A swiffer makeover/ green clean 2014

Hi guys!

The snow came back today. It was actually pretty bad on my drive to work, but it cleared up by the time I had to drive home. Predictably, work was incredibly slow. One of my coworkers and I used the downtime to deep clean and organize backstock, and I have to say, we were both extremely proud of the result. 

I was at an awesome work event all day yesterday, which I'll get to in a minute. First, a few pics from the night:

My husband has been begging for more veggies at home, so I came through and made this meal of baked shrimp on a bed of lightly steamed rainbow chard, + roasted broccoli and cauliflower. We covered our plates in Thai peanut sauce, which was the real star of the show. 

Of course, I had to bake a special lone shrimp for the cat:

Next, check out this beautiful thing - 

Isn't it incredible? It's a romanesco cauliflower, and you can eat it however you'd eat a regular cauliflower.

I can't stop staring at it. It's like a fantasy vegetable. 

I spent yesterday at a sort of training/education event that my company holds regularly for employees. It's meant to be an introduction for brand new staff, but I never got the chance to attend early on in my "career". In my department, we're so busy that as soon as you sign your paperwork, they hand you a knife, a case of bell peppers and tell you to start chopping. My formal education came just a few months late. 

The goal is to learn about the culture, values and purpose of the company, and I learned some cool factoids. For example - did you know that a dairy cow can be considered organic one year and conventional the next? All it takes for the organic label is 12 months without antibiotics, so cows often go back and forth between being labeled organic and conventional. Something to think about. 

One topic we covered was green cleaning products, which brings me to the real purpose of this post. We only touched on it briefly, but for some reason I got stuck on the subject. As you guys may know, I'm pretty careful about what I put in my body. I've come a long way from the days when I used to frequent KFC, the candy aisle at CVS and Dunkin Donuts on the reg. After learning about green cleaning, though, I realized that I could be using fewer (or no) toxic cleaning products. It would be better for the environment, better for us, and better for our animal, who spends a lot more time on the floor than we do. 

The first thing I wanted to green-ify was my swiffer pads, which I use almost every night but are wasteful and probably toxic. I had the brilliant idea to buy or make a reusable swiffer pad, and then looked online and realized that about a million people have already thought of that. Amazingly, I found two microfiber cloths in my stash that fit the swiffer mop perfectly.

I bought a super green and clean all-surface cleaner from work, and I swiffered the kitchen floor using that and my new microfiber swiffer pad.

It worked unbelievably well - way better than the disposable pads. Look at that clean floor! If only I had thought of this plan before I bought a Costco-sized box of the disposable ones.

So, one of my goals for the new year is to clean up my household products. I'm calling it Green Clean 2014. There are some products I'll never be able to go completely green with (deodorant being one of them - I tried once and swear it made me smell worse than if I had worn no deodorant), and I'm okay with that. It's more of a general effort. 

Any green cleaning tips out there?

Have a great night!

xo