Fresh Air

Even though our cottage has all of the basic kitchen appliances (refrigerator, electric stove, microwave, and coffee maker), we have moved away from cooking for every meal. We have found a great assortment of quick-and-easy menu items that either can stay in the cottage while we're away or can be easily carried across on the boat and hauled up the hill. But more on menus in another post.

Since we still do some cooking, we needed a simple solution for some of the pungent by-products of cooking: onion peels. egg shells, hot dog wrappers ... you get the idea. We used to bury some of the compostable items, but we're not on the island that often and didn't want to attract the local wildlife (there is an occasional bear sighting on the island). We also didn't want to store trash outside the cottage for the same reason.

One of the great things about a cottage is that we have time to think ... large thoughts or small, it doesn't matter! There are a surprising number of times when we have an "aha! moment" and come up with a simple yet effective way to do things. In one of our brainstorming sessions, we hit on a simple solution for smelly food waste that works just fine for us. We bought a two-gallon wide-mouth jug, put some Borax in the bottom, and lined it with a small wastebasket size garbage bag. Simply add your potentially smelly waste, lock up the top, and bingo!

 

We end up taking a bag into town with us every few days ... we don't do much cooking but there are always larger jugs to buy from the local hardware store or online. Put one of these together and you will never have friends show up and tell you what you had for dinner the night before!