Lifestyle

BDN file photo In Maine fresh berries are available throughout the summer. With strawberries appearing in June, raspberries and blackberries in July, and blueberries rounding out the summer season in August, there is so much goodness…
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Compound butter and mix-ins. | Photo by Sam Schipani One of the easiest ways to make your home kitchen seem like a gourmet restaurant is to make your own compound butter for everyday meals. Compound butter is simply a mixture of…
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A typical carpenter ant is often reddish brown or solid black and can be up to an inch long. | Photo by Jody Green, PhD Carpenter ants are among nature’s most efficient insects when it comes to breaking down and transforming rotting or…
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Photo by rawpixel.com from Pexels Citrus fruit and juice have a wide variety of uses in your daily life. Whether you are squeezing an orange into fresh juice or squeezing lemons to use as a natural stove top cleaner, you probably have…
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BeforeAfter I’m a dirty chef. I let food splash everywhere when I’m cooking. I’ve had more than my fair share of pots boil over with hot water, broth and sauce. My apron looks like it’s been through war. As such, I have an…
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Photo by Sam Schipani As more and more refrigerators have built-in icemakers, ice cube trays may seem like an unnecessary novelty. Standard, rectangular ice cube trays always seem to pop up at thrift stores, relegated to forgotten…
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BDN File Photo My laundromat is the Bermuda Triangle of socks. No matter how hard I try, I always end laundry day with at least one sock that has lost its mate to the swirling morass of machine washing. I may lament over the loss of…
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Photo by Sam Schipani You may be used to rinsing your fruit and vegetables in the sink before you eat them in order to remove the invisible grime of production. But if you are worried about imperceptible chemical pesticides, fungi and…
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Even zero-waste enthusiasts occasionally forget to bring reusable bags to the store. And when it happens, there’s that sinking feeling at the check-out counter, when the conveyor belt is brimming with groceries and our handy totes are…
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Photo by Oleg Magni from Pexels String lights are a fun, creative and inexpensive way to light up a room, without an electrician or fancy equipment. Also known as Christmas lights, they have more use in them than just for the holiday. …
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Some studies show that single-use plastic bags are more environmentally-frie­ndly than reusable bags when considering the impact of production, use and disposal. Critics of the studies say that such life cycle analyses fail to take into…
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Photo by Pjotrek on Morguefile. Kitchen sponges are dirtier than you think. The warm water and swirling food remnants in your kitchen sink make it an ideal breeding ground for bacteria, and porous sponges make a cozy home for microbial…
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