Green Options

Carrots straight from the farm are dirty little freaks. Knobbly, hairy, misshapen and covered in soil, these root vegetables bear no resemblance to the neon orange and uniformly shaped clones found in your average supermarket plastic bag. But I love knowing where the vegetables came from and supporting local farms through my veg bag of organic produce (British equivalent of a CSA). I enjoy confronting an array of unfamiliar vegetables or familiar vegetables in unfamiliar guises like a large green ball of cauliflower that’s nearly 90% leaves. My favorite new game is figuring out how to use all these vegetables in delicious vegetarian dishes.

However, I’ve been having a bit of trouble with the carrots as they’ve always been lower down on my list of favorite vegetables. Once the more perishable items like the spinach and tomatoes have been eaten in fresh salads, I find myself with a big bowl full of dirty carrots and potatoes. It’s like getting to the harder advanced levels of the How-To-Cook-Up-Your-Veg-Bag game and I need to challenge myself to solve the cooking puzzle. So I’ve written up two simple recipes that explore the wonderful world of carrots and potatoes: a Carrot Potato Pancake and Crispy Veggie Fritter that’s essentially a vegetarian meatball. Perhaps it should be called a veggieball. Regardless, both recipes are simple and tasty and a great way to use up any root vegetables you’ve got lying around. Enjoy!

Ten credible on line calculators gave Carbon Footprints that ranged from 27 000 to 76 000 pounds of carbon emitted a year for the same input data. An understanding of the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions associated with what we do and consume will give us a better chance of reducing our emissions than using such inaccurate calculators. 

What’s the problem?

J. Paul Padgett and collegues at Vanderbilt University and the University of Washington analysed the results obtained using 10 carbon footprint calculators from credible organisations including; American Forests, Bonneville Environmental Foundation (BEF), CarbonCounter,The Conservation Fund and the Environmental Impact Agency (EPA). Their results are published in the Environmental Impact Assessment Review 28 (2008). They identified the massive range refered to above, that ammounts to a difference of  180% between the lowest and highest figures and concluded that “Given their prevalence and potential influence, CO2 calculators can provide even greater public benefit by providing greater consistency and clarity.