Individual action vs. collective action

Yesterday I spent most of the afternoon at an event with my Citizens' Climate Lobby (CCL) chapter. When I got home, I found that in my absence Brian had:

• Washed all the dishes from lunch.
• Made a batch of coffee ice cream base with our new vegan cream.
• Ridden his bike to three different local stores and brought home four pounds of tofu, one pound of broccoli, a bottle of ibuprofen, a bottle of digestive enzymes, and a bottle of gin.
• Uprooted a large tree of heaven sapling behind the shed.
• Weeded the strawberry bed and the asparagus patch, which was so heavily overgrown that it probably contained more weeds than asparagus ferns.

In the same amount of time, I had:

• Driven to a town about half an hour away, filled out about 40 postcards for the Environmental Voter Project (EVP), and driven home. 

But when I commented to him about how much more productive his day had been than mine, his response was along the lines of, "Yeah, but the one thing you did was more important than all the stuff I did."

That brought me up short. Was it? 

Obviously I thought sending the postcards was important, since I was willing to devote a whole afternoon to it. And I had some basis for that belief, since the EVP has plenty of data to show how effective its efforts are in getting environmentalists to the polls. In some elections, the number of additional voters they calculate they've turned out has actually exceeded the winner's margin of victory. If the 300 postcards our chapter mailed out to voters in Virginia convince 300 environmentalists, or even half that number, to vote in the upcoming gubernatorial election, that could potentially tip the election in favor of a pro-environment governor who will enact pro-climate policies in that state. And if that happens, obviously it will make more difference to the planet than all of Brian's smaller eco-friendly actions.

But that seems like an awful lot of ifs. Brian's actions, by contrast, are guaranteed to have an impact. No matter what happens in Virginia this fall, it won't change the fact that Brian has removed one invasive plant from our yard, kept around 10 vehicle-miles off our car, and (literally) churned out one vegan dessert for the two of us. Each of those things may only make a tiny difference to the world as a whole, but they make a big difference to our household—and these effects, big and small, don't depend on anyone or anything else to bring them to fruition.

And that's why I think both kinds of action are important. It's true that nothing I do for the environment as an individual, from darning a sock to replacing our heating system, can possibly have as big an impact as government policies like a carbon fee or subsidies for clean energy. But it's also true that all the effort I've put in over the past 5 years with CCL, and indeed all the effort CCL as a whole has put in over the past 18 years, has so far failed to get a carbon fee enacted. And the clean energy subsidies we did manage to get just a few years ago have now evaporated and certainly won't be restored under this administration, if they're ever restored at all. So right now, if we want to make things better, those tiny, individual-level changes—in what we drive, what we eat, what we buy—may be the best we can do. 

Of course, we still need to keep pushing for the big policy changes. Even if it seems like we're getting nowhere right now, enough drops of water will eventually wear away a stone, and who can say which drop—which letter to a Congress member, which postcard to an environmental voter, which conversation at a street fair—will be the one that finally breaks through? But while we're working toward those few big, distant, difficult goals, it's also good to have a few smaller, closer goals that we can actually achieve, like biking to the store and picking up some groceries for a healthy vegan meal. That way, we at least have some small gain to point to at the end of the day. And those little wins can give us renewed strength for the bigger battles that we're still fighting. 

Recipe of the Month: Coconut Cauliflower Curry (with bonus bread and dessert)

As I've noted before, my husband has a bit of a cauliflower problem. When he spots a cheap cauliflower at the store, he just can't resist buying it, even if he has no idea what he wants to do with it. Last week, he found himself in this position once again, and rather than fall back on an old standby like aloo gobi, he decided to look for something new. On a site called Rebel Recipes, he found a cauliflower and chick pea curry recipe with coconut milk, which he adores, so he decided to give that one a try. He didn't modify it much, aside from scaling dialing back the chili flakes to just a pinch and adding a teaspoon of salt, which the original recipe lacked entirely.

Visually speaking, this curry wasn't very appealing. It was a sort of orange, gooey mass, without much contrast in color or texture. The flavor, on the other hand, had a lot going on—a bit too much for my taste. Against the tang of tomato and the sort of musty coolness of the coconut milk, there was a huge array of spices—onion, garlic, ginger cumin, coriander, turmeric, garam masala, cinnamon, cardamom, fennel, chili—all fighting for attention. I found it a bit overwhelming, and I felt no urge to go back for more when I'd finished my bowlful. Brian, on the other hand, absolutely loved it. He's promised not to "subject me to it too often," and I've agreed to put up with it once in a while for his sake. Perhaps it'll grow on me after a while. And if it doesn't, he can have all the leftovers to himself.

But this was not the only new recipe we tried in August. We're only halfway through the month, and we've already tried two others: a simple bread that wasn't a stunning success, and a dessert that was.

The flatbread recipe was something I discovered while browsing Reddit. On the r/Frugal forum, a Redditor posted with great enthusiasm about a two-ingredient flatbread that he swore was a "gateway drug" for baking. To hear him tell it, this recipe could work for just about anything: pizza crust, burger buns, wraps, even crackers. It sounded interesting, but the original recipe called for Greek yogurt, which wouldn't fit our mostly dairy-free diet. So I hunted around and unearthed a vegan version that also called for only two ingredients: soy milk, which we had, and self-rising flour, which is easy to make by adding three teaspoons of baking powder to two cups of regular flour. (A third ingredient, salt, was listed as optional.) 

I showed the recipe to Brian and he agreed to give it a try with the next night's dinner, falafel. Making the flatbreads was pretty similar to the process he uses for the homemade tortillas he usually serves with this meal: mix the dough, knead it briefly, form balls, roll them out, and pan-fry them. However, since the dough got to rise a bit before cooking, the flatbreads came out larger, puffier, and more substantial than the tortillas. And at first, that seemed to be a good thing. The sturdier flatbreads could hold a larger volume of falafel and veggies without letting any spill out, and they felt more secure in the hand. And I found their chewy texture quite enjoyable.

But after a couple of days, the weakness of this recipe became apparent. The flatbreads that had been so firm and flexible when fresh out of the pan grew drier and more brittle with each day they stayed in the fridge. By the time I tried to use the last one four days later, it was so crumbly that it couldn't wrap around the falafel at all; it simply fell to pieces, leaving me to finish up the meal with a fork. Since the tortillas are about as easy to make and stay good much longer, it makes more sense to stick with those for all our sandwich-wrapping needs.

But on the dessert front, there is good news. For background, a couple of months ago, we discovered a vegan whipping cream at Trader Joe's that worked beautifully for plain whipped cream, in a fruit fool, in ice cream, and even in our anniversary cake. So we were devastated to discover on our next trip to the store that it had been discontinued. (This is an ever-present danger with Trader Joe's products we get too attached to, like their toothpaste and shampoo bar.) I thought maybe we could make our own plant-based cream using the TJ's product as a model, and I came up with what seemed like a promising recipe combining soy milk, coconut oil, and canola oil, with guar gum as an emulsifer. But apparently there was some key element of the alchemy missing, because the stuff stubbornly refused to whip.

But then the story took a happier turn. Last weekend, Brian stopped by Shop-Rite to use up a gift card, and while there, he noticed a plant-based cream from Country Crock in the refrigerated section. Both the package and the ingredient list looked pretty similar to the Trader Joe's product, suggesting that the taste and texture might be also. And when we tried whipping some, we found that was indeed the case. It needed more sugar, since it wasn't as sweet as either the TJ's cream or real cream, but the texture and mouthfeel were just fine.

After that, of course, we had to test it in an ice cream. Brian asked me to pick a flavor, and I suggested a fruity ice cream made from some of our frozen or preserved fruit. That reminded him that last year, he'd tried making a batch of raspberry jam that hadn't set up very well, so it was more of a raspberry sauce. And, recalling a particularly tasty black raspberry chocolate chip ice cream he'd had once at a place in New Hope, he decided to add chocolate to it as well. Solid chocolate chips aren't ideal for this purpose since they don't melt that quickly in the mouth, so he decided to use a technique he'd seen in another recipe: melt the chocolate with a little oil, then drizzle it into the ice cream base as it mixes.

The result: a truly delicious vegan ice cream. The flavor had the perfect balance of sweetness and tartness, and the mouthfeel was just as smooth and creamy as you'd expect from real dairy cream. It's good enough that, unlike the other two vegan recipes we tried in August, I think it's worth sharing in full. (This is a small batch sized for our baby ice cream maker, so adjust the proportions as needed).

Vegan Raspberry Chocolate Chip Ice Cream 

Combine ½ cup Country Crock vegan heavy whipping cream, 3 Tbsp. soy milk, 5 Tbsp. seedless raspberry jam, and ¼ tsp. vanilla. Refrigerate the mixture (if most of the ingredients are already cold, a couple hours should be fine). Place in ice cream maker and run for 10-15 minutes. Melt 1.33 oz. chocolate chips and 1 tsp. canola oil in a double boiler until liquid. When the ice cream is soft-serve consistency, slowly pour in the chocolate either while the maker is still running or while stirring. Run the ice cream maker for a little while longer, then freeze the mixture for a couple hours before eating.

Darn, not so tough

See this picture? What you are looking at is something that, in theory, you should never see: a darned Darn Tough sock. To understand how this came about, I'll have to start at the beginning and explain how Brian and I became aficionados of Darn Tough in the first place, and why we aren't any longer. 

For several years, Brian and I were big fans of Smartwool socks. We both relied on them throughout the winter because they were warm, non-itchy, and machine washable. True, after a couple of winters they would start to grow threadbare and eventually develop holes that required darning, but we assumed the same would be true of any brand.

Then, a few years ago, we learned about Darn Tough. This brand also offers washable, itch-free wool socks, and folks in the Reddit Buy It for Life forum consistently claimed theirs were far superior. Some Redditors said they'd been wearing the same pair of Darn Tough socks for five, six, even ten years with no sign of the thinning and holes that had plagued our Smartwool ones. The company even backs up all its socks with a lifetime guarantee: if they don't live up to your expectations, it will replace them, no questions asked.

So, rather than buying Brian more Smartwool socks for Christmas in 2022, I decided to spend a few extra dollars per pair on Darn Tough socks. And for the first couple of years, they seemed to live up entirely to the hype. They were warm, comfortable, and as far as we could tell, super sturdy. We were both so impressed with them that I invested another $30 in a third pair for him last year and was planning to spring for a couple of pairs for myself as soon as my old socks wore out.

And then, last week, while hanging up a load of laundry, I discovered a tiny hole in the foot of one of Brian's two-and-a-half-year-old Darn Tough socks. If it had been any other sock, I'd just have whipped out the old sewing kit and darned it in a minute or two. But in a sock that I'd paid $13.50 for (half of a $27 pair) less than three years ago, and that I'd been assured would last at least five, it seemed like an insult.

Small as the hole was, it shook my confidence in the brand. I began to wonder if it was worth buying any more of them in future, or even keeping them on my list of holiday gift ideas for Brian. Going back to Reddit to look into the matter, I discovered numerous posts suggesting that Darn Tough's quality had been slipping in recent years. One thread from six months ago argued that, while they're good socks, they're not really $30 socks, and the lifetime warranty is simply a "marketing strategy" to get away with selling them at that price. The author linked to a YouTube video testing Darn Tough's wool hiking socks against several less expensive brands, and the reviewer found that their overall performance was "pretty average." Darn Tough was in the top half of the pack, but four less expensive brands did better—and one of the absolute top performers was Costco's Kirkland Signature, which costs only one-eighth as much. Many Redditors responded by defending the brand, but others agreed that it's overrated, and a few piped up to say they prefer the Costco socks.

This answered one question. If we could get socks of equal or better quality for $3.75 a pair, clearly there was no point in spending $30 on Darn Tough anymore. But it left the question of what to do with the old pair. Should we attempt to take advantage of the unconditional warranty and see how good the brand really was about honoring it? Or should we just darn them and be done with it?

After some consideration, Brian suggested we should give the warranty a go. It would be more work and it would mean being without the socks for a few weeks, but he felt like the company ought to be held to account for its lapse in quality. So I went online and filled out the paperwork to do an exchange. The process was quite easy, but the last step pulled me up short: The site informed me that to get a new pair, we'd have to return the old ones at our own expense. So the "free" replacement wouldn't truly be free; it would cost at least $3 for shipping, almost as much as a whole new pair from Costco. Given that we could simply darn them and carry on using them for the cost of only a few cents' worth of thread, it didn't seem worth it.

So our plan now is to treat these Darn Tough socks the same way as all our other socks. We'll keep them in service until they wear out, darning up the holes as long as it's reasonably possible to do so, and when that stops working, send them off to textile recycling. But we see no reason ever to invest $30 in another pair. Instead, we've shelled out $15 for four pairs of the Kirkland socks. We hope they'll prove at least as durable as their predecessors, but even if they start to develop holes after just one year instead of two and a half, they'll still be a better value.

Gardeners' Holidays 2025: Summer Harvest

Although the summer solstice is sometimes referred to as Midsummer, this term only makes sense if you think of summer as the six months between the spring and fall equinoxes. The real midpoint of summer falls right around now, at the beginning of August. It's a time when the garden is normally at its peak, cranking out a huge variety of veggies. But sadly, this year's weird weather (including a week of blistering heat followed by pounding rain) doesn't seem to have agreed with our plants. In the past week, we've harvested only:

• 5 cucumbers (one of our old Boston Pickling cukes and four South Winds, our new variety)
• 4 Premio tomatoes, 4 San Marzano tomatoes, and 14 Sun Gold cherry tomatoes
• 7 ounces of bush cherries 
• 1 zucchini 

That's not bad, but it's a lot less than we got last year or the year before. The cucumbers are doing all right, but the tomatoes, peppers, and zucchini have all been a bit sluggish. Worst of all, the plums, which according to their normal two-year cycle should be producing a bumper crop right now, have yielded hardly anything. The Golden Gage plums haven't ripened yet, so there's still a chance of a decent harvest there, but Brian has already picked the Opal tree clean and collected only 9.5 pounds in total—less than one-third of our 2023 harvest and one-fifth of what we got in 2021. And the Mount Royal has done even worse, producing not a single plum that survived to full ripeness. 

More worrying still, the tree itself is looking rather peaky. Its branches, even after two years of diligent pruning, are still heavily infected with black knot, and its leaves have come in small, thin, and riddled with tiny holes. The most likely culprit, apparently, is a fungal infection called shot hole disease. To deal with it, sources recommend removing and destroying every bit of infected foliage, then giving it a dose of fungicide in late fall. Unfortunately, there's pretty much no part of the tree that isn't affected, and the other two trees seem to have it to some extent as well. So to follow this advice properly, we'd have to strip all three trees bare, which is hardly practical. Probably the best we can do is rake up and burn all the leaves in the fall, spray all the trees with our usual copper fungicide, and cross our fingers.

However, there are some plants in our yard that are absolutely loving this weather: the weeds. Between personal travel, business travel, and hazardous weather conditions, Brian and I haven't been able to spend much time in the garden over the past few weeks, and the crabgrass and mugwort took advantage of the lull to invade every planting bed in the yard—flowers, herbs, asparagus—while growing to nearly waist height in the open areas. Brian spent most of yesterday out there with the mower and the string trimmer just beating them back, then we both spent some time on the ground carefully hand-weeding the areas that couldn't be mowed. Brian even put up a new barrier around the flowerbed, using some big pieces of 4-by-four lumber he had sitting out back, to make it harder for the weeds to retake the territory in future. (The phone line insulators that previously marked out the boundaries of the bed went on top.)

So, on the one hand, we don't have much of a harvest to celebrate for this particular Gardeners' Holiday. But we can at least celebrate a temporary victory over the weeds. We can't claim to have defeated them, but at least they're not at risk of eating the house, and that's more than we could say two days ago.

Recyclable =/= sustainable

Late last year, I subscribed to the One5C newsletter, which drops tidbits of climate news and tips for lowering my carbon footprint in my email inbox twice a week. Some of this info is useful, but occasionally the editors make silly mistakes about things that would have been easy to check. One recent newsletter called "natural gas" a misleading term invented by fossil fuel companies "to confuse consumers" when it's actually been used since the 1820s to refer to methane gas that's naturally occurring, as opposed to synthetic. (Consumers may indeed be confused because they mistakenly assume "natural" means "wholesome," but that doesn't mean the term itself is inaccurate.) Another touted a proposed law it said would require schools to provide nondairy milk "for any child that wants it—no note required," when the bill in question actually would require students to provide a note identifying the "disability" that prevents them from drinking cow's milk. And a third recommended bidets on the grounds that they save water, a claim I debunked last year.

Having run across problems like these before, I was a bit wary of One5C's recommendation for Ball's new aluminum party cups. I didn't doubt the editors were technically right in claiming that these aluminum cups are "infinitely recyclable," while "Classic red Solo cups...are #6 plastic, which few facilities recycle." But I wasn't prepared to assume this automatically made the aluminum ones the more ecofrugal choice. After all, the widely demonized single-use plastic bag actually does a lot less damage to the environment than a single-use paper bag or even an organic cotton tote bag. How could I be sure these new aluminum cups were really the most sustainable choice—both economically and environmentally?

To tackle these questions, I started out by shopping around in the "disposable tableware" section on Target.com. There I found several alternatives, some marketed as green and some not. First, as a baseline, I looked at the 18-ounce red Solo cups the One5C editors alluded to. These cost $8.99 for 72, or 12.5 cents each. Target also has its own brand of plastic cups that cost only $5.89 for 72, or 8.2 cents each. Both brands are made of polystyrene (#6 plastic), which isn't typically recyclable, just as One5C claims.

One product marketed as a greener alternative is Repurpose compostable cups. These clear plastic cups hold 12.2 ounces and cost $7.99 for 20 (40 cents each). That's more than three times the cost of the Solo cup and nearly five times the cost of the store brand in exchange for a questionable environmental benefit. The bioplastic these cups are made from has a lower carbon footprint than petroleum-based plastic, but it also uses more land, produces more pollution, and depletes the ozone layer more. Even the cups' claim to be "compostable" is dubious; bioplastics will break down in a commercial composting facility, but not in a home compost bin.

Compared to the Repurpose cups, the new Ball aluminum cups seem at first glance like a more legitimately sustainable alternative. Unlike most plastics, aluminum really can be recycled indefinitely, and aluminum recycling really does save significant resources and energy. Unfortunately, the cups themselves are not recycled; they're made from virgin aluminum, which has a significantly higher environmental footprint. In fact, a life-cycle analysis by Upstream found that these single-use aluminum cups are much worse for the environment than plastic ones, using 47% more energy and producing 86% more emissions. They also have by far the largest footprint in terms of cost. At $5.29 for 10, each cup costs 52.9 cents, more than four times as much as that "classic red Solo cup" and more than six times as much as the store brand.

Clearly, there's no good reason to recommend the Ball aluminum cups over traditional plastic ones. It only took me a few minutes of research to figure that out, and I'm a bit annoyed at the editors of One5C for not doing even that minimal amount of due diligence before recommending them. But what annoys me much more is that they're recommending a single-use product at all. Surely we all know by now that the slogan "reduce, reuse, recycle" puts recycle last for a reason, and that there's almost always more environmental benefit to reducing and reusing when you can.

And in this particular case, there's a very obvious reusable alternative that doesn't cost a cent. If you're having a gathering at your home, using your own cups and glasses costs nothing and creates no waste, aside from a little bit of water and energy for washing. In fact, I went to a potluck this weekend, and the host did exactly that. She served the meal with reusable glasses, reusable plates, and metal utensils, all of which worked much better than flimsy disposable equivalents.

And if you don't have enough glasses for that many guests? Well, if you plan on throwing parties often, it could be worth investing in a dozen 16-ounce mason jars, sold elsewhere on the Target website for $13.49, or $1.12 each. They'd be a better deal than the Ball aluminum cups after just three uses. Even compared to the cheapest plastic ones, they'd pay for themselves after 14 uses. They can accommodate both hot drinks and cold ones. And while the Upstream life-cycle analysis didn't look specifically at glass cups, a separate one by the UN's Life Cycle Initiative found that they're one of the greenest alternatives in just about every situation.

The moral of the story? It's not simply that reuse trumps recycling, although that is the case more often than not. It's that it's worth doing your homework rather than just assuming a product is ecofrugal, or even eco-conscious, just because it's recyclable. If there's an existing life cycle analysis out there, it will only take you a few minutes to find it, and it could save you from a costly mistake—for you and for the earth.

Ecofrugal episodes, July 2025

Time for another exciting installment of ecofrugal episodes, in which I fill you in on all the little things that have been going well and not so well in our ecofrugal life. This past week or two has had a mix of both, so I'm doing the post in "hits and misses" style.

Hit: Our first trip to Savers

Last weekend, Brian and I went to visit my sister and her family in Boston. One of the things we did there was visit Savers, a for-profit thrift store chain we don't have in our area. (There's a store in the same family, called Thrift Superstore, in Union, but that's a good 40 minutes away.) The store has a good selection and decent prices, but no dressing rooms, so we had to either try things on as best we could in the aisles or take our best guess about the size. Brian got one pair of jeans and a new pair of Ren Faire shoes, since his current set (also thrifted) has proven insufficiently supportive for a long day of walking. I got one fairly cute top and a pair of warm tights for winter. (It's not clear how big a hit that purchase is, since I still don't know if they fit. I couldn't try them on in the store, and after we got them home it was too hot. But for only a couple of bucks, they seemed worth the risk.) 

Since my sister's family also brought along four bags' worth of used clothes to donate, they got four coupons good for 40% off on up to $100 worth of purchases and gave one to us. With that discount, our total cost was $26.87 for the four items. That's not breathtakingly cheap, but it's clearly cheaper than buying new, which isn't always the case at thrift shops nowadays.

Miss: A sustainable-living guide that doesn't

On our way back from Savers, we stopped by a farmers' market. One of the booths there was a used-book stall run by the local public library. I can't pass by a table full of books (especially cheap ones) without at least taking a look, and I always like to support libraries when I can, so I spent $2 on a paperback copy of The Self-Sufficiency Bible, by a Brit named Simon Dawson. The cover promised "100s of Ways to Live More Sustainably - Wherever You Are," so I was hoping there might be at least a handful I didn't already know about.

Unfortunately, like many books on this topic, this one proved to be a mix of things I already do and things that aren't relevant to me. The three chapters on "The Home Dairy," "Livestock," and "Meat Preparation and Basic Butchery" were of no use to us at all. The chapter "Curing and Preserving" wasn't completely irrelevant, because the instructions for preserving meat were interspersed with pointers on pickles, chutneys, sauces, jam, and dried mushrooms and herbs. But most of this was already familiar to us, as was everything in the chapter "The Home Baker." And parts of the chapter "The Kitchen Garden" were clearly aimed at a British audience and didn't apply to us, like the advice that tomatoes and peppers are "likely to disappoint you" if you try to grow them outdoors. 

There were also a few tips that didn't seem to fit the "self-sufficiency" brief. The chapter on "Natural Solutions: Health, Beauty, and the Home" contained numerous recipes for natural cleaners and beauty products made from ingredients that you clearly can't produce yourself and aren't cheap to buy, such as cocoa butter, sandalwood oil, and avocado. His homemade hair conditioner recipe ("beat an egg either with an avocado or a banana") would cost a minimum of $1.16 per application, while my Suave conditioner costs around 9 cents. 

Also, the few chapters that looked like they'd be most useful, like "Arty Crafty Bits," largely glossed over the details of the things I was keenest to learn about. The section on knitting lists all kinds of things you can make this way, but never actually talks about how to do it; the section on making your own clothes advises you to "buy a good, lightweight machine...and get sewing," as if setting the machine up and threading it and using it required no explanation. And on top of this, the book is peppered with errors, both mechanical ("it's" for "its," "forraging") and factual (saying that rhubarb leaves are unsafe to compost, describing wood as a green energy source).

Despite these drawbacks, I did manage to glean a few useful tidbits from this book. I learned (and confirmed from reliable sources) that it's best to water seedlings before transplanting them so you lose less soil; that you can make an alcoholic "turbo cider" from store-bought juice in a couple of weeks; that you can knit with strips of fabric rather than yarn; that the comfrey plant growing next to our recycling bin can be eaten (in moderation); and that you can preserve mushrooms at home by air-drying or freezing. But having filed away those facts, I don't see any need to keep the book on my shelf for future reference. I'll either donate it to our library book sale or drop it into one of our town's many Little Free Libraries so it can go to someone who may get more use out of it.

Hit: DIY shower indicator buttons

When Brian and I bought new shower control knobs nine years back, they came with little plastic "indicator buttons" to identify the hot, cold, and direction knobs. These weren't truly necessary, since most people know which is which, but they served to cover up the mounting screws. Unfortunately, within a year, these buttons started to fall apart. They wouldn't stay in place because the little teeth that held them in the knobs had come loose and begun to fall out. This looked like an easy fix; we just bought a new set of indicator buttons for about $5 and swapped them out. But within another year or so, these buttons also began to fall apart in exactly the same way. I looked for metal indicator buttons that I thought might be more sturdy than the plastic ones, but I couldn't find any to fit our faucets.

So, with two of our faucet knobs now sitting there naked and the third button hanging on by a thread, I started brainstorming ways to rig up a DIY version of these buttons. I considered metal bottle caps, but we don't tend to buy drinks in glass bottles, and I wasn't sure how I'd get them to fit into the faucets. I also thought about gluing some decorative beads in place, but that would make it impossible to get at the screws. Finally, I concluded that the best fix would be a couple of large metal washers tucked under the screws. This would leave the heads exposed, but it would hide the dingy, mineral-stained surface underneath. And if the washers themselves got dirty, I could easily remove, clean, and replace them.

I found two washers in our collection that were just the right size and painted them with nail polish: red, which I already had, for the hot-water tap and blue, which cost me $4 at the local discount store, for the cold. It was the work of a couple of minutes to remove the screws, thread the washers on, and screw them back in. With these in place, the damaged knobs look much more presentable. And whenever that last button gives up the ghost, I can give the middle knob the same treatment.

Miss: Shaky sunglasses repair 

On sunny days, I wear special sunglasses designed to fit over my regular glasses. They're much cheaper than a pair of prescription shades, and they're easier to put on and take off because I don't need to stash my other glasses. Their weak point, it turns out, is durability. This month, the frames cracked right across the top. Brian thought maybe he could mend them with epoxy, but the difficulty would be figuring out how to clamp them while the glue dried. I decided instead to shell out $2 for some fast-drying superglue from the discount store and try to fix them that way. I laid them out on a sheet of newspaper, put on gloves so I wouldn't glue my fingers together, dabbed on a little glue, and held the joined area in place for about a minute to let it set.

At first, this simple repair seemed to be holding. Then the crack opened back up, but only partway. I glued it again, but after a week, it popped open completely. I got out my tools and glued it one more time, but this time there was a slight mishap; I got a bit of glue on my glove, which then got stuck to the inside of the nose piece. I was able to pull most of the nitrile off, but there's still a little scrap of blue there that will have to be scraped off with a utility knife. And it remains unclear whether this second repair will hold any better than the first. If it doesn't, I'll have to move on to more complicated methods: either adding a splint along with the glue, as suggested at Eyeglass Repair USA, or plastic welding.

Miss: High quotes for heat pumps 

Last month, in the wake of a brutal heat wave and the passage of a bill that will kill home electrification credits at the end of this year, Brian and I took another stab at getting quotes for a home heat pump. Three weeks ago, after talking to two contractors and getting one quote back, I was feeling doubtful. Now, after five consultations and four quotes (the fifth one never got back to me, even after a follow-up call), I'm even more pessimistic. 

The bottom line seems to be that a system that can completely replace our gas boiler will cost well over 30 grand. That doesn't include the $10,000 decarbonization credit that the first contractor mentioned, but that's because none of the other contractors I spoke to believed that this credit actually exists. More than one of them said that PSE&G has been talking about such a program for years, but nothing has ever happened, and there's no evidence that this year will be any different.

Now, if we were willing to settle for a hybrid system—one that would supplement rather than replace the boiler, reducing our gas usage—we could probably do that for between 20 and 25 grand, including the upgrades to our electrical panel. But that's still a lot of money, and the new system would probably cost as much to run as our current one, if not more. So the costs would continue to pile up every year.

What I'm starting to wonder is, if we're only going to reduce, not eliminate, our use of fossil fuel for heating, do we even need to install a whole-house system? Maybe we could just replace our old through-the-wall air conditioning unit with a heat pump that could provide supplemental heating as well as cooling. It looks like we could buy one for around $1,000, and since it would be replacing an existing unit, the installation cost shouldn't be more than another grand; we might even be able to install it ourselves. We'd still need to use the gas boiler, but the heat pump could probably cut our gas use by half, and for less than one-tenth the price of a complete system. It would be like the heating equivalent of our little induction burner: not a full replacement for a gas appliance, but one that can take over most of its duties for a fraction of the price. Am I crazy, or is this the ecofrugal way?

Recipe of the Month: Green Bean and Mushroom Curry

First, a quick apology for the late post this week. We were away for the weekend and didn't get home until Sunday evening, by which time we had no energy left for anything productive.

Now, on to the meat—or rather meatless—of the post. Brian found July's Recipe of the Month the way he often does: by searching online for a dish he can make with whatever we happen to have in the fridge. In this case, that was a half-pound of mushrooms and a roughly equal amount of green beans from the garden (our first of the season). Running a search based on those two ingredients, he hit on this Green Bean and Mushroom Curry from a site called Cooking with Mum, which bills itself as "a collection of authentic recipes from Fiji." So we can now add Fijian to the list of world cuisines we've sampled.

Well, sort of, anyway. As usual, Brian had to make a few modifications to the recipe based on our dietary needs and what we had available. He left out the optional curry leaves, the Thai chili, and cilantro, none of which we had on hand. He used only half the volume of green beans the recipe called for, since that was all we had, and he didn't bother blanching them. He reduced the amount of oil from half a cup, which seemed a bit excessive, to a quarter-cup, and substituted cheaper canola oil for olive oil.  He added half a teaspoon of salt, since the original recipe called for none at all. And lastly, he gave the dish a boost of protein by cubing up 8 ounces of firm (or at least firm-ish) tofu, sauteing it with a quarter-teaspoon of salt, and tossing that in at the end before serving the whole thing up over brown rice. After all these changes, what he finally put on the table was more like an adaptation of the original Fijian dish than a faithful translation.

In its edited form, this dish was not particularly inspiring. Despite the large variety of spices included in the recipe, it wasn't all that flavorful. Even though Brian had added salt to it, we both ended up adding more and couldn't imagine how flat it would have been with none at all. Perhaps if he'd been able to include the missing chili and curry leaves, or if he'd sprung for the half-cup of olive oil instead of a quarter-cup of canola, that would have made all the difference. But I have a little trouble believing that. 

But though this curry wasn't remarkable, it wasn't bad either. The flavor didn't knock our socks off, but the dish was still reasonably enjoyable, and, with the addition of the tofu,  substantial enough to fill us both up. And even with the reduced volume of green beans, it made enough for two dinners and two lunches. It isn't necessarily worthy of a place in our recipe collection, but it served its purpose: turning the odds and ends into our fridge into a reasonably satisfying meal.