Okay, so they’re more Saturday Green Links this week. (I’m sure you were all holding your breath….)

• As Oil Threat Creeps Closer, A Rush on Seafood – New York Times. It seems like the only time people actually care about the environment is if it actually affects some part of their own lives. Weird.
• Why Norway’s Offshore Drilling Is Safer – Salon. Offshore drilling sucks, but Norway’s state-owned system is safer than our privately owned one.
• Strawberries Are About to Get More Toxic – The Thin Green Line. Methyl iodide, a gas used to create cancer in lab rats, has been proposed for use on strawberries in California.
• Around the Urban Homestead – Viggies Veggies. Viggie gets a pressure canner. I’ve thought about it myself, to get a handle on all the excess veggies from our CSA, but I think until we have our own garden one day, I’ll stick with freezing. (But I’m still interested in her process.)
• Sounding Out the Bell for Bicycling – Eco Yogini. So many people are taking up biking this spring! I really love reading about other people’s efforts. It’s so encouraging!

That’s all. As always, if you find something interesting, send it my way.

I’ve been trying to clean out my pantry lately, in the same way I cleaned out my freezer a couple months ago. It’s taking a little longer, but over the next few days I’ll share some of the things I found in there and what I made with them. Check out my easy crockpot vegetarian chili, too.

I’ve tried making pasta sauce only once before. It was my sister’s recipe, but it took forever on the stovetop and didn’t come out half as good as hers. So when I found two giant cans of whole tomatoes that I bought almost a year ago with the intention of trying again, I decided to go back to basics: a very simple marina sauce from Not Your Mother’s Slow Cooker Cookbook.

Easy Crockpot Marinara Sauce

Easy Crockpot Marinara Sauce

1/3 cup olive oil
1 medium yellow onion, finely chopped
1 clove garlic, minced
2 28-oz. cans whole plum tomatoes, with their juice
6 oz. tomato paste
pinch of sugar
salt and pepper to taste

1. Heat 3 tablespoons of oil over medium heat, then cook onion and garlic, stirring until softened, about 5 minutes.
2. Transfer to slow cooker; add the other 3 tablespoons of oil, tomatoes, tomato paste, and sugar; and stir. Cover and cook on low for 4-5 hours.
3. Purée with immersion blender. Season with salt and pepper. Keeps refrigerated for up to a week or frozen for 2 months.

That’s it! It’s easy, tastes great, and makes a lot—enough to last the two of us months—so I froze almost all of it. Since then I’ve thawed and used about a third, and it was just as good as the day we made it.

The idea was to move from this very simple tomato sauce recipe to something more complicated, but I really like this one. It tastes exactly like the sauce in this Italian restaurant in Bradford that Jason and I used to go to, which went out of business almost ten years ago. It’s funny how tastes and smells can bring back memories so strongly.

I’ve been trying to clean out my pantry lately, in the same way I cleaned out my freezer a couple months ago. It’s taking a little longer, but over the next few days I’ll share some of the things I found in there and what I made with them.

The question: What to do with cans of black beans, white beans, kidney beans, and diced tomatoes? The answer: Make Erin’s vegetarian chili. It takes just two hours to cook in the crockpot and no time to prepare—cutting up a green pepper and an onion is the worst of it. It’s delicious, and it makes a lot of servings—Erin says four, but it looks more like eight to me.

Easy Crockpot Vegetarian Chili

Of course, freezing half the chili means we’re filling our freezer back up. But I guess I’d rather fill it with homemade frozen meals than storebought ones.

Have any old sneakers lying around that are too far gone for the thrift store? Send them to Nike to be recycled! The Reuse-A-Shoe program turns sneakers into surfaces for playgrounds, tracks, basketball courts, and more. You can either take them to a nearby Nike store or mail them to:

Nike Grind Processing
8400 Winchester Road
Memphis, TN 38125

Thanks for the tip, Ali!

Birthday Edition! I’m off to see Jesus Christ Superstar tonight, but I’ve collected this ahead of time for you. Enjoy.

• Where Borrowing Is Greener than Buying – Pays to Live Green. I visit the library once a week to tutor, and I do borrow books, but I’m not convinced that getting books for free from the library is better than buying ebooks. It’s not like more resources are going into them, and don’t we want to support the writers and publishers of the books we love?
• Which Is Greener, Plastic Wrap or Aluminum Foil – Slate. Yes, I, too, stay up at night wondering about unimportant questions like this. So put your mind at ease, it’s aluminum foil. Or, more precisely, recycled aluminum foil that you then recycle.
• The Greenest High – Slate. Pot is the most efficient, but there are still major environmental issues with the way most of it’s grown.
• Swimming in the Charles Another Step Closer – Cambridge Chronicle. I don’t know that I ever would actually go swimming there, but I do go kayaking, and I’m glad it’s so much cleaner now.
• Use a Ceiling Fan Instead of an Air Conditioner – Energy Circle. A good reminder—it’s time to switch that ceiling fan back to counter-clockwise rotation for the summer.
• Concord Fires First Shot in Water Battle – Boston Globe. It’s a shame they did this right before Boston’s water “crisis.”
• Boil, Baby, Boil – Boston Globe. This basically says the same thing I did, but it’s nice to hear from another person.

That’s all for now. Remember to send anything interesting that you see this week my way.