Easy Peasy: Reduce Your Cooling Costs

Photo Wikimedia Commons, photographer unknown

One simple way to save on cooling costs is to close your blinds or curtains first thing in the morning.  This helps keep the sun out and the cool in.

Easy Peasy: Reducing Waste in Baby Steps

If you follow this blog, you are probably like me.  You want to reduce waste.  You things to be as simple and efficient as possible.  If you are also like me, the likelihood of a Martha-Stewart-style makeover is not in the offing.  Instead, you make small changes a little at a time and gradually get to where you want to be.

My journey towards a waste-free life is taken in baby steps.  For folks like me, I'm introducing the Easy Peasy series.  From time to time I will post a simple, single step to help reduce waste.  I hope you enjoy this, and would love to hear any suggestions that you folks might have along the way.

Time Saver: Conquering the Mess of Natural Peanut Butter.

I prefer natural peanut butter to supposedly "normal" peanut butter.  I like the very peanutty taste, and I like the fact that nothing is in it but peanuts and salt as opposed to those of "normal" that can include things like molasses and hydrogenated palm oil.  The only draw back of natural peanut butter is that the oil separates from the peanut solids and looks like this:

Photo by Timothy Valentine

No matter how hard I try, when ever I try to stir this peanut butter, I end up with a big, gloppy oil mess.  Not only is this something I don't want to clean up, but if you lose too much peanut oil, the peanut solids become unspreadable.

Now there are gizmos, such as this one at Lehman's that are intended to remedy that situation.  You screw the lid on the top and a corkscrew mechanism stirs everything together.  The only problems with this are that the lid doesn't fit every jar, so it might not work for your brand or your homemade container and you also have a corkscrew thingy to clean when you're done.

I tried putting it in the fridge before opening it, but that just created a solid mass of peanut oil at the top of the container (which is about as appealing as eating vasoline.)  And then it hit me:  I put the lid on the jar tightly and put it in the fridge UPSIDE DOWN.  When I opened it later, it was mixed perfectly and the consistency was just right.  No mess, no waste, no clean up!  Ta Da!

Of Course I Can!

Poster from the USDA "Beans and Bullets" exhibition

While we don't have to worry about ration points today, home canning serves much the same purpose today.  We are taking responsibility for feeding our families with our own hands and avoiding the corporate production of food.  I understand that gardening and canning aren't possible for everyone, but for those of us who can, we should can!  It saves money and worry over what is in our food.

Reducing Phone Book Waste

Creative Commons Image by Gentle

How many of you use actual paper phone books?  The only time I've used one in the past year has been as a booster seat for my 4-year-old.  For those folks that get business information online, you can opt-out of yellow page delivery here:  https://www.yellowpagesoptout.com/.

If you still use the paper books, you can check with the folks at Earth 911 for local recycling resources.  And of course, you can also find ways to reuse them in your home.  (Hint:  They make great booster seats.)