In honor of Earth Day I wanted to give some quick, easy tips to minimize our impacts and celebrate today:

Bottled Water vs. Tap Water: The Facts

What can we do?

It’s no secret these days that animal products, including meat and dairy, have large carbon footprints in comparison to vegetables and other food products. However, what never ceases to amaze me is how much meat Americans consume. Americans have one of the highest rates of meat consumption in the world. It is not uncommon for many of us to eat meat with every meal.

This past week Santa Clara University’s dining commons, which are run by Bon Appetit Management Company, decided to do a low carbon diet day to help bring awareness to their future plans of decreasing meals with meat on Fridays. Oddly every single main dish or special had meat in it. What carbon calculator were they using?

Shockingly, if Americans went vegetarian for one day, the US would prevent 1.2 million tons of carbon emissions according the New York University Polytechnic Institute.

Decreasing our consumption of carbon heavy foods can massively affect our carbon emissions. Switching to a vegetarian diet can save more carbon emissions than driving a hybrid vehicle! A vegetarian diet saves 5040 pounds of CO2 per year and a hybrid saves 5000 pounds of CO2 per year according to PlanetGreen.com.

As Earth Day approaches I am not demanding all humans go vegan, or even vegetarian. Instead, I ask that we consider what we eat and take the challenge of reducing meat to one meal a day, meatless Mondays, meatless weekdays, meatless May, or meatless everyday.

I love lemon. I will choose a lemon dessert or dish over anything else, including chocolate. Right now our tiny tree at my family’s home is bursting with delicious Meyer lemons, which means I am baking them into all of my favorite deserts as well as trying a few new ones.

After collecting a few ripe lemons from the backyard I decided to make a Meyer lemon bundt cake that my mom had found. I got most of the recipe from a video that America’s Test Kitchen had published, but they refuse to give the full recipe and instead insist that you pay for it. As a broke college student I decided to get crafty, and I was able to find the full recipe on a site that was nice enough to just let you enjoy this zingy, flavorful cake.

Ingredients:

3 lemons (depending on size and tartness of lemon), zested and juiced for 3 tablespoons of juice and as much zest as possible

3 cups unbleached all-purpose flour

1 teaspoon baking powder

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

1 teaspoon table salt

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

3/4 cup low-fat buttermilk

3 eggs + 1 egg yoke

18 tablespoons butter (2 1/4 sticks)

2 cups sugar

and as always, local and organic are best!

One nice thing about making a cake is that there are so few ingredients. It blows me away that people buy packaged cakes. It only takes a few more minutes to make a cake completely from scratch. Not to mention that mixing your ingredients at home means it has less packaging, fewer chemicals, and you choose your exact ingredients and where they came from.

The last time I made a bundt cake I forgot to prep the pan. It was a disaster. I spent forever trying to pry the poor thing out and I ended up having to pull it out in mangled pieces. After that experience it always comes pretty quickly to me that I always need to grease the pan. America’s Test Kitchen had a great little tip to melt one tablespoon of butter and mix it with one tablespoon of flour before using a brush to coat the inside of the pan. It was quick and I have never had a cake come out so smoothly or perfectly.

To make this cake as delicious as possible it is glazed twice. Once right out of the pan so the heat of the cake melts the glaze into it and again an hour later once the cake has cooled more to give it the bright white glaze we all love.

Although this cake is by no means healthy, it is nice to indulge every once in a while with a tasty treat. This cake is great for parties or just to share with family, friends, and people in your dorm (especially if you are worried you might eat it all yourself).

This week instead of doing the piles of homework that was assigned to me, I ended up watching Wasteland, which is a documentary about the world’s largest landfill in Rio de Janeiro. Artist Vik Muniz spent two years working with the local garbage pickers who live off the little money they make sorting through mountains of waste to remove the recyclable objects. Muniz hired the pickers to help create stunning portraits of themselves out the materials they work with every day, trash. This film was an incredible look into how much of the world lives. It also made me consider where my garbage goes when I put it out on the curb every week.

every time i go to the grocery store or the farmers market i have an internal battle over which is worse- wasting a plastic bag to protect my groceries on the way home and in the fridge or risking contracting some weird disease from the basket or check out counter. when i do choose to use a plastic bag i try to keep it for as long as possible and reuse it. i have looked around online for good reusable produce bags a few times, but i have never found anything i like. i need bags that i can keep fruit and vegetables in the fridge with so they do not get dried out, and most bags are either cotton or mesh which do not keep in moisture.

my brother has been lusting after scones for months now. i see him at least once a week and each time he brings up scones more than once. the problem with this is that i did not start out wanting scones, but the more he mentioned them, the more i wanted them too. i finally gave in and made us some scones.