My Secret Life as a Hippie Housewife

Alright, I’ll fess.  While I consider myself to be a modern career girl, I think I may have a 50’s housewife and a hippie trapped inside me.  When not doing my day job in corporate america, I find myself scouting out recipes for the best homemade jam, gathering food scraps for composting, and burning incense.  Give me an excuse to bake a cake and I’m all over it!  Recycling?  Oh yeah.

Food, nutrition, and environmentalism are a few things that I have a lot of passion about.  In my quest to master them all, I’ve learned that healthy eating and lifestyle habits go hand in hand with being environmentally healthy, which is good for us all. This site is my way to talk about the things that make my heart go a’flutter.  I hope that what I write on this site make your heart go a’flutter too (no pressure, though).  I can’t imagine why anyone wouldn’t be thrilled to the bone about vermicomposting, for example, so I have a gut feeling you’ll find something intriguing. My simple goal for this site is just to inspire you in some way, big or small, to embrace your inner tree-hugging domestic god or goddess.

When it comes to food, I guess I would consider myself a bit of a slow foods foodie, or maybe a whole foods foodie.  Whatever kind of foodie I am, I’m a foodie that aims to eat unprocessed, real, naturally existing food.  In my past I ate my fair share of fake, imitation food but those days are done.  I make most of my food from scratch now, which isn’t often as daunting as it sounds.  I also buy mostly local and/or organic, which can be as daunting as it sounds but is totally worth it.  Actually, I think Alice Waters (author of one of my favorite cookbooks, The Art of Simple Food) said it best with her rules of thumb, which are:

  • Eat locally and sustainably
  • Eat seasonally
  • Shop at farmers’ markets
  • Plant a garden
  • Conserve, compost, and recycle
  • Cook simply
  • Cook together
  • Eat together
  • Remember food is precious

I guess that kind of sums my philosophy up, too (although Alice Waters dare not take credit because I was doing those things before I knew of her rules!). Food is an undervalued resource in our society.  Most people are so concerned with cost and convenience that they sacrifice quality and their health in the process.  We’ve developed amnesia about how to make food from scratch and we’ve become accustomed and dependant on “food” made in ways we can’t understand, with ingredients that we can’t even pronounce, and with recipes we couldn’t duplicate if we tried.  Completely homemade food is a lost art that many people feel is too daunting to even try and that is a sad thing.  I hope to slowly regain that memory and see if I can help other people regain that memory along with me.

In the recipes on this site, I’ll often use and refer to organic ingredients and/or natural ingredients but both can be substituted for non-organic or conventional ingredients.  I will do my best to tell you why I feel the natural, organic/sustainable ingredients are best and why I choose to spend the extra money on them.  I do believe quite strongly that it is money well spent and I hope to convince you of that, too.  But I won’t be upset with you if you don’t do everything I say (although I may throw a rotten tomato at you when you’re not looking).

Other than food topics, you’ll find info on composting and making your own non-toxic cleaning supplies.  Both are cheap, easy, fun and exhilarating!  Okay, I guess “fun” and “exhilarating” may be too strong, but both are really cheap and easy, that’s for sure.

So there you go!  I hope you enjoy what you find!

Strawberries