procrastinize-blog

[procrastinize-blog]

Meal Prep

Watching meal prep videos on YouTube has been a guilty pleasure of mine for some time now.  In the same way that I used to watch The Biggest Loser while consoling my feelings with an entire tub of Ben & Jerry’s, I would watch other people get organized while I struggled to adult and binged on chips or fast food. 

A while ago, my significant other and I started doing Weight Watchers and with my busy schedule and his laziness, we found that spending a couple of hours each weekend to get ahead with our food prep was vital to our success.

So these are the typical ingredients I start with. Chicken cooked in herbed creme fraiche with baked carrots, parsnips and Mediterranean vegetables and wholemeal bulgar, turkey bacon cabonara with broccoli, salt and pepper salmon with mashed potato and steam broccoli and carrots.

Sidebar: I see all my zero wasters getting angry about the amount of plastic here and I am with you! Buying fresh ingredients without plastic is absolutely impossible, especially here in Sweden where fresh food often travels long distances and unfortunately the supermarkets have killed off all the butchers and fresh food markets. Increasingly more and more brands are using more sustainable plastics made from pea proteins etc but there is a long way to go.  All of the plastics you see here will be reused or go in the recycling, what isn’t recycled is burned and used to heat our houses.  Whilst far from a perfect solution, I do everything I can to reduce the amount of waste that I produce.

Then we get to work.  My significant other and I share chopping duty, him meat and me vegetables.  The way we work in the kitchen together is pure poetry as we work to cook all of these foods simultaneously.

About 2 hours later we have lunch for ourselves and prepped 10 lunchboxes. It’s always very satisfying when it’s done!

I am actually proud of myself that I have gone from procrastinating by watching other people get organized to procrastinating by organizing myself. I think I get some adult points for this one!

[procrastinize-blog]

Zero Waste Laundry

We have all seen pictures of the plastic mountains in the ocean, videos of turtles getting straws pulled out of their noses and head stories about finding ocean animals with stomachs full of plastic bags.  But have you thought about what else you are, literally, pouring down the sink?

The situation with the environment, global warming, the oceans and everything really stresses me out and I am always looking for ways to improve the footprint I leave on our beautiful planet.  Whilst I am far from a true zero waster or environmental warrior, if we all made small changes think what an impact it would make!

I have made so many small changes now that I honestly have forgotten that I did it another “normal” way before.  One of those changes I have made is to my laundry routine.  I found out about soap nuts about a year ago and wanted to give them a try.  I got a 400gram bag on sale for 41 Swedish crowns (that’s about $6 USD). You use about 5-6 of the soap nuts and you can reuse them about 5 times before you throw them away into the compost.  I was never a fabric softener person before, but the soap nuts can leave a *slightly weird* smell.  My fabric softener is made from 1 part vinegar, 2 parts water and about 12-15 drops of essential oil (my favorite is lemon grass).  The vinegar serves to both soften the water and disinfect and the essential oil offsets the “I work at a chippie” smell left by the vinegar and leaves a slightly fresh smell.

My laundry routine has had so many positive benefits, not only for the health of our planet but for my own health as I am not covering myself in dangerous chemicals on a daily basis.  From a purely economic standpoint, if I calculate my per wash one bag of 400 grams divided by 10 grams per batch of 5 soap nuts, divided again by 5 washes per batch, each wash is coming out at about $0.03 per wash.  I am still going on the first bag of soap nuts I bought!

[procrastinize-blog]

Uh oh...flour moths

Last week I went into my dry goods cupboard to get some breadcrumbs to make meatballs (of course - I’m half Swedish!) and realized that we had flour moths. As a university student with assignments due and a chronic procrastinator, this “disaster” was just the excuse I needed to turn my cupboard into something Pinterest-worthy.

First things first...I had to get rid of the moths.  Moths can be a stubborn pest to eradicate so I had to put all my ideas of zero waste out of my head and throw out all my dry goods and clean and spray the cupboards.  I got a tip to leave the cupboards empty for a few days and sprinkle bay leaves to discourage any stragglers.

My kitchen lacks a proper pantry and the cupboard in question is one of those annoying, awkward corner cupboards where things get pushed up the back into the corner and left undisturbed can result in bug problems. I had seen some really nifty solutions on Pinterest using “lazy susans” to make it easy to access everything on each shelf.  Like many things on Pinterest, I often see things that I think are a good idea but almost never do them in reality.  But hey, I’ve got an assignment due - so what better way to avoid responsibilities than with a trip to IKEA?

There are four shelves in the cupboard but as the top shelf is unreachable without standing on a chair, I got three lazy susans, three round place mats and some new glass jars with airtight lids.

I suppose to make this truly Pinterest-worthy I would have to have all matching glass jars etc but as I am trying to cut down on how much stuff I buy, I only bought enough jars to replace the inferior plastic containers (which I will on-sell - one person’s trash is another’s treasure).  Here is the result:

Who needs Netflix, right?