Recipe of the Month: Cannellini Beans with Cabbage and Pasta

Slipping in just ahead of the deadline, our Recipe of the Month for September is "Cannellini Beans with Cabbage and Pasta," out of Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything. I'd actually bookmarked this recipe months if not years ago as something we should try, but we never got around to it until last week. We had some cabbage in the fridge, and I was looking for something to do with it besides our usual old standbys (Rumbledethumps, Indian-spiced cabbage, or the "Bow Ties and Cabbage" out of Vegetariana). We read through the ingredients for the recipe—cabbage, pasta, olive oil, leeks, celery, fresh thyme, veggie stock, and cooked cannellini beans—and found that we happened to have all of them right on hand, so this was clearly the time to give the recipe a try.

This dish isn't very complicated to make. Briefly, you boil the cabbage for just a few minutes ("until just tender") in one big pot, then use that same water to cook the pasta; meanwhile, you sauté the leeks and celery in a big skillet until they're soft, add the thyme and stir for one more minute, and finally stir in the cabbage, beans, and stock, season it, and heat it through. When the pasta's all done, you drain it and toss everything together, and serve it up with Parmesan cheese.

We didn't make this recipe exactly as written, however. It calls for half a cabbage to half a pound of pasta, but what we had in the fridge was more like a third of a cabbage, and Brian didn't want to have any left over. So he decided to make a half recipe, thereby using up a quarter-pound of rotelle that he also happened to have left over, but with a little bit more cabbage than the recipe called for. The "sprig" of thyme he added was also probably rather larger than Bittman had in mind (you can see it in the photo, resting on top of the pasta in the pot).

Fortunately, the dish appeared to stand up pretty well to the minor liberties. It was a bit heavy on the cabbage, but not too bad, and thanks to our favorite Penzey's vegetable stock, the veggies were quite flavorful. So was the pasta itself, since Brian has lately taken to following Bittman's advice to salt the water liberally when making it—a good tablespoonful of salt to a large pot of water. This innovation has caused us to adjust all our pasta sauces accordingly, adding a lot less salt than we used to, and I personally found that this dish didn't need any added Parmesan to raise its flavor. The half-plus recipe he made was enough to feed us both for dinner, with a little bit left over for the next day's lunch.

All in all, I think this dish will be a very useful addition to our repertoire. Cabbages are one of the few fresh veggies that remain cheap and decent-tasting all winter long, so we buy them fairly regularly, and it will definitely be handy to have a new way of using them that's both easy and satisfying. And if we get tired of it, we can always try the variant version of the recipe, "Chickpeas with Cabbage and Pearl Couscous," which spices it up with a tablespoon of harissa (north African chili paste). That ought to make a good warmer-upper for the winter months.

Money Crashers: Should You Pay for a Credit Monitoring Service?

My latest piece to go live on Money Crashers is on a topic that's gotten a lot of search traffic since the  2017 Equifax hack: credit monitoring and ID theft services. These services promise to watch your credit report for signs of fraud, give you access to your credit score, insure you against identity theft, and sometimes even monitor the "dark web" to see if anyone is trying to sell your Social Security number. But these benefits come with a cost—typically between $10 and $30 per month.

So are they worth it? The answer depends on your personal situation. In the article, I outline the pros and cons of credit monitoring, the features of the top credit monitoring services, and some alternative ways to protect yourself for less—or even for free. Then I conclude with a list of three questions to ask yourself to decide whether paid credit monitoring is worth the money for you.

Read all about it here: Should You Pay for a Credit Monitoring Service? - Best Options

Please note that this article was written several months ago, and there's some info in it that's a little out of date. The article says that initial fraud alerts last for only 90 days and that freezing and unfreezing your credit report costs money in most states. However, a new law that took effect last month changes both these points. An initial fraud alert is now good for up to a year, and credit freezes are now free throughout the country. This info should be updated in the article shortly.

Gardeners' Holidays 2018: Harvest Home

Well, we finally made it through this brutally hot summer. For once, fall weather has arrived right on time according to the calendar, and my house is already decked out in its fall colors, with a little basket of autumn leaves on the side stoop and a row of Jack Be Little pumpkins in the front.

That means it's also time for Harvest Home, the Gardeners' Holiday that celebrates the peak of the fall harvest. This year, however, we celebrated it in an unusual way: rather than feasting on produce from our own garden, we did a little foraging. Or at least, Brian did.

A couple of days ago, one of his coworkers showed up with several pawpaw fruits that she said had come from a tree located close to their workplace, just outside of the campus boundaries. Pawpaws, for those who don't know, are a native fruit found throughout the entire eastern half of the U.S., as far west as Texas. The landscaper we consulted about our yard back in 2012 actually suggested a pawpaw tree as a possible good choice for our front yard, but we were reluctant to commit to a tree whose fruit we'd never actually tasted. You see, pawpaws are pretty much impossible to find in supermarkets, because they're too delicate and fast-ripening for large-scale shipping. So the easiest way to get a taste of it is to find a tree growing wild, as Brian's coworker did. (That may be changing, however; according to NPR's "The Salt," interest in pawpaws has grown dramatically in the last couple of years, to the extent that some have labeled it "the hipster banana." In fact, right after we both tried them for the first time on Thursday, we discovered a bin of them at the Whole Earth Center that identified them as the produce of a local farm—something we'd never seen in there before, as far as I can recall.)

From the outside, these weren't much to look at: sort of mottled, brownish-green ovoids about the size of my fist. According to a video Brian found online, there are two ways to eat them: you can slice them or just cut them in half and scoop out the pulp. (The peel isn't edible, but there's no good way to remove it from outside without destroying the squishy inner portion.)

So he sliced one open, revealing soft, creamy-yellow flesh studded with large, dark-brown seeds about the size of an almond. We each sampled a cautious spoonful, not really sure what to expect. A piece I found on NPR's "The Salt" described them as "a cross between a mango and a banana," with possible hints of pineapple, but to me, the flavor wasn't mangolike at all, though the soft, slippery texture was a bit reminiscent of a slightly overripe mango. It was more like banana than anything else, but with a distinct perfumey quality—I really can't think of any other word for it—that was unlike any fruit I'd ever tasted. I honestly found it a bit off-putting, but Brian liked it enough not only to finish the fruit he'd started, but to go out in search of the tree the next day and scavenge a couple more. After eating one more of them today, he says he's still kind of on the fence about it; he mostly likes it, but he can't decide whether that odd perfumey element to the flavor is appealing or disturbing.

Nonetheless, he's intrigued enough by the fruit to save the seeds from the ones he's eaten so far, carefully keeping them moist and cool in the refrigerator as The Survival Gardener recommends. He admits he's not sure yet where he could plant them; the site described them as an "understory tree" that likes to grow in the shade of larger trees, so he thought perhaps the shaded back corner of our yard (currently home to a massive pile of concrete chunks left over from our patio project) would be a good spot for one.

However, I'm not sure it's really worth devoting space in our yard to a tree neither of us is sure we like, especially when the California Rare Fruit Growers site says "Avoid heavy, wet, alkaline soil." I think a better use of the seeds might be to seek permission to plant some along the Meadows Trail, a short hiking trail through woods adjoining the Raritan River just outside of Donaldson Park. That would give everyone in town—including the local wildlife—a chance to try this unusual fruit, rather than saddling us with a whole harvest to dispose of on our own.

All in all, I'd say that I'm pleased to have had the opportunity to try this unusual native fruit, but I'm in no hurry to eat it again. However, if Brian persists in his plan to grow them—and succeeds—I'll probably give them at least one more try. Our old edition of The Joy of Cooking, in a single brief paragraph on pawpaws, says "The taste for these, we feel, is an acquired one"—so I should probably make at least a little bit of effort to acquire it.

Why I've made peace with Walmart

Lately, I've started to wonder if everything I know about shopping responsibly is wrong.

It seems like it should be obvious, right? You shop at local businesses when you can, but when you can't, you go for the businesses that have a greener, socially responsible image, like Trader Joe's, Costco, or IKEA. And if you absolutely have to go to a big box store like Target, you can at least console yourself that it's better than the most truly evil of all evil megacorporations, Walmart. (I've only set foot in a Walmart store once, when we wanted to get my parents a bread maker for Hanukkah and literally could not find one anywhere else, and I felt dirty for the rest of the day.)

From time to time, I've questioned whether Target is really any less evil than Walmart. Occasionally I try running a Google search to dig up an answer, but usually I can't find a straightforward comparison between the two. The closest I came was a 2013 rant by Ralph Nader on Huffington Post, and since he also insisted there was no difference between Al Gore and George Bush, he's lost all his credibility as far as I'm concerned.

However, last week, I was taking a survey that asked me about my views on various major retailers, and I decided, before giving Target higher marks than Walmart, to look once again for information on how they compare. This time, I tried searching on "Target vs. Walmart social responsibility"—and that search led me down an Internet rabbit hole that appeared to end up in some sort of Bizarro World, where all the facts I'd come to take for granted were turned on their heads.

First, I found a piece on Retail Dive entitled "Why Wal-Mart is a retail sustainability leader (but doesn't really want to talk about it)." I was flabbergasted to read that it's actually been over ten years since Walmart adopted three major sustainability goals: to use 100 percent renewable energy, to eliminate waste in its operations, and to offer "more sustainable" products in its stores. Today, the article continued, Walmart is "the leading company in the U.S. for total on-site solar capacity and installations," with 25% of all its operations powered by renewable energy and a goal to double that by 2020; it has reduced its plastic bag waste by more than 38% (since 2005) and has diverted 81% of all material from its stores and distribution centers from landfills; it cut its carbon footprint by nearly 650,000 metric tons in 2016 alone.

Why hadn't I heard any of this before? Because, apparently, Walmart has deliberately chosen not to talk about it. Its typical customers don't really care about this stuff; they care about value, and green labeling might actually turn them off because they assume it will mean higher prices. So far from engaging in corporate greenwashing, Walmart is doing exactly the opposite, what you might call brownwashing. The article also notes that in its letters to customers, employees, and shareholders, Walmart talks about its green initiatives (when it talks about them at all) in terms of the money they can save the company. In other words...they're ecofrugal.

Reeling from this discovery, I tried to recall what else I'd heard about Walmart over the years that had led me to boycott them. Well, they treat their workers pretty badly, right? Like, forcing them to work after they've officially clocked out so they don't have to pay overtime, and paying so little most of their workers qualify for public assistance, thereby foisting off their costs onto the state? That's bad, right? Not anymore, apparently. In 2017, the Employee Benefit Advisor reported that Target was raising its starting wage for workers to $11 an hour—in an effort to one-up Walmart, which had already raised its minimum hourly wage to $10.

Still searching for an answer to my original question, which big box was better, I turned to The Good Shopping Guide. This site doesn't directly rate or rank different companies, but you can search for a company name to find out what news has recently surfaced about it, positive or negative. There I learned that Target had also committed to 100 percent renewable energy—but in November 2017, ten years after Walmart. It had also set a goal to source 100 percent of its cotton sustainably by 2022, so that looked like it gave them a slight edge over Walmart in terms of eco-cred. But then, I searched Walmart on the same site and discovered that it was one of 900 major U.S. companies that had pledged to abide by the Paris Agreement even after President Trump had officially pulled the country out of it. This group also includes Microsoft, Coca-Cola, and Kellogg's—names that green bloggers normally only mention to revile them for their alleged Earth-trashing practices. (I checked the website of the group, the "We Are Still In" coalition, and found Target has signed on also.) Big businesses pledging to to the right thing when our government won't? What in heaven's name is going on here?

I made one final attempt to locate a simple ranking of the two companies by searching for "retailer report card," and that led me to a site called Mind the Store that was almost what I wanted. It had rated 30 major retailers and given each one a grade, but only on a single issue: toxic chemicals. Yet here, once again, I was baffled to see that Walmart was almost at the top of the rankings, with an A-minus. (Only Apple, the only company to earn an A grade, did better.) My much-beloved IKEA, I was relieved to see, came in just behind, with a B-plus, as did Target...but Costco, which I'd always viewed as the responsible alternative to Walmart, only had a C-minus (though even that mediocre grade was high enough to put it in the top ten). And which retailer came in dead last, with a score of zero out of a possible 135 points? TRADER JOE'S! According to the site, the company has made "no significant public-facing commitments to address the safety of chemicals used in its private brands or in the other products it sells." Say it ain't so, Joe!

Now, I realize there's more to being a responsible company than just screening for unsafe chemicals, and Trader Joe's still gets high marks for its workplace practices. But Walmart—the company I used to look on as the epitome of corporate evil—appears to get high marks on every measure of corporate responsibility. They're doing a great job of avoiding toxins and shrinking their carbon footprint and paying workers a decent wage. And while Target is not doing too badly on these points either, they appear to lag behind their larger competitor for most of them.

Under the circumstances, there simply seems to be no way to justify shopping at Target while continuing to boycott Walmart. I have to either declare that neither one is virtuous enough to suit me—a decision that would also put pretty much every major retail chain in the country off limits—or acknowledge that they're both basically okay.

So today, on the very blog where I first announced and then withdrew my boycott of Hershey, I'm announcing that I am officially no longer boycotting Walmart. Mind you, this probably doesn't mean I'll be shopping there very often; of the two, Target still seems to offer a better selection of sustainable products at a reasonable price (as highlighted in the Harvard Business Review). And, as Business Insider observes, Target stores just have a more appealing atmosphere.

But the next time I'm searching for products online and the best price I can find is at Walmart...into the cart it goes.

A new low in plastic packaging

Back in July, when I embarked on the Plastic-Free July challenge, I discovered just how hard it really is to avoid single-use plastic, particularly in packaging. Even though I almost never buy prepared foods of any kind, I couldn't get through a grocery shopping trip without bringing home more of the stuff—a bag of popcorn, a carton of eggs, a gallon of milk. Even containers that weren't made of plastic, like a cardboard box of tea bags or a tin of ginger mints, came in a plastic wrapper.

However, the most absurd, ironic use of plastic packaging I noticed during that month was something I spotted on a trip to the H-Mart. Next to the checkout was a display of kids' plastic toys and dishes with labels boasting that they were made of environmentally friendly sugar cane bagasse. Now, bioplastics like these have problems of their own, as this post on Columbia University's "State of the Planet" blog points out. Although they have a smaller carbon footprint than petroleum-based plastics, they also produce more pollution over their life cycle, from the chemicals used to grow the crops they're made from to the processes that turn those materials into plastic. Also, they're harder to recycle, at least at present, so they usually end up in landfills, where they produce methane as they break down. They use up land that could be devoted to food crops, and they're expensive.

However, as bioplastics go, plastic made from sugar cane bagasse is better than most. Bagasse is a by-product of sugar production that would just go to waste normally, so it's not using up valuable cropland. And it can be made about as cheaply as petroleum-based plastic, according to the MIT Technology Review. So, that's good, right?

But now here's the catch. All these eco-friendly, plant-based plastic items come packaged in...plastic. Good old-fashioned petroleum-based plastic.

I suppose the absurdity of bioplastic packaged in petroleum plastic is probably some sort of metaphor to do with environmentalism or society or life itself, but unfortunately, I'm not feeling sharp enough at the moment to figure out just what it is. The only moral I can spot in the story is that greenwashing is everywhere, and you need to keep a sharp eye out for it. Pretty much any product can slap some kind of a green claim on its label, so if you want to buy truly sustainable products, you need to look beyond the label and take a hard look at the products themselves, including how they're packaged.

Or maybe it's just that a Korean supermarket isn't necessarily the best place to go looking for them.

Plant-based milk experiments, phase 2: Coconut milk

After last month's unsuccessful experiment with making our own oat milk, I decided to take a different tack with plant-based milks: this "semi-homemade" coconut milk recipe from Our Four Forks. It looked simple enough to make: just combine a can of light coconut milk with two cans of water, add a bit of salt and vanilla, and sweeten to taste. The blog notes that you should "gently shake before each use," but that seemed simple enough to do if I mixed it up in one of the bottles we use for powdered milk.

Well, I tried this last week, and I'm sorry to report that it isn't the perfect low-carbon milk alternative I've been looking for.

The first problem appeared when we went to Trader Joe's for the coconut milk. It cost $1.29 a can, rather than the $1 a can the bloggers said they had paid. Since their recipe made about 5 cups, that worked out to a price of about $4.13 per gallon for just a straight coconut-milk-and-water mixture, without any salt, vanilla, or sugar added. That's nearly twice as much as we normally pay for cow's milk, but I comforted myself with the thought hat it's still cheaper than most commercial plant-based milks, which typically cost around $6 a gallon. And there would be less packaging waste, too—just one recyclable metal can, rather than a plastic-lined cardboard carton that can't be recycled in our curbside collection.

The second problem showed up when I started mixing up the coconut milk. For some reason I'd overlooked the fact that our milk bottles only hold a quart (four cups), and this recipe makes about five cups. The only container I could find big enough to hold it was a gallon-sized plastic pitcher, which doesn't have a snug-fitting lid like the milk bottle. So I had to settle for stirring it thoroughly, rather than shaking it. This wasn't enough to dissolve the coconut milk completely, but I managed to get most of the solids suspended in the liquid.

First I tasted the mixture plain, with nothing added. Not surprisingly, it tasted strongly of coconut—a flavor I happen to like, but one that's definitely not as neutral as milk and wouldn't work in every recipe. It also wasn't as sweet as dairy milk. I added the salt and vanilla and tasted it again, and interestingly, this seemed to make it taste a bit sweeter—but I decided to go ahead and add a bit of sugar anyway. I stirred in a teaspoonful, decided it needed just a bit more, and eventually ended up using about two teaspoons of sugar for five cups of coconut milk. Since we now pay only 80 cents a pound for organic sugar at Costco, that works out to about 1.5 cents' worth of sugar. Add another 8.5 cents for the vanilla and salt, and the price of the milk comes to a total of $4.45 per gallon.

Another thing I checked as I mixed up the milk was its calorie count. According to the label, the can contained six servings of coconut milk, each with 70 calories. That meant the entire batch of milk had 420 calories' worth of coconut milk, plus 36 calories' worth of sugar. Divided by five cups, that's about 91 calories per cup—roughly the same as the skim milk we usually drink.

For my first taste test, I tried the coconut milk straight, as an accompaniment to a chocolate chip cookie. Once again, it tasted like coconut, not like milk, but that worked out fine, since it was compatible with the flavor of the cookie. The more noticeable difference between this and the skim milk I'm used to drinking was the mouthfeel, which was slightly greasy. It wasn't creamy, like whole or 2 percent milk; it felt more like a cup of skim milk with a bit of added oil that coated my mouth and left a faint film on the cup. Still, it was drinkable, so I wasn't too discouraged at this point.

Next, I tried the coconut milk in an egg cream. This was a little more problematic, since the milk had separated slightly since I mixed it up, and even a vigorous stirring didn't dissolve all the solids. But once I mixed it up with the chocolate syrup and seltzer, the coconut oil seemed to blend in fairly well, and the greasiness wasn't noticeable. I noticed that the seltzer didn't create quite as much foam with this coconut milk as it normally does with dairy milk, but that wasn't really a problem. The coconut flavor was only faintly noticeable and didn't clash with the chocolate. At this point, things were looking fairly promising.

By this time, I'd drunk enough of the coconut milk that I thought it would fit into one of our quart-sized milk bottles, which would allow me to shake it rather than stirring it before use. Unfortunately, transferring it from the pitcher to a bottle proved to be a messy and inefficient process. The globs of coconut oil clogged up the funnel, and I had to poke them repeatedly with a bamboo skewer to get them into the bottle. And even then, I was left with a fair amount of fat clinging to the sides of the pitcher, which wasn't that easy to wash off. I assume this problem would have been even worse with full-fat coconut milk, but even with the light stuff, it was pretty bad.

In the morning, Brian tried some of the coconut milk on his cereal and ran into yet another snag: even after shaking, the coconut oil wouldn't dissolve. So he poured some through a coffee filter, straining out the lumps, and poured the strained liquid on his cereal. He said the coconut flavor was compatible with most of the ingredients in his morning mixture—bran flakes, oats, flaxseeds, and walnuts—but interestingly, it clashed faintly with the raisins. So it wouldn't be ideal for his purposes, though the oat milk worked okay for him.

However, when I tried the coconut milk in my morning cocoa, it was an epic fail. Although I shook the bottle as vigorously as I could, the coconut oil just didn't dissolve; it formed a faint film on top of the liquid in the cup. It melted when I heated up the cocoa, but it didn't blend into the liquid; it formed a sort of oil slick on top, and the greasy mouthfeel when I drank it was more pronounced than ever. I was able to finish the cup, but I wasn't enthusiastic about using any more of the stuff. Brian thought maybe he could use it up in a batch of pudding, but he didn't have time, so the remaining cup or so ended up in the compost pile.

So, sadly, it looks like this DIY coconut milk isn't the ideal solution to the milk dilemma either, and I'm not sure what to try next. I noted on a recent trip to Aldi that their almond milk is considerably cheaper than most brands—just $1.89 for a half-gallon, or $3.78 per gallon, which is cheaper than this homemade stuff—but it still has the problems of the heavy water use from almond growing and the packaging waste created by the cartons. Ripple, or pea-protein milk, ticks all the boxes for sustainability and nutrition—according to this piece in Fast Company, its carbon footprint is only 7 percent as large dairy milk's, its water footprint is only 1 percent as large, and it has a comparable amount of protein and more calcium and vitamin D—but it's ludicrously expensive. And while I found a recipe for homemade Ripple at Matthew's Manna, it's frankly more work than we're willing to go through every time we need milk. It looks like our best bet for now may be to stick to cow's milk for a while and see if the price of Ripple drops with rising demand.