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Very Vegan Valentine’s Day Dinner


Join Infusion Tea for their annual candlelight, gourmet vegan dinner for Valentine’s Day.

On Saturday, February 13 at 7:30 pm, they will offer a fabulous four-course experience complete with wine or tea pairings.

Dinner is $39/per person. Email to make a reservation or for more information.

Menu:
Black Bean-Avocado Salad Stacks
Cream of Roasted Red Pepper Soup with Basil-Spinach Puree
Truffled Wild Mushrooms with Whipped White Beans
Chocolate Decadence Cake

Enjoy FREE BEER (while it lasts!) and live music from our house
musician Lauren Lester, while you shop for Valentine’s gifts at Artistree, the co-op that shares space with Infusion Tea.

 

Want to know more about tea?  Interested in finding the right variety alooseleaf tea varietiesnd flavor for you?  Curious about how to maximize tea’s health benefits?  Spend an hour learning and discussing with Infusion’s Tea Manager. We’ll taste a variety of teas, compare leaves, and answer questions about the characteristics and benefits of specific tea varieties.

$15 per person includes dinner. Reservation and prepayment required — call (407) 999 5255 or email us here.  

Tea Tastings will take place on the Second Monday of each month. Come to one or all of the sessions! The schedule is as follows:

Monday, February 8:  Black Teas of India and China
Monday, March 8:      Oolong Tea & Metabolism
Monday, April 12:       Green & White Teas
Monday, May 10:       Herbal Teas, Rooibos & Yerba Mate

Serve God, Save the Planet is a thoughtfully written book explaining how people of faith should take the fundamental principles of living a Christian life and apply it to their daily lives in an effort to be more eco-friendly and protect God’s creation.

Written by J. Matthew Sleeth, MD, a former ER physician, Serve God, Save the Planet is an easy to read book that weaves tales of Sleeth’s personal stories to exemplify how living a more eco-friendly lifestyle often goes hand in hand with helping your neighbors, looking out for the poor and, in general, protecting the health and safety of the varied people of the planet.

While Sleeth talks about many common practices of eco-friendly lifestyles, such as reducing energy use and eating local foods, he also goes beyond the typical mantras and speaks of reducing your dependence on television, decluttering your life and honoring the Sabbath.

Using stories of his personal ups and downs throughout all aspects of life, not just his efforts to live an eco-friendly lifestyle, Sleeth realistically portrays how a life of excess and consumerism can often parallel a life of indifference to those less fortunate in the world who are being especially affected by environmental concerns.

At it’s core, going green is really about doing good for others, whether right here and now or for generations to come.  Serve God, Save the Planet puts this into a faith-based perspective and inspires readers to start doing good….even if it is changing out a lightbulb!

Kimberly Button is a green living consultant with greenWell, an eco-wellness company that helps families, businesses and churches create healthier, greener living and working environments. For more information on greenWell’s services, including presentations, workshops and consultations, visit www.greenwellconsulting.com.  For green and healthy lifestyle tips, visit greenWell’s blog at www.getgreenbewell.com.

CVS just came out with their Greenbagtag – an innovative way to encourage people to stop using plastic bags and be rewarded for doing so.

If you’re a CVS ExtraCare card member (it’s free to join!), then you can buy a Greenbagtag for. 99 cents at CVS. Skip the plastic bag on your purchase, swipe the Greenbagtag card and after four visits, you’ll earn $1 in Extra Bucks on your ExtraCare card.  Extra Bucks work just like cash at CVS and you can really save some money if you visit CVS on a regular basis.

CVS joins Whole Foods and Target by financially rewarding customers who skip the plastic or paper bags and use their own.  Whole Foods offers .10 cents for each reusable bag, while Target offers .05 cents for each.

Kimberly Button is the founder of greenWell, a green consulting company which helps families and businesses create healthier, greener living and working environments. Visit www.greenwellconsulting.com for more information on greenWell’s green living services in central Florida and www.getgreenbewell.com for green and healthy living tips.

Ethos Vegan Kitchen, located at 1235 N. Orange Avenue, Orlando, has many events every month that are open to the public!  Some of their upcoming events for January and February are:

  • Tuesday, January 26, 2010, 7-8pm on the patio: Intro to Vegan Cooking.  This is a FREE cooking demonstration and Chef Kelly will cover how to make sauces and gravy. 
  • Saturday, January 30, 2010: FREE cookies for all to help celebrate Ethos Vegan Kitchen’s 2 year anniversary!  Yummy!
  • Monday, February 1, 2010: Buy Local Orlando Day.  Show your Buy Local Orlando card and receive a 15% discount!
  • Thursday, February 4, 2010: 10% day to benefit Health Care Center for the Homeless.  Get great vegan food while supporting a very worthwhile cause!

If you go to their website, you can sign up for their monthly email newsletter that will let you know of all their upcoming events.

A community garden volunteer opportunity!

UCF Community Garden Workday

10 AM – 4 PM

UCF Arboretum

Spend some time up close and personal with an organic garden. The UCF Arboretum has a one acre community garden for students and also open to the public.

Please join in this day to help plant & pull weeds. The garden is well established with a great diversity of vegetables, herbs, & fruit trees. This garden workday is cosponsored by Simple Living Institute, Inc.

The UCF Arboretum is looking for ongoing support from the greater Orlando communicty and you may volunteer any time. Bring your tools, gloves. Carpooling is highly recommended as there is limited parking at the campus. Sign up if you would like to join in. info@simplelivinginstitute.org or call 321-228-4310

It’s almost planting time… here’s another garden opportunity!

Organic Growers Meeting

7 PM – 9 PM

Camilla Room,
Harry P. Leu Gardens

1920 Forest Ave,
Orlando, FL 32803

The Organic Growers meeting is free and open to anyone interested in organic gardening, organic foods, or products. Arrive early (6:30ish) for socializing & food. After the meeting, the discussion continues til 10p at nearby Ethos Vegan Kitchen.

THIS MONTH

Tina Richards, Environmental Education at UCF Arboretum, will share her expertise & experience setting up the highly successful Organic Community Garden at the UCF Arboretum.

A follow up field day helping at the UCF Community Garden will be held Friday Jan 22nd from 10a to 4p.

A cooking, tasting demo is being added to the monthly meeting: Sign up to show how to prepare something from your garden.

Uncle Matt’s has shared some citrus for us to sample at the meeting.

MORE INFO

As always, bring any surplus from your garden to share, treats for the tasting table, and plants and gardening supplies for the raffle table. (Tix $1 each, 6 for $5) Every month an abundance of raffle items appear along with some tasty garden treats.

Our sales table items includes: totes & t-shirts @$10 $8 each for members worm bins & vermicompost products assorted plants & seeds burlap cloth and garden amendments Let us know if there are any plants or supplies you would like to buy. That’s also where the raffle tickets are sold. $1 each or 6 for $5.

Here’s one for those who are spring cleaning!

E-PASS Shredding and Recycling Event

It’s time for a fresh start! Get a leg up on Spring cleaning and help prevent identity theft by shredding those documents you’ve  accumulated and recycling electronics you are no longer using. E-PASS is sponsoring a shredding event Saturday, January 16,  2010, at the Colonial Plaza (2728 East Colonial Drive, Orlando, FL 32803) near the intersection of Primrose and Colonial.

The  event is scheduled from 10:00 am to 2:00 pm in the parking lot area in front of where Circuit City was once located. Look for  the orange E-PASS tent. E-PASS will also be giving away goodies including certificates for a free E-PASS Mini sticker tag  (limited quantities apply).

This is a free event, open to everyone. Residents can bring their documents and watch as they are shredded. In addition,
participants can bring working and non-working electronics for recycling. Data will be destroyed as appropriate and a
certificate of destruction will be available. See below for accepted items. E-PASS is not responsible for any items dropped off
during this event.

The following electronics will be accepted, working or not working: desktop, tower, laptop computers; CRT, LCD, plasma
monitors/displays; televisions; printers/plotters; fax machines; telephone systems, switches; cell phones, PDAs, radios;
stereos; VHS/DVDs; video games; projectors, cameras; any kind of storage media.

For computers and other items like cell phones and PDAs, a private company will process the item for data destruction (factory  clearing cell phones and degaussing the sim cards; three pass electronic erasure and Department of Defense level sanitization of  hard drives) and provide the appropriate certificate of destruction. All identifying marks, stickers and labels are removed. If  media cannot be securely destroyed electronically, physical destruction is carried out at their facility.

*Note: Individuals wishing to participate should note that the Westbound 408 exit for Crystal Lake may be closed Saturday for  construction activities. Please use the Mills exit instead.

For more information, please call 407-690-5000.

Soap Packaging Varies Widely

Recycling and saving gasoline are currently among the most highly touted ways to save the Earth.  Oh, my bad! Don’t let me forget switching to CFL lightbulbs. This is probably the iconic, Eco-Friendly photo you’ll see anywhere, except for perhaps the recycle icon or symbol itself.

Anyway, the purpose of this post is simply to get you thinking about the packaging your purchases are wrapped in. This is one area that is less talked about, and yet can have a tremendous impact on our landfill space, as well as the toxins we deposit there.

Take a look at the photo above. These are my 3 favorite soaps that I can buy at many local healthy food stores. Can you guess which packaging is the most Earth friendly? Tricky, huh?

Let’s start at the right. The Clearly Natural glycerine soap is wrapped so that you can see the product. This is appealing to many consumers, so it often has the desired effect–a purchase. However, plastic or celophane wrappers, plastered with a large, metallic sticker, don’t even begin to make the sustainable list for packaging.

Moving on to the Tom’s soap in the middle, we see, at first glance, that the box is recycled paperboard. This stuff is compostable or recyclable, thus making it highly sustainable, even though it originally came from one of our coveted trees. Once again, though, there’s a catch. If you open the box, you’ll find that the soap inside is wrapped in clear celophane. Major blunder on Tom’s part. I wish they would drop the plastic wrap, although I understand they’re trying to give the product a longer shelf life. Soap doesn’t exactly have a problem in this area, as compared to other products. They could earn consumer ‘brownie points’ by losing the inner wrap, in my opinion.

Finally, at left, you’ll find the Sappo soap, labeled simply with a sticker. I found this quite surprising the first time I saw it. The bars were just stacked in a shipping box on the shelf. If I remember correctly, the ingredients were printed on the shipping box, as there is nothing much on the sticker–just a name, ‘flavor’ (almond, in this case), and a bar code for price scanning. Awesome! Despite the fact that you can’t recycle or compost the sticker, it still is the clear winner because of its size. And of course, there is NO other packaging.

I hope this little exercise will get you to watch your many other purchases. Every product category has its own variations, and there often is one company who has found a way to beat the system. Look for them. Support them. Drop them an email and let them know you appreciate their efforts. Vote for Earth.

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