Happy New Year! Reflections on 2008 and Goals for 2009.

Happy New Year!

Wow, a new year already! I can still remember being young enough to feel each year drag by until the summer holidays and rolling my eyes at the "old folk" marvelling at how fast the year had flown... I guess I must be one of those "old folk" now LOL, because I can't believe how quickly the days seem to pass!

As always though, the beginning of a new calendar year seems a good opportunity to reflect on the past year and set goals for the new one. The past two and half years since we started down the path to simplicity and sustainability have been such an interesting experience for us; exciting, educational, satisfying, and also at times confusing, bewildering and even sometimes stressful, but - I have to say - mostly joyful.

Looking back it seems that that time has been divided roughly into two parts. Our first year or so was spent "greening" our lives: replacing incandescent light bulbs, reducing our household waste output and our water, electricity, natural gas and fuel use dramatically, and so on.

This second year or so seems to have been spent "simplifying" our lives: vastly expanding the items I can cook from scratch, vastly reducing our need to buy pre-processed foods, learning how to sew and mend, teaching myself to knit and crochet (badly!), getting rid of the second car, gradually purging the plastic from our lives and replacing it - where really necessary - with natural materials such as glass, timber and stone, paring down our wardrobes to the minimum and only buying the best quality (and preferably pre-loved) we can afford at the time.

Which brings me to this coming year! I see 2009 as the year where I will concentrate on learning how to really "nourish" my family, and by that I mean nourish them not only health-wise, but spirit-wise as well.

I feel as though I am at quite a cross roads in my cooking - having learnt the basics, now I am finding it hard to find recipes which aren't based on highly refined, highly processed white flours, white sugars and so forth. I see enticing packages of spelt flour or soba noodles for example, at my local organic grocer but don't really know what to do with them! So this year I plan to research and experiment with more wholesome alternatives in my cooking.

As well, I plan to address other areas in our life. I want to begin some new family traditions that - I hope - my children will look back fondly on when they grow up and leave home. I also want to further enrich our home, for example by getting rid of even more plastic and mass-produced products. In the same way that (I feel) a lovely meal not only involves taste, but also a pleasing combination of colours and textures, a lovely home environment - to me - is also a combination of pleasing colours, textures and smells. More and more these days I find I am repulsed by artificial fragrances (such as in dishwashing liquid or hand soap) which I wouldn't have even noticed a couple of years ago. The same goes for bright mass-produced plastic toys; I find them ugly and brash, unlike toys made from more natural fibres and materials, which have been sturdily crafted by a loving hand (not a machine).

And I can't forget my garden of course. Last year I joined Melinda's Growing Challenge and broke through a mental barrier regarding planting with seeds (instead of punnets of seedlings). This year I plan to learn how to save seeds from my own garden, which will involve not only learning how to do that for each type of plant, but also setting up some sort of logical (and accessible) storage and filing system for them.

Blog-wise, when I first started my journey it seemed logical to me to set up separate blogs for my favourite recipes, my garden diary and my slow food blog, because I wanted to keep my "green/ ethical living" research posts separated for easy reference. However, now all of those issues are part and parcel of my daily life and I see no need to have them separated. As such I am going to be incorporating the two lonely posts from my slow food blog, and then post a recipe from my cooking blog each week until they have all been swapped over, and close the two other blogs. I'll probably keep my garden diary blog, but just for (boring) planting records.

So, to add a little more fun to my blog layout and, more importantly, to help me organise myself a little more this year, I've made up some little picture headers for various post subjects and I'll be posting along a very rough schedule I've made up for myself, although I'll be still be blathering on randomly when I feel like it ;-)

Anyway, I hope you enjoy reading along, it's going to be an exciting learning curve for me!