Many of my friends will chock this up to becoming a Left Coast Hippie, however, I feel it is less about becoming a hippie and more about becoming aware of what we are ingesting knowingly and unknowingly. R and I sat down after the swiffer sweater success and started brainstorming ideas on where else we could make sustainable, healthy choices in the items we buy.
First off was trying to eliminate processed food. We started cooking most items from scratch. We are talking pizza, macaroni and cheese and a whole host of other meals. Part of this was to create meals that could be counted on for left overs to help stretch the food dollar longer and the other was to not rely on boxed, frozen or otherwise prepared and shipped pre-made meals. This does take a little longer than just slapping a frozen meal in the oven, but I am enjoying the prep every night. R and I spend some quality time both participating in the meal creation and have managed to create some great dinners. Our favorite was the Betty Crocker Homemade Mac and Cheese, but it has since drifted to Betty Crocker's Cream Quinoa Primavera.
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| Veggies for the quinoa dish |
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| The finished product! |
Granted, there are some things we cannot live without that happen to be processed. Flour, pasta and dairy products are the main stays that are a necessary evil. However, to cut down on waste we are buying our flour and pasta in bulk, and purchasing organic whenever possible.
Another area we've made a change is in our body, hand and shampoo soap. After reading a bunch of labels, we realized there were so many chemicals in commercial soaps that there had to be a better way. Lo and behold there is, you can make your own. However, R and I didn't want to commit to making soap just yet, we weren't sure if we could make it and live up to our standards. So we compromised and made a visit to P-Town's Saturday Market. I had purchased some handmade soap there for bridesmaids gifts back in 2009 and knew that there was a company that always had a booth.
R and I found the booth belonging to The Oregon Soap Company. After talking to the lady running the booth, we walked away with a few different things.
- A grab bag of miscellaneous ends for $6.00. This was full of all their different types of soap. R and I figured this would be a great use for hand soap in both the kitchen and bathroom.
- A shampoo and conditioner bar. This is amazing. I love the way that it doesn't strip my hair of the natural oils, but just gets rid of the gunk from day to day. It takes a bit of adjusting especially if you are a wash the hair everyday type like me. It was amazing to see just how much conventional shampoo was stripping my hair.
- 2 2oz. bottles of their all purpose liquid castille soap (they were having a buy one get one free special, and for $2.00 how could you pass that up). We have used everywhere from laundry, dishes, to clean the counters and shampoo the rug. This stuff is amazing. It smells better than any cleaner we have used and there isn't anything that I have found that it can't clean up. This is stuff is amazing.
Next we are going to start making our own deodorant and laundry soap. I'm very excited about this. I know it seems a bit extreme, but when you start researching all those hard to pronounce and longer that all get out words, it starts to scare you.
So here we go down this adventurous path. I hope to have a tutorial soon on how we make our own deodorant and laundry soap, along with prices and photos. We'll be using recipes we find on the old Internet and will link accordingly.
