For more green ideas, visit www.onethingsacramento.com

At Germany’s Munich Zoo, you can watch the courtship rituals of the banded mongoose, hear the morning song of the scarlet ibis or visit the Indian elephants, who help keep the lights on with electricity generated from their poop. They can “doo” this because Munich Zoo has harnessed “poo power” – energy stored in animal waste, which can be converted into a fuel known as “biogas.”  Here’s how it works – the zoo has built three large containers, each capable of holding about 100 cubic meters of animal waste, or about a weeks worth of dung collected from all the vegetarian animals in the zoo. Once inside the containers, it’s mixed with warm water and the bacteria in the dung is left to decompose in an oxygen-free environment for 30 days – yummy!

The resulting biogas rises naturally through vents in the ceiling to a corrugated hut on the roof where it’s collected in a big balloon.

The biogas is then fed into a gas-powered engine that’s used to generate electricity which is used to warm the gorilla enclosure. And warm gorillas are happy gorillas, right?

A mature elephant can eat about 100 kilograms of fruit, vegetables and pretzels (?) a day, producing a mountain of dung.   All the zoo animals together create roughly 2,000 tons of the stuff every year, or enough to power about 100 Munich households.

No S**t!

For more green ideas, visit www.onethingsacramento.com

Keep your appetite in check while you do your prep work:

You need to deslime snails before using them in recipes (see what I mean?).  Soak them in water with 1 tbsp. of vinegar and 2 tbsp. of salt for every dozen snails. Change the solution several times. After soaking, rinse the snails then boil in just enough water to cover them for 10 minutes.  Pick the snails out of the shell with a needle or nut pick, or simply crack the shell between your thumb and forefinger to remove the snail. Cut off the intestines and black parts. Also remove the tail, cartilage and gristle, if desired.

You can buy reusable shells, which are sold in import or gourmet shops as “coquilles”. Stuff two garden snails in each shell and press herb butter into the opening. Bake at 425 degrees until the butter bubbles.

Go on - embrace the garden snail with open arms and an empty stomach. From now on if you catch a snail eating your lettuce, eat the snail!  Simple, sustainable, effective and delicious.

For more green ideas, visit www.onethingsacramento.com

The Top 10 responses from the survey of things people couldn’t live without:  Sunshine, internet connection, clean drinking water, refrigerators, FACEBOOK, health  insurance, stoves, e-mail,  flushing hte toilet, and cell phones.

• So Facebook is more important health insurance? Wow. Farther down on the “less important than Facebook” list are items such as air conditioning, your wedding ring, push up bras, shoes and …….chocolate????? If this resonates with you at all, time to log off for a bit.  Please?

Solar cooking is the simplest, safest, most convenient way to cook food without consuming fuels or heating up the kitchen. The first solar cooker we know of was invented by Horace de Saussure, a Swiss naturalist experimenting as early as 1767.  A solar cooker is like a hot box, in which we can cook our food without any cooking gas or kerosene, electricity, coal or wood. Solar cooking is not only fun but it’s a great educational tool. Solar box cookers, constructed using cardboard, newspaper, aluminum foil, and a piece of glass will typically cook at temperatures between 225 – 275 F.  Box solar cookers have the advantage of slow, even cooking of large quantities of food. Variations include slanting the face toward the sun and the number of reflectors. With box cookers, the food will cook more quickly if it is divided into several smaller pots instead of having it all in one large pot. A good first food to try is a small quantity of rice, since it is fairly easy to cook and looks very different cooked than it does raw. Chicken or fish is also very easy to cook. There’s no need to rotate the oven to follow the sun, though it will improve cooking times. Bon Appetit!

• For more green ideas, visit www.onethingsacramento.com

Yep! For a cool $3200, your ex can buy you a “sorry it didn’t work out” ring in the shape of a broken gold heart separated by a line of diamonds.

But still –a ring you wear every day on your wedding ring finger to remind you of partnership that didn’t work?

Of course, maybe receiving something like this DURING the marriage would’ve prevented the need for a divorce ring altogether. Right?

Mom and Dad are serious fans – Jennifer and Robert married on Oct. 23, 2010, the night the Giants won the pennant to get into the World Series.