I have been reluctant to try much gluten-free baking beyond cookies since my weird chocolate cake experiments. But this recipe developed by The Culinary Institute of America had the secret…egg whites. Egg proteins really create the structure of the cake pastry as the gluten proteins take a backseat. Folding in those egg whites whipped into soft peaks made all the difference between a fluffy moist crumb and a rock hard doorstop.

This recipe is labor intensive. It required three separate ingredient bowls, draining carrot juice, separating eggs, and two 6″ cake pans to bring to life this gluten-free delight. (Can I brag about my cake pan collection sizes 6″ to 14″? But really, who normally has 6″ cake pans?) It took about an hour to make the cake batter which seems entirely too liquid to bake into anything delectable. And it took 48 minutes in my burns-hot-electric-oven to bake the cake. The recipe then calls for letting the cake cool entirely in the pan. When I took turned the cake out, it seemed as if the bottom were a bit soggy, like well, the cake cooled in the pan; condensation pooling under that delicate layer. But now I think the moisture retention was intentional and adds to the tender, if a bit spongy, texture of this very good gluten-free carrot cake.

In my opinion, this recipe could use a few more spicy additions like more cinnamon and perhaps ground cloves?? It was a bit bland. And the frosting needs a bit more of that smooth cream cheese tang and a bit less sugar. Oh that toddler desert sugar buzz before bath and bedtime, not so good.

I found Gluten-Free Baking with The Culinary Institute of America at my library. (Always a good idea to try out the recipes before buying the book.) Although the introduction to Celiac disease diagnosis in the first chapters scared my socks off (I am not medically diagnosed), I am eager to try a few more recipes from this publication. “Cheers” from the gluten-free blogger who ate carrot cake for breakfast this morning.

What do we throw away when we use all 1080 paper towel sheets?

• 12 shrink wrap wrappers
• 12 cardboard tubes
• one HUGE plastic wrapper that held all 12 rolls and is large enough to picnic on.
• oh, and one thousand and eighty (1080) paper towels!

What do we throw away when we use dish towels, miracle cloths, washies, and cloth napkins?

• The cardboard box that holds 42 loads of detergent.

42 laundry loads is a lot of dish towels which, unlike a paper towel, we use to clean up more than one mess. Some of what we toss out is recycleable or reuseable. However, I can only tolerate so many paper towel tube telescopes, loud speakers, and brandishing weaponry that seeks to threaten my wall decor. Why even choose to consume more packaging if there is a good-for-your-lifestyle option that means less paper and plastic in your shopping cart?

After this stash, I don’t think we will be buying that much throw-away packaging ever again. And that feels pretty good.

Stay tuned for 16 more days of discussion about choosing to purchase less packaging. Up next, meat…

How are you thinking about the amount of packaging you consume?

It must seem to you that all my family does is drink liquids. Chai tea, frozen popsicles, and now juice. It is just that our family seems to consume tons liquid that made its way into our home inside of a package.

I think this choice is a bit obvious.

Toss:

1 plastic juice container (or 48oz can)

or toss:

8 small non-recyclable juice boxes or juice pouches,

and 8 little plastic straws that came inside 8 little plastic liners

and that plastic shrink wrap or cardboard box everything came inside.

Sure many of these items are recyclable, or reusable, but their production and recycle processes require energy. Why not bring less of this packaging into your home and throw out less too?

For an on-the-go family taking drinks with is a necessity. We have Camelbak sippies and Kleen Kanteens but I don’t like to put juice in these for fear it will sour and mold will grow on the inside of our drink holders. Maybe we should just forgo the juice and drink more water. Oh, wait, our county has some of the worst municipal water in the country. We’ll save that for another post…

Day 2 in a discussion about packaging.

As I began to open my eyes, and notice all the printed cardboard, plastic shrink wrap, and packing peanuts coming through my front door, I started to wonder, where does this come from, how can I lessen it, and why is it necessary? I am perplexed and slightly in awe of how our society has transformed life into a face-paced, disposable, never-look back hamster wheel. And I wonder how I landed squarely on that wheel that spins round and round and doesn’t go anywhere. Sometimes you even get a bit behind; backed up between the 9 o’clock and 6 o’clock sides. Maybe this is why we consume so much packaging. Maybe this is why we don’t know what to do with it, so we throw it out.

Well, this month, spurred by Hip Mountain Mama’s One Small Change challenge, I plan to lessen the paper, plastic and Styrofoam we throw away everyday; for our environment, for our bodily health, and for our sanity.

Yes, we are a year-round popsicle family. Well, the kids do the consumption here. Sensitive teeth kind of get the better of me personally. In the throws of a bad toddler stomach illness, I snuck into that I-am-convenience-with-tons-of-sugar-and-preservatives-section of the grocery store, aka the frozen food section, and popped a bit of frozen liquid delight  into my cart, hoping that these babies would somehow calm and hydrate my son’s poor little body.  Well, he loved them. Red no. 40 and all. Since, we have switched to a more natural brand that doesn’t add artificial ingredients, but we still come home with

• 12 little plastic wrappers,
• 12 sticks of wood,
• a cardboard box,
• and sometimes even a piece of shrink wrap large enough to erect a greenhouse for a hedgehog.

How to eliminate this extra throw-away? Make your own popsicles.

I snagged these molds at Ikea. Plastic I know. Not the best, but hey, the food isn’t going to be on contact with this plastic for that long. Little popsicle-vores. I simply make a smoothie in the blender, or pour a bit of 100% juice into the mold, replace the stick-top, and freeze. To un-mold, run the container under warm water and the popsicle will slide right out. Home-made popsicle throw-away:

• Juice container (we get ours in those tin-48 oz cans which you can recycle, or reuse…I made punched lanterns out of these things as a kid. MS has a good how-to here. Or Google the phrase.)

Make-your-own (MYO) is the less packaging route hands down. It doesn’t take too much time to open a container of juice, pour, and freeze. The kids aren’t yet brand-sensitive-consumers, (but they will be) and like this frozen version just as much as the boxed kind. I wash the molds in the sink with a bottle brush, or some versions maybe dishwasher safe. I think MYO wins out here in the packaging throw-away challenge.

Why is MYO the poll-winning answer so far here on 20 Days of Packaging? Time versus money I get. Time versus the environment…my jury is still out on this one. Is it just another horn sound alerting me that I should “slow-down” a bit for the world around me?

Update: found another wonderful tutorial for a tin can punched luminary with pictures here!

:: Take care when chopping. Uniformity makes a nice presentation.

:: Don’t ignore the nuances, squeeze all that water out of the blanched spinach before you begin the sauté.

:: Never bother to measure your seasonings…let the nose and tongue be your guides.

:: Be sure to make the dish your own. Let it’s flavors, textures, and smells, suggest your personality, style, and heritage.

:: It is never too late to learn. I learned how to prepare this traditional Korean dish, in addition to how to locate those sweet potato noodles in the Korean grocery, in my 30s.

Here is my recipe.

**Chap Chae**

• 2T cooking oil – like expeller pressed safflower oil (don’t use olive oil, you’ll get a weird Tuscan-Korean blend thing going on.)
• 1 med yellow onion julienne
• 3 med carrots julienne
• 1 lb ground beef, browned and drained
• 8 oz fresh shiitake mushrooms julienne
• 1 lb spinach, blanched, drained (squeeze all that water out) julienne
• 2T minced fresh garlic
• 1 lb sweet potato noodles, cooked per package directions and rinsed 2-3 times in cold running water, then drain
• 2T sesame oil
• 1t sesame seeds
• 1/4C soy sauce (use a wheat-free variety to make this dish gluten-free, yes, wheat is the second ingredient in soy sauce after water…and before soy.)
• 3T sugar
• salt and ground black pepper to taste

1. Heat cooking oil in a 12″ heavy bottom fry pan over medium heat. Add onions and carrots and cook until onions are translucent and soft but not brown.
2. Add beef, shiitake mushrooms, spinach, and garlic and heat through.
3. Add noodles, sesame seeds, sesame oil, soy sauce, sugar. Toss and heat through.
4. Taste! And season with salt and ground black pepper as needed.
5. Serve warm or at room temperature.

Serves 8

*  *  *

And to change continents, with the help of my husband, I prepared Tacos al Pastor for dinner. You can find this deliciously smoky, spicy, and sweet recipe here. The zesty lime flavor and fragrant ancho chile salsa took me back to the time my friends and I stopped at this road-side taco stand on the side of a highway not far from Tampico, Mexico. Under a killer sun and among sandy grasses they ordered tacos, un kilo de puerco. We drove in a beat up vintage VW bug back to an apartment with folding chairs and aluminum edged card table to feast. Roasted onions–blackened to beat the pungent bite into sweet, mild submission. The salsa was a smoky mix of flavors and the heat lingered only for a moment. Fresh, pungent cilantro and the smoky charcoal pork clashed to make a fresh, slightly mysterious explosion in the mouth. Beautiful I say. Mind you there were 8 or so of us that finished those 2.2 lbs of that tasty barbeque.

My daughter and I rise to wash up, dress, and get ready for the day in time to meet the sun as she is rising in the east. It is quiet as I steal these pictures of fresh calmness and awakening. No traffic rumbling on the road yet, just a few birds singing their wake-up songs and the soft din of our heater. I can smell newness in the damp leaves on the ground as dreams of the activities in the day to come dance in my eyes. For a moment, my heart is filled with optimism, inspiration, and supreme peace.

I revel in this serenity. I add a cup of coffee, a few scrambled eggs (only to be stolen by my daughter’s hungry grabby hands) and a bit of reading. These early morning moments are fleeting. I don’t know where they run off to during the day. But I do know these bits of peace return each morning to greet us early risers with joy and gladness.

Have a wonderful day all.

Though I don’t get to the coffee shop much anymore (oh, but if they had drive-thru….) I do so love these cardamom scented, sweet, caffeinated, creamy delights. So when I discovered the above in the grocery, I plopped one in my cart pronto. Just one taste of this honey-sweetened, warm-you-through goodness reminded me that I have my degree, don’t need to study, and that I wanted more. I wanted so much more, I was throwing away a carton a week. That is 52 of these non-recyclable cardboard, plastic-lined, plastic-spouted, rather large, doo-hickeys a YEAR going in our landfills, to be buried and haunt the living population for centuries to come.

Okay, there is an alternative, brew your own chai tea.

Is this brewing at home more economical? I don’t know. Is there less packaging? Definitely.

I can reuse

• the cardboard box and the tin my tea came in
• the twine and cheese cloth I use to brew the spices and tea
• glass and plastic spice containers
• the glass or plastic honey container
• I can use a reusable produce bag to carry home my fresh ginger root

I throw away

• the 1 plastic Ziploc bag that held my peppercorns (1 baggie holds a year’s supply, or 1 lb, of peppercorns)
• the plastic milk jugs that make my tea a latte!

A note about these 20 days of packaging: Fossil fuel consumption is certainly a valid measure of green-ness, but I am not going to use it here. I am simply going to discuss the packaging I choose to bring into my home, and that which I discard. I think there is enough fodder here for discussion without going down other avenues.

So, does it taste the same? Definitely. And I can make the taste my own. I like more honey-sweetness, and a bit more cardamom spiciness. Here is my recipe.

***Chai Tea Latte Recipe***

Gather the following in a cheese cloth and close the top with a length of kitchen twine.

1/8C South African Rooibos Superior loose tea (actually this is a bark that brews a wonderful red tea, you can also use a straight black tea of your choice)

1 1/2″ long knob of ginger (I use one that is about as wide as a quarter)

20 black peppercorns (my favorite are tellicherry from India)

10 whole allspice

(1) 3″ large cinnamon stick

1t cardamom seeds (or use the green cardamom pods)

Put 6 C of water in a sauce pan and float your cheesecloth bundle. Bring to a boil over medium heat uncovered and then turn off the heat. Let cool. Remove the cheesecloth bundle and discard contents (in your compost if you have one!)

Decant into a pitcher and place in the fridge. Use with in 1 week.

To make your latte: mix 1/2 tea, 1/2 milk and microwave this until hot. Sweeten with honey to taste and enjoy. (I use about 1T of honey to 12 oz of latte.)

* * *

So what kind of packaging do you consume on a weekly basis? Is there away you can substitute another product, make something at home, or use a reusable bag to decrease the amount of packaging you bring through your front door? Is the substitute economical? Is it affordable? Why is it that we “consume” so much cardboard, ink, plastic shrink wrap, disposable re-sealable bags, and tin foil lids? And where does this all go when it leaves our home? I plan to discuss some of these in the coming posts as I weave my way through 19 more tales of an on-the-go-suburban family striving to be more responsible consumers.

Next up: popsicle packaging…yes, we consume these in the dead of winter. Have a wonderful weekend!

In the month of February, challenged by Hip Mountain Mama to make One Small Change, I declared Ziploc Elimination in my home. (In January I decided to break our reliance on paper towels. You can read about our month and my washie tutorial here.)

We use Ziploc baggies for so many things in our home. Organizing the junk drawer, storing linens, sorting toys and puzzles, and even keeping papers (stick your paper recipe card in a Ziploc, and it will never again get destroyed by spaghetti sauce splatter.) We store snacks, freeze meals, save dry foods, and sometimes marinate in Ziplocs. I know that the plastic against food isn’t the best, and the wasted plastic in the landfills is even worse, but cutting our dependence on these baggies is certainly the most difficult in the kitchen.

To begin to eliminate Ziploc bags in the kitchen I substituted sewn snack baggies for crackers, goldfish, and pretzels, and tried out Kids Konserve stainless steel snack containers for wet snacks like grapes.

Kids Konserve is a lovely brand of eco-friendly food saving products. I tried out their stainless steel snack containers with lids for kiddie snacks. The tops fit pretty tight so grapes didn’t leak and make a mess, though I wouldn’t recommend these for yogurt. The kids couldn’t get the tops off the containers without help. They are lightweight, but don’t dent easily. (My kids tried throwing them on the floor already.) They are dishwasher safe, but obviously don’t nuke these in the microwave. They are small enough for toddler portions, but for an adult, they’d most certainly leave you hungry.

The only complaint I have  about these petite, indestructible, cuties is that they are expensive. Three (3) of these little guys run you about $18 plus shipping and handling. Although they will probably last you a lifetime, we will probably lose these expensive snack containers in no-time. (These comments aren’t in anyway connected to Kids Konserve and are simply my opinions.)

I also stitched up a few snack sacks from cotton scraps and PUL fabric (polyurethane laminated fabric.) PUL is a unique laminated fabric that acts as a moisture barrier. Since I didn’t want the laminate to touch the food, I simply lined the pouch with another layer of 100% cotton fabric and stitched in a Velcro strip to close up the baggie. Just toss the sacks in the laundry when it needs a cleaning. These diminutive snack sacks measure about 4″X6″ and fit enough food for a rather large toddler snack like dried fruit, cereal, goldfish, cookies, crackers, pretzels, nuts, yogurt covered raisins, bagel chips, popcorn, trail mix … you get the idea. There are plenty of tutorial about how to make these around the blogosphere so I will not bore you with another one here. Go here, here, or here if you’d like to learn how to stitch your own.

Purchasing PUL is a bit tricky actually. It isn’t sold in retail stores that I know of, but there are Yahoo purchasing co-operatives like this one or this one that purchase colored and printed PUL fabrics regularly, but you must become a member to place an order. (Just a note, I already had PUL in my fabric stash before February. It would probably take you a few months, give or take a bit, to get that PUL order in hand.) And I think this site also sells PUL, though I haven’t purchased from this retailer personally. Additionally, PUL is not bio-degradable. But you can stick it in the laundry or simply wash it in the sink and use it again and again and prevent hundreds of Ziploc baggies from facing a forever-fate in our landfills.

Reusable containers required a bit more effort to launder and wash than simply grabbing another plastic bag out of the drawer, but we probably kept 50+ Ziploc bags out of our landfills in the month of February alone! Yes, you can wash and reuse Ziploc bags, but preschool teachers aren’t going put an empty plastic bag back in your toddler’s lunch box. But a stainless steel container in a toddler’s lunch tote isn’t going in the trash! Yeah for less trash!

If there had been a bit more time, and a bit more money, I might have tried out other Ziploc-substitutes for larger food storage like Pyrex. I tell you though, What do you put cheese in after you open that plastic vacu-pak wrap? A Ziploc? Saran-Wrap? Tupperware? making sure your food isn’t touching something plastic is quite a feat.Does anyone put their cheese in an earthenware dish with a clay top and stick that in their fridge? What do you do with toasted seaweed sheets after you open the plastic baggie? A Ziploc? Glad-Ware?  Why is everything packaged in plastic to begin with? This brings me to March’s challenge: responsible packaging consumption.

My one small change for March is to blog 20 days about packaging consumption. We all love snack-size convenience, but the environment doesn’t love snack-size packaging. We like Costco economy, but the environment doesn’t like plastic-shrink-wrapped jumbo sized packaging. Are there ways we can consume less plastic and paper packaging, cut down the amount of trash we toss out, and reduce the number of items we place in the recycle bin every day? Tune in for  20 days of discussion about how to purchase less packaging. Here is to a greener earth for everyone.

And, go to Hip Mountain Mama’s blog to take a peek at what others are doing to make One Small Change.

Isn’t it interesting that adults who have lost so much of that ability to let go, wander, dabble, and meander try so hard to reclaim these qualities. Isn’t it strange that from an adult perspective all of those words mean “do-nothing”, but from a toddler’s perspective, to waffle, wallow, and bask, are words of profound productivity.

These watercolor pictures are pen drawn by me, and mostly watercolor painted by Tyler (I am pretty sure you can tell which watercolor painting I did.) Yes, the second is my attempt at a car…even with the dinosaurs you didn’t think we could get too far from wheels did you?

Upon a toddler request, we visited the Smithsonian Natural History Museum in Washington, D.C., to see the dinosaur exhibit. I was just so overjoyed to encourage a passion other than wheels and race cars. So we went…and had a lot of fun.

In a nearby exhibit is the Hope Diamond.The 45 carat blue diamond from India.

Daddy: Do you like it Sydney?

Sydney: pe-ttie. Wannn it!!!

On the crafting table this week: Manos de Uruguay Wool Classica legwarmers, this Berry Hat, this sweater vest, seam-binding in StoneHill Collection Zest, Orange Medallion, and finishing up some baby gifties! Whew, happy Monday!