At the beginning of spring I often crave salads after the long root-vegetable-filled winter, but I try to wait to actually eat them until the veggie share starts, because I know we will have truckloads of greens for about a month straight.  We try to be creative and eat lots of different kinds of salads, but no matter what, after a month of daily salads my body kind of stages a protest. Luckily that’s about the time the greens start to run out.  Phew.  This year we made cobb salads for the first time, and I made a super yummy fennel-yogurt-dill dressing.  I was determined to use all the dill from the farm share and our out-of-control garden crop, so I also made a delicious dill scallion butter (in the little container by the beer and homemade dog-biscuits), froze some dill, and then dehydrated the rest in our dehydrator (which, by the way, was about the most noxious smelling thing EVER – Nate put it outside with an extension cord.  Blech.).  So everyone, be expecting to get dill for Christmas.

In other culinary adventures, we’ve been making our own yogurt.  With my ever-increasing obsession to reduce our waste, yogurt was really bugging me, because we kind of go through a lot of it, and Minneapolis doesn’t recycle the plastic containers.  The Kastlers had recently started making their own yogurt, so Madeline got me started, and we’ve been making it ever since.  It goes something like this: heat a bunch of milk to a certain temperature, cool it to a certain temperature, add a yogurt starter to a portion of it, add that back to the rest of it, mix it all up, put it in jars, and put it in a cooler and keep it a certain temperature for several hours after that.  Voila. Delicious, organic yogurt in reusable jars, and the whole process costs us half as much as buying already made yogurt. 

Nate’s also been expanding his bread-making repertoire, which I fully support.  Check this out:  pain d’epi and chocolate ganache brioche!  Num num num.  We’ve also been taking big ole containers to the co-op and buying tons of flour in bulk, which makes me happy.

So while we’re on the subject, indulge me for a moment as I brag about some of the things we now either make for ourselves or take our own containers for and buy in bulk, thereby eliminating the need for packaging:  yogurt, dog biscuits, eggs, flour, milk, soy sauce, olive oil, canola oil, granola, hand soap, dish soap, laundry detergent , pasta, beans, oats, and nuts.  I already have my sights set on more things to add to that list soon, and can’t wait for our co-op to open it’s new store, which will have an expanded bulk section! 

Want to save the world but don’t know where to start?  Look for a way to see what’s interesting and / or fun in the world of green news?  Go check out hugg.com and get hugging.  It’s a pretty cool ripoff of Digg, where users can add stories to the list and other users can "hugg" them (rate them higher) so in theory you start seeing the best news from the green web.  If all that went over your head, just click the link and get ready to waste an hour reading about how to save the planet.  Do it.  Do it.

I picked up some forms almost a year ago intending to send them off ASAP and stop the junk mail, but as things happen I only just sent them last week.  The big one is the Mail Preference Service, with information here.  Also at that link is info on 18885OPTOUT which gets you out of credit card offers.  (MPS charges you if you do it through their site, but you can just send it in by hand and it’s free)  Lastly I sent in the info for ADVO, another agency that I think we’re getting a ton of stuff from.

Sure, we recycle all our junk mail, but how cool would it be to just not get it in the first place?  Those requests take a while to process, but fingers crossed that they’ll cut down on the junk.  I’ll post an update in a few months (if I remember).