Yeah, I crossed that line.  I’m making my own granola.  This is from a recipe I found over at Angry Chicken via her recipe cheat sheet.  I wish I was like 1/3 as self-sufficient as she is!  I felt pretty cool eating my own yogurt AND my own granola for breakfast today.  It is pretty good, I’m going to play around a little with the oat to nut ratio– I used pumpkin seeds and walnuts.  I’ve read that both are super good for you but as it is now the recipe could be a little better.  Hopefully, one of these days, I’ll have enough time to try Orangette’s daily granola… at the moment, however, it has an intimidating number of ingredients.

Giving up plastic is harder than you might think.  Although I’ve done pretty well with the dairy products and am making some serious in-roads into the personal hygiene thing, there are still a lot of places in my life that are plastic-heavy.  First, at the gym I can’t quite bring myself to use the spray-deodorant.  I’m using some Tea Tree Oil Deodorant at the gym mostly because I don’t want to spray any innocent bystanders. Second, I love frozen berries.  They’re so cheap, they’re so good in smoothies!  I can’t afford to buy real berries and all frozen berries come wrapped in plastic.  One of these days I’ll get around to freezing my own berries, but really that is predicated on finding berries below my $2.50/lb price point.  I’m sort of giving up on that– especially now that it is September.  There was like one brief week where we could get berries at a reasonable price… now, however, I’m kind of closing my eyes and pretending like it is okay since I’ve done well in other areas of my life.

Third, sometimes you buy things you think are packaged in metal and/or glass but then find out you were terribly wrong.  The above sugar tin is a perfect example.  I was so excited!  Tin!  Cheap!  A small amount of an ingredient I’m not sure I’ll ever use again!  Sadly, when I opened the tin (when I was at home and had already paid for it) the sugar was in these single-serving packets and wrapped in a plastic bag…  I felt a little defeated.

Anyway, I’m going to keep playing around with the granola recipe but I think I’ve got the yogurt down.  Even Jon said that he liked my yogurt and he is a very skeptical environmentalist.  Next up is soap and my own deodorant (also via Angry Chicken).  I need to find out where to get some Shea and cocoa butter in the D.C. area.  I could mail-order them, but that almost seems like a waste– are you really saving the environment if you’re paying to ship stuff all the way across the country?  I can’t tell…