Renewable energy in the flesh.

Over the 4th of July we joined my parents for a couple days and a night at their campsite in MI's thumb.  We packed the Jeep with our cooler (of water, fruit, some raw goodies, pumpkin muffins, and a quinoa and kale salad), our bikes, and our tent.  We repaired one of our tent poles, blew up our Thermarests and set up our camp for the night.  I love sleeping in our tent, even when you need to use an arm for a pillow =) 



Enjoying the great weather outside and a beautiful Sleeper State Park



My favorite tree on the campsite, see him? it's a wee little pine.



My Dad had spotted some wind turbines in the distance so we went to investigate and it turns out that this wind farm is where some of our GreenCurrents power comes from to our home!  How exciting to stumble upon this. 







The fields all around were full of beets, I really wanted to eat some greens, but no doubt they were probably sprayed with something toxic and GMO :/  Also I would not steal from a farmer's field.  I think these fields are sugar beets (that's how we make white sugar here in MI )  It was gorgeous anyway to see huge fields of greens. 



Here's a short video I took, you can hear how windy it is too.  The turbines are really kind of meditative to watch.  There are 30 at this farm. 



Driving around we found this too.  A solar project at the school. 



Here is the turbine at the school, this one was more noisy than the big ones and made of different materials. 



and here is the little turbine and solar array powering the superintendent's house, pretty cool. 



on to some food shall we?

We've been loving salads from our garden.  This is our romaine cos, beans, and basil, and FM onion, Bubbie's pickles, and raw olives.  The dressing ( I don't think is on in the pic) is Cumin-Cinnamon Vinaigrette from ED&BV. 



Reading HeatherEatsAlmondButter I wanted to try the pesto sauce she was raving about too.  The recipe is here on MakingFoodandOtherStuff.  I didn't have parsley, but I did have some frozen chive discs and subbed one of those in along with our garden basil.  I also added nooch and no jalapeno (I did have one, just forgot ;)  and no garlic.  I wasn't feelin the garlic and our potatoes that we were having too had a lot of garlic in them.  The sauce was super yummy and creamy from the soaked pine nuts, we loved it!  We used our last bag of kelp noodles (must remember to nose around some new to me groceries soon), a cucumber from the garden that I sliced super thin on the mandoline, and fresh beans snapped from the garden too, oh and a cute little pimento pepper from the FM as our noodles for the sauce. 





I'll leave you with this funny quote from a dairy bottle (it was being used as a flower vase) I saw at Oryana this past weekend.