"Going green” is a phrase that we hear a lot lately. Today, you’re not considered a “hippie” for being environmentally conscious, you’re just considered “hip”. There are so many ways to “go green” even the big box stores have jumped on the trend. Long gone are the days where you had to haul yourself to the elusive health food store to find your organic and environmentally friendly products.
But with rising fuel costs, why bother going to the store to find your eco-friendly products? You probably have everything you need to get started right in your kitchen cabinets.
There really are very few things that you need to get started. My basic cleaning arsenal consists of baking soda, vinegar, olive oil, essential oils and Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soap. I’m sure that you can find the first 3 ingredients readily available in your home already.
Baking soda is a natural water softener so it’s great to use in your laundry. It’s also a mild abrasive and when you make a paste with the Dr. Bronner’s Soap, it’s fantastic for cleaning the scum out of the bathtub, spots on your kitchen counter, and even the burnt bits on your flat top range.
Vinegar is anti-microbial/anti-bacterial and a very mild bleaching agent. Use 1 cup in the rinse cycle as a fabric softener and when you mix it in a 50/50 solution with water and 2-4 drops of essential oil in a squirt bottle, it makes a fantastic all purpose cleaner. Straight vinegar in a squirt bottle makes a great glass cleaner or natural odor neutralizer.
My husband absolutely cannot stand the smell of vinegar so I use a couple of drops of essential oil in my vinegar solutions to mask the smell. Essential oils are easy to find at your local health food stores, both Mountain Mama’s and Vitamin Cottage carry a wide variety. I have also managed to find a limited supply at The Vitamin Shoppe and GNC. My favorites are lavender and tea tree. Not only do they smell fantastic, but both are anti-microbial/anti-bacterial. They are pricey initially, starting at around $7.00 for a .5 ounce, but that small bottle will last you a very long time. I still have my bottle of lavender oil that I bought over a year ago.
Olive oil is fantastic for polishing furniture. I have found that it works even better than commercial cleaners. All you need is one tablespoon rubbed well into a coffee table to revitalize the wood.
Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soap is not easy to find and it is not cheap. I bought my Tea Tree scented 16oz bottle at Vitamin Cottage for $7.49. But it’s a fabulous cleaner. I dilute 1 tbsp to a gallon of hot water to mop my floor. I also make a paste with baking soda to scrub my tub and shower clean and I even use it as a face wash and hand soap. Yep, because it’s pure castile soap, it’s safe to use on your skin. The bottle actually says that this soap has at least 18 different uses. And like the essential oils, it will last a long time because you don’t need to use a lot.
So now that you have your basic kit assembled, go forth and clean! Enjoy, for the first time, cleaning without breathing in all of the toxic fumes from traditional cleaners. Enjoy the knowledge that your new cleaning kit is doing something good for you, the planet and your pocket book!
For more ideas on eco-friendly and wallet friendly cleaning, check out the book, “Clean House, Clean Planet” by Karen Logan.
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
Friday, March 20, 2009
What Does It Cost To Eat In America?
I ran across this website after watching an Internet broadcast of Fox and Friends. Its called One Dollar Diet Project. These two teachers decided to try an experiment. They wanted to see if the could eat for $1.00 a day per person for an entire month. Sounds crazy right. They blogged about their experiences. He lost weight (15lbs), they both were cranky, tired and irritable but they did it for an entire month. Why? Because people all over the world live on $1.00 of food a day. They were talking about how much food they wasted on a daily basis and wanted to see if they could live off of one dollar a day. So they tried it for a whole month and they were thankful when that month ended. So that got me thinking. How much do I spend in a month just on groceries.
My budget is $60.00 a week. Sometimes I spend a little more sometimes I spend a little less but it usually evens out to $60.00 a week. If you break that down per person, you come out with $15.00 per person, per week which is about $2.14 per day. Not too bad right? Granted two of the people in the house are tiny but they still eat A LOT. Just for breakfast today, Kylie ate 1 egg, a biscuit, a glass of homemade chocolate milk (milk, 1/2 tbsp baking cocoa and 1 1/2 tbsp powdered sugar) and about a half a can of fruit salad. Kaitlynn also had an egg, fruit salad and a biscuit. So they maybe tiny but they are not little eaters.
For $2.14 a day, we have plenty of fruits and veggies. Granted the veggies are mostly the frozen variety and the fruit mostly the canned. We have snacks, hot breakfasts, desserts. We have meat which is mostly cheaper cuts but its still meat. We eat really well for $2.14 a day per person. Most of that money is funneled into dinner. Breakfasts and lunches cost a lot less. We are not malnourished and no one here is losing any weight (yet, check back with me when the national body challenge starts next month).
A typical day for us looks something like this...
Breakfast
Either oatmeal in some form (baked or cooked with flax and cranberries, if its cooked instead of baked I usually throw some canned pumpkin in there) or eggs (we like green eggs: spinach, eggs and garlic pulsed in a food processor and then scrambled in the pan) and toast both served with some kind of fruit.
Lunch
Its a smattering of different things but always includes some kind of fruit: either apples, oranges or something from the can; and a veggie: carrot sticks, frozen peas and carrots or corn. The main dish varies from sandwiches (PB & J for Kylie, Sunbutter and Jelly for Kaitlynn who is allergic to peanuts), to chicken nuggets, leftovers from dinner the night before, soup (if I serve soup, I don't usually include a veggie side)
Dinner
Also a variety of things. I get bored easily with food so I try to vary the kinds of foods I make. I posted about the soup I made the other night. On Kylie's birthday (this past Thursday), I made spaghetti. We had this with warm pears (29oz canned pears in their syrup throw into a 425 degree oven with a little cinnamon sprinkled on top) and my quick greens recipe (I used frozen green beans this time. Green beans cooked in chicken broth with garlic, 2 pieces of chopped fried bacon, garlic powder, onion powder, and garlic pepper. YUM!) The price of this dinner?
Spaghetti
Sauce: $1.00 (purchased on sale)
Noodles: $.88 (purchased in bulk at Sam's Club)
1/2 lb ground beef: $1.50
1/2 chopped onion: $.02 (a 3 lb bag bought on sale for $1.00 6 onions in the bag)
1 tsp minced garlic: $.02 (1 jar of minced garlic bought for $1.00, 48 tsp in a jar)
Pears
29oz can of pears: $1.00 (purchased on sale last week)
Cinnamon: ? (I really couldn't tell you how much cinnamon I used so I can't really determine a price but I just sprinkled a little on top and the jar of cinnamon cost me about $1.25 at Walmart)
Green Beans
16oz frozen Green Beans: $1.00 (purchased on sale)
1 tsp minced garlic: $.02
1 can chicken broth: $.39
2 pieces of bacon: $0.16 (purchased on sale for $1.77, 21 pieces in a packages)
Spices: again, I don't know the quantities I used so I can't tell you exactly how much they cost.
Total price for dinner approximately: $5.99 or $1.50 per person, a lot less if you include that we had a lot of leftovers. It probably ended up factoring to more like $.75 a person just because we had 1/2 of everything leftover after we were done eating. We had enough food leftover for the girls to have it again for dinner on Friday and for Jeff to take the majority of it to work with him for lunch the next day.
So okay, typical long winded Kristi. My point is that $1.00 a day in our economic climate is extreme. Most people around the world live on $1.00 a day because they grow or gather their own foods, raise their own animals for meat or hunt for it. So meat costs them nothing to very little and the same goes for vegetables and fruits. It takes time and not much money but you are subject to low food supplies during times of extreme weather. I think in a truer $1.00 a day experiment, they should have grown some of their own foods. They would have been able to eat well while maintaining their budget. It would be interesting if they did this again but planned on starting a garden in spring. I wonder what their food intake would look like then.
**Cross post from my personal blog
My budget is $60.00 a week. Sometimes I spend a little more sometimes I spend a little less but it usually evens out to $60.00 a week. If you break that down per person, you come out with $15.00 per person, per week which is about $2.14 per day. Not too bad right? Granted two of the people in the house are tiny but they still eat A LOT. Just for breakfast today, Kylie ate 1 egg, a biscuit, a glass of homemade chocolate milk (milk, 1/2 tbsp baking cocoa and 1 1/2 tbsp powdered sugar) and about a half a can of fruit salad. Kaitlynn also had an egg, fruit salad and a biscuit. So they maybe tiny but they are not little eaters.
For $2.14 a day, we have plenty of fruits and veggies. Granted the veggies are mostly the frozen variety and the fruit mostly the canned. We have snacks, hot breakfasts, desserts. We have meat which is mostly cheaper cuts but its still meat. We eat really well for $2.14 a day per person. Most of that money is funneled into dinner. Breakfasts and lunches cost a lot less. We are not malnourished and no one here is losing any weight (yet, check back with me when the national body challenge starts next month).
A typical day for us looks something like this...
Breakfast
Either oatmeal in some form (baked or cooked with flax and cranberries, if its cooked instead of baked I usually throw some canned pumpkin in there) or eggs (we like green eggs: spinach, eggs and garlic pulsed in a food processor and then scrambled in the pan) and toast both served with some kind of fruit.
Lunch
Its a smattering of different things but always includes some kind of fruit: either apples, oranges or something from the can; and a veggie: carrot sticks, frozen peas and carrots or corn. The main dish varies from sandwiches (PB & J for Kylie, Sunbutter and Jelly for Kaitlynn who is allergic to peanuts), to chicken nuggets, leftovers from dinner the night before, soup (if I serve soup, I don't usually include a veggie side)
Dinner
Also a variety of things. I get bored easily with food so I try to vary the kinds of foods I make. I posted about the soup I made the other night. On Kylie's birthday (this past Thursday), I made spaghetti. We had this with warm pears (29oz canned pears in their syrup throw into a 425 degree oven with a little cinnamon sprinkled on top) and my quick greens recipe (I used frozen green beans this time. Green beans cooked in chicken broth with garlic, 2 pieces of chopped fried bacon, garlic powder, onion powder, and garlic pepper. YUM!) The price of this dinner?
Spaghetti
Sauce: $1.00 (purchased on sale)
Noodles: $.88 (purchased in bulk at Sam's Club)
1/2 lb ground beef: $1.50
1/2 chopped onion: $.02 (a 3 lb bag bought on sale for $1.00 6 onions in the bag)
1 tsp minced garlic: $.02 (1 jar of minced garlic bought for $1.00, 48 tsp in a jar)
Pears
29oz can of pears: $1.00 (purchased on sale last week)
Cinnamon: ? (I really couldn't tell you how much cinnamon I used so I can't really determine a price but I just sprinkled a little on top and the jar of cinnamon cost me about $1.25 at Walmart)
Green Beans
16oz frozen Green Beans: $1.00 (purchased on sale)
1 tsp minced garlic: $.02
1 can chicken broth: $.39
2 pieces of bacon: $0.16 (purchased on sale for $1.77, 21 pieces in a packages)
Spices: again, I don't know the quantities I used so I can't tell you exactly how much they cost.
Total price for dinner approximately: $5.99 or $1.50 per person, a lot less if you include that we had a lot of leftovers. It probably ended up factoring to more like $.75 a person just because we had 1/2 of everything leftover after we were done eating. We had enough food leftover for the girls to have it again for dinner on Friday and for Jeff to take the majority of it to work with him for lunch the next day.
So okay, typical long winded Kristi. My point is that $1.00 a day in our economic climate is extreme. Most people around the world live on $1.00 a day because they grow or gather their own foods, raise their own animals for meat or hunt for it. So meat costs them nothing to very little and the same goes for vegetables and fruits. It takes time and not much money but you are subject to low food supplies during times of extreme weather. I think in a truer $1.00 a day experiment, they should have grown some of their own foods. They would have been able to eat well while maintaining their budget. It would be interesting if they did this again but planned on starting a garden in spring. I wonder what their food intake would look like then.
**Cross post from my personal blog
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We hope that you enjoy this new supplement to our fabulous Future Homeowner Program!
This blog is designed to keep you up to date on what's going on around town, budget friendly meals and tips, and ways on maintaining your home and improving your credit score!
We hope that you enjoy this new supplement to our fabulous Future Homeowner Program!
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