We’ve been involved in big household projects and I have to, have to, have to organize my office/craft room and our laundry room (if not our entire basement) with my limited free time. Easy meals rule this week!

Sunday — MIL’s turkey tetrazinni and other leftovers.

Monday — Cheesy Tuna Quinoa (recipe below)

Tuesday — Rotisserie chicken, garlic fries, and corn

Wednesday — Hopefully out with my husband, weather and childcare help permitting

Thursday –Chicken chili

Friday — Linguine and clams

Saturday — Pizza night

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Cheesy Tuna Quinoa

1 cup quinoa, prepared as directed (I boiled in 2+ cups of homemade stock)
½ medium zucchini, diced
½ medium yellow squash, diced
½ small onion, diced (for all the veggies I subbed about half a bag of Whole Foods frozen Asparagus stir fry, which is a really nice, inexpensive blend of frozen vegetables)
1 (6oz) can tuna
½ bag of shredded cheese
1 tbsp butter
¼ cup or so milk
Salt, Pepper, & Cumin to taste
Slivered almonds

Blanch zucchini and squash (or, in this case, thaw…). Mix ingredients together in a large bowl and transfer to casserole dish. Top with almonds. Bake at 350 until heated through, about 15 minutes.

It’s Buy Nothing Day, so sage finds will pause in recognition of the consumerism brouhaha that is Black Friday and instead, let’s talk about what we can do with our free time!

• I’m still looking for a few people to do a holiday ornament swap. Feeling crafty? Make something cute and nondenominational with your kid(s) today!
• You might have the ingredients or materials around the house for some fun handmade gifts like Herbal Sugar Scrub or Holiday Granola.
• Gather up books and magazines that are cluttering your space and bring them to your local Childrens’ hospital. We were lucky that our little boys didn’t spend time in the NICU when they were born but many families aren’t so fortunate and the holidays are an especially difficult time to be juggling sick kids and other responsibilities.
• Hit the recycling center. This is our favorite day to bring piles of goods to the city lot, because it’s not a city holiday but the place is generally deserted.

What are you going to do with your Black Friday?

The New York Times last week, Oprah the week before that. Now, even NPR is talking couponing now! There is no bright spot to our global economic situation, but all of this attention has to be good for bargain hunters. The more people looking for and using coupons, the more a company is likely to put them out there. Right?

Clearly, the economic situation has filtered down into the green consciousness, and quickly. None of us want to part with our natural lifestyle choices, if it can be avoided. Treehugger discusses our collective belt-tightening and what it means for the ability to buy organic foods, nontoxic cleaners, and the like. Of course, sage is here to argue that you might be able to find a way to have it all (or at least find a coupon to help…). And I’m not the only one. Divine Caroline shares Smart Organic Choices for Limited Budgets. Eco Child’s Play has posted 4 articles in a series (so far, perhaps more are coming) on Being Green in a Tight Economy (Part I, II, III, IV).

What changes have I made?

• Continuing to drive less and combine errands, even when gas prices feel like a bargain. As a bargain nut, it’s easy to say, “$2.33? Fill ‘er up!” The truth is, prices will stabilize sooner than the economy does, and the impact on the climate hasn’t changed one iota.
• Tightening our “extra expenditures” budget. When I hit the ATM, I take out half as much money as I used to, to see how long I can make it last. In addition, we slide a lump sum into an ING account that I have a debit card for, to cover all of our household expenses besides bills and grocery shopping for the entire month. This is the shoes and cloth diapers and eBay fund, which I augment with anything I get via PayPal. So far, I’ve never exceeded the ING budget, and I try to spend as little of it as possible.
• Making my own cleaners as store-bought ones run out. I’ve been a slave to method and Seventh Generation in places where borax and baking soda would do.

I guess mostly I feel like I know how to make smarter choices, by keeping this site I’ve linked to so many easy, important ideas, so now it’s time to put my money and my efforts where my mouth is!

How about you? What small changes have you made, maybe without giving them too much thought, that you hope will impact your bottom line? Inspire me

Before:

During:

We’re not quite at after, yet. And you’re saying, I see boxes, I see papers, but where is the sewing???

It’s a long story, but like most things, it starts with the triplets. I had a craft/guest room before the babies were born, but that became P’s playroom when their stuff took over our family room. For the past seven months, I’ve thought that I could fit all of my endeavors into our street-facing sunroom and still keep it presentable. Finally, two weeks ago, my husband convinced me that I would never get anywhere if I was just trying to keep the room neat, so I moved everything into the basement office we had been using for general storage.

Now that everything is downstairs, I’m trying to make it functional (and a little pretty) so that I can indeed sew again! I did have room for an adventure with fusible web and a wolf costume, so we’re definitely half way there.

My next post is up at BeCentsAble so make sure to check it out!

If you’re visiting here for the first time, welcome. A new sage reads post will be up tomorrow, new green and natural finds on Friday, and perhaps some of my random thoughts in the middle Get the feed and you’ll always have the inside scoop!

For the first time, I’m participating in the Green Moms Carnival, home to a group of women I really enjoy reading. I’m so happy to join the party!

This month, the topic is gratitude/name three most favorite green things ever, which is exciting but so hard to narrow down to just three things!

1. The eco-friendly cleaning wonders of Borax and vinegar. I’m working on a Borax tutorial post for BeCentsAble so I won’t go into to too much detail, but really, what *can’t* these two things do? Just this week, I ran out of Seventh Generation dishwashing powder and made a substitute on the fly from Borax and baking soda. For $3, you can get a huge box of Borax and a 2 gallon jug of white vinegar at just about any supermarket in America. It’s an easy way to go green that’s soft on your pocketbook and gentle to your family and household items.
2. Perhaps a stock answer, but how about the internet? We don’t have to buy magazines or cookbooks anymore for recipes, design ideas, or parenting tricks. Email is more efficient than snail mail or faxes. More importantly, we have more venues for selling or swapping items before they hit the landfill and more easy access to information about green options. Better information enables us all to do more with less and make choices kinder to the earth.
3. “Knit an x into a y” patterns: knit plastic bags into a new tote, t-shirts into a dish scrubber, I’m a sucker for these upcycling, utilitarian patterns. I love to knit but can’t get bogged down with something complicated or using a lot of pricey yarn. Knitting up a potholder from an old sweater over the course of a weekend is just my kind of thing.

I have a lot to be thankful for this year, my expanding green network just one of them. If this is your first time stopping by sage, I’ll hope you’ll be back to visit again!

After the best of the baby clothes have been snatched up by the resale store or passed along to friends, what do you do with the rest? Here are a few ideas for donating, and for upcycling what might not be feasible to donate.

Donations

A lot of people think initially to drop a box of clothes off at the Salvation Army or Goodwill. Nothing wrong with that, but if you have the time, think about other types of nonprofits that could use the items for their clients:

• Homeless and domestic violence shelters see more children than we care to think about and will accept clothing and baby gear. In my experience, they frequently need car seats in clean and safe condition. Call the office of the shelter nearest you, they definitely have a wishlist handy you might be able to fulfill part of, and your donation is also a tax write-off.
• Your Humane Society will gladly take old towels and bed linens, no matter their condition. A great destination for an excess of receiving blankets!

Upcycling

Even after donating items, you may find you have some stragglers that no one is interested in taking off your hands. You still don’t have to hit the landfills!

• Sometimes, an item is not resale quality due to a hole or a stain. If you’re handy with a sewing needle, a cute applique can fix it right up. If you’re only handy with an iron, try Rikrak iron-on letters, hearts, or birds for a quick fix. I’ve saved all of our outgrown plain-colored onesies to personalize as baby gifts in the future.
• Sewers can also fashion T-shirts into grocery bags (how cute with onesies!).
• Re-nest posted a how-to and pattern for knitting dish scrubbers out of t-shirts. They would knit up so quickly and since it is plain knit stitch, it’s a practical project even for novice knitters.
• Crafting a Green World details how to unravel and recycle sweaters into yarn for new projects. (The photo above is my own recycled yarn project, a pair of slippers for my oldest son from an old cotton Gap sweater.)

Creative re-use ideas are popping up everywhere. What do you do with your cast off items around the house?

If you have a budding Tom Brady, why not pick up this soft cute ball at the super reasonable price of $9?

AppleBlossomBaby’s shop, Blossom Toys, has so many nice, affordable items for kids, from crayon rolls to teething rattles. Even gift sets stay within the “baby shower for a coworker” price range, which is generally hard to do when shopping for home- and handmade wares.

Ask Moxie took up frugal living today, and there are lots of spectacular ideas in the comments that you should check out. She also broached a topic important to me, and closer to my heart on this day (Yom Kippur) than almost any other day of the year: hunger.

More people are going to be eating from food banks. Lots of times what they end up with are food that are not high in nutrition (boxed mac ‘n’ cheese, anyone?), and a consistent diet of that kind of stuff is going to depress mood and cause depression, sluggishness, and weight gain. Which is exactly what people struggling to hold things together financially do NOT need.

I’m wondering if we could think of some nutritionally-good, tasty, not-too-complicated recipes that could be made out of ingredients that can be kept at a food bank. That means nothing frozen, and no fresh meat or dairy (right? It’s been years since I was actually at a food bank and saw the facilities.) We’re talking mostly boxed and canned, with some fresh produce that has a longer shelf life.

If you’re willing to put your recipe-developer hats on and take up the challenge, I’m hoping we can be ready to post next Friday. Then we can figure out how to make these recipes useful. (printing out the recipe and donating the set of ingredients together? making some sort of mini-cookbook for food banks to distribute? something totally obvious I’m not thinking of?)

I used to work for our state’s largest independent food bank. I know a little too much about food insecurity and how it touches so many lives. So I responded to the post and to Moxie privately, as well, offering what knowledge I have.

My comment #1, in part:

I used to work at one of our state’s largest food banks with more than 30 pantries in the bank’s network. One of my former colleagues had a lot of healthy recipes using common donation items, like ramen noodles. Anything that encourages healthy donations is such a plus, but we also loved it when we would receive cake mixes and things like that. Even families facing hard times like to celebrate birthdays, you know?

IME, the recipes are out there, but small pantries in churches and the like wouldn’t have the budget to print a cookbook for all of their clients. One thing pantries really need? Volunteers. This is especially timely, because I always volunteer around Yom Kippur. Most pantry volunteers are seniors and they have a lot of trouble packing and lifting the heavy bags and boxes.

And after a few questions were asked, #2:

Food *pantries* distribute food in a community, while food *banks* distribute food to pantries. So… while a case of tomatoes might overwhelm a pantry, a bank would make good use of them. And a $ donation to a pantry might go to buy food, it won’t go as far as the $ to a bank because they have the real buying power.

That being said, don’t neglect your pantry! If you have the time, find the one in your neighborhood and ask them what their needs are, they’ll definitely tell you. The food bank will answer that question if you call, too. One nationwide food bank is America’s Second Harvest and they do peanut butter and jelly drives at schools. Maybe start one at your school, even if you don’t live in a A2H city?

I wanted to share this all here, because I think it’s important, and say a little more.

First, if your situation dictates, don’t be wary about asking for help. You might think that only unhealthy food comes from a pantry, and it’s true that is often what is donated, but any food bank (and their pantries) that get any federal funding *must* follow the food pyramid and you will get peanut butter, beans, and other proteins, as well as pasta or another grain and likely some fruit. If your family qualifies, utilize your community resources. Get WIC or food stamps and use your dollars (and your coupons!) for all the other stuff.

There is absolutely no stigma to asking for help to feed your family. If you visit at a food pantry, you’ll see, these aren’t homeless single men or some faceless other being served. It’s families like ours that couldn’t make ends meet this month. Consider volunteering if you have the time. It’s very rewarding work and children can help!

We’re headed out of town on Friday and won’t be cooking at home until next Tuesday night. With that in mind, I’m going to dive in and plan out 2 weeks! First, we focus on using up produce and other perishables, then when we return we won’t have much in the manner of fresh food until I get to the store on Thursday and farmers market on Saturday.

Sunday — My husband was at a conference most of the day, so Chinese take out it was for us!

Monday –  Pizza noodles (egg noodles baked in homemade meat sauce with turkey pepperoni and mozzerella cheeseand apple crisp, since I’m trying to use up all of our apple-picking bounty before we leave!

Tuesday — Slow cooker curry with quinoa (with apples!)

Wednesday — This has become our “date night” with our older son. We’ll hit the burger and custard shop for chicken sandwiches before the start of Yom Kippur.

Thursday — Quick big stir fry with all of our veggies and lots of rice and frozen spring rolls. Not traditional break-the-fast food, but I don’t want our produce going to waste while we’re out of town, and I don’t want to use a lot of pots and pans right before we leave, either.

Tuesday — Chicken Tikka Masala simmer with Trader Joe’s naan.. I haven’t tried this new simmer sauce, but it’s in our cabinet and I’m looking forward to giving it a shot.

Wednesday — Something in the slow cooker… teacher conferences at school.

Thursday — Tuna casserole. I’ll post the recipe for this next week.

Friday — Pizza night!

Saturday — No clue… I’m going to check out some other meal plans for some inspiration!