Jump to Recipe Lemonade takes less time to make than schlepping to the store to buy it and tastes better than anything you’ll find there on the shelves. Simply dissolve sugar in a small amount of hot water, pour in a larger amount of cold water to both dilute and cool the sugar syrup and finally, stir in lemon juice. Because I’m fortunate enough to have a lemon tree growing in my yard, my lemonade costs little to make. (My sister says this tree keeps me rooted in California and she has lost all hope that I’ll ever move back to Canada but she never imagined Project 2025.) As well, branches of o ..read more

My daughter Mary Katherine works as a recycling coordinator in Northern California. She spends the majority of her time helping businesses comply with SB 1383, California’s food scraps recovery law, which requires residents, businesses and organizations to separate organics from trash. Several months ago, I asked people on social media if they had any questions for MK. They had many! She answered most of them on Instagram Live, which I’ve lightly edited below for brevity. How recycling works Q: Why is this all so complicated? MK: It shouldn’t be this complicated but we have so many d ..read more

An online search for items to simplify your life will turn up pages and pages of consumer products. But you don’t need to buy a bunch of expensive new stuff to simplify. And you may already own several of the humble items on this list. If you don’t, find them in your Buy Nothing group and they won’t cost anything. Jars would be my number one life-simplifying item but I’ve already written about them many times here and here and here, for starters. 1. Hooks I recently watched the Patagonia film “Shitthropocene: Welcome to the Age of Cheap Crap” and I can’t stop thinking about hooks and how many ..read more

Would you like to socialize with crafty, like-minded friends, make something useful together, help reduce plastic pollution and build community, all while having fun? Then consider organizing a sewing bee for making reusable produce bags. Learn how to get started in this free Zoom meetup on Friday, July 19th, 2024 at 10am PT/1pm ET. Plan to stay for 30 to 40 minutes. What you’ll learn In 2018, my friends and I started making simple, reusable produce bags out of donated fabric that might otherwise go to landfill. So far, we’ve handed out 3,994 of these. Used weekly for one year, 3,944 cloth bag ..read more

You won’t need to spend money to pack an on-the-go, zero-waste kit if you own a bit of basic gear (like knives and forks) and can sew a straight line. If you do have to buy a fork, you needed to do that anyway so “free” still applies. And if you can’t sew but would like to learn, perhaps you can do so for free. Many libraries now make banks of sewing machines available either at certain times or during classes. Bring an old sheet and worn pair of jeans and you’re all set. Water bottle (or jar) An expensive thermal water bottle is nice to have but a jar also works. In Las Vegas a few years ago ..read more

Jump to Recipe Most lemon syrup recipes call for lemon juice. This one calls for mere rinds left over from juicing lemons. Here’s the short version: Combine 2 parts lemon rinds with 1 part granulated sugar (by weight). Cover and let sit at room temperature overnight. Strain. Enjoy. Either compost the sugary rinds at that point or brew a small amount of bubbly lemon soda with them. (Jump to the soda instructions.) Lemon syrup ingredients The neighbor’s cat supervising a lemon giveaway courtesy of our prolific tree Filling up at the bulk bins doesn’t have to look pretty You need only two ingredi ..read more

Homemade reusable, washable, cloth snack bags cost basically nothing—you can sew them out of fabric scraps. They make snacks look appetizing. They take up little space in your bag after you’ve finished eating. And they can keep thousands of polluting plastic baggies out of the waste stream. Americans go through hundreds of millions of single-use plastic baggies every single week. And as study after study after study reveals, making every damn thing out of plastic turns out to have been a bad idea. We desperately need regulation to curb plastic pollution. Unfortunately, the Global Plastics Trea ..read more

Jump to Recipe This chocolaty granola tastes not-too-sweet, has a nutty flavor and helps you use up ingredients you have on hand. No granola will go to waste—you’ll probably wish you’d made more—and those bits and pieces in the cupboard that found a home no longer risk going uneaten. Win-win! Homemade granola: Ultra-processed food (UPF) replacement Read this if you eat In his best-selling book, Ultra-Processed People, scientist, doctor and award-winning BBC broadcaster Chris van Tulleken explores the science and health impacts of UPFs, which make up as much as 60 percent of diets in the U ..read more

Jump to Recipe Early this year, while prepping for one of my use-it-up, stir fry workshops, I realized I had run out of toasted sesame oil. A small amount of this oil drizzled in a stir fry—and many other savory dishes—adds an inversely proportional wallop of nutty, savory, umami flavor. I didn’t want to go without it in the demo. But I also didn’t want to go to the store. So I quickly “made” delicious toasted sesame oil. Ingredients and tools You need only two ingredients—sesame seeds and oil. I almost always have both on hand—unless I’ve run out of these too! Buy raw white hulled sesame seed ..read more

Jump to Recipe Aquafaba, the liquid from canned chickpeas, yields foolproof, egg-free mayonnaise and meringues and macaroons and lots of other stuff. But I cook dry chickpeas myself and so never have store-bought aquafaba on my hands. I prefer to cook dry beans to save money, to bypass the BPA (or BPS or BPF) in the plastic lining of cans—and to eat tastier beans. Making aquafaba from dried chickpeas does work but you have to play around with the chickpea-to-water ratio and cooking times to render a consistency similar to the gel in canned chickpeas. As with fermentation, be prepared for some ..read more