This part of the story has been a long time coming. What I have been trying to give you guys is a good background on why I needed to make the life changes that I made. I want you to see how bad it got for me and how ultimately my diet and ridding my life of chemicals has changed me for the better. This story, after all, was for a reason. I have been slowly healing my body in amazing ways just by making these life-style changes. Read more »
After our dishwasher broke, we waited for a month for the maintenance crew to actually fix it. Long story short, it’s been 2 months and no one has come to fix our broken dishwasher. That’s ok! The hippy husband suggested that we wash our dishes by hand for a few months and see the difference it makes on our electricity bill! (You gotta love a husband who so willingly follows in the quest of living a more sustainable lifestyle!) After I finally ran out of the Dawn dish soap that I had been finishing up, I needed a new dish soap that I could make just like all of the other cleaning products in my house. At first I tried only using castile soap as my dish soap but I needed something to cut the grease. The first recipe I tried combined castile soap with lemon juice and vinegar, but I eventually realized that the reason that the solution curdled so often was because I was mixing castile soap (a base) with vinegar and lemon (an acid) which was advised against by Dr. Broner’s themselves because the acid/base chemical reaction makes the soap de-saponify causing it to no longer be soap and render it useless as far as cleaning. Read more »
The first time that I tried to make sloppy joe’s vegetarian style, I used tofu. I thought that I could just stir fry the tofu the way that I used to brown ground beef. That batch of “sloppy joe’s” was soooo wrong. I had no idea how to use tofu, so I hadn’t properly pressed all of the juice out of it before using it. The sloppy joe’s turned out totally soft and without any sort of crunch to it. It was like pouring a thick ragu’ on a bun and trying to eat it. Needless to say, I have come a LONG way from that first attempt at making vegetarian sloppy joe’s. Read more »
If you are anything like me, you just love animals of all shapes and sizes. I have pretty much had every kind of pet that you can think of (except a bird as I have a fear of them thanks to Daphne Du Maurier and Alfred Hitchcock.). I have had the normal; dogs, cats, and fish. I have had the “small animal”; hamsters, gerbils, rats, guinea pigs, and mice. I have even had the exotic; ferrets, lizards, frogs, salamanders, and (my personal favorite) snakes. In fact, I love snakes so much that even as a child I adored them. When I was about 10 or 11 (this was when I was in 4th or 5th grade in MN) Easter was coming up, and I wanted to do something special for my mom. I knew that the baby garter snakes were out in full force and thought my mom would just LOVE to have a bunch of them as her own pet. Read more »
To think that I thought I would only be able to do this story in 2 or 3 parts…I must have been crazy to think that all of the medical issues that I have dealt with could only be described in 2 or 3 parts. That last part was quite a story though huh? It took me 9 whole months to believe it too! My son is almost 3, so if you do the math you’ll realize we are almost caught up with this story. I most certainly left a lot of parts of my life out of this story. I mean, who would have the time to read THAT novel? Read more »
You’ll have to forgive me, (I am ALWAYS full of excuses, aren’t I?) I have been putting off writing this one for the last week because I have been reading, planning, and putting together my first home-school curriculum. Mind you, it’s for a soon to be 3 year old, preschool curriculum, but it’s busy work! Just picking out the books that I want for each theme of the week that I have created, takes me so much time. I hate being a bibliophile when it comes down to choosing between books. In any case, this particular installment of my personal story Read more »
I got this recipe from Vegetarian Times (Pg. 52, August/September 2012) magazine. It’s actually a Chloe Coscarelli recipe also in her new cookbook, “Chloe’s Kitchen”. This was soooo good. We just ate it tonight and I am so stuffed just from eating these alone. I didn’t even end up making a side dish as this makes 20 potato halves. I made a few changes to the recipe but they are more additions than anything else. I doubled the cumin because after taste testing (Always taste while you cook. How would you know if you need to fix something if you aren’t tasting???) Read more »
I LOVE salsa. I mean I REALLY LOVE salsa. So much so, that when I make a really BIG batch, I eat it all in less than 24 hours. Seriously! You can ask my husband, he always complains that he didn’t even get to eat any. If you have a food processor (Mine is the Ninja. It’s the best food processor out there!), the salsa is a snap. I also like to put the salsa that I just made, into the guacamole. I just can’t stand jarred salsa. It has
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I suppose that I was rushing through the last post of this story. That surgery was probably the one that I blocked the most memories out from because of the pain that I experienced right afterwards. I must add an addendum to the people that came to visit me for Thanksgiving Star Wars in the Hospital day. Two other non-blood related family members (I feel that family doesn’t come from blood, it comes from those who treat you like they love you. My son has so many aunts and uncles not related to him Read more »
Between writing about myself for you guys (because you all seem to be more interested in my personal story, rather than any of my other articles) and watching the Olympics, I have been a little slacker when it comes to my next installment of Green Living. It’s a day late, but you guys didn’t want to clean anything yesterday anyway, it was Monday! I am my own worst boss. I can’t stand it when I turn something in late, get lazy and decide I only need to write every other day, or take three day weekends! Read more »
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