Heat pumps revisited

In the middle of last week's heat wave, I decided maybe it was time to take another crack at getting quotes on a home heat pump. We were getting along okay, using every trick we knew to stay cool—keeping the blinds lowered and the oven off, using fans everywhere, drinking lots of water, and retreating to the basement at night—and running our window air conditioner for just an hour or so in the hottest part of the day. But the longer we stuck to this routine, the more I realized it wouldn't be sustainable on a long-term basis. We weren't getting nearly as much sleep as usual, partly because of the cats prowling over us all night and partly because of the early morning sun shining through the thin curtains. During the day, we were sitting with desk fans pointing directly in our faces and still sweating through the bare minimum of clothing we had on. 

We bore up under this pretty well because we knew that the heat wave was only going to last a few days. However, we also knew that this heat wave wouldn't be the last. On the contrary, as the planet continues to warm faster and faster, heat waves will only become more frequent and more punishing. Sooner or later—most likely sooner—we'll reach a point where it's no longer sustainable to live through a New Jersey summer without central air conditioning. And if we know we're going to have to put ourselves to all the trouble and expense of adding central AC, it seems silly not to spend a little more on a heat pump that works in both directions, so we'll no longer need to rely on fossil fuels to heat our home.

When we looked into this last year, we had a rather frustrating experience. Most of the contractors we spoke to refused to give us a quote at all, and the one quote we managed to get was for $23,400—significantly higher than the top of the range most sources provide for a heat pump installation in New Jersey. We decided at the time that we should just repair our gas boiler and put off a decision on a heat pump for a few years, figuring that by that time there might be better options available. But now, with Congress about to vote on a budget bill that will almost certainly kill the tax credit for installing a new heat pump, it was looking like a better idea to act right away.

This time around, I searched specifically for heat pump installers in Middlesex County, rather than just HVAC companies. At first, it looked like I was having better luck with this approach: I was able to schedule three appointments with three different companies within a week. But very quickly, things started to go downhill. First, one of the three contractors called me back and said he was completely booked up for this week and had "no idea" why his secretary had scheduled him to give me a quote. I then got an appointment with a different company for that same day, only to get a call back from them saying that actually, the kind of installation we'd need was too big a job for them to do during the summer rush. I said I didn't need the work done right away, just the quote, but they said no, they couldn't even give me that until August. So I called up yet another company (number five, if you're counting) and managed to get an appointment with them for Monday.

The first contractor came on Tuesday, and right away, he started giving me the same line I'd heard from the previous HVAC contractors: listen, heat pumps are great in warmer climates, but here in New Jersey, they're just not a reasonable way to heat your home in the winter. Yes, yes, you might see sources online that say they can do it, but he knew from personal experience that in the real world, they weren't up to the job. In vain did I point out that I'd personally talked to people who use cold-climate heat pumps in New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts, and even Canada—all of which, last time I checked, were all in the real world—who were all heating their homes this way; he swore that he'd tested them for himself and they simply weren't practical. He even claimed it wasn't just a matter of electricity being more expensive than gas; at low temperatures, he insisted, a heat pump would actually use more energy, measured in Btus, than my gas boiler to produce the same degree of warming. He didn't explain how a heat pump that's over 200% efficient is supposed to use more energy than a gas boiler that's just under 90% efficient; he just knew for a fact that it would, and that was that.

For all his negative talk about heat pumps, however, he declared himself willing to give us a quote on one if that was what we really wanted. He recommended that we add ductwork to the upper level for heating and cooling, then leave the gas boiler in place to heat the basement when necessary. Bringing the ductwork down to the lower level, he claimed, wouldn't be worth the expense, since we seldom used the space and it would cool itself naturally in the summertime anyway. When I asked about ductless mini-splits, which most sources suggested would be cheaper for a house without existing ductwork, he said, "Not these days," citing price hikes (due largely to Trump's tariffs) that had significantly jacked up the price of each unit. And, after examining our electrical panel, he added that we'd definitely need to upgrade from 100 amps to 200 amps, which would be an additional expense.

The visit from the second contractor started off much better. When I told him what the first contractor had said about heat pumps falling short on winter heating, he said, "That guy must have been a real old-timer," because he'd been installing cold-climate heat pumps that did a great job in this climate for over ten years. He also mentioned something the first contractor hadn't: PSE&G's new "building decarbonization" program, which would give us a rebate of a whopping $10,000 on an electric heating system provided we got rid of the old gas boiler. (The gas water heater, dryer, and stove could stay, for the time being, as long as the heating system was disabled.) After examining our space, he said he'd recommend a cold-climate heat pump with six air handlers: one for each room in the house, not counting the bathrooms and the currently unheated laundry room. He also said that we could, in fact, do this with our existing 100-amp service, since we would no longer need the circuits devoted to the boiler pump and the upstairs air conditioner. However, he said he could give us a separate quote that would include a panel upgrade as well, in case we wanted to do it now in preparation for further electrification later.

After this visit, I was feeling much more optimistic. If his quote was in line with the $23,400 one we got last year, the $10,000 decarbonization credit would drop it to a much more manageable $13,400, and the $2,000 clean energy tax credit—still available up through the end of this year—would knock it down to $11,400. Even if his quote was closer to the $28,700 price the earlier contractor gave us for a ductless system, our all-in price would only be $18,700.

But my optimism evaporated when we saw the actual quote. The price for a six-zone ductless heat pump system, plus the deactivation of the old boiler, plus the upgrades to the electrical panel, would come to $38,720 before rebates, or $24,470 after. Even if we chose to skip the panel upgrade, it would be $19,630 after rebates. Moreover, hat price included only deactivating the old boiler, not actually removing it or the baseboard radiators, which would add another several thou. Oh, and it also didn't include any fees for permits. 

As if to soften the blow, a line at the bottom added that we wouldn't have to pay this all up front. Instead, we could use "utility interest-free financing," which would cost us a mere $291 per month, conveniently tacked on to our monthly utility bill, for 84 months. I know this would technically be a better deal, since we could keep the money in our account earning interest until each month's payment came due, and we'd also get to make the later payments with inflation-depreciated dollars. But to me, having that extra $300 monthly payment hanging over our head for the next seven years felt even worse than paying the 24 grand up front and being done with it.

This quote left me feeling seriously dejected and doubtful about whether a heat pump would ever make sense for us. I know we're in a better position to do it than many people, because we have the money; we can choose to take that $24K hit for the sake of the environment. But we'd only be doing it for the environment. A heat pump almost certainly wouldn't save us any money on our utility bills; most likely, it would end up costing us more every winter, perhaps significantly more. There's no chance at all that it would ever pay for itself. So we'd be paying $24,000 now (or $291 per month), plus an extra $100 or more on our heating bills every year, just to save the roughly 295 therms we'd otherwise burn to heat our home. According to the EPA, that would keep approximately 1.56 metric tons of CO2 equivalent out of the atmosphere each year at a cost of roughly $3,600—about $2,315 per ton. That's five to ten times the price per ton of most carbon dioxide removal (CDR) projects. We could do the planet a lot more good by investing $600 a year in CDR and leaving our gas boiler untouched.

I suppose I shouldn't give up hope yet. We still have one more quote scheduled for tomorrow, and it's possible we'll get better news from that one (or possibly from the first contractor's quote, which we still haven't received). But if we don't, we have to ask ourselves: how much is it really worth to us to say that we, personally, are not burning fossil fuels in our home? From a purely utilitarian standpoint, isn't it better to stick with our crummy, but cheap, heating (and occasional, expensive cooling) and pay to remove a larger volume of climate pollution somewhere else?

Dessert experiments

If you live anywhere in the eastern half of the country, you already know we're in the throes of a heat wave. Here in New Jersey, we got a bit lucky today: a heavy thunderstorm hit this morning, keeping today's heat index down to a mere 99 degrees F. But by 9 am tomorrow, we're expected to be in triple-digit territory, and we won't be back to a more normal level of summer heat until Wednesday night. All of which makes this an excellent week to enjoy ice cream and other frozen treats.

But before I get to my lighthearted dessert content, I'd like to take one minute to talk seriously about this massive heat wave. We all know, or at least nearly 80% of Americans do, that climate change is real, and that it's making dangerous weather like this much more common. And a solid majority of Americans want the government to do something about it, supporting a variety of policies that would help reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In particular, three-quarters of all Americans think we should regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant. 

Unfortunately, EPA director Lee Zeldin is not one of them. He recently announced a plan to eliminate all greenhouse gas emissions standards for fossil fuel plants, arguing that this pollution is not "significant." He bases this claim not on how much of it there is or how much damage it does, but on the fact that, in his opinion, it's too expensive to fix. And if there is no "cost reasonable" solution, then by definition, there is no problem. To add injury to this insult to our intelligence, he's also decided this is a good time to repeal the rule that regulates power plants' emissions of mercury and other toxic substances, such as arsenic.

If you agree that this is mind-blowingly stupid, there's a way to make your voice heard. Elders Climate Action (ECA) has created two simple forms you can use to submit comments to the EPA on these proposed rules changes. All you have to do is enter your contact info, make any changes you like to the sample comment ECA has provided, and click submit. The comment form for the greenhouse gas emissions repeal is here, and the one for mercury and toxic air pollution is here.

So, desserts. I mentioned in last week's post that we'd recently tried Trader Joe's new vegan whipping cream and found that it lives up to its name, at least as far as whipping is concerned. Well, this week we got around to trying it in an ice cream base. We went with plain vanilla, since it has so many possible uses, and topped it with fresh berries from our garden. And I have to say, the result left absolutely nothing to be desired. This was the first plant-based ice cream I've ever tried that I literally couldn't tell was vegan. There was nothing about either the flavor or the mouthfeel that would make me suspect it was anything other than good old vanilla ice cream.

In short, this vegan dessert experiment was an unqualified success, and we've still got a little bit of the vegan cream left to tinker with. My idea is to try using it for a small batch of either the chocolate mousse or the raspberry mousse that goes into our anniversary cake. If it works for that—and there seems to be no reason it wouldn't—we can buy some of this stuff, rather than a pint of real cream, and make the cake dairy-free this year. It still won't be vegan, as the sponge cake itself contains eggs, but it will be one step closer to it.

But Brian and I were not content to rest on our dessert laurels. Tonight, we tried yet another new vegan ice-cream alternative, this time a healthier version made mostly from fruit. 

This one has a bit of a story behind it. Yesterday morning, we noticed that our neighbors across the street were having a yard sale. We wandered over to take a look, and the one thing on the tables that looked most intriguing to me was a Magic Bullet Dessert Bullet—a machine that claimed it could make "all natural, dairy-free, gluten-free, diabetic-friendly, low fat, low sugar, low calorie desserts everyone can enjoy." I couldn't tell whether the price sticker on top was a 6 or a 9, but when I asked my neighbor about it, he said he'd let me have it for $5. 

Well, I knew we didn't actually need this gadget, and there was a possibility it wouldn't even be able to do anything our blender couldn't. But I remembered that we'd thought the same thing about our regular Magic Bullet when we first acquired it on Freecycle, and it proved to be so useful that when it finally died, we went straight out and paid full price for a new one. There was always the chance that this $5 investment would prove just as worthwhile, and even if it didn't, I knew I'd have no trouble finding a new home for it. We'd only be out $5, and that was a price I was willing to pay just to satisfy my curiosity.

So I took the Dessert Bullet home, opened it up, and perused the recipe book that came with it. All the recipes in it appeared to be built around frozen fruit, with a few additional ingredients like yogurt, peanut butter, chocolate, or coconut thrown in here and there. They were basically smoothies, but with less liquid. The booklet provided instructions on how to prepare and freeze the fruit and how long to thaw it before putting it into the Bullet to get the right consistency.

For our first trial, we decided on a simple chocolate dessert recipe with just three ingredients: a frozen banana (broken into chunks), 2 tablespoons of "raw cacao powder" (which we figured we could swap out for cocoa powder without harming the flavor any), and a drop of vanilla extract. We popped straight out to the Superfresh for a bunch of bananas, peeled two of them, broke them into chunks, and put them in the freezer. 

The instructions said to freeze them for at least 24 hours, so we had to wait until tonight to give our new machine a literal whirl. It has several parts: the base containing the motor a chute to insert the fruit in, a pusher to shove it down with, a rotating screw attachment that grinds it up, and a couple of different orifices to extrude it from. We chose the basic oval mouth rather than the star-shaped one. Following the instructions, we let the frozen banana pieces thaw for 5 minutes and sprinkled them with the cocoa powder. We ran the vanilla extract through first to coat the screw attachment, then dumped in the bananas and pushed them down as the motor ran. After a few seconds, the banana reemerged, transformed into a wide ribbon of roughly soft-serve consistency.

The process was interesting to watch, but the finished product was far from life-changing. It did not taste at all like chocolate ice cream; it tasted, unsurprisingly, like a banana coated with cocoa powder. It wasn't bad, exactly, but it wasn't any more enjoyable than just eating a banana, which is a lot less work. If anything, it was less enjoyable, since the texture was a bit slimy. As a dessert, it wasn't nearly as satisfying as a cup of my low-sugar hot cocoa. 

Out of curiosity, I tried topping the banana mixture with a spoonful of the vegan vanilla ice cream we'd made the night before. As you might expect, this combination was vastly superior to the banana alone, but it wasn't nearly as good as the vanilla ice cream with raspberries. And I think adding more than that one little dollop of the vanilla stuff would have nullified any claim this banana dessert has to being healthful. 

So far, the Dessert Bullet doesn't look like a game changer, but we're not giving up on it yet. There are a couple of recipes in the booklet that don't depend primarily on banana, like Creamy Berry Sorbet (a blend of frozen strawberries, blueberries, and blackberries with unsweetened coconut) and Coconut Colada (a misleadingly named blend of frozen coconut-milk yogurt, frozen pineapple chunks, and unsweetened coconut). We'll try at least one of these, as well as a few other combinations of fruit, before deciding whether this gadget deserves a spot in our crowded kitchen cabinets.

Even more ecofrugal episodes

Nothing happened this week that seemed big enough to warrant an entire blog post on its own, so instead I'm doing another of my ecofrugal episodes posts—a roundup of the small successes and failures in our ecofrugal life. Fortunately, this time the successes outnumber the failures. 

Item #1: A grout makeover  

My birthday request this year was for Brian to replace the grout in our upstairs tub-shower, which had developed stains that no amount of scrubbing could remove. (This photo—taken after the grout had just been cleaned—doesn't really do it justice, but it should give you an inkling of how bad it was.) It wasn't until this month that we finally had a free weekend to tackle the project, and we ran into a couple of setbacks while carrying it out. 

First, after he'd already scraped out as much as he reasonably could of the old grout, Brian discovered that the pre-mixed grout he'd bought to replace it was was actually sanded grout, which isn't recommended for narrow gaps like this. (It would have been nice if the package had said this on the front, rather than in small print on the back.) So we had to make a hasty trip to Home Depot to replace it. We also grabbed an extra tube of caulk, just in case we needed extra. At first, Brian thought this purchase had been a waste of money, since the old tube ended up having enough in it to fill all the joints. But he learned otherwise the next morning, when he discovered that the caulk he'd just applied, which was supposed to set up within two hours, was still liquid. Clearly it was no longer good, so he had to spend part of that morning laboriously removing all the goo and replacing it with fresh caulk from the new tube. 

So this birthday request proved to be more of a hassle than we expected, but it turned out well in the end. Every time I've stepped into the shower this past week, I've been delighted at how fresh and clean the grout looks now. Brian even took the extra step of repainting the grungy-looking trim on the tub window, so the whole enclosure now looks sparkling and new. Once the new grout has had a couple of weeks to cure fully, we're going to follow up by applying a sealant, which will allegedly keep it fresh and stain-free  for the next few years. And even when it wears off, we can just apply a new coat, rather than going through this entire messy job again.

Item #2: Pride pants 

Recently, I noticed that my older pair of blue jeans was starting to wear out in the thigh area. This is a common occurrence for me, but this time the pattern was a bit unusual: instead of spreading across the whole inner thigh area, the threadbare sections were confined to a line right along the inseam. I thought this would be a good spot for a little visible mending, but wasn't sure whether it made more sense to darn these tiny holes individually or try to cover all of them with a patch. 

I went hunting for suggestions online and came across this image: a long row of stitches in different colors of embroidery floss running down the length of the seam. I decided to try a similar idea, but with a rainbow color scheme. The whole worn area was about 12 centimeters long, so I divided it up into sections of roughly 2 centimeters for each color. I started at one end putting in parallel stitches in red embroidery floss, then about 2 centimeters down I tied off the red thread and started on orange, and so on down the spectrum to purple.

I've only done one seam so far, since the wear on the other isn't quite as bad, but eventually I intend to do the other one to match. The stitching is far from perfect, but it's colorful and cute and gives me a little boost of happiness every time I wear these jeans now. And it's just in time for Pride Month!

Item #3: Repair, then replace 

About a year ago, our old toilet seat broke. Rather than buy the cheapest model to replace it, we decided to spring for one with "soft close" hinges. I quite enjoyed this feature, but unfortunately, these slow-closing hinges weren't very durable. A couple of days ago, I noticed that the lid was askew, and when I examined it, I discovered that one of the hinges had snapped clean through. I managed to wiggle it through so that the lid could close fully, if no longer softly, but this clearly wasn't going to be a long-term solution.

Rather than run out to buy a whole new toilet seat, Brian decided to try repairing the hinge with epoxy. He applied the glue to both broken edges, then clamped the lid in the open position overnight to give it plenty of time to set. But sadly, as soon as he unclamped it in the morning and tried lowering the lid, it snapped straight apart again. 

Although this repair wasn't a success, I still think it was worth making the attempt. It didn't cost us anything except a little extra time, and we had no way of knowing it wouldn't work unless we tried it. And now that we know, we feel no guilt about discarding the broken toilet seat and spending $40 on a replacement. (This time around, we spent $10 more for one with metal hinges, which we're assuming will hold up better. Paying the extra $10 now seems like a better deal than spending $30 to replace the whole thing again in another year.)

Item #4: Whipping it good 

Ever since we first started cutting back on dairy products back in 2018, we've been looking for a decent substitute for whipped cream. We tried numerous homemade versions using various combinations of coconut cream, aquafaba, and plant milk, with results ranging from near success (but not quite) to colossal failure. We tried a commercial product called Coco Whip that worked reasonably well in a raspberry fool, but the store where we found it has since stopped carrying it. And we tried one or two commercial plant-based cream substitutes that were so unimpressive I didn't even bother blogging about them.

But on a couple of recent trips to Trader Joe's, we've noticed a product in their dairy case called "Vegan Heavy Whipping Cream Alternative." We couldn't remember if we'd tried this one before, but at only $4 a pint—about the same price as regular cream—we didn't have much to lose by giving it another go. So we grabbed a pint, and last weekend Brian took a crack at using some in a honeyberry fool (a phrase I love having the opportunity to say). And right away, we noticed that this stuff actually was whipping up like real cream. It formed genuine stiff peaks that held their shape and didn't collapse even when we folded in the berry mixture. And if the flavor and mouthfeel weren't exactly identical to real cream, you could hardly tell by the time it was combined with the berries.

We only used about half the pint for this experiment, so we're going to try tinkering with it further, seeing if it can make a plant-based ice cream that works better than our iced coconut cream (which didn't turn out so well the second time we tried it). If it works for that too, we'll probably stop messing around with DIY versions and make this our go-to substitute for any recipe that calls for cream—possibly even our anniversary cake.

Item #5: Extension cord life extension

One of the items we picked up at last year's yard sales (or, to be exact, from the piles of discards after the sales) was an electric hedge trimmer. It's just a light-duty plug-in model, but since our property only has one hedge and we only trim it a couple of times a year, it's been perfectly adequate for our needs. But last Friday, Brian discovered its biggest drawback: make one false move with it and you cut right through your extension cord. To add insult to injury, he had noticed that the cord was in harm's way and was just attempting to move it out of the way when it happened. 

Naturally, he was quite annoyed that this one brief slip had, as he thought, totally destroyed an extension cord that would cost around $17 to replace. But then he discovered that it's actually possible to cut off the damaged portion and attach a replacement connector, which only costs about $3. You just end up with a slightly shorter cord—in this case, 47 feet instead of 50, which is still plenty for our small yard. Less cost, less waste, and less frustration about having damaged the old one. (Of course, if this keeps happening, the cord will gradually get shorter each time until it's too short to be of much use. But I suspect after this incident, he'll take extra care to keep the cord out of danger in future.)

Recipe of the Month: Roasted Cauliflower and Chick Peas (plus bonus dessert)

On the last Thursday in May, during our weekly grocery run to Lidl, Brian made an impulse purchase of a cheap cauliflower. Having bought it, he then had to figure out what to do with it. We'd already had aloo gobi recently, and he didn't have any leeks to make his roasted leek and cauliflower pasta. So he went hunting online for ideas and dug up a recipe at a site called Last Ingredient for a dish made from roasted cauliflower and chick peas, topped with an "herby tahini" spiked with fresh parsley, cilantro, garlic, green onion, and lemon juice. We had all of that except the cilantro, so he just substituted additional parsley, which the garden is producing plenty of, and left the rest of the recipe unchanged.  

This dish isn't at all complicated. All he had to do was divide the cauliflower into florets, toss them and the chick peas with olive oil and spices, spread them out on a baking sheet, and roast them for half an hour. While it was cooking, he whipped up the tahini sauce and a batch of quinoa to accompany the dish. (The recipe didn't call for this, but it noted that "Leftovers can be stirred into cooked pasta, quinoa, farro or barley," so Brian figured there was no need to wait for it to be left over.) 

He served the dish with the herbed tahini on the side, along with some extra parsley for sprinkling. I tried it first without the sauce and found it quite enjoyable on its own: with its blend of onion and garlic powder, cumin, smoked paprika, black pepper, and salt, it wasn't at all lacking in flavor. But when I added a dollop of the sauce, that extra punch of lemon, garlic, and sesame flavors livened it up still more. It didn't need a lot, just a little sprinkle in each bite to give it that extra brightness and piquancy.

In short, I expect this recipe to become a part of our regular rotation. So long as cauliflower remains cheap at Lidl, we can alternate back and forth between it and aloo gobi so we don't get tired of either one.

This was not the only new recipe Brian tried last week. Late in May, the New York Times climate column ran a story (gift link here) about a vegan chocolate cake that was so good, it convinced the author to go vegan herself. She'd long been concerned about the climate and the impact our food choices have on it, but she also couldn't see a life without animal foods as worth living. Tasting this "sumptuous" cake at a backyard wedding, she reports, opened her eyes to the idea that "plant-based eating could be delicious."

Of course, this did not come as news to Brian or me. We already had many delicious vegan recipes in our repertoire, including a pretty good chocolate cake. That recipe, known in my family as "wacky cake," depends on a vinegar-and-baking-soda reaction to leaven it with no need for eggs. It's incredibly simple to make; I first learned to do it at the age of 7 or 8. But Brian found the swooning description of the cake in the New York Times piece so intriguing that he decided he had to try it for himself. 

The recipe, from the site Nora Cooks, isn't particularly complicated. In fact, the ingredient list is pretty similar to our basic wacky cake, with the addition of a cup of soymilk and some applesauce. The main feature this recipe has that mine doesn't is a chocolate buttercream frosting to go with it. The recipe calls for vegan butter to make this frosting—specifically, the kind that comes in sticks rather than in a tub. Brian and I used to buy this kind of plant butter for pie crusts, but lately it's become harder to find in stores. So, rather than go hunting all over for plant butter in stick form, Brian decided to try using our homemade plant butter homemade plant butter in the frosting and see if that worked okay.

The answer turned out to be "sort of." The problem is, the oils it's made from (canola and coconut) have a significantly lower melting point than the palm oil used in the plant butter sticks. Brian had to put the cake layers into the freezer to keep the frosting from melting as he applied it, and the iced cake had to go immediately into the fridge and stay there to keep it from melting just in the warmth of the kitchen. When we wanted to share some slices with our friends at Morris dance practice, we had to pack them into a cooler to keep them from turning into puddles.

That bit of hassle aside, this was definitely a good chocolate cake, with a moist, rich texture and a strong chocolate flavor. But to be honest, it wasn't that much better than our usual wacky cake. It was mainly the rich frosting that made it feel much more lavish and decadent—almost too much so for my taste. I had to carefully manage the balance between cake and frosting as I ate to keep the sweetness from being overpowering.

So, while it was interesting to try this cake of legend, I honestly don't know that it lives up to the hype. Personally, I didn't find it that much better than the wacky-cake cupcakes with coconut frosting Brian made for my birthday ten years ago, and it certainly can't hold a candle to our wedding cake with its layers of chocolate and raspberry mousse. If we could figure out how to make that cake vegan, now, that would be a cake truly worth converting to a plant-based diet for. But this one, while good, is hardly a life-changing experience.

Sumer is icumen in

It's been an unusually cold spring here in New Jersey. During a stream cleanup we did in early April, it was actually snowing. Last weekend, we were guests at an outdoor wedding, and I kept my coat on pretty much the entire time. And just last night, we opted to skip the local outdoor film series because the temperature was already down in the 50s by showtime.

But as soon as the calendar page flipped over to June, the weather seemed to get the memo that it's supposed to be summertime. The temperature forecast for this week is heading steadily upward, from a high of around 70F today up to 92F by Thursday. And our garden is likewise getting with the program, swinging into full production mode. Yesterday, Brian gathered a big bunch of lettuce and arugula for a salad and a pound of rhubarb for a strawberry-rhubarb compote; today, we went out and filled up two pint containers with our honeyberries and alpine strawberries. And, in a preview of things to come, we gathered six snap pea pods and our first raspberry of the season.

To celebrate all this bounty, Brian fired up the grill and cooked a batch of his mushroom seitan burgers. To accompany them, he also grilled a batch of zucchini spears, some onion and potato slices, and a couple of ears of corn in their husks. He upped the veggie content of the meal with a salad of home-grown lettuce and arugula, livened up with a few white strawberries, snap peas, and chopped walnuts (the only component we didn't grow ourselves). 

By many folks' standards, this is a pretty humble home-cooked meal. There's no meat, and the ingredients—including the store-bought buns and a batch of our favorite balsamic vinaigrette dressing—cost us less than $12 for at least two or three meals' worth of food. But as I admired the spread laid out on our table, I exclaimed to Brian, "We're so rich!" and meant it. A satisfying supper featuring fresh-picked organic produce, a beautiful June day to cook it on, and my favorite person to eat it with: if that's not wealth, what is?

Recipe of the Month: Butternut Squash Mac & Cheese

When Brian asked me to look for new recipes to use up our plentiful supply of butternut squash, I recalled one I'd seen a while ago on It Doesn't Taste Like Chicken: Vegan Butternut Squash Mac & Cheese. We'd previously tried the Vegan Mac & Cheese Powder from the same site, and it hadn't at all successful, but I thought this squash-based "cheese" might be more successful. Most of the ingredients in it—onion, garlic, butternut squash, veggie broth, nutritional yeast—were things we liked and already knew would go well together, so it didn't seem like it could go too wrong.

However, there was one ingredient the recipe called for that we didn't have: white miso paste. We assumed this would be easy to find at our local H-Mart, which carries all kinds of Asian foods at affordable prices, but Brian couldn't find it there—nor at the Ranch 99, another Asian grocery store a little way down the street. Our local SuperFresh had some, but it was $9.99 for a 14-ounce package, which seemed a bit much to spend on an ingredient we'd never used before and might never want to use again. We finally managed to locate a smaller package for $2.99 at Trader Joe's—a 5-ounce resealable tube that we hope will help the stuff keep long enough for us to use it up.

Making the "cheese" sauce was simple enough: just saute the onion and garlic, then add the cubed squash and broth and cook it until tender, and then puree the lot in a blender with the nooch, miso paste, and a little salt. However, the volume the recipe produced seemed like far too much for the three cups of cooked macaroni it was supposed to cover. Fortunately, Brian had decided to cook a whole half-pound of elbows, which came out to about four cups cooked, because even this larger volume of noodles was more or less swimming in the sauce. It was more like a soup than a pasta dish. 

As far as I was concerned, these messed-up proportions more or less ruined the dish. There was nothing really wrong with the flavor of the squash sauce (although, like the other mac & cheese recipe from the same site, it tasted nothing at all like cheese), but there was just too much of it. I tried to eat it carefully so that the noodles were distributed as evenly through the sauce as possible, but I still ended up with a significant volume of cheese-sauce soup in the bottom of my bowl that I had to spoon up by itself. This wasn't at all agreeable and left me with no appetite for the leftovers. 

Fortunately, Brian didn't mind it as much, so he was able to finish it off over the course of the next few days. But neither of us feels much inclination to try it again. In theory, this dish might be okay if we just made a smaller volume of sauce. But why bother making a squash-based pasta dish that's only okay when our Brown Butter Butternut Squash Pasta recipe (and the new vegan variation we've created) is already delicious without any tinkering?

The gift of less stuff

We're in the middle of a busy couple of months. Between events with Citizens' Climate Lobby (CCL), Morris dance performances, and stuff we're doing with family and friends, we don't have a single free weekend until June. And some weekends, including this one, are crammed full of events on both days. Today, I was "tabling" (staffing a table at a street fair) for CCL in the afternoon, and we're going to the opening of our local outdoor movie series tonight; tomorrow, we have a Morris performance down in South Jersey during the day and a CCL get-together in exactly the opposite direction in the evening. With all that going on, this hour before dinner is about the only time I've got to update my blog, so you're only getting a quickie post this week.

One of the things that kept us busy last weekend was Mother's Day. My mom is a difficult person to buy gifts for, because her house is so full already that she doesn't need any more stuff. On the contrary, she's always saying she wants to get rid of the stuff she has. So, last year, I had a brainwave: I offered, as my Mother's Day gift to her, to come to her house and spend the day helping her clean out one room of her choice. I didn't suggest this because she had any heavy boxes to move, nor because I thought I could do a better job than she could deciding what to throw away, what to keep, and where to put it. The main advantage of having me there all day was that it would force her to sit down and do the work of going through things, instead of wanting to do it and never finding the time. And it seemed to work pretty well. She chose her office, and by the end of the day we'd cleared away all the piles of paper in there, removed some old things of mine that had been sitting in that room since it was my bedroom, and put all her computer equipment in places where she could easily find it.

Since that was such a success, I decided to give her the same "gift" this year. This time around, she decided to get a bit more ambitious and tackle the sun porch, which is a repository of all kinds of miscellany: decades-old toys, plants and garden supplies, old sporting equipment, a big bookshelf full of board games and puzzles, and a huge stack of my old notebooks from high school and college. Mom seemed to think we could go through this stuff quickly and maybe have time to move on to another room, but I suspected we wouldn't even make a dent in the contents of the the porch itself. 

It turns out the answer was somewhere in the middle. We didn't clean out the whole porch, but we did get through a lot more of it than I expected. I spent a large portion of the day going through my old notebooks, pulling out the few things I wanted to keep (mostly stories and poems that I didn't have digital copies of), then breaking down the notebooks themselves so the contents could be recycled. I discarded so much paper that I had to split it between two separate bins so they wouldn't be too heavy for my dad to haul to the curb. But I also found time to review the contents of several bins and shelves with my mom. She opted to keep a lot more of the games and puzzles than I would have in her place, but we still set aside quite a lot of them to give away. We also cleared out things from the bins I'd had no idea were in there: a couple of giant "magic bubble wands," several old tennis rackets, a baseball bat and a few balls, multiple Frisbees, an old model airplane kit, and even an old jump rope of mine that I hadn't seen in decades.

All that stuff went downstairs into the storage room, where it will sit until Hopewell holds its next town-wide yard sale. My parents aren't planning to host an official sale, but they'll haul out a folding table, set it up on the lawn, and put out all their unwanted items with a big sign saying that everything (barring the table itself) is free. They hope that the yard-sale shoppers, always eager for a bargain, will snap up most of it, leaving them with only a few items to either Freecycle or discard.

All in all, I'd say this was a pretty ecofrugal present. It was something my mom actually wanted, and it cost nothing and used no natural resources to produce. Better still, it helped get all this unwanted stuff out of the house and, hopefully, into the homes of people who can use it—people who might otherwise have spent their own money, and the planet's resources, on new products. In fact, it worked so well I'm thinking of offering the same gift to my dad for Father's Day next month. (That will result in one more rather full weekend in June, but at least it will be only one weekend out of an otherwise quiet month.)