Catlin Goodrow's blog

For some reason, when I was a kid, I didn't really like pizza. Maybe it's because (as my friends will tell you) I have a contrarian streak and a kid's favorite food is supposed to be pizza. Or maybe it's because the pizzas one eats as a kid -- pepperoni, cheese, mushroom and olive if you're really adventurous -- just aren't that exciting.

I've come face-to-face with the fact that the sustainable foodstuffs I love just aren't on the shelves at every grocery store in America. I know, I know, you're probably thinking: Catfish, haven't you picked up a Newsweek lately? You know America's grocery aisles are stocked with high-fructose country-fried bacon and pancake-on-a-stick -- are you really surprised you can't find an egg labeled with the farmer's name?

OK, I admit, if I'd thought about it, I would have realized that the organic gooseberries at my neighborhood market aren't a staple at everyone's grocery. But I was too busy stocking up on quinoa and textured-vegetable-protein to notice.

My friend Darci has come up with her own solution to the problem of finding fresh, organic, and affordable food. She's taken up urban agriculture in her own backyard.

This is Darci's garden:

My yard is actually a deck with two cacti, so lawn mowers are not something I think about very often. However, sometimes the Zeitgeist just talks to you, and right now, the Zeitgeist is jumping up and down and saying, "Reel push mowers."

Zeitgeist, I asked. Why are you talking about lawn mowers? Aren't you supposed to be talking about Lady GaGa?

I first noticed resurgence of the reel push mower when my super-cool neighbor Michael was mowing his lawn. Michael and his wife Trish have an incredible sense of style and do all sorts of eco-friendly things like recycling, composting, and gardening. Then, my friend Darci commented on facebook that I should write about reel push mowers, and an avalanche of comments followed, all from folks who love their reel push mowers. It turns out that hip people with lawns wouldn't mow any other way.

Why?

This is a picture of my phone.

(Isn't it cute? It's purple.)

What you can't see too well, is that my boarding pass for a flight to Phoenix is displayed on my phone's screen.

Greenies, this is the paperless revolution.

You no longer have to print your ticket or boarding pass (in some airports... for some airlines). You can simply download a barcode to your phone and wave it at the fancy machine at the TSA podium.

It's a really, really cool age we live in. Who needs a printed map anymore? -- we can send our driving directions to our phones. We can do our taxes online, and my doctor types my words into a computer, verbatim, saving paper and making my medical records more accurate.

I still love paper (I've got a little bit of a notebook fetish). But let's face it -- in the future, no one will need to hear the screams of the trees ...

Does the term "bran muffin" conjure up a cardboard-like breakfast your Great-Aunt Ida used to serve - the kind of thing you'd slip to the dog when no one was looking? If it does, you've been the victim of a very common health food blunder: thinking that "healthy" and "high-fiber" are synonymous with "tasteless" and "impossible to digest."

It's true: bran muffins can be challenging to make exciting. I've been baking a lot lately, though, and so with some help from my friend Andrea, I've taken on the challenge of making a bran muffin that you want to eat but which has few artificial ingredients.

Why all the baking? Well, in trying to be a more conscious eater, I've found that the foods with the most strange and unpronounceable ingredients are my beloved carbs. It's hard to find bread products without a paragraph of chemicals after the word "Ingredients." Hence, the baking.

Did you see that movie Up in the Air? George Clooney plays a dude who spends three hundred days a year on the road and gets a hard-on from rental car rewards cards.

Let me tell you, sometimes I can relate.

Packaging is important.

Some packaging just doesn't last, and it ends up being thrown in landfills or choking a sea turtle. If marketers were smart, they'd realize that if they put more thought into how their packages could be reused, they'd be stealthily recruiting secret advertisers who carry their product packaging around even when the contents are gone.

So ... maybe you made a New Year's resolution to eat less meat (a great way to be healthier and sustainable-er). Maybe you have always been a vegetarian. Or maybe you're just looking to try something new.

Well, here is the recipe for you!

Cannelloni (the name means "large reeds", which is quite evocative) is a sheet of pasta rolled around something yummy - usually cheese. However, many pastas contain ingredient lists a mile long, so those of us who try to stick to Michael Pollan's "eat food" rule can find them troublesome. That's why this recipe is so great: instead of pasta, you use eggplant as the wrapper for your filling. I really enjoy the creamy consistency of eggplant; the key is to make sure it is completely cooked. Raw eggplant kind of tastes like a chewy mud pie.