February 14
For Valentine’s Day we went to the tip and made baked beans from scratch! Is it possible to get more romantic than that?
I have always been a hoarder. I learnt it from my grandparents who lived through the Great Depression and kept EVERYTHING. I still have my grandmother’s pill bottle full of safety pins, and I still use them! I’ve kept everything ‘just in case’ – but also to find as many ways as possible to re-use stuff to keep it out of landfill.
The thing with metal, though, is that if you take it to any of the Blue Mountains Resource Recovery & Waste Management Facilities it doesn’t go into landfill. It gets recycled and re-enters the economy. The more we recycle metal, the less mining and smelting we have to do.
So, today, for Valentine’s Day and A Year in a Day, my husband and I bit the bullet and went through our yard and shed to find all the metal that we’ve been hoarding for years (when I say we, I mean me … the Valentine’s present to my husband was me finally being willing to let it go!).
It’s free to drop off and today we dropped off 200KG or 0.2 of a TONNE!!!!! It included the small metal items I’ve been collecting inside the house too because I didn’t want them to get lost in the recycling bin process.
My second Valentine’s present to my husband was to make homemade baked beans on sourdough for lunch
My husband LOVES baked beans but we’ve always eaten them out of a can. When it comes to metal though, AVOIDING USING IT is still better than recycling. Making fresh baked beans means we avoided using yet another can – and they were just so much tastier homemade. The beans were dried cannellini beans that I’d cooked up and kept in portions in the freezer to make it quick and easy to use them for minestrone, instead of resorting to cans. They turned out to be perfect for ‘baked beans’.
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