I have been craving spinach for weeks already. Being one of my favorite greens and one I failed to grow enough of this past winter, I’m pretty well doomed to do without until the cool weather returns and I can grow my own - I just don’t care to pay for spinach out of season unless I have to. And now I know I need to grow at least three times as much if I want to have enough to freeze, seeing as how I tend to eat it all.

Cue a bit of magic here. While working at the organic market & bakery in town on Thursday night, the fellow delivering some produce off the truck asked if I liked spinach.

“Oh yes, I love spinach. Why?”

Turns out, he had a box of it that a client had rejected… along with a box of broccoli, romaine and a fruit none of us had heard of before (and that I cannot recall now, it’s just super-sweet and totally faboo). This was great news for the market too, which is in need of some unexpected cash. Pretty soon Cream of Broccoli Soup and Tofu-Spinach Lasagne will be on the menu.

Me? I got four bunches of both the spinach and broccoli to take home. Gratis!!! Of course, if we ate that much in greens in one week, we’d be turning green around here so I had to find out how best to preserve most of it.

Spinach is easy. The hardest part was making sure I got all the dirt off and picked out the less than great leaves. From there you just stuff it into bags and toss in the freezer. Done.

Broccoli is a little more work. You rinse it and cut it up into one-inch pieces, then set it in a bowl of water (the water should just cover it) and squeeze half a lemon over it, mix it in, let it sit five minutes. Then you need a pot of water and a steamer pan, and you steam the broccoli at full boil for three minutes, then immediately plunge the broccoli into a bowl of ice water for three minutes to get it to stop cooking. Then you pat it all dry, and finally bag it up. My steamer isn’t huge, so I had to do it in three batches, using a lemon and a half. BUT… it’s done, and I have broccoli for a few more weeks! And spinach!

Don’t forget to save the water from each part of the process - the water I rinsed spinach in even turned green, so my veggies got spinach and broccoli water to help them along a bit. Never hurts to have a few more nutrients. It also takes up more time, but the woodier stems of broccoli and the less than great pickings of the spinach were chopped up and tossed on my compost pile.

I love my little car. It’s not a hybrid or anything really “green” but it is a small, manual transmission vehicle that gets pretty good mileage. With the advent of $4/gallon gas, it’s now costing ME fifty smackers to fill up my tank. Ah, the not-so-long ago days when it was only $12. Oh well. No sense mourning the past (dammit!) – we must simply deal with the here and now.

My area is fairly hilly. In fact, we have a few low mountains around here. These hills and mountains are perfect for my little experiment: driving in neutral.

I’ve found I can travel down nearly the whole mountain in 5^th gear – that keeps me at a steady 60-65 mph (provided someone with less nerve isn’t in front of me hitting the brakes at 40). On that very last curve and drop, I drop the car in neutral, let it go as fast as it wants (about 70) until I hit town, where I can barely make it up a hill still out of gear, dropping me down to 30 mph and then the gradual downslope keeps me inside the small town’s range and I have to stop at it’s only traffic light.

I do this all the time – at the top of a hill, I put the car in neutral and see how far I can go without being in danger of some speed-happy motorist coming up behind me. It’s totally fun, and if I’m saving myself only a mile’s worth of gas per 30 mile trip, it’s still saving me something, right?

Except my clutch, I bet.

I have no idea how much gas this actually saves, sometime I guess I’ll try going a week without doing this and a week of my creative acceleration and seeing how well it works.

At some point, I suppose I’ll get pulled over for either coasting downhill too fast or for floating along on a flat stretch as far as I can and be going too far under the limit. I’ll keep you posted on what the officer says when I explain my frugal endeavors. I’ll probably wind up with a ticket and all the gas savings will be lost. Would be my luck!

Our homes are under attack! Paper, paper everywhere!

Many times I’ve visited a friend or a relative and wanted to help in the kitchen, washed my hands and then stood there like an idiot by the sink with my wet, drippy hands looking around for a dishtowel to dry off with. Seems the humble, often attractive kitchen towel is on its way to extinction in favor of paper towels. I try to dry my hands with just one little sheet to conserve a little waste, but it winds up sticking to me and doesn’t really want to go into the trash. With such a short lifespan, I wouldn’t want to go in the trash that fast either.

Me being the decorative type, I have tons of dishtowels in various shades of green that match my kitchen, so the lack of an opportunity to decorate a home is lost on me. I switch them out every day, and I have some of terry and some that are more like bar towels depending upon what I am using them for. Please help the humble kitchen towel avoid extinction, and for heaven’s sake don’t use paper towels with all that tacky ink on them - a cloth towel is so much prettier.

My next in line? The cloth napkin. Often reserved for black-tie events and restaurants where the cost per plate can be no less than $50, the cloth napkin is an indication that you are special enough to warrant a little extra laundry. Why not be special to yourself every day? Besides, who wants paper napkins? They don’t mop up spills very well, tend to leave little shreds in men’s facial hair (which you know he spent considerable time grooming rather than sleeping early that morning), fly off in the slightest breeze and stick to your glass.

With all that in mind, it should be pretty easy to consider bringing the cloth napkin back to your table. They aren’t a whole lot of laundry, and they sure make your guests (and yourself) feel special when dinnertime rolls around. Plus, you can get the kids a book on fancy napkin folds and keep them quiet and out of your way for an hour or so at a time.

One more on the list: the little old rag. They’re great for dusting, wiping down floors, countertops, bathtubs and so much more. Best yet: they’re reusable! Just wring them out over running water and keep going! When you’re done, chuck it in the wash until cleaning day rolls around again.

I have plenty of rags from my husband’s holey old t-shirts to use for cleaning house. They’re even color-coded: old white ones for spaces that need to be really clean, and dark ones for floors (this is also so I don’t ever REALLY know how dirty my floors were before I started). No expensive Swiffer pads for me.

Your home will be no less clean for using cloth over paper. Really. And think about it: paper products are just another way to get us to buy more stuff we don’t really need. Is it really any harder to throw away several paper towels and napkins a day rather than throw the fabric versions in the wash?

With power prices rising in some parts of the country in double digits, it makes sense to adjust your thermostat. My own thermostat is set at 79 during the day and 77 at night. If prices rise higher, and as the summer gets hotter, my home may find the air set at 82 during the day. Still considerably cooler than the 100+ degree temps we’ll be enduring in August.

Before you get bored with me suggesting a horribly obvious way to save both money and energy, let me delve a little further into the topic. Experiencing the weather isn’t a bad thing for us. In our current lives, we are so insulated from the realities of the elements that we might be missing some of the benefits of the weather. Such as living in air conditioning all summer rather than enjoying the warmer months.

But it’s HOT, you say. Yes, of course it is hot! However, your body has a remarkable ability to adjust to the heat – your blood thins down and the body naturally wants to shed a few pounds to help it stay cooler. Think of all the ads that say “Lose Weight… EFFORTLESSLY!” We don’t need to subscribe to some expensive 3-meal a day diet plan. My husband and I both lose weight in the warm months of the year. He lost a pant size last year and appears to be about to lose another pant size this year – getting close to what he was when I started dating him over a decade ago. I’m doing much the same, as many of my size 4s are too big and I’m running out of safety pins to help keep things in place (the only downside is some of my assets are disappearing too, but oh well).

In the summer months, we drink a great deal of water, our appetites are very low in the heat and what we do consume is usually fruits, fruit smoothies and veggies sautéed on the stove and tossed over whole-wheat pasta – because it’s too hot to turn on the oven! We are just listening to our bodies and what they want, and it appears they don’t want a whole lot.

Further, letting your body sweat is good for your skin – sweating keeps the skin in the elasticity stage, helping to prevent wrinkles. I am all about multitasking. Who knew that instead of that $60 wrinkle cream, all you had to do was take a good long walk or work in your yard for an hour a day? You can get in shape or clean up your yard, and have an anti-wrinkle treatment at the same time! How cool is that?

Since I’ve always spent a lot of time in the hot weather (I grew up in Florida), I bet that’s why people consistently think I am in my 20s. Two years ago I had people asking which high school I attended. That’s a little too young and nearly insulting but I know they had only the best of intentions.

There is another benefit to letting our bodies experience the heat. When we sweat, impurities and toxins are released through the skin, thereby cleansing the body. You may not need some strange new device or mineral tablets or odd diet to help release toxins… our bodies contain ways of doing that very thing – so long as we are careful about what we are putting in them and not overwhelming them, and letting them function naturally to take care of themselves.

Nature really is amazing, isn’t it?

It never ceases to amaze me how quickly weeds grow. Seems they show up too tiny to pull one morning, the next morning they’re HUGE. Of course they don’t really grow that fast, but it sure seems that way. One little rain and suddenly thousands of dormant seeds spring up all over the place, making my garden look untidy and competing with my vegetables for water.

I used to do marathon weeding sessions – you know, spend the whole of Saturday out in the hot sun yanking weeds that had two weeks to get established. Why two weeks? Because I could never bring myself to weed all day two weekends in a row. Working that way gave me heat exhaustion and dehydration all the next day, and I’d just be so sluggish (if not sunburned too) that all of Sunday would be wasted.

However, after years of gardening, I’ve finally figured out how to keep them under control. You know I won’t use herbicides (besides being horrid for the environment, they’re expensive!), and other than lawn clippings and fallen leaves, I don’t use mulch either. Wood chips leach nitrogen out of the soil as they decompose – a macronutrient most plants need lots of.

So what’s my trick? I get up early in the morning, make myself a cup of tea, and head outside. I weed only a section of my gardens a day – it only takes about a half hour – and work another section in rotation the next day.

It works out amazingly well. I can spare a half hour in the morning, and it turns out to be a peaceful and pleasant way to start off a busy day.

“Let thy food be thy medicine and thy medicine be thy food”.

-Hippocrates

One of the things I read over and over again on news websites and on blogs devoted to frugality is how people are cutting back on food spending. It makes sense, as it’s pretty easy to do – you just comparison shop and buy what’s cheap.

Unfortunately, what’s cheap often isn’t good for you. What’s cheap may cost you a lot more money in medical bills in the long run. Processed foods like Macaroni and Cheese may fill your tummy for a few hours, but they don’t offer your body much nutrition to work with to keep you healthy. And you can technically live a while on ramen noodles and white rice (just ask any college student) but eventually you’re going to find you can’t think as clearly and you’re really tired at 2 in the afternoon – a phenomenon that’s so common these days people think it’s normal. It’s not, I assure you.

What’s more disturbing than these foods lacking in any nutritional value is what they contain. Monosodium Glutemate, aka MSG, which we heavily ban from any Chinese restaurant and yet it’s in everything from salad dressing (just try to find one without it next time you go shopping!) to pasta sauce. It’s frequently hidden under another name, and many times when something announces “berry flavor” that “flavor” was created using MSG.

MSG is bad for us because, in brief, it’s an excitotoxin, meaning it overexcites your cells to the point of damage. It also might be a leading contributor to obesity – since the 1960s, scientists have known that it adds visceral fat (fat around your organs) increasing risk of heart attack, stroke and type 2 diabetes. It’s very hard to avoid because it hides under all kinds of names like flavor, broth, casein, hydrolyzed, autolyzed, gelatin, yeast extract, malted barley, rice syrups, and HVP.

Most people by now may have heard of High Fructose Corn Syrup. This too, is in nearly every processed product. It has been linked to numerous detrimental health effects stemming from the fact that this sugar is unnatural and our bodies simply don’t quite know how to process it correctly. It causes spikes in blood sugar and forces the body to break it down and manufacture glucose. Oddly enough, it also affects chloresterol levels – making the good number too low and the bad number high. Bad chlorestorol levels can be a precursor to heart disease – which is the number one killer of men AND women. A good enough reason in my mind to stay far away from it.

What may be most disturbing to me in many processed foods is the presence of genetically modified wheat, corn, soy and canola. 70% of corn is GM, 80% soy, % wheat and 90% canola have had their genes altered to make them withstand heavy doses of glyphosphate, a known carcinogen that is the main ingredient in Round-Up. Most of Europe, Canada and Japan have banned GM foods from their shelves for health concerns. I know it’s easy to think one country might be a little alarmist, but all of those are comprised of some pretty smart people. If their researchers say GM foods cause anything from liver tumors to decreased brain function in lab rats, I believe them.

But wait, there’s still scary stuff in the grocery aisles. Most produce is irradiated to kill off bacteria. This may sound like a good thing, because bad bacteria is what makes the produce not last as long on the shelf. The bad part is, it also kills the good bacteria and many of the nutrients that were in the produce to start with, so you’re essentially eating “dead food.” My mother in law brought a bag of store-bought grapes with her when she visited back in February. Two months later, I found that bag of grapes – and they still looked edible. I remember as a kid, you had to eat those suckers within a few days or they’d start growing fuzzy gray beards.

The meat in the store is a sadder story. I’m not going into the following information so you go vegetarian and swear off meat products forever. Not everyone feels their best without meat in their diets. However, there are local sources for grass-fed beef and probably free-range chickens and eggs too.

About 10 years ago there was a big stink about Food Lion in Florida bleaching meat in the back of the store to keep it looking and smelling OK longer. What some people may not know is, chicken is thrown into a bleach bath TWICE before packaging. Chicken in Canada is tender and has its own flavor. Chicken here is tough and bland without 24 hours worth of marinating. A hidden factor in what is unhealthy in the meat we buy is what the animals were fed, and all the hormones and antibiotics they were given to both make them grow really big really fast, and keep them healthy-ish in inhumane conditions. You do take in those antibiotics and hormones when you eat these animals.

One of the earliest X-Files shows was about chickens causing some kind of disease, and it turned out that the problem was created by the farmers feeding the chickens parts of other, diseased chickens. This is actually a true practice. Calves are weaned on cow’s blood and cows are fed unusable parts of other cows in with their corn (cows are also fed chicken excrement). The corn itself isn’t good for the animals either – according to the documentary King Corn, cattle would only live six months fed a diet of corn. Cows eat grass. Chickens eat bugs. Not corn. Unhealthy animals equals unhealthy meat, which in turn makes us unhealthy.

So now that I’ve scared you into reading labels (sorry), how can you both feed your body AND cut back on your food bill?

Eat Fresh. Eat Local. Eat Organic.

In my next installment, I’ll explain why organic is better for you than non-organic foods, and in the third installment of this series I’ll offer easy ways to incorporate healthy eating into your busy life, whether you are an accomplished chef or the “I can barely boil water” type.

Many visitors remark, upon leaving the stuffy cars they’ve been trapped in for hours while they traveled to see us, that the air here seems wonderfully clean and fresh. I’m inclined to agree. We live in a small town that is surrounded by exceedingly rural conditions – mostly woodland – and our home is situated at the top of a hill. Consequently we are blessed with both good drainage and a gentle breeze.

It is just this air, and enjoying this air, that makes hanging the washing on line so pleasurable to me. The job is full of little pleasures, from carrying the wet linens out in an old wicker basket, to enjoying the breeze and listening to the birds while I carefully hang each item.

It also allows me a chance to really inspect the state of each article of clothing. My husband will wear shirts until they are so full of holes they are technically more hole than shirt, and so it is good for me to catch this problem before he does. Once the item is dry, I can cut it into rags (a practice he protests no matter how many holes decorate his shirts).

As I hang each item with my wooden clothespins (the plastic ones just don’t work so well) I think of my grandmother, and her mother, and countless generations of women from whom I am descended. I probably don’t hang the washing as they would. Compared to them, I’m a novice. My mother hung clothes on the line every once in a while when I was younger, and I only dimly recall that shirts should be hung upside-down and that the pins should be removed as you take things down – leaving them up is tacky (and bad for their life expectancy if left out in the rain).

I’ve found that I’m much more inclined to fold each article as I take it down than when I just take a giant wad of warm clothes out of a dryer. From the dryer, the folding just seems like this giant pile of clothes to fold, and I really have hated that part of the washing. Now though, it’s just as easy to fold the pants and shirts as I drop them back into the basket, and I don’t mind coming inside with a basket full of warm, fresh-smelling, folded laundry.

Despite the roughly ten minute time investment that it takes to hang the clothes up rather than chuck them into a dryer, it’s a great break from my computer routine to carry that washing outside. There’s something satisfying about glancing out my office window and seeing the sheets flapping in the breeze. Something old, and quaint, and a basic sign of life, and knowing that those waving pieces of cloth are flags declaring that I’m trying to do my part for the environment… and saving money at the same time.