no, I never wondered

This article in the Times food section yesterday cracked me up. A fellow known as Harold McGee, who refers to himself as "The Curious Cook," prattled on and on about whether we really need to use so much water when we cook pasta. He earnestly suggested that using less water than the typical 4 to 6 quarts per pot of pasta would save several trillion BTUs at the stovetop, which translates to a half a million barrels of oil. Give or take. Now I'm already not buying his obviously drunken cocktail napkin math, mostly because it sounds ridiculous and improbable. And because he sounds way too much like Andy Rooney whining, "Didja ever wonder why we use so much water to cook our noodles?" If this article was 60 Minutes, I'd have already clicked away to a MacGyver rerun. (Didja ever wonder why they won't sack that miserable goober Andy Rooney already?)

Anyhow, I decided to keep reading, primarily because Mr. McGee indicated he was going to pester the Big Mama Mias of Italian cooking, Marcella Hazan and Lidia Bastianich, about his little egghead theory and I reckoned Lidia would smack him upside the head for me. Instead, both Lidia and Marcella agreed to experiment with using less water, even though you and I both know they had much better things to do. Upshot? Marcella reported that yes, you can do it, but you have to spend all your time stirring the pasta so it doesn't stick, so you're using less water but expending more effort. And Lidia said, "Yeah, sure, I guess you can do it. Now beat it, buster." Hardly ringing endorsements of his brainy less-pasta-water technique.

Bottom line: When we saved Italy's bacon in WWII we were promised we could use all the cool, clean water we want to cook those piles of tasty pasta we brought home with us. And if God wanted us to use less water to cook our spaghetti, He wouldn't have given us those awesome pots the nice kids at Williams Sonoma will sell you. One of those babies can cook three pounds of pasta at a time, you know! This is America. More is better. And less is almost always, well, less.

my CSI flashlight

A few nights ago, we woke up in the middle of the night to discover that our power was off. Normally no big deal but it's 17 degrees out and you don't want your pipes bursting while you're waiting for the ConEd guys keeping the seats warm at Dunkin Donuts to figure out that the power is down for five square miles, you know?

So I got out the awesome CSI flashlight Santa gave me for Christmas, found my cellphone, and called the electric company. As promised, a truck was there in 20 minutes and the power was back on within a couple of hours. Before I went back to sleep, I took back my mean thoughts about the ConEd guys goldbricking at Dunkin Donuts.

In the morning, I saw that the utility pole at the end of our driveway had been broken just about in half by a wayward dark green Acura. This I knew because my handy CSI flashlight (which we all know solves crimes best in broad daylight) revealed the various telltale car parts the driver had left behind in his hurry not to be arrested by the cops who NEVER patrol our neighborhood looking for those fun-loving kids who spend every Friday night knocking over mailboxes with a baseball bat. Of which the driver of this dark green Acura was one, I easily ascertained with a quick look up and down my street. More than half of the mailboxes were dangling from their posts like a first-grader's loose tooth.

Well, well, the little turd had missed my mailbox and destroyed his car. Yeehaw, surburban justice! I mean, gee, I hope he's okay. Of course, the taxpayers or ConEd or, more likely, little ole me gets stuck paying to replace that handsome utility pole. Still, I like to think of this as a little lesson his mommy and daddy forgot to teach him. Tee-hee.

Anyway, back to my neat flashlight. Sometimes, to conserve electricity, I like to watch CSI in the dark. With those kickass flashlights they're all carrying and those glowy forensic substances they use to find fingerprints and blood and other Vegas-style bodily fluids, it's like sitting in front of a cozy fire—who needs lights! It makes me want to put on my fuzzy slippers and make a nice cup of hot cocoa. When I'm feeling extra conservy, I carry around my CSI flashlight 24/7 so I only have to switch on the lights when I can't find the TV clicker! And playing a friendly game of flashlight tag with a CSI-style weapon? Shock and awe, baby, shock and awe.

To get one for yourself, go to www.csiflashlights.com. You can also get a professional grade crime scene investigation kit for a cool $4895. Sweet.

clotheslines

We had a few 60-degree days last week, here in the land of endless winter. It was such a good thaw that the four inches of ice that has covered my driveway for three weeks finally disappeared. Ice? Oh, you know, the ice from that one snowstorm when SOMEONE neglected to shovel the driveway and then it rained and the snow turned to ice so thick you couldn't bust it up with a pile-driver. I have fallen on that ice five times, bruising my tailbone, bonking the back of my head, and twice sliding into a homeplate of fresh dog poop SOMEONE ELSE neglected to pick up, even though it's HIS dog. But I digress.

This warm spell got me feeling cheery, hopeful, ambitious in a home-makery kind of way. So I got out my old clothesline, strung it up between two big trees in my back yard and dried a load of towels. Oh, pioneer!

I love everything about drying laundry on the line. I love the old cotton rope, the faded wooden clothespins (the ones that look like little soldiers, not the ones that look like binder clips), the saggy old clothespin bag, the creaky old pulleys. I'm sure there are all kinds of new-fangled, eco-friendly outdoor drying systems on the market right now, probably made of recycled plastic grocery bags or old duct-tape wallets or something. But that stuff's just not for me. My clothesline has to be the real thing, banging and squeaking like an old screen door.

Everyone knows that sheets dried on the line smell approximately like heaven will smell, if we somehow manage to get there. And because of that good-smelling factor—and, of course, the dozen or so BTUs we're saving for the folks who really need them—we can forgive the fact that towels dry so rough outside that they can draw blood when you're wiping down after a shower.

My favorite part about drying clothes on the line is how deeply therapeutic it is. Hauling that heavy, wet load up from the basement, dragging it outside all by yourself because SOMEONE won't help you, clipping each piece up on the line one by one for what seems like an hour but is probably only 55 minutes, trying not to be mortified by how dingy and miserable all your stuff looks when you see it in broad daylight. I wonder, is there anything sadder than the sight of your own underwear drying on the line? Still, the whole experience is like a Zen koan. Really.

So I encourage you to give this a try. It may seem like alot of trouble, especially when your nifty dryer is right there next to your washing machine, just begging to do the job the Good Lord meant it to do. But the real benefit—knowing you've done a little something right by this planet—truly outweighs all the effort. Plus, if you put the kids to work hanging laundry, it gives them something better to do with their hands than texting their creepy friends all day.

just call Joe

I'm thinking of calling 1-877-JOE-4-OIL just to see if ole Joe Kennedy himself shows up to fill up my oil tank. That commercial I saw last night for his "citizens energy program" had him carrying the oil truck hose up the walkway to some poor lady's house. He was even wearing sturdy work gloves!

Here's what I want to know: After he finished hugging that poor lady and sopping up her Camelot-worshiping gratitude, did Joe Kennedy tell her where her tank full of oil came from? Did he mention that he got that oil from the power-mad, America-hating, Marxist dictator Hugo Chavez, who's been Kennedy's South American sugar daddy for the last three years? That guy makes me miss the CIA.

Let me get this straight—I'm not allowed to have any of those tasty hand-rolled cigars I like so much because there's a power-mad, America-hating, Marxist running Cuba. But I'm not only allowed, I'm encouraged every night on prime-time television to call Joe so he can personally deliver a load of Communist oil to my front door. That doesn't seem fair—but then those sneaky Kennedys don't play fair. Just ask Richard Nixon!

I think Joe Kennedy should get back to work cleaning up my Hudson River and quit petro-pimping for his good friend Hugo Chavez. In the meantime, though, I just may give Joe a call. Times are tough and I guess I wouldn't mind filling 'er up and putting it on Hugo's tab!

fridge fools

This is what I'm talking about, people. You saw the GIGANTIC piece in the Times yesterday about the "trend" among greenies getting rid of their refrigerators.

First of all, I know I don't have to tell you when the Times devotes this much space to something, you can be sure a) The Wall Street Journal wrote about it a year ago and b) they're stretching the data more than a little to suggest a trend. Whatever. My real beef is with the people in this article who were crapping on refrigerators!

Moses didn't lead us to the Promised Land of Sub-Zeros and central air and TVs in every room so we could later turn up our noses at God's miracles. Every one of these innovations—and a whole bunch of others, including, but not limited to, the electric wine bottle opener my parents gave me for Christmas last year—was a reward to modern culture for managing to survive the Dark Ages, the Inquisition, two world wars, and mid-1970s prime time network television programming (S.W.A.T., Caribe, One Day at a Time—huh?!?). For slipper's sake, we deserve this stuff!

I love all my TVs as if they were my own children, but I couldn't live without my refrigerators. That's right, refrigerator plural—I've got two of them. One is a ridiculous GE Profile Arctica, a stainless steel side-by-side that has been the bane of every day since we bought it five years ago. And one is a brokeny old something-or-other we've dragged around the country for 25 years. This one lives in my basement and I would throw myself on the train tracks before I'd let someone take it away.

Why two? Because the kitchen fridge really is that stupid (it doesn't fit anything, stuff is always falling out, the vegetable drawer broke on like the second day we had it) and the basement fridge keeps things so super cold we fight like kindergarteners over who gets to have the first sip of "downstairs" milk. Plus, it fits everything—Thanksgiving turkey, all the beer you could ever think of drinking, emergency stores of Oscar Meyer bacon, and a vast collection of condiments and ingredients for dishes I'd like to make (pot pies!) but that have recently fallen off my son's list of favorites and moved over to his list of most despised. I don't get that. Anyway, my point is those people in the article who claim they'd rather be without their refrigerators than be responsible for their fridge's millions of pounds of CO2 emissions are lying.

People who unplug the TV so their kids' brains don't turn to mush, fine. Folks who dry their laundry on a clothesline instead of in a dryer, go for it. But getting rid of your refrigerator and using coolers and root cellars and keeping food outside during the winter? That's just posing. These people love it when their friends say, "What, you don't have a refrigerator?" Then they can go on and on about how "easy" it is to be refrigerator-free, how much healthier they're eating now, and how much better it is for the environment, i.e., how much better they are than the rest of us.

I liked the lady in the article who said she'd rather give up meat to reduce her share of CO2 emissions than get rid of her fridge. That's not a bad idea, but then what would I do with all that ground sirloin I bought on sale that's stacked in the freezer side of my idiotic upstairs fridge?

Here's a better idea: Breathe less! For the average 28,000 breaths you take a day, hold your breath about 120 times and reduce your daily personal CO2 emissions by 6 minutes! It doesn't cost a dime and you'd get to keep that awesome refrigerator (or two) that makes life worth living.

Just doing my part,

Karen

(PS, that appliance pictured above is my beloved basement fridge. She's a keeper, am I right?)

green stuff

My name is Karen and I am an auto-environmentalist.

This simply means I don't care about how conservation or preservation or recycling or precycling will help to save the world. I only care about how it will help me. I'm here to tell you that following a strict policy of environmental self-interest is an amazingly practical way to live. It's not a bad way to raise a family, either. In fact, it was one of those special "parenting moments" that turned me into an avowed auto-environmentalist in the first place.

No, it wasn’t cradling a precious newborn in my arms that made me want to buy myself a leotard and join the Planeteers. It was a chilling moment some sixteen years later, while doing the fifth load of laundry in three days, holding in my hands my son’s yellow tee-shirt, the one with “Let’s Hug It Out” in faded letters across the front. I had seen this tee-shirt before, exactly two loads ago. Why was I washing it again, drying it again, and folding it again—when I didn’t remember seeing him wear it in the first place?

It seems he'd put it on one morning, changed his mind about wearing it, and tossed it into the hamper instead of putting it back in his drawer. Didn't seem like a big deal, he said to me when I asked "What the @#$#% are you doing, buster?" Look. I don't care if we were all lazy, inconsiderate teenagers once. I'm getting scoliosis from hunching over mountains of laundry day after day while he's trying on and tossing off shirts until he lands on the one that brings out the blue in his eyes? Homey don't think so.

The day of my epiphany was special. Life-altering, paradigm-shifting, game-changing special. One moment I was wondering like a dimbulb why I was holding that shirt and the next my life took on a focus so sharp it could take your eye out. Seriously.

Don’t get me wrong. I think Al Gore is a self-righteous stiff and I’d step in front of a moving bus before I would describe myself as an environmentalist. And I reject anything marketed to me as “green” or “eco-friendly.” That stuff is for suckers and the folks who are selling it to you are laughing all the way to the off-shore accounts where they stow their mattresses full of green money. How’s that for an inconvenient truth?

I’m just a born-again kitchen table conservationist with a moral obligation to change how my own little family operates. To raise the one child I’ve got to think about where things come from, what happens when we use them, where they go when we’re done with them. To know exactly why he does or buys or uses something. And to quit standing in front of the open feckin’ refrigerator looking for desirable snack options that AREN’T THERE.

We don't recycle in my house to help reduce the size of that putrid landfill we drive past when we go to the airport in New Jersey. We (by "we," of course, I mean Mr. Let's Hug It Out himself) take those empty bottles and cans back to the grocery store for all those shiny nickels that add up to crisp dollars that won't put a dent in the tuition bill we'll be receiving from the lucky university that has agreed to take him off our hands next year.

See what I mean? Quit worrying about how your using less electricity will help the people of some village whose name you can't pronounce that's in some country you wouldn't visit if someone paid you cash money. I promise you, they're not worrying about you right now. You've got your own problems, friend, and if you can find ways to solve them playing the environmental angle, hey, you may just walk off with your own Nobel Prize. A girl can dream, can't she?