Healthy Homemaking is an e-book written by Stephanie Langford and has 26 steps to greening up your life. None of them are outrageous and she has lots of tips and clues on how to incorporate them. So here is my run-down of ways that I have found to implement these greener ideas in my life, on my miniscule budget.
1. Reduce waste. A whole post on this one topic here.
2. Use vinegar. If in doubt I try vinegar. I make my own window cleaner with vinegar, clean jewellery and appliances with vinegar, use it in laundry, make a paste with baking soda to remove tough stains.
Oh yeah, and I wash my hair with apple cider vinegar (I mix half vinegar & half warm water in an old shampoo bottle, then I use it as a rinse/conditioner by spraying it on, letting sit a bit and rinsing out. Makes my hair less frizzy and restores a nice colour tone, I find).
Plus we use it in cooking all the time. It really is a good first step when dealing with a household crisis.
3. Use brown rice. A while ago I just stopped buying white rice. Now we have minute brown rice and regular brown basmati rice. The minute rice takes... minutes, in the microwave. The regular rice takes 45 min in the rice cooker at a mix of 2 parts rice to 5 parts water. This helps get a nice soft, but nutty rice. I find the best way to improve my diet is just to stop buying whatever the offending food is and make do. Eventually you get used to it.
4 & 5. Lighten up your pantry (get rid of junk foods, high salt and fat foods, processed foods). So.... we do ok in this area. But just barely ok. Right now we have a case of Kraft dinner (which Prince Charming has been LOVING), but this is probably the first time we have had this, other than while camping, since moving to Edmonton. We do keep really fast, easy foods around for lunches or rushed dinners, and vary up the items between canned soup, baked beans, perogies, ramen noodles and pasta.
On the other hand I also hand-baked 4 loaves of bread for us this month and we haven't had store-bought cookies or other "kids snacks" in years. So, we approach this one with a varying attitude, mostly depending on my current commitments.
6. Use reuseable grocery bags. This one is really easy to do if you shop at a grocery store that charges you for bags, and requires you to bag your own groceries anyways. Since we aren't shopping for a huge family we generally don't use all our bags, so we just leave most in the car all the time. We also got some bags that have flat cardboard in the bottom so they fold out into a box. These we love. And once you start saying "we don't need a bag" in most stores, you just get used to carrying stuff. We have a lot less plastic bags around our house now.
7. Buy higher quality eggs. This one is something I am currently ignoring, in favour of; use lots of eggs. Organic eggs from a grocery store are about double regular eggs, and when you go through as many eggs as we do, its just not an option. So instead we get the cheap eggs and eat them a lot.
I believe that my body can actually handle a lot, and we don't have issues with our gut, skin or generally anything that isn't something I haven't brought home from work. So for now this is reality.
My dream of course would be to have chickens. Prince Charming does not share this dream.
8. Meal plan. Yeah. I don't understand that this is a goal for people. I honestly can not make food without a planner. I can't grocery shop without a full list. I tried once and literally had to just go home because I had no idea what I was doing. Don't see this as "oh wow, she's so organized" but rather, wow, look at the poor girl who has to geek out at the grocery store with a computer printed, organized my aisle list. Oh yeah, and I regularly forget stuff even though its on the list! Honestly.
I use this site called Plan to Eat, and I really like it. It saves me a lot of time, simply by organizing my shopping list for me. And I love that I can easily switch things around on their planner tab. Now that I have gotten the hang of it, entering my recipes into their system takes about 30 seconds, so that part doesn't bother me, even though I am someone who uses a lot of physical recipe books. If you use mostly recipes from the internet, then you will love this site!
9. What goes on, goes in. (Use safe personal hygiene products). Ok, I am sorry, but after about a year of trying many "natural recipes" with very unsatisfactory results, not to mention expensive ingredients that can only be acquired in large amounts, I am over this one. My sister (who is a chemical engineer) and I joke that there is a reason chemical engineering is a thing, and most toiletry companies use them. So yeah, I totally don't follow this. I just use what works, and only buy what I will actually use. And then I use very little of it. Like I spend most of my time not wearing makeup, and only wash my hair every 2 days. And almost never use styling products. One area I do spend money on is sunscreen (for my pale-skinned husband) and I use Ombrelle, since I have heard from several friends who've experienced skin cancer, that this is what their oncologists recommend.
10. Cleaning au naturel. A whole post about this one here.
I do believe that this is enough reading for this week!
What steps do you take to go greener/healthier at home?
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