Recipe of the Month: Chick Pea Pancakes

I discovered this month's recipe while doing my daily walk-and-watch exercises (which I've started doing for at least a short spell after most meals to help keep my blood sugar down). I came upon a video titled "$25. One week. 21 VEGAN meals," which was exactly what you'd expect from the title: vegan YouTuber Merle O'Neal attempting to cook for a whole week on a $25 budget. Naturally, this piqued my interest, since it combines three things I love: plant-based food, saving money, and a good challenge. 

So I watched the video and made mental notes about which dishes looked the most appealing as potential future Recipes of the Month. I ruled out some, like the potato cheese, because they didn't contain enough veggies (no, potatoes are not a veggie, no matter what your school cafeteria says) and others, like the tomato confit, because they were too similar to something we already make (the roasted tomato pasta from The Clueless Vegetarian). Of the remaining dishes, the one I found most intriguing was something O'Neal called a "chick pea flour omelette," which she described as high-fiber, high-protein, and pretty simple to make. And I also knew we happened to have some chick pea flour in the pantry, so we wouldn't even have to take the extra step of grinding up the chick peas.

O'Neal had thoughtfully provided links to all the recipes below the video (except for a couple that she typed out in full), so I clicked the link for the "omelette," which took me to a recipe on The Hidden Veggies. And for a change, Brian followed this recipe exactly, with no tweaks. It calls for a quarter-cup of "vegetables of choice," so he threw in a bit of broccoli and red bell pepper. He also made a second batch in which he doubled the veggie additions to half a cup to give it a bit more body. 

First things first: Neither of these versions looked or tasted even remotely like an omelette. They were more similar to our homemade veggie cakes (originally based on the spinach pancake recipe from Snack Girl, but we now make them with all sorts of veggies). I would say the one made strictly according to the recipe, with just a quarter-cup of vegetables, was much less successful than the one with the extra veggie boost. It was sort of doughy and didn't seem to have cooked all the way through. The double-veggie version was firmer and crisped up much better. As for the flavor, not surprisingly, it tasted mostly of chick peas, which is a perfectly fine flavor, but a trifle bland. I think it could have used a bit more salt and nutritional yeast than the recipe called for, along with maybe some spice (garlic? Pepper? Cumin?) to punch it up a bit. 

All in all, I'd say this isn't a great recipe, but it has potential. Brian says if he were to try it again, he'd want to make it "as an adjunct to something" rather than a stand-alone dish. For instance, maybe the cakes could replace the rice as an accompaniment to a stir-fry, or maybe instead of forming the batter into pancakes, he could make balls to add protein to a pasta dish. It's worth experimenting with a bit more, but it's unlikely to become a staple meal in its current form.

Gardeners' Holidays 2026: Harvest Home

We’re at a turning point in the year. The Jewish calendar has just rolled over from 5786 to 5787 (which is why this entry won’t be posted until tonight, because I’m currently on my annual Internet fast for Yom Kippur). And tomorrow marks the fall equinox, otherwise known as Harvest Home, the official kickoff of the autumn harvest season.

And our garden is certainly rising to the occasion. For the past few weeks, we’ve been up to our elbows in raspberries, green beans, peppers, and especially tomatoes. According to my running total, we have now harvested 12 Vivacious tomatoes, 20 Goldies, 126 San Marzanos, 189 Premios, and a whopping 841 Sun Golds. The only disappointing producer has been the lone Pineapple plant, which has yielded only two big, juicy fruits. Brian and I have come regretfully to the conclusion that, tasty as the Pineapple tomatoes are, we’ll have to drop them from next year’s garden, because they’re just not able to earn their keep. We’ll consult the Fedco catalogue to see if there’s any other variety on offer that purports to be as flavorful as the Pineapple but more productive; if not, we’ll probably just stick with the varieties we have.

Fortunately, the tomato harvest has finally tapered off to just a few fruits per day, so we only need to eat a tomato-centered dish maybe once a week instead of every day. That leaves us free to concentrate on our green beans, which are still going at full blast. We’ve harvested most of the Provider beans at this point (about two and a half pounds’ worth), but the Climbing French beans are still cranking them out fast enough that we need to harvest them pretty much every day. Brian has been handling that job for the most part, so when I offered to help him with it yesterday, he wouldn’t let me get started until he’d acquainted me with “the rules”:

1. Take care not to step on the zucchini plants. These didn’t give us much during the summer, but there are still a few healthy fingerlings on them, and he wants to make sure they get big enough for grilling.
2. Take care not to impale yourself on the stakes on the pepper plants, which are so big and heavy that they’re starting to bend over and drag the stakes down with them. They haven’t been as massively productive as the tomatoes, but they’ve still given us a pretty good haul already: 4 peppers off the new Apple plant, 6 massive Aconcaguas, and 12 of our trusty Carmens.
3. Only harvest beans that are of good eating size. If they’re too small (skinny and less than a couple of inches long), they should stay on the vine to get bigger; if they’re too fat (meaning the beans inside the pod are big enough to form a distinct bulge), they’re not much good for eating and should stay on the vine until frost, at which point we can harvest them for seed.
   

Following this last rule was trickier than it sounds, because the vines are so big and sprawling that it’s sometimes hard to spot the beans. You could go over one plant thoroughly, thinking you’d picked it clean, and then come back in five minutes and find another whole handful of beans that had escaped your notice the first time. It took us several passes to glean about 4 ounces of beans in that one picking, and there were another 4 ounces out there on the vine when Brian went out again today, bringing our total for the year up to about 6.6 pounds. And that’s just from our first planting of French beans. There’s a whole second crop that I put in at the end of July in place of the snap peas, which are only just now starting to flower. If those plants are anywhere near as productive as their older siblings, they should keep us in beans until Thanksgiving.

The final crop that’s been keeping us on our toes is the raspberries. We’re about midway through our second harvest of these, and we’re bringing in close to a cup and a half of berries every day. I’ve been eating berries every day for lunch, and last weekend I brought a big plastic tub of them to a CCL event (sending postcards to CCL members in New Jersey encouraging them to vote). About three minutes after leaving I realized I’d left the container behind with over a cup of berries still in it, and I didn’t even bother going back for them because I knew there would be more than enough ripe berries on the canes for the next day’s lunch. (There were.) 

We’re celebrating Harvest Home tonight with of our new vegan version of Pasta a la Caprese, using our own home-grown tomatoes, peppers, and the tail end of the basil crop. (The plants are still out there, but they’re starting to look a little yellow and brittle, and we probably need to harvest what’s left soon and process it into paste for the freezer.) Fortunately, I’m not fasting in the conventional way, so we’ll be able to eat well before sundown and head off to board game night at Pino’s. That’s the nice thing about Gardeners’ Holidays as opposed to traditional ones: You can celebrate them in any way you like, at whatever time is most convenient. And speaking for myself, I’d much rather welcome in the autumn with a meal of home-grown produce than with a day of fasting and prayer.

More mini updates

Once again, I've got nothing big to share this week, so instead I'm bringing you an assortment of little mini updates from our ecofrugal world. It's along the same line as my quick fixes posts, but these run the gamut from successful projects to unsuccessful ones to ideas that are still at the planning stage.

Update #1: Darn, still not so tough

Remember a year ago, when I was disappointed to discover a hole in one of Brian's Darn Tough socks? And how I decided that it wasn't worth using the alleged lifetime guarantee when I could just darn the hole and be done with it? Well, I now have confirmation that this incident was more than just a fluke. Last time I hung them on the line, I discovered that a second pair of Darn Tough socks had also developed a hole, this time toward the front. Once again, I was able to darn it without difficulty, but it confirmed my decision not to bother buying this brand again, warranty or no warranty.

Update #2: A DIY lipstick case

I don't normally wear a lot of makeup. Most days, it's just a swipe of white nail pencil (or my new favorite substitute, grease pencil) under each fingernail and a spot of concealer as needed to cover any blemishes. I keep both of these in a cosmetic case in my purse, along with such other everyday carry necessities as hand sanitizer, lotion, Band-Aids, and a mini sewing kit. Unfortunately, the cap on the concealer tube isn't very secure. Occasionally, it comes off as it rattles around in there and I end up with concealer smeared all over my other necessaries. And eventually, it ends up getting cracked and won't go back on the tube at all unless I wrap it with clear tape.

To fix this problem, I decided to invest in a little lipstick case. These are easy to find for $10 or less on Amazon, but it's much harder to get one at a reasonable price secondhand. And when I searched for tutorials on how to make one from scratch, they all seemed to require skills I didn't have, like crochet or metalworking. So I decided to make up my own design: a simple envelope made of felt. I just wrapped the felt around the tube to gauge the size, leaving a little overlap to make a closure flap. Then I cut it to size, sewed the ends shut, and added snaps to hole the top flap down. It's not very elegant or very sturdy, but it should be sufficient to protect the tube or, at the very least, keep its lid on.

Update #3: An unsuccessful wallet repair

Remember the new wallet I was so pleased to find for $5 at the thrift store last July? Well, within about a month, the metal discs that support the clasp on the front flap (one on the inside, one on the outside) fell off. Now, technically, the wallet is still usable without it: the clasp on the flap can still be closed even if there's nothing but fabric behind it. But it looked kind of odd, and I feared the fabric would wear out pretty quickly.

In theory, it should have been easy to reattach the metal pieces with a couple of small screws. Unfortunately, they'd have to be very small screws, smaller than anything we have in the shop, and searches at both Home Depot and Michael's turned up nothing of the appropriate size. So I hunted around for something else I could use to secure the discs in place, and I hit on the idea of using some toothpicks. I could fit one end pretty securely into the outer metal piece, then thread it through the holes in the cloth flap and the inner metal disc, and hold it all down with hot glue.

Well, that was the theory, anyway. Unfortunately, it didn't work very well in practice. The glue leaked out around the edges of the metal, and the metal tip of the glue gun heated the discs up so much that I burned my hand while trying to press them into place. Also, I couldn't manage to clip off the ends of the toothpicks neatly, so there was still a small, jagged end poking through. And after all that, the glue only held up for a week or two before the discs started coming loose again.

So, for now, I'm just keeping the metal pieces with the wallet, with only the clasp to hold them into place. I'm hoping that someone at the next Repair Cafe, which is coming up in November, will have the right size screws to fix it properly, or at least a better way to do it improperly.

Update #4: Finally, the right ground cover?

Ever since we bought this house, I've been trying to find a suitable ground cover to replace our front lawn. I didn't want to use anything invasive, like English ivy or Japanese pachysandra, but so far, all the more sedate plants I've tried—from Dutch white clover to creeping thyme to the native barren strawberry—have been unable to compete with the crabgrass. And every time I tried searching lists of native ground covers, I found the same old recommendations I'd already considered and deemed unsuitable. None of them could stand up to all the conditions in our yard: clay soil, afternoon sun, and occasional foot traffic.

Until last month, that is, when I stumbled across a native plant directory called Planoot. I searched for plants native to our area that were perennial, low-growing, and clay-friendly, and I came across an unfamiliar plant that goes by two different colorful names: frog fruit or turkey tangle. It's suitable for clay, likes full or partial sun, and grows to just 6 inches in height, and according to the directory, it "spreads vigorously as a low, trailing groundcover." Native Backyards was even more enthusiastic, calling it "my favorite native ground cover" thanks to its fast growth, low maintenance, and appeal for humans and native pollinators alike.

After a quick consultation with Brian, I searched out and ordered five frog fruit plants from a seller on Etsy. They were supposed to arrive last weekend, but the package appears to be held up in Texas. Once it arrives, we'll put the plants in the ground and see how well they live up to the hype.

Update #5: Middle-hanging fruit, maybe

This month, New Jersey became the ninth state to officially legalize balcony solar. Unlike large-scale solar setups that can power a whole house, these are miniature arrays that plug into a wall outlet and provide a smidgen of energy for internal use. They're easy to install, and crucially, they don't require an interconnection agreement with your electric utility, since little or none of the energy they produce will ever make its way onto the grid.

During a webinar I attended about this new law, I learned about a nonprofit called Bright Saver that's supposedly selling these mini solar arrays at cost in states where they're legal. If you sign up for a $29 yearly membership, you can either get a kit with a single 180-watt panel, an inverter, and a power cord for just $285 or pay $414 for a larger two-panel version. (You can also pay $499 for the smaller kit without signing up for a membership, but it's not clear why anyone would, since you can cancel when the year is up.) 

This was a better deal than I could find anywhere else, and it seemed like a great way to dip our toes into solar panel usage without a big commitment of time or money. It wouldn't reduce our home's carbon footprint, since we already use community solar for all our electricity, but it could still save us a little something on our energy bills each month. According to my back-of-the-envelope calculations, which I needn't go into here, it looked like it could pay for itself in just a few years, much faster than a full rooftop array (which we can't get right now, anyway, because our electric usage is too small). It seemed like a perfect example of the kind of middle-hanging fruit I've been looking for to make our life more ecofrugal in modest but meaningful ways.

More intriguingly still, Bright Saver says balcony solar is just the first clean-energy project it plans to tackle. There are plans in the works to help members save on home battery systems, insurance, and crucially for us, heat pumps. By joining now, we might eventually be able to get one for much less than the $24,000 after rebates that local installers have been quoting us.

This got me excited enough to plunk down $29 on a membership, but as I was preparing to place my order for the mini solar array, I hesitated. A small, suspicious voice in the back of my head whispered, "How do I know this is for real? If it sounds too good to be true, doesn't that usually mean it is?"

Further research did nothing to ease my mind. I could not find one single review from someone who actually owned Bright Saver's solar panels and could confirm they worked well. I found positive reviews, but they were either from "professional" sources who were simply repeating the info from Bright Saver's website or from folks on Reddit who had pre-ordered them and were expecting to receive them in August, only to have the shipment delayed until September and now October. I found myself wondering if the company might just take my money, promise shipment in a month (and then another month, and then another), and eventually disappear. Or maybe they would send me something that looked to the untrained eye like a solar panel, but when plugged in it would do nothing. I have no actual evidence that Bright Saver is anything but a legitimate company—but I also have no proof that it is one.

So, for now, my policy is to watch and wait. If and when Bright Saver says they are actually ready to start shipping out the solar panels, then I'll place an order. If it arrives and we plug it in and confirm it's working as claimed, great. If it doesn't, then we'll cancel the credit card charge before the bill comes due. And if the panels never become available on the site at all, at least I'm only out $29 instead of $443.

Piecemeal project

When we bought this house back in 2007, one of our first projects was to refinish the kitchen cabinets. They were all natural wood with a beautiful grain, but it was somewhat hard to see under the heavy varnish. So we took off all the doors, laid them out in the (at the time) unfinished basement, and stripped them with a product called "Safest Stripper," which took about 24 hours to work but was safer and less smelly than anything else we could find. Then we gave them a coat of wood conditioner to raise the grain, followed by a couple of coats of a nontoxic water-based finish.

In hindsight, this eco-friendly product may not have been the best choice. Over the 19 years since, the finish has gradually worn away, particularly in the areas along the edges and around the handles that get touched most often. As a result, our lovely wood cabinets now look worse than they did before we first refinished them. 

This month, Brian and I agreed that it was about time we refinished them. However, we no longer have a large unfinished basement in which we can work on all the doors at once. Instead, we're tackling this project in a piecemeal fashion: pulling off just one or two doors at a time and taking them down to the workshop to be stripped, treated with wood conditioner, and refinished (this time with "water-based, oil-modified polyurethane," which we're hoping will hold up better than the old water-based finish).

It took a little trial and error to figure out the best way to get the old finish off. At first, Brian thought he could just sand the doors down as he did with all our interior doors ten years ago. He tested this process on the smallest section of cabinetry, the front panel of the little tilt-out drawer under the sink, and that piece came out okay—a bit lighter than the other doors, but we figured they'd all end up the same once they'd been refinished. But this turned out to be a slight miscalculation. When he tried the same process on two larger doors, he discovered that it took more sanding to get the finish off in the damaged areas around the edges than in the middle. As a result, the wood in those spots looked lighter than the rest, and the grain was less visible. So for the remaining doors, he switched back to chemical stripping. Fortunately, the product we have now, called Lift Off, while still nontoxic, works much faster than Safest Stripper. It only takes about five minutes to bubble off the old finish, so he can completely turn around one pair of doors—removed, stripped, cleaned, refinished, and reinstalled—in just a day or two.

While we had the doors off, Brian thought we should also have a go at cleaning the handles, which had never been really thoroughly scrubbed since we first installed them in 2014. It turns out that nifty basket-weave design that looked so cute when they were new is also really good at trapping particles of dirt and grease from the air. Soaking the handles overnight in a mild solution of dish soap brought all this hidden goo to the surface in a thick, sticky layer. A quick scrub with an old toothbrush removed most of it, but once the handles dried, little mottled patches appeared where some of the schmutz was left behind. (We know it's dirt and not the finish being scrubbed away, because it comes off when scraped with a fingernail.) So it will most likely take multiple rounds of scrubbing to get these fully clean.

This project is kind of a microcosm of all the home renovations we've done in the years since we bought this place. Our approach has always been to take as long as we need to do a good job on a low budget, rather than a quick-and-dirty rush job or a high-priced, high-end whirlwind makeover. We spent literally years after we moved in redoing our big basement room piece by piece, close to a year on the downstairs bath, half a year on the guest room, three months on the office closet doors, and over a year on the laundry room. So redoing these cabinet doors bit by bit, tackling one or two at a time and spending maybe an hour on them each day, is much more our style than setting aside one long weekend and trying to blast through the whole job at once.

Introducing the Green Machine

Since he retired last February, Brian has been spending a lot of time on his bike. Back when he was working, his main form of exercise was riding to work; even after the COVID lockdowns, when he was only required to be in the office one day a week, he'd still ride to the office in the morning (weather permitting), water his plants, and come home for lunch. When he retired, he worried at first about how he'd replace that daily exercise. He could still go out on his bike and just ride around, of course, but he had trouble motivating himself to mount up without a destination in mind. But he quickly figured out that there were lots of other places he could go in the area, either to run small errands or just to explore. Now, on clear days, his usual routine is to suit up after breakfast and head out to do a little grocery shopping, pick up or drop off library books, or maybe just test a new route before lunchtime.

After doing this for a while, he asked me if I'd be interested in having a bike of my own so I could join him once in a while. I was open to this idea, but also a little hesitant, since I hadn't ridden in decades. So he proposed taking his spare bicycle (the one he still had left after last year's basement cleanup) down to the park, along with the the cheap helmet we'd picked up for me at some point, and testing it out. Then we'd know, first of all, how well I could still handle a bike after all these years, and second, whether this spare one fit me well enough to be my personal ride.

This experiment had mixed results. The first thing we figured out was that Brian's spare bike was definitely too big for me. Although he's a foot taller than I am, the difference is entirely above the waist, so we'd been assuming that if it fit him it would also fit me. But we'd forgotten that, while my legs are as long as his, my feet are not. When the seat was at a comfortable height for him, I couldn't reach the ground even on my tippytoes. Just to get me onto the bike, he had to remove the rear reflector so he could lower the seat down to the very bottom of its stem. Once I managed to get saddled up, I found that I still remembered how to balance, pedal, and steer, but stopping, not so much. The brakes on Brian's spare bike were a lot more powerful than what I remembered, and a fairly gentle squeeze brought it thumping to a halt and sent me toppling over sideways onto the pavement. Fortunately, I wasn't scraped up too badly, but it was rather unnerving. So was the gearshift, which was a bit fiddly and liable to knock the chain loose on certain settings. Overall, it was clear that if I was going to get back into cycling, it shouldn't be on that bike.

So, on our way home, we decided to keep our eyes open for a cheap or, better yet, free bike that would be more suitable for me. It needed to be sized for a small adult (or a pretty large kid) and, ideally, have a simple click-style gearshift that would be easy to manipulate. Well, apparently my old bargain-hunting mojo was up and running, because the very next morning, I saw this listing on Freecycle: 

OFFER: Green bike (Highland Park)

Date: Fri, 21 Aug 2026 13:09:58 +0000
From: rkfriedman

Green bike that was painted (used to be another color). My son has outgrown. Tired need air and may require other repairs but seems largely intact.

Reply online |  Back to the top 

I emailed immediately and got a response saying it was out at the curb, free for the taking to anyone who wanted it. Not wanting to miss out, Brian and I drove straight there, found the bike, checked to make sure it was an appropriate size for me, loaded it in the car, and got it home, all within the space of about 20 minutes. We felt a bit silly about taking the car to travel less than a mile, especially since we were already planning to walk to the library, just a block away, later that morning to join a work party removing invasive plants. But since the bike wasn't in good shape, there was no other practical way to get it home. As we stowed it in the back, I dubbed it the Green Machine, since it's both green in color and eco-friendly.

In the week since, Brian put in a bit of work on the Green Machine to get it back into roadworthy condition. (While he was doing that, my bargain mojo was apparently still activated just in case the new bike didn't work out, because I spotted no fewer than three additional listings for free bicycles on our local Freecycle and Trash Nothing lists. But it proved unnecessary.) He pumped up the tires, lubed up the chain, adjusted the gears and the brakes, added reflectors to the wheels, and replaced the green seat with a cushier one that would be easier on my out-of-practice backside. The bike is now fully road-ready; the only question is whether I am. 

To answer that, we'll have to head down to the park again and give me another road test, this time on my new, optimally sized bike, and see how well I handle it. If I get the hang of it pretty quickly, I can work my way up to taking it out around the neighborhood and maybe, eventually, to venturing out with Brian into less familiar territory. I don't think I'll feel comfortable riding on major roads with heavy traffic anytime soon, but fortunately, Brian already has a pretty good mental map of bike routes in our area that circumvent these streets as much as possible.

Of course, this also means that we're once again back to stashing three bikes in the basement instead of two. But since the Green Machine is small, it can nestle on the floor below Brian's main bike on its ceiling-mounted rack. That means the path isn't significantly more obstructed than it was already, and I have easy access to my new used bike when I need it.

Recipe of the Month: Spicy Noodle Stir-Fry

In my last Recipe of the Month post, I noted that I'd been building up a stash of vegetarian recipes from the New York Times Cooking section, which were just waiting for the necessary produce to be in season. Last week, we got a chance to try one of them out. Our green beans have finally recovered enough from last June's deer damage to provide the 12 ounces required for Brian to whip up Nisha Vora's Spicy Noodle Stir-Fry with Salt and Pepper Tofu.

As usual, he had to make a few minor modifications to the recipe—some approved by the author, some not. She said right in the ingredients list that it was fine to replace tamari with soy sauce, arrowroot with cornstarch, and black sesame seeds with white, and a note below the recipe suggested substituting dry sherry for Shaoxing wine. The canola oil he used to fry the tofu more or less fits her description of a "neutral high-heat cooking oil," and it's a lot cheaper than the avocado oil she recommended. His homemade five-spice powder was probably a reasonably close approximation for a bottled blend, and since this ingredient was optional anyway, it presumably wasn't crucial to get the proportions exactly right. And while soba noodles weren't one of the types she specifically suggested in the ingredient list, they do qualify as "dried noodles" (and her three choices—ramen, udon, and "egg-free wheat noodles"—were all different enough from each other to suggest that it didn't matter that much).

However, in other cases he had to take more liberties. The tofu we've been buying at H-Mart doesn't come in an extra-firm variety, so he substituted firm tofu, but took the optional step of freezing and then thawing it to improve the texture. He also used table salt in place of kosher salt in the salt and pepper tofu, while dialing down the white pepper from 1/2 teaspoon to 1/4 teaspoon to accommodate my sensitive palate. For the same reason, he cut the ginger by an even bigger margin, using just a half-inch chunk instead of 2 inches, and cut the cilantro out altogether. But his most dramatic change was attempting to whip up a homemade substitute for "chili-garlic sauce or sambal oelek," neither of which we had available. He replaced this ingredient with two crushed garlic cloves and one dried red chili, leaving out the vinegar, salt, and sugar these sauces usually contain.

After all these changes, it's safe to say Brian's dish probably tasted quite different from the original version. For one thing, these "spicy" noodles were actually quite mild, even for me. The substitution of finer-ground table salt meant the tofu was probably saltier, while the makeshift chili garlic sauce made the whole dish less acidic. But none of these changes stood out that much, because the flavors that really caught our attention came from the five-spice powder. 

This isn't an ingredient we've used in anything else, and the blend of cinnamon, pepper, fennel, anise, and cloves gave the noodles a unique, striking flavor. The only word I could come up with to describe it was "musty," but it wasn't necessarily unpleasant, just unusual. I couldn't quite decide if I liked it or not and kept trying to figure it out with another bite, and then another, until I'd polished off my bowlful and gone back for a bit more (so the answer was probably yes). Brian was less ambivalent; he considered it a definite success and would happily make it again. I told him next time he could be a little more ambitious with the spice, since I found the pepper level more than manageable and the ginger barely detectable. And if we can get our hands on some real chili-garlic paste, that would probably improve the dish too.

But even if we don't repeat this recipe, Brian feels like he's learned a few useful things from it. He now knows how freezing and thawing affects tofu, making it firmer and extra porous, so it absorbs flavors better. He's also now familiar with Chinese five-spice powder, and it's safe to say he's a fan. So if not this exact dish, other recipes containing it will probably be in our future.

So *that's* why I hang my laundry

This week, I responded to a post in the r/Frugal forum on Reddit asking, "What's your lowest payoff frugal tip?" That "lowest" is not a typo; the questioner was interested not in learning tricks to save a bundle of money, but in hearing about frugal habits that are "more about principle than the actual savings." Comments included things like reusing plastic bags, cutting dryer sheets in half, and saving packaging items like twist ties and rubber bands—a habit one commenter said has saved them "tens of cents."

I chimed in to talk about how I always hang my laundry, weather permitting, even though the savings are minimal. Each load I hang instead of running it through the dryer saves about a quarter-therm of gas, which is currently worth about 40 cents—more than the 24 cents it cost when I first wrote about it in 2012, but still far from impressive. Since it takes at least 15 minutes to hang the laundry in the morning and take it down in the evening, that works out to $1.60 an hour. That's barely 10 percent of New Jersey's current minimum wage of $15.92 an hour, making line-drying an even worse financial deal than it was in 2012. And it reduces my carbon footprint by a mere three pounds.

In my 2012 post, I concluded that the real reason I hang laundry is because it makes me feel good, even if the practical benefits are small. But when I commented about it on Reddit, another Redditor replied to point out that there is another practical benefit as well: "you’re extending the life of your clothes by hang drying them instead of blasting them in the dryer." Now, in theory, I knew this already, but I'd never been sure just how significant a perk it really was. After all, how could I tell how much longer my clothes were lasting as a result of being hang-dried? Short of buying two identical garments and line-drying one while tumble-drying the other, how would I even test it?

But just one day after seeing that Reddit post, I hit on what economists call a natural experiment. I was darning up some holes in my blue knit shorts, the pair I'd bought at Sears back in 2015 when there still was a Sears, and it occurred to me that at the time I bought them, I hadn't expected them to last very long. In college, I'd owned a few pairs of sport knit pants from the same company, and I'd quit buying them because they always developed holes within a matter of months. But now, here were these shorts just getting their first little holes after 11 years. So either Lands' End had started using much sturdier fabric some time between 1995 and 2015—not a very likely scenario—or line-drying had made the difference. 

However, it isn't quite fair to say these shorts lasted 11 years when their predecessors lasted less than 1. Being shorts, they were only worn during the summertime, or about 3 months out of every 12. Still, that means they remained intact over 33 months of use, while the knit pants I owned in college never made it more than 6 months. In other words, line-drying the shorts had prolonged their lifespan more than fivefold.

I wouldn't go so far as to extrapolate from this that all my clothes are lasting five times as long thanks to line-drying. These shorts are a knitted cotton fabric, like a T-shirt, and some of the other comments in the Reddit thread suggest these are particularly vulnerable to dryer damage. However, probably about half the garments in our typical laundry load are knitted items, including T-shirts, socks, and undies. If all these garments are lasting five times as long, we're saving 80 percent of what we'd otherwise spend on them. That's roughly a 40 percent savings on clothing as a whole, even if the other half of our clothes gains no benefit at all from line-drying.

How much is this in dollar terms? Well, according to my budget spreadsheet (yes, of course I have a budget spreadsheet), Brian and I spend an average of $389 per year on clothing and shoes. Let's assume shoes, which don't go in the laundry, account for $89 of that, leaving us a nice round $300 a year for clothing. If this figure has had 40 percent knocked off it by line drying, that means our clothing budget without line-drying would be $500, or $200 higher. We do a little over one load of laundry per week—say 60 loads per year—and we line-dry about three-quarters of them, or 45 loads. So that means each load I hang on the line is saving us not just a measly 40 cents on fuel, but also about $4.44 on clothing costs. Add it all up, and that's a savings of $4.84 per load for roughly 15 minutes of work, or $19.36 per hour—well above our state minimum wage, and more than 2.5 times the paltry federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour.

Mind you, knowing all this isn't likely to change my behavior in any meaningful way. I'll still line-dry my clothes in nice weather and resort to the dryer only if it's freezing cold or rains for days on end. But now, each time I do it, I'll have the satisfaction of knowing that it actually is saving us money. Spending 15 minutes out in the sun and fresh air will be just the cherry on top.