Halloween. The very name sends tears streaming down any Eco-Hero‘s face as they contemplate the mass murder of millions of innocent pumpkins. But fret not. Out of this pumpkin massacre, some good can come. And that good is known as roasted pumpkin seeds and homemade pumpkin pie.

Homemade Pumpkin Pie

Let us begin with the pumpkin pie recipe. Now I’m not talking about pumpkins from a can, or frozen pre-made pumpkin pies. No. I’m talkin’ ’bout some made-from-scratch, down-home, honest-to-goodness, homemade pumpkin pie.
Pumpkin Pie Ingredients

• 1 cup sugar
• 1.5 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 2 teaspoons nutmeg
• one half teaspoon ground ginger
• 4 large eggs
• 3 cups stewed pumpkin, mashed
• 12oz of evaporated milk

Here’s whatchu do:
* Find a pumpkin (a jack o’ lantern will do). After appropriately mourning its brutal death, collect all the parts that were cut out (eyes, nose, mouth, the works).
* Skin these pumpkin pieces, and cut them into “manageable chunk” size.
* Boil these in a microwave or on the stove until you can easily push a fork through them.

* Mash up the boiled pumpkin.
* Add condensed milk, sugar, eggs, and spices.
* Dump it all into a pie crust (filling to about 1/4″ below the top).
* Bake at 425 F for 15 minutes, then bake for about 50 minutes at 350. You can tell it’s done if you stick a knife in it and it comes out pretty clean.

* Let cool on rack
* Eat the delicious pie made from the flesh of the defenseless pumpkins, or you can wrap it up using some reused foil from a restaurant, like so:

Roasted Pumpkin Seeds

* When you clean out a pumpkin to make a jack-o-lantern, save the seeds.
* Rinse the seeds, removing any of that orange, stringy mess.

* Add a wee bit o’ oil, some salt, and any other flavors you want (hot sauce, honey, curry).
* Bake at 275 degrees for 10-20 minutes (until they’re golden brown), stirring the seeds when they’re halfway done.

* Congratulations, you have now made a delicious and nutritious snack from the guts of a freshly killed pumpkin. I hope you’re proud of yourself.

These are great ways to use every part of the pumpkin, much like the Indians (these Indians, not these) used every part of the buffalo. Let me know if y’all know any other good pumpkin recipes. Thankee kindly.
Also, it is not too late to enter the free giveaway contest!! Click here for some details.

Right, let’s “cut to the chase”, as “they” say. There’s a stray cat that roams our neighborhood (not Gimpy the stray cat, a different one), and me and Tiff have been feeding him/trying to adopt him for a while. So far he’s not ready to stay in our house, and since the weather is ’bout to start getting chilly, I decided it was high time to build him his very own homemade cat house from reused materials. Luckily I still had a bunch o’ materials left over from our kitchen remodeling, even after making a kitchen cart from reused materials.

First, I cut the floor and walls from some old wood I had from our kitchen remodeling. After some screws n’ glue, this is what I had:

I had some carpet left over from mi casa, so I cut out a lil’ chunk and oh-so-carefully fitted it to Charlie’s cat house.

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FREE CALCULATOR CONTEST! IT’S WORTH IT, TRUST ME.
Way back in the day, I remember my mom would sometimes make homemade strawberry jam. We would spread it on our week-old bread, crying with happiness as the sweet fruit preserves covered up the normal moldy taste of our bread. An added bonus is that when it’s homemade strawberry jam, you can use organic, local strawberries and also reuse some old glass jars, instead of getting strawberries from who-knows-where and a brand new glass jar.

After much Internet (and soul) searching, I decided to share this secret homemade strawberry jam recipe. Unlike my recipe for homemade protein bars, this actually requires using the stove, so get an adult’s supervision!!!!!

Get a Glass Jar

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There you stand, in the grocery store, wishing that you had enough money to get you some of those crazy expensive protein bars. Sadly, you turn away, lamenting your puny muscles, wishing that there was some way to get protein bars without all the extra packaging and high prices. Well pay attention, for here is how to…

Make Your Own Protein Bars

Thanks to Krista’s protein bar recipe, I was able to make some protein bars of my own. Follow along with this picture essay, and you will learn the secrets of how to make some cheap, homemade protein bars.Here are the ingredients. If you want to use some eco-friendly protein powder, or organic bananas, or what have you, then by all means do. I opted for the cheapest ingredients for this demonstration.

• Banana
• Whey protein
• Oats
• Peanut butter
• Raw Peanuts (optional)

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This made the front page of Care2, vote for it yo

Since me n’ Tiff bought and moved into our bodacious townhome last summer, we’ve changed a lot about it. A big thing we changed was the kitchen; with the help of Leon, Bil-lay, and 10, we took out a lot of old and put in a lot of used (new for us) things. I saved a lot of what we took out (nails, wood, etc.), and have reused those materials to make some new things.

For Valentines’ Day, I made Tiff a kitchen island with these saved materials. I started with not much, but with a lil’ gumption and elbow grease, the kitchen island was completed. Here is its story…

If you fail to plan, you plan to fail. With this handy advice in my noggin, I drew out the plans for the island. I wanted to make it the same height as our counters, and also make sure that there was enough room for our trash can to fit in it. Before I show you my plans, please remember that they are copyrighted, so if you copy them I’ll sue your pants off.

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Look above. That used to be a yellow cheese school bus! Man, when I first saw this, I was too interested. I read all the steps, and looked at all the pictures of what Jake Von Slatt did. What he did was buy a cheap school bus (a little more than $2,000) and transform it into a beautiful, homemade RV. I like his homemade RV for a couple reasons:

1. He did it cheaply. The bus cost about $2,000, he did most of the work himself (or with his friends), and he got a LOT from the dump, craigslist, or freecycle.
2. He reused a lot of materials, thereby creating his RV in a very “green” way (reused bus, materials from dump, reused mess off websites).
3. You can see the process of the bus’s conversion. Seeing all the steps it takes is really interesting, and makes me want to (one day) attempt something like this. It’s really cool, so por favor take a look at it.

Anyhoo, enough with my thoughts. Enjoy this video of Von Slatt giving you a tour of his homemade RV that came from a lil’ ol’ cheese bus.

Last spring, two of my friends went to work building a bicycle generator. They slaved away on it for literally a couple days, but eventually it was ready to be tested. Me and Tiff stopped by for this special occasion; Thanh and Billy had hooked up the bike generator to a lamp. All we needed was a volunteer to ride the electrical monstrosity. After a moment of trepidation, I bravely stepped forward to offer my bike pedaling services, and as night fell in the thriving metropolis of Raleigh, I began pedaling…


Amazingly, it did not explode in a deadly shower of sparks. It worked. We had invented… ELECTRICITY. As that realization hit us, Captain Planet flew into the room, and everybody high-fived. It was awesome.Update: WRAL is going to put this on the news. The bad news is that we have to put the bike generator back together, as it’s been through some mess since last May.