As promised yesterday, when I announced the winners of the green kitchen tip contest, I have compiled a digest of the other submissions.

I want to thank you all for taking the time to share your tips. It was an exciting feeling to have all 288 of them pour into my inbox throughout the day, proving yet again how much you care about these issues, and how hard you try to minimize your impact on the environment.

I learned a lot, too, and I will work to incorporate as many of these habits as I can into my own kitchen routine. The good news is, green often equates frugal, so now is the perfect time to put them into practice.

Some of those tips may only make a small difference, one that might seem negligible in the eye of glass-half-empty people, but small differences add up, and the important thing is the mindset: once you start to consider your actions and your surroundings with environmentally-conscious spectacles, everything matters, regardless of scale.

I will add that those tips should all be taken with a grain of salt, and a whole shaker of common sense: depending on your personal situation, location, equipment, etc. the greener choice may not always be the one suggested here.

 1. Buy Local and Seasonal
 2. Reduce Food Waste
 3. Reduce Packaging Waste
 4. Reuse Packaging and Containers
 5. Eat Fewer Animal Products
 6. Grow Your Own
 7. Compost
 8. Avoid Using Disposable Paper and Plastic Products
 9. Bring Your Own
10. Save Energy
11. Conserve Water
12. Use Natural Cleaning Products
13. Share

Continue reading »

For my Earth Day post last week, I partnered with Eva from flip & tumble and asked you to help plant trees in Malawi, and to submit your best green tips for a chance to win a reusable shopping bag.

Some 500 tree-planting comments were submitted. Eva and I had planned to have two trees planted per comment, but then we got excited and decided to double the stakes, and in the end each of us funded the planting of two trees per comment. Congratulations and thank you! You have effectively helped plant 2,000 trees, a combination of indigenous, exotic and fruit trees, in the Nkhata Bay District in Malawi. Let’s all make the wish that these saplings grow to be strong trees that thrive for decades.

As for the green tip contest, your response was overwhelmingly enthusiastic, and I received 288 submissions. Today, I am publishing the ten I picked to win a reusable shopping bag. I must say it’s been hard to choose the winners in such a wide-ranging collection of thoughtful, smart, and inspiring tips, and I am working on organizing the rest of them as a digest to share with you next.

See below for the ten green tips that win their submitters a flip & tumble bag (they should have received an email from me) and check back tomorrow for many more green kitchen tips.

See also: Tips for a Green Kitchen, Part II.

Continue reading »

This is part of a series on French idiomatic expressions that relate to food. Browse the list of idioms featured so far.

This week’s idiom is, “Mettre de l’huile sur le feu.”

Literally translated as, “putting oil on the fire,” it means making a difficult situation even worse, exacerbating a conflict, often purposefully. It is equivalent to the English expression, “adding fuel to the flames.”

Note that it can also appear as, “Jeter de l’huile sur le feu” (throwing oil on the fire) or “Verser de l’huile sur le feu” (pouring oil on the fire), and that an older form puts the oil dans le feu (in the fire).

Example: “Il aurait pu porter plainte contre son voisin, mais il ne voulait pas mettre d’huile sur le feu.” “He could have filed a complaint against his neighbor, but he didn’t want to put oil on the fire.”

Listen to the idiom and example read aloud:

Continue reading »

This is part of a series on French idiomatic expressions that relate to food. Browse the list of idioms featured so far.

This week’s idiom is, “Tomber dans les pommes.”

Literally translated as, “falling in the apples,” it is a colloquial expression that means passing out, fainting, losing consciousness.

Example: “Le métro était tellement bondé que la fille à côté de moi est tombée dans les pommes.” “The metro was so crowded that the girl next to me fell in the apples.”

Listen to the idiom and example read aloud:

Continue reading »