DIY art books

My two bigger kiddies are really into making up and illustrating stories lately, so we had to make some of these little cereal box books I saw over on Alpha Mom. They're quick and easy and -- best of all -- made from materials you already have around the house.

I like the funkiness of seeing the cover of the cereal box inside the book. It would be cool to make a thicker version for myself, but have it spiral-bound instead of tying it together. For the kids though, tying or sewing a few pieces of paper in is obviously the faster, cheaper route.

Inspired to Eat In

Due to budget constraints and food allergies we don't do a lot of eating out these days, but we are known to pick up a bake-it-yourself pizza or a roasted chicken from the grocery store once a week.

Inspired by EnviRambo's The Week of Eating In post on the Green Phone Booth yesterday, I decided to take the HuffPost challenge and make it a made-from-scratch week in the Greenhab house.

Yesterday we had a delicious potato and asparagus soup with homemade croutons. And right now I'm baking bagel chips in the oven....mmmmm.

Have you joined in the challenge yet?

Meatless Monday ~ Potato & Asparagus Soup

When we first started participating in Meatless Monday, I had a hard time thinking of new things to make for dinner that weren't centered around pasta - that was always my last minute "Eeek, what am I going to make for dinner?" meal. I feel pretty hard-core now that we're going meat-free, gluten-free and dairy-free ("GFCF"). That takes a little more thought and effort.

Tonight we had a GFCF cream of potato and asparagus soup with homemade croutons that was delicious. (Even the kids asked for seconds!) It's a little different from your normal potato soup that would include butter and milk or cream, but it's really just as good (and less fattening!).

Remember I'm not big on precision, so here's a makeshift recipe...

6 medium sized potatoes
6 cups water
3 Tbsp chicken bullion (or chicken stock, or veggie stock)
1 bunch of asparagus
1/2 of a small onion
1 clove garlic
salt and pepper
olive oil

• Clean and cut potatoes into small bits. (Remove skin if you'd like; I left it on.)
• Boil water and chicken bullion, add potatoes, boil until tender.
• Separately, steam asparagus for a few minutes. You'll want it to still be slightly crisp rather than mushy. Cut up asparagus into bite sizes pieces and set aside.
  
• Reserve the bottom 2 inches of each stalk and puree it in a food processor or blender.
• Chop onion and garlic. Saute it along with the asparagus.

• When potatoes are tender, mash with a potato masher. Add asparagus puree and the sauteed asparagus, onion and garlic.
• Stir together and let simmer for about 20 - 30 minutes. If you find that it's too thin you can add corn starch; if it's too thick, you can add in some of the water that you used to steam the asparagus. It should be filled with good vitamins.
  
• Add salt and pepper -- or other spices -- to taste.

We had half a loaf of french bread left from last night's meal, so I cut it up and baked it in the oven with butter and garlic salt at 170 degrees. It was perfect on top of the soup! For my GFCF boy I made some croutons from his gluten-free bread.

I love it when a meal comes together and everyone is happy!

New on Etsy...

I love love love this print. It's from a thrifted skirt I thought would make a cute little spring / summer bag. It's in my Etsy shop right now for a low price. (I ran out of magnetic snaps, so it doesn't snap closed like the rest, but it's just as adorable!)

Thrift Store Cake Plate

I've been searching the thrift stores for at least a year for a cake plate, with no luck. A few weeks ago I stood in our local big box store looking at a new one, touching it, picking it up, then putting it back on the shelf, trying to convince myself one way or the other. In the end, I just couldn't justify buying a new one since it was more a really want than a need.

Serendipitously, I found this beaut at Goodwill about a week later. It's not old or anything - in fact, I think it's the exact one I saw at the big box store - but I feel much better about giving something new life instead of buying one new at the store.

It was the perfect home for the first batch of gluten-free, casein-free cookies I made for my boy last night.

Clipboard Car Caddy on MIFS

My kids LOVE to color in the car (and I love that it keeps them from killing each other!), but there's always a mess of paper and crayons everywhere. Using a clipboard, I made this caddy that holds crayons, colored pencils and paper, while giving them a hard surface to press on. You can find the tutorial over on Make it From Scratch today!

Making school lunches healthy and sustainable

Remember the days of school lunches that looked like that, plastic tray and all?


Want a lunch that looks more like this for your kids?

Read about a non-profit group currently trying to make this a reality in lunchrooms across the country. Visit the Green Phone Booth today and check out my blog post Real Food For Real Kids.

Dreaming of Summer...

Dear Birthday Fairy,

I know that my birthday is still 4 months away, but I just wanted to show you this awesome gallon-size Ball jar with spigot. Isn't it great? Can you just imagine hot summer days, sitting on the deck with fresh lemonade (and maybe a little vodka) in this? I'm just sayin'...

Love, Kellie

Have I told you how to make peanut butter?

I keep meaning to post about my adventure in peanut butter making! A few months ago EnviRambo blew my mind when she posted about making your own brown sugar. I had never even stopped to think about how brown sugar was made or where it came from, so hearing how easy it is to make shocked and inspired me.

I've tried making a few other things from scratch since then, including peanut butter, which was quite simple as well. It's easy enough to find natural, organic, no-junk-added peanut butters at the supermarket, but almost all of them come in plastic containers which irks me to no end.

A few weeks ago I stumbled across a recipe for peanut butter accidentally and thought I'd give it a whirl. I bought some organic, dry roasted peanuts (no salt) and was all set - yep, that easy!

I've found that I often get too excited to be bothered with things like precision and measuring, but "we're not building a piano" as my father-in-law used to say, so you can use your own good judgment.

I put a few hands full (hand fulls?) of peanuts into my food processor and drizzled a tiny bit of canola oil on top. (Maybe a tablespoon to start with, then add 1T more if necessary.) The recipe called for peanut oil, but I found it to be pretty expensive and I didn't want to spend $10 on it if this wasn't going to turn out well. The canola oil did the job and I always have it on hand so...

Turn the food processor on and let it work its magic! First it looks like quinoa, then it starts to clump together.


Eventually it becomes one big ball in the food processor, then finally spreads out and becomes creamy (and warm - be sure to eat some right then!).

I store mine in a glass container in the fridge. There's nothing more satisfying that making a PB&J sandwich with homemade peanut butter and the jelly I canned over the summer. Look at me getting all Little House on the Prairie!

I know it may be a silly, smug type of satisfaction but I CAN MAKE FOOD! Food that most people I know buy at the store. The ingredients haven't been grown with chemicals, picked, shipped somewhere, altered, added to, processed by heavy machinery, packaged in plastic (which was made from petroleum, formed into a jar using heavy machinery, shipped to the food processing plant) then shipped to a distributor, then driven across the country to a supermarket.

I knew I loved peanut butter, but I never knew all that happiness and satisfaction could come in such a little homemade jar of it!

February APLS Carnival: Winter Motivation

Winter is my least favorite season of the year. Especially here in the mountains of Colorado, where winter seems to last for nine months out of the twelve. Summer is downright hot for about 3 months, then fall is cold, winter is bitter-cold and spring is mostly cold. We roll our eyes on Groundhog Day and say "Ha - we wish there were only 6 more weeks of winter!" It's this time of year that we start getting spring fever and dreaming ahead to summer.

Our garden area is still covered in snow, but we plan what we'll grow and start our seeds...

...then put them in our sunny upstairs window and watch the sprouts pop up. Seeing little green sprouts push their way through the soil is always a nice reminder that spring is indeed on its way.

We've started planning our summer camps. The Denver Zoo and the Museum of Nature & Science both have some amazing summer day camps but, with three kids and limited funds, we'll be doing a DIY version instead.


Both of our boys *love* dinosaurs and we're lucky enough to live near Dinosaur Ridge which is home to 150 million year old dinosaur bones (that you can touch!!!), 100 million year old dinosaur tracks, trails, tours and so much more. I can safely say that I'm as excited as the kids to see this. We'll pair that up with library books, crafts, a trip to the dino exhibit at the museum and a few other activities for our very own DIY Dino Camp.

We'll also have some time at the zoo "studying" (I use the term loosely) animals, gardening lessons (followed by cooking, seed saving, and composting lessons) swimming time at the local pool and anything else that suits our fancy. There are a plethora of ideas on this homeschooling website to get your creative juices flowing. It's been fun brainstorming and dreaming ahead to the lazy days of summer.

Because we do spend so much time outdoors -- away from the hot kitchen -- in the summer, I tend to cook and bake more in the winter. In the summer, it's fresh fruit and veggies, PB&J sandwiches and anything else that packs well in a picnic basket. In the winter, I have time to pour through cookbooks, try new recipes, and practice making things I'd normally buy. No wonder we all gain weight in the winter!

I've made some headway on my goals of eating more sustainably and making more from scratch. I find myself shopping the perimeter of the grocery store much more now and skipping the inside aisles of boxed, processed food. I've stopped buying peanut butter and am making it myself instead. I've stopped buying boxed, frozen waffles as a quick breakfast and started making and freezing pancakes in big batches. I like being able to control the ingredients (gluten and dairy free for Fletcher) and being able to add in any fruit we have that might be going bad. It's so much easier to experiment with things like this in the winter when I have *zero* desire to go outside!

My showers may be longer and hotter than they are in the summer months and I may drive more often than walking, but there are just as many sustainable things to do inside during these dark days of winter that will pull us through to the inevitable days of spring.

This post is my submittal to the February APLS Carnival "Winter Motivation" that will be hosted at Going Green Mama on February 24th.

Book review: Green Metropolis

As Mr. Greenhab and I approach 2 years of living here in the wilderness, we're starting to fall out of love with the bitter cold winters, the high electric bills, the long drive to get anywhere, the lack of cultural diversity, etc. and we feel a tug to move back to the city.

Seeking information - or inspiration - I picked up a copy of David Owen's Green Metropolis: Why living smaller, living closer, and driving less are the keys to sustainability.

See what I thought in my book review over on the Green Phone Booth today.

Eat From Your Pantry Wrap-Up

Here it is a whole week into February already and I haven't even posted an update on Life As Mom's Eat From the Pantry challenge. It was a great challenge and -- had I been able to keep the rest of my family out of the grocery store -- I think I could have cleared out the entire pantry.

A few things I learned along the way...

My family is addicted to the clearance rack at the grocery store. Evidently if something is junk-food, or of no use to us at all, it's okay to buy if it cost less than a dollar. I'm just sayin'.

With the right spices, my family can be tricked into eating things that have pureed veggies hidden inside: spaghetti sauce, muffins, hamburgers. Mwah ha ha ha ha ha ha! (That's my evil mom laugh.)

No one likes leftover Thanksgiving turkey turned turkey noodle casserole. No one.

When something gets pushed to the back of the fridge, freezer or pantry, it is quickly forgotten. Once found, it's hard to tell what it was originally.

In the month of January, we went through all of the canned veggies and most of the boxed pasta and side dishes in our pantry. We also went through a lot of frozen meat and veggies. At one point, our pantry was down to about half full (or half empty, depending on how you like to look at it), but then Mr. Greenhab stopped at the grocery store to pick up milk and ended up coming home with 6 bags of groceries.

I'm very happy about the progress we made during the month and I hope to continue eating from the pantry as much as possible.

The Brown's GFCF Diet

If you haven't been following our food allergy saga (BTW - anyone else inherently add hash tags to terms like #foodallergy from too much tweeting?) we recently found out that the protein casein in milk can affect behavior in people who can't digest it. It's referred to as a "dietary opiate". We took our 4 year old, Fletcher, off milk immediately after finding that out and his behavior, attitude, mood and personality took a complete 180...for about a week.

I was thrilled to meet this happy little man I'd never seen before and equally distraught when his behavior returned to normal. I high-tailed it to the library and started pouring through several diet and behavior related books. One of the best I found was Special Needs Kids Eat Right which described how gluten was also a dietary opiate, similar in structure to casein.

Mr. Greenhab, who happens to be a the-Man-is-always-trying-to-get-me-to-spend-more-money conspiracy theorist and, officially, Cheapest Man on the Planet was not buying it. Or, I should say, he wasn't buying special gluten-free food.

So I worked and nagged and berated him with facts and figures. I explained how this will help with our goal this year of eating less processed foods and more natural / whole / raw / recognizable foods. And, perhaps his "all in" moment, I promised not to buy all the pre-made gluten free snacks and goodies and save some money by making them myself.

Not only did Mr. Greenhab agree, he also decided (all by his little ol' self) to go dairy-free himself. He's suffered from allergies and asthma his whole life and has some wicked GERD now. Evidently somewhere in my spiel he heard something that hit home about dairy and allergies.

Tomorrow we start our GFCF diet (that's Gluten-Free, Casein-Free)...and I start doing a lot more cooking. We went out in style tonight with our Super Bowl party. "Style" might not be accurate actually. We went out like a meth addict about to check into Celebrity Rehab...or K-Fed joining Celebrity Fit Club. (Yeah, junk food wasn't all we had this weekend, we watched a lot of trash TV as well.)

Wish us luck. Oh, and if you have any great GFCF recipes or resources, please share them with me!

Greening Valentines

I love getting crafty and I'm not-so-secretly hoping that it rubs off on my kids. Each year Fletcher and I make Valentines for his friends at school out of scrap booking paper and any other crafty goodies we have around the house. It's been fun to see how his creations have progressed from year to year, from scribbles to putting stickers on paper to writing his name.


This year we melted some of his old broken crayons and made them into crayon hearts. Sadly, it was not as satisfying as I thought it would be. I've heard that the off-brands don't melt as well as Crayolas. I assumed that meant they took a little longer but, really, they just don't melt. I don't know what the heck they're made out of.


After 2 hours of peeling off labels, and testing out Crayola and RoseArt and crayons collected from various restaurants I found that Crayolas are really the only ones that actually melt. I also found that our microwave seemed to go into self-defense mode after just about 2 minutes of microwaving crayons. It completely shut down for 20 minutes, then turned itself back on. Annoying, but I suppose it's a good safety feature to have.


So I ended up using this yogurt-cup-held-up-by-a-pan-double-boiled-in-an-old-pot method. And just four short hours later we had heart shaped crayons...and a few arrows too.