Green(ish) Challenge 3 Wrap-up

It's Monday. And I have used the drier about twice as much as I did last week, so I am counting this one as a fail-- not an epic fail, just not a success. 12 loads of laundry, 5 of them dried in the drier. The problems that I had mostly focused around the weather, which was a bit unpredictable this week-- one day I was overly cautious, another day I wasn't cautious enough.

I'll keep hanging it up whenever the weather permits-- I find laundry much less burdensome if I can spread it out, so I try to do that whenever I can. This was a bad week for laundry... a bad week for exercise (no idea why) and a sad week in general (the loss of our friend). So we'll start over again. I think we have a decent routine going, and that's half the battle.

This week we are getting ready for a trip to the beach, when we will have our fourth green challenge of the summer... bringing our cloth diapers along on vacation.We're going to use mostly hybrid diapers-- here's hoping this goes well.

Things that did go well this weekend:
We picked strawberries with some friends and had a lovely time. All the berries have been eaten, frozen, or cooked. Rachel and I made no-sugar freezer jam from this recipe and it came out really well, if you like tart jam (we do-- and Rachel ate it up with no comments about it not being sweet enough).  I saw in the comments that some added small volumes of sugar or honey to this to sweeten it just a bit. It set really well (much better than other freezer jams I have made-- the extra pectin and the slow cooling seem to help).  I also made this cake for the 4th-- we haven't tried it yet but it looks really good. I was going to use blueberries and strawberries together but didn't get out the blueberries and therefore forgot them.

They look good from this angle. You can't see just how many under-ripe berries came home with us. But they were tasty anyway!

Kale Chips: prepared with Adam. Note to self, do not let Adam add the salt next time.
Continued good use of CSA share, despite some menu changes (and my ILs had us over for dinner last night). We have eaten everything or will be eating it tonight (except for a few beets...which are going to my dad who is, frankly, way more fond of beets than any of us).