Green with Envy, Riddled with Guilt

This blog is being set aside for a while - I’m on a road trip and boyfriend and I have set up a whole new blog for it:
www.recessionroadtrip.com.

Boyfriend and I have officially left our apartment in Brooklyn and have been in Massachusetts freeloading off our parents and getting ready for our big trip. Did I mention our trip? We’re heading out on the road for a couple of months to see the country and blow our savings (trip blog is coming soon). So far we’ve already done a great job blowing our savings - we bought a car that turned out to be a lemon, and now we’re buying another car so that we don’t end up stranded in rural Alabama. This trip better turn out to be fun and liberating, because so far the whole ordeal has been a bit of a pain in the arse.

But back to my point, we quit our jobs and moved out of our apartment. Anyone who’s ever moved will probably agree that moving is a great opportunity to clean out your home, sort through your things and ultimately get rid of all the garbage that you’ve accumulated. I have a lot of trouble throwing things away because it’s wasteful, so the whole moving out process was rather stressful. Plus, we had about 3o0 pounds of partially-digested compost to get rid of, and a truck to rent, and a couple of cats to pack up and relocate to their grandparents’ house in Massachusetts.

After everything I learned a few good tips for green moving: (more…)

Ok, for starters, if you’re not Matt Damon, you need not read this post. This is a personal discussion between him and I, and I’d appreciate it if you keep your fat nose out of this. (more…)

One of the few things I remember from my highschool physics class is the concept of potential energy. It basically says that if you, or any object, goes up, you’re storing up potential energy, because gravity will inevitably bring you down. So if you throw a ball up in the air, you’re putting energy into sending it upwards, but you’ll also get some energy back as it falls back to the ground. Very basically: what goes up will come down, and it will come down with some force.

A scientist in virginia is putting this basic principle to work with his new invention: a gravity lamp. It’s awesome and I want one. Aside from looking like a prop from the Star Trek set, it’s totally cordless and powered only by you - the user. All you have to do is lift a weight up, and then the light truns on and stays on for 4 hours while the weights slowly fall and release their gravity-induced energy.

I’ve actually seen something like this before, but sadly I can’t find a clip to share with you. If you rent the 1986 classic Harrison Ford movie “The Mosquito Coast,” you’ll come across a scene towards the middle of the film where Mr. Ford has built a really awesome ceiling fan that runs using this falling-weight gadgetry. (more…)

Most people probably don’t find compost very sexy, but I’m actually quite passionate about it. Organic waste, like food scraps, sticks, leaves, dried flowers, etc. aren’t really “waste” at all - they’re potential dirt. And dirt is good. All you really need is a bin and some worms, and you can trun your food waste and yard scraps into nutrient-rich soil for your garden. And in New York, which is plagued by soil shortage and an expensive waste disposal system, compostable garbage should be coveted.

Unfortunately, most New Yorkers send these nuggets of nutrients to the dump rather than keeping them around. And I really can’t blame them. There isn’t much space in the city for composting - even if you have the cahones to set up an indoor worm bin, most New Yorkers don’t have enough space inside their apartments to squeeze one into. The city should really set up a more effective system for collecting yard and food waste (right now all we’ve got is a yard waste collection program). But that’s not the point of my writing today - I’m here to discuss a more urgent and somewhat personal matter.

My apartment, as you may know, has an outdoor deck area with plenty of space for composting. As you may not know, however, is that Boyfriend and I are leaving the city at the end of this month and heading out on a road trip (more on that later). This means that I have to somehow get rid of my compost before the next tenants arrive to take over our (beautiful) home and garden. And I can imagine that they’re not going to want to deal with this: (more…)

Like most Americans, I love eating food in single, hand-held servings, especially when it can be frozen and conveniently heated up in my toaster oven at any time of the day. Unlike many, however, I’m a little bit squeamish when it comes to food additives and preservatives and food items with more than 7 or 8 ingredients. In an effort to negotiate my love for food pockets and my disgust for most frozen foods, I did a little experimenting with pie dough and my oven. It was a rather successful experiment.

These pie pockets have apples, dried cranberries and walnuts in them (with sugar, brown sugar, cinnamon, ginger), but I figure you can pretty much put any kind of pie filling in there (or any savory pot pie or samosa filling). The key is to get a good dough going first. (more…)

Boyfriend and I had some friends over this weekend and cooked up a nice meal in their honor. The main ingredients all came from the Union Square Farmers Market, which isn’t as lush and fruitful this time of year as it is in the summer, but even in February you can find a meal there. I picked up a couple of pounds of ground turkey, some beets, a tub of goat cheese and some baby bok choy, all grown locally in New York and New Jersey.  

Turkey burgers are as easy to make as hamburgers - just mix in some spices, an egg, some breadcrumbs, garlic or onion (if that’s how you like it). We also like to mix in some barbecue sauce to give the meat a little kick. Serve it with all your normal burger condiments and on nice big fluffy rolls from a local bakery. Turkey is a great substitute for beef, as it’s lower in fat, and also less energy and water-intensive to produce (since cows are bigger, they take more feed and time to produce the same amount of meat as pork and poultry).

Bok Choy is also easy to make, and is also the cutest of all the green vegetables. (more…)

It turns out that I’m not the only one thinking about how to convert human energy into electricity these days. The New York Times reports today that Canadian researchers have developed a gadget that harvests energy from the knee joint as people walk, using a knee-brace with a mechanical device that can collect about 5 watts or electricity (enough to power a few cell-phones or other small electronics). Plus, it doesn’t take any extra effort to generate power using it - all you have to do is walk, and the juice starts flowing. It’s unlikely that these things will be on the market any time soon, but its really good to know that there are guys in white coats in labs out there making these things. Maybe one of them is working on a hand-crank cuisinart battery at this very moment… 

Yesterday was perhaps the most American of days (excluding Xmas, 4th of July, and this coming Thursday, which I’m sure I don’t have to remind you is the first day of Chinese New Year). My friends and I gathered around the TV and put on the game, and treated ourselves to a feast fit for about 300 sumo wrestlers. There were ten of us.

Now, it’s not like I eat this way every day. The Superbowl is a special day, where we’re all given a free pass to binge on salty, fatty, orange-colored foods. It’s part of what makes America great. Right?

No, not right. Aside from the crippling stomach situation that resulted from my 8-course meal (consisting mainly of chips, cream, cheese, cream cheese, salt and beer), the feast left me with a soul-ache. This had a lot to do with the fact that most of the food I procured for the event wasn’t seasonal or organic (except for the salsa and some of the chips). And it had a whole lot to do with the sheer amount of food that my cohorts and I stuffed so willingly into our faces. (more…)

 The New York Times published an article last week about some new research that showed really really high (scary high) levels of mercury in tuna found in sushi restaurants in New York. For those of us who love sushi, tuna, and fish in general, this is bad news. My personal recommendation is just to stop eating tuna, especially bluefin tuna, because aside from being mercury-laden, it’s also over-fished.

But, if you just can’t live without it, and want to find out the maximum amount of mercury tuna that your body can handle safely, check out the Environmental Working Group’s Tuna Calculator. As a woman of child-bearing age, I am basically told not to eat any tuna at all (boo). Apparently, mercury has this nasty habit of causing brain damage in fetuses. Pretty lame.

Also, if you want some more info about the mercury-in-fish situation, Consumer Reports provides a decent overview. It even answers the question “how the heck does mercury get into fish in the first place?” (here’s a basic answer for those of you who are too lazy to click on the link:

1. coal and other fossil fuels are burned up to make power for our TVs and cuisinarts and whatnot

2. the smoke from the power plants contains mercury, and blows all over the place - including into the ocean

3. here the mercury gets absorbed by plankton and other tiny organisms at the top of the water, then fish eat those little guys, then bigger fish eat those fish

4. the mercury gets caught up in the fish’s fatty tissue and never comes out until that guy with the funny hat and the super sharp knife slices it up and puts it on a plate in front of you).

The End. Watch out for the fishies.