Recipe of the month: Winter squash and eggplant curry

On our last trip to H-Mart, Brian succumbed, as usual, to the siren song of cheap eggplant. (The skinny Chinese eggplants are frequently on sale for less than a dollar a pound, and Brian just can't resist them.) His original plan was to make it into bangan bartha, part of our standard recipe rotation. However, when I mentioned that we still needed a Recipe of the Month for December (and didn't have much time to make it, since we'd be spending Christmas week with the in-laws in Indiana), he decided to hunt around for a new eggplant recipe instead. He hit upon this Oven-Roasted Eggplant and Butternut Squash Curry recipe on Food.com, and since we already had a full year's harvest of butternut squash stored away, he thought it looked like a perfect choice. The only ingredient it called for that we didn't have were scallions (which he didn't think it really needed, since it contains onion already) and fresh cilantro (which I don't care for anyway, so he had no problem leaving it out).

However, there was one other snag: the recipe as written was somewhat complicated. It calls for you to wrap the whole eggplant and squash individually in aluminum foil, roast them for an hour and a half, let them cool, peel them, and mash them. Then you have to mix the mashed veggies with the masala (onion, tomato, and spice) mixture, which you've prepared while they were in the oven, and let the whole thing cook for another ten minutes. And when it's all done, you're supposed to serve it  with chappatis, which are not exactly trivial to prepare.

All this rigmarole seemed rather unnecessary to Brian, since he knew that it was perfectly possible—and much faster—to roast eggplant by cutting it into cubes. That's what he normally does when making bartha, and it comes out just fine. So he created a simplified version of the recipe with the eggplant and squash cooked this way and simply mixed into the masala. He also improved on the masala itself by using whole fenugreek seeds, sauteed along with the cumin seeds, rather than ground fenugreek. And where the recipe called for fresh tomatoes, Brian used a combination of fresh and canned—the last two little tomatoes from our 2019 harvest, and enough canned diced tomatoes to make up a cup of volume.

Here's Brian's modified version of the recipe:

Cut into 1/2-inch cubes, coat with 1 Tbsp olive oil, and roast 45 minutes at 450 degrees F:

20 oz. butternut squash

10 oz eggplant

Prepare masala:

2 Tbsp olive oil

2 tsp cumin seeds

20 fenugreek seeds

1 onion, finely chopped

1 c diced tomato

1/2 tsp ground coriander

1/4 tsp turmeric

3/4 tsp salt

Heat the oil on medium-high. Saute the cumin and fenugreek seeds until they become aromatic (about 30 seconds). Add onion and saute for 5 minutes or until soft.  Add tomatoes and saute for another 5 minutes. Add coriander, turmeric, and salt and remove from heat.

When the squash and eggplant are done, combine with masala and serve over rice.

This dish smelled great as it was cooking, with all those fragrant spices popping in the oil and mingling with the smells of pungent onion and tart tomato. When it was finally done and the veggies were mixed in with the masala, it didn't exactly look as great as it smelled, but the taste delivered everything that the aroma had promised. It was warm and spicy, packed with flavor without tasting too overpoweringly of any one ingredient, and the tender texture of the baked eggplant and squash didn't seem to have lost anything from Brian's simplified cooking method. Likewise, the mixture of fresh and canned tomatoes didn't hurt the flavor any, and was probably preferable to supplementing our last two garden tomatoes with one of the pale and mushy "fresh" tomatoes many supermarkets carry in the wintertime. In fact, we're planning to try it again tomorrow, this time with only canned tomatoes, and my guess is the flavor won't suffer at all as a result.

Even with Brian's simplified method, this recipe isn't super fast to make; counting chopping time, it probably takes a good hour from start to finish. But it's pretty easy and pretty cheap, especially if you have all the spices in your cupboard and a source of cheap eggplant like the H-Mart. And it's also both vegan and gluten-free, so you can serve it to pretty much anyone you might be inviting over to dinner.

Which brings me to a question I've been considering for 2020: should the Recipe of the Month become the Vegan Recipe of the Month? When I first started the Veggie of the Month feature back in 2013, my goal was to increase the amount of produce in my diet, and when I discovered that trying a new fruit or veggie each month wasn't the best way to do that, I modified it to be a new produce-centered recipe. But in the past year, my main dietary focus has been less on eating more produce for my own health and more on promoting the health of the planet by avoiding animal products. So should my Recipe of the Month also work toward that goal?

This plan wouldn't be too hard to put into effect. While in Indianapolis, we made our usual annual foray out to Half Price Books, and one of the items I picked up there was a new-to-us vegan cookbook, Conveniently Vegan, which contains lots of simple plant-based dishes for us to try. And my subscription to It Doesn't Taste Like Chicken is dropping new vegan recipes in my inbox twice a week as well. Between these two sources, I've already got a short list of new vegan dishes I want to try, so I should have no problem coming up with a new one each month.

The only downside I can see is that if I stick to 100 percent vegan dishes for these monthly experiments, I could miss out on some wonderful discoveries like the Raspberry Fool I made in July 2018. But on the other hand, that was technically a bonus recipe; I'd already done a Recipe of the Month for July, and it didn't stop me from experimenting further. So I figure, as long as I allow myself to try new dishes that aren't vegan, requiring myself to try at least one new dish each month that is vegan will be a good way to expand our plant-based repertoire and shift our diet gradually closer to our ideal.

Gardeners' Holidays 2019: The Changing of the Garden

I was unable to put this blog entry out on the actual winter solstice, yesterday, because Brian and I spent that day in our car, making our way across parts of five states on our annual winter trek to Indianapolis. But, as usual, we took advantage of this one-on-one time to go through the new Fedco seed catalogue and decide which of our garden crops we wanted to keep, drop, or replace next year.

I thought this conversation would be a pretty short one this year, since most of the crops we've grown this year were pretty successful. Running down the list—arugula, regular basil, Thai basil, cucumbers, dill, two kinds of green beans, leeks, three kinds of lettuce, marigolds, parsley, two kinds of peppers, scallions, snap peas, two kinds of butternut squash, and four kinds of tomatoes—we found that most of them had provided decent yields and given us very little trouble. We found only a few that we thought we'd like to replace, such as the new King Sieg leeks, which produced only a few scrawny specimens. Rather than go back to our previous Lincoln variety, which was never a big producer either, we're taking another stab at finding a better variety—most likely the autumn-producing Lancelot, which is billed as "a dependable heavy-yielding, virus-tolerant bolt-resistant leek." We're keeping both our trusty Carmen peppers and our new Cabellero chilis, but we're dropping the old Jimmy Nardellos (which didn't even give us one healthy seedling) in favor of a new frying pepper, most likely the early-producing Takara Shishito.

Among our tomatoes, we're keeping the Premio for early production, the Pineapple for late-season production, and the Sun Gold for tons of tiny cherry tomatoes all season long. However, we're dropping the other cherry variety, Honeydrop; it was indeed less prone to cracking than the Sun Gold, but not quite as tasty and not nearly as productive. And we're definitely dropping the Heinz paste tomato, which produced only a meager crop of small tomatoes, barely enough for one good batch of sauce. We've identified two candidates for a paste tomato to replace it: Opalka, touted for "copious yields" and ability to withstand hot, dry summers, and Vilms, a massive producer resistant to many tomato diseases. However, given that Heinz is the second or third plum tomato we've tried without success, I'm not getting my hopes up too much.

So I thought those minor changes would be it for next year's garden. Then, however, Brian threw me a curve. He said that next year, he'd like to try adding an entirely new crop to our repertoire: potatoes.

Brian's newfound interest in potatoes was motivated less by a desire to eat them—since, after all, they're readily available and pretty cheap at the supermarket—than by curiosity about how to grow them. He has a coworker who grows potatoes in his garden, and his descriptions of the process piqued Brian's interest. Plus, he says half-jokingly, being able to grow a crop that can actually supply a reasonable amount of our daily calories will come in handy during the global-warming-induced End Times.

However, when I turned to the "Potatoes" section in the Fedco catalog, it looked like we'd hit a snag. I read through the section on potato culture, and the way they described it made it sound like this crop requires a lot more work than most of the veggies we grow. You have to plant at just the right time, when the soil is at 55 to 60 degrees and dry enough to work easily; and earlier or later, and you risk having your seed potatoes rot in the ground. You're supposed to plant them four to six inches deep, then "hill them up" (mounding dirt over the stem, so it can turn into a tuber underground) when they reach 6 inches tall and again at 12 to 15 inches tall. And you have to water them consistently, an inch or so each week. And ideally, you should give them a good coating of mulch after the second hilling to keep them moist and control weeds. And you have to wait two to three weeks after the vines die before harvesting them, and keep them chilly—55 to 60 degrees—for several weeks before putting them into storage in exactly the right conditions: 38 to 40 degrees, 85 to 90 percent humidity, and complete darkness.

But the most serious problem was the amount of space needed. The minimum amount of seed potatoes you can buy from Fedco is two pounds, and according to the catalogue, each pound will fill 5 to 8 "row feet"—so to grow our potatoes in the traditional way, we'd need a minimum of 10 feet, and up to 16 feet, of potato hills. In our tiny square-foot garden, that just wasn't going to be an option.

Fortunately, we'd both heard of other ways to grow potatoes in containers, such as barrels or bags. I pulled out my phone and Googled "grow potatoes small space," and I found several articles about these methods. One, from A Modern Homestead, was very enthusiastic about the "potato tower" method: making a cylinder of chicken wire, lining it with newspaper and mulch, and planting your potatoes in that. The writers claimed this method could produce "hundreds of pounds of potatoes in less than 30 square feet." This seemed a bit iffy to me, given that Fedco said you needed to plant your potatoes at least 8 inches apart for fingerling varieties and 10 to 12 inches apart for full-size ones. However, the Ontario Potato Board was more optimistic, saying you only needed to space the seed potatoes 5 to 7 inches apart. It also said you can use other kinds of containers, such as a burlap bag, a garbage can, or any tall container with drainage holes drilled in the bottom.

Now, as it happens, Brian and I already have some large buckets with drainage holes in them: the ones we used as tree-watering buckets when we first planted our plum trees. According to Instructables, each of these should hold about three potato plants, so with five buckets, we could accommodate fifteen plants, or just about two pounds' worth. We're not going to attempt anything on a bigger scale than that just yet.

As for which variety of potato to grow, Fedco sorted its offerings into four types: early, mid-season, late, and fingerling. We confined our search to the fingerling type, since we've found this type of potato to be both particularly tasty and particularly expensive to buy. Fedco had nine fingerling potatoes on offer, with intriguing names and descriptions such as the deep purple Magic Molly, the red-fleshed AmaRosa, and the Austrian Crescent, with its "unearthly yields" of pale yellow potatoes up to ten inches long. The best one for newbies like us appeared to be the Pinto, described as a "real workhorse with high yields and excellent resistance to pests and disease. They're pretty, too, with "striking bicolor skins" of yellow and red, and their flavor is described as "buttery and decadent with a creamy texture." For a first experiment with potato growing, it sounds like a sure winner.

So, as our 2019 garden settles in for the winter, we're looking ahead to another year of doing more of the same stuff that worked so well this year—plus a little something new that may or may not work. Only one way to find out!

Disposables not yet ditched

Back in January, when I did my Thrift Week series on disposable items we've replaced with reusable ones, I considered doing a follow-up post on the few disposable items we still use, and what it would cost us to get them out of our lives. However, other and more time-sensitive topics absorbed my attention for a while, and so I never got around to it.

But in the past couple of days, a couple of things (which I'll discuss below) brought the topic back to the top of my list. So here's a quick rundown of the disposable items that I have not eliminated from my ecofrugal life, and why:

1. Almond Milk Cartons
Since we (mostly I) switched from cow's milk to almond milk, our household's waste output has actually risen significantly. Unlike dairy milk, which is cheapest to buy in recyclable plastic jugs, almond milk can be purchased most cheaply in plastic-lined cardboard cartons that can't be recycled anyplace that I know of. (The Almond Breeze website claims that its cardboard cartons are in fact recyclable for "nearly 12 million households in 26 states in the US," but ours doesn't happen to be one of them.) These cartons now make up by far the biggest component of our household trash.

Now, there are some brands of almond milk that are available in large plastic jugs, such as (again) Almond Breeze. However, it's not clear what type of plastic these jugs are made from. The fact that the jug is opaque suggests to me that it's probably a #5 plastic, which our curbside recycling (along with most recycling programs around the country) no longer takes. Unless there's a brand out there that comes in recyclable #1 or #2 plastic jugs, switching wouldn't solve the problem.

The only reasonable way to eliminate this source of waste would be to start making our own almond milk. However, research I did into homemade almond milk last year suggests that this would actually be quite a bit more expensive than buying it. Without the commercial thickeners the big manufacturers rely on, you have to use a whole lot more almonds per cup to get the consistency right. I calculated that using Kitchn's recipe, which calls for a ratio of one cup of almonds to two cups of water, we'd be paying around $8.57 for half a gallon of almond milk— roughly four times as much as we pay now. Assuming I go through about two cartons of almond milk per week, our cost per year would increase from around $210 to over $890. So that would be an extra $680 per year just to send less trash to the landfill — not to mention the environmental cost of all the additional almonds that would go into the homemade almond milk. It really doesn't make sense from either a financial or an environmental viewpoint.

2. Toilet Paper
It's now been almost exactly five years since I conducted my toilet paper tracking experiment, in which I counted how long it took me and Brian to go through a 12-pack of toilet paper and used that info to figure out how much TP we use in a year. After finding that it took us exactly 64 days to use up a dozen rolls, I calculated our usage at 68.5 rolls per year, for an annual cost of $25.66. Since then, the cost of Trader Joe's TP has gone up from $4.50 per dozen to $4.99, bumping up our annual cost to $28.46, but we're still not exactly breaking the bank on this stuff.

So I was somewhat baffled to see a Reddit post claiming that a bidet would "pay for itself in savings." The author argued that "the average person uses about 50 rolls of toilet paper a year...and a family of four spends about $250 annually on the stuff," and I thought, whaaaaaat? I realize our usage of 34 rolls per person per year may be a bit below average, and we're certainly paying less than the average person for each roll, but surely it can't be that big a difference!

Just to make sure, I crunched the numbers for the most extravagant, plushiest toilet paper I could find: Quilted Northern Supreme. This stuff is certainly a lot pricier than Trader Joe's, at a whopping $1.17 per roll. But even so, at 50 rolls per person per year, that's only $234 per year for a family of four. What does this poster think the "average" American family is wiping its tushes with, dollar bills?

Moreover, even if you accept the $250-per-year claim at face value, it's still unclear that a bidet would be a money-saver. In my initial research on this topic, I found that in theory, at least, a bidet is used not to replace toilet paper but to achieve "complete cleanliness" after wiping. Now, some people obviously ignore this advice and use the bidet for cleaning, but they still need to dry off afterwards. They've either got to use TP for that, which would use up at least half as many sheets as simply wiping, or use a towel or washcloth, which then has to be washed, adding to annual laundry costs.

Assuming that (a) you live with three other people, all sharing one bathroom, and (b) you're currently using the most expensive TP possible and actually paying a total of $250 per year for the family, and (c) you spend $200 for a bidet seat at Lowe's, and (d) you immediately start using it with reusable towels, eliminating your TP cost entirely, and (e) the additional water used by the bidet itself and the extra loads of laundry comes to no more than $50 per year, then this device could pay for itself in one year. But that's an awful lot of ifs. And it's quite clear that for my family, with only two people and a $28.46-per-year TP bill, it would take at least 4.4 years to pay for itself, probably longer. So unless the price of TP goes up a lot, or the price of bidets comes way down, I can't see this being cost-effective for us.

There is still, of course, the "family cloth" alternative: using reusable cloths for wiping, rather than toilet paper. But given the additional equipment and laundry required (basically equivalent to having a cloth-diapered infant in the house), it hardly seems worth the effort to save, at most, $28 per year.

3. Dental Floss
The last time I measured our household trash, back before the almond milk cartons swelled our waste stream, dental floss was actually a significant component of it. It was also a particularly annoying one, since it seems like you should be able to make dental floss out of something that could be composted. However, the cheapest brand I've ever found that meets this criterion is Radius, which is made from silk and costs $4.88 for 33 yards. The standard nylon kind we buy at the drugstore (or get free from the dentist) costs, at most, $2 for 100 yards. Assuming I use 18 inches of this stuff each night (Brian seldom bothers to floss, yet still somehow has better teeth than I do), we go through about 1.8 containers per year, for an annual cost of $3.65; switching to the silk stuff would increase this cost to $26.99. Considering what a small volume of waste we're talking about here, it really doesn't seem worth it.

There's one other alternative I've seen that would be completely waste-free: a water flosser, such as the WaterPik. A study I've seen on these suggests that they're actually quite effective at removing plaque — even better than string floss — so I don't think my teeth would suffer as a result. However, the water flosser has several disadvantages, starting with its cost. The top-rated MOSPRO flosser costs $40, equivalent to nearly 11 years' worth of dental floss. On top of that, we'd have a small ongoing cost for electricity to recharge its batteries. (There's one water flosser, the Carejoy, that doesn't require electricity, but it doesn't get very good reviews.) It's also much bigger than a roll of floss, which fits neatly in the medicine cabinet; we'd have to keep it out on the counter, where our cats would be sure to mess with it. Once again, this doesn't seem like a very good investment for the tiny amount of waste it would eliminate.

4. Cotton Swabs
The final disposable product in our medicine cabinet is cotton swabs. We use these for a variety of tasks: cleaning computer keyboards, dabbing antiseptic on a paper cut, small gluing jobs, and occasionally cleaning ears (yes, I know you're not supposed to do this, but honestly, what else are you supposed to use?). And to be honest, most of the time, I don't really count them as waste. We buy the swabs with cardboard cores rather than plastic ones, so used ones can simply go in the bathroom compost bin. So the only waste these swabs add to our household trash is the plastic container they come in, and since we go through maybe one package per year, that's not much.

However, using waste as a proxy for wastefulness obscures the real environmental cost of disposable products like these. In reality, most of the damage they cause comes not at the end of their life, but at the beginning. And cotton happens to be a particularly costly crop, using large amounts of water and pesticides. (Organic cotton doesn't use the pesticides, but it uses even more water and land, since it takes more plants to produce the same volume of material.)

This past week, I learned of a company that's actually making a reusable alternative: the LastSwab. Made from silicone, it can be washed by hand with soap and water and used over and over. It comes in a "basic" style with a nubby tip, and a smoother "Beauty" style with a fine point for applying make-up. The downside: both versions cost $16. They purport to "replace up to 1,000 cotton swabs," but considering that you can buy 500 cotton swabs at the store for about $3, the LastSwab is still more than 2.5 times as expensive — and unlike the paper-and-cotton swabs we use now, it can't be composted when it reaches the end of its life. So it seems unlikely that it would ever actually pay for itself. (The same company that makes LastSwab is also apparently working on a "LastTissue," which it plans to unveil soon via KickStarter. It's a bit confusing to me, since I thought a reusable tissue was called a handkerchief and could be purchased for a buck or two. But maybe they've come up with a revolutionary new alternative that millennials won't find gross.)


So there you have it: the four disposable products in my life that I'm not actively planning to replace any time soon. Of course, if a truly ecofrugal alternative to any of them comes along — something that's both less expensive and less wasteful — I'll cheerfully snatch at it. But realistically, I'm not expecting that to happen any time soon.

Money Crashers: Best Christmas Gifts for Girlfriends and Boyfriends

Two more of the holiday-themed articles I've written for Money Crashers just came out today, and they're what you might call a matched set. The first, 20 Best Christmas Gift Ideas for Your Girlfriend (on Every Budget), offers up gift ideas for the special lady in your life at different price points: under $20, $20 to $50, and $51 to $100. And the second, 20 Best Christmas Gift Ideas for Your Boyfriend (on Every Budget), does the same for your gentleman friend.

I made a point of stressing in both articles that the ideas listed here are just that — ideas to get you started. I can't tell you the perfect gift for your girlfriend or boyfriend, because I don't know that person like you do. What I can do instead is tell you about gifts other women or men have said they liked, and you can map that onto what you know about your significant other's interests and tastes to come up with an ideal present that fits your budget.

Note that the use of "Christmas" rather than "holidays" in the title was my editor's idea, not mine. I tried to keep the articles neutral, using the word "holidays" throughout, so they'd be appropriate gift guides regardless of what holiday you're celebrating, but I guess my desire for neutrality was trumped by SEO concerns. However, I did succeed in keeping both articles gender-neutral as far as the reader is concerned, so no matter whether you're a man or a woman, you can shop for either a girlfriend or a boyfriend with the help of these pieces.

Grow-your-own decor

For several years now, I've followed the same routine when it comes to seasonal decorations. In the fall, as soon as Jack-be-little pumpkins become available at the farmers' market, I buy three of them for $2 and deploy them on the steps of my front stoop. Those stay up until Thanksgiving weekend, when I stop by the Christmas tree vendors in the Sears parking lot and pick up a big bundle of trimmed-off branches for another buck or two. I bind the longest pieces to the railings of the front stoop with red-and-silver holiday ribbon, add a string of white LED lights, and use what's left of the greenery to make indoor arrangements in flowerpots. I've made some modifications to the indoor decorations in the past few years to make them cat-safe, but the basic decorating scheme has stayed the same. And in a typical year, I don't have to spend more than $5 on it.

But this year, this system ran into a snag. Two snags, actually. First the farmers' market didn't have any Jack-be-littles, so I had to buy them at the supermarket. That cost an extra dollar, but that was no big deal; the bigger problem was that the supermarket pumpkins, exposed to the elements, started to rot within a couple of weeks. I've never encountered that problem with the ones from the farmers' market; sometimes they'd be starting to look a little iffy by the time Thanksgiving rolled around, but I was always able to make them last until it was time to put up the Yuletide greenery. This year, I had to discard two of the three pumpkins well before Thanksgiving, and by that time the store was no longer selling them, so I couldn't replace them.

Then, over Thanksgiving weekend, when we stopped by the Sears parking lot to pick up our evergreens, we discovered that the Christmas tree vendors were no longer there. Even though our Sears store is one of the few in the country that's still in business, the vendors had apparently decided the traffic there wasn't good enough, so they'd left a sign saying that they'd moved to the parking lot of a Staples in Woodbridge, eight miles away. Eight extremely traffic-heavy miles in a direction we never travel normally.

We were reluctant to go that far out of our way solely for the evergreens, so instead, we decided to do a little hunting around the shopping centers in our area to see if we could find anyone else selling trees closer by. While shopping last Wednesday, we cruised through about half a dozen shopping center parking lots and found nothing. We also checked the prices of greenery at the Home Depot and Lowe's, thinking it might be worth paying a bit more for our evergreens if it saved us a stressful trip. They had some, but they were charging $10 for a small bunch less than half the size of the bundle we usually buy from the tree vendors, and probably not enough to decorate more than one of our railings.

So at that point, we decided to go to Plan C. Instead of finding a new tree vendor, we'd see how much greenery we could manage to trim off our own trees and bushes.

Now, since we cut down all the big bushes in front of our house, the only evergreen we have actually on our property is a largish cypress in the back yard, squished up between the garden fence, the back fence, and the shed. However, there's also a cypress in our next-door neighbor's yard that hangs over the fence into our driveway, which puts us within our rights to trim the bits that are encroaching on our property. We were also able to trim off some branches of their yew bushes that were sticking through the fence.

So, between those two and the one in the back, we were able to amass a fairly reasonable collection of greenery, using our recycling bin as a container. The only problem was that it didn't have many of the longer branches that are most useful for attaching to the railings. I could have used a whole bunch of the shorter ones, but it would have been a lot more difficult to tie them on securely. So I opted to decorate only the front railings this year and skip the side porch.

On the plus side, the yew and cypress branches were much less prickly than the spruce and fir we tend to acquire from the tree vendors, so the process of securing them to the railings was much more comfortable than it usually is. I even snipped off some long branches from our rosemary plants to twist through through the lights and cover up the bare wire.

And there was plenty of greenery left over to fill all the vases in the house and make my little flower-pot arrangements for the tops of bookcases. I was even able to make more dramatic displays for the downstairs rooms, with the help of a couple of extra rolls of ribbon I bought last year.

The moral of this little story, I would say, is "Use what you have." Many people, finding themselves unable to buy cheap greenery from the Christmas tree vendors, would have assumed their only option was to pay the inflated prices for it at Home Depot and other home stores. (For that matter, many people would never have thought to get greenery from the tree vendors in the first place; they would have just shelled out $18 for a roll of fresh pine garland every year.)

But for us ecofrugal folks, it makes much more sense to follow the "buyerarchy" outlined in a recent post in the Frugal forum on Reddit. If you need something, instead of running out to the store, first check to see if you can make do with what you have. If you can't, work your way through other options such as borrowing, swapping, thrifting, or making your own. Only if all else fails should you actually have to shell out cash for something new.

I'm dreaming of a thrifted Christmas

Yesterday, my sister sent me a link to a story from the Boston Globe about how more and more people—millennials and post-millennials in particular—are asking their family members and friends not to buy them new stuff for Christmas. Instead, they're requesting secondhand gifts or gifts of experiences, such as museum passes and event tickets. In addition to the individual stories, the article provides survey data to show that nearly half of all Americans would consider giving secondhand gifts, and well over half would be willing to receive them.

In other words, I have once again found myself—to my complete surprise—ahead of the curve.

Because, as you know, Brian and I have been giving secondhand and otherwise green gifts for years. I frequently post a green gift roundup article after the holidays about which of the gifts we gave that year were eco-friendly, and how they went over, as well as about any gifts we received that will help us lead a greener life in the coming year. I even have a column labeled "green" in my holiday Excel spreadsheet (because yes, of course I keep track of all our gifts with an Excel spreadsheet. I am the nerdiest person in the whole entire world.) It denotes what percentage of the gifts we've given were secondhand, purchased from local businesses, or otherwise earth-friendly, and each year I aim to push the percentage a little higher than it was the year before.

This year, I'm pleased to report, we're off to a good start. Earlier today, Brian and I dragged out the box of items we've picked up at yard sales and other events as possible gifts, and we went through it to figure out which of them might be suitable for this year. Some of them didn't make the cut—in particular, an assortment of books, mostly from yard sales, that we'd been holding onto for years in hopes one of our niblings would like them. We finally concluded that any kid in our family who wanted to own these probably already did, so we set them aside to donate to our local library's first annual Children and Teens Book Sale. (We also culled some board games that we never play from our collection for this purpose.)

However, other items in the box were more on-target. Without getting too specific (since some of our relatives occasionally read this blog), we found books we'd acquired at the library book sale, toys and clothes picked up at yard sales, works of art bought from the annual Arts in the Park Event, and pre-owned games that some of our niblings should be just the right age for. Between those and subscriptions to eco-friendly publications, we've already got over one-third of our holiday gifts covered with items that qualify as green.

As for the gifts we still need to buy, we have several ideas about where to shop for additional green items. The aforementioned Children and Teens Book Sale is two weeks from now, and it will afford an opportunity to find not books and games for the children and teens who aren't covered yet—as well as for game-playing families. I've also been cruising eBay for potential clothing gift items, and I've watch-listed a couple I have my eye on. And I can always check out Alibris for specific books I'm hoping to find secondhand.

We've already bought a few gifts that didn't qualify as green (such as the game we gave my cousin, which we encouraged him to open right away so we could play it together over Thanksgiving weekend). And there are a couple of gifts we're making (mostly homemade foodstuffs) that aren't especially eco-friendly. So our gift list won't be 100 percent green this year, but with a little luck, we may be able to come closer than we ever have before.

Money Crashers: Holiday articles

As you know, I've long been a believer that the holiday season (meaning Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Yule, Festivus, and any other winter solstice holiday) should not start until after Thanksgiving. I avoid going into local stores that display Christmas wares before Thanksgiving, and I've actually boycotted stores that started their Black Friday sales on Thanksgiving Day. However, this boycott does not extend to my work life, since any holiday shopping article needs to be written well before Thanksgiving in order to make it through to publication in early December. (Once I wrote an article on green gift giving that didn't get published until December 23, with Hanukkah already over and Christmas just two days away, so ever since then I've made a point of being early with these.)

Hence, I've currently got several holiday articles in the pipeline at Money Crashers, and two of them have already been published. However, I've waited until now to publicize them here, so as to avoid thrusting Christmas into your Thanksgiving weekend. Now, with the holiday season officially under way, I can tell you about them.

The first piece, 30 Best Gift Ideas for Foodies (on Every Budget), is about how to find  the perfect gift for a foodie friend. It provides options in several price ranges, from new and interesting ingredients to useful kitchen gizmos to spiffy aprons and chef coats. With so much to choose from, you're sure to find something suitable for your favorite foodie.

The second, How to Create a Holiday Budget and Stick to It, is about using a budget to avoid holiday overspending. Technically, this one may be coming a bit late for those who started their holiday shopping on Black Friday, but it can still help you keep your total spending within limits and avoid a debt hangover after New Year's Day.

By the way, this second piece also includes a long section full of money-saving strategies for the holidays—but after it was published, my editor asked if I could pull those out into a separate article. So at some point in December, most of these tips will get cut from the budgeting piece and moved into the new one. I'll alert you when it comes out.

So much for solar panels

It's been more than five years since I first started toying with the idea of putting solar panels on our roof. The first time I attempted to estimate the cost of a solar array, I found that it would cost something like $10,000, or a little over $7,000 with the 30% tax credit available at the time, and would take about 11 years to pay for itself. Given that we were already able to buy renewable energy through the NJ Clean Power Choice program for only around $5 extra per month on our electric bill, it seemed to make most sense to wait and see if the prices dropped.

A year later, I got some quotes on a solar energy system. The cost was still around $7,000 after credits, but factoring in the rebates we could receive from our utility from putting clean power into the grid, it looked like solar would be a good value anyway; if we paid for the system up front, it could net us around $11,000 over the course of 20 years. But we hesitated to take the plunge, because we knew that our roof was pretty old and would need replacing within a few years. That job would be a much bigger hassle if we had solar panels up there, so it seemed to make sense to wait until after doing the roof before looking seriously into installing a solar power system of our own. The prices were still falling, so it looked like we had nothing to lose by waiting.

Well, this past spring, after a contractor alerted us that our roof was on its last legs, we finally replaced it. (Turns out that job may not be done yet, as we discovered just this week that our brand-new roof is leaking, but that's a story for another post.) So when we ran into a guy in Home Depot last week who was keen to send someone to our house to give us a quote on solar power, we figured, sure, it couldn't hurt to take the meeting.

So, a week or so ago, a guy from Sunrun showed up at our house. After looking at our electricity usage, he warned that we probably wouldn't be able to save that much with solar panels, simply because our current electric usage was so low. (I had already told the guy we met in the store that our average monthly electric bill was less than $40, but I guess he was being paid based on the number of people he signed up.) But then he said, hey, many people did this just for the environmental benefits, and it wouldn't cost any more this way, so he might as well give us a quote. Except when he tried to enter our numbers into his estimator app, it didn't work. He called up headquarters and found out what the problem was: We did not meet the minimum size requirements for a Sunrun system.

Turns out, at least in PSE&G's territory, solar installers are not allowed to give a customer a system that provides more than 100 percent of their power needs, because then PSE&G would have to pay those customers more each year for their contributions to the grid than they could collect from them. (You would think they'd consider that a plus, since it would help them to increase the percentage of the energy in the grid that's renewable, as state law requires, but apparently that's not the way they like to do it.) And since our electric usage was so low, a system meeting 100 percent of our needs would simply be too small a system to be worth installing.

So this seems like a pretty simple and conclusive answer to the whole solar question. Even if a solar power system could save us money in theory, in practice, there's no way for us to get one. So I guess we can stop worrying about it and simply continue paying 12.85 cents per kWh to Ambit Energy, our third-party power provider, for its wind-generated energy. Or, better still, maybe we should go ahead and dump our month-to-month plan for a two-year commitment, which gets us a guaranteed 3 percent off the price per kWh we'd be playing with PSE&G. The only reason we didn't sign up with this plan in the first place is that we thought we might want to dump Ambit for solar panels within the next two years; if that option is off the table, we have nothing to lose.

Money Crashers: 8 Best Browser Extensions to Save Money While Shopping Online

Six years ago, I wrote about my initial suspicions, and later wholehearted embrace, of the PriceBlink add-on for my Web browser. Whenever I shopped online, it automatically searched other sites for the same item at a lower price, making comparison shopping easy. It could even locate coupon codes for me to save me more money at whichever site I was using.

I continued to use this browser extension for several years, but when I installed the latest version of Firefox on my computer, I could no longer get it to work. Every time I tried to install it, I got a "connection failure" message. So, for a while, I gave up and went back to comparing prices and finding coupon codes the (somewhat) old-fashioned way, hunting them out one at a time for each item. It was still a lot easier than comparing prices the genuinely old-fashioned, pre-Internet way, by physically going around to different stores, so it didn't bother me much.

But recently, Money Crashers invited me to write an article about a new browser extension called Honey, which appears to do many of the same things PriceBlink used to do for me. It can't compare prices across different sites, but it can compare prices from different sellers on Amazon, as well as automatically tracking down coupon codes and, on many sites, giving you cash back. After a little discussion with my editor, this proposed piece turned into a roundup of nine browser extensions that save you money online in a variety of ways. They compare prices, find coupon codes, provide cash back, track Amazon prices over time so you can see when you're getting a good deal, and warn you when online reviews of a product appear to be fake.

For me, Honey appeared to be the best of the bunch, so I'm now running that on my browser, and it has already saved me nearly $20 on a pair of winter boots. Check out the article, and you might just find a browser add-on (or several) that will work equally well for you.

8 Best Browser Extensions to Save Money While Shopping Online

Dairy-free hits and misses

In our ongoing quest to reduce our use of dairy products, Brian and I are continuing to experiment with new substitutes for the few remaining cow-based products in our diets. In the past month, we've tried two new nondairy alternatives—one successful, one not so much.

The successful one was a coconut whipped topping that we found at Trader Joe's. Back when we first started down the dairy-free path over a year ago, this was the first place I looked for a whipped cream alternative, since I'd seen some very good reviews of their coconut-based whipped cream. But sadly, when we went looking for it, we found it was no longer available. So instead, we tried a bunch of other substitutes, including coconut-based Reddi Wip (which tasted okay but didn't come out of the can very well), various DIY recipes that didn't work at all, and Coco Whip, which was good in a raspberry fool but not ideal for topping pudding or cocoa, since it doesn't keep very long in the fridge.

However, on a recent trip to Trader Joe's, we discovered cans of a new coconut whipped topping in the refrigerator case, bearing the name "Sweet Rose." We snatched up a can, brought it home, and tried it on cocoa and other desserts, and I can report that it works quite well. It does have a very distinct coconut flavor, not a neutral sweet taste like regular whipped cream, so it might not be suitable for every type of dessert, but it was perfectly compatible with chocolate and reasonably good with the apple-raisin bread pudding (made with oat milk). We made a point of handling the can with particular care, always shaking it before use, keeping it vertical while dispensing, and cleaning the nozzle after use, and we seem to have avoided the problems we had with the Reddi-Wip can.

The only real problem I have with this stuff is the cost. A $3.29 can only holds 6.5 ounces, only half as much as the large cans of whipped cream we usually buy for around the same price, so that makes it around twice as expensive. Worse, it seems like the amount we actually got out of the can before it ran dry was less than half as much as we usually get from a can of whipped cream. I didn't actually measure it, but I know it only lasted us about a week. So if we wanted to switch entirely from regular whipped cream to this coconut stuff, we'd have to pick up two or three cans on every trip to Trader Joe's, and we'd also have to go through the work of recycling those cans a lot more often. Still, I suspect the small amount of extra waste produced from those extra whipped cream nozzles is less damaging to the environment than the cow-based emissions from real whipped cream.

Still, if we're willing to put up with these minor inconveniences, it looks like we may finally have a workable solution to the problem of whipped cream. Cheese, however, continues to elude us.

After our success with the vegan mozzarella recipe from It Doesn't Taste Like Chicken, we thought we'd try the same blogger's vegan nacho cheese recipe to see how well it substituted for cheddar in something like our favorite Cheesy Rice Casserole. This recipe calls for cashews, so it's both a bit pricier and harder to make than the mozzarella, but we thought we could at least try it and, if it worked, see if we could come up with a way to combine the seasonings from this recipe with the technique from the faux-zarella.

However, before we got around to acquiring all the ingredients for this experiment, I came across this other recipe on the same blog: Homemade Vegan Mac & Cheese Powder. And we thought, gee, that looks much easier to make, and it doesn't call for any ingredients we don't already have. And if it works as well for macaroni and cheese as she says it does, it should work equally well in our casserole, if we can just figure out how much to use.

So we consulted a standard macaroni and cheese recipe and found that, with half a pound of cheddar cheese—slightly more than we use in our casserole—you can make enough cheese sauce for 1 3/4  cups of dried pasta. And according to the blog, 1/4 cup of the mac & cheese powder was enough for 1 cup of noodles. Hence, we reasoned, half a cup of the powder, or half a recipe's worth, should be plenty for our casserole. We'd just mix it up with some homemade oat milk in the same proportions she used for her mac & cheese sauce (1/2 cup powder to 1 1/2 cups milk), stir it into the spinach and rice, bake it, and see how it came out.

When we pulled the casserole out of the oven, it looked pretty close to the original version. A bit yellower in color, and not as nicely browned on top, since we hadn't added the melted butter the recipe calls for, but reasonably like what we were used to. But the actual taste was nothing at all like the original. It wasn't just that it lacked the cheesy flavor we were used to; it had a distinct flavor of its own that was discordant and off-putting. There was a faint sweet undertone to it that seemed completely wrong, and the lemon pepper and turmeric, though there wasn't a lot of either in the recipe, also struck a discernible, discordant note. Brian wasn't as bothered by it as I was, but he certainly wasn't enthusiastic about it.

So, as far as we're concerned, the It Doesn't Taste Like Chicken blog is now batting .50 on vegan cheese substitutes. The mozzarella was great, the mac & cheese powder awful. Based on this average, we're not in any big hurry to try the nacho cheese recipe, which could come out anywhere on that spectrum.

However, we did learn one thing from this experiment with the casserole: it doesn't necessarily need to have cheese in it to taste good. What we disliked about this dairy-free version wasn't the lack of cheese, but the added flavors that didn't work with it. So now we think the next time we try it, we'll just leave out the cheese entirely and instead stir in a spoonful of Penzeys Mural of Flavor, which should be compatible with all the other ingredients. With the eggs (which we currently have no plans to give up) to hold the casserole together, it will probably work fine, and it will actually be easier and cheaper than the original.

As for the other cheddar-based recipes we enjoy, such as quesadillas this Easy Vegan Cheese sauce from ElaVegan looks like it might do the trick. It appears genuinely easy and quick to make—even easier than the vegan mozzarella—and all the ingredients in it are already in our kitchen. So this will probably be our next dairy-free experiment, and I'll post you on the results.

Money Crashers: 3 new articles

Money Crashers has just popped up three new articles of mine all in a row: pop, pop, pop. Actually, two of them aren't completely new, because the editors decided to split this old article of mine into two. So now you've got one article on the pros and cons of paid credit monitoring and how it compares to other ways of protecting your information for free, and a separate article on how the top credit monitoring services—both free and paid—compare in terms of their features and performance. (I was not able to compare them in terms of cost, sadly, because it's a new policy at Money Crashers never to mention the actual price of anything. The theory is that prices change so fast, our articles would quickly go out of date if we did this. Which is true, but I still think it's not very useful to tell people "X is a better buy than Y" if we can't say what X and Y actually cost.)

The other new article is on a different topic: how long you actually need to keep all those documents that mark every moment of our modern lives. Store receipts, junk mail, bills, bank statements, tax returns, pay stubs—do we actually need to keep all this stuff? If so, for how long? And if we do, how are we supposed to keep it organized so we can actually find it when we need it? And if we don't, can we just toss it in the bin, or does we have to shred it so identity thieves won't get their hands on it?

My article answers all these questions. It outlines what all those documents are actually good for, how long to keep them, several ways to organize them in both paper and electronic form, and how to dispose of them safely. (One tidbit I learned while researching this document: If you use a crosscut shredder, the kind that's recommended for optimal security, you can't just throw the resulting fragments into your curbside recycling bin, because they would blow away and make a mess. It can still be recycled, but it needs to be packaged differently to make it work. You can, however, toss them into your compost bin if you have one.)

How Long to Keep Important Documents (and What You Can Shred)

Recipe of the Month: Vegan Stuffed Acorn Squash

Last summer, Brian and I discovered a great vegan mozzarella recipe on the blog "It Doesn't Taste Like Chicken." It was so much better than any of the more expensive nondairy cheeses we'd bought at the store, and so easy to make (much easier than real homemade mozzarella, which we've also attempted), that I decided to sign up for her weekly recipe mailings. And last week, my email brought me one that looked so tasty and interesting, I just had to try it: Vegan Stuffed Acorn Squash.

You can get the full recipe on her site, but the gist of it is, first you cut acorn squash in half, scoop out the seeds, and bake them. Then you stuff them with a filling made from quinoa cooked in veggie broth with onion, garlic, chopped nuts, dried cranberries, thyme, sage, salt, pepper, and cinnamon. There was nothing in that description that didn't sound good to me. Plenty of healthy fresh veggies, quinoa to supply carbs and protein, and an interesting combination of flavors and textures. How could it miss?

We already had most of the ingredients needed for this recipe on hand, but we needed to buy the dried cranberries and, of course, the acorn squash. Since the recipe said two squash would make four servings, we decided to buy just one for the two of us. On a trip to Shop-Rite, we spotted acorn squash for just $1 a pound, but we decided to hold off and see if it was available at the farmers' market, figuring we were willing to pay a little more for the sake of supporting local farmers. That turned out to be a smart move. Although it was a very chilly trek out to the farmers' market on Friday, with the temperature at around 43 and a stiff wind blowing right in our faces, the butternut squash there were only 75 cents a pound—so buying local actually saved us money. One good-sized squash cost us $1.80. As for the cranberries, we needed only a quarter-cup of them for the halved recipe—which was fortunate, since these suckers are really expensive even when bought in bulk. That one scoop of them cost us $1.55, nearly as much as the squash.

Since we had other activities going on Friday and Saturday nights that cut into our cooking time, Brian waited until tonight to make the dish. It wasn't all that difficult, just a bit time-consuming, since the squash halves took about 40 minutes to bake (5-15 minutes longer than the recipe's estimate). However, there were no such complications with the quinoa filling, which went pretty much according to the instructions. The recipe offered a choice of different nuts to include in the filling, so Brian used walnuts, which we had on hand; salting it "to taste" came to about 1/4 teaspoon for the half batch. The only thing he admits he may have fudged a bit is that he didn't quite halve the amounts of fresh herbs he used when halving the recipe.

The finished dish was certainly pretty to look at. The baked squash halves, with their golden color and scalloped shape, looked quite appetizing with the filling mounded up over their tops. Appearance-wise, at least, it was a dish you wouldn't hesitate to serve at a fancy dinner party.

And taste-wise? Well, it certainly wasn't bad; it just wasn't quite as good as I expected based on the ingredient list. Part of the problem may have been that Brian used a rather generous hand with the herbs, so the filling was a bit too wibbly-wobbly thymey-wimey for my taste. But mostly, I just didn't like the baked acorn squash quite as much as the butternut squash we usually make. Although it was certainly cooked through and tender, it seemed a bit stringier than the butternut squash, and it didn't have the same sweet, full flavor. As I said, it wasn't exactly bad, just a little tasteless. However, I found that sprinkling on some of the squash seeds, which Brian had roasted without cleaning them first, as Martha Stewart recommends, helped quite a bit. And while the dish wasn't exactly bursting with flavor, it certainly was filling; although Brian finished his whole squash half, I only got through half of mine before hitting the full mark on my internal gauge.

So would we make this recipe again? Well, probably not. Though it wasn't that hard to make, I wasn't exactly crazy about it, and the dried cranberries make it a little pricey for a dish that we don't both love. Instead, I might be inclined to try a different squash recipe from the same website, Stuffed Roasted Butternut Squash. This one uses butternut, a squash I know I like, and mixes the flesh of the squash in with the stuffing, which would probably help distribute the flavor better. So keep an eye out for that dish in a future blog post.

Gardeners' Holidays 2019: Late Harvest

When I checked the weather report this morning, I discovered a warning from the National Weather Service about the first frost of the year hitting in the wee hours of last night. (Why the NWS didn't warn me about this when I checked my phone last night, instead of warning me about tornadoes that had already hit the area the night before, I'm not quite sure.) Fortunately, it seems to have mostly spared our immediate area; one of our peppers looks a bit frostbitten, but the rest of the peppers and tomatoes still on the vines, and what's left of the basil and beans, look unharmed.

Still, this was a timely reminder to us that it's about time to start getting our nest ready for winter. So today, we've been taking care of various little errands like replacing the windshield wipers on the car (including the rear one, which was long overdue), stocking it with an ice scraper and mini shovel, checking the condition of our roof gutters, and draining the rain barrel. Brian also went through the garlic we'd harvested this summer (and already eaten some of) to see how much we had left to plant. Unfortunately, the answer turned out to be less than he thought, as some of the heads had rotted, despite being cured with their stalks on in the approved manner. So even though he planted everything we had left, it looks like our garlic crop next year will be no bigger than this year's. Next year, perhaps we'll try picking them a little earlier and making sure we get all the dirt off before curing them.

He then decided, since frost is apparently a potential threat at this point, to go ahead and pick all the remaining peppers and squash. (There are only three squash here, but he'd already brought in about nine others.) He also harvested what was left of the basil, which he will grind up and freeze (the best method we've found for preserving home-grown basil). However, he didn't touch the green tomatoes left on the plants, since none of them were beginning to blush yet. We figure we have a better chance of gleaning a few more ripe tomatoes by leaving them on the vines a bit longer, taking our chances with future frosts, than we do by picking them now and trying to ripen them in a box, which hasn't worked altogether successfully for us in the past.

One other crop he harvested is most of our remaining Climbing French beans. He made a point of letting some of these beans go dry on the vine so that he would have a supply of seed for next year, since we can't buy these at Fedco. As a result, we didn't get as many of these beans for eating this year as I'd hoped for, but we have a whole bunch for planting. So he picked and shelled most of those, and we'll set them aside for next year's garden.

Now the only question is, what shall we do with all this lovely produce? Since this is the last harvest of our 2019 garden (unless we manage to get a few more tomatoes), it deserves a little something special to commemorate it. I would have liked to make the stuffed acorn squash that my new favorite vegan blog (the one where I found the vegan mozzarella recipe we've been using for the past couple of months) served up a recipe for today, but I didn't know how well it would work with butternut squash. And we'd need to acquire some dried cranberries for it, anyway. So we'll have to try that one some other time, possibly as our Recipe of the Month for November.

For tonight, the plan is to make a simple fried rice using some of our freshly harvested Carmen peppers and Thai basil. It'll be a last taste of summer to bid farewell to the warmer days and welcome the cold winter in. And we'll most likely follow that up with a batch of chocolate pudding and a bit of the vegan coconut whipped cream that we were delighted to discover is back in stock at Trader Joe's. We're hoping this will work for us better than the coconut-based Reddi Wip we tried, which got stuck in the bottle and wouldn't dispense. If it's good, it might be the final piece of the puzzle—or at least the biggest remaining piece—in our attempts to go dairy-free.

Then it's off to snuggle up on the couch with a blanket, some Critical Role, and the cats (if they cooperate), before turning back the clocks and tucking ourselves in for a long winter's nap.

Coupon coup

As I've noted before, Brian and I aren't big couponers. Although extreme couponers like to promise that their strategies can save you 50 percent or more on "every single item you buy," my previous experiments with coupons have shown that this only works if you're willing to restrict your diet to whatever happens to be most deeply discounted in any given week. And since we can't really live on a tube of toothpaste, a can of shaving cream, and a candy bar, we simply don't bother with coupons most of the time.

So on those rare occasions when we actually do manage to score a majestic deal, it's such a thrill that I want to share it with the whole world. Or at least the subset of the world that reads my blog.

To that end, check out our haul from a trip to the Stop & Shop yesterday. We got two small (8.9-ounce) boxes of Cheerios, two boxes of pasta, one large can of diced tomatoes, and one little cup of "Sabra Snackers"—a single-portion cup of hummus with pretzels. (This is exactly the kind of ridiculous, overpriced, overpackaged item that we normally avoid, but you'll see in a minute why it made it into our cart.)

Now here's the total price we paid: $2.69. That's less than the regular price of the hummus cup alone, and we got the entire bagful for it.

How, you ask? Well, it's all thanks to the digital coupons that I get with my Stop & Shop loyalty card. This week, it sent me a "Free-Day" offer for the little Sabra hummus cup, and when I clicked to download it to my card, I saw a couple of other good offers on the site as well. Fifty cents off two boxes of store-brand pasta...75 cents off a big can of store-brand tomatoes....and, best of all, $1 off two boxes of certain General Mills cereals. Which happened to be an especially hot deal because the store was running a special three-day sale on those General Mills cereals for just 99 cents a box. Now, at our new baseline price of 12 cents per ounce, that's already a good price, even for a tiny little box. But with a dollar off on two boxes, that works out to less than 50 cents each, which is not merely good but fantastic.

Put all those deals together, and you get a bagful of groceries, including the one pricey packaged item we wouldn't normally buy, for less than three bucks. (Brian can keep it in the fridge at work as a healthier alternative to cocoa for emergency fuel.) We didn't merely win the register-receipt game (the one where the goal is to have your "total savings" at the bottom of the receipt exceed your actual spending); we saved $10.65—nearly 80 percent—off the regular price.

But the very best thing about this particular deal is that the bargains didn't end there. Because when we rang all this up at the checkout, the clerk, rather than treating us like we'd stolen something, actually handed us a store coupon for $1.50 off three boxes of General Mills cereals—the very same cereals that were still on sale for 99 cents a box. And when I dug through my small stash of clipped coupons in my purse, I discovered that I also had a manufacturer coupon for $1 off three boxes of the exact same cereals. And as anyone with any couponing experience knows, store coupons and manufacturer coupons can be stacked.

So today, the last day of the special three-day sale, we went back to the Stop & Shop and bought three more boxes of Cheerios, using both coupons, for a grand total of 47 cents. Three boxes for 47 cents, when the regular price of just one box is $3.69! That's a savings of over 95 percent! Our previous shopping coup pales in comparison.

If we had kept all three of these, our total tally for both trips would have been five boxes of Cheerios for a grand total of $1.45, or 29 cents per box. But we were so happy with our earned blessing, we felt like sharing the wealth, so we dropped one of the boxes in the food bank collection box on our way out of the store. So we still got four boxes for just over 36 cents each, and someone in town who's down on their luck will get to enjoy a bit of ours.

If we really wanted to, we could rinse and repeat yet again, because at the checkout we received yet another store coupon, this time for $1.50 off four boxes. (This is a common coupon strategy: offering first a great deal, then a merely good one on the same product, then a so-so one, until they've got you hooked.) So in theory, we could go back there yet again today and buy four more boxes for $2.46, or 61.5 cents each. But that would give us a total of eight boxes of cereal to store, and there has to be a limit somewhere.

Money Crashers: 6 Health Insurance Options If You’re Self-Employed

It's now been over 15 years since I first left my job to become a freelancer. It was an uncharacteristically daring move on my part, since freelancing meant an uncertain income and, more seriously still, no benefits — particularly health insurance. I think the only reason I had the nerve to do it when I did was that Brian and I had just become engaged, so I knew I'd soon be able to get health insurance through his job. I just had to sign up for pricey but short-lived COBRA coverage to see myself through the few months before the wedding.

Today, freelancers have a much wider array of options. Instead of having to pay through the nose for COBRA, freelancers can buy a policy on their state healthcare exchange. This is significantly cheaper even at full price, and cheaper still for those with low enough income to qualify for an ACA subsidy.

However, with Obamacare perpetually under siege, first from Congress and now from the courts, it's unclear how much longer freelancers will have this option. And even if it remains available, there's no guarantee it's the best or cheapest way to get coverage.

So if you're a freelancer, it makes sense to learn about all your options. In my latest Money Crashers article, I cover all the different ways freelancers have of finding health care coverage, including Medicaid (for low-income freelancers), Medicare (for those over 65), coverage on a family member's plan, and coverage through organizations. I also discuss the possibility of getting a part-time job that provides benefits.

6 Health Insurance Options If You’re Self-Employed

Money Crashers: 8 Things to Put in Your Safe Deposit Box (and What to Keep Out)

Just a quickie post here to let you know about my new Money Crashers article on the subject of safe deposit boxes. If the very phrase sounds hopelessly 20th century to you, consider this: even today, there are times when only the original paper copy of a document will do (like when you need to renew your NJ driver's license with our arcane 6-point ID system). So you need to have these documents, and that means you need a safe place to keep them. And while you could just buy a safe to keep at home, it's going to be either incredibly bulky or pretty easy to steal, lock and all.

So, what are these old-school boxes actually good for? In this article, I review the eight things that most experts say it's a good idea to keep in a safe deposit box, as well as eight things you probably shouldn't.

8 Things to Put in Your Safe Deposit Box (and What to Keep Out)

How to make dairy-free bread pudding

Our journey toward a dairy-free lifestyle is still in progress. Some steps are big (like finding a plant-based milk that ticks off all our boxes for flavor, texture, availability, and cost) and others are much smaller, but even the small ones get us farther along the road. This past week, we overcame yet one more small hurdle in our way: figuring out how to make bread pudding without cow's milk.

The first time we first tried making a dairy-free version of this dessert, using some walnut milk we got as a freebie, it didn't work at all well. It took ages to bake, and even when Brian finally gave up and pulled it out, it was still kind of soft and soupy, not firm like a bread pudding should be. And when we tried the same experiment with our favorite almond milk, the result was much the same. Based on these two failures, Brian was inclined to suspect that bread pudding just wouldn't work without dairy, and if we were serious about giving up milk, we'd have to give up this dessert, too. However, I'd seen dairy-free bread pudding recipes online that looked like they had the right consistency, so I thought there must be some way to do it.

As it turns out, one of our early failed experiments along the dairy-free road proved to be the key to this particular puzzle. When we first started looking for a sustainable and inexpensive alternative to cow's milk, one of the first things we tried was homemade oat milk, which we quickly rejected because it turned so thick and gluey when heated as to make hot cocoa undrinkable. However, it occurred to me that this bug could actually be a feature where bread pudding was concerned, since thickening up was exactly the result we wanted and couldn't get with the nut milks. And since oats are cheap and we always have some at home, it wouldn't cost much to try the experiment.

So, last week, when I happened to spot happened to spot a loaf of white bread on the "free stuff" table at a local church, it struck me as a perfect opportunity to try out this new recipe. However, in my eagerness, I snatched it up without noticing the words "gluten free" on the label. When I discovered my error, I was all set to abort the experiment, because using this bread would mean changing two variables at once from our original recipe. If it was a failure, we wouldn't know whether the bread or the milk was to blame; if it was a success, we wouldn't know whether it would still work with regular bread. But Brian persuaded me it couldn't hurt to try, since we already had the bread, the milk would cost us little, and more data is always a good thing.

For the test, he whipped up a batch of homemade oat milk using 1/4 cup of oats and 1 1/3 cups of water. He soaked the oats in the water for around 10 minutes, then blended them. This produced 1 1/3 cups of unsweetened oat milk, which he then used in our standard bread pudding recipe. And as soon as it came out of the oven, we could see the results looked more promising than our previous attempts with nut milks. The surface looked firm and lightly browned, just like it should. But the proof of the pudding, as they say, is in the eating. Would the taste and texture be right once it was dished out?

The answer was yes, mostly. The texture was firm, not soupy like the puddings we'd made with nut milks, but it was a bit sticky. We have no way of knowing whether this was an effect of the oat milk, the gluten-free bread, or a combination of the two; we'll have to try the recipe again with a conventional bread to see. Also, this pudding was noticeably less sweet than it is when we make it with dairy milk, presumably because cows' milk contains some natural sugar and oat milk has essentially none. Brian figures if we try the recipe again, he'll soak the oats a little longer and add a tablespoon of sugar to the milk. But even with these minor flaws, the pudding was definitely edible, and much closer to the original recipe than we'd ever come with either walnut or almond milk.

Now, this bread pudding recipe isn't truly vegan, since it still contains eggs. However, as I've noted before, our goal isn't to develop vegan superpowers; we're just trying to reduce the carbon footprint of our diet, and eggs are fairly trivial offenders as far as carbon is concerned. We might still experiment later with combining the oat milk this recipe with an egg substitute (such as soy flour and water, or ground flaxseeds) to see if we can make a genuinely vegan version, but that's mostly a matter of curiosity. If we can just perfect a dairy-free version, we'll be satisfied.

Next challenge: coming up with a vegan whipped cream to serve with it that isn't a complete fiasco.

My 24-hour Internet fast

It’s been many years since I fasted on Yom Kippur. Even back in the days when I did it every year, I never really believed that I was obeying a command from God or that I would be punished if I didn’t. Partly, it was a matter of cultural identity; I fasted because I was a Jew, and fasting is what Jews do on Yom Kippur. But also, I believed that on some level, it was good for me. Good for me physically, because a 24-hour fast would shrink my stomach and make me less likely to overindulge in the new year, and good for me spiritually, because going hungry for a day would make me more sympathetic to people in need.

Over the years, though, I began to have doubts about whether my yearly fast was really having the desired effect. It certainly wasn’t making me feel better physically; on the contrary, it usually left me with a throbbing headache and an uneasy stomach that didn’t want to accept the food it needed. And these discomforts, far from making me feel spiritually uplifted and sympathetic to all humankind, made me cranky and snappish with the humans in my immediate vicinity. I eventually reached the conclusion that fasting wasn’t doing either my body or my soul any good and quit doing it.

But I never felt entirely easy with my decision. Although I knew that fasting hadn’t done anything to make me a better person, it still felt wrong not to do something special on Yom Kippur — something that would give the day the same weight and significance it had in the lives of my ancestors back in the shtetl. So this year, as I attended the evening service with my parents, I found myself wondering: was there something else I could give up on Yom Kippur, something that really would be physically and spiritually beneficial even if it was difficult? And suddenly the answer came to me: I should go 24 hours without connecting to the Internet.

I quickly realized that doing this would be, in some ways, more of a challenge than going without food. No Internet definitely meant no work, since my job is pretty much entirely online these days — a mixture of Internet research, composing articles in Google Docs, and connecting to coworkers via Gmail, Slack and Trello. And most of the things I normally do as a break from work — checking email, answering online surveys, clicking on whatever intriguing article has popped up on Pocket — would also be off-limits. I wouldn’t be able to solve my daily cryptic crossword (downloaded from BestforPuzzles.com) over breakfast, listen to a podcast in the shower, or read the day’s top headlines from the New York Times. It would be a complete disruption of my routine.

And in a way, that was the point. An Internet fast would force me to take a break from all my daily habits, both good and bad — and in the process, step back and get a clearer look at which was which.

So, after a little initial hesitation — what about the emails I hadn’t answered that afternoon? What about other urgent messages that might come in during the day? — I decided to give it a try. And I made a further decision: as I went through my Internet-free day, I’d document it to see just how it had affected me, for good or bad.


Here's what happened.

***

Tuesday, 10 pm: Upon my return home from services, my husband Brian gets onto my computer to answer, on my behalf, the one email message I feel I can’t afford to leave dangling for the next 24 hours. He then ceremoniously disconnects the Ethernet cable from my computer to ensure that I won’t slip up and connect to the Internet without thinking about it. So now it’s official: I’m doing this.

Wednesday, 7 am: Since Brian is still going to work today, even if I’m not, the alarm wakes us at the usual time. After I take my pills and brush my teeth, I realize I’m not sure what to do with myself next. Since I can’t eat breakfast until half an hour after taking my pill, I’d normally spend the next 30 minutes checking email and printing out my morning puzzle before breakfast, but those activities are now off-limits. Instead, I pick up yesterday’s copy of the Daily Targum — a college paper I normally get only for the crossword — and actually read it.

Wednesday, 8:40 am: After Brian departs for work, I sit down and start writing this article (in TextEdit, which I can use offline). I quickly discover how much I’ve been in the habit of taking mini-breaks throughout my workday, every time I get stuck on a tricky paragraph, to check my email or play a quick game of 2048. Unable to engage in these diversions, I root around on my computer’s hard drive and unearth an old copy of Montana Solitaire, which I can play without benefit of Internet.

Wednesday, 11:10 am: I decide it’s time for a shower. Clicking on iTunes, I realize that I still have part of yesterday’s Hidden Brain podcast left over that I didn’t finish listening to, and since it’s already downloaded, I can listen to it today without breaking my Internet fast. It feels a little like cheating, but I do it. The topic of the episode is outrage: how it’s “hijacking our conversations, our communities, and our minds.” As the presenter and his guests talk about how social media, in particular, has become a constant stream of vitriol, I mentally run over all the emails that have entered my inbox over the past few days and are probably continuing to pile up this very minute. How many of them were from one political mailing list or another, shrieking about the latest travesty in the political realm and the urgent need for MORE MONEY, NOW NOW NOW NOW NOW, to combat it? All of a sudden, I feel a lot better about not being available to receive them.

Wednesday, 12 pm: Time for lunch. As my tummy rumbles, I feel thankful that I’m skipping Internet today rather than food. Then I wonder how ironic it is that not fasting is making me more appreciative about eating.

Wednesday, 1 pm: After consuming my soup, biscuit, apple, two squares of chocolate, and a chapter or two of Ngaio Marsh’s last novel, I find myself once again at loose ends. I can’t do any work, and I can’t do most of the things I normally do for play, since they all involve going online. So instead, I sit down at my computer and start putting together a scenario for “Honey Heist,” a silly little role-playing game I’ve been meaning to run for a while. This is a task I’ve never managed to find the time to work on; during the day I was always either too busy with work or allowing the wonders of the Internet to distract me from work. Apparently a day offline was the kick in the pants I needed to get started.

Wednesday, 2:20 pm: Got so absorbed in planning my Honey Heist, I didn’t even notice it was past my usual time for my afternoon walk. It's chilly and damp out, but not too cold once I get moving. Since I have no work to get back to, I feel free to take my time strolling around town, gathering fall leaves, and stopping into the store to pick up some snacks for tonight’s game.

Wednesday, 3:50 pm: Back from my walk. Take my time arranging my newly collected leaves in their basket and fixing myself a snack (hooray for not fasting). Go back to “work” on the Honey Heist.

Wednesday, 5 pm: Brian comes home from work. I ask him if he knows what time sunset is, since I can’t go back online until then (and I can’t visit Accuweather to check for myself). He checks for me and reports that sunset is at 6:27 pm, so I still have about an hour and a half to go. He also brings me a fresh copy of the Daily Targum, so I have plenty to occupy myself until then.

Wednesday, 6:40 pm: The moment of truth. Having finished dinner, I reconnect to the Internet. In the course of this one day — counting from 5:30 last night, when I left for services — I have accumulated 40 emails (not counting survey invites) across my three email accounts. These include five work-related messages, six about dance practice, four about the concert series, five concerning a friend’s request to borrow a couple of board games from us (which Brian handled for me), one about our weeknight gaming group, and two shrieking political messages. The rest are all newsletters and other trivia that don’t really require my immediate attention.

It takes an hour or more to go through all these accumulated messages, sorting them and responding as necessary. If I'd dealt with them as they came in over the course of the day, it would probably have taken at least as much time, but it would have felt less burdensome because it would have been spread out into shorter blocks of 15 minutes or less. By the time I'm done with it all, I feel almost as tired as if I'd really fasted all day, and more than ready to collapse on the couch with some Netflix (courtesy of my long-lost friend the Internet).


***

So, now that it's all over, what conclusions do I draw from my experiment?

First of all, I can say with relief that I'm not genuinely addicted to the Internet. Going without it for a whole day wasn't terribly burdensome; in some ways, it was actually quite pleasant. Being unable to work or goof off in the ways I usually do left me with time free to do things I normally wouldn't, like planning my Honey Heist, and more time to spend on offline activities I enjoy, such as reading and taking my afternoon walk, without feeling guilty about all the time I was taking away from work. It was definitely less painful than going a day without food.

That said, I have to admit that my life with the Internet is, on the whole, easier than my life without it. It really was awkward not being able to do the little things I've come to rely on: printing out my puzzle in the morning, checking the weather report, sending a quick email message. And while I didn't happen to miss any urgent messages during my 24-hour "fast," that was largely a matter of chance.

As to whether this Internet fast was good for me, that's a tougher question to answer. On the one hand, I think my day without Internet was, on the whole, less stressful than a normal day with it. But the time I spent recovering from the "fast" was actually more stressful than usual, because I had to clear out a 24-hour backlog of messages. And I'll probably have to continue putting in extra hours over the course of the next week or so to make up for the day of work I missed.

I certainly wouldn't say that Internet fasting is something I'd want to incorporate into my life on a regular basis. But as something to do every year on Yom Kippur, it has its points. It certainly does make the day feel different from other days. It forces me to take my mind off my usual everyday concerns and focus on different things — maybe not spiritual things, exactly, but things I might never find the time for on a normal day. And at the same time, it makes me more appreciative of the many blessings of the Internet when I finally get to go back to it. (And unlike regular fasting, it doesn't make me feel too ill by the time I break my fast to be able to enjoy it.)

And if I want to feel more connected to my ancestors in the shtetl, well, after all, they lived without the Internet every day of their lives.