Recipe of the Month: Buttered cabbage

After getting back from our Indiana trip late Thursday night, Brian and I knew we'd have to hurry to squeeze in a Recipe of the Month for December before it was time to ring in the new year. And with the thermometer stuck well below the freezing point, we weren't too eager to run out and buy any new produce for it.

Fortunately, I was prepared for this possibility. Before we left, I'd noted that we had a half head of cabbage left in the veggie drawer, so I'd hunted through our big green cookbook (How to Cook Everything Vegetarian by Mark Bittman) to find something we could make with it. The first recipe that jumped out at me in the index was "Buttered Cabbage," which could hardly have been simpler: boil some cabbage leaves until they're tender, then toss them with melted butter (browned, if you can manage it). Bittman's description said, "For a two-ingredient vegetable dish, this is pretty great," and it wouldn't require us to run out and buy anything. I figured if this dish turned out to be as good as Bittman claimed, it would be an incredibly useful addition to our veggie repertoire; since we tend to have both these ingredients in our fridge at all times, we could whip it up any time we happened to need a green vegetable to round out a meal, rather than just relying on frozen peas. And even if we didn't love it, it would still serve the useful purpose of finishing out our Recipe of the Month selections for 2017. Sold.

So on Friday night, we made this simple cabbage recipe as an accompaniment to some baked potatoes and roasted free-range chicken legs, spiced with Forward! seasoning from Penzey's (part of one of our Christmas presents). And it was...okay. I wouldn't call it great, or even "pretty great," but it was edible.  Cooked for just a few minutes, the cabbage was tender but not mushy, and the brown butter added a little fullness to the flavor, but it was still pretty bland.

As an experiment, we tried sprinkling the cabbage with a blend Brian mixed up of salt and a little more of the Forward! seasoning. As it turned out, this actually perked up the flavor quite a bit. Penzey's describes this blend as an "all-purpose seasoning," blended from pepper, onion, paprika, garlic, and an array of other spices, none of them overpowering; it's a bit like a mild chili powder without the oregano. With a dash of this seasoning layered over top of the browned butter, the cabbage was reasonably flavorful—but it's still not something we'd go out of our way to make. It might serve as an acceptable emergency veggie for those nights when there's not much else available, but I don't think it will become a staple.

And that wraps up our Recipes of the Month for 2017. Fortunately, I've got plenty of new ones to try out in 2018; on our regular annual trip to Half Price Books in Indianapolis, I picked up a copy (for just $7) of the Fix-It and Forget-It Vegetarian Cookbook, which promises "565 Delicious Slow-Cooker, Stove-Top, Oven, and Salad Recipes." The "Vegetables and Fruits" chapter alone contains 92 recipes, so we should have no trouble coming up with new dishes to try in the coming year.

IKEA hack: Cat-safe vase 3.0

One of the first things we had to do after we got our two rambunctious kitties in 2015 was figure out a way to protect our flowers from them. It didn't take us long to figure out that it wasn't enough for the vase to be stable enough to keep the cats from knocking it over; it also had to physically block off their access to the flowers, since anything they could reach would get pulled out and turned into a cat toy/snack. Even if we limited ourselves strictly to cat-safe flowers that wouldn't hurt the kitties if they chose to chew on them, it would kind of defeat the purpose of displaying flowers to make the kitchen look nice if they instead ended up scattered all over the floor.

Our first attempt at a cat-safe vase was a glass canning jar inverted over top of a smaller jar. This experiment showed us that a fully enclosed container wouldn't really work, because water condensed all over the inside and made it nearly impossible to see the flowers underneath. We needed something with a bit of ventilation to allow the flowers to breathe.

Our next attempt, our cat-safe vase 1.0, was a repurposed glass candle chimney from our local thrift shop. We just inverted it over top of a small glass of wildflowers, keeping them out of reach of curious paws while still allowing us to see them (sort of). This arrangement wasn't ideal, since it severely limited the size of the flower bouquet that would fit underneath, but it worked reasonably well for about a year.

Then, after what seemed like a fairly minor tap against a candlestick, the glass shade completely broke. We couldn't find another, so Brian came up with a DIY cat-safe vase using a plain glass vase and a wooden stand with holes that allowed air to circulate from below. This, once again, worked tolerably well, but it still wasn't ideal. For one thing, having the vase inverted over the top tended to cramp the flower arrangements inside, squashing any artistically draped leaves or blossoms against the side of the glass. It was tricky to load and unload it properly, getting the glass centered in exactly the right spot so the vase could fit over top without crushing the flowers. And although it theoretically allowed for some air movement, the inside of the vase still had a tendency to mist up—and after a bunch of flowers had been in there for a week or so, mold would start to form along their foliage. This required us to change the flowers quite a bit more often than we had to when we were using a simple, open vase.

Then, last week, we accompanied Brian's sister's family on a trip to the Indianapolis IKEA and spotted this nifty SINNESRO lantern. It's meant to keep a candle protected from the wind outdoors, but it occurred to me that it could just as easily protect a small vase of flowers from our inquisitive felines. And since it was designed to provide enough air to keep a candle flame burning, we figured it ought to do a reasonably good job of allowing air to circulate around our flowers. At any rate, for eight bucks, we thought it was worth a try. Even if it didn't work, we could still use the lantern for its intended purpose, either indoors or out on our patio.

As soon as we got home from Indiana, we set up the new the lantern on our kitchen table. Since there are no flowers blooming at this time of year, we just put a little sprig of evergreens in a cup and tucked it inside as a proof of concept.

Right away, it was clear that this lantern had a couple of advantages over the previous cat-safe vase. For one, it was much easier to load and unload, since you could tuck the glass of flowers right inside the glass enclosure instead of having to carefully lower the vase down over top of it. It was also a lot more polished-looking than our makeshift vase with its wooden stand. (Brian had sanded the piece down a little bit to smooth it out and covered over the screws with wood putty, but it was still pretty obvious that it had been cobbled together from plywood scraps.)

So far, the new lantern-vase shows no tendency to fog up inside, but in this extra-cold, dry weather, we can't necessarily read too much into that. We'll have to give it a few days to see whether the greenery inside stays clean and free of mildew, but for now, I'm liking this arrangement very much. And we still have our old cat-safe vase 2.0 available if we decide we want to display some flowers in another location.

So for anyone out there who is looking for a way to keep flowers and cats in the same house, I'd say this ultra-simple IKEA hack is the easiest way to make it work. If you don't happen to have an IKEA store in your neck of the woods, pretty much any candle lantern intended for outdoor use should do just as well, though you might have to pay a bit more for it. A quick online search just turned up several options priced around $12 at stores like Pier 1 and Quick Candles; you can almost surely find something to fit both your taste and your budget.

Gardeners' Holidays 2017: The Changing of the Garden

In accordance with our new holiday tradition, Brian and I brought the Fedco Seeds catalogue with us on our long drive out to Indiana to see his family, so we could go over what we'd like to buy for next year's garden.

It looks like we won't be actually replacing too many varieties this year. Although some crops didn't do very well, they're mostly varieties that we've grown just fine in the past, such as the Marketmore and Cross-Country cucumbers that produced so bountifully in 2016 we were scrambling to try out new cucumber recipes. This year, by contrast, most of the seeds we planted didn't germinate at all, so we had only a few skinny vines and not many cucumbers. We're assuming the problem is simply that the seeds are too old, so we're planning to get more of the same varieties and not try replacing them. The same goes for the basil, which gave us only a skimpy yield during the summer and none at all to preserve for the winter, and the Cascadia snap peas, which gave us a generous crop in 2016 but then mostly failed to come up this year.

Another crop we'll need to buy more of is the King of the Garden lima beans. We neglected to buy any this past year, so we decided to try planting some seeds we'd saved from last year's crop, and most of them didn't come up at all. So at this point, we don't see any reason to mess around with trying to save seeds in the future. Buying them is a lot easier, and the seeds are a lot more reliable—and as long as we're placing an order with Fedco anyway, adding another $1.70 for a packet of lima beans is a negligible expense.

So the only crops we're actually planning to change up are the peppers and tomatoes. Our new pepper varieties this year, Carmen and Gilboa, gave us mixed results. The Carmen, a mild frying pepper, gave us nine good-sized peppers from just one plant—easily outstripping our trusty Jimmy Nardello, which gave us about a dozen peppers from two plants. The Gilboa, by contrast, yielded only one pathetic little green bell pepper all season.

Based on those results, we concluded we should plant at least two of the Carmen peppers next year and ditch the Gilboa. In fact, since Gilboa was about the seventh bell pepper variety we've tried without any significant success, we decided that maybe we should just stop trying to grow bell peppers at all and concentrate on chilis and frying peppers, which tend to do much better. So we combed through the Fedco catalogue and settled on a promising-looking chili pepper called the Czech Black, which is just a trifle milder than a jalapeño. We're also planning to try again to grow the Klari Baby Cheese peppers, which gave us a good yield but somewhat unexciting-tasting fruits. They weren't great for cooking or eating raw, but Brian thought they might be good for pickled stuffed peppers. (This was what he was making during his canning experiment a couple of weeks ago, which I didn't disclose in my previous entry because they were going to be a Christmas present for his dad. He opened them today and we all tried them, and Brian is now keen to try making more.) So we're planning on two Carmens, one of the new Czech Blacks, and one Klari Baby Cheese. We'll keep one of the Jimmy Nardello variety if we can figure out where to squeeze in a fifth pepper plant; otherwise we'll drop it.

As for tomatoes, we are definitely keeping our new Pineapple variety, which was both incredibly tasty and incredibly productive. However, our new Mr. Fumarole paste tomato was a lot less impressive. Like pretty much every Roma-style tomato we've tried, its yields were unimpressive—about 10 tomatoes total, most of them quite small. The other new one, Black Prince, was somewhere in between: tasty and reasonably productive, but not extraordinary. Fortunately, our trusty Sun Golds gave us plentiful yields as usual.

Looking over our tomato selections, we thought what we really lacked was a reliable early tomato (aside from the little Sun Golds) and a reliable paste tomato. Flipping through the catalogue, we discovered a variety called Heinz that looked like it might meet both needs: "An early red plum type that often ripens all its 2 1/2-3 oz fruits before frost" and is fairly disease-resistant. So we're planning to get some of those, and just for fun, we're also trying a cherry tomato called Honeydrop that's supposed to be "much less prone to cracking in wet weather than Sun Gold." To hedge our bets, we'll plant one of each; even a single Sun Gold plant should give us plenty of fruit, in case the new one is a complete bust. If, on the other hand, it turns out to be as good as the Sun Gold or better, we might just switch over completely.

That was all we needed for seeds, but our shopping didn't end there. The new Fedco catalogue also includes a separate section for its sister brands, Organic Growers Supply and Moose Tubers, so we paged through that as well. We skipped over the grains and cover crops and went straight to the sections on "Plant Protection and Pest Control" and "Orchard and Garden Health," looking for things that could help protect our plum trees from the twin scourges of brown rot and felonious squirrels. I found one product called "Tree Tanglefoot," which is a sticky substance meant to stop climbing insects from reaching your tree buds and fruits—but I'd also read on the Briggs Garden site that it can deter squirrels from climbing trees, since they don't like the way it feels on their paws. It might not work, but at any rate, it can't hurt. We can also pick up a bottle of fungicide to fend off the brown rot. This article recommends either a copper fungicide or a sulfur powder, both of which are available.

We still have a few other patches elsewhere in the yard that could do with some filling in. I'd like to beef up the herb bed, which right now is much thicker toward one end; we planted several plants in between the big bushes that used to be there, which have since spread out and are crowding each other, while the space where the last of the big bushes used to be is almost completely bare. I keep trying to persuade Brian to move one large rosemary plant down to the other end to relieve the crowding and fill in the bare spot at one stroke, but he insists on leaving it where it is because it's thriving there and he isn't sure it would in a new spot. So I guess we'll need to find some other useful herb we can stuff into that spot. There are a few—lemon balm, lovage, skullcap, summer savory—that should do okay in our soil and look nice, but I'm not sure what we'd actually use. We'll have to look into them a bit more and, if we can't decide on a useful one, maybe just go by looks.

I'd also like to choose some new flowers for our flowerbed. The all-perennial mix we planted this year has proved disappointing, with only a few scattered blooms that couldn't compete with the weeds. The echinacea flowers were nice, because they attracted goldfinches, but the others were pretty unimpressive. I went through several lists of plants that thrive in clay soil and came up with a list of five perennials that should, in theory, be able to grow with relatively little care and give us blossoms from spring through fall: drumstick primrose, Japanese primrose, coreopsis, yarrow, and Autumn Joy sedum. Unfortunately, I can't seem to find any nursery anywhere that can sell me all five of them. Fedco has two of them in seed form, so perhaps my best option will be to add those to my order and try and find seeds for the others elsewhere, then plant everything at once and hope for the best.

So, once we manage to go through our actual collection of seeds and see what else we're short on, I'll be able to draw up my order and send it off to Fedco. And with that, we draw up the covers over our 2018 garden beds. Sleep well, little garden, until spring.

DIY canning equipment

Ever since we started gardening, Brian and I have used a variety of methods to preserve our excess produce (when we were fortunate enough to have any). Winter squash, of course, are easy to store; we just stash them downstairs in the cool confines of the laundry room until we want to use them. Freezing is the next easiest method, and a search of our freezer on any given day is likely to turn up bags of rhubarb, containers of tomato sauce, and cubes of pesto that we've frozen in the ice-cube tray. Over the years, we've also experimented with packing fresh basil in salt or olive oil, drying cherry tomatoes in the oven, and making jars of ice box dill pickles that keep for several months in the fridge.

Until recently, though, we'd never actually tackled the toughest of all home preservation methods: canning. For one thing, it's a much more involved process than any other method; a quick search on "how to can" just led me to this page from the National Center for Home Food Preservation, with literally dozens of different fact sheets on the various tools and techniques involved. There's a lot that can go wrong—and the consequences of a mistake can be deadly.

Recently, though, Brian was moved to try a pickle recipe that called for actual canning. It didn't look too complicated: load the veggies into the jars, pour the boiled pickling mixture on top, then seal the jars and process them in a hot-water bath for 15 minutes. The worst that could happen would be that the jars didn't seal properly, and it would be pretty easy to tell if they hadn't—in which case we could just treat the resulting pickles as ice box pickles and keep them in the fridge.

The problem was the equipment. These days, it's fairly easy to find canning jars and lids at supermarkets, and we have a large stock pot that's big enough to process small jars in a boiling water bath. However, there are two additional, specialized pieces you need for canning: a rack to keep the jars off the bottom of the pot, so water can circulate properly, and a pair of wide, curved tongs for lifting the jars out of the hot water bath. Brian was naturally reluctant to invest money in these for a single canning attempt that might turn out to be his last.

To see if there was any way to mock up reasonable substitutes for these two pieces, I did a quick search on "DIY canning equipment" and came across this handy "home hacks" article on Kitchn. It said you can easily convert a pair of ordinary kitchen tongs to sturdy, jar-gripping tongs suitable for canning with some rubber bands. Just wrap several of them securely around the blades of the tongs, fitting them into the grooves. Brian tried it with our basic kitchen tongs and found that with this addition, they could lift a full pint jar with no slippage.

The article also suggested a way to make a canning rack out of aluminum foil by twisting it into ropes, then weaving them together to make a circular mat that fits your stockpot. However, the resulting jerry-rigged rack didn't look very sturdy, and it seemed likely that it would only be good for a single use. Brian figured that if he was going to go to the trouble of making something from scratch for this canning experiment, it might as well be something that he could use again if he decided it was worth pursuing canning any further in future. But on the other hand, there was a chance he'd only use it once, so he didn't want to buy any new materials for it.

So he disappeared down into his tinkering workshop, from which a series of mysterious banging sounds soon began to issue. When he finally reemerged, he was carrying this ingenious device, cobbled together from several lengths of perforated steel hanger strap. He'd bought this stuff so long ago that he couldn't even remember what it was initially for, but it came on a fairly big roll, and there was lots of it left. He simply made a series of rings from it, ranging from very small to almost the circumference of the stockpot, and lined them all up together so that he could thread a single bolt through the holes in all the circles at once.

As you can see, this DIY rack fits neatly in the bottom of the pot and supports a quart jar on top, with a good couple of inches to spare. The multiple layers of sturdy tape are strong enough to hold up the larger jars, and close enough together that even the smaller jars can't slip through. It can hold at least three quart jars or four little pint jars at a time.

As it turns out, the pickling process didn't go off entirely without a hitch (though that's a story for another blog entry). But the DIY equipment itself performed admirably. Best of all, neither of the pieces took up much room when we were done with it. The canning rack can be stashed right in the pot, ready to go in case we decide to use it again. The tongs, stripped of their rubber bands, are back in their usual place in the drawer; should we decide to take another crack at canning, it will be a simple enough matter to get them wrapped up again. Much better than spending money on a whole new piece of equipment that we then have to make room for.

Normal behavior is crazy

Yesterday, Brian and I were out in the yard, dealing with the long-delayed task of raking up this fall's leaves. We distributed most of them across our various planting beds—the rhubarb, the asparagus, the bush cherries, and the new flowerbed in the front—where they will provide a layer of moisture-preserving mulch and insulation from the cold, which we hope will help the plants get an earlier start in spring. The leftover leaves that the beds couldn't accommodate got scooped into the compost bin, along with the dried-out remains of last year's wildflowers and asparagus, to break down into free, organic fertilizer that will give next year's beds a nutrient boost without any harmful chemicals.

At some point during this process, it occurred to me—as it occasionally does while going about my ecofrugal life—that what we were doing was not normal.

What a normal person would do is use a leaf blower to corral all those leaves, scoop them into leaf bags, and leave them at the curb to be hauled off to the landfill. Then, having saved so much time and energy by substituting a noisy, fuel-burning, carbon-emitting engine for their own muscle power, they would hop in their fuel-burning, carbon-emitting car and go off to an expensive gym to get some exercise. And on the way home, they'd probably stop at the home center to pick up a few bags of mulch for the flower beds, and possibly some fertilizer for next year's garden.

Moreover, it would simply never occur to them that it was possible to do anything else. If they happened, while heading out in the car, to spot us in our yard raking our own leaves—saving money and gas, and getting some free, healthy exercise to boot—they would probably smile pityingly (or perhaps smugly) on those poor folks who "couldn't afford" a leaf blower to do the job for them. If we tried to explain that we were raking our own leaves because we wanted to, they'd think we were crazy.

But what's really crazy here? Our ecofrugal lifestyle—or the "normal" way of doing things? Are we crazy for doing a simple job with our own hands instead of an expensive, gas-guzzling machine, or is it crazy that we live in a society where that's not considered normal?

Once I had this epiphany—that normal makes no sense—I started seeing more examples everywhere. For instance, when I spotted the stack of holiday gifts in our guest room, all wrapped in reusable gift bags and reused wrapping paper, I realized that, if I were normal, I'd just go out and buy new wrapping paper every year and send it all to the landfill after a single use. (According to this Marketplace story, Americans spend more than $7 billion a year on wrapping paper—$21 for every man, woman, and child in the country—and most of it can't even be recycled.)

I noticed it yet again later in the day, when we stopped off at a Starbucks after doing some holiday shopping and pulled out a deck of cards to play cribbage, instead of each sitting down and staring at a screen like everyone else in the place. (Of course, I realize that some frugal folks would argue stopping at Starbucks at all, and spending $4 on a cup of coffee—even if it's a peppermint mocha—is itself crazy. But at least Starbucks is an eco-friendly business that I'm happy to support, and a cup of coffee from there is no more harmful to the earth than one brewed at home—with the exception of the disposable cup, but come on, it's a special holiday cup that doubles as a coloring book. That's a kind of crazy I'm willing to live with.)

The fact is, a lot of things we ecofrugal folks do are going to come across as weird to society in general. Heck, even an article about frugality on Money Crashers went so far as to attack "the crazy things some people do" to save money, like cutting Post-It notes in half (rather than wasting a whole square to write a single word) or doing the same thing with dryer sheets (thereby spending less money, wasting less material, and halving their exposure to the questionable chemicals these sheets contain). The author, who describes himself as a frugal person, nonetheless says anyone who has "ever thought of doing stuff like that" needs to "take a chill pill" and quit "living like you're an early primate."

This kind of judgmental sneering can sometimes lead us to question our ecofrugal choices and wonder if we really are being unreasonable—perhaps even crazy—for trying to save money and help the environment, instead of living a wasteful, "normal" lifestyle. At times like this, it helps to take a step back and objectively compare what you want to do with what the rest of society is doing, and ask yourself which one makes more sense. Then you can throw your head back and shout along with Suicidal Tendencies, "I'm not crazy! You're the one that's crazy!"

Now, if you'll excuse me, I think I need to get outside and start shoveling the year's first snow off our sidewalks. And if any of our "normal" neighbors show up at the same time with their loud, heavy, expensive snow blowers, we'll have fun seeing if they can actually get the job done any faster.

Cheap tools for role-playing games

Tonight, Brian and I are having some friends over for role-playing games (RPGs for short). Since most visitors to this blog probably don't play this sort of game, I'll start out with a quick explanation: role-playing games, such as Dungeons & Dragons (D&D), are a type of game in which all the players tell a story together. Each player assumes the role of a particular character, and all the characters go through a series of adventures together—which, depending on the game, could involve battling goblins, tracking down criminals, fending off alien invaders, or dealing with palace intrigue. The only player who doesn't have a specific role is the game master, or GM, who instead plays the rest of the world, telling the players what they see and what other people they meet as they move through it.

Personally, I think RPGs are about as much fun as you can have with your clothes on. But I realize that to the uninitiated, they can seem a little intimidating. Especially with the more complex game systems, such as D&D, there just seem to be so many different things to keep track of—sheets with your characters' abilities, spells for magic-using characters, dice, pens, maps, and enough rules to fill three large books (with an ever-growing number of extra books full of additional, optional rules). And if you tune in one of the increasingly popular "liveplay" shows in which professional entertainers broadcast their RPG sessions online (such as Critical Role, a personal obsession of ours), the elaborate, gorgeous game maps, miniatures, and other paraphernalia could easily give you the impression that this must be a very expensive hobby.

But here's the thing: it doesn't have to be. Yes, you have to shell out money for the basic rulebooks (though, as I noted in my Money Crashers article on affordable tabletop games, there are quite a few systems for which you can pick up at least a starter set of the rules for little or nothing. Even for D&D, one of the more expensive systems out there, you can access a free set of basic rules online.) And many games require a set of special polyhedral dice, which you can pick up for around five bucks at sites such as Dice Game Depot. Aside from that, virtually everything you need to play a tabletop RPG can be made from materials you probably have lying around your house.

In this post, I'll share several examples of inexpensive tools for your home RPG. All of these are tools Brian has been using in the D&D campaign he's been GM'ing at our house. A couple of them come from ideas he found online and borrowed or adapted for our game; others are entirely his own invention.

Tool #1: The Picture-Frame Battle Map
Many if not most RPGs involve some amount of combat. During a battle, it can get tricky to keep track of exactly where all the players and their enemies are, so it's useful to have a map on which you can place miniatures representing the PCs (player characters) and NPCs (non-player characters run by the GM). Maps are also useful to help the players visualize the terrain as they work their way through a fortress they're trying to take by stealth or the subterranean lair of a dragon (and to let the GM know exactly when the PCs are about to set off one of the many traps with which such settings are invariably dotted).

There are lots of ways to create a map for the players. On Critical Role, battles tend to take place on beautiful, three-dimensional maps crafted by Dwarven Forge, which look absolutely amazing and can cost hundreds of dollars. However, most home gamers have to content themselves with lower-tech solutions, such as hand-drawn paper maps, cardboard dungeon tiles that you can arrange to form various natural and unnatural settings, and dry-erase boards on which you can mark out the rough shape of the room and the positions of PCs and NPCs with a marker.

The battle map Brian uses is an elegant design of his own. He printed out a grid of large squares (using an image he found online by searching for "grid paper") and framed it in an inexpensive 24"x36" picture frame we had lying around. (You can get one like it for about 10 bucks at Target.) He uses a dry-erase marker to draw out his maps on the plastic surface of the frame. The gridlines provide a built-in scale—typically, one inch to five feet—so we can tell how big and how far apart everything our characters see is. And at the end of each encounter, it can simply be wiped clean with a rag.

Tool #2: Print-Your-Own Minis 
Once you've got your battle map, you need something to put on it to represent your characters and the creatures you're fighting. (You could just mark your positions with a marker, but that means an awful lot of erasing and redrawing during each battle, and with a setup like ours, you'd risk erasing part of the wall by accident.) You can purchase specially designed figurines, commonly known as "minis," to portray just about any type of person or creature—but these can get expensive, and after you've been playing for a while, your ever-growing collection will start to take up quite a lot of room.

Brian, searching for a cheaper solution, decided to adapt an idea he'd seen online: minis printed on paper and held in little clip-on stands. To make the stands, he took several ordinary binder clips of varying sizes (the kind you can pick up for around $2 a box at Staples) and removed the wire part. He then asked me to comb the Internet for images we could pick up and use (without permission, but after all, it's only a home game) to represent each of our characters. For instance, I chose this adorable little cartoon to represent my gnomish wizard, Gnome Ann (named after this XKCD cartoon), and this willowy beauty for our elven druid. Brian also found some sample images he could use for monsters we might need to fight.

To print these out, he used a program called Inkscape (a free knockoff of Adobe Illustrator) to lay out sheets with the various images. To make two-sided minis, he used two copies of each image—one right-side-up, one upside-down—so that the printed piece can be cut out and folded. Here's a sample sheet showing some character minis (labeled with the characters' names) and some monsters of medium, large, and huge size. After printing the sheet, he cuts out each mini, folds it, glues it shut with a glue stick, and "laminates" it by covering it with clear packing tape. (This works better for the smaller minis than for the big ones.) These little pieces of stiffened paper can be slipped into and out of the clip bases as needed. With the clips to hold them, they'll stand up on their own and can be moved about the battle map easily.

Tool #3: The DIY GM Screen
One difficulty for the GM is keeping the secret details of an adventure, such as where a trap is hidden or which friendly NPC is planning to betray the party, hidden from the players. Many GMs get around this problem by using a GM screen, which conceals everything the GM wishes to keep secret. There are all kinds of GM screens available online, from this $25 model with vinyl pockets that can hold maps or rules sheets you refer to often to this handcrafted hardwood model that can store everything a GM could possibly need—rule books, dice, even a tablet—and costs about as much as a ticket to Hawaii. And online videos like this one show you how to build your own GM screen with reference sheets built in.

However, if all you need your screen to do is, well, screen, then you can easily make one out of corrugated cardboard for nothing. Brian constructed his by taking apart an Amazon shipping box, cutting the cardboard down to an appropriate size, and folding it in several places so that it can stand upright and wrap neatly around his spot at the end of the table, keeping all his stuff hidden. (Cat not included.)

He decorated it by cutting crenellations into the top and sketching in a grid to resemble the stonework of a castle wall, but you don't even have to do this much if you don't want to. An unadorned sheet of cardboard will serve just as well to keep all your GM business private.

Tool #4: Turn Order Cards
Now, you may notice in the above pictures that there are several small cards arranged along the top edges of the GM screen. These are to solve another problem that comes up in running battle scenes: keeping track of whose turn it is. In many systems, players determine their turn order by rolling a die, and the GM usually has to write down all the numbers with the associated names—along with separate numbers for the players' adversaries—to make sure everyone gets their turn. But in a large battle, it can be hard to keep track of all those numbers, and even the most experienced GMs sometimes skip over someone by accident.

Brian's solution is these handy turn order cards. He can't actually claim credit for this idea, since he picked it up from another gamer whose page he saw online—but unfortunately, he can't remember where. It's too bad, because this idea is absolutely beautiful in its simplicity. All you need is a folded index card with the name of each PC, plus cards for each foe the PCs are facing. Then, once you've determined the turn order for the battle, you arrange all the cards in that order in a row along the top edge of the GM screen. Brian marks his cards on both sides so that both the players and the GM can read them. Since the same set of cards reads from left to right for the players and right to left for the GM, he added little arrows on each side to show which direction the order of play is proceeding in.

These cards come in handy in several ways. First of all, the GM can see at a glance who's up next in the turn order, so no one gets skipped. Second, the players can easily see when their turn is coming up, so they can start planning ahead what they intend to do. That way, when the GM points to one and says, "Gnome Ann, you're up; what do you want to do?" they don't just sit there going, "Uh, wait, what?" And finally, the players can tell which other players' turns are coming up after theirs, so if they want to do something to help another character, such as casting a healing spell, they don't have to pepper the GM with questions like, "OK, wait, who goes after me?"

Tool #5: Player Ability Cards

It's not just the GM who has a lot to keep track of during a game session. Each player has an assortment of abilities that can be used only once in a while—some that only work once a day, others that return after a short rest. Normally, the players keep track of these by marking them off on their character sheets when used, then erasing the markings at the start of each new in-game day. But in the heat of battle, it's easy to forget to do this—and even when you remember, all that writing and erasing tends to make a mess of your character sheet.

Brian's innovation was to come up with little index cards for each player with these special abilities marked. For instance, our barbarian, Hafdan, gets to use his rage ability twice a day, giving him bonuses to his strength and agility. To keep track of these, he has two cards marked "Rage," and each time he uses the ability, his player hands the corresponding card over to the GM. When he's out of cards, he's out of rage.

These cards can also be used for wizards and other spell-casting characters to keep track of the spells they've used. Here you see cards for Gnome Ann, showing her Level 1 and Level 2 spell slots. As she casts these spells, I hand the card in to Brian, and I can see at a glance how many spells I have left to use. I also have a card for Ann's "bardic inspiration," which allows me to give any PC the ability to roll an extra die as a bonus. I hand in the card when she uses this ability, and Brian gives the corresponding player a card marked "inspiration," letting them know that extra die is there when they want it. (He has separate inspiration cards for each player, since it's possible for more than one person to have inspiration, but each person can only have one at a time.)

All these RPG tools are both inexpensive and easy to make. To make everything you see here, you would need only:

• 1 large picture frame ($10)
• 1 set of dry-erase markers (about $2.50 at Target)
• 1 box of binder clips (about $2)
• 1 pack of ordinary printer paper (about $4) and an indeterminate amount of colored ink
• 1 roll of clear packing tape (about $2)
• 1 package of 3-by-5 index cards (about $5.50) and a felt-tip marker (about $2)
• 1 cardboard box (free with your order of anything, from anywhere)

And there you have it—everything you need to run your own D&D campaign, or any other RPG system of your choice, for under $30. And if you already have some or all these materials lying around your house, as we did, the total is even less.

So, bottom line: you can decide not to play RPGs because they're too weird, or they just don't look like fun to you (though I'd say don't knock it until you've tried it). Or you can decide not to play because you don't know how, or because you don't have anyone to play with (which is the situation we were in for a while). But if you're not playing because you think it looks too expensive, you have no excuse anymore.

[2019 update: Since publishing this piece, we've switched from dry-erase markers for maps to wet-erase ones, because we found dry-erase maps tended to get smudged too easily when we moved our markers around (or when a cat came and sat on the map, which inevitably happens at some point). These create a map that stays put during your game and can be erased afterwards with a damp rag. Wet-erase markers are harder to find than dry-erase ones, but you can order a set for around $5 at Walmart (which I'm no longer boycotting). We looked for some at Staples, but the cheapest set there was about $12.]