Today’s post celebrates some wonderful products designed to encourage sustainability / green practices.
- Keep Cups – Stylish reusable cups. I’m loving mine. click here for more info
- Rimu Snack Bowl – Who says that kids lunch bowls need to be made from plastic. These tactile bowls are made from recycled Rimu and handmade in NZ – available on the organic Nature baby website
- UniquEco Recycled Rubber Hippo – Made in the developing world from rubber thongs washed up on the shores of the Indian Ocean in eastern Africa - click here for more info
- Recycled poster bowl – Using rejected posters and magazines from a printing company – great innovation! click here for more info
- Worm farms – Keeps vegetable scraps out of the rubbish and converts into wonderful worm wee which in turn helps fertilise vegetables for next season
- Angove Organic Wine – Since my post a couple of months back I’ve been sacrificing my brain cells in the quest to find a great organic wine. So far, the only one that stacks up on taste is this one. I’m happy to suffer some more though if any more suggestions are offered!
- Green pages – Not really a product as such – a directory for Australians seeking green products & services.
- Organic sourdough bread – More of a taste sensation than product … Bought from a Farmer’s Market or Bakery you’re buying a product with minimal “food miles” that’s free from pesticides, herbicides, and artificial preservatives and additives
Let me know of any other great products and exciting finds that you have made.
I attended a birthday celebration for a 99 year old last Tuesday. She was still sprightly and has all her faculties albeit a habit of forgetting to take her hearing aid places which just endears her to me more.
Thinking of all that she would have experienced and learnt in her 99 years, I wondered what sort of life lessons (from a sustainable viewpoint) she could impart to my children & I.
Her early childhood would have been marred by the 1st world war and her early 20′s impacted heavily by The Great Depression (as an aside Australia was one of the hardest hit in the western world due to its extreme dependence on exports.) Both these events would have forced behaviour like rationing, buying only the necessities to survive, making products last, growing your own vegetables and bartering within communities. If you didn’t want to starve you just had to eat what was put in front of you – this is definitely a lesson my 5 year old should take on board as the majority of the lovingly prepared meals I put down in front of her are heavily critiqued and picked at with disdain!
If something broke there was no Ikea, 24/7 convenience store or KMart handy to buy a cheap alternative and you would either have to suffer the loss or repair yourself. Which made it so important to have those handyman skills (no repair man on speed dial then) or to actually have products made to last and last and last …. I wonder how many people my age now have furniture that they could pass down to their grandchildren.
So with a 99 year old hat on, here is what I think we can learn from her …
- Write a menu plan for each week based on what you have available and write a shopping list of what you need to buy to supplement.
- Delay your shopping by a day or two to actually use up what is in the cupboards. Check out this website to read about the $21 challenge which encourages people to itemise every single thing in their fridge, freezer and cupboard and only spend $21 in one week on groceries to supplement.
- Use a slow cooker for those sad vegetables and cheaper cuts of meat (recipes here)
- If you don’t have an ingredient work out a substitute (check out this website for substitutes for most common ingredients)
- Get in touch with your inner handyman (or woman). There is a lesson for everything on youtube.com! Just type in “how to” and your challenge and I guarantee there will be a video demonstration.
- Repair instead of replace – like my boots I wrote about in an early post there is a lot of satisfaction that can be gained when something is repaired and not thrown out
- Buy well crafted furniture & handmade items even if they cost more initially it will last a lot longer
- Buy from Farmer’s Markets or even better grown your own – it makes you appreciate food more, waste less and understand seasons
- Reuse reuse resuse – think before you throw away. What else could the item be used for? Ideas here
Above all, I think the biggest lesson is to be thankful for what you have and don’t take for granted anything in life which is a lesson I wish I’d learnt sooner.
Does anyone have any other lessons that we can learn from other eras? Or any frugal recipes. Please share.
For those regular readers of my blog, you may recall one of my early posts where I waxed lyrical about the local Farmer’s Market, the fantastic life education it provided my daughter and the benefits from a sustainable planet point of view in buying fruit & vegetables either grown locally (less “food miles”/reduced carbon emissions) or organically.
One of the things I mentioned then was the life lesson that the errant ducks provided as week after week they refused to lay eggs thus restricting us to the freshly laid chicken eggs instead. What a great demonstration of the link between farmer and table that we often forget and the importance of being conscious of being aware of where our food comes from (as an aside, I spoke in depth about this in one of my first posts on the enlightening documentary Food Inc and my visit to a chicken processing factory – click here to read that post).
Yesterday at the markets we were delighted to hear that the ducks had concluded their strike and that we could purchase some duck eggs at $1 each. So we purchase two lovely large eggs which are waiting now in the fridge ready for consumption. I’m thinking that they will taste delicious as scrambled eggs with just a touch of milk, salt & pepper on buttery sourdough toast – but I’m open to suggestions! Hurry though as not sure how long I can hold off 
I’ll let everyone know how they taste – stay tuned
An UPDATE: Yum delicious as scrambled eggs
Sometimes joy is found in the most simplest of pleasures. Take today for instance.
A little dance whilst making lunch
Followed by a delicious, organic vegetarian lunch of:
- wholemeal sourdough toast topped with
- mushrooms (assortment of Swiss Brown, Golden Enoki & Chestnut) sauteed with a little butter and mixed herbs from Herbies Spices
- and truss tomatoes just bursting with flavour
- then sprinkled with freshly cracked pepper & some sea salt
All ingredients were sourced from the Orange Grove Farmers Markets (locally grown and produced with minimal food miles).
Like hugs from friends, often it is the smallest things that enrich our lives and make us happy.
xx
How about you? Any fantastic vegetarian recipes that use simple ingredients and that are a joy to eat?
The ducks were on strike yesterday – again. So no duck eggs for the family from Orange Grove Farmer’s markets in Lilyfield. Whilst disappointing, relying on the whims of some ducks is a great demonstration of why farmer’s markets are so great. My inner city daughter now actually understands that the eggs don’t just appear magically in egg cartons and that pineapples don’t grow all year round.
The Farmer’s markets are held every Saturday morning in the grounds of Orange Grove Primary school in Lilyfield a 5 minute amble up the road. Most Saturday’s we wander up to buy fruit & vegetables that last twice as long as those purchased in the supermarket.
To kick start the morning we indulge in the best bacon & egg rolls in Sydney eaten on the grass amongst other families who are settling down for a lazy Saturday morning on their picnic blankets.
Then it is off to fill the bottom of the pram. Purchase highlights today were:
- Hen’s eggs laid yesterday & Bloodwood Honey from a farm in Mangrove Mountain – around an hour’s drive from Sydney and home of the wayward ducks
- Organic lemons from Johnson’s Farmgate (a farm nestled between Dungog & Clarence Town in the Hunter Valley). Ugly, misshapen lemons but bursting with flavour. Again a great lesson for my daughter as she told me I had to throw out the lemons as they had “marks” on them.
- The addictive Sweet Tomato Relish by Pariva Produce in Bathurst. Fantastic with cheese on toasted sourdough.
- A bag of crisp Pink Lady apples grown in Batlow near the Snowy Mountains. These apples are a true joy to eat and a favourite of my daughter.
- A handful of Swiss Brown mushrooms grown in the Blue Mountains from a stall (The Mushroom Depot) devoted to mushrooms (Enoki, Shiitake, Shimeji to name a few on offer).
Such a lovely way to shop and an easy way to tread a little lighter supporting local farmers and organic practices.
What about you? Do you shop at Farmer’s markets? What’s your favourite purchase?
“You’re not going to become a vegetarian again are you?” my husband challenged me ten minutes into watching the documentary Food Inc (www.takepart.com/foodinc). The movie is a confronting look at the US food industry and the handful of goliath corporations that control the majority of what goes into US consumer’s mouths.
Particularly disturbing were the visuals of the cattle feedlots with the cows ankle deep in their waste eating corn instead of grass as it fattens them quicker.
Like Americans most Australians are ignorant to the intensive farming practices that occur and presume that their meat comes from animals that have grazed happily in fields their entire lives. Chicken farming practices occasionally get bad press with activists often using the powerful imagery of battery hen farming to support their cause however it is not sufficient to result in securing a ban on these practices.
A couple of years back I had the fortune (or misfortune) to be a guest of a large chicken corporation and our group were shown all aspects from conception to the processing of the chicken. At the start of the tour I held in my palm a baby chicken freshly hatched which was then put on a conveyor belt to be automatically sorted into a box with 99 other baby chickens. We then journeyed to a farm using sheds not dissimiliar to those in the movie. Long tunnels devoid of natural light with thousands of chickens destined for the supermarket shelves of Coles & Woolworths. Whilst the chickens are not fed growth hormones (as is the case with all chickens in Australia since the 1960s) there is a team of scientists employed to “naturally” grow the biggest and fastest maturing bird through breeding practices and manipulating circadian rhythms via controlling night & day in the tunnels.
With the stench of the tunnels still lingering, we then proceeded to the “processing” factory. The first room we went into was incredibly upsetting for me as it was the “kill room” – whilst some of our group were disappointed to have missed the kill 15minutes before I have never been more happy to have missed an experience in my life. As I walked through blood, past bits of beak that had fallen off the conveyor belt and past the automated plucking machine (there were even feathers stuck to the ceiling!) I seriously questioned my return to chicken eating after an 8 year stint of vegetarianism.
But turning vegetarian is not the answer. There will still be people out there who want meat and to ensure we don’t slip further into US practices I believe we should focus more on supporting organic & free range to help create further demand and encourage more farmers to change their methods.
Have you seen the movie? What are your thoughts?
Red wine & I are great friends. However like any great friends sometimes we have a falling out and need to spend some time apart. Red wine hangovers can be particularly nasty. I’d heard that organic wine hangovers are less intense so was curious to test this theory with an organic red last night.
Insulating myself against the cold night, I ventured out to the local bottle shop to find a suitable test subject. There were four choices in the entire store. One from France, one from Cowra NSW and two from South Australia priced between $14 – $25. I choose the $19 one produced by Angove – a 2008 Shiraz Cabernet.
The wine was great. Smooth, full bodied and all the descriptors usually accompanying a South Australian wine of that vintage. And yes I didn’t have a hangover today. Although didn’t excessively indulge either.
But I’d expect a wine for that price to deliver and could easily find one around the $10-$15 mark that would be equally enjoyable. And that’s the dilemma. Should I in the spirit of my 365 experiment continue to buy only organic at $19 a bottle or enjoy a fatter wallet through buying cheaper (with the current wine glut I could actually get a halfway decent table wine for around $6-10)?
Let’s look at the top 4 reasons to drink organic wine.
- No chemicals, pesticides or herbicides used in the growing of the grapes
- Grapes farmed using sustainable practices which is better for the land in the long run
- Lower levers of sulphur dioxide used in the production – better for your head
- The more drunk / requested by consumers the greater likelihood more winemakers will jump on board the organic train. And that help push the product more into mainstream and prices down.
All sound reasons and enough to suffer the wallet hit so yes I will make an effort to buy organic from now on.
What do you think of organic wines? Any great ones to recommend?
