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You can find vegan pastry dough in many stores, and if you stock up when it's on sale it can even be inexpensive. By experimenting with the dough, we invented many kinds of turnovers.

To make the traditional triangle-shaped turnover, cut the dough into even squares about three inches long. To get rectangle-shaped pastries, you can cut the dough into four-inch by three-inch rectangles and fold it over. Then, you can slice the dough on top for ventilation -- or to make the pastries seem more professional. Note: Line the cookie sheet with foil, as filling often comes out during baking.

Desserts are one of the easiest things to make. For nine simple apple turnovers, peel an apple and dice it, then put a small mound of pieces in the middle of each square. Sprinkle cinnamon and sugar on top of the apple pieces, and fold each pastry into a turnover shape. Crimp the edges together and seal them with water. They are done when the pastry is golden-brown. (If you cut the dough into rectangles and fold those over, you could top the pastry with sugar so that it sparkles.)

To make nine baklava turnovers, pour about ¼ cup walnuts into a bowl and pour a little milk (soymilk works well) over them. Using a spoon, put some of the mixture on the pastry squares, and add sugar on top. A few cubes of butter in each pastry improve the taste, but than can also be omitted. Fold them over and crimp.

I experimented several times with bear claws, and although I never made the store-bought kind I found some other fillings. To make twelve "bear claws," mix 1 cup brown sugar, ½ cup white sugar, 2 teaspoons cinnamon, and ½ cup ground almonds and walnuts together. Fill the pastry squares with the mixture, then fold them over and crimp. Before baking them, press sliced almonds into the top of each pastry. When they are done, they can be sprinkled with sugar.

Another time, I decided to try to make cinnamon rolls. They were not bad if you weren't expecting a... cinnamon roll? First, open the pastry sheet but do not cut it. Then, mix together some cinnamon and sugar (⅓ cup sugar and two tablespoons cinnamon is fine, but it doesn't have to be perfect) and spread it over the dough, pushing it in. (Leave about half an inch at one end of the pastry so that it will hold together. Then, carefully slice the dough into long, thin strips. (Where you would get three turnovers, you get four strips.) Next, scatter a few chopped walnuts on top. Roll up the strips and push the end in, to stick it to the pastry. Then, lightly dust them with cinnamon. After they've baked, they can be sprinkled with powdered sugar.

Jam turnovers are very easy. Simply put a spoonful of jam in each pastry and crimp. However, these always find a way to leak. Katrianna likes eating the crystallized jam that's been baked. Strawberry jam is our favorite, but any type will work.

Pastry is not exclusive to desserts. Salty or even healthy pastries can be made with equal success. Just filling the pastry with cheese (cheddar works best) makes a very popular snack. If you choose to make these in rectangles, you could put a little salt on top.

Trying to replicate samosas, we filled them with potatoes. Some also had peas in them and others included cheese. Additionally, we tried putting the yellow, mild turmeric, which fights cancer and other diseases, in the turnovers. They were surprisingly good. My sister often adds all sorts of other vegetables and herbs when she makes them (but her recipes are "top secret!").

Whatever you do with the pastry, it usually turns out well. It's also very easy to prepare and bake.

In the deep dark chasm,

The day after Thanksgiving means the beginning of the Christmas season. The radios begin playing Christmas carols as people put up their lights and decorations. Bits of wrapping paper deck the floors as people hurry to hide their presents. Kids wonder what they'll get as they try to surprise their family with some useless -- but essential -- item. Nativity plays are written and then rehearsed at the top of the actors' lungs.

But the Christmas tree plays just as big a part of the festivities as any of those things. Traditionally, Dad carries it in, Mom puts the lights on it, and finally the kids get to help decorate it. But as we've learned, getting your tree from the wild adds much more to the whole tradition.

Many national forests across the country allow you to cut your own Christmas tree. When we heard about it for the first time, we thought it sounded suspiciously like logging. However, there are many reasons why it is better than getting one commercially.

By doing this, you are helping with the maintenance of forests. It may be viewed as a better alternative to prescribed burns or selective logging. When clumps of trees are too close to each other, they don't get enough light to grow properly. So, if you choose a tree that's standing next to at least one more, it will make the other trees in the stand healthier. Usually, forests not offering this program have to either use prescribed burns to remove stands of trees and dry wood that is a potential fire hazard or hire people to cut down some of the trees. They have to do something, or wildfires will start easily and quickly get out of control. So you're also helping to make forests safer.

Additionally, places with a large demand for trees set a limit on obtainable permits. In the desert states, where trees are not as common as in other places, available permits may total just above 6,000. However, where self-serve Christmas trees are not as popular, there may not be any limit at all. Besides this rule, there may also be restrictions regarding how many trees one family may take. The numbers can vary from one per family to five per person, so it's a good idea to clarify this if you plan to get more than one Christmas tree.

It is illegal to cut the top part off a tree. Accordingly, the highest you can cut is six inches off the ground. In some places, the circumference of the trunk also has to be six inches or less. Still, I would recommend following this rule whether it is enforced or not, because the trees with thicker trunks are older and will take longer to grow back. Chainsaws are also prohibited. Another general rule is that you're supposed to cut at least fifty feet from the road. In most places, however, there are specific plots indicated with ropes or ribbons for cutting trees and you don't have to worry about that.

Getting a Christmas tree that has already been cut can have its own problems. In 2009, Washington sent shipments of Christmas trees to Alaska. Unfortunately, live Pacific Chorus frogs had made their homes in the trees. This species of frog can carry fungi or viruses, including the chytrid fungus that has killed amphibians on many continents. The frogs were not native to Alaska, and residents were told to kill the frogs if they found them in their tree. In 2007, a load of Washington trees headed for Hawaii was redirected to Alaska when they found two yellow jacket queens and a kind of hornet riding on them. Hawaii is much stricter than Alaska about what it lets in (they probably learned from the mice, mongooses and mosquitoes introduced by early settlers), and requires trees to be shaken by a machine before entering the islands. No matter where you live, introducing non-native species is a problem.

If there is a national forest near where you live, you can find out if they allow Christmas tree harvesting. (Do not rule yourself out because you live in the Great Plains. Both Nebraska and South Dakota actually allow cutting Christmas trees in their national forests.) For most national forests, their websites list details under the "Passes and Permits" section.

It's a good idea to know what species of tree you're allowed to cut. In Florida, bushy sand pines are available. In one New Mexico forest, any species of conifer is available. In Arizona, it varies by forest. In two of them, you can take any species of tree; one is exclusively firs; another only pinon or juniper trees. In some Colorado forests, you are obliged to take the yellow-green lodgepole pine.

Directions are also important so that you make sure you end up going to the right forest. In California, both the Mendocino National Forest and the Lake Tahoe Basin do allow people to take trees, but the nearby (and easily confused) El Dorado National Forest penalizes those who do.

Finally, cutting your own Christmas tree in the forest is an experience that is entirely unmatched by going to most tree lots. Finding a tree yourself is unforgettable -- although it does help if you remember to bring a camera!

Becoming a vegetarian not only benefits the animals, it also helps the planet. By easily altering your diet, you can save many resources, including land, food, water and energy.

Energy One third of all fossil fuels produced in the US are used to raise livestock to be eaten. Eighty percent of all agricultural land is used by the meat or dairy industries. All of the little stages needed to convey meat to your home add up into one huge problem. Turning off lights or unplugging appliances when they are not needed are very minor contributions when compared to the immense environmental profit created by a transition to vegetarianism. Consider the steps needed to produce a packaged hot dog or hamburger or chicken nuggets:

1. Remember the 80 percent of all farming land used by the meat companies? They use a lot of the land to grow corn, soybeans and grain to be used as feed. These crops must be watered, sprayed with pesticides and nurtured just as food for human consumption would be. This uses a lot of energy in itself. While this process is not eliminated by vegetarianism, many of the other steps could be.

2. When you see 18-wheelers driving down the highway, don't they strike you as being very bad for the environment? They're giving off clouds of pollution, and they get very bad mileage or they use more gas per mile than an energy-efficient car would use. Those trucks carry the grain to the feed mill. The feed mill isn't environmentally-friendly, either. It uses a lot of electricity to power it. Although being a vegetarian isn't perfect, at this point the food would be ready to go to the grocery store. But there's still a long process before the final product arrives at the supermarket.

3. The feed is loaded back into the 18-wheelers and driven to the factory farms, where animals are mass-produced. The animals have to be raised on the factory farms, which wastes a lot of energy. Think about it - they have to be fed, watered, and given injections of hormones and antibiotics to prevent the diseases which spread quickly in such unsanitary conditions, and many other things that most people don't realize are necessary.

4. Once the animals are grown, they are loaded onto specially-equipped 18-wheelers and trucked to the slaughterhouse. The slaughterhouse, which is yet another inefficient industrial building, takes huge amounts of energy to run.

5. After they have been killed, the animals are often again transported and delivered to packaging factories, which must be powered to pack the bags of processed food that you buy in a grocery store.

6. The packaged food is driven to a grocery store, where it must be refrigerated to prevent its spoiling. You buy it and take it home, where it must again be kept cool.

Greenhouse Gases If every American substituted vegetarian food for a meal of chicken once a week, the carbon dioxide reduction would be equal to taking over half a million cars off the road, according to the Environmental Defense Fund, an organization trying to preserve natural resources. Eating one pound of meat is the carbon dioxide equivalent of driving an SUV 40 miles in the amount of energy expended to produce the final product.

Wasted Food Eating meat wastes more grain than dining on vegetarian foods, which do not have to be harvested to feed animals before they finally become human food. It takes 16 pounds of grain to produce just 1 pound of animal meat, according to John Robbins' Diet for a New America. That's a ratio of 16 to 1. If every pasture used to graze livestock or grow cattle feed was planted with soybeans for human consumption, no one in the world would be starving.

Pollutants The runoff from factory farms producing meat pollutes public water more than all other industrial sources combined. In towns around Bellingham, in Washington state, the fields are sprayed with contaminated, brown water from chicken plants. We went to a town, Lynden, which had a Dutch heritage and featured windmills and half-timbered buildings. It would have been quaint, except that it smelled horribly like the dirty water being used to irrigate the nearby fields. Because the corn fields were also being watered with the polluted water, that Halloween we could not go to any corn mazes.

Scenic Drives The French and Swiss Alps have been turned into huge cow pastures. The smell in some towns was so bad that we could not walk around in them. We tried to hike up to a glacier located in open space in France, but had to jump fences and avoid the fields with grazing cows in them. In England, it is sheep and not cows which roam everywhere. Although the sheep are not as bad as cattle, they still make traveling less enjoyable. When driving through the Midwestern US, we often pass stockyards where cows are packed into small, muddy enclosures.

Benefits of Vegetarianism Although being a vegetarian sounds strange and difficult, it is one of the very best things you could do for the environment. People turn off the air conditioning or the TV when they leave a room and use canvas grocery bags instead of paper or plastic ones, but, although this helps the environment some, eating meat wastes a lot more energy.

      In 2006, lab scientists grew hog meat from stem cells. Although they said the pork was too squishy, the untasted meat still seemed to be a success.

     NASA decided to give it a try, because they thought their astronauts would be able to eat meat in space that way. They began a research program, but the scientists just got a layer of pig tissue -- astronauts would just have to be vegetarian.

      To build meat on Earth, they separate stem cells from muscle cells. They then put it in a nutrient-rich jelly. It might not work, however. Making a small pork chop would require letting the cells sit for 30 days. However, we may be able to develop advanced technology such as "Cell Incubators" to breed fake meat.

      Is it really humane to do this? Although it allows some pigs to be saved, it still makes for an unlucky few to be killed for their cells.  Vegetarianism is definitely a better policy, as it doesn't allow any pigs to be killed (for cells or meat).


This is still important, however, as a million pork cells = 999,999 pigs saved from the slaughterhouse......

1. Cut up 6-pack rings because animals can choke on these.
2. Avoid balloons or other flimsy plastic items. Turtles can choke on these because they mistake them for jellyfish and eat them.
3. Recycle everything that can be recycled. Buy recycled paper or notebooks at the store.
4. Try to reduce use of heat or air conditioning. Instead, turn on the fan or don a handy sweater.
5. Try to get out of using your car. Instead you can buy a bike or, if it is a short distance, walk.  
6. Plant trees in your garden. That reduces pollution in the air and gives shade.   
7. Reduce usage of water by not turning it on full blast in the sink or turning it off while you wash in the shower.
8. Turn off lights or the television when you leave a room: it saves electricity.  
9. Don't throw any food out the car window. That teaches animals to hunt by the road and eventually they get run over.
10. If you don't need bags at the grocery store, say it. That reduces plastic usage (see above) and saves paper. Another option is reusable bags.   

Turtles are greatly endangered due to both light and plastic. Both seem harmless. But they are greatly damaging the population of sea turtles.

It is not uncommon to build hotels or other accommodations on the seashore. But it is harmful. Turtles are naturally guided by the moon to the sea once they hatch from their eggs on the beach. But the lights now guide the turtles away from the beach. They soon die.

Then there's plastic. They mistake it for jellyfish (one of their favorite foods) and die because they cannot digest it. Their life expectancy is 80 years in the wild, but now these dangers threaten their lifespans. And, to add to the cumulative effect of this misery for the graceful creatures, only 1 out of every 100 eggs laid will survive to adulthood. The turtles' chances of survival naturally are not great, and that is why we need to be more aware of their peril to this day.

    Every species of sea turtle is endangered. That means that one of these species could go extinct if we all keep going with these wasteful ways. We have to try and stop it when these things happen to the fragile world around us.  

    What We Can Do:

•    Use less plastic
•    Try not to stay in hotels on the seashore or
•    Encourage your hotel to use light dimmer than the moon
•    Buy reusable cloth bags at your local store
•    "Adopt" a turtle at a wildlife conserving website like WWF or Defenders of Wildlife
•    Cut up any 6-pack plastic rings or balloons or
•    Don't buy any flimsy plastic items