Recycle, Renew, Reuse; Mantra of An Eco-Friendly Life or Just Frugal?

As a child of the sixties, my formative years were filled with an awareness of how our actions affected our environment and the greater world.

As a child of WWII Holocaust survivors, my years were also filled with not taking anything for granted, and the ever present question "you have so much money?"

The two teachings served me well into adulthood and raising my own young impressionable minds. That is, until the teen years.

What was once Mom's great commitment to our world and all of us doing our part, became "that's ghetto".  Remembering how my then husband and I secretly made fun of his World War II generation parents and how his mother saved every piece of tin foil ever used, I felt a little hurt, a little ashamed, but mostly surprised that they reacted as any teen would.

Now most of my brood is out of their teens, some even raising families of their own. We share cycling tips, yoga stories, found-art crafting and vegetarian recipes while the younger boys snicker and reach for another rib, thank you very much.

Now, don't get me wrong, I am not the local Zen Mother. I still participate in filling our landfills, eat meat on occasion, weigh more than the typical yoga girl (way more), and while I may have issues with over packaging I will still buy a product wrapped in unneeded layers when I should protest.

All this is leading up to my sheer joy in finding a resource online that my daughters and I could share on our daily forays into the produce aisles, washable produce bags. Reminiscent of the ditty bags we used to make in Girl Scouts these bags come in sets and are available online at: http://washableproducebags.com/

Take them to the market, use, wash, repeat. Renew, reuse - its that easy.

You can take the girl out of Berekely...

In my 20s I put myself through college and started my family doing any number of things that any Art-Major-slash-Designer would to stay afloat including catering.

The nuances and talents of Alice Waters was lost on 20 year old me when my date tried to impress me with a dinner at Chez Panisse in Berkeley, but her story and philosophies that brought that diner to the table were not.

As a resident of highly populated apartment dwellers in San Francisco the idea of creating a meal with only the freshest ingredients from your garden and market place seemed exotic and foreign to me. As a broke college student it seemed completely out of the scope of reality.

But I was inspired (and determined) I started with herbs on my kitchen window sill, then container growing on the balcony of my LA apartment. Ripped out the front lawn of the most adorable rental home in Tujunga for fresh flowers and veggies - followed by amazing edible floral salads. By the time I moved to my first house of my very own in Lake View Terrace I was well past turning out gourmet meals ala' Alice Waters but on a mission of sustainability that seemed closer to survival. After all, I had a mortgage, a baby and a husband who was "finding himself" professionally.

As the family enlarged I wanted them to embrace my garden to table love. Thinking I was creating memories I would take the kids out to the garden and its small orchard to select items for feasting upon. A year ago, when I proudly told them how pleased I was to be able to do that for them and their personal memory books there was a silence. Finally, Sara spoke up and said "Yah, we hated that".

Now, three kids later, a grandchild and an upgrade (read: larger mortgage) to Century City our garden became the Ralph's at the end of the street and eschewing Alice Water's teaching for my mother's post holocaust frugal methods. No wait, not eschewing -- combining and transitioning into my own.

 

 Ralph's has an awesome deli counter with items like the Roasted Corn Salad pictured above. At $4.99 a pound it really isn't in my budget. I could afford it if it was just my immediate family but I don't have that kind of life. Pre-4th of July the dinner and over night drop ins started to arrive, we had 8 for dinner, 10 for breakfast, with a smaller group of 6 for dinner.  This is no different then my weekends as family and friends come and go. Amazingly, that is just the way I like it.

I might like it, but it does take marketing and preparation into a whole new arena. Everything is planned around what is available. I've gone from what is in the garden to what is on sale. You know what? That is just the way I like it.

Our Ralph's has a manager that I adore - they way they continually mark down quality items allows me to stroll the vegetables and yes, even meats to create yummies on a whim.

Finding 3 packages of baby spinach on sale I knew I had to come up with something that highlighted the tender leaves.  But what? I knew I didn't want to cook, the kitchen was just too hot and grilling was out since the fridge was packed with leftovers.

Wait! Did I just say leftovers? Behold; the leftover chicken transformed into a fa-bu lunch for 8.

How did I do it? 99 cents a lb chicken (picnic pack - breasts, thighs, legs etc) from last night's grill. $1.97 Ralph's fresh packed baby spinach, I threw in some of the roasted corn salad which was bought just to stretch other recipes and topped it off with Ralph's 70 calorie light ranch dressing, another mark down find at 98 cents!

I love my husband, but he has different methods then I do. He'll ask "What do you want from the market?" and of course, I'll answer that I don't know - what's on sale? Once I had the manager's special spinach and roasted corn salad I knew that I had to pull it together with something that could make it a side dish or an entree for our mixed use/semi vegetarian/meatarian family - on to the pasta aisle. Once again, Ralph's did not disappoint. An affordable family sized pack of 4 cheese tortellini brought the ingredients to just what I wanted for my group.

  I might not be the green gardener I once was but with local stores, our farmer's markets and a little creativity in the kitchen I still adhere to a pick-n-eat and enjoy as many drop-ins as wish to join the table.