Only the pure coconut water does the trick. Also, to be clear, I’m talking coconut WATER here, NOT coconut milk! (I know, I know, but I just wanted to be absolutely, 100% clear.)
2. Curing Pills – one tube with a glass of water before going to bed performs the magic that all those other phantom cures promise, but never deliver. These would be number one if they weren’t difficult to find. But believe me, its worth the extra effort to find someone who can procure these magic pills for you. They are distributed by San Francisco’s Herba Enterprise, but I can’t find a website for them. I recommend you find a Chinese Herbalist to purchase them for you.
3. Yoga – some of the moves (sun salutations, cobbler, hip openers, not to mention my all time favorite – child’s pose) just make you feel better. Can’t tell you what about them helps with the hangover, but I’m sure its related to getting your circulation really moving and processing all those lingering poisons.

Then, there are always the 2 comfort foods that may not be so green, but they ALWAYS make me feel better. Or, at least, they make me smile when nothing else can… B&B – biscuits and bacon!

HAPPY NEW YEAR, Everyone!

I hope 2009 brings you much love, success and an abundance of joy.

The new games like Kite, Picture Frame, X, L, etc. require a lot more attention than 5-in-a-row and I could barely keep up with looking for the current number being called, much less scan my cards for the winning patterns. Considering that a majority of the players were senior citizens with worse vision and slower hands than mine, it was quite a shock how much faster than me they were at playing each number. Plus, they played the bonus side games that compliment the actual bingo game being played. Don’t ask for more details, I have no idea how the bonus games work. Couldn’t keep up with them!

In all, I think there were around 20 different games that night, not counting the bonus games. For each game, a player has at least one sheet with 6 bingo cards printed on it. Pretty much every player that night used 2 sheets, which means they played 12 cards. That’s a lot of numbers to scan!

A quick calculation of 300 players, with 2 sheets per game, for 20 games tallies to 12,000 sheets of paper that we burned through in a mere 3 hours.  TWELVE THOUSAND pieces of paper, on the conservative side! And not a blue trash can in sight. Not a thought to recycling any of that paper. In fact, the volunteers that run the Bingo nights provide handy little trash bags for players to keep at their seat so that they can dispose of their sheets at the end of each game. 

While I’m all for using Bingo as a fundraiser for the church that runs it, they really need to think about the other green.

The plan was to take out the lower of two trays in our worm composting bin and use the castings to feed our outdoor plants, as well as to enrich the soil for re-potting 10 indoor plans I bought recently. (Click here to read more about our bin set-up.) To prep for this momentous occassion, we had added the second tray to the bin around three weeks ago and began putting the food in this upper tray in order to encourage our worm friends to migrate up.

Happily a majority of the worms did actually make the move to the upper tray like they were supposed to, but there were still almost two hundred worms mixed in with the castings we wanted to harvest. We’re lazy, but we did manage to pick out around half of them and threw them back into the bin. The rest are now living “out in the wild”, somewhere in the garden.

Without going into too much detail, let me just say that the castings were not odorless. I’m not really sure why, but I expected the castings to be pretty much odorless. Maybe because the bin itself doesn’t really emit much of a smell, or maybe because potting soil doesn’t really have a bad smell, or maybe because I hadn’t thought it through well enough. In any case, we soldiered on, smell and all.

While one person cleaned out the water retaining part of the bin – where the “worm tea” accumulates – the other began spreading the castings around the yard. Lucky for me, I was the one spreading the castings around the yard – under the calamanci tree, around some of the flowering plants that I don’t remember the name for, under the mexican pepper bushes, under the lemon tree. You get the idea. Meanwhile, my much braver half got the job of cleaning out the tea holder, where some mysterious, floating, non-composting worms had managed to make an appearance and breed to their little hearts’ content.

To tell the truth, once I got away from the pile of castings in the tray, the smell wasn’t so bad. Probably the most surprising thing about the castings was how heavy they were. They are super dense. This is probably something a real gardener would know. But not me. The consistency of the castings came as a total surprise. In fact, the castings were so heavy that the mesh-like bottom of the tray had started to buckle.

In the end, we used up all the castings in the tray, filled a few gallon jugs with worm tea, and are happy to continue with feeding our worm friends in tray #2. But next time, I doubt we get as excited about harvesting time as we were this past week.

As a family of 3, we aren’t big food wasters so we were intially skeptical about our ability to keep so many worms fed – we bought a standard bucket-full from a local vendor. Turns out we could probably keep two bins worth of worms going. All those fruit/veggie peels, bread bits (stale pieces, tortillas, and DD doesn’t do edges), coffee grinds and old leftovers really add up! 

We use a Wriggly Wranch worm bin. After doing a lot of research on the various choices – build, buy, convert – I chose it because its stacking layers and handy spigot seem to greatly cut back on the amount of direct worm handling required to harvest the worm tea and worm poo. Very important features, if you ask me. 

While we love the fact that our old food is no longer wasting resources being driven to a landfill, or taking up space in that landfill, or adding methane to the atmosphere as it decomposes in that landfill, or wasting energy being ground up by the In-Sink-Erator, probably the most satisfying thing about our worm composting is being able to harvest the tea and poo for fertilizing our household and garden plants. Not only is our waste no longer doing harm, it is actually doing good now! What could be more satisfying?

P.S. – if calling the by-product “poo” makes you too uncomfortable, some vermicomposters use the term “castings” instead. Just a fancier way of saying poo, but it sure is easier to say you’re going to spread the castings around the garden than saying your spreading the poo.