Dove's Eye View

Five Frugal Food Treats: Save Money, Save the Planet

I've been blogging frugal food for a couple of years now, and thought I'd summarize a few greatest hits in belated honor of Mother's Day. But these ideas do more than just save money. Food that has been processed less can be healthier than the store-bought alternative; using less packaging it saves resources as well.

1. The Internet's Most Famous Red Lentil Soup

2. Pasta with grated cheese, olive oil and a bit of leftover lentil soup. Much more frugal than Amy's Mac N Cheese, and healthier too.

3.  Pumpkin Tahini

4. Your own Chai: Spiced Tea

5.  Sweetened-up yogurt instead of commercial flavored yogurt cups, as suggested by Marion Nestle in her book, What to Eat. Use fruit preserves, honey, or just plain sugar. With a little more trouble (but not much) you can make your own yogurt, no machine required.

I feed my sons plain yogurt with a dot of vanilla and a half teaspoon of sugar for dessert. They think it's an amazing treat. I tried giving them jam in yogurt but they don't like it as much.  

Check out the calorie values.              

	amount	calorie
lo-fat plain yogurt	8 oz	154
sugar	1 tsp	16
vanilla	drop	0
Total home sweetened yogurt	8 oz	170
Lo-fat vanilla yogurt	8 oz	208
Lo-fat fruit yogurt	8 oz	250

So your home-brewed flavored yogurt can have less sugar in it than the store-bought stuff; it also uses less plastic (especially if you make your own) and has no preservatives or other fillers. Thrifty eating is better for the health of the planet.

Bravo to all the Moms (and Dads and other caregivers too) putting food on the table every day.

Google Rents Goats

Twitter world is aflutter: Google Rents Goats!

Official Google Blog: Mowing with goats.

This is old news to Californians, but we’re glad the rest of the world is interested. Goats are a good non-petroleum-fueled way to clear brush from fire-prone parks and open spaces. They fertilize, too!

One year when a son of mine attended a school in East Oakland, I was staggered to drive down the hill and see a phalanx of goats grazing in front of a Spanish-style church, part of an old college. The vista looked like Spain. In another block we were square in the middle of the ‘hood, with the liquor stores, the donut-tracks on the streets, the drug dealers, etc.

All our hills are goat-trimmed. The wildflowers in Redwood Park are gorgeous this year, and if you look closely you can see tiny dried-up pellets of goat turds strewn amongst the blossoms.

East Bay Regional parks also hire draft horses to log timber in steep areas where bobcats or big bulldozers would erode the hillsides.

Lazy Environmentalist: Garden Dept.

Lynnette Evans of the SF Chronicle posts on The lazy person's guide to the fall garden.

I've practiced this sort of gardening for years. Don't rake the leaves off the flower beds - that's mulch. Etc.

But when I get back from my Lebanon trip I really want to pull the dead tree leaves out of my native plants in the front yard - the orange sticky monkey flower and carex Berkeley. Fallen leaves can go UNDER the plants but they look terrible IN the plants.

Middle Eastern Moods in Oakland: Ramadan Karim

It's been so darned hot here, for so many days, that our house has become quite intolerable in the evenings. Tonight I felt energetic and decided to inaugurate our newly repainted back deck by dragging out our Persian rugs, floor pillows, lanterns (thank you Julie and Naomi) and the brass coffee pot from Riyadh. My sons brought their favorite accessories - Jacob, with his sense of the theatrical, played his flute, and Joseph chose to do math sums in a workbook.

We lounged around on the pillows until well after dark, enjoying the cool of the evening. Our garden is surrounded by trees and a small stream runs through the back of the property. There was a quarter moon shining, the stars came out, the crickets cheeped. "This is really great," David said.

"This is perfect for Ramadan," I answered, and I told stories about iftar in Egypt and around the Muslim world. The deck is topped with a pergola, white pillars supporting brown beams that frame the stars, plum trees and sky. We lounged in the darkness, watching the stars emerge; my children snuggled into my arms on either side of me, my husband stretched crosswise, wrapping his legs over my feet. It was like camping out, being luxurious nomads lying on hand-knotted rugs under the night skies.

Ramadan Kareem to all of you celebrating this month. I wish you were here to break the fast on my back deck. It's truly Damascene with the low benches and cushions, almost like a mastaba, but with a craftsman-style wood pergola above.

Woops, a small earth tremor hit us just as I was typing. If the big one hits tonight, at least we know we'll be comfortable on the deck under the stars...

Fun Food By Bus

Today's SF Chronicle Food Page reviews an Afghan cafe in the Emery Bay Public Market food court. Bargain Bite: Pamir Afghan Cuisine.
The food court itself is a wonder - no chain fast food at all, but every ethnic food you can imagine, including a German hofbrau with roasted meats, as well as Asian, Middle Eastern and South American foods. During the 90s all the high tech guys ate lunch there, including my fiance, later husband.

Check out the Google map showing the direct bus from my neighborhood to the Public Market. We usually drive to Emeryville but the bus gets you there, too!

View Larger Map

If you were so lucky as to land a job at Pixar Studios, you could also ride the 57 bus to work.

Emeryville is a former steel and manufacturing town, controlled by a small cadre of corporations; it decided to remake itself in the 70s, brought in artists to colonize the empty warehouses and put up sculptures; the town then expanded into high tech, "big box" stores, bio-tech and now Pixar. The artists were like the cover crop, providing early hipster nutrients to the former factories and working-class homes.

People sneer at Emeryville for being too development and business-oriented, but we all end up shopping there: Ikea, Williams-Sonoma, discount carpet stores, Home Depot. I bought my first wig at Beauty Pie on San Pablo...

Emeryville has also built vast numbers of "loft" condos and apartments, turning gritty stretches of boulevard into yuppie havens. They haven't filled all their office space or sold all their residential real estate, but they have created a new world out of a funky, post-industrial mess. It's not perfect but it's prosperous and somewhat interesting. Arizmendi, the workers' bakery co-operative and offshoot of Berkeley's Cheese Board, has a branch right behind Pixar. Yummy bread and pizza, fresh coffee, and of course wi-fi. You can't open a barber shop in Emeryville without providing wi-fi.

Wine in a Box: Save Planet and Cash

Wine in a Box Protects the Environment and Saves You Money - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com.

More than 90 percent of American wine production occurs on the West Coast, but because the majority of consumers live east of the Mississippi, a large part of carbon-dioxide emissions associated with wine comes from simply trucking it from the vineyard to tables on the East Coast. A standard wine bottle holds 750 milliliters of wine and generates about 5.2 pounds of carbon-dioxide emissions when it travels from a vineyard in California to a store in New York. A 3-liter box generates about half the emissions per 750 milliliters. Switching to wine in a box for the 97 percent of wines that are made to be consumed within a year would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by about two million tons, or the equivalent of retiring 400,000 cars.

I don't drink wine anymore but this concept interests me. We used to have the problem of opening a bottle and not finishing it before the wine went vinegary. I further discovered that there's a darned good pinot gris (pinot grigio) made in Oregon that is sold in a box - it marries well with both Lebanese food and Southern home cooking (fried chicken, ham hocks). So I am predisposed to like box wines. Now we learn that they emit less overall carbon than bottled? Hah!

Of course you should try to drink local wines where possible. Note that trucking is much of the carbon cost. And drinking water from the tap is even greener than drinking wine, now isn't it?

Eschaton's Radical Plan

Duncan Black at Eschaton outlines his

...radical plan to convert all of America into Manhattan:
1) More money for mass transit, including, where appropriate, subway, light rail, better bus systems, commuter rail, and high speed medium haul trains...
2) Changing land use rules especially around transit stops and stations, encouraging higher density and mixed used zoning.
3) Better pedestrian integration between nearby lower density development and higher density development near transit stops.
4) Reverse trend of construction of single access road development.
5) Within existing urban areas, a reversal of the car-centric planning which damages the urban streetscape.

None of this is actually all that radical ... All this would ideally reduce car dependency and give more people easier access to mass transit and at least some small walkable town center type areas.

Black thinks most Americans want to "live in a world where they don't have to have one car per driving age family member, where their non-driving teens have some independent mobility, and where they can walk to get a cup of coffee or a beer occasionally. And, yes, their yards too."

Duncan Black just described my part of Oakland, CA. If AC Transit restored a couple of crucial bus lines to fancy hills neighborhoods, this would describe every section of Oakland. I live on 1/6 of an acre, two blocks from cafes, designer beer, organic produce markets & indie bookstore. 18 minutes by freeway to San Francisco, 25 minutes by express bus. Bus links all over town and to Bay Area Rapid Transit. I could take a bus to anywhere on the planet (via SFO or Oakland airport).

Meanwhile in my urban, hyphy-pumpin', scraper-car spinnin' neighborhood, we have beekeepers, chicken-ranchers and gardeners. My kids are up the hill right now at a day camp in a fly-fishing park, doing art projects and catching fish. They were in the redwoods last week, 1.5 miles away, camping overnight. The bus goes there, too.

View Larger Map

And my 8 year old recently slipped out of the house, walked four blocks to the produce market, begged a lemon and walked home. We don't want him to do that again, but if the crime rate got a little better - fewer cars and more people on the sidewalks would do it- we would feel okay about letting the kids get out on their own. Only a generation ago we did.

It's within our reach, folks. Every town core built before 1945 could work like this, and the later suburbs could be adapted.

Don't Just Do Something, Sit There

Sometimes when crisis swirls and you're running around like a butchered chicken, it's good to remember this slogan: don't just do something, sit there.

I refer to it often. Many times problems will resolve themselves if you don't just do something. Furthermore, simply sitting there, even if only for five minutes, will help you get centered, gather information, and ultimately take an action that's considered and useful as opposed to hysterical and reactive.

 Reducing consumption and saving energy naturally arise from this policy. If you don't just jump up and drive your car to the store to fix your latest problem, craving or anxiety, you will save gas and resources. If you sit there and don't buy a car for a few years, you save money and reduce consumption of new cars. Sitting still is good for your psyche if you're practicing your breathing meditations; it's also free and carbon-neutral.

I just saved $12,000

I don't spend much time thinking about stuff I want to buy, but after living in California for fifteen years I do think about my ride. Whenever I see a Toyota Matrix I fantasize about owning one. My neighbor and former professor, a glamorous Arab-American poet (hi Elmaz!) bought a bright gold Toyota Matrix this summer and does she look hot in it!

Honda Fit, those little Nissans (what are they called?), Honda Civic hatchbacks - I covet a small, fuel efficient car with a little hatchback. I imagine myself driving the kids around in one and feeling smug about saving gas. Why don't I lust after a Prius in this manner? Because they're too popular among people like me and I'm contrary. I was eying a Ford Focus mini-station-wagon the other day, almost asked the owner how she liked it, but decided that was too weird. My friend Alison says the Vibe is also a very good car in this category.

The New York Times has just busted my fantasy, thank you very much:

Your Money - Ditch the Gas Guzzler? Well, Maybe Not Yet - NYTimes.com.

Our current cars are not gas guzzlers - a '98 Honda Accord and a '90 Toyota Camry - if you know my address and search it in Google Maps Street View, you'll see both of them in the driveway.

When I plugged my '90 Camry into the trade-in calculator, prospecting for a 2006 Matrix (not even new!) I discovered that it would take me 17,000+ months to recoup the expense. That's with gas @ $4.50 a gallon. This planet doesn't have 17,000 months of petroleum left in the ground so I guess I can't justify buying even a used Matrix.

I tried a car with better mileage - a Fit I think - and still it would take me decades to recover the cost. Part of the equation is that we hardly drive our Camry. We just don't drive much - hubby works at home, I sit around a lot these days, kids go to school nearby, and I refuse to drive all over the state for shopping.

So, figuring that a used Fit would have cost me about $12K (probably more in this hot market for small cars) I calculate that by NOT trading in my Camry I have just saved all that money.

Now we need to tune up both cars and check their tires for maximum MPG.

P.S. - with this post I inaugurate the Lazy Environmentalist category. Food for another post maybe, even though Susan Straight already wrote an essay like this in the L.A. Times.

Slacker Environmentalists

Susan Straight, a novelist, describes my style exactly: It's so lazy being green - Los Angeles Times.

We practice a sort of a weird Southern California transcendentalism that doesn't fit in at all with American upward mobility, increasing our equity or impressing our friends.

OK so I don't move the couch out into the front yard for the summer, as Straight does, but in almost every other detail she describes our lifestyle. We haven't renovated or even done much maintenance because we don't feel like it; hence we have not sent our kitchen to the landfill in favor of granite counters, custom cabinets, new energy-hogging appliances and so forth. Our living room and dining room furniture is mostly hand-me-downs. I inherited my mother's silver service for parties (and the glass punchbowl from great-grandma but I gave that back - my kids might break it). The children's room is furnished with beds and rug passed on by the neighbors, who redecorate more often than we do. Our newest car is ten years old. And so forth.

I know my relatives, both Lebanese and Southern WASP, think we live like gypsies. They all live in big, new houses with nice furniture and well-maintained lawns. That's lovely for them; on the other hand I'll bet our carbon footprint is one-third the average for my extended family. We earn a reasonable salary, too - we're not poor.

This could all be an excuse for shiftlessness. On the other hand, the writer Walter Moseley suggests in his book on writing a novel that writers put off home repair until the house falls down around our ears. Unless you're a committed handyperson who putters to relax, you have to choose - doing your art or fixing up your house. I've made my choice (and so has hubby, who works on his own creative projects). How nice to think that this choice, while inelegant, helps us "be green the easy way."

My great-grandmother's punchbowl photographed by Randy Bayne.