The wheat, the whole wheat, and nothing but the wheat

Passover officially ended last night, and I'm reveling in fresh-baked bread after eight days of matzah. As I mentioned last year during Thrift Week, we bake all our own bread—or, to be more accurate, Brian does—and his default recipe is a basic whole-wheat loaf. This means we go through quite a lot of whole-wheat flour, which, while no doubt better for us than white flour, is also quite a bit more expensive. The best price we can normally find for whole-wheat flour is 85 cents a pound at the Amish market, which is more than twice the usual price for store-brand white flour at nearby supermarkets.

So we were thrilled to the core—or at least several layers down into the crust—when on a recent trip to Costco, we spotted a 20-pound bag of "Chakki Atta" whole-wheat flour for $7.99. That works out to 40 cents a pound, the same price we normally pay for white flour. Assuming it worked the same as our normal whole-wheat flour, it would mean we'd no longer have to make a trade-off between health and cost every time we baked. With this stuff, whole-wheat bread would cost no more than white.

The first recipe Brian tried it in was his basic brown bread, and we discovered with the first bite that this flour was not, in fact, identical to normal whole-wheat flour. The look, texture, and taste of the bread were all changed—but not necessarily for the worse. The bread was lighter in color and finer in texture than usual, a bit denser and moister than our usual slightly crumbly brown bread. The flavor was also lighter and slightly sweeter, closer to white bread. To someone who prefers an extra-hearty bread like Brian's Mega-Fiber Health Bread, it would be a disappointment, but it was perfectly suitable for an everyday loaf—in fact, possibly better than our usual wheat bread, since the flavor was a little more neutral and would go with more types of topping.

I couldn't help suspecting, though, that if the bread this flour produced was so tender and fine-grained, it couldn't really be as healthful as our usual whole-wheat flour. So I did a little research, and I found that there are a few distinctions between the two types of flour. Atta flour is more finely ground than regular whole-wheat flour, and it comes from Indian white wheat, which is a different variety than the type we usually get here in the States. It's lighter in color and also higher in gluten, which means that the bread is likely to hold together better. (Brian normally has to add extra wheat gluten to his brown bread, but this stuff doesn't even need it.) Sources differ about its nutritional content, but it seems to be pretty close to regular whole-wheat flour—probably not quite as high in fiber, but in the same ballpark.

Encouraged by the results of his first experiment, Brian went on to try the atta flour in some homemade parathas, a type of Indian flatbread that's repeatedly rolled out flat and folded over to produce thin layers, like a croissant. These are baked on a griddle rather than in the oven, and Brian was pleased to find them puffing up as they cooked the way his cookbook said they should. In the past, when he'd made them with regular whole-wheat flour, only maybe one out of three parathas would puff, so he concluded that this type of flour was the right stuff to make them with. And indeed, when we bit into them, he felt that the taste and texture were much closer to the parathas he'd had before in Indian restaurants and never actually been able to replicate at home. (When he told a couple of Indian coworkers about this triumph, however, he didn't get quite the response he expected; they were so impressed that he actually made his own parathas that they hardly registered his point about the flour.)

I was so impressed with the performance of this flour that I suggested Brian try it in a golden egg bread, a rich, slightly sweet, eggy bread similar to challah or brioche. This is a type of bread I really like but seldom request because I've always assumed it needed to be made with white flour to achieve the desired fine texture. However, the atta flour seemed to be up to the task. The loaves were a little denser and a little darker than they are with the white flour, but the texture was still tender and tasty. (The flavor was a little more salty and less sweet than I remembered, but that might be because Brian couldn't find the recipe we've used for this bread in the past and had to turn to Mark Bittman's, which is probably a bit different.)

All in all, we're quite pleased with this new variety of wheat flour and see no reason to go back to the supermarket stuff. I'm looking forward to trying a version of Brian's Granola Bread made with atta flour in place of all-purpose flour, not to mention rye bread, muffins, popovers—maybe even cookies and cakes. If they all turn out well, we might actually be able to give up on white flour altogether and rely on this atta for everything.

Money Crashers: 9 Easy Ways to Make Some Extra Cash

Last month, as you may recall, I was quite pleased to discover that my Money Crashers article on finding missing money had already been useful to one person—my sister, who scored "a tiny little extra payday" after checking her state's unclaimed funds pool.

So I'm hoping that my latest Money Crashers piece, 9 Easy Ways to Make Some Extra Cash, will prove useful to even more folks. It covers not just one, but nine ways to put a little extra money in your pocket.

Some, like claiming missing money or claiming a sign-up bonus for a new credit card, are quick and easy ways to collect a one-time payout. Some, like getting cash back for shopping or selling ad space, are ways to pick up a few extra bucks on an ongoing basis. And some, like getting a side gig or starting a business, involve more work, but have the possibility to bring in real money—possibly even enough to take the place of your day job. The article conveniently arranges these methods from most to least complicated, so you can skip straight to the ideas that fit your schedule and your inclination.

Check it out, and if it helps you fatten your wallet a little, please let me know.

How lucky am I?

Yesterday, Earth Day, was windy and wet—not a particularly great environment for getting in touch with the earth. I did manage to get out for a walk in the afternoon and try out my new reusable cup at the Dunkin' Donuts, but I had to wrestle with the wind for control of my umbrella the whole way. It didn't leave me feeling very planet-friendly.

Today, however, made up for it by being balmy and beautiful—almost unreasonably warm for April. I set out for my usual walk around 2:30 in the afternoon, and the farther I went, the more overwhelmed I felt by just how lucky I was. I kept thinking of all the different things I had to be thankful for:

• It's a beautiful spring day - sunny and warm, but not overpoweringly hot, with no rain or harsh wind.
• I have a job that allows me to take an hour off in the middle of the day to take a walk and enjoy this beautiful weather.
• I live in a place where I can safely take a walk in the middle of the day, with sidewalks to keep me apart from the traffic and no roving bands of muggers.
• Not only is my neighborhood safe, it's full of beautiful springtime blossoms—redbuds, dogwoods, ornamental cherries, the last of the daffodils and magnolias, and the first of the lilacs.
• My health is good enough to allow me to walk three miles through this beautiful landscape without straining my heart, coming home limping in pain, or just suffering miserably from hay fever.
• I was able to take a route home that led me right past a new local business selling bubble tea.
• I have no dietary restrictions to prevent me from enjoying a bubble tea, and no financial restrictions to make the four bucks it costs a strain on my budget. (And if I feel any guilt about the "unnecessary" expense, I can just consider it part of my local shopping budget.)

That's seven different strokes of good fortune just in the space of a single hour. And, most fortunate of all, I was actually able to realize how lucky I was, and to appreciate it, where so many other people in my enviable position would simply take it for granted.

A possible addition to our edible landscape

Brian and I have finally decided that this is the year the forsythia bushes on the north side of our yard absolutely have to go. They've just become too big and too unmanageable, and we have to trim them constantly to keep them from entangling our clothesline.

However, since the bushes are sitting on top of a rather unstable slope, we can't simply take them down and be done with it. Removing them without replacing them would leave nothing to hold the dirt in place, creating a real danger that the slope would simply erode away and collapse, taking our fence with it. Plus, Brian would like to have some sort of barrier there between us and the neighbors' yard, which is not exactly scenic.

This is the main problem that's kept us from replacing the forsythias up until now: deciding what to replace them with. Since we've been slowly converting more and more of our yard to edible landscaping, the ideal replacement for the forsythias would be some kind of fruit bush. We'd love to be able to grow some blueberries there, but sadly, blueberries absolutely require acidic soil, and our heavy clay soil is just on the alkaline side of pH neutral. Possibly we could make that part of the yard acidic enough if we mulched the dickens out of it with oak leaves or pine straw, but it would take a lot of work on an ongoing basis, and probably some expense as well. It just wouldn't fit in with our goal of a sustainable, low-maintenance edible landscape.

We considered other fruiting plants for that area, but nothing seemed quite appropriate. Any sort of actual tree would be too tall, and there aren't too many other crops that grow on bushes. We could have put in some more bush cherries, but we already produce as many cherries as we can reasonably use for baking, and they're too sour to be good for eating fresh.

We had just about made up our minds to give up on the idea and just get some potentilla shrubs, which perform well in clay soil and would at least provide us with some flowers for our table, when my mom mentioned some climbing roses she'd seen in a catalogue that she thought we might like. So, when I went over to her house for Passover this weekend, I checked out the catalogue. I quickly dismissed the roses as too tall for the fence on the north side of our yard, but I kept paging idly through the catalogue, and I came across a listing for a type of fruit I'd never heard of before: honeyberries.

The catalogue described these as a cold-hardy shrub that "produces large crops of elongated blueberry-like fruits 1-2 years after planting." They had two varieties available, the 3-to-4-foot Indigo Gem and the 4-to-6-foot Indigo Treat, and said that by planting both (since you need two varieties for pollination), we could "enjoy fruit from May-July."

Intrigued, but a little uncertain, I did a little more research into this type of fruit. I found a website devoted entirely to this crop, Honeyberry USA, which offered some more info:

• The plant is a member of the honeysuckle family, grown throughout the northern parts of the northern hemisphere. However, it's not invasive like the notorious Japanese honeysuckle.
• The flavor of honeyberries (also known as haskaps or edible blue honeysuckle) isn't quite like blueberries. The site calls them a "mystery berry" with elements of blackberry, cherry, kiwi, and grape. However, it says they will work in most blueberry recipes. The site has recipes for honeyberry pancakes, muffins, pie, ice cream, jam, and even wine.
• They're one of the earliest fruits to ripen in the spring. The earliest-blooming varieties produce fruit before strawberries (which, around here, tend to start in May), and the latest-blooming ones just a few weeks later.
• Depending on the variety, each plant can produce between one and ten pounds of fruit per year at maturity. 
• They're disease-resistant and pest-resistant, with the exception of birds, which will eat all your berries if you don't cover them with netting.
• They can grow in sunny or shady locations and in most types of soils. They can handle any pH between 4.5 and 8.5, though they like it best in the 5-8 range. And they may actually like clay soils better than sandy soils.

In short, this sounds like pretty much a perfect plant for that soon-to-be-vacated spot in our yard. But there are a couple of questions remaining: first, how many can we fit in the space? Second, what varieties should we get? And third, where can we buy them?

The catalogue my mom gave us seems to provide simple answers to the last two questions: order a mix of Indigo Gem and Indigo Treat plants from them for $30 a pair. However, the Honeyberry USA site, which also has plants for sale, does not recommend these two varieties to pollinate each other, even though they bloom at the same time. Instead, it suggests growing either of them alongside Aurora, Berry Smart Blue, Honey Bee, or Sugar Mountain Blue. And Honeyberry Home Gardeners goes further and recommends planting at least three varieties in the same garden for maximum fruit yield. We've got 27 feet along that fence to work with, and the plants should be 5 to 6 feet apart, so we could fit five plants—two of one variety, two of a second, and one extra—just as we did with our bush cherries.

The other question is when we want to plant them. Honeyberry USA says you can plant in either the spring or the fall, but Honeyberry Home Gardeners says fall is better. So if we want to plant these shrubs this spring, we'll need to get a move on deciding what we want, ordering them, and planting them. If we wait until fall, we have more time to consider, but we'll have to wait longer before we can expect to harvest any berries.

In short, I'm going to have to do a bit more research to figure out exactly how to make this work. But it's heartening to know that we probably can plant a new crop in place of our forsythias, rather than having that spot go to waste on something purely decorative.

Money Crashers: 12 eBay Selling Tips to Maximize Your Profits

Although I buy stuff on eBay from time to time, I've never sold anything there. Most of the time, by the time I'm ready to get rid of something, it's not worth that much anyway, so it's much easier to list it on Freecycle or donate it to the local thrift shop.

But what if you have a lot of stuff to get rid of—say, you're downsizing to a smaller home, or clearing out a house after a death in the family? Is it worth the extra effort involved to list your items on eBay? Or is the amount of extra cash you could pick up this way so small that it's not really worthwhile?

Well, it depends partly on how savvy an eBay user you are. If you know the ins and outs of the site, you can minimize the effort involved in selling, while also maximizing the money you earn for each item you sell.

In my latest Money Crashers article, I offer 12 tips on how to become a standout eBay seller and maximize your profits. I cover how to choose the right items to sell, create great listings, choose the right time and list price for your auction, minimize fees, pack and ship your items, and get good feedback from buyers.

Learn more here: 12 eBay Selling Tips to Maximize Your Profits

New asparagus, take 2

Around this time last year, Brian and I decided to replace the asparagus crowns in our secondary asparagus bed, the one just outside the fenced part of our garden. The first set of crowns we'd installed in that bed, way back in 2014, had been a big disappointment, producing next to nothing for the first few years and eventually nothing at all. So when we went to the Belle Mead Co-Op to stock up on mulch and saw some asparagus crowns for sale, we grabbed a batch and planted them.

Unfortunately, the brand-new crowns proved no more productive than the old ones. True, you're not supposed to actually harvest any asparagus the first year you plant it, but there should at least be a few shoots to show that it's alive, and we didn't see any. We guessed that we'd probably waited too long to buy them and plant them; by the time we got them, they'd already been sitting in the bins at the co-op for over a month, so (a) we didn't have much of a selection left to choose from, and (b) they may have been past their prime. Or possibly (c) it was too late in the season, so they didn't take very well.

Regardless of the reason, we decided not to make the same mistake this year. As soon as April rolled around, we headed out to the co-op to pick out some new asparagus crowns and get them into the ground early. This time, we had three varieties to choose from, including a purple variety that was supposed to be particularly tasty and another that was touted as a highly prolific producer. However, as soon as we read the label on the Jersey Giant crowns, which said "Also performs well in heavy clay-like soils," we knew that was the variety for us. Getting loads of asparagus or extra-delicious asparagus would be nice, but our top priority was making sure that we got some.

Yesterday it was a bit too wet for gardening, so we waited until today to get the new crowns into the ground. First, we weeded the bed, then Brian excavated the trench he'd dug for the crowns we put in last year. He lined it with compost, then laid out the new asparagus crowns in the bottom, about a foot apart. The instructions on the packet thoughtfully noted, "The roots will grow no matter how they are placed in the trench," so he didn't worry too much about spreading them out, just put them in and added a couple of inches of dirt on top, as required. He didn't water them right after planting as instructed, since it looked like rain was imminent, but it hasn't actually started falling yet; if there's nothing coming down by the time we're done with supper, I'll run out and give them a quick once-over.

Since we only had room for eight crowns in that bed, Brian decided to stick the other two in our old asparagus bed on the south side of the house, which has also been underperforming of late. (We have harvested about a dozen spears from it so far this year, but they were all really skinny.) He didn't want to disturb any of the existing plants that were still producing, but there was a section on the far right of the bed where nothing at all had popped up for a couple of years, so he dug out that section and tucked the two new crowns in there, one in front of the other.

If this variety is everything it's cracked up to be, and if we actually managed to get these into the ground soon enough this time around, we can hope to start seeing shoots from these new crowns over the next few weeks. All we have to do is keep an eye on them and and add more dirt as they grow, until the trench is all filled in. Then we can hope that by this time next year we'll actually have at least a few spears ready to harvest, and a proper crop two years from now.

Recipe of the Month: Spicy(ish) Tofu and Eggplant

In the month or so since Brian figured out how to make Sesame Tofu, we've already had it several times. Obviously, we like this recipe a lot, but there's one problem with it: since our new version uses only half a pound of tofu at a time, it leaves us with an extra half-pound of tofu to use up. Unfortunately, we don't have that many recipes in our standard repertoire that call for tofu. There's this Thai Stir-Fry we tried last summer, but it calls for fresh green beans, which aren't in season right now. So that pretty much leaves only regular stir-fry or pad Thai to choose from, and having either of those several times in a month would get pretty old.

Thumbing through our cookbooks in search of some new alternatives, I came across one in The Clueless Vegetarian that I had bookmarked years ago, but never actually tried. It was called Spicy Tofu and Eggplant, and it called for a pound of tofu, one medium eggplant, and two tablespoons of Chinese chili paste. (The recipe says you should "feel free" to cut down on this ingredient, as it's very spicy as written; since I am a total spice wimp, I figured we'd probably cut it down to around one teaspoon.) I though two of the skinny Chinese eggplants we normally buy at H-Mart would be equivalent to one regular eggplant, so we could easily make a half recipe of this whenever we needed to use up some extra tofu. All the other ingredients (soy sauce, brown sugar, sherry, sesame oil, cornstarch, vegetable oil, fresh ginger, garlic, and scallions) were things we routinely keep on hand.

All, that is, except one: the chili paste. When I chose the recipe, I thought I remembered having a jar of this in the back of the fridge, but Brian reminded me that we'd actually discarded it last time we cleaned out the fridge, which was actually quite a while back. He argued that the Panang curry paste we had in the fridge would make a perfectly good substitute, but I argued that it's not the same flavor at all; a Panang tofu and eggplant curry might indeed be tasty, but it really wouldn't be the same dish the author had in mind. The cookbook suggested substituting "a dash of hot pepper sauce" for each tablespoon of chili paste, but that wasn't much help, since we don't keep that on hand either. (Did I mention I'm a spice wimp?)

So we ended up putting off making this dish until we could pick up something that would serve for the chili paste. On our next trip to Trader Joe's, we spotted a bottle of something labeled "sweet chili sauce" for only a buck fifty, and we decided the ingredients in that (water, sugar, red chili, tapioca starch, garlic, acetic acid, and salt) sounded close enough to a Chinese chili paste to make a reasonable, if milder, equivalent. After tasting it, in fact, Brian said it was so mild he thought we could probably make the recipe as written, with the full two tablespoons.

So, last night, Brian prepared a half batch of this (though he used two small Chinese eggplants instead of one). I don't want to transcribe the whole recipe here, but basically, you cube and drain the tofu; cube and steam the eggplant; mix up a sauce from the brown sugar, sherry, sesame oil, cornstarch, and water; get your wok hot, and saute all the ingredients (first the ginger and garlic, then the chili paste, and then everything else) until they're heated through; and serve it over rice. So once all the prep was done, the actual cooking went quite quickly.

The result was tasty, though our substitution of the chili sauce for chili paste made it quite a bit milder than intended. Wimpy as I am, even I thought it could have used a touch more heat. So next time, we might add just a wee pinch of cayenne to bring the flavor up a little. We could probably also leave out the brown sugar, since the chili sauce is fairly sweet on its own.

But even if it wasn't hot, it wasn't lacking in flavor, and the combination of textures was nice. Neither of us was so excited by this dish that we wanted to make it again as soon as possible, but we both enjoyed it enough to consider it a reasonable addition to our tofu repertoire.

Money Crashers: The Gender Wage Gap

Last year, I wrote a piece for Money Crashers on how men and women deal with money. It discusses how men and women differ in shopping, saving, and investing habits, how they deal with debt, and their hopes and fears about money. One topic I didn't cover in this article, though, was the differences in earning between women and men. I originally intended to, but the more I looked into the subject, the more clear it became that this was a major can of worms that really needed an article all to itself.

And here that article is: The Gender Wage Gap – Do Men Really Earn More Than Women? It addresses such questions as:

• How big is the gender wage gap, really? (The answer depends on what you're measuring: data across all workers, full-time workers only, or men and women in the same field. But I can give you one spoiler: The commonly cited statistic that "women earn 70 cents for each dollar men earn" isn't right by any of these measures.)
• How does the gap vary based on factors like age, race, and location?
• How has it changed over time?
• What's behind it? Is it mostly differences in the career paths men and women choose, the hours they work, time taken off for family responsibilities, or outright sexism? (Answer: A little of all those things.)
• What effects does this gap have, not just for women, but for families that depend on their income?
• How does it affect the economy as a whole?
• And finally, what - if anything - can be done about it? (Answer: "Equal pay for equal work" isn't a solution. It will require much more complex changes to the structure of the workplace and society as a whole. But this isn't impossible; in fact, in some places, it's already happening.)

I found this article really interesting to work on. I hope you'll find it equally interesting to read.