Ideal Bite

In a move that apparently makes me horrifically old-fashioned (if any of my peers are indications), I admit to being quite attached to cleaning my counters with actual dishcloths.  If I spill something that is a bigger job than a cloth can handle, I grab an old tea towel and soak it up. Everything tosses into the washer. To me, this makes perfect sense.

For whatever reason, it seems like most people I know use some version of a freakin' babywipe to sweep down their counters. And god forbid a glass of wine upends on the counter or kitchen floor...out come the paper towels - a whole roll in the service of mopping up something that could just as easily have been sucked into washable, reusable towel.

When did we become such creepy germophobes?  Has anyone ever seen any studies that show that moms who use bleach-infused wipes have kids with fewer bouts of sickness than Read the full post... 

Here in the middle of Week 3 of nonstop business travel, I have to admit to feeling a bit burnt out.  I need a vacation.

Bizarrely, my thoughts keep turning to my ex's family's summer home. They owned these little islands in the middle of one of the Great Lakes in Canada, where they built lovely sleeping cottages and a large living-dining area - sort of like a small-scale, high-end summer camp. Nearly impossible to explain, but the place was idyllic and tranquil and dreamy - no consistent electricity or running water, so we lived on candlelight and fresh air.

One of my favorite things about time spent there were the raucous, delicious dinners we'd chef up in the dining hall...and the fantastic all-natural chandelier suspended from the ceiling. We'd take sheets of honey-combed beeswax and roll our own candles, and fit them into that chandelier. Hoisted up, it gave Read the full post... 

There's only one arena in which these great sugar alternatives can't compete, and that is the heavenly realm of cinnamon toast, best eaten before bedtime IMHO. (And yes, I'm fully aware that cinnamon toast and bedtime snacks are usually associated with 12 year olds. Ahem.) The cinnamon mixture that I liberally apply to heavily buttered, perfectly golden toasted white bread simply requires pure cane sugar - that's the one. So there it is, in the glaring light of the Ideal Bite blog: I have a little box of C&H sitting in my cupboard for those moments when only cinnamon heaven will do.

-Jenifer Morgan...off to do some more Z Sweet experimentations... Read the full post... 

You people. You know who you are. You remember birthdays and send a card. You compile great photos from shared experiences and pop them in an envelope accompanied by a perfect slip of stationary. Magically, you even manage to send out your thank you before it seems you have even had time to open the present…

Me? You’re lucky if I even remember to dash off an email to you sometime during the month after your birthday.

-Heather…off to get some Sappycards to have on hand for the perfect occasions… Read the full post... 

Whenever I called my dad and told him I was feeling stressed, his answer was the same: "Just go play some tennis."

-Jenifer Morgan...off to work on my follow through... Read the full post... 

After wasting hundreds of hours of my life driving around in circles looking for street parking (parking spaces in downtown San Francisco run in the $300-$400 range per month), I decided to become a real urban girl. I sold my car, signed up for FlexCar, and invested in a few versatile pairs of walking shoes and some MUNI passes. The carbon I emit during my commute is from breathing alone. To boot, Ideal Bite is offsetting my plane travel this year. Not too shabby.

As the video we included in today's Personally Speaking points out, offsetting alone isn't the end all be all solution to our global-warming problems, but it's a start, and it sure feels good.

-Jenifer Morgan...off to walk past people driving around in circles... Read the full post... 

Our friend Adam Browning at Vote Solar turned us onto a new bargain: low-hassle solar installation from Sun Run. The CA-based company handles all the hard stuff (design, installer screening, maintenance) while you pay reduced setup fees and get tiny electricity bills as soon as your system's running. Starting with pilots in the Golden State (it's not yet national - which is why we didn't include it in the Daily Tip), this kind of program is set to bring solar to the masses.

-Toshio...off to stare at the sun... Read the full post... 

I miss Trixie.  Trix was this biodiesel '76 Benz I bought on Craisglist so I could tool around in her after I first got to SF last year.  She was a lovely broad - sort of past her prime, but blissfully unaware of that fact.  (She was insanely fun to drive, albeit a bit cranky about things like shifting into the right gear or starting at all.)  But she drove like a dream once started, and she ran on biodiesel.

Then that pesky vixen Jen Boulden rear-ended me during a company retreat, bashing in the Trix's backdoor and locking up her trunk, and I couldn't afford the bodywork, so I donated her to help fund a women's shelter.  Figured that was a good way to continue Trixie's grand good-girl/bad-girl, girl-power karma.

I don't know what karma is gonna do to the evil, trunk-bashing Jen.
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Keeping It Real: I have a backyard the size of a postage stamp, on top of a huge hill made out of bedrock. I am NOT digging a hole to China to tap into the earth's energy core.

So why the tip, you ask? Because some of you might just live somewhere like Yellowstone. You might just have 100 acres and a spare wad of cash lying around, and you might just give it a shot.

And the rest of us can simply drink geothermal vodka and plan our next vacation to Iceland...

-Heather... off to carbon offset yet another cross-country flight

Read the full post... 

Every energy source has its drawbacks. With wind, one of the biggest issues with windmills are bird and bat deaths. Rooftop windmills don't pose much of a problem, but the big ones, according to this article in Audubon Magazine, kill tens of thousands of birds each year. Read the article, though, and it's clear that there are bigger, badder threats (housecats, for example, which kill as many as 100 mil wild birds each year). Compound that with the fact that nobody seems to know how many birds die from nongreen power sources, such as pollution from coal, and it's hard to know what to believe.

In spite of the deaths, the two biggest bird organizations in the country, the Audubon Society and the American Bird Conservancy, support wind power as long as birds are taken into account during windmill design and Read the full post...