Leftover Wine And Fruit Scrap Vinegar

February 27, 2016February 27, 2016 / Liesl Clark / 7 Comments

Wine aficionados claim that a bottle of wine should be consumed within 36 hours before the perishable liquid inside starts to deteriorate. Once oxygen is introduced, the wine begins to change. Recorking or sucking the air out of it will only deter the deterioration by a matter of hours. Putting the bottle in the refrigerator might help keep it for up to a week, but after that, it’s time to make wine vinegar!

Vinegars are so easy to make, it’s almost a crime to not make them with your leftovers. In a glass jar combine 2 cups of leftover red wine with a cup of distilled water and some “mother” from a previous organic vinegar you’ve finished and cover the jar with cheese cloth or a clean piece of cotton cloth so air can get in and dust stays out.

“Mother?” You ask.

If you look closely at the contents of the bottles above, you’ll find my 3 mothers. They’re from blackberry, apple, and pear vinegars, respectively, and I’ve been hanging on to them so I can use them as a starter for the next vinegars I make. A vinegar’s mother is a gelatinous mass that usually sits at the bottom of your vinegar bottle. It’s a sign that your vinegar is likely organic because it houses a lovely live culture. The mother is actually a type of acetic acid-producing bacteria called “acetobacter” and it consumes the alcohol in your wine, converting it into delicious vinegar.

If you don’t have a mother with which to start your homemade vinegar, you can find some in the bottom of a jar of Bragg’s Unfiltered Raw Organic Apple Cider Vinegar. Until I started making my own apple cider vinegar, this stuff was an essential ingredient in our home. It’ll cure you of any cold and is an excellent rinse for your hair. Save that mother and you’re ready to start making your own vinegars.

What about fruit vinegar? I make my own throughout the year from scrap apple peels and cores when making pies and apple sauce. Blackberries from our vines also make an incredibly delicious vinegar. Simply put your fruit scraps in a jar with some water and a “mother” from another vinegar and cover with cloth so the vinegar can breathe.

If you get mold because your fruit is on the surface and exposed to air, take the offending mold out and make sure your fruit is totally submerged in the water/mother mixture. Check on your jars periodically, but it’ll take a few weeks for the fermentation and culture to reach its peak. I always go by feel. After about a month I run the vinegar & fruit mixture through a cheesecloth, separating out the fruit but I retain the mother and place it and the filtered vinegar into a pretty bottle and cork it. And as the vinegar ages, like me, it only gets better.

Vinegars make great gifts, so you can never make too many bottles! Do you make your own vinegars? Please share your thoughts and let us know what your favorite fruit or wine varieties are.

Use Newspaper to Wash Windows

February 26, 2016February 24, 2016 / Liesl Clark / 10 Comments

By Finn Clark

Have you ever tried washing windows with a rag? What happens? You get lots of smudges and lint all over your window. And if you’re using paper towels for window washing, the same problem will occur because paper towels have lots of loose material that gets stuck on your nice glass window. I’ve found a simple solution to the problem: Use newspaper! (My mom has also banned paper towels from our house, so we can’t use those.)

If I were to be really scientific about it, here’s the method I’d use for best results:

Spray a solution of mostly water and just a little vinegar onto the window. I don’t know why anyone would go out and buy “window cleaning solution” since this simple solution is easy to make, is less expensive, and is great for the environment.

Don’t use too much spray or it’ll be harder work for you rubbing all the wet stuff off your window. Next, rub in any direction you want. Some might say circular motions work well on caked-on bird poop. (Yup, I said bird poop in this post and I think it’s funny. Don’t worry, there’s no bird poop on our windows.) Your final strokes should be long up and down or back and forth motions to take off any residue. That’s it.

Does newspaper leave an inky smudge on your windows? No! I’ve never noticed any smudging, even with colored newsprint. We bring the crumpled wet newspaper inside and let it dry so we can use it as starter for our wood fires, or in summer we put it in our compost or worm bin. The worms love worn newspaper for laying eggs in.

Happy window cleaning!

8 Uses For Garlic Skins

February 25, 2016February 24, 2016 / Liesl Clark / 8 Comments

In my ongoing fascination with the things I typically throw away, even in the compost pile, I thought I’d look up some of the most interesting ways to reuse garlic skins. Some, I already do, but there are a few new uses in this list I thought you might want to try.

Don’t toss those papery white skins!

1) Save them in your freezer and use for your vegetable or chicken stock. I also throw them in my slow-cooked beans to add more flavor.

2) Compost them.

3) Keep the skins on your garlic when you roast it and the protective skin layer keeps your garlic soft on the inside.

4) Eat it! According to the Daily Mail, the skin on fruits and veggies shouldn’t be discarded. As for garlic: “Peeling garlic cloves removes the phenylpropanoid antioxidants which help fight the ageing process and protect the heart.”

5) Make a paper rose out of your garlic skins.

6) Turns out garlic skin is a major antioxidant. Plan on seeing it in all sorts of health products in the near future.

7) Add them to your handmade paper recipe. They add a lovely texture.

8) Dye your hair with them using a natural ayurvedic technique.

10 Toughest Steps to Reduce Your Plastic Footprint

February 24, 2016February 24, 2016 / Liesl Clark / 4 Comments

If you’ve followed our guides to zero waste, which are simple ideas to get you thinking about reducing unnecessary plastics in your home environment, you’re doing really well! But you’ll likely still have plastics in your trash can every day, like I do. These are the toughest steps we take to get beyond our fear of being judged and push through the next level of plastic-free(dom) and even closer to zero waste:

1) Figure out what your biggest plastic vice is and find a plastic-free alternative. One of my family’s weaknesses is Amy’s frozen organic burritos. My children love them and they’re easy to heat up for school lunches. But we also love to eat burritos and enchiladas for dinner from delicious dried black beans that we slow cook and then assemble the burritos and enchiladas from scratch. Solution? Make an extra-large batch of burritos on burrito night and save them for school lunches. You can even freeze quite a few so you have your very own Amy’s-style yummies to keep the earthlings happy at school.

If your vice is raw bars or granola bars and snack bars, find a baker near you who makes them and order them plastic-free. On Bainbridge Island, Rebecca makes Rawbecca Bars that are better than anything I’ve ever purchased in a store. She’ll make them for you in bulk, in many flavors, and totally plastic-free. We’ve ordered them in bulk to take on our expeditions in the Himalayas because they last over a month. Our local bakery also makes some unbelievably tasty peanut butter raw bars that I can order up waste-free.

We love crackers but can’t find our favorite varieties without plastic packaging. And our homemade crackers are better than any bought in a store. So, once in a while, we’ll make our own to help reduce our impact. And we’ll make enough for 2-3 days. They go fast.

2) Stop buying plastic containers and come to love glass. I love glass containers of all sizes and can’t find anything that I can’t store in them.

3) Buy your cheese plastic-free. This might take some hutzpa on your part, but if you talk sweetly to your deli counter people, they’ll likely let you buy their bulk (often gourmet) cheese without any of their packaging. Just bring your own container and act confidently when you ask if they can just put their cheese it it. Smile, say “cheese.” Then, at home, store it in a beautiful glass cheese container. It stays fresher longer and looks delicious in there.

We store our cheese in a large glass container, like our friends in France do. © Liesl Clark

4) Same goes for meat and fish. Buy it fresh, bring your own container, and store in glass.

5) Just say “no” to plastic clamshells. Clamshells? These are the polystyrene boxes that hold fresh berries and cherry tomatoes. Yes, it might mean you’ll have to say goodbye to these delicious food items until they’re in season and you can get them at your local farmer’s market. Refusing them sends a message to your grocer that you just won’t buy produce in that packaging. Better yet, take a letter to your grocery store’s customer service department and let them know that you, and a whole lot of other people in our community, are refusing to buy fresh produce in clamshells.

6) Say “no” to plastic mesh produce baskets (see above.) And use our letter to your grocer to do some good.

7) Flowers don’t need to be wrapped in plastic for the journey home. First let your florist know you’ll carry them home sans plastic in your bag or basket, or your own two hands like you do at the farmer’s market or from your garden to your table.

8) Try a less plastic toothbrush. It’ll make you feel good. Some are so plastic-free they can be used as kindling when you’re done with them.

9) Switch to homemade powder toothpaste. I’m still perfecting our recipe, but it’s basically baking soda, a few drops of stevia and a few drops of organic peppermint extract. The kids like it and we’ve reduced our toothpaste tube waste significantly.

10) Exert your buying power by choosing products that are entirely plastic-free. You’ll thank yourself later when your wood/metal/rubber/glass item is still functioning years later. I can attest to this for useful household items I’ve bought like pencil sharpeners, colanders, cheese graters (ones with plastic handles break), rakes, rubber spatulas (that’s why they call them rubber and the wooden handles are nicer to hold), soup ladles, straws (glass ones have a lifetime guarantee). My list could go on and on. I’ve never regretted purchasing a sometimes more expensive plastic-free item.

What are the toughest steps that you’ve taken to reduce the persistent plastics that you can’t seem to eradicate from your bin? Please let us know in the comments below so we can all try to come up with solutions together to help you reduce them.

DIY Tooth Powder (Plastic-Free Toothpaste)

February 23, 2016February 23, 2016 / Liesl Clark / 4 Comments

When you’re trying to go plastic-free, toothpaste is a crux issue for most people. But crux no more! We have a plastic-free toothpaste/tooth powder recipe that’ll keep you happy and make you wonder why we all strayed from this basic recipe years ago in the first place.

I remember the days of tooth powder. It came in a family-size metal bottle with a top on it that you could shake over your toothbrush and the powder would come out. Pretty basic. But this stuff was great and I wonder why we’ve replaced it with paste in a plastic tube?

My family has used variations of this recipe for the past 4 years, on-again and off-again, and we’re always happy when we get back to using it. The baking soda cleans my teeth better than any other toothpaste out there.

And it takes less than 3 minutes to put it together:

2 tablespoons Baking Soda

2 pipette stoppers-ful of liquid stevia (liquid stevia comes in glass jars with stoppers)

1/4 teaspoon organic peppermint flavor (It’s a combination of sunflower oil and peppermint oil)

1/8 teaspoon organic mint extract

Mix your ingredients together in a small bowl or small mason jar.

The next step is perhaps the toughest: Finding the right container to hold and apply your tooth powder with. I found a pretty vanilla extract bottle with a small lid that works perfectly. We just shake it over our toothbrushes over the sink and if any powder falls into the sink it’s an added bonus for cleaning the sink! Baking soda has many uses. Cleaning your teeth AND your sink are just 2 of them.

So, why not give it a try? You’ll love the clean feel of this toothpaste/powder. It’s truly somewhere half-way in between a paste and a powder and feels great!

And to the question of toothbrushes:

Toothbrushes wash up on our beaches much too often, presumably because of the sewage that oft seeps into Puget Sound and the Pacific. Imagine that, some people flush their old toothbrushes down the toilet.

Going plastic-free in the bathroom is a great way to reduce our overall impact. Our post on toothbrushes can help you find ones that have less plastic and we’ve also found some helpful reuses for your old brushes so they can be utilized for special jobs around the house.

Green Guide To Recycling Ski Gear

February 22, 2016February 22, 2016 / Liesl Clark / 3 Comments

By Mr. Everest

We’re at the height of the ski season and if you’re like me, this is a great time to start demo-ing new gear. But what to do with the old? Here are a few options I’ve been able to find:

SELL
You can always list your gear on Craigslist or take it to Play It Again Sports to find a buyer.

GIVE
Joining your local Buy Nothing group and giving them away to your neighbors is a great way to keep your ski and snowboard gear out of landfills and still cruising the slopes. Some people are cool with using outdated gear. My wife, for example, skied the slopes for 15 seasons on her old Black Diamond AT gear. And our 12 year old son is going to give them a try on his first hut trip this week.

Donate your gear to a local youth ski program or adaptive ski program. If you check with your ski areas or local ski shops, you’ll most likely find a program that would be happy to use your equipment that’s in good condition and not outdated. Snowpals of Tahoe is just one example.

REUSE
You could always start your own ski swap, enticing others in your community to bring their gear so families can outfit the kids with neighbor’s hand-me-downs. It’s a great way to keep skiing affordable for us all.

Yankee Magazine has a great article, with plans, showing you how to make your own ski Adirondack chair. Some people build cool fences with stockpiled skis.

RECYCLE
The North Face stores will take all of your ski clothing (hats, gloves, pants, bibs, jackets, socks), ski boots, goggles, and ski helmets. Their Clothes The Loop program sends the gear to a company called I:CO which shreds it into its elements and makes new products with it. My article about this great program goes more into depth about this the Clothes The Loop initiative in all of The North Face stores, and where to find those stores.

Ski poles? They’re mostly made of metal, so taking them to your nearest metal recycling center might be your best bet. Poles haven’t changed much over the years, though, so be sure to try giving them away before you send them to metal recycling.

If you live or ski in Colorado or Utah, a great ski industry recycling service was set up by the Snow Sports Recycling Program, which recycles ski gear collected at participating stores. I can’t find a list of the stores any longer but calling the phone number listed on the page, under “Waste Not” could likely get you the names of stores near you that’ll recycle your old gear. This program turns your gear into chips that will be turned into new goods. They’ll take skis, snowboards, boots, helmets, bindings and poles. These materials create waste streams that are approximately 5% steel, 25 % aluminum, 60% plastic and the balance are wood and fiberglass, all reusable in new applications.

Ski Poles Are Mostly Made of Metal © Liesl Clark

If you live near Aspen, CO you can contact Reeski to see if they’ll take your skis and boards to turn into cool looking furniture.

There’s no need for our gear to end up in the landfill. If you’re stumped about a particular item and want to find a reduce, reuse, recycle option for it, drop us a line in the comments below and we’ll get on it.

Recycle Your Metal Screw Caps!

February 21, 2016February 21, 2016 / Liesl Clark / 12 Comments

If you drink wine, you’ll know the caps I’m talking about. They also come on other glass bottled liquids, are made of aluminum and are never mentioned in municipal recycling lists. What’s a person to do with these things?

Here are 3 options:

1) Recycle Them! According to most wine magazines and green advocates the screw tops can be recycled. Well, not in my neighborhood. And here’s what Seattle’s Ask Evelyn has to say on the matter:

“Put small caps in the garbage. Small lids can jam the machinery at the recycling plant.”

Don’t listen to Evelyn. After a few hours of research, I was able to sample enough municipal sights that do take these small caps (Los Angeles, CA and Boulder, CO for example) but they ask you to NOT screw your metal caps back onto your bottles (same goes for metal lids on glass jars) as they will then need to go to a secondary sorting facility where someone will have to take them off. Metals go in metals, glass in glass.

So, here’s the deal: Metal has value. Save those little caps, no matter where you live, and throw them in your municipal metal recycling bin. If you’ve collected enough of them, I doubt they’d turn your accumulated metal away.

2) Even If Your Recycler Doesn’t Take them, Recycle Them Anyway! Here’s how: If you can recycle cans, you can recycle these little screw caps. Step on them to squash them and put them inside your can. Fill your can half way with the little caps. Then, close the lid a little so the caps don’t fall out. It’s subterfuge, but it should keep the caps from getting into the equipment and will add them to the recycling mix. These caps are made of aluminum, so if you want to be a purist, you should probably put them inside an aluminum pop can (that you’ll have to open with a can opener). If you’re really cautious, then save them, as I mentioned above, and put them in the scrap metal bin. We have a friend on our island who collects them, along with all aluminum foil, pie plates, aluminum wine cork wrappers, etc. and she delivers this aluminum to a recycler in Seattle who will pay for it!

3) Screw Cap For Your New Water Bottle: Reuse the cap, wine bottle and all by turning the whole thing into your new glass water bottle. It’s chic, cheap, and easy.

That just about sums it up. I had a tough time finding ANY information on these twist caps, except the fact that scientific studies are showing that twist top wine tastes better than natural corked wine (!), but some aged red wines do better with oak cork though they run the risk of cork taint. Other than the cork vs screw top debate, there’s a hole in the materials culture media about these little caps and we’re happy to fill it as best we can.

Am I missing something really cool (or obvious?) that should be done with metal screw caps? If so, please let me know. What do you do with yours? Let’s talk!

Kick The Can (Habit) And Slow Cook Your Beans

February 20, 2016February 20, 2016 / Liesl Clark / 25 Comments

By Mr. Everest

Cooked beans are a staple in our family. Whether they’re pinto or black beans, we cook up a pot of beans at least once a week. Today, the house smelled wonderful as the beans cooked in the slow cooker with garlic and onions.

For the past 3 years, we’ve gone plastic-free in the culinary arts so that means no canned food. Most cans have bisphenol A (BPA) in them which is an epoxy resin-like substance that is an endocrine disruptor and a chemical linked to cancer. Beans in a can are among the top BPA-laden canned foods out there. When we converted our kitchen over to a plastic-free one, canned beans were a favorite staple we had to rethink. But the Greek ancestry in me knew it wouldn’t mean we’d go without beans for long. My Dad always had a pot of lentils on the stove, so why not do the same with pinto and black beans?

Every few days I pull out the slow cooker, throw some beans in (say 4 cups-worth) add quadruple the amount of water, throw in a bay leaf from our friends’ tree, several cloves of garlic from our garden (whole cloves are fine), a few extra garlic skins, chopped onion, and about a teaspoon of sea salt. Each time I do it the recipe changes but this is a basic one that works. Put the cover on the slow cooker and let ‘er cook for about 18 hours or until your beans have reached their desired tenderness. No stirring is required. Just leave the slow cooker alone and enjoy the rest of your day.

We buy our beans in bulk, 25 lbs at a time, so they come to us in a big paper feed sack. We then store them in glass jars for easy access.

I tend to turn half of the cooked beans into refried beans (just mash ’em down as you fry them with a little more garlic and onion and add some cumin and liquid aminos for salt) and then make burritos or enchiladas that we can freeze for easy school lunches to reheat for the kids. We also make black bean soup with them or just a simple bean dip.

These beans are always better than anything I’ve eaten from a can, and they cost about a tenth of the price. But the real benefit of kicking canned food is the mindfulness of slow-cooking and making your staples from scratch. Cooked beans in a slow cooker are so simple, yet they require a few minutes of forethought and planning for the meals that your family will enjoy in the week ahead. Four cups of dried beans will result in about 8 cups of cooked beans, enough for a family of 4 to enjoy for a week in many different creations. As your home fills with the buttery and savory smell of cooking beans, enjoy the pleasure, as my Dad did, of slow-cooked food and the sweet time it takes for the flavors to blend together completely.

How To Fix Dead Ballpoint Pens

February 19, 2016February 19, 2016 / Liesl Clark / 7 Comments

I promise, I haven’t gone off the deep end. I hate to throw things away that don’t need to be tossed, and most pens that stop writing can be fixed in a matter of seconds.

We had a few hundred pens to test after having collected them from boxes bound for a dumpster. Sure, we had saved them from the landfill, but did they work? Most did, but the 30 or so that wouldn’t write just needed a little nudge. The roller ball was locked in place by dried-up ink from lack of use and we decided to put an age-old remedy to the test. If you put the tip of a ballpoint pen in a flame for a second or two it heats up the ball and gets it moving again.

Moving parts are all that’s needed when you know there’s still ink in that pen. Here’s how we did it. This ain’t rocket science:

I had 2 excellent lab testers to do the job. The result? Thirty pens saved! And, why do we do this? Because we find too many plastic pens out in the environment, on our beaches, sides of roads, sidewalks. Every time we go to the beach or to town, we find pens.

Papermate Washed Ashore at Point No Point, WA © Liesl Clark

I don’t think I’ll ever need to buy a pen again. They’re everywhere, and most are made of plastic so they’re here to stay, forever. Let’s try to fix the ones that don’t work and give them a second, third, and fifth life if necessary. And when all the plastic pens have been used up, we can start buying one special metal pen a year, like my husband does. He carries it with him and uses it religiously, because it’s his one pen, his favorite pen, meticulously made, and ready for him to write beautiful things because it’s well made and doesn’t dry up so easily.

My Pet Peeve About Pet Poop

February 18, 2016February 18, 2016 / Liesl Clark / 25 Comments

Warning: The contents of this blog post might be disturbing, if you don’t like thinking about, or looking at, s**t.

Imagine hiking along a pristine trail in the Pacific Northwest with your dog. It’s a perfect spot with majestic trees, spring birds singing their first songs of spring. But your eye is caught by not one, but four or five little wads of plastic bags, placed carefully along the trail, loaded with a hiker’s canine crap. The numbers of plastic bags filled these days with dog waste on the trail can be quite shocking. Are pet owners intending to leave these plastic methane bombs there for me to pick up? Or, are they planning to come back one day to gather up the not-so-hermetically-sealed pathogen-filled goodies? I believe they think they’re doing the environment a favor by just bagging them up in plastic, assuming they’ve done their service to the planet, thinking, “No methane escaping today!”

Which is worse? This plastic bag or what’s inside? Well, now both are there to stay, on the trail. And the methane’s out of the bag. Sailor doesn’t know what to make of it.

I’m not going to get into the reasons why dog owners are bagging Fido’s fecal stuff. Suffice it to say, tail-wagger’s turds are one of the biggest contributors to water pollution in urban and suburban settings. We live on an island where we’re surrounded by Puget Sound. Everything ends up in our waters, given our torrential rains. So, doggie’s doodoo left in the rain can be considered the next nutrient to enter the Sound. But there’s definitely nothing nutritious about the stuff.

This isn’t Sailor’s poop. Just another example of what’s found trailside on our island paths. Trowel anyone? This might be the most environmentally-sound means of pet waste disposal.

We use a Bokashi Pet Waste Composter for our cat’s waste, and since our dog mostly poops in one spot on our property, we’re doing our best to bring it inside and flush it down the toilet. He eats no meat, mostly our veggie meals, and a few bites of the cat’s dry food each day. The EPA says flushing is the most environmentally-sound thing we can do with Rover’s #2, considering we live just feet from Puget Sound. But putting your dog’s fecal matter into a plastic bag and leaving it on the trail to stay forever is, by my calculations, two counts of littering.

One of my favorite authors, Susan Freikel, who wrote Plastic: A Toxic Love Story, summarizes the situation perfectly in a recent article for LiveScience:

Dogs can harbor lots of viruses, bacteria and parasites — including harmful pathogens like e coli, giardia and salmonella. (A single gram contains an estimated 23 million bacteria.) Studies have traced 20 to 30 percent of the bacteria in water samples from urban watersheds to dog waste. Just two to three days of waste from 100 dogs can contribute enough bacteria, nitrogenand phosphorous to close 20 miles of a bay-watershed to swimmingand shellfishing, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.It also can get into the air we breathe: a recent study of air samples in Cleveland, Ohio, and Detroit, Mich., found that 10 to 50 percent of the bacteria came from dog poop.

I understand the reasoning behind bagging your pet’s waste. But (wait for it) I’ve seen hundreds of pet waste bags, still filled with said waste, washed up on beaches along our shorelines. These floaters stay extra-buoyant in their plastic packaging. It’s one kind of plastic waste we’ve had to leave out there on the beaches as we can’t bring ourselves to pick it up. I have visions of whales and sea lions ingesting the knotted bags of eco-dog-love left behind by doo-gooders of Puget Sound.

Is there a more environmentally friendly way to dispose of our pet’s waste? According to this Huffington Post article, Paul Canella’s Poop Bags are biodegradable. But, those presumably will just go into the landfill, with the same toxins and microbes deemed unhealthy to humans leaching into our watersheds. Some scientists suggest that burying your dog’s waste, as you would your own, might be the best method for disposal along the trail. One foot deep, below the runoff zone, is safe. Are you willing to start digging in your public park? Probably not.

We have a bit of a merde mess in our over-poopulated urban settings, but in a few places, like Portland and Boulder, enterprising people have developed pet waste processing companies that compost your four-legged friend’s feces. It turns out hot commercial composters could actually use Fido’s fuel. One dog-friendly park, in Gilbert, AZ, lets you toss your turds into a bin that turns it into a flame for a lantern in the park while you let your dog have some off-leash fun.

Yet another plastic-encapsulated trailside turd.

The plastic bagging of dog droppings just isn’t cutting it. We’re making a bigger mess of things in our wild places, watersheds, and maritime environments. There are now flushable bags made for caca collection, and this might be one of the easiest and eco-aware options out there.

Vegetarian waste left behind by horses is of no concern.

Until we have anaerobic pet waste composters in each city, we’ll have to settle for the lesser evils available to us for disposing of it. And the next time I come across plastic-sealed scat, I have a pocketful of hand-written notes that I plan to leave behind, scribbled on paper, to accompany the abandoned excrement: “Did you forget this? This PPOO (plastic poo) needs a PPU (prompt pickup) by you.”

Pioneering The Simple Life

Healthy Living in Fragile Environments

Sustainable Living