5 Eco Things

 Every couple of weeks, I like the idea of trying to track 5 eco things I'm doing or have done. This is in line with The Frugal Girl's list of 5 Frugal Things that she publishes every week (The Frugal Girl is a blog I like). 

This week, I:

1. Used a lot of "scraps" of water from water bottles and such to water my balcony plants.

2. Collected and packaged some items to send to ThredUp to be resold. This is both ecologically and financially sound, provided the clothes find their way to a home. I'm hopeful, because most of the items are name brand as they request. Separately, I also collected a bunch of clothes to take to the Be Thrifty in Annandale. 

3. We ate a lot of random leftover-y food, but in good fashion. For instance, in the morning I ate some fruit that was on its last legs, something else random that needed using up, and a partial bag of chips that had been sitting around. Shantonu doesn't really eat breakfast but I know at some point in the day he ate a yogurt that was getting on. For lunch, I used part of a can of kidney beans, part of an onion, some freezer corn, and paprika, garlic powder, and salt to make a delicious bean stir fry thing. Then I topped that to a microwaved sweet potato, which had been sitting in the fridge. I added salsa and it was surprisingly delicious. 

Later that day (this was Tuesday, when I wasn't feeling well), I used the remainder of the can of beans, the remainder of the onion, some very old remainder of a celery heart, old peppers, and some very old Trader Joe's Chicken-less bouillion (we've had this since we lived in Baltimore and they don't even sell this anymore, sadly). I used some herbs and stuff too to make a soup that was very good. I also found some potatoes that had been lingering in the fridge and added some to the soup. The rest we airfried with lemon olive oil (which I'd gotten off of Buy Nothing) and parmesan. Super good! 

And finally, I'd used some yogurt (one dairy cup, one non-dairy), a handful of old granola, strawberries, and some sugar-butter mixture from my failed toffee making attempt with Kelly to make these frozen yogurt clusters. They spread out in the freezer and got very flat. But I finally pulled them out, coated them in some chocolate (a random bag of chocolate chips melted with vegetable oil) and refroze them, and then had one for dessert. Good, not great, but still edible. 

I'm probably most proud of my food-saving efforts this week. In addition to eating lots of odds and ends that needed it, I didn't wind up eating anything particularly gross out of the creations I had made.

4. Got some books from the library. My favorite place! Walked there, too, as we almost always do.  

5. Making a more concerted effort to turn off lights. I'm not always good about this but Shantonu really is. I've been trying to be better about this, and it helps that in the summertime the light is better outside anyway.

I don't think this counts but also - I started this blog! Which will help me track my personal environmental habits as well as my own interest in more systemic ones. 

This list looks a lot different if we're more or less social, in Baltimore or in Northern Virginia, traveling, or if I'm in school (I'm on summer break - yay!).