The Creative Salad – Page 36 – Crafty fun and homeschool adventures in Sonoma County, California.

Getting the BPA Out of the Kitchen

We’ve tossed the BPA-laced canning lids and only buy BPA-free canned goods, yet we still have BPA lurking throughout the kitchen. Here’s my plan of attack.

Replace our old salad spinner with a metal or BPA-free-plastic salad spinner:

Toss out our old plastic cutting boards in favor of bamboo ones and say goodbye to our Cuisinart food processor:

Many countertop appliances like food processors or blenders contain BPA in the food bowls. (Yet another reason to switch to the BPA-free Vitamix blenders — we LOVE ours!)

I just contacted KitchenAid and evidently the bowls for their brand new 7, 9, and 13 cup food processors are now BPA free! (The 7 cup is model KFP0711, the 9 cup is model KFP0922, and the 13 cup model is KFP1333.) Since Cuisinart has yet to jump on the BPA-free band wagon for their full-sized food processors, it looks like I’m going to be asking for a BPA-free KitchenAid food processor for the Christmas this year!

Updated November 2012:
Great news! There are now MANY more food processors that contain BPA-free bowls: Breville BFP800XL Sous Chef Food Processor, Cuisinart DLC-2011CHB Prep 11-Cup Food Processor and Cuisinart FP-12DC Elite Collection 12-Cup Food Processor, among others (see Cuisinart’s site for more information about each of their models).

Donate our plastic cooking tools (like spatulas and ladles) and keep our bamboo, wood, silicone, and stainless steel ones:

But it’s not quite so simple.

There are so many other places BPA may be lurking:
– plastic strainers
– plastic mixing bowls
– plastic measuring spoons and cups
– plastic tupperware (instead we use sets of these Pyrex glass and BPA-free lids and Snapware Glasslock Glass Storage Containers!)
– plastic water pitchers (Brita pitcher are BPA-free)
– any type of canned product that doesn’t specifically say BPA-free; including soda pop cans, not just that can of soup! (I recently stopped buying cans of coconut water and now buy terta pak containers instead.)

While I believe that making the above changes are important for our health, it’s difficult to justify the expense of replacing kitchen items that remain functional! I need to remind myself that while it may seem like an extraneous expense, we feel it’s an important one. I guess we had better budget for those new kitchen items. Check back in to see how we do.

Decorating Easter Eggs With Tissue Paper

Last week we shared with you a quick and easy way to blow out eggs and how we dyed Easter eggs using natural ingridents found in our kitchen. This past week we’ve been decorating eggs with tissue paper, an easy and fun decoupage project!

My friend Dorothee cut notches in the top of toddler sized shoe boxes, so we could lay eggs speared with wooden skewers across them. What an easy way to hold the eggs! Using the skewers made for MUCH less mess than our holding the eggs for our kids while they decorated them:

We used small tissue paper circles (a great thrift store score!) and cellulose glue (you could easily use Mod Podge!) to glue the tissue paper to the egg. Be sure to do a coat of glue on top too so the circles stay on securely.

Mama had fun decorating eggs too:

Colorful Little Girl Room Updates

Last year we transformed our spare room (i.e. junk closet!) into a colorful and personalized room for our daughter:

I want to share with you two small, colorful additions to our daughter’s room, both projects from her birthday extravaganza in January that have been rather shamefully hanging in our living room for the past three months until now:
– festive and colorful ribbon chandeliers and
– collages featuring photos of our daughter and her friends over the past four years.

We took our ribbon chandelier (i.e. ribbons hung on an embroidery hoop) and placed it around her light fixture, dressing up an otherwise very hum-drum light (ah, the downside to renting!).

After two months hanging in the living room over the couch, we’re so glad to no longer be bumping into the ribbons every time we sit down.

We hung the photo collages of our daughter and her friends above her bed:

Such a sweet space for our daughter:

Click here to see all of our posts about our daughter’s room transformation, including our handmade felt banners, embroidered portrait, nerdy posters, and repurposed photo wreath frame.

How I Inadvertently Started Eating the Paleo Diet and Began to Feel Better

Here we are, trying to lose weight and attempting another fad diet… Wait, that’s not what’s really going on! Let me back up and tell you about my food sensitivities and how we stumbled on to this one.

I’m gluten intolerant, so I can’t eat your typical breads, pastas, and cereals. I’m also sensitive to corn, and rarely eat processed sugar, caffeine, or alcohol (just cause it makes me feel crappy!). I’m trying to lose weight (spraining your ankle and miscarrying repeatedly seem to be weight-gaining activities for me, imagine that!), so I’m cutting down on my intake of rice pasta, potatoes, gluten-free breads, and cheese.

For the past few years I’ve been thinking that I was completely worn out from being a mom — after all, being on call 24-7 IS exhausting! It turns out that it wasn’t just parenthood wearing me down. Evidently I wasn’t eating what my body needs.

I just started eating meat after two decades of vegetarianism and found it energized me. I stopped feeling worn out and tired all of the time. I started laughing and smiling more because I finally have the energy to really keep up with my four year old.

Over the past month I’ve realized that I feel best eating vegetables, fruit, nuts, and meat every day. Cut out the other processed crap and that’s what I crave. I wake up every morning and eat a meatball. Or a hamburger. With a big bowl of greens and some toasted nuts. And I feel great.

Oh my. Why, that’s the Paleo diet. I just can’t seem to help myself.

That being said, I still eat brown rice occasionally, put milk in my morning cup of tea, and love eating cheese, so I’m not 100% Paleo, but I’m curious to see how I’d feel if I cut those things out.

We’ll see how this goes. I’m typically as skeptical as you are right now… except that I’m feeling so darn good!

A Tree Kale Update

Remember our tiny little tree kale?

We planted it last September and watched in horror as it failed to thrive thanks to some very attentive caterpillars. Then it rested over the winter and, as the rains have returned to Sonoma county, our kale has begun to grow and grow and grow:

Can you imagine this plant growing to over ten feet tall?! That’s a whole lot of kale goodness to come. I do believe we have some kale chips to make.