Eat More At Home To Save
Nobody wants to cook every night and it’s sometimes great to out to eat to get a nice meal with no cleanup required. The major problem with going out is that most restaurants don’t usually serve many healthy dishes that also taste great. On top of that, restaurants can be really expensive, even when considering fast food. Why not choose to make food at home where you know exactly what ingredients are going into the meal while saving extra money.
Whole Foods recently conducted a survey that concluded that 51 percent of adults are choosing to eat at home due to the hard economic times. An even higher percent of the respondents, 68 percent, said they have least changed their cooking and eating behavior. There is not a whole lot to shed light on times like we are in, but at least people are becoming more grounded again and realizing that we can get more quality meals at home for a fraction of the cost of getting them at restaurants.
Regardless of the current economic situation you are in, changing your eating habits ot eat more at home can make a huge difference in your life. Eating at home on a nightly basis can seem daunting to many, but you’d be surprised just how easy it can be to eat a healthy meal, while saving a little extra cash.
How To Fit In Home Cooked Meals
I’ts not always easy to fit making a meal and cleaning up into our hectic schedules. Here are some ways to make it easier to fit eating at home in our schedules.
Reduce Work Schedule
Too many people have stressful lifestyles that often lead us to eat out as often as we do. It’s become too acceptable as a society that we work much more than our 40 hour work week. This only leads us to be more stressed out and not want to make a good meal at home. Not only do you suffer, but the rest of your family suffers as well. By working less or reducing some of the major stresses, making a meal at home will become so much easier. If you can’t work less, try working some later day and some shorter so that you will have the time to make a meal at home.
Meal Planning
Planning you meals for the entire week can really make it easy to fit eating at home in our lives. People often get discouraged when they get home from work and realize that they have no idea what they want to make nor have the ingredients to make it. A great idea is plan out the meals before going grocery shopping and shop for the entire week. Surf the net and seek out healthy, yet easy recipes that you can make for the week. I find that going to my local farmer’s market and stocking up on produce for the entire week is the easiest way for me. The quality of the foods you will buy will be superior what you could find in most grocery stores and almost always stay fresh throughout the week.
Improve Your Life
Now that you’ve found more time to eat a home more regularly, it’s time to look at some ways that it can help improve your life.
Healthier Ingredients
So many times when we go out to restaurants, the only fruit or vegetable we usually get is either a potato or is fried. Also, just because we eat at home doesn’t mean that we eat healthy or spend less than restaurants. This gives also us the opportunity to eat less meat and use healthy ingredients for you meals. It’s especially easy since many of the foods at our local farmer’s markets are healthy and fresh. Buying healthy foods doesn’t usually cost more money even if it does cost a little bit more, isn’t your health worth it?
Improve Family Life
Whenever I hear the song ‘Cat’s in the Cradle’ it always reminds me of just how dysfunctional our family life has become. So many families don’t sit down to eat a meal together and parents have no idea what their kids are eating. Involving the entire family in cooking the meals and getting them to sit down to dinner every night may help strengthen the relationship we have with our families. You can also ensure that everybody in your family is eating a healthy meal.
Save Money
This may be the most important reason for many people, as the survey above suggests. It’s so easy to save money by cooking at home, especially since the average cost of a meal at a restaurant is around $25 per person. Even if that figure is closer to $5 as you would get at a fast food restaurant, you can still possibly save some money. There are so many ways you can save money by eating at home since you exactly what you put into the meal. One great way that I found to really save is to eat less meat. Try making at least one meal a week without meat. Not only is it healthier for you, but you will find that it can much less expensive to make. Also, you can save much more money on usually expensive dishes like fish, while also knowing exactly where the fish is coming from. Get creative and you will find it easy to spend far less when eating at home.
Cheap Solar House Fighting to Win Contest
A solar house built by a group of students from Rice University out of Houston, TX strives to be a low cost option for houses to reduce their carbon emissions while still reducing monthly energy bills. The Zerow House as it’s called is going to be part of the Solar Decathlon contest hosted by the Department of Energy.
The major accomplishment the students are trying to achieve is to build an affordable house that a normal family can afford, yet still reduce their carbon footprint. Other entrants in the contest took quite a different approach in that they built expensive homes with fancy features. Roque Sanchez, one of the students involved in the project had this to say about the Zerow House:
We’re taking a house that any family could live in and any family could afford and adding solar to it.
It’s great to see that these students took a different approach to this house than the other entrants. I hate it when winning products of contests like this are so expensive that the normal person could never afford. Being priced at just $100,000, this house could be an excellent way many Americans could build solar enabled, yet inexpensive and practical homes. After the competition is over, Rice University also plans on donating the home to a low-income family.
I wish the best of luck to this group. Lets hope this home can make a huge impact on how homes are built throughout our country regardless of whether they win the Solar Decathlon.
GreenScroll: Power the Internet by Renewable Energy
Surfing the web may seem like a harmless act, but amount of energy required to run each any every website we visit is massive. There are hundreds of millions of websites currently active that all require some type of web server to run off of. It is estimated that a company of the size of Google has nearly a 1/2 million web servers. Just imagine how much energy and hardware that is required to run an operation of that size.
The web is now a staple in our lives and only continues to grow daily, so reducing the amount of servers or energy does not seem probable. There are ways to reduce the amount of energy required by servers through the use of cloud computing initiatives and virtualization, but you can only reduce the amount of energy so much. There are also green web hosting companies that run their servers on renewable energy to help reduce the impact of your web site. That also works, but not all green hosting companies cover their entire operation’s carbon footprint regardless of the claims they make.
This leads me to a non-profit organization I found called GreenScroll that helps fill the void for those who want to help reduce the carbon footprint that the Internet leaves. This means that you can keep your web hosting service and use GreenScroll to ensure that your website is carbon neutral.
How Does it Work?
Depending on the size of your website, you can make a fairly small pledge that will go towards purchasing renewable energy credits. As GreenScroll grows, they plan on contributing to more and more green energy projects to allow contributors to know where their pledges are going to. They seem really open to allowing their community of contributors being involved in the efforts they are undertaking.
At the moment, their operations are fairly small as they just started at the beginning of 2009. The company hopes to continue to grown to allow more and more people make the Internet as carbon neutral as possible. As I mentioned above, this is a non-profit company and the only benefit they are getting is to see more and more webmasters go carbon neutral. This site is worth checking to make ensure that your website is carbon neutral.
The Ultimate Homemade All Purpose Cleaners
There are alternatives to using the dangerous chemicals that comprise most of the cleaners on the market today. Especially when it comes to an all purpose cleaner, we want to make sure that is safe for our families, especially the little ones. These all natural homemade all purpose cleaners will keep your family safe, while saving you tons of money.
Spray Cleaner
Mix equal parts of water and vinegar in a spray bottle. Yes, it’s that simple. This handy cleaner will take care of almost any cleaning job throughout your house. Here are just a few of those jobs:
- Carpet: This solution will eliminate most spills on our carpets. It does sometimes have a difficult time with set in stains, but it does a really good job for most situations.
- Kitchen: Will clean just about any surface in the kitchen including your counter tops, appliances and cutting boards.
- Shower: Removes soap build up and eliminates mold and mildew on tiles.
- Toilet Bowl: Get’s rid of those mineral build up around the ring of our toilet bowls.
- Windows: Just as effective as window cleaning products.
Depending on what job you are doing, you may have to increase or decrease the amount of vinegar in this solution. I just this cleaner on a daily basis and usually keep more than one bottle of various levels of vinegar to water.
Abrasive Cleaner
Mix 3 parts of baking soda to 1 parts water. Once again, nothing complicated about this recipe. This will give you a paste that will is just as versatile as the one above, but for tasks that may require an abrasive. It can be used on a variety of applications just as the above cleaner:
- Bathroom Tub: This paste can remove stains and mildew.
- Carpets: Removes most stains and odors from our carpets.
- Grease: This paste will eliminate grease stains on just about any surface.
- Kitchen: Removes stains stuck on particles on our kitchen sinks as well as pots on pans. This paste easily removes caked on food on pots and pans with ease.
- Laundry: Removes odor from clothes and can help whiten them.
The only word of caution with this cleaner is that it can cause scratching on some surfaces just as with most abrasive cleaners.
These two cleaners complement each other well. They will take care of just about any cleaning job throughout your house. The vinegar spray cleaner takes care of the quick cleanups while the paste works well on tougher jobs around the house. Give these two cleaners a try and you won’t be disappointed.
Reusing Glass Drinking Bottle
Having an environmentally friendly and safe drinking bottles doesn’t mean you have to go out an buy an expensive drinking bottle. One alternative is to reuse a glass drinking bottle that you would normally recycle or throw out. What better way to save a little extra money while going green.
Glass bottles are thought of as one of the safest options available for drinking bottles. They are fairly easy to clean ( can be put into the dishwasher as well) and can be reused for a long time. The bottles with wider mouths are easier to reuse, but almost all will work just fine.
My favorite part about reusing glass bottles is that you can get them for practically free. The next time you have an extra glass bottle, and it doesn’t necessarily even have to originally have been a drinking bottle, clean it out and now you have your new drinking bottle. I have seen some restaurants that use Ball preserving jars as our water cups. Instead of spending 20 some dollars on a bottle, you now have one for practically free.
There are some downsides to using glass as opposed to other popular forms of bottles like stainless steel. One being that it’s breaks easily, which I am notorious for doing. The other being that it’s not as lightweight so therefore not quite as portable as the other bottles. For athletes in particular, it can be extremely difficult to carry around a glass bottle without the worry of it breaking.
For most situations, I would stick with reusing a glass drinking bottle to save money to get an extremely safe and effective bottle.
World’s Healthiest Foods
One of my favorite resources for finding out which foods are the healthiest for me is from WHFoods.com. The site has a list of the 129 foods in 11 categories, ranging from vegetables to natural sweeteners, that can help us live a longer, healthier lifestyle.
What I really love about this site is when you click on a particular food item. Each food has a thorough description of why it deserves to be in the list of healthiest foods. There is a list of all the nutrients contained within the food and health benefit that the food will provide you.
This list is a great resource, but don’t think that you have to eat every single one of these items. Comprise your diet of many of the items from each category that you enjoy to eat. Also, choose the local foods so that you are not only supporting your community, but still eating healthy. I found that my local farmer’s market has many of the foods on this list making it easy for me to eat the healthiest foods on a regular basis.
Hopefully this site can be as useful as it has been to me to help live a happier and more healthier lifestyle.
Why Not Aluminum Bottles?
No matter how much marketing dollars aluminum bottle makers put towards making their drinking bottles seem completely safe, they just aren’t. Aluminum is simply not a safe product to use for a drinking bottle as it can have dangerous effects if leached into our water. Let’s take a look as some of the ways aluminum bottle makers claim that their bottles are safe, but are completely true.
100% Safe Liner
The first thing that comes to my mind is, why do you need a liner in the first place if the bottle is so safe? Aluminum bottles makers usually use an epoxy liner on the inside of their bottles that is made to avoid contact of the liquid to the aluminum container. It seems like a lot of trouble to use aluminum when you have to put a liner on the inside just to make it safe. If this liner happens to scratch or break, the aluminum could now be leaching into your water.
BPA Free
Aluminum bottle makers have had to constantly defend their bottles against critics who say their bottles aren’t BPA free as they claim. Sigg currently is the largest, most popular and trusted manufacturer of Aluminum drinking bottles and has taken the most heat on this issue, but they still defended their claims. It was just revealed recently that Sigg Bottles do contain BPA. If such a trusted name in the industry was so deceiving about their bottles containing BPA, can you really trust any of them? The reason why so many switched to aluminum bottles was to avoid BPA in plastic bottles. Now all their claims seem to come into question, can you really trust these companies any more?
Comparable Bottles Dangerous
Aluminum bottle makers have even taken to attacking stainless steel and plastic bottles claiming they are not as safe as their bottles. Stainless steel bottles may not be perfect, but they do not require an interior lining to make them safe. They also are more durable than aluminum and are priced comparably. I see no reason why aluminum bottles are any different from plastic ones. Plastic is exposed to your water in either bottle and now we know that some aluminum bottles could even contain BPA.
Next you need a drinking bottle, it seems to make more sense to stick with buying a stainless steel bottle from a reputable company or reusing a glass drinking bottle.
