Green Kitchen: Use-Up-Your-Herbs Cilantro Pesto

Give me your tired, your poor, your wilted herbage straining for the trash can, the rotting refuse of your crisper drawer. Send these, the yellowing, long-forgotten to me, I will make them into awesome pesto!

That’s what your food processor is saying right now, if it were also the statue of liberty.

Talk about eating and cooking in environmentally friendly ways often comes back to the same ideas – eat local, eat unprocessed, eat happy meat. These are awesome ideas – they connect your kitchen to lovely, independent farms, shortening the distance from the soil to your fridge – but they are also sometimes difficult ideas. 

Not everyone has access to greenmarkets. Not everyone has the education or skills to choose or prepare unprocessed foods. Not everyone can afford local, free-range, grass-fed, ethically raised meat. It’s sadly easy to sigh in resignation when we can’t manage those good choices and lose sight of a good choice every single one of us can make.

Frugal Food Shopping: Hitting Up Multiple Stores

NOTE UP TOP: In almost four years of blogging, I can’t believe I haven’t dedicated a column to the following food shopping strategy, because it’s one of the most effective around. Experienced frugalists, you're probably familiar with this already, but it shouldn’t stop you from seeing the, er … surprise note from … uh … Bob, um, Barker? … at the end of this article. So let’s get to it.

My old apartment was within a mile of three major supermarket chains. 

“Whee?” you might say. “Let’s throw a fiesta?”

And while the prospect of ending this column here and grabbing a margarita is highly tempting, I endeavor to persevere, meaning this: It may sound like it ain’t no thang, but having access to multiple supermarkets allowed me to save huge, big, hulking bucks on my grocery bill every month. In fact, hitting up two or more food stores is one of the most effective food shopping strategies around. (Where have I heard that before?)