How to Make Slow-Cooked Veggies You’ll Actually Want to Eat

1. Swap out plastic food wraps and containers for more sustainable options.

Plastic wraps and containers are another big environmental “don’t,” Kellogg says. Instead, opt for reusable beeswax wraps to preserve your food and invest in reusable, plastic-free containers and silicone bags instead of plastic ones to store food.

This especially comes into play during meal prep when you’re packing lunches, Kellogg adds, which is often the most wasteful meal of the day when it comes to using disposables.

2. Be a beauty product minimalist.

Kellogg is a proponent of keeping a “capsule collection” of versatile staple beauty products, and she employs a “one in, one out” rule with all of her makeup and other products, so everything gets used to capacity before she buys something new. If she decides she isn’t a fan of a certain shade or type of product, she gifts it to a friend to try out rather than pitching it.

3. Reduce the number of items used in your beauty routine.

It’s important to keep down the number of disposables you’re using in your skincare and beauty routine. “Put toner in a spray jar, and spray it on your face that way instead of using a cotton pad,” suggests Kellogg as one example. “It doubles the life of your toner, too.”

There are also easy opportunities for upcycling used beauty products, such as cleaning off and donating old mascara wands to help care for wildlife. Another great hack for reducing beauty disposables is opting for bars of soap rather than bottled products. Brands like Lush, Kitsch, and Brixycarry shampoo bars, conditioner bars, and body wash bars that omit plastic containers for eco-friendly, recyclable packaging.

4. Make your toilet into a bidet.

“The number one thing I can recommend in your bathroom is getting a bidet attachment for your toilet," Kellogg says. "They help cut down on how much toilet paper you’re wasting, which for the average American is about three rolls a week.”

Getting the attachment is a financial and environmental investment, but it can even be more sanitary than toilet paper. If you do want to supplement with toilet paper, make sure you buy rolls made from recycled content or cardboard-less rolls.

5. Rethink your menstrual products.

You can’t stop your period from coming, but you can make more eco-friendly choices in dealing with it. Some people choose a menstrual cup, reusable cloth pads, or period underwear, but another solid option is a reusable tampon applicator and organic cotton tampons (not the standard kind, which contains other materials like rayon), which can actually be composted!

6. Always buy lonely bananas.

Did you know that many grocery stores and markets throw away single bananas detached from a bunch at the end of each night? This is a huge environmental bummer, and it massively contributes to food waste and food insecurity.

“Bananas have a high carbon footprint, because many of them aren’t grown in the US,” Kellogg explains. There’s nothing at all wrong with a single banana, so you should buy them instead of letting them go to waste, she says. And when you do pick up produce, bring your own mesh produce bags or canvas totes to eliminate the need for single-use plastic grocery bags.

7. Brew your own tea.

Tea bags are one of those surprising items that actually contain microplastics, which then gets in our tea, and then in our bodies, Kellogg says. Brewing your own loose-leaf tea with reusable infusers is healthier for you and for the planet — and with the option to perfectly customize the blend, it can be even tastier, too.

8. Find creative ways to cook with food scraps.

Ideally, we should waste no part of the ingredients that we’re cooking with, especially if they’re plants (many leaves, stems, and greens of fruits and vegetables are edible and can be incorporated into recipes — though there are a few notable exceptions, so be sure to Google first). To make a flavorful vegetable stock in your slow cooker, Kellogg recommends using the skins of onion and garlic.

9. Enforce a 30-day clothing buy delay on yourself.

“Put a 30-day hold on anything you’re eyeing and feel like you want to buy — separate yourself from the feeling of wanting the item,” advises Kellogg. Marketers can really trap us and get us to spend money in stores or on their sites, but fast fashion and its processes, in particular, are hugely detrimental to the environment.

“If you feel like the piece is an investment for your closet, that you’ll get many wears out of, then purchase it,” Kellogg says. If not, shop secondhand at the thrift store, make use of clothing rental sites like, or swap clothes with friends!

10. Rethink your trash.

If you aren't in a great position to compost, but still want to do more than just throw your food scraps away, check out Mill. Every member receives a Mill kitchen bin that dries and grinds kitchen scraps overnight to turn your banana peels, pizza crusts, and egg shells into food grounds, which can be sent back to farms instead of going into the landfill. The best part is that it can take the meat and dairy your compost bin can't, you only have to empty it every couple of weeks, and you don't have to deal with stinky trash anymore!

11. Donate your clothes and household items to charities.

Once you’ve decided what does and doesn’t spark joy in your home, think twice before dumping bags off at a large donation center or thrift shop – where you don’t exactly know what will be done with the items, Kellogg says.

Be especially wary of curbside collection boxes, which often belong to for-profit organizations that ship the clothes overseas, where they flood the market, reducing demand for local craftspeople. These shipped textiles often end up in the ocean, too, harming the environment.

Reselling your clothes is a smart option, plus Kellogg suggests that you “try to find a specific charity for the specific pieces you have,” such as an organization that collects gently used prom dresses or interview-appropriate clothing for those in need.

Ingredients for Honey-Lemon Chicken Thighs

• 4 bone-in, skin-on chicken thighs
• salt and pepper, to taste
• 1-2 tablespoons olive oil
• 5-6 cloves garlic, peeled
• 1 tablespoon butter
• juice of half of a lemon
• 1 1/2 tablespoons honey
• 1-2 tablespoons fresh parsley, stems removed and chopped

Directions for Honey-Lemon Chicken Thighs

1. Pre-heat the oven to 425 degrees F. Pat chicken thighs dry, and season with salt and pepper on both sides. Drizzle olive oil over the skin sides.
2. Set a cast-iron skillet or oven-safe pan over medium heat. Cook the chicken thighs, skin-side down, until very browned and crispy, about 15 minutes. Readjust them about 5 minutes through so the fat touches the skillet and coats it with liquid.
3. Remove the skillet from heat, and scatter garlic beside the chicken. Place the skillet in the oven until the chicken is cooked through, about 15 minutes.
4. When the chicken is cooked through, set it on a separate plate, leaving the garlic and juices in the skillet. Add butter, lemon juice, and honey to the skillet, and stir, scraping off the browned bits, over low heat. When combined, replace the chicken, and spoon the sauce over the thighs. Garnish with parsley.

As a Power of Women honoree, Mariska was recognized in regards to her work as an advocate for sexual assault survivors. She took the stage and used her platform to discuss rape and assault conviction reversals, shining a light on the recent overturned ruling in Harvey Weinstein's landmark NYC case. Here's what she said:

Today I want to talk about reversing convictions, and more specifically I want to talk to you about how impossible it is to reverse mine. It’s impossible to reverse my conviction that survivors matter. It is impossible to reverse my conviction that what happens to us matters, and that our society must respond to survivors with a more a compassionate, holistically, deeper, and more nuanced understanding of what healing means.

It is impossible to reverse my conviction that after a trauma, survivors can reclaim lives of hope, of possibility, of audacious risk, beautiful intimacy, and glorious, glorious abundant joy. And I stand before you as evidence of that statement.

It is impossible to reverse my conviction that we must listen to survivors as experts on what justice means. It is extraordinary how little their voices are consulted, let alone incorporated, in the process of deciding how to repair harm. Justice is not a one-size-fits-all journey.

It is impossible to reverse my conviction that patriarchal impunity has to end. Patriarchal impunity is when a male-dominated system exempts perpetrators from punishment. Studies show that only 20% of all rape cases in the U.S. are reported to the police, and that between 5 and 0% of all rapes result in a guilty plea or a conviction. So why do 80% of victims not report? Because they're met with a system that grants impunity to perpetrators; a system that blames victims; a system that accepts only those victims who are experienced as "real" rape; a system that completely misunderstands the neurobiology of trauma, which causes behavior in women that doesn't fit the picture of how a "real victim" would act.

Is that change needed that victims should just pull themselves together? Just buck up and report anyway? No. No, it's the system that receives them that needs to change

It is impossible to reverse my conviction — and the conviction of my extraordinary team, The Joyful Heart — that the backlog of untested rape kits can be brought to zero; that the testing of all new kits must be mandated; that we need a statewide kit tracking system; and that survivors have the right to access the status of their kits.

It is impossible to reverse my conviction that grammar — yes, grammar — that we use when we speak about rape must change. In the sentence, "A woman is raped," there's a crime and there's a victim, but there's no perpetrator. Where's the perpetrator? Where is he? Statistically, as we know, most likely he's walking free. He's so free that he doesn't even appear in the language about the crime that he committed. Is that not extraordinary? It's extraordinary that in the very grammar, the perpetrator goes free. Reintroducing perpetrators in the language of rape will make some very unwieldy grammar, but that's the nature of change. It's unwieldy, it's messy, it's uncomfortable, but it's necessary.

Hargitay continued on in her prolific speech to describe that rape shouldn't be considered a "crime of passion" because it's "not simply the next step in the trajectory of his passion" when a man takes a consensual hookup too far and assaults a woman against her will. She stated that it's "an exercise of power," doubling down that the language we use is important.

The speech went on to address that rape is both about power and control, as a "construct" that was "built, and assembled, and reinforced over time." She noted that there are people with these positions of power — and she specifically called out those in the entertainment industry — that could make a difference and aligned themselves to victims and survivors.

After this and some other remarks, Hargitay specifically called out the Weinstein conviction reversal. She said:

I do want to say something about the Harvey Weinstein conviction, specifically about the reason that it was overturned: too many women's voices. Too many women's voices were allowed to speak. Hallelujah! Amen! I can't imagine anything more beautiful than that. The Daily podcast episode talked about how it was so risky for the prosecution to have that many women testify. Risky to let women speak? You're damn right it is!

Too many women speaking brings change. Too many women speaking shakes the establishment. Too many women means we get listened to more, and people might actually hear what we have to say. Look what happened when women started saying just two words, right? Me too — just as an example — a tidal wave of change. Me too.

And then of course, there was the response: the Me Too Movement. The backlash. The examination of whether the changes that have come are lasting, or are even positive. Of course there's a backlash! What did they expect? For women to speak repeatedly, loudly, together, with a purpose — for there to be no backlash? The backlash is evidence of how powerful those voices were, how powerful those voices ARE.

Watch Mariska Hargitay's Full Speech Here

Turns out that your TV heroes really can be your IRL heroes after all. Long live Olivia Benson! Long live Mariska Hargitay!