The working triangle in a kitchen?

While most of the designs in the kitchen should be done to accommodate the tastes and work-style of the lady of the house, the working triangle remains the same. 

There should be easy access to the stove, refrigerator and the sink. It would be an added advantage if you have a counter away from the stove, near the refrigerator. 

 At Samskruti Builders, we also have a small planter for growing fresh vegetables too.

Write to us to share your views and ideas or to know more.

Speak to us to know more: 

     Call 99162 17777 

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Love your family

The most important contribution you can do to your family is being there. Find a home closer to your workplace/school and skip time wasted in travelling. Found this wonderful image from Alison Astair.

At Samskruti Builders, we make sure our locations have good access to transport, schools, hospitals and places of work.

Plates loaded with pesticides

Stop feeding poison to your loved ones. Choose organic terrace gardens, kitchen gardens for healthy pesticide-chemical-free food.

Probably it's time to take a closer look at what's on your platter. Cypermethrin, heptachlor, quinalphos, aldrin, chlorodane, dichlorvas, cypermethrin — these banned pesticides could well be a part of your regular diet. Okras, leafy green cabbages and other vegetables, bananas or oranges and apples that you so relish may be overloaded with some of these harmful pesticides.

A study by the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India under the Union agriculture ministry threw up some unpalatable facts. Common food items contain banned pesticides in quantities a thousand times more than the permissible limits. The findings are based on random samples collected from across the country.

From the vegetable basket, brinjal tops the chart with the level of banned pesticide at 860% above legal limits, followed by cauliflower and cabbage. Wheat and rice too had these dangerous chemicals. While the level of aldrin in wheat is 21,890 times more than the permissible level, that of chlorfenvinfos in rice was measured at 1,324% above the allowed limit.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/bangalore/Plates-loaded-with-pesticides/articleshow/25405174.cms?#write

#samskrutibuilders #organicgarden #thesamskrutiway

At Samskruti Builders, we provide community garden spaces for growing vegetables and fruits and look at sustainable source. Read more here: http://samskrutibuilders.blogspot.in/2013/07/community-garden.html

We also have a community kitchen to allow consumption of these vegetables by the community.

Happy Diwali!

May the divine light of this diwali bring you peace, prosperity, happiness & good health. 

Wish you a noiseless, pollution-less and happy Diwali!

Community Kitchen Caldas - eating inexpensive and healthy meals together!

At Samskruti Builders we believe in community kitchen and community gardening as a source to build, nurture and strengthen the community. Here is the concept explained!

Community Kitchen Caldas - eating inexpensive and healthy meals together!

Inspired by the community food bank concept, Community Kitchen Caldas (CKC) is an extension of the idea but focused around the activity of cooking through a community farm, community kitchen and community canteen, with the benefit of bulk-purchasing and bulk-consumption. The menu and recipe is derived from locals and experts collaboratively to create a healthy menu with local tastes, targeting malnutrition for women and children. The result is a pool of CKC members enjoying inexpensive and healthy meals.

Community Cooperative

CKC operates like a cooperative, with joining members putting in hours for the work involved (farming, cooking, maintenance) in exchange for close to cost price of food that is bought in bulk, farmed on the community garden, and cooked by members on rotating basis. It is a center of community building around the act of cooking.

Health and Malnutrition

The extra component of the CKC is the input of recipes from local residents and health experts, especially for the target of women and children malnutrition. The health or nutrition experts would spend time at first on the field understanding the issues of malnutrition, working with local residents to create recipes and eating habits that could remedy the condition. Such recipes are then shared in an open-source format and cooked in bulk (reduce cost) in the community kitchen. The health or nutrition experts can be on ground initially, but over time the can operate more remotely from Bogota (7-8hrs drive), Medellin (5-6hrs drive) or even overseas with investment of communication equipments.

Growing your own crops + bulk-buying

Urban agriculture in Havana Cuba has tremendous success, the lack of foreign imports becomes an opportunity for local farmers to adopt organic methods of fertilizing soil and using compost. The idea is that with more and more member support, the community garden scale can grow to cushion fluctuating food price and reduce cost, but more importantly, tailor the need for the problem of malnutrition with the right crops together with bulk-buying of food (enabled by food bank).

Entrepreneurship

This could become a scalable model to affect more people, and the local management opportunity becomes a channel to build entrepreneurship through the management of this local cooperative. Logistics, finance, marketing are all essential part of this cooperative to ensure success as a social business.

OpenIdeo Collaboration

During the week of consultation we have updated our base scheme with the following:

Cookbook

Using the combined efforts of health experts and local recipes, the result can be combined into a physical or online cookbook that would be sold to support the operations of the Community Kitchen

Cooking Fuel and Cooking Equipments

Using a centralized setting, the efficiency of better stove and better fuel can be utilized fully to reduce the cost per meal. Biogas is an option where bio-waste from either community toilet or community kitchen itself can be converted into cooking fuel in an anaerobic tank. Low tech and inexpensive improvements such as Rocket Stove could also be used to reduce fuel consumption by maximizing stove efficiency.

Community Chefs

An ideal training ground for community chefs that would have potential national exposure and repeated training with local community and health experts, these could either be family members that are already cooking for their families everyday, or they could be young aspiring chefs from the local regions.

Individual Farming Plots

Small plots could be assigned to families to have ownership of the plots, cultivating a collective culture of farming using shared resources of both tools and knowledge, and also can tailor the crops produced based on needs and preferences and monetary value.  

Community Kitchen Vendors

Vendors could rent stores next to the community kitchen to produce processed healthy food such as fruit juices, yogurt, etc. They could reap the benefit of bulk-buying from the Community Kitchen operation, and also getting all the traffic from CKC members.

Ecosystem of Materials

Bio-wastes from the Community Kitchen and Community Gardens operations could be transformed back into compost / fertilizers / biogas. The centralized grouping of waste allows for efficient upcycling. 

What is organic veg-scaping?

Gardening has a lot of benefits apart from just providing vegetables, fruits and flowers. 

Gardening has been proven as a stress buster. Accessibility to a garden where you can grow and show your children about the food they eat teaches sustainability, respect, knowledge and help children eat more vegetables and is therapeutic too.

Apart from the oxygen, plants provide a rich, aesthetic and luxurious visual comfort and feel that is also natural and healthy 

There would be significant nutritional value from the vegetables as they aren’t stored and are consumed fresh after harvesting. This means you have a lot of free space in your refrigerator and save your time and money from visiting the supermarket 

Gardening and harvesting would encourage you to spend more time with your friends and neighbors which would result in caring and sharing! 

To summarize organic veg-scaping would aid in better oxygen + fragrance + Visual comfort + Ornamental!

Harnessing solar power

One of the most underutilized and underrated solutions to the power crisis is depending on solar power.

At Samskruti, we have solar panels which are used to generate power to:

1. Provide hot water to all taps
2. To purify water

We also anticipate enough solar radiation to accommodate time-sharing of solar power.

Do you utilize solar power in your home?