Hello internet!

Tomorrow is Organic Recipe Friday here on BambiGoesGreen and I’m looking for your help!

I have a horde of organic strawberries that I picked myself yesterday and I’d like to use them in a couple recipes for tomorrow. Have you got any awesome ideas as to what to do with strawberries? I’ll likely be making some jam, jelly, freezer jam, and maybe a pie, but I want to hear some neat ideas so far Twitter has given me these:

karolijn @BambiBlue Jam! But freezer jam. Much better that way. #recipe
docstrange @BambiBlue goes great diced up with mangos and a dash of ice cream.
Jackmoe @BambiBlue Kiddie pool full of strawberry jam. Then all you need i a drum of pb and a couple hundo loaves of bread.
kylemcinnes @BambiBlue A strawberry bath!
saxby @BambiBlue I’ve got just the thing for you! http://bit.ly/n9VNw
nutzareus @BambiBlue strawberry jam, or clean them and freeze for smoothies later.
MThellfire@BambiBlue You’d definitely make some JAM with that many strawberries! It’s a timeless art and healthier than the crap you buy in stores.
pezhore@BambiBlue A metric crapton of Freezer strawberry jam? (The unit conversion from kg to ct can be tricky, but I think it works out).

What have you got for me?

Hayden Panettiere has taken to YouTube to support the cease and desist of commercial whaling!

The Heroes star has teamed up with The Whaleman Foundation and SocialVibe to inform the public about the dangers of this practice.

Animal rights activist Panettiere alongside the environmental activists hope to collect 1,000,000 signatures for the petition against commercial whaling to deliver in the hands of the International Whaling Commission!

Join BambiGoesGreen and help the cause by checking out the video above and signing the petition!

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While Cameron Diaz’s environmental passions were less probed in the May issue of Vogue, the actress certainly didn’t hold back for this month’s feature in Marie Claire. The magazine not only got some great quotes out of Diaz on her eco-cred, but also tagged along for some filming of her new low-budget documentary on “our relationship to the planet”. From the article,

“Inspired by the annual TED conference that she’s attended—a kind of smarty-pants consortium dedicated to the spread of innovative ideas put forth by speakers like Bono, Al Gore, Jane Goodall, and Samantha Power—Diaz felt the urge to start a far-reaching conversation about the environment. ‘I was like, I’m going to get a camera, and I’m going to mobile-home it across the country, and I’m just going to find out what people are thinking. What would it take for the common person to become engaged?’—in the catastrophe that is the state of our natural resources. Most of all, she wants to help raise consciousness. ‘There’s a lot of great minds out there who are thinking about this,’ she says, who are coming up with solutions. Not to crash anybody’s party, but to actually make the party better.’ She laughs. ‘Really, that’s what it’s about—that’s my participation in it.’”

There aren’t too many celebrities that take it upon themselves to get out there and get people talking about the environment. Diaz is truly engaged in getting the issues front and center — though she admits it can be a bit of a depressing challenge.

“‘I’m sad,’ Diaz says later, in the car on the way to a Mexican joint for dinner. ‘It’s just sad.’ She drains a plastic water bottle and tosses it on the floor of the car. ‘And I’m unhappy about the waste I just produced.’ Diaz and Dylan, sitting next to her in the backseat, conclude that we as a people are summarily, environmentally ‘f****d.’ In fact, that quickly becomes the leitmotif of the trip, and it cracks them up every time. Diaz, out of the blue: ‘You know what we are?’ Dylan: ‘Let me guess—f****d?’”

I’m sure we’ve all thought that at one time or another.

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The Athabasca Oil Sands (also known colloquially as the Athabasca Tar Sands although there is no actual tar) are large deposits of bitumen, or extremely heavy crude oil, located in northeastern Alberta, Canada – roughly centered around the boomtown of Fort McMurray. These oil sands, hosted in the McMurray Formation, consist of a mixture of crude bitumen (a semi-solid form of crude oil), silica sand, clay minerals, and water. The Athabasca deposit is the largest reservoir of crude bitumen in the world and the largest of three major oil sands deposits in Alberta, along with the nearby Peace River and Cold Lake deposits. Together, these oil sand deposits lie under 141,000 square kilometres (54,000 sq mi) of sparsely populated boreal forest and muskeg (peat bogs) and contain about 1.7 trillion barrels of bitumen in-place, comparable in magnitude to the world’s total proven reserves of conventional petroleum.

With modern non-conventional oil production technology, at least 10% of these deposits, or about 170 billion barrels were considered to be economically recoverable at 2006 prices, making Canada’s total oil reserves the second largest in the world, after Saudi Arabia’s. The Athabasca deposit is the only large oil sands reservoir in the world which is suitable for large-scale surface mining, although most of it can only be produced using more recently developed in-situ technology.

Read on about the environmental impact of oil/tar sands

I really love these vintage sales pitches. Don’t you find this to be a little eerie? It’s a small car that’s easier to park and fits just about anywhere and it’s perfect for war time petrol rationing… hrmm. When was this made? 1940, huh?

I love that it accomodates women drivers, too.

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This is the world’s first solar car (1960) – powered by a ten thousand cell panel on the roof.

I love that the license plate reads:  ‘California / Horseless Carriage / 2103′.

And this line: “It’s a significant point that every day as much energy falls on the earth from the sun as has been used in the whole history of our civilization!”

One of the men seen could be Dr Charles Escoffery, a scientist and pioneer in solar energy, who brought the car over from the United States.

Lookit the size of that walkie talkie!

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This is a simple DIY that simply involves re-packaging a solar garden light. All you need is a deodorant stick, a solar light, and some silicone.

This is great for people who bike to work and park outside. Free renewable energy from the sun!

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Alright, alright… so this isn’t really a Transformer. But isn’t it super cool? It’s pretty darn close to a Transformer. I mean – it transforms. Right?

This comes from Inhabitat’s sister site (for kidlets), Inabitots.

So what are the features of this 6-in-1 solar powered toy?

• 6 different possible configurations: robotic dog, moving plane, stationary plane, boat, car, and windmill
• Solar powered (obviously)
• The 25 pieces assemble WITHOUT screws!
• The diagrams are big and easy to follow

Inhabitots makes one last great point about this toy saying:

“Transformers are all the rage…again. But if they really are intelligent life forms exiled from a dying planet, why didn’t they decide to take the shape of the 6 in 1 Solar Robot? Why choose fossil fuel hungry vehicles (Chevrolets no less), that have put planet earth at the brink of peril? We believe it’s all an intergalactic conspiracy concocted on planet Cybertron.”

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If you’ve been following along, you’ll agree that this — the green experiment, bringing me from not-so-green-at-all to whatever shade of green I can manage to get comfortable in — has been a scatterbrained journey to this point.

Researching and discovering cool green news, products, foods, and initiatives has been really key in this  ‘going green’ journey. I think my preconceptions of what it was to be ‘green’ involved things that were way less cool and interesting, and way more bland, boring, and well, a lot of work.

And in hindsight, I’m almost ashamed to admit that it takes neat videos, celebrities, yummy looking, easy to make food, cool inventions, and flashy sales pitches to catch my attention when it comes to becoming more eco-friendly. But it does — and I’m probably not alone.

Like many of you, I just wasn’t born and raised to care about the environment, to put it bluntly. I certainly don’t blame my mother, she had plenty of things to worry about, like many mothers do. But as I’m getting older — gaining knowledge, experience, observations of my own and opinions to go with them — I find I am starting to notice, with the help of this green experiment, of course, that I should care about the environment. That it’s important to care about the environment. And whatever it takes to motivate me to actually do something, so be it — why be embarrassed? That’s why companies and organizations make these flashy sales pitches, cool inventions, and neato videos featuring their products and initiatives.

So what am I doing differently? How has this experiment changed me?

Well, I can tell you honestly, my interest in green, eco-friendly things has been awakened. I notice eco-friendly things everywhere – things I’d definitely not noticed before. The buses here in Ottawa, for example — some are hybrid! You know, I hadn’t even noticed that before all this. I’m definitely more aware of things like EcoCabs, reusable cloth bags at grocery stores (and now the need to pay 5 cents for every plastic grocery bag you use), organic food and drink everywhere! But do I notice things that aren’t eco-friendly? I don’t think I’m quite there yet. I mean, unless it’s blatantly obvious, I don’t notice it much.  But I’m hoping to get there!

I hope you’ve enjoyed taking part in the journey so far, I’m looking forward to seeing what this next part of the journey holds for me.

As you may have noticed, I’ve been slowly dubbing features based on the days of the week.  Here’s a rundown of the ones I’ve got so far:

Celebrity Thursday — Bringing you news of celebrities that are eco-friendly and making a difference in the world with more than just their blockbuster films and pretty faces.

Organic Recipe Friday — Delicious organic recipes from the perspective of someone new to the organic foods world. I’m not ‘granola’ — on any given day you could not pay me to eat twigs and berries for supper (well, berries maybe. Mmmm.) I’m trying to prove to you as well as myself that organic food doesn’t have to be weird, expensive, for total hippies… or whatever stereotype you might subscribe to when it comes to natural foods.

Saturday Recap — This one’s pretty self explanatory: Each week I’ll take the week’s most popular post and feed you something new about it, like comments from my readers, impressions, or a video demo.

Let’s add a few!

While I’d like to leave Sundays and Mondays for things that catch my eye or editorials that I’d like to get off my chest, that still leaves us with Tuesdays and Wednesdays that have yet to be named. Here are my thoughts on what those days should be:

I would like to dub Tuesdays DIY Tuesday where I can cover cool do-it-yourself eco projects I find for you to try out at home.  And don’t be fooled, I’ll be trying out these projects as well. I’m really looking forward to this day of the week — I love do-it-yourself projects that yield me cool gadgets and fun toys — and why not have them be from recycled, reused, or otherwise eco-friendly parts? Who doesn’t want a jar full of sunshine?

Now comes the tough love.  These bits are the ‘candy’ that I use to lure me – entice me, if you will – into becoming more eco-friendly. But what about the hard facts? Why should I become more eco-friendly, because some A-list celebrity is? Because I’d get to use neato gadgets and cool robot lawnmowers? Starting now I’d like to introduce a new weekly feature: Hard Truth Wednesday. Why we should be going green.  Sure, it won’t be glamourous, fun, or full of cool do-dads, but sometimes the truth shouldn’t be sugar coated, right?

Have some suggestions that would fit into any of these theme days? I’d love to hear from you!

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