I am outta here

I'm just about out the door for my eco-friendly, low-cost, no-kid weekend to visit a friend. I won't be back posting until next week, so in the meantime, check out my most recent essay on Grist.

Off to the train. You know they serve beer, right!

Friday recipes; or Fricipes

Who doesn't love a good smoothie? That's right. Nobody.

So I was pretty happy my husband passed along his mom's quick smoothie recipe for a refreshing after-dinner treat. You can make it with ice cream, but I find it works just as well with plain yogurt (I never buy the pre-sweetened stuff because it's chock full of high fructose corn syrup and it's just as good if you take the plain stuff add a generous helping of maple syrup and your choice of fruit).

This smoothie literally takes about three minutes and could use almost any fruit. I read another great recipe to freeze these in Popsicle containers for smoothie frozen pops. Yum...

Strawberry-banana smoothie

• I cut up one banana, a half dozen good sized strawberries and throw those in the blender. I add about a cup and a half of yogurt and two TBS of maple syrup, which I swear does not make your yogurt take like maple syrup, just yummy sweet.
• Blend.
• Add about a handful of ice cubes.
• Blend until the cubes are crushed.

The big green escape

I'm going away this weekend because A) I have a really incredible husband who understands a break is needed whenever I start contemplating selling the kids on eBay and B) I have a really incredible husband.

After I bought Amtrak tickets, I started thinking maybe I should have rented a car. It's about $80 cheaper than the train, and a lot faster.

That's before my incredible husband (he really is, and yes, I'll stop mentioning it) pointed out that with the distance I'm driving, it would actually be $20 more expensive if I drove straight there and back, was lucky enough to get a car that got 30mpg and gas prices don't go much higher than $4 a gallon.

Not to mention the missing relaxation factor I get from riding the train.

When traveling alone, a train is much more eco-friendly than either the car or plane (especially planes with one of the fastest growing sources of greenhouse gases), so it just makes sense to grab an iPod and a couple of library books to help decompress after a steady stream of "mommy, mommy, mommy" during the last six months.

Grist recently ran a list of ways to green your trip and it's definitely worth checking out. Another tip: I always drink a ton of water when I travel, whether it's by plane, train or automobile. Bringing a reusable water bottle helps cut down on plastic waste.

Train photo by sheilaellen

What a line

I just want to sing the praises of the clothesline of a moment.

It's one of the easiest ways to eco-fy your house. And, unlike many very small (and cheap! hooray) changes, it packs a pretty big punch. I like to put in a load of laundry every night (I'm lucky to have a timer, but sometimes I wait until I wake up to start) and line dry late morning until early afternoon.

I do one load of laundry everyday, unless it rains. I can take it down at noon, or if I'm busy, later. It doesn't matter because line-dried clothes don't wrinkle like they do in the dryer. In fact, I have some clothes that have to be ironed no matter how quickly I retrieve them from the dryer, unless I hang them on the line.

Alexander Lee, Director of Project Laundry List, was recently quoted here:

One dryer, he knows today, eats up to $100 or more in power each year while emitting up to a ton of carbon dioxide. Collectively, America's more than 80 million dryers annually burn 6 to 10 percent of all residential electricity — second only to refrigerators and the equivalent of 30 million tons of coal or the output of the nation's 15 least productive nuclear reactors.

Stop all that just by hanging your laundry. Lee has a new blog for his organization that gives tips, musings and news all about the clothesline. I swear by it!

Beautiful big breakfast

When you run two miles in the morning, and then bike four miles to a restaurant carting 70 pounds of kid behind you, there's absolutely no guilt as you're practically licking your plate clean of its three-egg omelet. This I know to be true.

What I do find a little guilt-probable is the food. We were looking at the table condiments and found each packed with high fructose corn syrup, which is essentially banned at our house. Sure, I understand this sweetener, which is not that much chemically different than plain table sugar but a crap-load cheaper, is used to sweeten jams and jelly.

But when honey contains sugar, high fructose corn syrup, plain old corn syrup and, oh yes, honey, in its top five ingredients, you know there's a problem. So maybe we don't use the tiny packets on our table, but what about the pancakes? What about the juice? What about the sausage?

What's in that stuff? And how many empty calories did I replace from my vigorous morning workouts?

It's not that I'm against sweet stuff. I happen to like sweet stuff very much. I'm just against mass-produced foods adding this stuff, and calories that could be contributing to our obesity epidemic (although this issue is up for debate), to items that don't need sweetening. It's not that this corn-product is worse than sugar, but it's contributing calories to almost every processed food.

Honey, for instance, doesn't need sweetening. It's sugar. Why would you sweeten sugar? That's why I find it's just easier to avoid high fructose corn syrup altogether.

Master list

When scoping out big-ticket items at a garage sale, it helps to have some sort of a running list of things you need. On our list, we had dressers, a kids bike and a salad spinner.

So yesterday when we happened upon dressers for our two girls, we hadn't actively looked for probably about a year. But there it was. A three-piece set popped up out of nowhere for $80 (after my husband talked the seller down $20) and it only took us three car trips to haul that bad boy home.

The result, we have pretty decent dressers for both girls. It's not the steal we got last year when we bought our oldest daughter's big-girl bed, or the deal in the classifieds for our tiled dining room table, but it's still a great deal and it's totally recycled.

Friday recipes; or Fricipes

As promised, another DIY for homemade crayons, stolen straight from my Green Living Family Tips for Nick Jr. Magazine. I wrote it, so I guess it's probably OK for me to steal it.

This is a great option for birthday favors, along with homemade Play-Doh or a homemade CD burned with your favorite kid tunes.

Recycle your crayon bits

1. Collect broken and used crayons for a rainy day project.

2. Remove the paper from crayons and fill muffin tin halfway. Use just one color, or mix a bunch for a tie-dye looking crayon. Bake at 200˚F for 12 minutes, or until wax melts. Watch closely. Let cool.