Loving Lucy and I
Making jam tarts from the renegade grapes
Trashy novels from an awesome lady
Winter growing from Little House in the Suburbs
One Pretty Thing’s daily lovelies
Kansas City Restaurant Events
My parents are visiting this week to help us clean the basement/reorganize. We really simplified our living space upstairs. That said, everything else went to [...]

Canned 12 quarts over the weekend…many more to go! Maybe I’ll just dry the rest of the tomatoes.

Oh dear…it’s been a long time since I’ve done anything really fun with our CSA shares. My parents were up last weekend, and then I caught the cold mom had and have been nursing that this week. I will say, nothing fancy, yes, but lots of soup. Our share this week looks [...]

I made this pie on Monday night (around 10 pm!) after we thought we’d recovered enough from our shared illnesses. Quick question: why would anyone who loved you not tell you their house was full of a summer plague? If I were that sick, I would guide possible guests towards the Holiday Inn [...]

Happy Solstice! Aren’t those Simpson-esque clouds just ridiculous? I hope you’re having a lovely day…I realize that the moment of “stillness” actually happened last night, but it is just as fun to celebrate during the day, smelling all the green, the onion-bite, cows and moisture from all the recent rain,

Oh dear–we’ve been moved to Saturday pickup instead of Tuesday, so our Week 3 items already came in, hence, an early post on Week 2:
I love how the CSA allows us to try things we normally wouldn’t, like the 9-grain bread from Rayville Baking Company.
The strawberries, we sprinkled with sugar (macerated), and after they sat [...]

We signed up for a CSA this summer because we’re relocating parts of our vegetable garden closer to the house and didn’t have time to plant enough for summer eating and canning. The photo above shows last week’s offerings–mmmm…and sausage and bacon–what a treat!
We were able to make:

salsa
stir fried peas and pea shoots with [...]

Can I just complain really quick and say, Flickr, you sometimes suck. I am working on my flickr account–trying to make it more manageable for people who visit (over 10,000 photos, oye…the power of the uploader). At any rate, I mass-changed the privacy on my photos, which changed the URLs for image source, [...]

I wish I could say that things were moving along at a nice clip, but we’ve been swamped with homework, garage work, and wow–what a horrible, allergy-ridden spring! All that aside, I feel pretty blessed with some new additions to the food-family:

Paw paw trees (this on had a break, but it is so young [...]

We celebrated national library week where I work. One of our speakers gave a presentation on green cleaning–thought you all might appreciate the resource list I pulled together for the event! At the very least, have efforts go towards more than one cause.
Chemical lookup and consumer resources
• Cleaner Solutions Database (Toxics Use Reduction Institute [...]

I’ve am addicted to reading Wisebread.  A few articles that caught my eye:
How to buy stuff that lasts forever
10 ways to be nicer to the environment and your wallet
 What if foreigers quit lending the U.S. money?

In 2004, I started a blog (many, oh, the multiple personalities) called Responsible Shopper. My goal was to try living without sweatshop produced, non-local food, china-made Anythings. I documented things for 3 months, and it was not an easy endeavor. The hardest part was working around my husband. If you are [...]

First, care for the earth (because the earth sustains us). Second, care for the people. Third, recycle all resources towards the earth and the people.–Ecospace.cc

Oh. I emailed someone about another meeting, and then lamented that I missed the registration for the SARE conference next week. The response was “Too many conferences, too many earth fairs, too much!” Damned rising interest in sustainability! (I’m kidding, of course~)
I feel their pain. I feel their pain because the [...]

See the photo above with all the foof under the drapes? For the past 5 years, we’ve started our seedlings at our living room window. As seedlings grew out of their starter containers, we would move them into progressively larger containers which eventually took over the kitchen, dining and living room (in our [...]

I found this photo of our garden from two years ago. It gives me a lot of hope–we did things right in 2006. 2007, we tried some new things…collaboration, expansion and some “free design layout.” While working full-time freelance over the summer. Things that didn’t work:
Collaboration: volunteers…what a lovely idea, [...]

Via the IdealBite newsletter:
* A four-digit number means it’s conventionally grown.
* A five-digit number beginning with 9 means it’s organic.
* A five-digit number beginning with 8 means it’s GM.
And then I just had to share this–my eyes were so teary at the simplicity, the wonderfulness…

I like the idea of this. I am not entirely sure if my adoption helped, but it’s a fun, simple community. And I like that it is Adopt THE Sky. Although, my section is over South Dakota??

Someone who pledged to live Plastic Free for 2007!
Working on my Mondo Beyondo list
How to open a coconut (caution, old ones smell like industrial clean fluid! toss it)
Excited that Persepolis open out here on February 1st!