Paisley Vegan Kitchen

Great news local vegans - there is an awesome new restaurant in Cocoa Village - Paisley Vegan Kitchen!

Paisley opened earlier this month and the food is amazing! Paisley is located at 630 Brevard Ave Suite A in Cocoa Village and is the long term dream of the owner Alyssa. Both times I have eaten there the place has been packed with an eclectic mix of hipsters, families, tourists, and locals. The food is so fresh and tasty that it will please both vegans and omnivores.

We started with one of my favorites - buffalo cauliflower bites.

We followed these with Macaroni & Cheese, the Chicken Parmesan Sub, BBQ Pulled Pork, and Lasagna Rollatini.

I sampled everything and it was all delicious. We wisely saved half of our meals to take home so that we could indulge in some peanut butter chocolate cheesecake. We were hoping to snag a cupcake of the day but they sell out quickly - guess we will just have to return another day! The cheesecake was heavenly - rich and creamy.

I highly recommend checking out Paisley and bring some omni friends so they can discover how amazing vegan food is!

Check out the menu www.paisleyvegan.com/menu/

Why I love Pinterest

Pinterest is a wonderful place to find new recipes, crafts, green ideas, and so much more! It is also a great place to organize all those amazing ideas you come across on the internet. It can also unfortunately become a place of electronic hoarding. I have been pinning things for years and besides some great homeschooling ideas, I don't attempt most of the things I pin. This year I decided I was going to create a new board for things I am going to try each week. For this week I pinned recipes,things to try with my iPhone, organizing ideas and more. Some were hits others not so much, but at least I am doing something with all those pins :)

Here are the highlights from my week:

1. I downloaded three great apps for my iPhone - Project Noah, Red Stamp, and Closet +

2. I learned how to make ringtones out of songs at http://artoftheiphone.com/2009/01/19/how-to-create-an-iphone-ringtone-using-itunes/

3. I made some yummy new recipes from Skinnytaste.com

Spicy Buffalo Cauliflower Bites from http://www.skinnytaste.com/2013/01/spicy-buffalo-cauliflower-bites.html#_a5y_p=1149459

Roasted Parmesan Green Beans http://www.skinnytaste.com/2011/11/roasted-parmesan-green-beans.html

4. I prepared a cute bag to keep in my car with a bunch of essentials

I am looking forward to trying a bunch of new things this year!

40 Bags in 40 Days

A week ago I had a moment of feeling totally overwhelmed by all the stuff in my house and decided it was time to clear out the excess. I had read about the 40 bags in 40 days project online and decided to give it a shot. The idea is simple - clear out 40 bags of stuff in 40 days. Although the 40 days are typically associated with Lent, I think this is the perfect time to clean out in preparation for the holidays.

I started today when I packed up our Halloween decorations. I weeded out the excess decorations that we did not use this year. I also went through our fall decorations to prepare for Thanksgiving decorating and kept only what I love and use. So I now have 3 bags of holiday goodies to take to our local Goodwill!

I was feeling motivated so I moved on to our utensil drawer in the kitchen and cleaned out another bag of duplicate and unneeded items. Day one and I already have 4 bags to donate!

Anyone up for joining me in the 40 bags in 40 days challenge?

I'm back

After too long of a break, I am coming back to blogging! I have spent a lot of time thinking about what kind of "green" things I want to blog about and how my family really lives greener. What I've come to realize is that most of the time being greener doesn't mean buying the latest eco-friendly trend, but by making do with what you have. Of course sometimes you need to purchase new items as gifts or to replace things that can't be fixed, so I will still share with you some of the latest green trends. However most of the time I am going to focus on ways to follow the wise advice from our grandmothers' time "Use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without."

Stay tuned for some exciting green ideas!

Daylighting

What is daylighting? Daylighting is the use of natural light instead of electricity to illuminate buildings and homes. Daylighting will save you money while reducing your carbon footprint. New buildings are being designed to take advantage of natural light - check out www.daylighting.org for more information.

Our house was not specifically designed to take advantage of natural light, but we are fortunate that it gets great daylight in most of the rooms. We are able to get great natural light all day and only need to turn on lights after the sun sets or on cloudy days. See if you can take advantage of daylight by opening the curtains instead of turning on a light.

Carbon Rally

I stumbled across a great eco-networking site - www.carbonrally.com which has great earth-friendly challenges for everyone looking to live greener.

The site puts up new a easy to handle challenge every few weeks and keeps track of how much carbon you save. The current challenge is Cold Then Fold - use only cold water to wash and rinse all of your laundry this month. Previous challenges include biking one day a week, line drying laundry, recycling your old cell phone, and reducing the amount of meat you eat.

If you've got a competitive streak, Carbon Rally has challenges that you can do as a team. So compete as a group, family, or workplace and the planet will win.

10 Reasons To Go Veg

Here are some great reasons why you should become a vegetarian:

1. A car driving vegetarian produces fewer CO2 emissions than a bike riding meat eater.

2. Cow farts contribute to global warming.

3. Pig farms pollute local water resources.

4. Rain forests are cut down to create grazing land for cattle.

5. It takes 35 calories of energy to make one calorie of meat.

6. Prevent animal cruelty in factory farms.

7. On average vegetarians live 6 years longer.

8. You’ll reduce your risk of food-borne illnesses.

9. Save money at the grocery store.

10. Pigs are much smarter than dogs, they have the mental capacities of a 3-year-old child.

Repair, Don't Replace

We all know the 3 Rs - reduce, reuse, & recycle. Of the three the first - reduce is the most important. Every new item you purchase has a large impact on the planet, production uses raw materials, energy & water and creates waste. In light of this the most earth friendly thing you can do is to keep an existing item rather than buying new. Renew old items by visiting a jewelry repair, shoe repair, or local seamstress. A few months ago I broke a heel on a pair of my favorite shoes - a quick trip to the shoe repair store and $10 later my shoes were as good as new.

Guide Dogs Go Green

I have been crazy busy the past month with our new guide dog puppy in training - Grace. Grace is an active, precocious, and absolutely adorable 3 month old black Lab. She is the third guide dog puppy we have raised for Southeastern Guide Dogs in Palmetto, Fl. Southeastern Guide Dogs has recently completed a major renovation of their puppy kennel. In an effort to save money and be more eco-friendly the school added solar panels to the roof of the kennel to take advantage of the Florida sunshine to heat the water used in the puppy kennel. The school estimates it will save $5,000 a year by switching to the solar water heater. The school also uses green cleaners to provide a healthy environment for the puppies.

Interested in more information on Southeastern Guide Dogs check out www.guidedogs.org while at the website be sure to check out the adorable puppies on the puppy cam

Twitter your gratitude

Care2 is sponsoring a twitter your gratitude day today. Take a moment to express your gratitude to your family, friends, and members of the community for making a difference in your world. Giving thanks for the special people in your life will remind you of the wonderful people who surround you everyday.

How do you join Care2 in expressing your gratitude?

1. Start your tweet with the hashtag “#caretuesday”.

2. Follow this with a message of gratitude and the names of the great people you want to thank.

See what I am thankful for at http://twitter.com/chartreuselife

Simple Steps to Greener Living

Ready to start living a greener lifestyle, but feeling a little overwhelmed? Not sure where to start? Here are ten simple things you can do this weekend and still have time left over to nap in the hammock.

1. Switch your conventional lightbulbs to Compact Fluorescent Lightbulbs (CFLs).

2. It's spring - open up the windows and let some fresh air in instead of running the air conditioner.

3. Clean or replace your air conditioning filter and put reminders on your calendar to complete this task monthly.

4. Hang your sheets on the clothesline to dry. What a blissful way to fall asleep - under fresh, clean sheets dried in the sun.

5. Buy and install a low-flow shower head.

6. Check to make sure your car's tires are properly inflated to save on gas.

7. Make up a batch of homemade earth-friendly cleaners with items found in your pantry. Check my archives for some easy recipes.

8. Tackle some of your weekend errands on your bike.

9. Go meatless this Sunday.

10. Shop your local farmer’s market. You will enjoy fresher fruits and veggies while supporting local growers.

Celebrating Earth Day

Wednesday, April 22nd is Earth Day, a day to reconnect with nature and to pledge to protect our environment. Looking for ways to celebrate Earth Day with your family?

1. Take a hike through nature and appreciate being outside.

2. Read Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax, a wonderful story with a powerful message.

3. Participate in a beach clean-up.

4. Sign a family pledge to make every day Earth Day by recycling, conserving energy and saving water.

5. Educate your children about key environmental issues like global warming, water conservation, protecting endangered species, and pollution.

6. Host an Earth Dinner - where the focus is on local, sustainable, and organic food. It is a time to reflect on the food's journey to your table - where was it grown and by whom? For more information on hosting an Earth Dinner, visit www.earthdinner.org

Earth Hour 2009

On March 28, 2009 at 8:30 p.m., join hundreds of millions of people around the world in making a statement about climate change by turning off your lights for Earth Hour, an event created by the World Wildlife Fund. Earth Hour will send the message that Americans care about climate change and that they will join the rest of the world in finding solutions to the escalating climate crisis.

During last year's Earth Hour over 50 million people, including 36 million in the U.S., representing over 400 cities on all seven continents turned out their lights. The lights were turned off at some of the world's most well known landmarks including the Sydney Opera House, Bangkok's Wat Arun Buddhist temple, the Coliseum in Rome, Stockholm's Royal Castle, London's City Hall, New York's Empire State Building, Sears Tower in Chicago, the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, and Cola-Cola's famous billboard in Times Square.

New for this year is a great website just for kids, www.earthhourkids.org. On the Earth Hour Kids site there is information, games, and lesson plans for teachers to use to educate their students about climate change and Earth Hour.

So gather up your soy candles and join in this worldwide statement about global warming and turn off your lights at 8:30 p.m. for an hour. Visit www.earthhour.org for more info.

Hope's Lessons

Recently our guide dog puppy in training Hope returned to Southeastern Guide Dogs to finish her training. Hope is the second puppy we raised for this awesome group who provides free guide dogs for veterans and other who have need them. While we taught Hope all the basics she needs to hopefully succeed in her training she taught us a lot about life. Here are some lessons Hope taught our family:

1. Live in the moment. Dogs don't worry about the past or future, they fully enjoy the current moment.

2. Trust your instincts. Pay attention to others body language and energy, it will tell you more about them than the words they use.

3. Be sure to communicate clearly with others. Dogs only understand clearly given commands, too many words can be confusing - the same can be true for people.

4. Don't hold on to negative feelings. If dogs in a pack have a conflict they resolve the dispute and move on.

5. Celebrate each day. According to Cesar Milan, "For a dog, every morning is Christmas morning. Every walk is the best walk, every meal is the best meal, every game is the best game." Live like a dog and celebrate life's simplest moments.

Want to learn more about the amazing experience of being a puppy raiser for Southeastern Guide Dogs or more about their great programs check out www.guidedogs.org

5 great reasons to give up bottled water

There are a million reasons why we need to break our country's addiction to bottled water - it's ridicously expensive, bad for the environment, totally unnessary, - the list goes on and on. Here's 5 reasons why you need to kick the bottled water habit:

1. Save $500 a year by breaking a bottle a day water habit.

2. According to earthpolicy.org, you could run 100,000 cars for a year on the amount of oil used to make plastic water bottles.

3. Nine out of 10 single use water bottles are thrown away insead of recycled.

4. If you drank the recommended 8 cups of water per day by drinking single serving Aquafina bottles, you would spend $2,500 a year! Kinda crazy in this current economic crisis to spend money on something you can get for free.

5. In most taste tests, people can't taste the difference between bottled or tap water. In fact the top selling bottled waters - Aquafina and Dasani - come from municipal water supplies.

Make the switch to reusable stainless steel water bottles, your pocketbook and the planet will thank you. Check out the great bottles available at www.earthlust.com

Recycle with Intent

I've previously discussed recycling magazines, which can be recycled by donating them to the library, nursing homes, or in some locations in your curbside recycling bin. However here's a fun activity to do before you recycle your magazines, use them to make an intention collage. I spent last night with some amazing women hanging out and making collages. Every creation was as unique as the woman who made it - some choose images, others words or phrases, others included beads or other objects that spoke to them. What is an intention collage or vision board? It is a collection of pictures, images, words, or phrases that reflects your passions or desires. You can do a board to bring a specific thing into your life - a new home, a puppy, a new career - or you can create a collage to discover your passions. Start by going through magazines and cut out phrases or pictures that appeal to you - don't analyze why you like a particular image or word just trust your intuition. Then go through your clippings and choose your favorites, weeding out ones that no longer feel right. Glue your items on your board and hang it in a place you will see it often. My collage came together to reveal my passion for living green and my desire to simplify mine & my family's life this year. I plan to do another collage with some things I'd like to manifest - a new home, a trip to Costa Rica, etc. My daughter also wants to make one, so I guess my magazines will hang around a bit longer before they make it to the recycling pile.

Get Cozi...

Why not save a few trees by switching to a paperless calendar this year? Consider one of the free online planners, such as Cozi. The Cozi calendar allows you to personalize your calendar display with different colors for each family member. Cozi also has a family journal, shopping lists, Christmas Card list,a screen saver option from your personal photos, you can send emails to your family members, jot notes, store recipes, and it can even be synced with Microsoft Outlook. When entering activities you choose their frequency - daily, weekly, every Tuesday, etc. - eliminating the need to enter the same information multiple times. Depending on your child's school district you can even download school calendars onto your family calendar. I love the fact that when I have access to the internet, I have my calendar no need to remember to carry my planner with me and best of all nothing to recycle at the end of the year. Check out Cozi at www.cozi.com

The 5 Minute Shower

The change to the 5 minute shower was an intimidating one for me since I loved a long, hot shower and I seemed to get all my brilliant ideas in the shower. However once I started timing my showers I found it was pretty easy to get squeaky clean in just 5 minutes. Now I will confess there are still a few times that my shower runs long - just recently I had a bad head cold and boy did a steamy shower really help that out. As far as my thinking goes I still have plenty of time in the shower to brainstorm and I've taken to carrying a notebook with me and letting my mind wander when I am stuck at traffic lights, doctor's offices, whenever I have a little downtime.

Why is shortening your shower so important? Even if you have a low-flow shower head a 5 minute shower will use 7-8 gallons of water. If you haven't installed a low-flow shower, put this on your must do list as a 5 minute shower without one can use an astronomical 20 gallons of water!

Getting my daughter to take a 5 minute shower is one of my family's green resolutions for 2009. As little as she is I'm not sure what takes so long in there, but I know it requires a lot of singing! To help her with her goal I got a Shower Coach timer. This great timer suctions on the side of the shower and has a 5 minute sand timer. The Shower Coach makes easy for her to see how much singing time she has left.

A Bright Green Year...

Happy 2009! It's a new year which is a great time to evaluate my family's actions and how to live greener in 2009. Here's my family's goals for this year:

1. Plant an organic garden this spring.

2. Use our clothesline more.

3. Hook our home theater system up to a Smartstrip.

4. Buy local whenever possible.

5. Check my tire pressure monthly to save money on tires and gas.

6. Train my husband to shut down the computer when he's done with it!

7. Shoes off at the door.

8. Limit purchases to those items we really need.

9. Get my daughter to take 5 minute showers.

10. Continue to educate others about the importance of going green and the simple changes they can make to live a little greener.

A year of changes...

When I started this blog at the beginning of the year my goal was to share our experiences with others and to encourage more people in our circle and out in the world to start on their own greener path. It's been a busy year full of great experiences and many changes, here's a recap of our year:

1. We have completely switched to washing our clothes in cold water.

2. We are all using reusable bags including my husband at the grocery store. With my purchase of the Green3 bag for my purse - I always have a bag available for my other shopping.

3. We have switched all our light bulbs to CFLs.

4. We recycle everything possible! This has reduced our waste to one small bag a week.

5. We adopted our road and have cleaned it several times.

6. We have all switched to reusable water bottles.

7. We participated in 4 beach clean-ups this year.

8. We now receive all our bills online are doing our banking online - eliminating tons of wasted paper.

9. We have fostered 9 kittens for our local animal shelter. We also adopted a shelter cat who has turned out to be a loving addition to our family.

10. We have all eliminated a bad habit of brushing our teeth with the water running.

11. I have switched to all organic makeup.

12. I have participated in the local Freecycle network as both a giver and a taker.

13. We have done both a Live With Less and a Financially Free week - basically a week of buying nothing. I learned a lot from these weeks about why we buy, what we buy, how to save money, and what we really need.

14. We did a Reverse Trick-or-Treating where we passed out fair trade chocolates along with information on what fair trade is and why it is important to the houses we visited on Halloween.

15. We have adopted a new habit of unplugging items when they are not in use - eliminating phantom loads.

16. I participated in Buy Nothing Day on Black Friday, where instead of heading out with the hoards of Christmas shoppers I enjoyed the day at the beach gathering items for our Christmas decorating.

17. As a family we volunteered in many ways - we raised a guide dog puppy for Southeastern Guide Dogs who graduated and is currently working, we are currently raising another guide dog puppy, I donated 12" of my hair to Locks of Love, we donated food to the local food pantry, we headed up a food drive for the animal shelter, I've handed out reusable bags to shoppers at the grocery store, as well as many random acts of kindness.

18. Instead of sending out paper Christmas cards we sent a Smilebox greeting which everyone loved and several people were inspired to send Smilebox cards themselves.

19. We wrapped all our birthday and Christmas presents in reusable fabric gift bags we made ourselves.

20. Hopefully through our actions, gifts, store, and blog we have educated and inspired others to make some green changes in their own lives.


I think we have accomplished our goal of living our life according to Gandhi's saying - "You must be the change you wish to see in the world." Thank you for joining us on our journey this year and I hope you will continue to join us in the new year.