Fourth of July Goodies

Celebrating Independence Day is never complete without the yummy food. Sure fire works are spectacular to watch but there's nothing like biting into a nicely grilled hamburger followed by a sweet and tasty dessert.

Now I'd be lying if I said I could cook but I sure can follow a recipe like nobody's business. Below is a list of the best Fourth of July recipes I could find and I hope that they make your backyard weekend grilling enjoyable and delicious.

To die for recipes:

• Grill the best burgers in town with tips from the Food Network.
• Find a million and one ways to service a scrumptious hot dog.
• Make a tangy orange-sage grilled chicken from Pillsbury.
• Easy to make a red, white and blue cake from Betty Crocker.

Is it Time for the Smart Fridge?

This smart fridge is something we've been hearing about for years. At first, it was just a fridge with a LCD screen and high-speed Internet access to help you with recipes and deliver the weather and news without having to use a computer. Then, the smart fridge idea evolved to help you remember what to buy at the supermarket, like the Electrolux MMS Fridge. To be honest, the smart fridge always seemed a little silly to me; the modern equivalent of the stuff in those old "Kitchens of the Future" videos from the 50's.

However, recently I found a smart fridge concept that really piqued my interest. Designer Ashley Legg has come up with a smart fridge concept that makes me feel like my appliances are from the Stone Age. With her concept, as you add new groceries, you tell the fridge what you're putting inside it (and in your pantry) via the futuristic touch screen.

I don't know about you, but at my house we end up throwing a way a lot of produce and other foods. While we have the best intentions, life sometimes gets in the way and before I know it I'm throwing untouched food in the trash. This fridge can help cut down on waste and make your kitchen a little more eco-friendly by reminding you about food that will spoil soon.

While having a list of what's inside your fridge and when it will expire is kinda cool, what really makes this fridge cool is that it takes that information and tells you what recipes you can cook with what you have on hand. I know I've spend many an hour staring at an open fridge, wasting electricity trying to work out what in the heck I could make with the contents, so it would be pretty sweet for the fridge itself to do that thinking for me. Once you've selected a recipe, the fridge will then walk you through making it with step-by-step instructions.

So, what do you think? Is this a smart fridge you'd pine for, or is this more silly futurism people will be laughing about in 2060?

Image via Yanko Design.

Five Hot Summer Saving Tips

Summer is but days away though the heat that is bearing down upon us make me say summer is here NOW. This means kids are starting to get out of school, A/C bills are starting to go up and parents are planning family vacations. With all the hustle and bustle going on it may be hard to remember that you can find awesome ways to save big this busy summer season.

Here are four summer saving tips:

• Give the Dryer a Rest - Don't use energy to dry your wash when you can line dry for FREE.
• Replace Air Filter Frequently - Change out your air filters each month so you A/C runs more efficiently and uses less energy.
• Kids Eat Free - Check out the CouponDivas' kids eat FREE list to save some money when your family eats out. Always call the restaurant to make sure they still have this special running.
• Switch and Save - Let WhiteFence help you shop and compare rates for Internet, electricity, phone and TV service so you can find a great deal and save money.
• Camping Vacation - Save money on airfare and hotels and take the family on a great camping trip near your home. 

The New Hybrid Vending Machine

Cars aren't the only ones being grouped into the 'hybrid' category, you can now include vending machines. Yes, that's right! So the next time you reach for a soda, make sure you're being green and shopping where there are eco-friendly vending machines.

Coca-Cola and Pepsi are two soda giants that are doing their part to be environmentally friendly and reducing their carbon footprint by using vending machines that use carbon dioxide and hydrocarbons instead of harmful refrigerants.

To learn more read, New Vending Machines Stay Cool without Warming the Planet, at MotherNatureNetwork.

Saving Money at the Grocery Store

As many of you know, there are plenty of ways for you to save money in your day-to-day spending. Whether it's through car pooling or the way you use water and electricity, you can find all kinds of opportunities to pinch a few pennies. One place where you can always use more money saving tips is the grocery store. CBS News has put together a list of tricks to turn you into a savvy food shopper.

• Check the bottom shelf — Since eye-level is where most shoppers do their spending in the grocery store, many companies pay to have their items stocked there. Check the bottom of the shelf for more cost-effective items.
• Mind the end-cap — Just because certain products are on display at the end of the aisle doesn't mean they are on sale. In addition, check the expiration date on these products. There's a chance the retailer has put less fresh items there in hopes of selling them before they go bad.
• Convenience costs money — Sure, you can buy pre-cut chicken or shredded cheese, but it's always cheaper just to buy the full product yourself and then cut it or separate it out later.

For more tips, read the CBS News article, How Supermarkets Lure You To Buy More.

Another way to cut your grocery bill in half is to use coupons. Clip them out of flyers and newspapers or print them online from the following sites:

• Coupon Cabin
• Kroger
• Coupons.com
• Randalls
• Coupon Mom
• Target
• Retail Me Not
• Safeway
• Smart Source
• Winn Dixie

Think Twice Before Deep Frying Your Turkey This Thanksgiving

Underwriters Laboratories, the product safety specialists, created this video they suggest you watch before making plans to fry your turkey this holiday season. It's a little scary to see how things can quickly go wrong!

Saving Time and Money with the Freezer

As a new home owner, switching food over between refrigerators and freezers has made me more acutely aware of just how bad I am about preserving food. After cleaning out several sets of leftovers, it's hard not to feel like there's more I could have done to freeze the food that wasn't going to get used right away. Using the freezer better not only results in less time preparing food, but also less money spent since you're using the leftovers so well.  I've tried to do this a few times in the past, but I've never been able to find the right balance of time and effort.

I'm not sure if any of you are in the same boat as me, but if you are, I found a recent post on Lifehacker to be fairly helpful when it comes to the freezer. 10 Simple Freezer Tricks to Save You Time and Money has some practical guidelines to follow that will make your life easier. For instance, one of the tips talks about using a chopstick to break apart pieces of frozen meat for portion control. Also, saving hard drives in freezers can help damaged recover lost data, or may at least allow it to boot long enough to get what you need.

To read more freezer tips, be sure to visit Lifehacker. How about you guys? Do you have any freezer or refrigerator tips to save time and money?

Coca-Cola to Release Eco-Friendly “PlantBottles”

Last month, I told you all about the Plastic Vortex, a swirling mass of plastic refuse in the Pacific Ocean that’s twice the size of Texas. Plastic bottles are some of the most common items found in the vortex, and are contributing heavily to the mass-scale pollution. According to the Container Recycling Institute, 22 billion plastic bottles are thrown away each year in the United States—that’s about 20 million per day! Clearly, even if we scale up our recycling, reducing and reusing efforts on a massive scale, something still needs to done about the make-up of these bottles.

Coca-Cola thinks they may have the answer in the PlantBottle, a new bioplastic bottle they have developed. Bioplastics, which are plastics made with biomass instead of petroleum, have been becoming more and more popular as an environmentally-friendly way to package goods. Bioplastics are much more sustainable than traditional plastics, with much smaller carbon footprints and reduced toxin levels. PlantBottles are made with spent sugar cane and molasses, and in their current formulation, cut carbon emissions per bottle by a whopping 25 percent. Coca-Cola is gearing up to start using PlantBottles for Dasani brand water in select markets by the end of the year, with VitaminWater following next year.

According to CEO Muhlar Kent, Coca-Cola has a "vision to eventually introduce bottles made with materials that are 100 percent recyclable and renewable." Though this version of the PlantBottle is only 30 percent bioplastic and will only see limited distribution for the foreseeable future, this is still a massive step in the right direction.

Fast-Food Restaurants Finding New Ways to Boost Energy Efficiency

Sure, fast-food restaurants aren’t exactly the darling of the green movement, but that isn’t stopping some of them from looking for clever ways to reduce energy composition and save some money in the process. The New York Times’ Green Inc. recently posted an article about Current Energy, a company that’s helping restaurants find innovate solutions to cut down on wasted energy.

Bassam Odeh, who runs 34 restaurants in Texas and Louisiana, has just installed a Current Energy system that alerts him with a text message whenever his employees leave the door to a freezer or walk-in refrigerator open. A remarkable success, the system has already slashed his electricity bill by 10 to 20 percent.

Current Energy also recently installed a system at a pizza joint that helps cut down on natural gas consumption. Before the system was installed, it was common for all three of the restaurant’s pizza ovens to be up and running, regardless of how busy it was. By monitoring the amount of people in the restaurant, and turning two of the ovens off and on based on occupancy, the system has already cut the restaurant’s natural gas bill in half.

On the energy creation side of the equation, CNET has reported that a New Jersey Burger King franchise is planning on installing a kinetic-energy capturing device in its drive-through. Essentially a speed bump that captures energy wasted when cars are braking, the system will harvest electricity for the restaurant in a similar manner to that of hybrid cars. With more than 150,000 cars a year rolling through the Hillside restaurant, that’s a lot of potential energy. The company that makes the device, New Energy Technologies, is planning on installing them in toll booths, checkpoints and other heavy traffic spots—so be on the lookout for one in your neck of the woods.

Chances are you don’t have a drive-through window, a walk-in refrigerator or three full-scale pizza ovens at your house, but these stories illustrate some tried-and-true green concepts that apply to everyone: don’t use what you don’t need and keep looking for new ways to harvest energy.

New Ways to Make Your Cup of Coffee a Little Greener

If you ever find yourself pondering your carbon footprint over your morning cup of joe, these clever new coffee-based inventions might just be for you.

Jeon Hwan Ju’s radical new printer concept named RITI would allow you to save the Earth and your wallet at the same time. Instead of traditional ink, RITI uses spent coffee or tea grounds to slash printing costs and waste. Taking eco-friendliness one step further, the printer uses human power to move the cartridge over the paper, meaning you won’t have to plug it into an outlet. While RITI is still on the drawing board at this point, if and when it comes to market people will finally have an alternative to costly and wasteful ink cartridges, not to mention delicious-smelling documents.

If you’re willing to plan out your coffee needs 12 to 24 hours in advance, the Hourglass Coffee Machine can help you cut down on both counter-space and electricity costs. Using no electricity whatsoever, the gadget brews up an environmentally-friendly coffee concentration that can be stored in the fridge for weeks and mixed with hot water when needed. As a bonus, the manufacturer claims the resulting brew tastes better than traditional coffee since the process both reduces acid content and retains essential oils lost in heating.

As for how to transport your coffee, Australian-based KeepCup has a great alternative to the endless flow of disposable take-out coffee cups. Sure, reusable cups are nothing new, but what sets the KeepCup apart is its shape. Available in three barista-standard sizes, the KeepCup is able to fit under the nozzle of an espresso machine, meaning it doesn’t have to be filled via a wasteful paper cup like its taller competition. Other green features include a recyclable and virtually indestructible Polypropylene #5 construction, low embodied energy, and a silicone band that allows owners to permanently brand their cup with their coffee preferences.