The Purpose

I'm starting this blog as a place to document my experiments regarding cooking, gardening and becoming more environmentally conscious. I feel like my lifestyle is constantly changing as I become aware of new options and endeavors and I wanted a place to share my progress (as well as stumble upon other people moving in the same direction or have them stumble upon me). This is by no means a "diary." I already have one of those. It's private and handwritten (just the way I like it).  I just want to share information that I have come across that has been making an impact on my life recently. For starters there are a few books/magazines that have been very helpful. Such as: Fine Cooking, Chicagoland Gardening, Grow Great Grub and Sleeping Naked is Green. I'll go through each one and let you know what I've found to be useful.

Fine Cooking is a great magazine. I'm totally against magazine subscriptions, except in this case. It's low on ads, low on celebrity chef appearances and low on basically anything you don't really NEED. Which I love! There's practically a recipe on every page and, in the specific issue that I happened to pick up, there is a whole article on building your own meatloaf. They give you a list of different ingredients to mix and match and away you go! I love experimenting in the kitchen and needless to say I was sold.

Chicagoland Gardening also offers a lot of useful information, but not necessarily the kind I was looking for. They have a small column about indoor gardening, but not enough to where I would subscribe to it just for that information. Which left me a little disappointed because it's called Chicagoland gardening and it seems to me like most of Chicagoland doesn't contain sprawling backyards. But parts of Chicago do and if you're a backyard gardener, however, I would definitely pick this up.

Grow Great Grub: Organic Food from Small Spaces, By: Gayala Trail definitely hit the spot that Chicagoland Gardening missed. As the title would suggest it's specifically aimed towards indoor gardeners or persons with limited outdoor space. There is a plethora of information in this book and I soaked it all up like a sponge taking notes along the way about which food plants I wanted to attempt to grow this spring. The book is divided into sections so that if you forgot what kind of sun exposure your potatoes need then you can flip to the section about potatoes and look it up. This book pretty much inspired me to transform the front window of my condo into an indoor garden. I'll be writing about that project in this blog. I'm not expecting a big harvest at the end of the year or anything. I'm just hoping to get my feet wet and improve my garden year after year. It's a process!

Sleeping Naked is Green, By: Vanessa Farquharson is the book that I am in the process of reading. Already it has inspired me to start this blog. Vanessa writes about her journey into discovering what "being green" means and if anyone can do it or if it should be left to the hardcore hippies. She, of course, documents the journey via blog by writing about one green lifestyle change per day for a year. I can't promise to give "one green tip a day", but I can promise to pass along my "environmental enlightenment" (as I like to call it) as it is obtained.

Well that's all I have for now.