We’ve been featured in Riptide, the blog of New Times Miami, a newspaper dedicated to local culture!  Thanks go out to Tamara Lush for making this possible. You can see the article about us here.

Rhett shows you how to use a brewing technique similar to methode champagne to put bubbles in flavored sugar water and make your own soda.  This is the traditional technique for making soft drinks such as ginger beer and sasparilla, and it makes for something sweet to serve with dinner or at parties.

Rhett’s ginger beer recipe: place 1/2 cup sugar, 1/8 tsp yeast, 1 tbsp (to taste) ground ginger root, juice of 1/2 lemon, and water to fill to 1″ head room in a 1L bottle. Cap, shake, and let the yeast do the hard work for 24-48 hours at room temperature.

This easy recipe came to us via this WikiHow article.  This technique can be adapted to any number of flavorings and levels of sweetness.  The only limit is your imagination! If you’d like to make cola, a good recipe can be found in OpenCola.  WikiHow provides a simple-to-follow recipe.

Formats available: Quicktime (.mov), MPEG-4 Video (protected) (.m4v)

Tags: soda, homebrew, diy, diet, do it yourself, reduce, green lifestyle, green, environmentalism

Rhett takes some time to answer some viewer mail. In addition, we’ve been tagged with the Thinking Blogger Award! So, in keeping with the award, here are our five favorite blogs and podcasts (they’re blogs, too!). If you write for any of these, consider yourself tagged! We give a blurb about each of the blogs in the video

• Green As A Thistle
• Visualize Whirled Peas
• America The Green Podcast
• Practical Green Living
• GreenerMiami.com

For this week’s project, Rhett gives some pointers on how to get started growing oyster mushrooms on old coffee grinds. This sort of “direct to food” decomposition is a real godsend for those of us who don’t have back yards or large gardens for making and using compost. Put your kitchen scraps to work making gourmet mushrooms! For more information, check out this primer. For more information and supplies for growing your own mushrooms at home, or to get a professionally made oyster mushroom starter kit, you can also check out Fungi Perfecti (this is not a paid endorsement), Rhett’s favorite mycoloculture supplier. Growing mushrooms can be easy and a really fun way to get rid of kitchen waste. Give it a try!

Formats available: Flash Video (.flv), MPEG-4 Video (protected) (.m4v)

Tags: mushrooms, mycoculture, composting, sustainable living, sustainability, organic waste, green lifestyle, green, environmentalism

Sustainability doesn’t just start at home…it starts with your stomach!  Things we unavoidably consume daily are ripe with opportunities to optimize for a greener tomorrow.  We’ve gone and done some digging in the American diet and found out something that’s obvious to anyone who’s eaten out– Americans eat too much meat.  So, we’re kicking off our personal projects in sustainability by scaling back significantly.  Hear how we’ve made eating only one meat/dairy dish a week work for us, from our personal comfort to our household budget.

It’s a lot to cram into five minutes, so look for future episodes to contain recipe ideas, tips on shopping without breaking the bank, and much more.  Don’t forget to email us!  We’ll read our mailbag on the show.

Resources for this episode:

• ERS/USDA Briefing Room - Food Consumption
• Earth Policy Institute - Plan B 2.0

Formats available: Quicktime (.mov), MPEG-4 Video (protected) (.m4v)

Tags: vegan, vegetarian, food consumption, sustainability, green, green lifestyle, environmentalism, urban life, sustainable living, meat, food, diet