Recipe of the Month: Arugula and Mushroom Pasta

Last Monday, when Brian asked me what I'd like for dinner, I said what I'd really like was a new dish for my Recipe of the Month, since the end of May was coming up. So Brian took stock of what we had in the fridge (mushrooms) and what we had in the garden that was ready to eat (arugula), searched for a recipe that would use both, and found this Warm Arugula and Mushroom Penne on a site called Recipeland.

As usual, he made a few modifications to the recipe. First, he doubled the amount of penne from four ounces to eight, since he didn't think it would be filling enough with mostly greens and just a sprinkling of pasta. (He also used plain penne rather than whole-wheat, because that was what we had on hand.) Since onions tend to disagree with me, he reduced the amount in the dish from a whole yellow onion to just half of a milder red onion.

Finally, and most interestingly, he omitted the Parmesan cheese the recipe called for. We'd just used up the last of our supply, and as part of our ongoing effort to reduce the amount of dairy in our diet, we hadn't replaced it. Although we're still having trouble finding a decent substitute for mozzarella, we figured replacing Parmesan shouldn't be nearly as hard, since it's used mostly for its flavor and not for its texture. Several sources had suggested that nutritional yeast—combined with bread crumbs or crushed nuts, or just sprinkled on straight—made a decent substitute, so Brian just combined four parts nutritional yeast with one part salt in a bowl and used that for sprinkling.

These changes, as far as we could tell, didn't hurt the dish any. As you can see, even with the extra penne Brian added, there was still a generous ratio of greens and mushrooms to pasta. As for the nutritional-yeast sprinkle, I liked it even better than real Parmesan. It added salt and umami flavors to the dish without that faint note of stinky feet that true Parmesan connoisseurs seem to consider part of this cheese's charm. Brian thought perhaps it was a bit too salty, but real Parmesan is plenty salty too, so I didn't find it at all overwhelming.

Even without the nutritional yeast, though, this dish wouldn't have been lacking in flavor. Between the savory mushrooms, peppery arugula, tart lemon, and the faint allicin bite of garlic and onion, there was plenty going on to keep the taste buds occupied. The blend of textures was interesting, too, with chewy mushrooms and pasta offsetting the just-wilted tenderness of the greens. All in all, it was a light, yet satisfying and flavorful dish, with plenty of healthy veggies—exactly what I look for in a Veggie of the Month recipe.

With the doubled volume of pasta, this recipe also made plenty of leftovers—but unfortunately, we didn't get the full benefit of them. When I went to fetch some out for my lunch on Tuesday, I popped the lid off the container a little too soon, and the whole Pyrex container went tipping out of the fridge, spilling most of its contents onto the floor. So, sadly, most of the leftover pasta ended up in the compost bin. (However, this illustrates another perk of leaving out the Parmesan; if we'd left it in, I wouldn't have been able to compost the spilled pasta, since any sort of cheese in a compost bin tends to attract pests.)

Fortunately, there's still plenty of arugula out in the garden, so I'm sure we'll get to make this dish at least once more, maybe twice, before arugula season is over. And when the arugula's all gone, we'll file away the recipe to pull out again when next year's crop comes up. This one's a keeper.

Money Crashers: How Stores Trick You Into Buying & Spending More

Some of my favorite articles I've written for Money Crashers are the ones that deal with the psychology of money. For instance, I really enjoyed writing my piece on happiness economics, and I was very pleased with the way it turned out. I feel like I did a good job of exploring a subject that a lot of people don't know about and showing why it's so interesting. Likewise, I felt like my article on cognitive biases was both entertaining and informative, even if it hasn't attracted a lot of views or shares.

So I'm quite happy with my latest Money Crashers article, which explores the psychological tricks retailers use to push your spending triggers and get you to spend more money than you planned. Just to whet your appetite, here's a preview of the questions you'll find answers to in this piece:

• Why are most stores set up in a way that encourages you to turn right when you walk in?
• Why are shopping carts are so much bigger today than they used to be?
• Why do supermarkets put staple foods, such as bread and milk, way at the back of the store?
• Why does it seem like just when you've figured out where to find everything at your favorite store, they reorganize the aisles?
• Why does Victoria's Secret offer a $1 million bra every year that they know nobody is going to buy?
• How can it possibly be a good deal for stores to offer free samples or free gifts with a purchase?
• Why do prices at some stores end in $.99, while other stores have round dollar amounts?
• Why are the salespeople in high-end boutiques so rude?

If you've ever wondered about any of these perplexing questions, now's your chance to learn the answer. Just check out the article here: How Stores Trick You Into Buying & Spending More.

Cow-free cheese experiments

Ever since we successfully got our household off dairy milk late last year (not counting the occasional latte bought away from home), I've been thinking about ways to eliminate, or at least cut down on, our use of other dairy products, particularly cheese. One approach is simply to leave out the cheese whenever possible; for example, we tried making a batch of our favorite Full Meal Burritos (from The Clueless Vegetarian) without the cheese, substituting some sliced avocado instead for the texture variation, and that seemed to work pretty well. But it's not really an option for a meal that relies on cheese as a primary ingredient, such as pizza.

So we were intrigued to see, on a recent visit to Trader Joe's, not one but two shredded mozzarella substitutes made from non-dairy milk. The only vegan mozzarella we'd tried so far, Daiya, had proved somewhat disappointing; the flavor was okay, but the texture wasn't the same as real cheese. It also cost something like $11.50 a pound (a little over $5 for a 7-ounce package), while these two products were only $7 a pound. That was still more than three times what we normally pay for mozzarella (since we typically buy it only when it goes on sale for $2 a pound), but it was less than the cost of the fresh mozzarella we occasionally spring for at the farmers' market, so it was at least within our splurge price range. Certainly it was low enough to be worth a test.

The product we opted to try first, Trader Joe's "Almond Mozzarella Style Shreds Cheese Alternative," wasn't technically vegan; its ingredient list included casein (a milk protein) and "natural parmesan cheese flavor," which was made from, basically, a small amount of parmesan cheese. But since its main ingredient was almond milk rather than dairy milk, it would presumably have a significantly lower carbon footprint than real mozzarella, which was what we were after. And when we tried some on a veggie pizza, the results initially looked encouraging. The not-quite-vegan cheese looked like real mozzarella, and it appeared to stretch like real mozzarella when we sliced into the pie. But when we bit into our slices, we found it didn't quite taste like real mozzarella - didn't taste like much of anything, in fact. It had the soft, melty mouthfeel of the real thing (possibly due to the casein), and the flavor was mild and slightly salty, as you'd expect, but it just didn't have the tang that makes cheese taste like cheese. It was perfectly inoffensive, and we were able to finish up the pizza without a problem, but without the same relish as usual.

So, on our next trip to the store, we picked up a package of the second product, Trader Joe's "Vegan Mozzarella Style Shreds." As it says on the package, this one is truly vegan, containing no casein, and this was apparent in the the texture of the raw shreds, which were rather more crumbly and less soft and chewy than real mozzarella. But what threw us most for a loop when we bit into them was the flavor, which was quite a bit more pungent than you'd expect from mozzarella. To my palate, it had the flavor of a much stronger cheese, something along the lines of Manchego, which neither of us cares for very much. But we decided to reserve judgment until we'd seen how it performed on top of an actual pizza.

Brian used these shreds on his butternut squash pizza, and it was apparent as soon as the pie came out of the oven that they weren't performing quite like real cheese. Although the shreds had indeed melted over the top of the pizza as they should, the surface of the pie had an odd sort of oily, slippery look to it. And when we tasted the pizza, it was clear that this peculiarity wasn't just a matter of looks. Although the flavor of the cheese in its melted form was still stronger than what we're used to, it probably wouldn't have been too off-putting by itself; it was the texture that we both found weird and disturbing. It was oddly sticky, almost gluey, as if the pie had been coated in some sort of mucilage instead of cheese. Brian was able to tolerate it, but I only made it halfway through my slice before giving up in disgust.

So, in short, neither of these products was really an adequate substitute for genuine mozzarella. I had a half-baked idea that maybe, if we combined the two, we might get somewhat better results; since the first one had an acceptable texture but no discernible flavor, while the second had a stronger flavor and an objectionable texture, I thought splitting the difference might give us something not ideal, but maybe closer to what we had in mind. But since neither the flavor nor the texture of the vegan cheese was really right, Brian thought this was unlikely to yield anything close to mozzarella. Combining the almond mozzarella style shreds with Daiya, which had the right flavor but not the right texture, might work a little better, but both the flavor and the texture would still be only halfway right.

Perhaps a better option would be to use the almond mozzarella style shreds, but top them with something else that could give them a flavor boost. A bit of nutritional yeast, for instance, might give this mild-mannered cheese substitute the extra umami it needs to make it a truly reasonable cheese substitute. Or, maybe we should just keep exploring other commercial alternatives. I'm pretty sure I've seen a brand of vegan mozzarella shreds in the refrigerator case at our local Stop & Shop that we haven't used before, so maybe that one is worth a try.

And if that still doesn't work for us, maybe we should look into the possibility of making our own. I found a recipe on It Doesn't Taste Like Chicken labeled "The Best Vegan Mozzarella," which the author claims can be whipped up in just five minutes of hands-on time—far less time than it took us to make real mozzarella at home the one time we tried it. And while the pictures on her site seem to suggest that it doesn't quite melt like real mozzarella, it certainly looks better than the Trader Joe's vegan shreds. (It does call for one hard-to-find ingredient, kappa carageenan, but she links to a source for that online.) The biggest downside is that you have to use it within a week, so we'd have to make small batches for immediate use. But it would be interesting as an experiment, even if it proved impractical for everyday use.

How do you like them honeyberries?

Sorry to be a little late with the blog entry this week, folks, but the past week has been absolutely nuts. Or perhaps, to be more accurate, I should say it's been absolutely berries.

Last weekend, as I noted, we spent most of Saturday hacking, slashing, pulling, and otherwise tearing down the big forsythia hedge on the north side of our back yard to make room for the new honeyberry bushes we'd ordered from Honeyberry USA. We'd planned to stop by the Belle Mead Co-Op after our dentist appointment on Sunday (since it's right in the same neighborhood) to pick up some mulch for the new plants, but the weather was too wet, so we had to put off that errand until Monday.

Brian had already arranged to take the day off from work, and I was able to rush through my work and go with him to load half a yard of bulk mulch into a motley assortment of bags and trash barrels crammed into the back of our little Honda Fit. We also picked up another 50-yard roll of groundcloth to protect the new plants from weeds. After unloading all this, we ate lunch and spent most of the afternoon stripping down and bundling up the big pile of forsythia branches. By evening, we'd reduced it to just a small pile of untrimmed branches, plus 23 bundles of sticks for bulk pickup and a mass of leaves for the compost bin.

However, even after spending most of the day on planting-related tasks, we still weren't as far along as Brian had hoped to be. He'd originally intended to get the ground all prepared for the new bushes, digging the holes and amending the soil with compost, so all we'd have to do on Friday would be to put the plants in the ground and cover them up. But at this point, it looked like we still had a whole day's work left in front of us to prep the ground, plant the bushes, and cover them with ground cloth and mulch. And since we were supposed to be heading down to Virginia on Friday to visit friends for the weekend, he didn't think we'd have enough time that day to get the job done. So, when we came in from our work and found the new bushes themselves waiting for us in a big cardboard box out front, Brian promptly contacted his office and arranged to take Wednesday off as well, so we'd be sure to have enough time to get them into the ground before our trip.

So Wednesday saw us once again suiting up in our gardening clothes and heading out into the garden. Following the rule of thumb that you should "dig a ten-dollar hole for a five-dollar tree," we figured we'd need holes a good foot deep and wide to accommodate the six-inch root balls of our new plants. Brian got each hole started with the big shovel, then moved on to the next hole while I went in with the trowel and excavated further to remove stones and stray roots and make sure the sides of the hole were rough enough for the roots to get a good foothold in the soil. (In clay soil like ours, if the sides of the hole are too smooth, you end up with the "clay pot effect," in which the plant becomes effectively trapped within the boundaries of the original planting hole.)

Next, we started adding compost to the holes. We didn't have enough compost left in our bin for this purpose, so we used some "Black Kow," a cow-manure-based compost that we picked up at Home Depot. Brian bought it right after we ordered the new bushes, and ran a compost test on the contents of both bags to make sure they wouldn't hurt the plants. The package said to mix the compost with soil in a one-to-one ratio and fill the holes halfway up with this mixture; rather than get out a separate container for this purpose, Brian just added a shovelful or two of compost to each hole, topped it with a roughly equal amount of the dirt he'd dug out earlier, and mixed it together in situ.

The next step was to lay out several sheets of groundcloth and cut a big "X" in each one over top of the planting hole, so we could fit it in over top of the bush. (We originally thought we'd put the bushes in first and then add the cloth over top of them, but we quickly realized it would be hard to get the holes in the right position if we couldn't lay the cloth out flat on the ground.) We laid them out, weighted them down with chunks of concrete so they wouldn't blow away, and cut the holes with a utility knife.

=However, we realized there was a flaw in this scheme of putting down the cloth first and then picking it up again to put in the plants: what if the holes weren't all in exactly the same place? What if we put the pieces of groundcloth down in different spots from where we originally laid them, and the holes didn't line up? It might not be a problem, but Brian didn't want to take any chances. So to make sure, he labeled each piece of groundcloth by cutting a series of slits in the bottom, from one to five, to show which position it belonged in.

We then removed the pieces of groundcloth again and, at last, got to the main event: putting the bushes themselves in the ground. The five bushes we'd bought were two Tanas and two Keikos, which could pollinate each other, and one Solo, which was somewhat self-fertile but likely to do better with a companion. So, to ensure the best cross-pollination, we laid them out Keiko-Tana-Keiko-Tana-Solo, which we can remember by the acronym KitTy-KaTS. Each plant went in with its roots spread out as best we could in the hole, just below ground level, and got a mix of compost plus dirt filled in around it.

After a quick break for lunch, we got back on the job, laying out all the sheets of groundcloth that we'd previously cut over top of the plants and then cutting additional sheets to fit in between them so the entire slope would remain (we hope) weed-free. (We had to cut out a few holes in the cloth to go around some particularly large rocks and concrete chunks that were embedded into the slope, which there was simply no way to move.) The groundcloth didn't come with any metal stakes to hold it down, but we weighted it down along the top edge with the concrete squares we'd pulled out from around the forsythias and along the bottom with some of the more intact timbers left over from our old garden bed frames. We also had a few stakes left over from a previous purchase, so Brian added one in front of each concrete block that was directly above a bush, hoping this would reduce their chances of  sliding down the slope and crushing the plant below.

The final step was covering this entire slope with mulch, which proved to be tricky. In the first place, the big barrels were too heavy to simply dump out on the slope, and getting a shovel into them to scoop out the mulch was rather awkward. And even once we managed to get all the mulch from the containers onto the ground, distributing it to cover that vast expanse of ground cloth wasn't as easy as it looked. Although we'd bought all that we could reasonably carry home, there was still just barely enough to spread across the entire area without leaving patches of ground cloth exposed. We certainly weren't able to put down anything like the three to four inches of mulch the manufacturers of the ground cloth said it really should have to protect it from sunlight so it doesn't degrade. So chances are, we'll have to go back to the Co-Op for yet another load of mulch some time later this summer. But for now, we at least have five honeyberry plants in the ground with a layer of ground cloth and mulch over them—not a trivial achievement, considering that just two weeks ago this whole slope was a wilderness of forsythias.

Now, I guess, all we can really do is keep these babies well watered and weed free, and hope that they thrive in their new home. Grow, little berries, grow!

Gardeners' Holidays 2019: Edible Landscaping Day

We celebrated May Day this year in our usual way, getting up dark and early to go dance on the battlefield with our Morris dance team, followed by assorted other gigs in and around Princeton. By the time we got home, we were too pooped to even think about working in the yard. So the closest we came to gardening on May Day itself was harvesting some of our home-grown rhubarb for a fruit crisp, which we thought we'd earned after our day's labors.

This weekend, however, is another story. We're devoting quite a lot of time to getting our yard ready for a really big gardening project: planting our new honeyberry bushes.

Given that our usual MO with home and garden projects is to spend a lot of time considering all the options before finally diving in, you may be surprised that we're actually taking the plunge on the honeyberries so quickly. But in fact, we'd already spent years debating what should take the place of the forsythias, putting off making a decision because we weren't really satisfied with any of the options. And we'd already decided that this year, the forsythias absolutely had to go, whether we had the perfect replacement for them or not. So when I read on the Honeyberry USA site that these bushes should be planted in either spring or fall, and I realized there wasn't that much left of spring, I decided we'd better hurry up and order these so we could get them in the ground before the weather got too hot. Otherwise we'd have to wait until autumn, and we just couldn't put up with the forsythias that long.

So, within a week of learning that there was such a thing as honeyberries, I had ordered five of them. (Acting on the advice of the Honeyberry USA site, I chose a mixture of later-blooming varieties, which they said are a better choice for Zones 6 to 8.) We even sprang for the more expensive three-year-old plants, rather than the smaller ones. The larger plants should produce berries for us within a year, and they'll also do a faster job of forming a privacy screen between us and our neighbors.

However, buying the honeyberries meant that we were now on a schedule as far as removing the forsythias. According to an e-mail I received on Thursday, our new bushes are winging their way toward us even as I type, and while they can safely wait for up to a week to be planted, we have other commitments next weekend that definitely won't leave us enough time to dig up the forsythias and plant the honeyberries. So our best bet is to remove the forsythias and do whatever else is needed to prepare the beds this weekend, then take the day off on Friday so we can pop the plants into the ground and get it taken care of.

This morning was rainy, so we puttered around taking care of indoor tasks like laundry (and made a trip out to the library's annual book sale, where, as is our tradition, we bought more books than we actually have room for). But by afternoon it had cleared up, and we set ourselves to the job of pulling out these forsythia monsters. And as we expected, this was no easy task. These bushes clearly didn't want to go. Brian, who was doing the actual cutting, several times cut all the branches on a bush completely free of the stump, so it was no longer attached to the ground in any way, and moved on to the next—and still the previous bush refused to budge, clinging on to its neighbors in a desperate attempt to keep itself put.

My part of the job was to wrest these big branches free and haul them up to the patio, where we planned to pile them until the leaves dried out and fell off, at which point we'd be able to bundle them and leave them on the curb. However, before I'd piled up more than half the contents of the hedge, it became clear that the sheer size of this pile so close to the house was going to make it a fire hazard. So we ended up shoving them off the patio and onto the grass, which they'll probably kill before we manage to get them bundled—but oh well, the less grass there is, the more chance that our favorite weeds, the barren strawberries, will spread into the empty space.

Once we'd cleared away all the branches, Brian got to work on the stumps that he hadn't been able to pull out with the first go. This was a sort of hit-and-miss process, involving hacking at the things with a variety of different tools—our big hedge clippers, our trusty King of Spades, and even the sledgehammer we used for our patio project—until he'd inflicted a combination of slashing, piercing, and bludgeoning damage sufficient to get them to part ways with the ground. Some of these things had actually been planted inside hollow concrete blocks (I don't know what they're called, but you can see them in the picture), so he had to pry the block up along with the stump, then continue to chop at it in order to extricate it. (He returned the blocks to their location along the fence, where he hopes they'll help hold the dirt in place until we're able to get the honeyberries in).

And that was just today's part of the job. Tomorrow, we're planning to pick up some bulk mulch from the Belle Mead Co-Op, since the Honeyberry USA site says suppressing weeds around your honeyberry bushes is a must, and after that, we need to prepare the space with some compost and see what we can do about cleaning up the mess we made today. And just in case we don't have time for all that tomorrow (since we have several other errands to take care of also), Brian has arranged to take Monday off as well.

So, basically, we spent all afternoon today, and will likely spend a good portion of tomorrow, just getting ready to plant a new crop that we don't actually have yet. But at least all the work we're putting in now should make it possible to get our new bushes into the ground fairly quickly when they finally arrive. And, though I don't want to count our berries before they're hatched, there's at least a fairly good chance that we'll actually be able to start harvesting and eating them as early as next year. (In fact, I've already got my heart set on using some in a honeyberry fool, which is almost as much fun to say as it would be to eat. Come to think of it, "Honeyberry Fool" would make a great title for a country song, too.)