Green Options

Editor’s Note: This is a contribution from one our content partners, Divine Caroline.

By Patti Ghezzi for DivineCaroline.com

In an effort to live green and eat healthfully, I invested in a local farm. With my year-long Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) membership, I paid a farm a lump sum at the beginning of the growing season and then got regular shares of the farm’s bounty.

My membership taught me how much work it takes to get food out of the ground. I tasted vegetables I had never tried before, such as pak choi and Chinese red noodle beans.

It was an adventure, but I didn’t renew my membership. Sadly, it doesn’t fit into our family’s budget this year. Still, I think everyone who can join a CSA should consider doing so, even if it’s only for a year. When you add up the plusses and the minuses, you’ll probably come out way ahead, like I did.

Editor’s Note: This is a contribution from one our content partners, Divine Caroline.

By Ransom Riggs of Mental Floss for DivineCaroline.com

Birds do it, bees do it (we think), even educated monkeys do it. So let’s do it, people. Let’s fall asleep. We’ve talked about the whys of taking naps before—they improve mood, creativity, memory function, heart health, and so much else—but never, to my knowledge, have we discussed how to take a nap. In fact, whenever we write about naps, we always get a few comments from people claiming they’re unable to nap during the day; they just can’t fall asleep, or when they do nap, they wake up groggy and unable to work. In that case, read on, my sleepy friends.
1. The first thing you should know is, feeling sleepy in the afternoon is normal.
It doesn’t mean you had a big lunch, or that you’re depressed, or you’re not getting enough exercise. That’s just how animals’ cycles work—every 24 hours, we have two periods of intense sleepiness. One is typically in the wee hours of the night, from about 2 a.m. to 4 a.m., and the other is around 10 hours later, between 1 p.m. and 3 p.m. If you’re a night owl and wake up later in the morning, that afternoon sleepiness may come later; if you’re an early bird, it may come earlier. But it happens to everyone; we’re physiologically hardwired to nap.

Editor’s Note: This is a contribution from one our content partners, Divine Caroline.

By Allison Fishman of MainStreet for DivineCaroline.com

One of my favorite dinners as a kid was “leftover night,” when my parents would resurrect the greatest hits from the previous week.

Only now do I realize they were not only serving me delicious encores, they were also saving money on grocery bills.

By high school I was a leftover epicure. I knew which leftover dishes were better cold (lo mein and pizza), which improved when microwaved (stews and chili’s), and how to morph certain leftovers into a totally different dish, even better than the first.

Here are six of my favorite recyclable meals: