Cooking green

I like to try in my own ways to be more environmentally conscious. I am not perfect and I will not preach, I just want to share the ways that I try to cook green in my home. I will also share how I have tried to my keep my kitchen more green.

1. I know it is not Monday, but I have decided to support Meatless Mondays (click for link). Some of you know that I LOVE meat. I don't want to say never, but it is highly unlikely I could become a vegetarian. However, I have decided to take the challenge of using no meat in my cooking on Mondays. I will have some vegetarian and even some vegan dishes come up. I have a friend who is vegan and she inspires me.

2. We compost vegetable and fruit scraps. It reduces waste and we can use it for fertilizer in our garden. We have something that looks like this in our backyard:

3. We have a garden. We have tried many different vegetables in our garden....but honestly, we need to do WAY more research. What we have done successfully is grow herbs and spices. They are easy to take care of and last forever. We do something called Square Foot Gardening (click link to find out more). Ours looks almost identical to this. The parts were cheap and it was easy to build if you are handy. I am not, that is why my man built it. 

4. We recycle everything that we can into those recycle bins you see by Shoppers or Superstore. I don't throw away old margarine containers or shampoo bottles. I rinse and recycle. We also recycle at the redemption center and get some money back!

5. We try to reduce the use of paper towel. This habit is hard to break and I would love to get rid of it completely, however, my man will not let me. Instead I bought some cheap facecloths (or you can turn old clothes into rags) and I keep them under the sink with a wet bag (if I remember to use the wet bag). I also want to use less napkins, but I need to find cheap, but pretty cloth napkins first. Yes, we will use more water to clean this, but I think it will not make that big of a difference in water usage compared to the savings in waste and cost in buying napkins and paper towel.

6. I try to buy organic and fresh produce from markets or were at least grown in Canada.

7. I have made my own kitchen cleaners to reduce the chemicals in our house. I also make my own laundry detergent and cloth diaper detergent (yes we cloth diaper and love it thanks to a friend who inspired me). I will admit to using half of my homemade and little bit of Tide, as I found it didn't clean them as well as I had liked. I also made the dish washer detergent, but didn't have success, however my parents did. I think it depends on the type of water you have.  Here are the recipes:

All-Purpose Cleaner
1 3/4 c Water
1 3/4 c Vinegar
1 tbs Dish Soap (a small squirt)
1 dropper full of Grapefruit Seed Extract or several drops of Tea Tree Oil **I used the Tea tree oil**

I gently mix this up (so I don’t cause too many bubbles!) and pour it into a spray bottle.  You can mix this up with just vinegar and water if you like.  

Glass Cleaner

1 1/3 c Water

1 1/3 c Vinegar

1 tbs Dish Soap (a small squirt)

1 dropper full of Grapefruit Seed Extract or several drops of Tea Tree Oil
1/3 c Rubbing Alcohol (this will give you a great streak-free shine)

Again, mix gently and you can leave out the dish soap and grapefruit seed extract (or TTO) if you need/want to.

Laundry detergent (2 tbsp/load, more if needed)

• 1 cup washing soda
• 1 cup borax
• 1/2 cup of oxiclean
• 1 bar of soap, finely grated

Dishwasher Detergent

1 1/2 Cups Lemi-Shine ** found at Canadian Tire with the cleaners**
1 1/2 Cups Washing Soda
1/2 Cup Baking Soda
1/2 Cup Sea Salt (any will do I’m sure)

Use 2 Tablespoons per load and if you like, vinegar can be added as the rinse agent in the event that you have any cloudiness.

So, I didn't make these changes overnight. It was a gradual process and we are not perfect, so every now and then, I may throw something in the garbage I normally would recycle or not make my laundry detergent as soon as it ran out, so I use Tide. But, I just keep trying as hard as I can. I would love to hear how you cook green or keep your house green or if you are inspired to make any changes!