When relatives give you moose meat….

Before the move, thoughtful relatives bestowed upon us a pound of moose meat. “Put it in a stew,” they said. But once I thawed it, it resembled ground hamburger so I scanned on-line to see how to cook it. Everyone had a different recipe for moose burgers….so this is what I came up with: mooseloaf.
Since the ingredients were similar to the ones for meatloaf, I decided to try to make it in a similar manner. After all, who am I to waste moose?

Ultimate zero waste food

Cook and eat the meat, compost the skin and bake the seeds. Can you guess what it is?

Blast it! I forgot my bag!

This has happened to us all….now, hasn’t it? The question is: What do you do?

Most folks will give in and take a bag, swearing to themselves they’ll remember next time. And I’ve been known to do that. But I’ve been better known to walk out of the store with cucumbers cradled beneath my armpits, and all the other products stacked up, balancing tomatoes against my chin. I’m determined, damn it. The system is not going to beat me.

Please remove me from your list

Junk mail, junk mail.
This is what I do when I get those annoying credit card applications!

Chopping onions in the bathroom

Due to my obsession with the crock pot, we have been able to eat fairly well since we moved into the hotel. Note I said fairly.

A lot of bread. A lot of frozen microwave meals. A lot of Ramen noodles. And most certainly, nowhere near the zero waste I can pull off at home. But without a kitchen, I think we’ve done fantastic by not eating out but once a week. So far I have cooked in the crock pot:

Wiping out with wipies

We’ve been using homemade wipies–which were working out perfectly. UNTIL we moved into the hotel.

Not knowing how long we’d be here while we searched for a house, I opted to use disposable diapers and wipes only while we lived stranded in the hotel–away from the convenience of our poop/pee buckets and drying racks.

Unplugging it

When I lived in D.C., a huge “I will turn it off/ I will unplug it more” campaign splashed the walls of the subway and the glass shelters of each bus stop I passed. I don’t remember who ran the ads, but I remember them five years later. (Now, that’s good advertising.)

I also remember thinking, “I didn’t realize unplugging was such a big deal. Does it really waste that much electricity?”

Homemade wipies and how to make them

From the get-go, we shot for homemade wipies. I mean we had all these old white t-shirts, why not cut them up and reuse them? Why pay for wipes when it took minutes to make them?

Eating local

My friend Ann at the local farmer’s market in south GA always states the only difference between the tomato you buy at the grocery store and the one she’s selling you at the market (picked from her back yard that morning) is 2,000 miles. The taste is the real difference. I couldn’t believe how much better everything tasted when we started growing our own food and buying at the market while in GA.

When we visited the farmer’s market in Fernandina Beach, Florida, shortly after arriving in south GA, we passed a man wearing funny glasses (to catch our attention) on the side of the road along Hwy 40. It worked!

Mother’s milk tea

Of all the teas I’ve ever chugged, this is the only one I’ve found in compostable paper!