Green Wines Are All The Rage

wine

Wine is one of my favorite treats.  More and more we are hear­ing about the health ben­e­fits of wine.  The recent rise in organic and sus­tain­able farm­ing on winer­ies is very encour­ag­ing to me.  Tra­di­tional winer­ies use inten­sive farm­ing meth­ods to ensure a good crop.  We are see­ing more evi­dence that bio­dy­namic, sus­tain­able, and organic prac­tices are cre­at­ing a higher qual­ity wine as well as bet­ter long-term, grow­ing con­di­tions for the wineries.

Here is a great graphic on how the wine indus­try is mov­ing towards sus­tain­able prac­tices. Check with your local wine pur­veyor for some green wines avail­able in your area.

Pre­sented By Wine.com Pur­vey­ors of fine green Wines

Dis­clo­sure: This is a spon­sored post for which I was com­pen­sated. All opin­ions are my own and I only post infor­ma­tion I feel my read­ers will find of value.

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Home Improvements for Sustainable Living

gh12_solarpanels

Our house is in need of some work.  We started notic­ing lit­tle things last year but we just haven’t had the time or money to fix them up. That hasn’t stopped me from imag­in­ing how I would improve our home if we could.  I find myself on the HGTV web­site all the time look­ing for eco-friendly ways to improve our home and redecorate.

We have sev­eral projects we need to tackle. We want to use sus­tain­able mate­ri­als to put new sid­ing on our house and add some solar pan­els for energy effi­ciency. Our long-time goal has been to have a run-off drainage sys­tem to col­lect rain­wa­ter for water­ing the gar­den. Most impor­tantly, both of our bath­rooms need over­hauls because the pre­vi­ous own­ers took short cuts which have caused mold to build up. Black mold is a silent killer and causes all sorts of health prob­lems.  We really need to get

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Nourishing Herbal Infusions: Nature’s Supplement

Nourishing herbal Infusion

Adding sup­ple­ments to your diet is the new great way to get your nutri­tional require­ments. If you aren’t for­tu­nate to know your farmer, reg­u­larly buy organic or bio­dy­namic foods or grow your own veg­eta­bles you need to be sup­ple­ment­ing addi­tional nutri­ents into your diet.

Net­tle Infusion

Using sup­ple­ments can be tricky because the sup­ple­ment indus­try suc­cess­fully lob­bied against any reg­u­la­tions on their label­ing.  What does this mean for you? You have to research your sources and know the sci­ence behind the sup­ple­ments you are using.  For most of us research­ing sup­ple­ment com­pa­nies isn’t at the top of the priority list.

A whole food alter­na­tive to tak­ing sup­ple­ments is using nour­ish­ing herbal infu­sions.  Infu­sions are made from steep­ing nutri­ent dense herbs in hot water for 4 or more hours. Like a strong tea. Spe­cific herbs pro­vide a pow­er­house of nutri­tion to sup­port the body in heal­ing and real­iz­ing opti­mum health.

Here is

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Moso Natural :: #WinnerWonderland Sponsor Spotlight

Moso Natural

Moso Nat­ural air purifier

Moso Nat­ural offers a unique air puri­fier designed to remove unwanted odors, harm­ful pol­lu­tants, bac­te­ria and aller­gens. Moso bags are made of 100% bam­boo char­coal. The porous and absorbent nature of the bam­boo char­coal removes odors and excess mois­ture to neu­tral­ize air­borne mold spores.

There are many air puri­fiers on the mar­ket these days.  Many of them con­tain chem­i­cals and scents that cover up odors.  With Moso bags, the char­coal actu­ally absorbs the odors and fil­ter them out of the air.  Bam­boo char­coal is non-toxic and safe to use around pets and chil­dren.  The char­coal effec­tive­ness lasts up to 2 years.

The bam­boo char­coal is acti­vated by the sun.  Once a month it needs to be placed in direct sun­light to get the full effec­tive­ness from the Moso bag.  The char­coal is effec­tive for up to two years.  Once it loses it’s potency, the bam­boo charcoal

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Fruit Fly Trap

Fruit Fly Trap

If you have ever com­posted you know how annoy­ing fruit flies can be.  Fruit flies, also known as Drosophila melanogaster, con­gre­gate around decay­ing food.  They love com­post bins sit­ting on the counter wait­ing to be taken out­side.  As a long time com­poster I am used to these annoy­ing lit­tle bugs.  They don’t do much dam­age but they cer­tainly are annoy­ing when they are every­where in your kitchen.

What you will need

Luck­ily there is an easy trap you can make from com­mon tools in your kitchen.  You will need:

A tall, skinny glass A bit of red wine, juice or vine­gar A round piece of paper Tape Scissors

In the glass put a bit of the wine/juice/vinegar about halfway up. Cut the paper from the edge to the cen­ter of the cir­cle.  Roll the paper into a fun­nel and snip the end of the tip to cre­ate a fun­nel.  Don’t make the

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I love my SodaStream!

SodaStream

We go through a lot of seltzer water in our house.  It’s a bit shame­ful con­sid­er­ing how con­sci­en­tious we are about liv­ing sus­tain­ably, but when you have a favorite “food,” you do what­ever it takes to get it, right?  We don’t drink soda so “fizzy water” becomes a treat for the kids and my bet­ter half loves it.

When I got the oppor­tu­nity to try out the SodaS­tream for a review I was danc­ing all around the house.  Finally a sus­tain­able way to make seltzer water in our home.  As soon as it arrived I broke it out and we made one of the soda pack­ets.  I was a bit dis­ap­pointed to find that most of the fla­vors were sweet­ened with Splenda.  Not sure why Splenda is still on the mar­ket but that’s a dif­fer­ent story.  It is actu­ally worse than using sugar if you can imag­ine that.  So the first

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Cantaloupe sorbet from the CSA

Cantaloupe sorbet

Green Beans and Toma­toes, Oh My!

We are get­ting some great veg­eta­bles these days.  Lots of toma­toes and the cucum­bers just keep com­ing.  I think my son is actu­ally reach­ing his limit of cucum­bers.  He no longer insists on hav­ing only cucum­bers for an entire meal.  Good to know there will be some for the rest of us.

This week the share included:

Curly Kale Car­rots Egg­plant Cucum­bers Toma­toes, Heir­loom and Slic­ing Zuc­chini Onion Pep­pers Salad Greens Red Leaf Lettuce

U-pick

Herbs (Not shown) Sun­gold Toma­toes (can’t get enough of these) Green Beans

The kids just love going into the field and pick­ing the toma­toes and green beans.  Then we head over to the play­ground for a while.  Going to the farm is such a treat.

Today’s can­taloupe sor­bet recipe is from din­ner with friends over the week­end.  Two weeks ago I put up some over ripe can­taloupe in the freezer.  It was a

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CSA share — Zucchini Fritters

Love those veggies

It has been a few weeks since I posted about our CSA share.  We are still get­ting our weekly share but some how the arti­cle posts have been get­ting away from me.  I decided rather than going back I would start from where I’m at right now.

Love those veggies

Toma­toes arrived in our CSA share this past week.  I’m so excited as are my kids.  U-pick included sun­gold toma­toes, hands down my favorite toma­toes, were ready.  I think the kids ate as many as they picked.

Sun­gold Tomatoes

Green Beans

Then we went and picked green beans.  So yummy.  I make them by toss­ing them with olive oil and salt and roast­ing them in a 450 degree oven until they are browned.  They work well on the grill too.  We call them Green Bean French Fries and they don’t last very long in the bowl.  I love

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CSA share with Quinoa Tabouli (Gluten-Free)

CSA Vegetables

CSA Veg­eta­bles from July 14, 2011

After being away on vaca­tion it has taken some time to get back on track.  I am finally get­ting caught up.  The CSA share this week was full of won­der­ful root and squash veg­eta­bles.  I love that we are mov­ing form a share full of only greens and let­tuces to these col­or­ful sweet vegetables.

Our share included:

Zuc­chini Yel­low Squash Beets Car­rots Cucum­bers New Onions Scal­lions Arugula Tot­soi Red Kale Swiss Chard Lettuce

Pur­ple, Lemon and Italian Basil

U-pick this week:

Pur­ple Basil Lemon Basil Basil Pars­ley Flowers

 

By far the favorite veg­etable of the week is the cucum­bers.  My son loves cucum­bers.  I think they trump every­thing but ice cream and pop­si­cle.  If I want him to eat I just need to men­tion we have cucum­bers and he stops every­thing and comes running.

Pars­ley

 

 

 

 

This beau­ti­ful pars­ley bou­quet wound

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CSA Bounty — Sugar Snap Pea Salad with Lemon and Scallion Vinaigrette

Strawberries and Peas

CSA Veg­eta­bles 6/20/11

Because I have been doing CSAs for over ten years, I’m kind of used to the amount of food that we get each week.  Since start­ing this blog series, I am blown away when I set up these photo shots and see every­thing laid out like this.  There is so much food.  We pay $25 a week for our share.  I could NEVER get this much organic, local pro­duce for $25 at a gro­cery store.  I would even be hard pressed to get this much food at the farmer’s mar­ket for the same price either.  It’s mind blowing.

So far this week we have had chard with tomato sauce, pea salad (see the recipe below), steamed greens over quinoa, beets with bal­samic vine­gar and greens cooked with bacon.  The left over greens and bacon made a won­der­ful pita pizza with just a

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