Valentine’s Day Cinnamon Hearts

Want a little hand-made love with limited skills from ingredients you can get at Wasteless Pantry, your local plastic-free shop? How about Cinnamon Hearts?!

Valentine’s Day can be very commercial and consumeristic, but it doesn’t need to be. It is just another day in the year to show love to the people that matter the most to you and you can easily achieve that with low-waste ideas. Think consumable and compostable rather than collectible and you’ll be onto a winner!

For example…

  1. Try making your own card using recycled paper or reusing old cards to design something unique.
  2. Focus on time together, such as sharing a meal or going for a nature walk.
  3. Make something to give, such as these Cinnamon Hearts.
  4. Give their favourite unpackaged chocolates or other treats from our plastic-free shop.
  5. Wrap any gift you do give in something recycled or reusable rather than disposable.

So if you chose to make our Cinnamon Hearts, this may be the easiest gift to make yet!

You’ll need these ingredients from our bulk food stores:

200g pizza bread mix

1 tsp yeast

125ml water

cinnamon powder & castor sugar to taste

Mix together to form a dough, roll out thin and then sprinkle over LOTS of cinnamon sugar (i.e. cinnamon and sugar to your taste) then roll the two long sides to meet in the centre. Slice 2cm pieces and pinch below the gathered rolls. Bake for 20 mins at 180C or until cooked through and slightly golden. Consume whilst warm for best results but still tasty when it cools ❤️


New Year resolutions – goals or habits?

With every New Year comes the temptation to set some resolutions and, for many years, I diligently made a list of outcomes I was striving to achieve over the next 12 months.  However, I would usually find myself at the beginning of the next year dusting off the previous list before writing a new version (can you relate?) with variable degrees of success.

In the past few years, I noticed that I achieved my goals when I managed to establish new habits.  When I focus on changing one habit at at time I make changes which in turn deliver the end goal and become embedded in my daily life and therefore last a lifetime. This has been true in terms of health, money, career and relationships!

In respect of waste reduction, it has been tempting to set goals like “I will generate less than 1kg of landfill each month” but this does not always translate to specific actions or help with decision making in the heat of the moment. I have found that habits that make everyday decisions easier to reduce waste have more impact.

What has worked for our family is to change habits which, in turn, have a positive  impact the outcome.  For example, we have been working on:

Habit Achievement
Always keeping a set of resusable containers and bags in each car 99%
Keeping a small foldable bag in our handbag (me), workbag (hubby) or backpacks (kids) 95%
Menu planning every week 85%
Using leftovers for lunches and/or having a leftover night 90%
Taking our reusable water bottle (everywhere!) 100%
Composting any food scraps that our dog can’t/won’t eat 95%
Not buying a coffee if we can’t use a ceramic cup or keep cup 100%
Using our sodastream and only buying soft drinks in aluminium cans 95%
Giving experiences as gifts rather than ‘stuff’ or wrapping ‘stuff’ in fabric squares, tea towels or reuseable gift bag 85%
Taking resusable drink cup to the cinema for frozen soft drink (really proud of my kids for this one!) 100%
Buy secondhand items wherever possible 80%
Taking home-made, unpackaged food for school lunches. 75%

The habit we are working on at the moment is to limit our food purchases to products that can be bought:

  • in our own reusable containers at the bulk store, greengrocer, butcher, bakery and deli counter
  • in cans or in glass
  • in paper or cardboard

It IS sometimes cheaper or more convenient to buy something close to hand, wrapped in plastic but that is where changing your habits makes the difference.  Instead of calling into the supermarket on the way home from work at the last minute, we now do a menu plan for the week ahead and schedule in time for shopping trips to buy low-waste alternatives. Once we had done this a few times and got into a rhythm with the new habit, the prepackaged items were no longer a temptation!  We still struggle to find alternatives to a few everyday items such as milk and yoghurt as well as some treats such as chips/cheezles (I know, right!) but, overall, I am pleased with our progress.

By changing our habits rather than focussing on the outcomes, our family has seen dramatic reductions in what goes into both our landfill and recycling bins and, once a habit becomes ‘normal’, we can avoid slipping back to the old behaviours that used to created waste.

Can you relate? What habits have worked for your household?

Amelia