Green Options

Stop in at most diners around the country and each breakfast menu reads nearly the same: Two eggs, toast, bacon. Pancakes with sausage. Cereal. Add grits, if you’re in the South. Perhaps a variation on toast in other parts of the country.

Despite the fact that we run Inn Serendipity B&B and “breakfast” is part of our business, we find the average American breakfast is, well, boring. With the same old, same old

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How far away do you live from the nearest grocery store? More than likely, you pass one on the way to school, two on the way to work and maybe even three on the way to the gym. If this scenario is something you can relate to even slightly, you do not live in a food desert.

According to The Low Income Project Team, food deserts are "areas of relative exclusion

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Editor’s note: We’re very happy to welcome Lisa Kivirist to the Green Options writing team! Lisa, along with husband John Ivanko, is the author of Rural Renaissance: Renewing the Quest for the Good Life (which we reviewed), and Edible Earth: Savoring the Good Life with Vegetarian Recipes from Inn Serendipity. Lisa and John own and run Inn Serendipity, a central

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Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is the true-life chronicle of author Barbara Kingsolver’s decision to move to an Appalachian farm and eat locally produced, organic goods for one year. She explains that her highest shopping goal was to “get our food from so close to home that we’d know the person who grew it.” Her husband and two daughters joined her on this journey.

The family raised an

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I live on the Palouse (a region of eastern Washington and northern Idaho), which is famous for its rolling hills and crops such as wheat and lentils. When I think of eating locally-grown foods, lentils instantly come to mind. In fact, lentils are taken quite seriously here. In nearby Pullman, Washington, there is even an annual Lentil Festival celebrating the lovely legume. No, I'm not kidding.

The Palouse is known as the most

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Each day, millions of Americans sit down to a meal, and coat it with a variety of condiments that have their origins in the Southwest of North America. Salsa and hot sauce are two of the favorites, and are a mainstay at dinner tables and restaurants across the country and the world. However the traditional salsa or hot sauce is a mass-produced mess, loaded with preservatives, “natural” and artificial flavors, and other chemicals

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Readers may remember my first Adventures in Homebrew, of several weeks ago. Then, in a somewhat bumbling and hapless fashion, a friend and I cooked up some homebrewed beer, and set it to ferment in a large glass jug. Now it's time to bottle the fermented concoction, and set it on its final path to being real beer.