Why Cloister Honey is an EcoFlirt favorite: Not only is it locally produced (yay), it’s also raw honey, making it a natural remedy for such things like allergies and migraines (learn more benefits of raw honey). Their flavors make honey a more versatile ingredient than I imagined it could be. Put the cinnamon honey on a sweet potato and it tastes like pie; add lemon zest honey to tea for instant relaxation. And then this one… arbol pepper honey on grilled shrimp. (I was assured that this recipe also works beautifully with scallops.)

Arbol Pepper Honey Shrimp

• Shrimp (extra credit for sustainably raised – try Clean Catch Fish on Selwyn Ave.)
• Cloister’s Arbol Pepper Honey
• Butter
• Garlic

Brush shrimp with melted butter and minced garlic;
grill for about five minutes on both sides.

Right before you remove shrimp from grill, brush each side with the pepper honey.

That’s it. Really. Serve it alongside rice and veggies for a fantastically easy (and healthy) dinner.

1. The Great Tree Debate: Live or Artificial?

Is it more eco-friendly to use a live Christmas tree or an artificial Christmas tree? It’s a debate often heard amongst eco-nerds: is the reusability of an artificial tree enough to compensate for its plastic components? Isn’t it bad to cut down trees for the sake of holiday décor? The easy answer: it’s better for the environment to use a live Christmas tree. The fine print: this is only true if the tree is grown from a tree farm that continually replaces trees. If you go all Clark Griswold and chop down a tree in the forest that will never be replaced, then you’re better with the artificial one. If you live in Charlotte, Mecklenburg County offers free Christmas tree recycling so your tree will soon become someone’s compost.

2. Use LED Lights

Switching to LED bulbs for your Christmas lights is an easy way to green your Christmas décor. According to Consumer Reports, LED lights run about 1 – 3 kilowatt hours of energy, while the traditional incandescent lights use 12 – 105 kw. As the reduced temperature of LED bulbs means they can use plastic instead of glass, they’re also the safer and more durable choice.

3. Buy Less Stuff

Christmas presents usually mean a lot of unnecessary stuff floating around – producing those things takes an environmental toll while not always providing much meaning for the recipient (how many lotion sets does a girl need?). Give meaningful, less “thing”-oriented presents like tickets, food or donations, presents that provide meaning without adding to the piles of stuff that wind up in attics and closets – and later, in landfills. To see the full impact of your purchases, read the anti-Cyber Monday ad from Patagonia called, “Don’t Buy This Jacket.” You’ll be amazed by the environmental impact of making a single jacket.

4. Get Original with Gift Wrap

Reduce your paper consumption by creating your own wrapping paper for gifts. TreeLiving has several creative ideas to set your gifts apart, including creating gift wrap from children’s art work, old maps, or even fabric. Beat that, Hallmark.

5. Buy Less Holiday Décor

Why purchase new decorations that you’ll only use once a year? Try to repurpose decorations you have already: use glass dishes as unique votive holders, decorate your tree (or even centerpieces) with pinecones from your yard, use wine bottles for candlesticks. The Green Your site has a list of ideas to get your creativity flowing.

Garlic has a reputation of being a cinch to grow. It requires sun but not much room: you can plant it in your garden, intersperse it around other plants, or even grow it in containers.

Why grow garlic? If you’re not already, be a garlic snob. Don’t be that person buying chopped garlic in a jar. (As Anthony Bourdain says, “Too lazy to peel fresh? You don’t deserve to eat garlic.”) Don’t be that person buying those sad, little garlic heads that shipped in from China. (I find it embarrassing when my food is better traveled than I am.)  Get the good, quality stuff from farmers markets, specialty stores, or your garden. As someone who’s spent an embarrassing amount of money on garlic, I’m opting for the garden this year. So let’s get some serious garlic snob cred by Spring while saving some cash.

How to Grow Garlic

And as an ode to garlic, a little more from Anthony Bourdain (swoon!):

“Garlic is divine. Few food items can taste so many distinct ways, handled correctly. Misuse of garlic is a crime. Old garlic, burnt garlic, garlic cut too long ago and garlic that has been tragically smashed through one of those abominations, the garlic press, are all disgusting. Please treat your garlic with respect. Sliver it for pasta, like you saw in Goodfellas; don’t burn it. Smash it, with the flat of your knife blade if you like, but don’t put it through a press. I don’t know what that junk is that squeezes out the end of those things, but it ain’t garlic. And try roasting garlic. It gets mellower and sweeter if you roast it whole, still on the clove, to be squeezed out later when it’s soft and brown. Nothing will permeate your food more irrevocably and irreparably than burnt or rancid garlic. Avoid at all costs that vile spew you see rotting in oil in screw-top jars. Too lazy to peel fresh? You don’t deserve to eat garlic.”

—Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly

Breakfast (or Brinner) for Four

Vegan Snacks for Friends

Ecolicious is to Plaza-Midwood what Paper Skyscraper is to Dilworth. It’s that gem of a store, the place you buy gifts that leave people asking you where in the world you found them. Only Ecolicious has another perk — all of its products are environmentally friendly and cruelty-free.

Love these! (By "Not Made in China. Also available in t-shirts)

Home decor and accessories

Environmentally friendly toys

Chemical-free cleaning supplies

And, of course, the wristlets. Handmade with 98% repurposed materials. The material of the lining had a previous life as shopping bags!

False. And Slow Food USA will prove it.

Slow Food USA has issued a challenge: Can you make a delicious meal made with quality ingredients for the cost of a fast food value meal? They think you can. So do I.

My Plea for Recipes

The goal of Slow Food USA’s $5 Challenge is to make a delicious, slow food meal that costs no more than $5 per person. EcoFlirt wants to up the ante and take this concept local. Charlotte-area farmers, retailers, foodies, chefs, bloggers, and food lovers — send me your recipe ideas for great five-dollar-per-person meals. Extra credit for anyone who uses an ingredient or two specific to a Charlotte-area store, farm, or producer.

If you want to participate (Eating great food and saving money! How could you not?), sign up for the Challenge with Slow Food USA, and begin to plan your meal. The date of the frugal feast is set for September 17, 2011. The setting? Wherever you’d like. It can be a potluck with friends, a romantic meal for two, or an indulgent feast for one. While you plan your concept, I’ll pick the brains of local chefs/foodies/farmers for their recipes and post them here in a five-dollar feast online cookbook.

After our meals, let’s share photos and stories of our five dollar feasts. It’ll be our way to show that eating healthy, slowly and locally can also mean eating frugally. Let’s show Charlotte that “your way, right away” has nothing on “our way” — healthy food that connects us to our local community and respects the land.

If you want to contribute a recipe to include in the EcoFlirt five-dollar feast cookbook, please leave it as a comment on this page. I’ll gladly credit your business or blog, so let me know if you’d like me to include your name and any relevant links or information with the recipe posting.

Let’s feast, Charlotte!

Related Links:

• Five-Dollar Challenge Recipes
• View Slow Food’s USA $5 Challenge Flyer
• Learn more about Slow Food USA

Preparing to go vegan was harder than going vegan. Prior to starting, I surrounded myself with books, all of which reiterated the same things: A vegan diet is easy! And so inexpensive! I’d like to protest both points. While some foods were obvious, others were surprising. Honey? Not vegan. Wine? Most of that isn’t either. One book that extolled the convenience of vegan foods then suggested recipes including umeboshi vinegar, burdock, kombu seaweed, and Gomashio. You know, the staples. Thanks to Google and helpful vegan bloggers, however, I soon had a semi-recognizable grocery list.

While veteran vegans know how to work the diet, it’s intimidating for a newbie. It felt like the first day in a foreign country when basic customs seem embarrassingly confusing. To extend the travel analogy, the prices made me feel like I was shopping in Euros. The maple sugar in one recipe was $15 for a small bag. Of sugar. Not happening. I had to pay MORE for soy ice cream than real ice cream. Part of me died at that moment. I wandered the aisles of Trader Joe’s, EarthFare, Healthy Home Market, and Harris Teeter fighting sticker shock and reading fatigue. As I shopped and became hungry and cranky, I began to harbor the paranoid suspicion that veganism was created to omit anything that brought me joy.

Seeking the silver lining, I changed perspectives to see the 72-hour vegan experiment as a challenge, and I do love a challenge. I rethought how I cook — all those ingredients I mindlessly throw together had to be scrutinized and often substituted. It inspired culinary creativity. I made a yummy vegan pizza with a homemade sauce and Trader Joe’s soy chorizo (love that stuff!). Even the dreaded vegan cheese wasn’t a showstopper because everything else had so much flavor: tomatoes, peppers, and herbs from my garden, the fresh whole wheat crust. By taking away my favorite part — real cheese — I paid more attention to the rest. That was the lesson: instead of focusing on what I couldn’t use, I focused on ingredients I neglected previously. At no point was I hungry or dissatisfied. It was a delicious few days. (Really.) There was even vegan junk food — chocolate peanut butter cups that were divine. (Really.)

As I became more confident with vegan recipes, the focus shifted again. The books sparked a lot of thought about what I eat and why. If you think about food too long, things get weird. While the vegan diet seemed very restrictive at first, I imagined if everyone around me had always eaten vegan. Would I break with cultural tradition to ponder what cut-up pig would taste like? Or eye the udder of a cow and think, Hey, I’d like to drink from that? Highly unlikely.

So the big question: why do we eat what we eat? Why do we find some things unthinkable and others acceptable? For example, gelatin — which normally contains animal parts and is a vegan no-no — can now be made from human parts. Would you eat human-derived gelatin? Why? Also, they can make artificial meat made from human feces. Would you eat that? Is eating poop more gross than eating an animal? What if that animal was a dog? If you realized your diet was envrionmentally destructive, would you change it? What about a diet that’s unhealthy? Or does taste trump all?

AGHH! It’s enough to make you ditch food for whiskey.

Let’s clear all judgment and embrace the confusion and moral ambiguity of it all, though. I’m not advocating one diet over another; I’m advocating conversation, not conversion. None of us can claim moral high ground here. We all make compromises; we can all admit hypocrisy. For example, myself: From animal and environmental perspectives, I feel that eating meal is wrong and have almost excluded it — but show me a cheeseburger at a summer BBQ and my resolve melts like cheddar. But would I kill a cow? Never. Would I eat a cow if someone else killed it? Sometimes, especially if it’s medium rare with a sharp cheddar. That’s so morally reprehensible. And delicious. While I’d love to go local and sustainable for all my food, the budget doesn’t allow for it – grocery stores fill the gaps. We have lines to draw based on culture and ethical code — not to mention budget, convenience, and personal taste. It’s an interesting question to ponder: Why do we eat what we eat? Where are our compromises? What are our priorities?

And here I thought the hardest part of the weekend would be the lack of cheese.

This doesn’t have to be an all-or-nothing subject. The purpose of this blog is to show the power of small steps, of experimentation. When we have these conversations about diet, think of them as an opportunity to change just a little bit. Do we need to adjust our diet — even slightly — to align with our priorities? Perhaps a Meatless Monday? A pledge to buy 10% local foods? Weekday vegetarian? We don’t have to do it all to accomplish a lot.

So now my three days of vegan eating are over. Somehow, though, much of the foods I eat are still vegan: new habits die hard as well, I suppose. But tonight, there will be ice cream. Nothing pairs better with moral quandary than real vanilla bean ice cream.

• Previous Post: Temporarily Vegan, Day One

I have many reasons for going vegan but only one reason for NOT going vegan. In the “pro” column are the biggies: I get that the vegan diet is better for the earth, for my health, for animals. Intellectually, vegan is the way to go. It represents my priorities.

Another reason I’m experimenting with vegan is because I’m tired of the anti-vegan hate. I’m tired of people lumping veganism with crazy fad diets. I’ve even heard so many of these very fad dieters — you know the type, the ones who live without carbs, live wholly on protein or weird little shakes — get judgmental on vegans for their extreme eating habits. Dude! (And I only say “Dude” when I’m angry…) At least vegans adopt the diet for loftier goals than jean size. What we choose to eat should represent how we want our bodies to feel, how we want our earth to operate. People forsake meat and cheese after a heart attack, and that’s noble; people forsake carbs to fit into a bikini, and we shrug; yet people skip animal products to protect their health or planet or animals, and it’s seen as crazy. Why are we so touchy about veganism? Does it touch a moral nerve to know that people live happily and healthily without animal products? In defense of my vegan brothers and sisters, I’ll give this a shot.

I mentioned, however, I have one reason for not going vegan. And for this, I turn to the curmudgeonly love of my life, Mr. Anthony Bourdain:

“Vegetarians, and their Hezbollah-like splinter-faction, the vegans, are a persistent irritant to any chef worth a damn. To me, life without veal stock, pork fat, sausage, organ meat, demi-glace, or even stinky cheese is a life not worth living. Vegetarians are the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit, an affront to all I stand for, the pure enjoyment of food.”

And I get what he’s saying. I love food. Love it. I can’t eat a good piece of cheese without sighing romantically — hell, I can’t eat a cheap, Kraft cheddar without oohing. And butter! And eggs! How does one live without such essentials to happiness? While I can live without meat and be just fine, I can’t imagine life without seafood. Shrimp sauteed in butter! Fish tacos with mounds of cheese! How is it that the vegans don’t feel utterly short changed? Why is it they look healthy and fit, have good skin, and seem generally OK?

So for three days, my head will win. Three days of a vegan diet. I can do this. I think.

What I hope to get out of this experiment… I hope to find new foods to introduce into my diet so that it leans more toward a plant-based diet, even after I return to the land of eggs and cheese and shrimp on Monday. I hope to explore those scary sections of grocery stores I usually rush through while wondering, “What IS arrowroot anyway?” I hope to increase my awareness and sympathy for what it feels like to be a vegan in a meat-eating world.

What I fear… Having to ask questions like, “What IS arrowroot anyway?” and sounding like a moron. Spending a fortune on food that won’t taste good anyway. Trying any food surrounded by quotation marks (if I can’t have cheese, I won’t have “cheese” or “cheeze.” I mean, dude. C’mon. Not fooling anyone.).

Today is day one. I’ve got some cookbooks, bookmarked websites, a ton of questions, and sixty more hours. Wish me luck.

(And if you’re vegan, please send the yummiest recipes you’ve got!)

For more info on the vegan diet, visit http://www.vrg.org/nutshell/vegan.htm

Learn how vegan diets help the environment: http://www.vegansociety.com/resources/environment.aspx