As an organic gardener, I’ve read more tributes to the healing power of compost than a person should in a lifetime. Compost heals the soil! It keeps valuable, soil-building material out of the landfill! A compost pile that is so hot that it steams is virtuous and sexy.

While I know that all of this is true, I had a dirty secret. I hated to take scraps out to my compost pile, especially after the sun had set. It meant walking to the back corner of my garden, where I imagined snakes frollicking by moonlight.

One day, my friend Shiner saw me throwing cantalope rinds into the trash. A gardener herself, she was shocked. I explained why I didn’t want to take it outside right then and I didn’t want to refrigerate it. As is so often the case, Shiner had a great answer: start a compost bucket.

Wildly Affordable Organic container 5: keep a compost bucket handy to boost your organic garden

Since Shiner gave me that wake-up call, I tried various compost buckets. Recently, I hit about the best one yet: a three-gallon step trash can with a removable plastic liner. During big cooking days, I put the liner right on the counter and toss in scraps as I go. The rest of the time, I just step on the lever to pop up the lid and toss in used tea bags, banana peels, and other scraps, like the ends of the asparagus in my Asparagus Socca recipe.

Every few mornings, I walk the bucket of scraps out to the compost heap, empty it, wash it out, and put it back into the trash can. And yes, having a hot compost heap again makes me feel a little virtuous and sexy.

Do you keep a compost pile? Maybe you’re way ahead of me and keep a worm bin or chickens. Share your tips for making good use of scraps in the comments below.

Are you throwing perfectly good food into the trash? Or worse yet, letting it molder in plastic tubs before you throw it way? In today’s post on kitchen containers, learn to set up and use a Stoup container to turn your scraps into a free lunch. This stew-soup is a core Wildly Affordable Organic meal.

WAO container 4: keep a Stoup container in your freezer for free meals, a cleaner fridge, and a greener life.

Start with a good quality, shatter-resistant jar or freezer-safe container with a wide mouth, perhaps the twin of your broth jar. Label it and put it in a prominent place in your freezer. Add the bits and pieces that accumulate in a kitchen: the chunck of onion that you didn’t need for a recipe, a spoonful of extra beans, and anything that might be good in a vegetable stew or soup. When the container is full, thaw it in the fridge, heat it up, and taste it. It’s probably great just as it is, because it comes from all the foods you like and cook with.

Recipe: Stoup with Corn bread Topping

Ingredients: About 8 cups Stoup 
1 recipe of your favorite corn bread batter

Instructions:

Heat the thawed contents of your Stoup container to a boil in a covered pot over medium-high heat, then reduce heat to low and simmer for 10 minutes.

Heat the oven to 400°F. Taste the Stoup. If it seems flat or bland, add a can of diced tomatoes, a few shots of hot sauce, or some lemon zest. If it’s more like a soup than a stew, drain some liquid into your broth jar. You want it to be more like chili than soup.

Make a batch of corn bread batter. Pour hot Stoup into a casserole, then pour the corn bread batter over the Stoup. Bake for about 25 minutes, until corn bread starts to brown and a tester inserted into the center section comes out clean.

Cut into squares and serve hot, making sure to get some juicy Stoup and crunchy corn bread in every serving. Refrigerate any extra for up to two days.

What do you have in the fridge that could be the start of a beautiful Stoup?

Are you pouring valuable broth down the drain? Most cooks do, then pay eleven cents or more an ounce for broth from a factory! In today’s post on kitchen containers, learn to set up and use a broth jar to capture that liquid gold. You’ll add flavor and nutrition to your meals and reduce your carbon footprint at the same time. That’s the living the Wildly Affordable Organic way!

WAO container 3: keep a broth jar in your refrigerator for free broth, better food, and less dishwashing.

Start with a good quality, shatter-resistant jar. I usually cook for two people and find that a quart-sized jar is just right. Label your broth jar and put it in an easy-to-reach place in your refrigerator. Add savory liquids to the jar, including liquid from boiling noodles or vegetables. Make the broth extra flavorful by swishing it around in cooking pots or tomato cans. I even give it a spin in my food processor after making pesto. Dishwashing is suddenly easier.

Q: Refrigerate an empty jar?
 A: Yes. By keeping it in the same place all the time, even when it’s empty, you’re making it easy to find and use.

Q: Why label it if I know what it is?
 A: Labeling makes it easier for others to help you in the kitchen. It also keeps your Cousin Ima from mistaking it for lemonade.

Use the broth to make any of your sponge foods, the ones that soak up water as part of the cooking process. I use it for rice, oatmeal, noodles, and quinoa. Also use it to boil more vegetables, as a soup base, and in sauces. Bonus: your broth will be as local and organic as your other ingredients.

Empty and wash out your broth jar every four days or whenever you don’t know how old it is. Remember, it’s free so play it safe.

What do you use broth for? Can you suggest other good uses of this free broth?

In this week of blog posts, learn about five key kitchen containers that will save time and money, making it easy to live the Wildly Affordable Organic Way. Yesterday, we used home-made ice packs to keep food cool on the way home from the market. Today, fill a spray bottle with a home-made produce spray to knock out bacteria on fresh fruits and vegetables.

Wildly Affordable Organic container 2: keep a spray bottle filled with diluted vinegar to spritz fresh produce

Spritz smooth-skinned produce with a produce wash made from one part white vinegar to three parts water. Wait a few beats, then rinse with running water to remove the vinegar. You’ll get rid of 98% of the bacteria, according to the editors of Cooks Illustrated, compared to just 85% removed by rinsing and scrubbing.

Start with a clean, empty spray bottle. I got one intended for misting house plants at a garden center. It’s handily marked with measurements and dilution ratios on the side. One cup of white vinegar plus three cups water makes four cups or thirty-two ounces of vegetable spray. I buy big bottles of vinegar on sale, so a full bottle of produce spray costs about 10 cents. That’s wildly affordable!

Spritz any smooth-skinned produce, especially ones that you will eat raw without peeling. Think strawberries, apples, bell peppers, celery, and summer squash. I also spritz cantaloupes before cutting them.

Do you make your own salad dressings? Do you use fruit in salads? I’d love to hear your clever salad ideas.

I love walking into a kitchen and seeing signs that people are cooking the Wildly Affordable Organic way. A food scale on the counter, measuring cups in the canisters, and plenty of pure ingredients for scratch cooking: beans, rice, flour, fruit, and vegetables. Looking a little further, I might spot some of the five key kitchen containers that save time and money. In my posts this week, I’ll tell you how to make your life easier with each of them, starting with the home-made ice pack.

WAO container 1: home-made ice pack slows spoiling, reduces risk of food poisoning

The warm and even hot weather that produces succulent tomatoes, ripe-ety ripe peaches, and peppers of all hues also encourages growth of another kind. Food-borne bacteria thrives in what the USDA calls “the danger zone”: between 40° and 140°F. Check out its scary chart of food-borne illness and you’ll soon detect this catchy chorus: keep cold foods cold and hot foods hot. Toss out perishable food that’s been in this danger zone for more than two hours. If the temperature is over 90°, toss it after just one hour. Keeping cold food cold also slows natural decay, helping your food stay fresh longer.

I learned this lesson the hard way, picking up some fresh chevre at a farmers’ market one Saturday, then having brunch with a good friend before heading home to refrigerate my purchases. The soft goat cheese still seemed fine but I got oh so sick! After that experience, I bring a cooler and some ice packs with me to the market during warm weather, especially when I also include a visit or side trips on the way home.

Making an ice pack is simplicity itself: take a sturdy plastic container with a screw-on top, fill it nearly full of water, and freeze it. My favorite container originally held excellent, locally made tomato sauce, but you can use plastic water or soda bottles too. Just make sure to leave enough room at the top for the water to expand as it freezes, perhaps a half-inch for wide containers and an inch for bottles.

Wrap the frozen-hard containers in a towel and pop them in a cooler. The towel helps keeps the ice-pack from rolling around in an empty cooler. At the market, put your most-perishable items closest to the ice pack. Once home, refrigerate any food that needs it. Check the melt level of your ice pack; it should still have a chuck of ice left. If not, use more ice packs or take a shorter trip next time. Wash your ice pack with soapy water, dry it, and put it back in the freezer. You’ll capture the energy spent freezing any remaining ice and have an ice pack ready for your next trip.

Do you shop at a farmers’ market? Share your tips for getting your purchases home in the comments below.

Most recipes for baked beans use pork for flavor and long slow cooking to thicken the sauce. After talking about the physics of baking with my Taster, who is an engineer as well as a patient man, I tried to capture the creamy richness of baked beans faster and with less work. The quick and easy recipe below makes beans every bit as tasty as the ones I grew up with, using equal parts peanut butter and tahini instead of pork and a slow cooker instead of an oven.

Bean Physics. Water boils when it reaches 212° F and doesn’t get any hotter except under special conditions, such as in a pressure cooker. So my original thought of baking beans and bread at the same time was a bust: a big pot of beans will drag down the oven temperature. Even alone in the oven, the beans took forever to cook. Why? My Taster says tranferring heat through the air, like in an oven, is much less efficient than transferring heat through physical contact, like on a stove or in a slow cooker. The acidity of the tomatoes and molasses makes a slow situation slower even slower by toughening the beans.

My solution? I think beans  can’t tell much difference between bubbling along in a slow cooker or an oven, but the slow cooker will be, yes, faster. Instead of cooking the beans uncovered in the oven to boil away some of the water, I just added less water in the first place. Don’t let tomatoes and molasses put the brakes on the cooking time either; add them when the beans are already tender, then let the flavors blend overnight.

Active time: 15 minutes. Total time: at least 4 hours, preferrably at least 12 hours. Makes 10 servings.

Ingredients

1 pound dried pinto beans 5 cups water 1 onion 2 teaspoons salt 1/2 cup unsulphured molasses (I used Grandma’s Original) 1/4 cup tomato paste 2 tablespoons mustard (I used Gulden’s Spicy Brown Mustard) 1 tablespoon peanut butter 1 tablespoon tahini

Method

1. Pick over and rinse pinto beans (see Cooking Dried Beans). Put beans in a slow cooker with water and cover. Optionally, allow beans to soak for up to 12 hours to reduce cooking time and improve texture.
2. Stir in salt and turn slow cooker to high. Cook beans covered until tender, about 3 hours if soaked and about 4 hours if not. Stir beans if they peek up above the water line, adding hot water if needed to keep them barely covered.
3. When beans are nearly tender, chop onion and stir into beans with remaining ingredients. Continue cooking covered on high until beans and onions are tender.
4. Serve immediately or, better yet, pour into another container to speed cooling, let cool for up to two hours, and then refrigerate overnight so the sauce flavors works their way through the pintos. Reheat and serve over rice, baked potatoes, toast, or as a side dish.

Tips and Notes

• I haven’t tried this, but I bet you could just add everything to the slow cooker at night and let it cook on low heat overnight. Refrigerate it in the morning, let the flavors mingle all day, and enjoy for dinner. If you try this, please let me know in the comments.
• Try these mild beans for breakfast, especially if you can’t enjoy a hot lunch. I first enjoyed beans for breakfast, along with pan-fried tomato slices, in many English B&Bs.

Oh, the glories of summer tomatoes, corn, peppers, and berries! Sometimes, I just want to eat a big salad for dinner. That’s where high-protein desserts like today’s recipe for Blueberry Clafoutis come in handy. It’s a great way to get your family to eat fruit and eggs. We have it for dinner one night and then for breakfast the next day.

High-protein desserts.

How much protein does the average adult need?  Nutritionist Jane Brody says 36 grams of protein a day if your ideal weight is 100 pounds, 54 grams if it’s 150, and 72 grams if it’s 200 pounds. Ironically, too much protein can actually lead to osteoporosis and other problems. So you don’t need to eat a Triple Patty MacWhopper twice a day (or ever) to get your protein. But some cookbooks take too casual an approach to getting enough. True, even apples contain protein, but in developing the Cook for Good menu, I found  it easy to drift below my goal of 50 to 60 grams a day.

To the rescue: high-protein desserts. Have a big salad or bowl of gazpacho for dinner, then top it off with a dessert that includes nuts, eggs, milk, yogurt, or even high-protein grains like couscous.

This is my last day as a guest blogger here at DrGreene.com, so I can’t give you a preview of tomorrow’s recipe. But it’s been great fun! If you enjoyed my recipes and tips, please sign up for the free weekly newsletter on CookforGood.com. It will help you save money, eat well, and make a difference!

Today, tell us about your favorite high-protein recipes in the comments section below. What’s your go-to treat after a big salad?

Go to Blueberry Clafoutis Recipe

I’ve been reworking recipes to make them more local this month, which got me thinking about ways to improve recipes in general. Get tips below and try the tasty example: Butterbean Hummus. When you cook the fresh beans of summer for succotash, cook extra to make hummus.

Improving recipes.

If you pay attention, every time you do something you have a chance to do it better next time. I learned this at IBM, where we software developers dreaded the “postmortem” meeting after every project. We’d look at what went right, what went wrong, and how to do better next time. In the good versions of these meetings, we emphasized what went right, took steps to improve the process the next time, and avoided having anyone flee the room in tears.

In your own kitchen, you  don’t have to worry about derailing your career when you look back at  how a recipe turned out and think about how to make it better next  time. Sharing the process with your children can help them learn to cook and learn to think at the same time! Here’s how to become a better, more efficient cook:

1. Know your goals. I’m usually trying to get the best blend of thrifty, easy, healthy, and  tasty. This month, I’m adding local to the mix and focusing less on thrifty.
2. Keep track of what is important to your goals. What was the exact recipe you followed? Write in your cookbooks or keep a notebook in the kitchen. Use a food scale to track amounts quickly and accurately. Track your costs if you want to save money, sodium if the doctor says so, etc.
3. Analyze your results. What went right? What went wrong? How did your results compare to your target? You might think about how delicious this batch of ice cream is  compared to other ice cream you’ve made or enjoyed.  I compare the  price of a meal to my current average, always trying to get it lower.
4. Adjust to improve. If the results should have been better in taste, texture, or  appearance, note what the improvement is you are after and how you  might reach that goal. For example, write “too sweet” and then note to  cut the amount of sugar by a teaspoon. If that change throws off the texture next time, you can look for a different way to get the improvement you want. Write down any time-saving improvements too, such as assembling the ingredients in a different order so you can use (and  wash!) one bowl instead of two.

Using these four steps can help you quickly improve your cooking skills, based on the goals that matter to you. I’ve been able to cook with local ingredients by using local whole-wheat flour instead of white  whole-wheat, fresh hot peppers instead of dried cayenne or chipotle,  local asiago cheese instead of parmesan, and honey instead of sugar.  For the most part, the changes have been improvements. My try at a blueberry cornbread cake was a … learning experience.

Tomorrow, get ideas for high-protein desserts to round out the salad meals of summer.

Click here for Spicy Butterbean Hummus Recipe

Looking for a way to save money, eat well, and make a difference to your community? Cook real food from scratch and pick local, sustainable ingredients whenever possible. This month, I’m joining people across the country as we try to see how local we can go.

It’s easy to eat healthy, local food in the summer. In fact, fresh produce is so abundant that your grocery bill may be at its yearly low. One of the best investments you can make is to take to stock your freezer with frozen peppers. Peppers that cost 50 cents each now will cost three dollars in February … and will be weary from a long journey. Freeze some peppers for later and and use others in the the recipe for Beany Gazpacho, along with ripe tomatoes.

Freezing peppers without frustration

Getting  rid of pepper seeds always slowed me down before. They cling to the inside of the peppers and seem as slippery as a wet two-year-old. Now I cut  each pepper in half and cut out the stem, seeds, and white parts. To remove those pesky extra seeds inside of the pepper, I dip the pepper halves into a bowl of water. The seeds rinse away  and float to the bottom, so the same bowl of water is good for a big box of peppers.  No more tedious picking at the seeds or clogged drain! Toss the seedy water into your compost pile along with all the pepper  scraps, so not a shred is wasted.

To finish freezing, spread  pepper pieces in a single layer on a cookie sheet. Freeze for several  hours until solid. Use a spatula to loosen peppers from sheet, then put  in a labeled freezer-strength bag, suck out the extra air with a straw,  and seal. Pop bags of peppers in your freezer and make sure to note  your harvest on your freezer inventory.

Do you preserve food to enjoy during the winter by freezing, canning, or drying? If not, what holds you back? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.

Tomorrow, find out how to improve your recipes to meet your goals, whether that’s going more local, being easier, or just tasting better.

Click here for the  Zesty Beany Gazpacho Recipe

How much local should we aim for?

Barbara Kingsolver describes in her captivating book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle how her family went nearly 100% local for a year. Here in North Carolina, there’s a movement to get everyone to go just 10% local. The shift helps community farms thrive, making fresh, healthy food more available and affordable. It keeps your family safer, too, by supporting a more diverse food system, which helps minimize the damage that can be caused by accidents, greed, and terrorist attacks. Your food uses less oil to get to you, reducing pollution and your carbon footprint.

My Taster and I are taking the Cook for Good plan local in July to see  what percentage of our food dollars are spent locally, without having a farm like Kingsolver. Half-way through July, we’ve spent 75% on local ingredients, including costs of eating at two  local restaurants. Taking out the restaurants puts us at a whopping 84%  local. And that’s with treats like the chocolate-covered cherries from who-knows-where at my local gourmet store. It’s easy and oh so delicious if you just cook seasonal food from scratch.

Tomorrow, find out how to improve your recipes to meet your goals, whether that’s going more local, being easier, or just tasting better.

Today’s recipe is  Summer Black Beans with Tomatoes and Corn