Recipe of the Month: Pineapple Soy Curls and Peppers

For November's Recipe of the Month, I'd planned to select a dish from the new vegan cookbook we picked up at the library book sale last month. But before I got around to picking one, Brian surprised me with a new dish that he sort of made up. It was loosely based on the Teriyaki Soy Curls with Pineapple and Bell Pepper from the Healthier Steps blog, but he drastically altered the proportions. Instead of using a full 8-ounce bag of Soy Curls to one bell pepper and a cup of pineapple chunks, he used only 3 ounces of dry Soy Curls and increased the peppers to 8 ounces' worth. He then reduced the amount of most of the seasonings by one-third to one-half (leaving only the green onion and garlic unchanged) and cut the sugar way down, from 6 tablespoons to one. He also replaced the coconut sugar and canned pineapple with brown sugar and frozen pineapple chunks, since that's what we happened to have available.

The resulting mixture was pretty good. The ratio of Soy Curls to peppers to pineapple was pretty even, which seemed like a better balance to me than the original protein-heavy version in which the bell pepper was basically a condiment. The pineapple juice made it both tangy and sweet (but not too sweet, as it almost certainly would have been with the full amount of sugar), and the soy sauce added a salty component. However, it was a bit on the mild side. In deference to my delicate taste buds, Brian deliberately went easy on the spice, leaving out the optional cayenne powder and keeping the ginger root down to 1 teaspoon, but the result was a bit tame even for me. In fact, I went so far as to grab our new bottle of sriracha and add just a few drops to my bowl, and I found that slight extra kick was a big improvement. If Brian makes the dish again, he'll try upping the ginger to 2 teaspoons and adding a teaspoon or two of sriracha to the sauce.

All in all, this was a pretty good recipe, particularly if you happen to have a whole lot of peppers that need to be used promptly. The only other ingredient it calls for that we don't tend to keep on hand is the pineapple, but picking up a container of frozen pineapple chunks specifically for this dish wouldn't break the bank. Or we could try using canned pineapple like the original recipe, adding it at the end instead of cooking it into the sauce. 

I think Brian's final version of the recipe is different enough from the original that I can reasonably reproduce it here, so here you go:

Pineapple Soy Curls with Peppers 

Soak 3 oz. Butler Soy Curls in warm water for about 10 minutes until soft. Squeeze out as much water as possible. Coat with 1 tsp. garlic powder, ½ tsp. onion powder, ½ tsp. paprika, and ½ tsp. salt. Saute on high heat in canola oil (stirring constantly) until browned. Squeeze out excess oil and set aside.

Roughly chop 8 oz. peppers (red and/or green) on medium-high heat until they soften and begin to brown. Add 8 oz. fresh or frozen pineapple chunks and continue to saute until they also begins to brown. Set aside.

Finely dice 2 cloves garlic and 2 tsp. fresh ginger. Saute in ½ Tbsp. unrefined coconut oil on low heat for 2-3 minutes. Add 1 Tbsp. cornstarch, 1 Tbsp. brown sugar, 1 ½ Tbsp. soy sauce, 1 Tbsp. water, and ¾ cup (6 oz) pineapple juice and stir until sauce thickens. Add peppers, pineapple, and Soy Curls and combine. Remove from heat and add 1 chopped scallion and 1-2 tsp sriracha. 

Serve with rice.

Gardeners' Holidays 2026: Late Harvest

Production in our garden hasn't entirely wrapped up, but it's definitely slowing down. We picked several of our plants clean about a week ago after getting a phone alert about impending frost. Naturally, this arrived just as we were settling down for the evening in front of the telly, so we hastily threw on our jackets, grabbed a flashlight, and ran out to harvest everything that we thought was at risk. Our top priority was the tender-skinned peppers, so we grabbed all the ones we could see, red and green alike. This brought our total pepper harvest for the year to a very respectable 85: 59 Carmens, 14 Aconcaguas, and 12 small but tasty Apples.

We had already picked all the tomatoes that had shown any hint of blushing, but there were still lots of green ones left on the vines—far too many to gather in a hasty session by torchlight. Covering the plants was also impractical, as the trellises are far too tall. So we settled for picking the largest few green fruits on the vines, covering our one stand-alone plant (a Vivacious tomato given to us by our friend Louise, which we planted out in the old asparagus bed), and hoping the smaller fruits would survive the frost. Fortunately, this plan seems to have worked, as nearly all the tomatoes left on the vines made it through unscathed. We might even have been able to get away with leaving the few big ones that we picked, but we thought it was better to take our chances with box-ripening than with frost. And even if the green ones don't ripen up, our tomato harvest to date is certainly nothing to complain about: over 1,000 of the little Sun Golds, and more than 450 of the larger varieties. (I observed to my dad, who is a fan of both gardening and classical music, that the tomato section of my garden log was starting to look like Leporello's notebook.) It's by far the biggest haul of tomatoes we've ever had, and quite an impressive showing for only nine plants.

Then, a little later in the week, Brian decided to go ahead and pick all our butternut squash. He'd observed that the plants had already died back, and while the squash wouldn't come to any harm hanging out there on the withered vines, they'd be more accessible if we brought them indoors. We'd already picked and used two of them, so the ones you see here bring our total to nine fruits totaling about 20 pounds. That's a pretty average harvest for us—better than last year's six squash, but nowhere near as good as the 42 pounds we got in 2024. Next year we may try adding a second variety to the mix and seeing if that boosts our total yield.

There are a few crops left in the garden that are still producing. Brian's continuing to gather in the green tomatoes as they blush, and we're still getting beans off our Climbing French vines. (They've also been having an exceptionally good year, producing about 8.5 pounds so far—about four times as much as they've ever given us before, and more than three times as much as our normally prolific Provider beans. I would say we got a particularly good batch of seeds, but they were just saved from last year's crop, so I guess the credit belongs to the hot summer weather.) And, amazingly for early November, we're still getting a trickle of raspberries from our canes, which have already yielded over 42 cups—not their absolute best harvest ever, but far better than average.

Still, with the clocks now turned back for winter and the air growing steadily nippier, it's clear the end is in sight. By the end of the month, most likely, the remaining produce will be all gathered in. After that, we'll have to subsist on supermarket veggies until spring, eked out by the few containers of home-grown bounty in our freezer (a few pints of tomato puree and a smaller one of basil). We could try growing another tray of microgreens just to spice things up, but most of our gardening efforts will be focused on planning ahead for next year.

Recipe of the Month: Sweet-and-Spicy Roasted Tofu and Squash

I was expecting to choose October's Recipe of the Month from the new vegan cookbook we acquired at the annual town-wide yard sale. But then, while browsing the New York Times Cooking section, I came upon an intriguing-looking recipe called "Sweet-and-Spicy Roasted Tofu and Squash." (Sorry, my stripped-down NYT subscription doesn't allow me to share the recipe as a gift link.) I showed it to Brian, and he agreed to give it a try.

For once, we didn't make any significant changes to the recipe as written. Brian's inclination was to substitute the firm tofu we had on hand for the extra-firm the recipe called for and to leave out the sriracha, since I normally don't like my food too hot. But I argued that these changes would fundamentally alter the character of the dish, and we should at least try it as written before making any major changes to it. Unfortunately, this decision made the ingredient list considerably more expensive. Instead of using a butternut squash, which we could have just gone out to the garden and picked off the vine, we had to pay $2.89 for an acorn squash. We also dropped $2.99 at Trader Joe's on a package of "super firm" tofu and $3.99 on a bottle of sriracha (although this particular purchase was probably long overdue, as we've already left sriracha out of quite a few recipes because we didn't have any). And the one change we did make to the recipe—replacing honey, which we already had, with agave nectar, which we didn't, to make the dish vegan—set us back an additional $4.75. So, not even counting the ingredients we already had in our pantry, acquiring everything we needed to prepare this dish cost us $14.62, or about three days' worth of our normal grocery budget.

Nor did our troubles end once we got the groceries home. I went into the kitchen while Brian was preparing the dish to find him struggling to get a paring knife through the tough rind of the acorn squash. The recipe didn't actually say the squash had to be peeled—it just said "cut squash into 1/2-inch thick half-moons"—but he assumed it wouldn't be edible otherwise. But when we checked the picture on the web, we saw that the squash clearly had its rind still on, and the caption at the top mentioned "a slight chew from the squash peel" as one of the dish's interesting features. Fortunately, the rest of the instructions were pretty clear, though Brian was initially a bit puzzled as to why the tofu and the squash had to be cut into such large chunks. But it became clear when he got to the step that said "Flip and roast until uniformly golden," since you can't reasonably flip a whole bunch of little pieces.

The finished dish was rather pretty to look at: big, golden-brown slices of tofu and squash, sprinkled with pale sesame seeds and green celery leaves, nestling on a bed of brown rice. (Brian also added some green beans on the side to boost the meal's veggie content.) And the taste was quite interesting too, although we both agreed that calling it "sweet-and-spicy" was a bit of an exaggeration. The squash had a natural sweetness to it, but the single tablespoon of agave didn't lend any noticeable sweetness to the sauce, and the heat from the mere half-teaspoon of sriracha was barely detectable, even to me. But it was still quite flavorful, with sweet, earthy, and salty notes all overlaid with the faintly nutty crunch of the sesame seeds. 

As for the texture, we found that Trader Joe's isn't kidding when they call their tofu "super firm." It was quite dense and chewy, and it didn't absorb the sauce terribly well. Also, what the recipe called "a slight chew from the squash peel" was a bit of an understatement. While the roasted peels were mostly edible, there were still tough bits that were entirely impossible to chew and had to be discarded. This was more annoying to Brian than it was to me, as he particularly dislikes having to fish inedible pieces out of his food or, worse, out of his mouth. He doesn't mind eating roast chicken off the bone, but if he's served a bowl of chicken cacciatore, he wants to be able to eat it with his fork and not have to remove anything with his fingers.

On the whole, we both rather liked the dish, and we'll probably make it again (especially now that we've already invested in the agave and the sriracha, so it won't cost nearly as much next time). However, Brian plans to tinker with the recipe a bit. For starters, he'll probably replace the acorn squash with delicata squash, which has a tender rind that should be easier to chew. He'll also use our usual firm tofu, or possibly one of the brands available at H-Mart that comes in an extra-firm variety, rather than the super-firm TJ's stuff. And he plans to try boosting both the agave and the sriracha content to bring it closer to the sweet-and-spicy flavor the recipe promised, but didn't quite deliver.

But even if we never make the dish again, we did learn two useful things from trying it. First, agave appears to be a reasonable substitute for honey, although you may need to use a bit more of it to achieve the same level of sweetness. And second, sriracha sauce is apparently mild enough for me to handle, and we both quite like it. I wouldn't go so far as to snack on pieces of matza topped with peanut butter and sriracha, as Brian has been doing ever since we opened the bottle, but I'll happily use it in any recipe that calls for hot sauce and possibly even some that don't.

Yard-sale haul 2026

This year's town-wide yard-sale weekend—normally one of my favorite occasions of the year—didn't get off to a great start. When we set out on Saturday morning, it was cold and grey out, and I was shivering even under four layers of clothing. The weather seemed to have deterred a lot of sellers, too. Many of the sale sites marked on the official map weren't actually there, and many others were just tables or piles at the curb labeled "free," where the hosts had evidently decided the few bucks they might earn from their stuff weren't worth spending the morning out in the chill.

So, after finding only a couple of small items, Brian and I decided to abandon the map and focus on the few parts of town that were sure things. We started at the library, which always hosts its fundraising book sale on yard-sale weekend. Despite the tempting prices, we kept our purchases moderate, knowing that we'd have to carry them with us for the rest of the morning. We came away with just seven books totaling $10—mostly fiction, plus a cookbook titled The Voluptuous Vegan that will probably be the source for October's Recipe of the Month.

That $10 worth of books, as it turned out, accounted for most of the day's spending. Although we visited several other hotbeds of sale activity—Felton Avenue, the parking lot behind the Reformed Church, and after lunch, a long swath of Lincoln Avenue on the north side—most of the items we actually picked up were from free piles. By the end of the day, we'd acquired a total of eight books, three board games, a small skillet, an assortment of cooking ingredients, a bicycle taillight, a set of flavored lip balms, and a small bagful of scallion bulbs for planting, and we'd only spent $15.50.

After Saturday's experience, I took extra care to bundle up before setting out on Sunday, but it proved unnecessary. Although the air wasn't much warmer, the sun was out, so I ended up shedding my coat and stuffing it into one of our bags within the first half hour. And the sun seemed to be shining on our excursion, too, as we found a lot more useful items for sale this time around. Over the course of the morning, we scored a couple of Pyrex storage containers, assorted office supplies, a string of battery-powered holiday lights, a couple of potential holiday gifts, and a Philips screwdriver to replace our old one that's stripped out. (This last one was something Brian had been explicitly looking for, and the sale where he happened to find it was at the home of a former coworker, so we had a nice chat with him as well.) Our most fortuitous find was a couple of sealed packages of our favorite hand soap from Trader Joe's, which, as we discovered on our last trip, has just been discontinued because the supplier has gone out of business. With luck, these four extra bars will be enough to get us through until the store finds a new supplier to work with. After returning home with three full bags and $13.50 less in my wallet, we decided we'd done well enough that we didn't need to go back out in the afternoon.

However, that wasn't quite the end of our sale adventures. Today, we returned to the library, which was disposing of the leftovers from the book sale at just $5 per bag—no matter how big or how full that bag happened to be. Since the prices were so good, and since we didn't have anyplace to go afterward but back home, we were much less selective this time around, stuffing our bag with a total of 14 books (mostly mysteries and science fiction). So, all told, we spent $34 over the course of the weekend—exactly twice as much as last year—and acquired a pretty good mix of entertaining and practical items. And we've made a nice start on this year's holiday shopping, too.

The best platform for selling art online

Every so often, people ask Brian what he's been up to since he retired back in February. He usually answers, truthfully, that he hasn't tackled any big new projects; instead, he's just doing more of the things he used to do outside of work. For example, he's spending more time in the garden, on his bike, and on the couch reading books. But he has also embarked, with my help, on one little project we haven't revealed until now: a shop to sell his artwork.

Folks who were around back when this blog first got started may recall that it was originally an offshoot of Brian's blog, Modern Troll, which he used mainly to share his drawings. After I started mine, he let his fall by the wayside and hasn't updated it since 2010. But I always had this vague idea that it would be cool at some point to make some of his art available to fans in a physical form, like posters or T-shirts. So, once he was officially retired and had some time to spare, I suggested setting up an online store for this purpose.

The first thing we did was go through his collection of artwork and select various pieces we thought might be appropriate for different uses. For instance, we thought this piece, which I've dubbed "Objects in Mirror are Closer Than They Appear," would work well on a T-shirt, as would his "Killer Tofu" sketch (which I envisioned with a snarky caption like, "Don't mess with Soy Boy"). Some of his bigger pieces, like "Mind" and this cartoon inspired by a trip to the Grounds for Sculpture, seemed suitable for posters. And a few of his little sketches, like this little guy, looked like they'd be nice for note cards.

Once we'd figured out what kinds of merch we wanted to sell, I started looking at websites that offered these types of products on a print-on-demand basis. That way, instead of having to order a whole batch of, say, 100 shirts and then try to find buyers for them (and a place to store them in the meantime), we could just list our choices online and wait until someone placed an order to print one up and ship it out. The two most familiar sites of this type are Redbubble and Zazzle, which have the advantage of a wide reach, making it easy for people to find the products they sell. The downside was that these sites charge both high prices for shoppers and high fees for sellers. For instance, the base price for a T-shirt on RedBubble—not counting the artist's cut—is $20.39. You can set your own markup on top of that, but with a basic account, RedBubble also keeps half of all your earnings as an account fee. So if Brian were to charge, say $24 for a T-shirt—which is more than he'd personally consider a reasonable price—he'd only get to keep $1.80 in profit for each shirt sold. Zazzle is a little more generous, keeping only 30 percent of the profits, and the base price for the cheapest "value" T-shirt is only $16.24. That means we could price them at a slightly more reasonable $20 and earn $2.63 per shirt—better, but still not great.

We also considered alternatives like Printify and Printful. These stores charge only a base price for the materials (for example, a unisex T-shirt from Printful costs $9.44) and you can decide how much profit you want to tack on top of that. The catch is that these sites provide only the printing; you have to set up your own online store to sell your products through another site. If we used a platform like Shopify for this, we'd have to pay a monthly fee of at least $29, which we'd almost certainly never sell enough product to cover. If we went with Etsy, we'd pay a one-time fee (of an unspecified amount) to set up the store, plus a multitude of other fees for product listings, sales, and payment processing. For a little store like Brian's, all these fees would probably more than eat up all our profits—and while we weren't expecting to make much money from selling Brian's designs, we weren't willing to set ourselves up to lose money.

Eventually, we settled on a platform that seemed like a happy medium: Fourthwall. It allows you to set up your online store right on the site, with no up-front fee and no listing fees for its basic plan. There's no fee for sales, either; all you pay to the site is a reasonable flat fee for its materials ($11.75 for a unisex tee, for instance, or $5.50 for a matte poster). You can set your own final price, so how much you earn on each sale is up to you. The site handles sales and customer support for you. It even has an AI assistant to help you create your designs (though, once I figured out what I was doing, I found it easier to go in and build the products myself).

So, without further ado, it is my pleasure to present Modern Troll Designs. So far, we've only created listings for a small handful of products (two T-shirts, a poster, and a notecard), but I thought we'd go ahead and unveil the store now so we could get feedback on these few products, and on the layout of the store itself, before adding more. Check it out and let me know what you think. And if you're a fan of Brian's art who would like to put in a request for a specific product featuring one of his pieces, like a sticker or a mug or something, let me know—we can probably make it happen.

How to feed a family for WAY less than $28 a day

Last summer, the New York Times Cooking section published an article called, "How to Feed a Family for $28 a Day." (Warning: the article may be paywalled. I tried to share it as a gift link, but apparently my subscription doesn't allow that for Cooking articles.) In it, recipe developer Kevin Pang chronicles how he challenged himself to feed his family of three (himself, his wife, and their "picky 10-year-old") for a whole week on a budget of just $200. He says that may sound like "a nice, big number," but it's actually less than $10 per person per day, which he claims is roughly equal to the $196.25-plus-tax limit set by the USDA's Thrifty Food Plan. (Actually, according to the site, that isn't quite right. For a 10-year-old, picky or otherwise, and a man and a woman between 20 and 50 years old, the Thrifty Food Plan budget is $187.90 per week. But it's possible the number has come down a little since he checked it in August.)

For Pang, this was a major challenge. The budget left "no room for impulse buys" and forced them to cut corners in several places, swapping out strawberry jam for cheaper grape jelly and a $4.35 tub of baba ghanoush for $3.77 hummus. They also had to forgo convenience items like "a microwavable frozen dinner here, a jar of marinara there." But they succeeded in feeding themselves three meals a day, using some new recipes that he links to in the article, such as carnitas, bacon cheeseburger meatballs, and sesame soy chicken. At the end of the piece, he proudly outlines the lessons they learned, such as "Assign a role to everything in your cart" (as opposed to "buying whatever looks good"), "Give leftovers a new life," and "Buy produce that lasts."

That's all sound enough, but it struck me as awfully elementary. Brian feeds our two-person family on a grocery budget of around $3,535 per year, which works out to only $4.84 per person per day—roughly half as much as Pang's. Even if you adjust for the two weeks or so per year we spend visiting, and eating with, friends and relatives, it's barely over $5 per person per day. I thought perhaps his higher budget reflected the high cost of living in NYC, but no; the Pang family lives in "the Chicago suburbs," where living costs generally and grocery prices specifically are nearly identical to what we pay in central NJ.

After reading the article, I thought maybe I should write my own, following the same structure as Pang's, to explain how we feed our family on roughly half as much as his budget. I could list all our grocery purchases and their cost, outline exactly what we ate every day for a week, and wrap it up with some general budget eating tips. But after thinking about it for a minute, I realized I'd already done this (except in even more detail) in my 2014 Reverse SNAP Challenge. Our eating habits have changed a bit since then, as we've shifted away from dairy products and started making more foods from scratch. But our principles remain roughly the same:

• Eat plants. Pang spent $43.60 of his $200 budget—about 22 percent—on meat. Six of the seven dinners the family ate were meat-based. Brian and I, by contrast, eat fish maybe once every week or so, poultry only a few times a year, and red meat basically never. As I outlined in my 2022 Ecofrugal Manifesto and observed again at the supermarket checkout this spring, skipping the meat and getting most of our protein from beans and grains cuts a big slice off our grocery budget.
• Cook from scratch. Convenience foods are an even bigger budget-buster. Pang recognized this, which is why he steered away from frozen meals and jarred pasta sauce. But it didn't occur to him to make his own hummus, which would have taken all of ten minutes and shaved an extra dollar off his budget (according to the Homemade Hummus Cost Calculator, which apparently is a thing that exists). And he certainly didn't go so far as to make bread, granola, or tortillas from scratch, all things that Brian does routinely.
• Shop around. I think Pang put himself at a disadvantage right from the start of his challenge by purchasing his entire week's worth of groceries in one go at "our favorite grocery store, Fresh Farms in Niles, Ill.," which doesn't sound like a particularly budget-friendly place. Our approach is to keep track of prices at different stores and make the rounds of them all over the course of a month, picking up whatever we need at whichever store has the best price.
• Use a discount grocery. Although we shop at multiple stores, the one we rely on most heavily is Lidl, a "limited assortment" grocery that sells primarily its own store brands. Before Lidl opened, we were regular patrons of Aldi, which works along the same lines. And we spring for a Costco membership because, while it doesn't have the best prices on all foodstuffs, just a few truly unbeatable bargains in the grocery aisle are enough to cover the membership cost three times over.

To anyone who reads this blog regularly, none of this comes as news. But it's always nice to get a little confirmation that what has worked for us all these years is still working, and that our bargain-hunting skills can beat the smart kids as handily in 2026 as they did back in 2012.

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.