Meatless March

Happy Earth Day! This tulip was planted in our yard before we bought our house, 8+ years ago.  It almost never blooms, but this year it did! When you have a blog devoted to cooking, people think you love cooking. I do not love cooking .  Most days around 5:00 I drag myself toward the kitchen with the feeling that I'd rather go anywhere else. I find meal planning to be a chore, and I hate grocery shopping.  Cooking is a means to an end for me, more healthy and economical than eating out or ordering in all the time. The point of this blog is eating (and therefore cooking) in ways that don't exacerbate global warming: I minimize meat and dairy, and I avoid food waste, and I urge others to do the same. So what I do love? I love fashion. I love looking at clothes, and touching clothes, and imagining exciting ways to wear clothes. I love dressing up and getting compliments on an outfit. I love costumes .  As with my approach to eating/cooking, my approach to fashion is to ...

Happy Vegan Vednesday! Choosing plant-based foods at least once a week is a great pro-environment choice for an individual, but I was heartened to read that New York's mayor recognizes the potential huge impact of city-wide policies that reduce meat procurement. This week, the mayor " vowed to reduce emissions tied to city food procurements by 33 percent by 2030 ," up from his predecessor's goal of 25 percent, according to the New York Times. The Big Apple, where the mayor responds to climate change and cats hitch rides on motorbikes The Times quoted Mayor Adams saying: "It is easy to talk about emissions that are coming from vehicles and how it impacts our carbon footprint, it is easy to talk about the emissions that’s coming from buildings and how it impacts our environment. But we now have to talk about beef. And I don’t know if people are really ready for this conversation."  I hear you, Mayor. A person I know reminded me recently that she had given up m...

You might think that a podcast is the wrong medium to appreciate something as visual and tactile as clothing, and you would be right. But when I'm doing yard work or walking somewhere and have mental bandwidth to spare, I nonetheless enjoy listening to  "How to be Fabulous" with Charlotte Dallison , which is about vintage clothes. "The approach with this business of mine is to get more people wearing more vintage," Charlotte said in her April 14 episode, talking about sustainability in fashion. "But...I think rather than telling someone who's used to shopping at Zara, for example, that they suddenly have to wear totally secondhand and vintage, it's more just about incorporating a bit more, and a bit more and a bit more....If everyone did that, it would have a far bigger impact than a select few--a smaller set of people--being totally carbon-neutral." That is the same strategy I employ with this blog. While it's a fact that plant-based diets...

Back in the quarantine "heyday", I embraced many of the fads, including hours-long walks, collecting  houseplants , overeating, drinking too much, and haircuts given to and received from family members. Selfie from the September 2020 haircut my backup dancer gave me on our patio I never did get around to watching "Tiger King", though, and even though I baked like the world was coming to an end--because I feared it was--I somehow missed the pandemic sourdough craze. Recently, however, as I've been gaining confidence in baking gluten-free breads (" Gluten-Free Sandwich Bread " by King Arthur Baking Company is the fave), I decided to expand my horizons. I put out a request for a gluten-free sourdough starter on a local gluten-free Facebook group, and a stranger kindly offered me some of hers. If I put a rubber band around the jar at the starter's level after feeding, I can observe how much it grows Not unlike owning a pet--a pandemic trend I also bypa...