For anyone that has ever wanted to bottle up summer. 

“You can infuse simple syrup with basil, right?”

These are the kind of questions that cross your mind when you are standing in your mother’s garden looking at two huge pots of fresh basil.

As it turns out, simple syrup was meant to be infused with basil. You end up with a sweet elixir that has a twinge of summer garden. An herbal addition to any drink, dessert or cocktail. It’s also good for a fruit salad dressing, drizzling over vanilla ice cream and bottling up summer in a jar, which is exactly what this Sparkling Blackberry and Basil Infusion is.

Sparkling Blackberry and Basil Infusion

Ingredients:

• 1 cup chilled sparkling water
• 1/4 cup blackberries, muddled
• 2 tablespoons basil simple syrup
• juice of 1/2 lemon

Directions:

Combine all ingredients in a glass (a mason jar is of course preferable) and stir. Serve immediately.

Basil Simple Syrup

Ingredients:

• 1 cup sugar
• 1 cup water
• 1 cup basil leaves

Directions:

Roll basil leaves and then slice into strips.

Warm water and sugar in a saucepan on medium heat. Stir until sugar is completely dissolved.

Pour simple syrup into a glass jar and add in basil leaves.

Let sit for a couple of hours to steep.

Strain out basil leaves and store simple syrup in an airtight container.

Want more food inspiration? Check out the rest of our Sunday Recipe series. 

The post Sunday Recipe: Sparkling Blackberry and Basil Infusion appeared first on EcoSalon.

Building a better London might just start with a broom and social networking.

The news tells us that communities have had their hearts ripped out. Yesterday morning, the streets of London were littered with debris, smashed glass and bricks, buildings were burnt or pillaged and three nights of rioting and looting had left the city smoldering.

Dan Thompson sat at his home in the coastal town of Worthing, West Sussex, 60 miles south of the capital, and tweeted a plea for anyone nearby to bring him coffee. He hadn’t slept all night, having started the idea of #riotcleanup on Twitter the previous evening. Soon the hash tag was trending, more popular than #LondonRiots, more popular even than Justin Bieber.

More importantly, thanks to Thompson, thousands of people had mobilized to meet at various points around London, Liverpool and Birmingham. They brought gloves and heavy-duty trash bags and flasks of tea. They called themselves Riot Wombles. Hilariously, people complained that in some places the council street cleaners had been too efficient and there was little for them to do.

Pictures began arriving on Twitter. Crowds marching down the streets, not with the masked faces of rioters looking for shops to loot, not an insurgence of violence and anger, but instead armed with brooms and smiles, ordinary people who had taken time off work and out of their lives looking for a mess to clean up, shops to help repair.

For many, this photo taken outside Clapham Junction station has become emblematic of the community whose heartbeat was said to be flat lining.

Meanwhile, an exhausted but elated Thompson was attempting to deal with over 100 tweets a minute.

In his every day life, he runs the Empty Shops Network, bringing disused buildings back into service to give cheap space to artists, makers, social enterprises and charities. While that network proved a good starting point for #riotcleanup, the majority of momentum came from the community, from people who love where they live, who wanted to show solidarity against threat and used the speed and might of social media to do just that.

While much of old media wrung its hands over the use of new media in organizing the riots, mostly through the Blackberry BBM network, the reality is that social networks were also streamlining positive action, like a rapidly charging defibrillator.

We are now onto day four of the riots.

Some 16,000 police in London last night ensured a quieter night in the city, but Manchester, Nottingham, Liverpool and Birmingham still suffered. Three people died trying to protect their community against violence.

No one knows why it is happening, although many have speculated. But this kind of violence almost certainly doesn’t happen in a vacuum. The rioters may not have a cohesive, coordinated voice, and while some are without a doubt opportunistic thugs, others are angry about something. We now have to ask ourselves: What, exactly?

As we reflect, we have to remember that while a handful of disenfranchised and disaffected people began destroying cities, the rest of the country collected together in an astonishing display of community. #riotcleanup mobilized thousands. Hot on its heels was Anti-riot: Operation Cup Of Tea, a Facebook group encouraging peace-loving members of the public to upload photos of themselves eschewing acts of violence and instead enjoying the most British of pass times – tea drinking. It currently has 220,000 members, 20,000 more than when I started writing this article an hour ago.

Then there is Something Nice For Ashraf, a reaction to the shocking video of a young Malaysian student who was injured in the riots and then mugged while bleeding profusely. He allegedly lost his front teeth, alongside a replaceable but probably still much loved bicycle, mobile phone and Sony Playstation. The Tumblr seeks to do something nice, to show Ashraf and his family that people in England are not really “scumbags and dickheads.”

Despite what Malcolm Gladwell would have us believe, social networking, in all its furious righteous indignation, its frenzied panic and easy moral outrage, is shaping up to be a new heart center of our communities, a simple place of gathering in an increasingly fractured world where we can show we are strong and caring and willing to stand together, where we can show what we can do with a little bit of love and care.

On Twitter, @riotcleanup now has nearly 88,000 followers. There’s nothing to tidy right now, so they’re playing #cleanupanthems for amusement: Litter Sweep Symphony; Where The Streets Have No Stains; Broom Shake Shake Shake The Broom; Sweep Caroline. It’s silly and self-deprecating, making light of what has been a harrowing and shocking few days. More than anything, it’s incredibly British.

After all the asking why is done, this is the message we should take away from the events of the last few days, this strength and humor, this common goal to live somewhere peaceful and fair and safe, and the knowledge that we have the drive to achieve that goal.

Someone tweets @riotcleanup: Nice idea, but what if they riot again tonight?

@riotcleanup replies: Then we clean up again tomorrow.

The post London’s #riotcleanup: Keep Calm and Carry a Big Broom appeared first on EcoSalon.

“A week without your computer, are you going to be okay?”

I raised my eyebrows and shook my head; sometimes people just don’t get it. Yes, I was about to take off and leave my computer sitting right where it deserved to sit: on my desk. No, I was not going to live-tweet about my trip or post pictures on Facebook. I was going to take six whole days off from the technical world, not even my cell phone was going to get turned on, and I was going to be just fine.

A New York Times article that I read almost a year ago has stuck with me, and I’ve cited it in several conversations regarding our inability to truly disconnect. Titled “On Vacation and Looking For WiFi,” the central topic hits a little too close to home, but raises an important point: we have created a society where we are so connected that we have practically made it impossible to ever truly pull ourselves away.

Five years ago, in Barbados, none of us consulted a computer. Three years ago, in Costa Rica, a few family members walked to an Internet cafe and checked our e-mail one afternoon just for the novelty of being online in a faraway place.

This year I stood in a long line in the lobby of this resort in the Dominican Republic, to wait my turn to sign up for 25 hours of Internet service for $25. Several family members brought laptops and we checked our work email daily.

It’s not about keeping in touch with what’s going on; no matter where you are in the world you probably have access to a newspaper, even if it’s a few days old. The fear of disconnecting stems from our need to be in control. What if an important email comes in while we’re out and we don’t get to it? What if the person needs an immediate response?

Well, what if? We’ve somehow traded our ability to trust that other people can handle themselves, answer their own questions, and even learn to wait if they can’t get an immediate response for the false sense of security that comes from thinking that we can always be in control.

Two days into a week-long stay in Mexico and those questions seemed very far away. Insignificant even.

Little did I know that while I was contemplating how unimportant all the stuff I had left really was, the document I had diligently prepared for my business partner and emailed to her at 1 a.m. – a document which included all that needed to be done while I was out – was in fact the wrong one. An attempt at making myself feel in control, yet slightly failing in the process. But, like any sound, intelligent human being, she called my neighbor, got let into my apartment and sent the document to herself from my computer. Smart woman.

Meanwhile – my everyday virtual duties switched for overlooking the ocean – I wrote in my journal:

Disconnecting. A whole week of it. And what does it remind me? That most of what we do isn’t that important. The constant updates, the information overload. In the end, we can turn it all off. In fact, it’s easier than we lead ourselves to believe.

So what can’t we turn off? Feelings, emotions, creativity… those the the things that are always there, often impended by our everyday routine that we deem necessary.

It’s easy to overlook the things that make us feel alive, to quickly get out of balance. But in taking time to slow down, we remember how to find that balance.

We can’t give up our jobs and we can’t give up email. To be an active citizen, we have to be educated, so we can’t give up consuming information. I would never argue for any of the above. But we can take time to assess how much of all of these things is healthy.

We can take time to focus on the slower activities that cultivate our friendships, our emotions and our creativity. Drawing, writing, traveling, walking, cooking, talking, sitting, thinking – all those good things that we often put into the “quality of life” category.

And as for that creative inspiration that only comes when I myself truly disconnect? Here are some Mexico photos.

Images: Anna Brones

The post No Ifs or Buts About It: Why We Have to Disconnect appeared first on EcoSalon.