Lucid Food_ Cooking for an Eco-Conscious Life - Louisa Shafia [17]
• Use locally grown, chemical-free flowers from the farmers’ market. Compost them afterward or send them home with guests.
• Use recycled glass bottles for serving beverages and as flower vases.
• Use flower petals and fruits to decorate the table. One of my favorite combinations for a winter table is pomegranates, small red apples, and dried rose petals. During the holidays, shiny silver bowls piled high with red pears, apples, and cranberries look festive and elegant. In summer, fresh flower petals, bright red cranberry beans in their pods, and the pink and green stalks of rhubarb are my favorite choices. Fresh chile peppers are also a beautiful choice, coming in red, purple, green, and orange—a great choice as long as your guests don’t take a bite!
• Use soy wax and beeswax candles or LED lights to illuminate the space. Soy wax candles are biodegradable, while beeswax candles are free from chemicals and use natural fiber wicks, and LED lights consume less power than regular lightbulbs, lasting approximately 20 times as long.
CLEAN-UP
• Recycle all glass bottles after use.
• Share. If you make a lot of food, ask guests to bring food containers so they can take home leftovers. You put a lot of love into this food, so don’t let any of it go to waste.
• Return any containers from the farmers’ market to the farmers.
Scrap Mettle: Composting for Beginners
I keep a one-gallon clear plastic compost container on the kitchen counter when I cook, and instead of throwing scraps into the trash, I throw them into my compost bucket. When it’s full, I empty it out at the farmers’ market compost drop-off. Between composting and recycling, I almost never have to take out my garbage. But there are lots of other ways to compost, too. For instance, if you have a yard, try mixing your vegetable scraps with dirt and leaves and let it sit, turning it every so often, until it turns into a rich black soil. For the brave, or especially teachers with classrooms, there is worm composting, where you put red wriggler worms, vegetable scraps, and soil into a ventilated box for composting indoors. If you’re interested, there’s a wealth of information on composting. For indoor worm composting, the best place to start is with Mary Appelhof’s kid-friendly instruction book Worms Eat My Garbage: How to Set Up & Maintain a Worm Composting System. For outdoor composting, check with your local botanical garden or gardening community for regionally specific guidance, or go online for more information.
With its citywide composting program for private residences and businesses alike, the city of San Francisco has set a precedent for closing the recycling loop. The compost is made into nutrient-rich, water-retaining soil that is used by area farms and vineyards to produce the food and wine sold at restaurants and food stores back in the city. This is an ideal solution for keeping all the food discarded by private homes and food businesses from taking up room in landfills. As author Michael Pollan points out in his essay, “Farmer in Chief,” if we could adapt this closed-loop model on a national scale, we would shrink our garbage output, reduce the amount of water used for irrigation and our use of chemical fertilizers, and increase the nutritional content of our food supply all in one fell swoop (New York Times, October 9, 2008).
Elderberry Cold Tincture
In fall, look for clusters of deep purple berries on elderberry trees growing wild throughout the country. I’ve seen elderberries for a fleeting harvest week at farmers’ markets, but you can buy dried organic elderberries as a substitute. This powerful tonic has worked effectively for me over the last two winters; I take a tablespoon right when I feel a cold coming on, and I keep taking it every few hours until I feel better. It’s very tasty, too!
Makes 5 cups
2 cups fresh or dried elderberries
2 cups