This past weekend was a jumble of various green-related ideas, chores and other goodies, so today I’m just going to give you a smorgasbord of green-related thoughts–green food for thought, if you will. Hope you find some useful nuggets:

* Green & Black = Delicious Chocolate

The public relations agency that represents Green & Black’s Organic chocolate got wind of my green Valentine’s Day post from last week and then got in touch with me. They were interested in having me include Green & Black’s in my Valentine’s Day roundup, though, obviously, it was too late. Nonetheless, they shipped me about a dozen candy bars of all of the different Green & Black’s flavors–mostly because I’d told them that I haven’t been a huge fan of the brand, ever since someone had given me a bar of the coffee flavor. Hey, me loves the coffee and me loves the chocolate, but me didn’t love the Green & Black’s coffee-chocolate combination.

OK, so now I’ll eat my words–after I eat some more Green & Black’s chocolate. While it’s disappointing that this chocolate doesn’t come in a tradiational heart-shaped box for Valentine’s Day, the taste of the flavors beyond the aforementioned coffee flavor (blech) more than makes up for packaging. Let’s just put it this way–my daughters recently picked up Girl Scout cookies from their friends, and this weekend chose to eat the Green & Black’s milk chocolate bars over Thin Mints. I’ll be heading out to Target soon to pick up more of these milk chocolate bars, including a couple of the almond ones for me!

* World’s Best Stain Remover Ever

When it comes to stains on my clothing, I’m a bit obsessive about getting them out. Maybe it goes back to my frugal roots, where you had to get as much wearing out of each article of clothing before you could toss it in the rag bin. Also, since I buy most of my kids’ clothing, I know how much I’ve paid and I’m not going to let one bloody knee or chocolate-stained top render a piece of clothing a rag.

When my kids were really little, I used Biz as a stain-remover. I’d fill a bucket with Biz and water, mix, and then soak the clothes. It did a pretty good job of getting out food and diaper-overload stains. Eventually, I graduated to Zout stain remover, after a friend raved about how it worked. Well, Zout was no Shout, and neither did a great job getting out things like mud stains. (Where we live our soil is red clay, and let me tell you, once red clay gets on your clothes, there’s no getting it out.) My fall-back stain remover–or should I say stain brightener–has always been bleach. But given its caustic nature, bleach is only good on tough articles of clothing and ones that are white. Plus, now that I’m trying to live a greener life, I try to avoid using bleach all together.

Recently I wrote a story about greening your household chores, and one of the tips I included was using borax as a stain remover. Before that piece I wasn’t really familiar with borax, except from the Fab jingle I remember as a kid: “Fab, I’m glad, there’s lemon-freshened borax in you.” But once I was researching my story, I figured I’d give borax a go, and wow, am I glad that I did.

For nearly any stain my kids can create these days, all I need to do to get them out is wet the article of clothing, sprinkle some borax on it, rub a little and toss in the laundry. There’s no having to let it sit overnight or soak in a bucket. Just sprinkle, rub, wash and voila, stain is gone. (The borax people are not paying me to say this.) Blood, dirt and chocolate don’t stand a chance now that I’m armed with borax. And what’s best is it’s a green laundry cleaner and cheap, too–I can get a 76-ounce box of 20 Mule Team Borax at my local ShopRite for only $2.99.

* When You Can’t Recycle, Burn, Baby Burn

I’ve mentioned many times in the past how my current trash hauler does not take paperboard of any kind with my recycling. Now that it’s winter time, I’m not stressing out too much about this anymore. That’s because I’ve discovered that paperboard and cardboard make excellent fire starters or fire enhancers. Along with used newspaper and some kindling I’ve picked up around the yard, I can get a really good roaring fire going by tossing in empty boxes of crackers, pasta and cereal. Perhaps it’s blasphemous even to be encouraging use of a fireplace, but I think it’s a whole hell of a lot better to burn up this excess cardboard than to toss it in a landfill.

Stay tuned in the future for more random green thoughts.