Mark & I have been doing the local & organic thing for about 1 year now with our food. This is largely with the help of Green BEAN delivery that has not only changed the way we eat, but also saves me vast amounts of time meal planning & wandering random groceries stores. Our health has improved, we eat at home more often, & I feel like we save money because we only buy what we need for the week & no junk food.
So now that we are super comfortable with the food routine...it is time to embark on Phase II Part One: Person Health Care items. Shampoo, Soap, hand soap, toothpaste. I found an website called Soap.com that regularly has sales on Organic & Natural products and always has free shipping over $38. So I did some research and found products that were highly reviewed, all natural, not ridiculously expensive, and we are currently in need of.
I am a "stockpiler" so this may take some time to phase into...we need shampoo right now, but we have a fair amount of other stuff from my Sam's Club Binges to last a while, but I ordered some soap, hand soap refills, & toothpaste so that we can begin the process. Phase II Part Two will be Deodorant (no crystal bullshit), feminine hygiene products, lotion, sunscreen, bugspray, toilet paper...and any other health care items I think of that we need to replace.
I am not giving up my Mary Kay moistureizer as I feel like if I stop using it...my face will fall off or instantly turn wrinkly. So they can continue testing that on bunnies and orangutans...don't care.
Phase III - Home Cleaning Products & Other Household Paper Products...coming soon...or in a year or so.
Phase IV - Dog & Cat Products. (there is a sister website to Soap.com called Wag.com that also has all natural stuff for pets.)
Kris
Yesterday, I finally got around to making sauce with my 10 bags of frozen tomatoes from the last year's garden. It was a fairly simple process but also time consuming. It involved standing around the stove for several hours stiring and tasting. It would have been out of the question to make this in the hot summer...so I can justify my procrastination with that :) So basically I cored & peeled the tomatoes, boiled them down to a sauce consistancy with the olive oil and seasonings, & ran the sauce through the food mill. We then put the finished sauce back into plastic bags and froze for future use in 2 cup portions. We got 6 bags of sauce. The food mill is awesome!! It totally filtered out the seeds but still left a nice tomatoey consistancy to the sauce. Thanks Mom & Dad for the great gift!!!! Here is the finished sauce prior to bagging: 
