Our kitchen and the lounge are tied for being the hub of the flat (aka the gathering place or the meeting ground). The kitchen is a hub because, can you guess why? Because there’s food there! It’s also often warmish from cooking and it is a pathway between the front rooms and the back rooms. The lounge on the other hand is behind a closed door in winter (to keep in heat) and has a heat pump and TV. 
We don’t use the TV for watching TV but rather for watching movies. Movies are $1-for-8-days from the video store up the road! At any given movie there are a couple of us from this flat as well as someone from our Bryndwr community. So we reduce energy use by sharing entertainment. We also keep blankets in the lounge to be extra snug, and that way we don’t have to heat the room as much. 
We have been hosting craft night for the past few months once a fortnight. Shanti hosts a Dungeons and Dragons night every week, not to mention the board game nights that crop up every few weeks. These events keep our lounge very busy!
We don’t use the TV for watching TV but rather for watching movies. Movies are $1-for-8-days from the video store up the road! At any given movie there are a couple of us from this flat as well as someone from our Bryndwr community. So we reduce energy use by sharing entertainment. We also keep blankets in the lounge to be extra snug, and that way we don’t have to heat the room as much. We have been hosting craft night for the past few months once a fortnight. Shanti hosts a Dungeons and Dragons night every week, not to mention the board game nights that crop up every few weeks. These events keep our lounge very busy! Light in the lounge is very important. It needs to be bright enought to work by but also not too harsh. We have opted to have 2 bulbs in the ceiling for working purposes. 
Then when we need to have a relaxed atmosphere we turn on the lamp and turn the roof lights off.
Then when we need to have a relaxed atmosphere we turn on the lamp and turn the roof lights off.
This means that we only have to cook once a week and so can focus on other things the rest of the week. Other benefits are getting to try dishes you may not have had before and that cooking does not become boring.
On average we feed 1.5 extra people per night (friends and boyfriends), which is replacing the non-vegan meal that they would likely have had otherwise. So it is good for the environment for us to feed more people! 
The brown rice was from Sun Thai (on Middleton Rd) for $68 per 20kg bag. White rice we get from the supermarket in a 10kg bag because the brand Sun Rice donates money to ChildFund for every kg of rice we buy. Actually, they did that last year but may not this year. We’ll check it out before we get the next bag. We also get white and wholemeal flour from Sun Thai for about $27 per 20kg bag. We order fair-trade cane sugar through the Trade Aid online shop for $70 per 25kg, which ends up being $2.80 per kg. This price is about the same as what you get ordinary white sugar for in supermarkets. We have opened this up as a little bulk-food co-op for our friends in the neighbourhood come. They mostly get the fair-trade sugar and cocoa from us because it is cheaper than in supermarkets (if they even have it) and more convenient than going to Trade Aid themselves. 
We reuse where we can. The most likely candidates are plastic bags, plastic containers and glass jars. We recycle cans, paper and plastic containers that are not very easy to reuse. Food scraps either go in our worm farms or are composted by the bokashi method. 
We would rather use the food scraps we generate to feed our vegetables rather than send it to somewhere else to be processed and then redistributed because this handling uses lots of petrol.
So I made 2 batches from the apples about 2 weeks ago. We have gone through about 5 jars (or more) since then! Here’s the recipe so you can make it too. Enjoy! 
