Eco-Chick · The modern girl's guide to living green & fabulous.

Starre’s Healthy Summer Coffee Energy Drink Recipe

Too many so-called energy drinks are missing key ingredients to give you truly sustained and healthy power. Too many refined sugars and caffeine, but no sustenance, and ingredients are processed and packaged months before you drink it. Fresh is always better and more life-sustaining– and if you’re looking for real oompf, ‘old’ ingredients just don’t cut it.

The drink below relies on plain old caffeine from (organic) espresso, yes, but it is moderated with a serious dose of protein, vitamins and minerals from raw nutmeats, and sweetness from raw honey, which in addition to sweetening the pot, also contains all sorts of fabulous enzymes which can help stomach ailments (ideal if coffee can bother your digestion at all), and contains anti-bacterials and natural anti-cancer properties. Look for local raw honey for the very freshest and healthiest versions. I live in Connecticut, so I either eat Andrew’s Local Honey (from right here in Fairfield County) or Apitherapy raw honey from Honey Gardens in Vermont.

Raw cacao is ridiculously tasty (I found mine at Whole Foods) and ups the energy ante in this drink through theobromine, a natural stimulant. It also contains plenty of magnesium, calcium and iron, as well as high doses of antioxidants (much more than processed or ‘cooked’ chocolate). Wilderness Family Naturals also makes an excellent raw cacao powder.
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The Best Nonmilk Cappuccino EVER!

A thing of beauty, no?

I’m so excited (or maybe it’s a caffeine buzz)! But I just made the best cappuccino I’ve ever had in my life (see above- I was so happy I took a damn picture of it).

I recently bought a Bialetti Mukka glass cappuccino maker from Williams Sonoma after looking for a stovetop latte/capp maker for ages.

Why stovetop? I don’t want another hunk of metal sitting on my countertop that sucks electricity from the plug. And those plug-in machines are expensive! The glass Mukka was $99 (the metal one is only $89). And I knew they lasted forever since my dad has his that he bought in Italy over 30 years ago. But I could never find one in the States (the stovetop espresso-only machines were easy to find, but I wanted to be able to steam milk too).

The glass Bialetti latte/cappuccino maker

I guess they’ve just started importing them and I snapped one up as soon as I heard they were available. Then I swung by Whole Foods at Columbus Circle in NYC (my shoe repair place is practically next door) for some delicious organic espresso beans.

I don’t really drink milk, and while I do enjoy soy milk, I also eat tofu on a pretty regular basis; on the advice of my holistic health nutritionist, Cynthia Stadd, I’ve been trying to mix my milk subs up with rice, soy/rice blends, almond and most recently, hemp milks. Having tried rice, soy and hemp milks in my new little capp maker, let me wholeheartedly endorse Living Harvest hempmilk as making the creamiest, richest, closest-to-cow’s-juice froth of the three.

I’m a huge fan of hemp products as you can read here and here, but other hemp milks (unless they were chocolate, or mixed with cereal) were a little strongly flavored for me. But this stuff is creamy, not ‘hempy’, and packed with Omega 3′s and 6′s. Cut the sugar by choosing original which is unsweetened. You can always add agave for a mellow sweetener if you really need it.

Yum Yum!

With some organic cinnamon and nutmeg on top and a square of fair-trade Endangered Species dark chocolate in the bottom, this is a serious afternoon treat for only about 160 calories.

Best Ecofriendly Coffins

I had read about people being cremated and adding their remains to coral reefs, but the other day, while perusing the Happy Hippie site, I noticed this tidbit on an eco-friendly company that sells many sustainable options if one is going to have a burial.

I realized that there are a few interesting biodegradable options when choosing a mode of interment:

-The Eco Pod (seen above) coffin lets you enter the ground in recycled paper.

The coffin table with it’s covers on to be utilized as a coffee table before death

Remove the top covers to store games, books and magazines, and eventually in which to place the body, which will biodegrade through the bottom slats, which the designer also said “mimics the human skeleton”

At Brooklyn Designs this year, one of the most innovative ideas was from Charles Constantine of the Pratt Insitute. This beautiful “coffin table” is meant to bring death into the center of family life (literally) by being used as a coffee table until such time that it is needed, so that it serves two functions. Charles said that in this way the family could become comfortable with death and be a part of the final resting place of the person who has passed.

-The Everybody Coffin is inexpensive and simple to assemble (?!) I am not sure who is going to want to build this after experiencing a loss, but maybe a family would get together to build it as an homage to the deceased. From personal experience, when my father died, I don’t think any of us would have been able to manage something like this, during such an intense time.

I like the idea of building it as a way to honor a loved one. You could incorporate flowers, botanicals, notes, letters, natural paints, and make it unique. Otherwise, if the family is too bereft, green funeral homes would assemble this for you. Since it doesn’t contain harmful chemicals such as formaldehyde, this could also be used for a cremation.

This wicker casket a nice option if one wants to go au natural and is planning on a ceremony. At first, we found it hilarious that you could go out in wicker! I have a “thing” about wicker, for some reason, so my hubby told me that if I get too cantankerous in my old age, I’m going out in one of these.

There are also biodegradable urns if you do go the cremation route.

And where to put that biodegradable coffin? Check out some of the natural burial grounds in the United States:
-Green Springs Natural Cemetery 93 acres in NY State
-Glendale Memorial Nature Preserve – 350 acres in Florida.

Starbucks Eco-frustration

Full Disclosure: About once a week I go to Starbucks. I hide my head in shame (hey, I protested Starbucks putting locals out of business in the 90′s) and stand on line for a soy latte. I work and attend grad school in Manhattan, and Starbucks are everywhere AND they always have Silk (sometimes organic but at least GMO-free) soymilk, a necessity for me since I haven’t drunk cow’s milk in god knows how long. And if you’ve been a student, (not to mention a way more than full-time blogger/freelancer/editor), you can relate to my need for caffeine! If given the option, I’ll go to a local coffee place- even go out of my way for one, but sometimes they can be hard to find.

So, my following rant has some substance to it, as a semi-regular customer of the ubiquitous chain (and yes, yes, I’m a bit of a hypocrite. I admit it, so sue me! I swear I never went there until I became a workoholic). But I write this as a real, regular customer, which I think gives it some weight. Here’s my suggestion, since Starbucks has been losing customers recently: Bring back the Mug!

On this entire continent called Europe, you go into any espresso bar or cappucino cafe and if you choose to stay, you get a real mug, teacup or espresso shot receptacle from which to quaff your java fix. And every Starbucks I’ve ever been to has the tables, and seems to encourage people to sit down, but why do those people all have takeaway cups? Paper cup and hot cup protector thingy (recycled, good), plastic top, all of which could be completely done away with if denizens drank from real mugs that could be washed and reused a thousand times. Of course, if you’re getting your coffee to go, you need to use a disposable (unless you have a refillable coffee mug to use of course- but Starbucks has trouble even dealing with these.)

If you’re going to sit down at a coffeehop, you shouldn’t be using a disposable cup. It’s wasteful, and frankly, uncivilized. Drinking out of a proper cup is a more relaxing experience, and reminds us that disposable items should not be an expectation, they should be a convenience, an exception. We should be using disposable ONLY when we really need them, period.

Just imagine where that cup started.

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Cure-All for Modern Life: Green Tea!

Tea is harvested by real people like this woman, so choose organic, fair-trade leaves when you’re at the store. 

While I’m practically allergic to the caffeine in coffee (though I so love the taste), some days I couldn’t get by without a little green or white tea to perk me up. As we’ve all heard ad nauseum fo the past few years, antioxidants, which are found in high levels in green tea, chocolate, pomegranates, blueberries and other foods are cancer fighters ’cause they attack free radicals (which are plentiful in our polluted air and water, even if you live in the middle of nowhere).

But you don’t want to drink just any tea, especially not one made with tea leaves that are of dubious quality (which don’t taste great) or Some great green teas to get you started include:

Srina Green Tea is delicious, with clean, earthy taste and a tidy brew. I got sent some as a sample a few months back and it perks me right up. Their farming eco-credentials are impressive:

Srina™ (pronounced, shrih-nah) is 100% organically grown green tea, hand-plucked and packaged using natural fibers. We grow our green tea on a distinctly high mountainous region of Sri Lanka located on a 90-acre rainforest called Paradise Farm.

Yogi Teas makes most of my favorite teas. All of them are mostly organic, and they have a huge variety of green teas (including non-caffeinated and chai). The teas have their origins in the 1970′s, when followers of Yogi Bhajan, served it in vegetarian restaurants and expanded from there.

Choice Organics green teas are all-organic, harvested sustainably from China, India, Japan and Nepal. They also have a huge selection of green teas; try a couple and figure out which ones are your favorites!