Money Crashers: 6 Best Live TV Streaming Services of December 2021

Last year, I wrote a piece for Money Crashers on streaming video services. This year, the editors doubled down by splitting that piece into two: one primarily about on-demand streaming services like Netflix and Hulu, and one about live streaming services like Sling and YouTube TV. These services bring your favorite shows to you in real time, just like traditional TV, but usually at a lower price than cable or satellite.

The new piece compares six top services: YouTube TV, Sling, FuboTV, DirecTV Stream, Philo, and Hulu + Live TV. I go over the key features of each one and also address some FAQs about how these services work. Read it here: 6 Best Live TV Streaming Services of December 2021

Recipe of the Month: Soy Curl Fajitas

For quite a few years now, I've been the only vegetarian (or, to be more precise, conscientious omnivore) in my extended family. This makes for a bit of trouble at holiday gatherings. I always tell my relatives I can just eat everything but the meat in whatever they're having, but they usually make a little extra effort to accommodate me. If they're not serving an Amy-friendly dinner like fish or pasta, they add a veggie version of the main dish to the menu, such as a separate veggie pizza alongside the pepperoni pizza the rest of the family is eating. I always tell the relatives they're welcome to some of "my" veggie selection, but most of the time, no one takes me up on it.

This year, one of the family dinners was fajitas. We've had this meal as part of our Christmas gathering before, but usually, they just cook the meat and the vegetables separately so I can have veggie fajitas while the rest of the family has meat. But this year, Brian had brought some Soy Curls with him, planning to cook them up Chinese style for a Jewish-Christmas dinner on Christmas Day after most of the relatives had gone home. So he decided to soak and cook a few of them along with the veggies and serve them to me for my own vegan fajitas.

As it turns out, Soy Curls work extremely well for this application. They're about the size the meat strips in a fajita would normally be anyway, and their chewy texture is pretty much indistinguishable from the real thing. As for the flavor, I think even a dedicated carnivore would have had a hard time telling them from meat under all the layers of seasoning added to them. 

If you'd like to try fajitas this way yourself, the process is pretty straightforward:

1. Soak the Soy Curls in vegetable broth. Brian used our trusty Penzey's Vegetable Stock.
2. Fry them in oil until they're slightly browned.
3. Add sliced bell peppers and onions to the pan and cook until the veggies are softened.
4. Add your favorite Mexican seasonings. Brian used a sprinkle of Penzey's Fajita Seasoning and a dash of Ortega Taco Sauce, the same flavorings that went into the chicken fajitas the rest of the family was having.
5. Serve them up with warm flour tortillas and toppings of your choice: sour cream, guacamole, salsa, chopped tomato, lettuce, or all of the above.

I couldn't persuade any of Brian's relatives to try these meatless fajitas, but Brian sampled a bit himself, and we both deemed them an unqualified success. And, as luck would have it, one of our Christmas gifts this year was a Penzey's gift card. So we picked up a little jar of the Penzey's Fajita Seasoning along with a couple more containers of the veggie stock, with an eye toward making these Soy Curl fajitas a regular part of our dinner repertoire.

Gardeners' Holidays 2021: The Changing of the Garden

After one year of celebrating the holidays exclusively over Zoom, Brian and I have resumed our annual visits to his folks in Indiana for Christmas. And as usual, we spent part of the 12-hour trip going over the Fedco seed catalog, deciding which of the crops in our garden to keep and which to replace. But this year, that discussion didn't take all that long, because most of the crops we planted in this year's garden performed reasonably well. 

That's not to say we got a good harvest of everything we planted. But most of the crops that failed did so through no fault of their own, like the pea and bean plants that were all eaten by that pesky deer before we got a chance to harvest anything off them. The seeds can't be blamed for that, so we're going to keep buying the same varieties next year (Cascadia snap peas and Provider and Climbing French green beans) while doing our best to shore up our anti-deer defenses. (I checked to see if Fedco offered any products that could help with that, but alas, it does not.)

The only crop we tried this year on which the actual seeds let us down was our new Apple peppers. Or perhaps I should say our complete lack of new Apple peppers, since not a single one of the seeds Brian started actually germinated. So we ended up planting three of our trusty Carmen pepper plants instead, along with one Caballero pepper to provide a bit of heat. And while they all performed fine, they didn't provide that much variety.

The sad irony here is that we didn't really want the Apple pepper in the first place. We only bought it at all because our first choice, an early producer called Banana, was sold out. So this year we're going to try again to buy the Banana pepper seeds, and in case those are sold out again, we've selected a later-producing but apparently quite tasty pepper called Aconcagua as a backup.

The one other new variety we're planning to try next year is another paste tomato called Grandma Mary's. The Opalka variety we grew this year did okay, but it suffered a bit from blossom end rot. The Grandma Mary's also has the advantage of being an early producer, so we'll have more opportunities to harvest them.

We're also planning a few other changes in the garden layout. We're thinking about dropping the Vanilla marigolds, which we originally got because they're supposed to help deter pests around the tomatoes. But we can't actually tell if they're doing any good in that regard, and they haven't proved to be very useful as cutting flowers. If you try to cut off just one bloom, it's too short to stick in a vase, and if you cut off a whole step, you get a lot of unformed buds and dead blossoms along with the few full-blown ones. Also, they're one of the most expensive seed varieties we buy. So if our supply of these seeds is depleted, we probably won't bother to replenish it. Instead, we'll use their square to plant some extra parsley.

We're also thinking about doing the same with the square where we used to plant dill. It never seemed to grow where we actually planted it, though we often got little volunteer plants all over the garden beds where we hadn't put in any seeds. And even these volunteers didn't produce much dill at the time when we needed it most, which is while the cucumbers were producing and we wanted fresh dill for pickles. We managed to put up just one or two jars of dill pickles before the dill all bolted and we ended up doing plain garlic or mustard pickles for the rest of the season. So in 2022, we think we might try planting some dill out in the herb bed in the front yard instead. Perhaps it will grow better there, and if it doesn't, we're not really any worse off than we were before.

One final change we're contemplating is to stop using our "carpet seeding" method when planting arugula. We originally started doing this because the thickly planted seedlings crowded out most of the weeds, and it's worked fine with the basil and even the lettuces, which we can gradually thin out as they come in. But with the arugula, the individual seedlings are too tiny to pick right away, and by the time they get big enough to have any good eating on them, they don't get in much growth before they bolt. So Brian thinks we might actually get a better crop by planting fewer seeds and giving them a little more space to grow.

There's one new technique we tried this year that we'll definitely be keeping: spraying the zucchini plants with Bt to deter squash vine borers. This worked where all our previous methods - yellow cup decoys to lure away the parent bugs, wrapping the stems in tin foil, covering them with dirt - have failed. Our two new Green Machine zucchini plants produced a steady stream of zucchini all through the growing season this year, ranging in size from medium to huge. And the huge ones hadn't simply escaped our attention before they could grow to that size; they actually seemed to get that big overnight, going from tiny to whopping while we slept. So we'll absolutely be sticking with this variety, and this method of growing it, in 2022.

One crop I can't report on the success or failure of is the one pot of potatoes Brian planted this spring. They were kind of an afterthought, as we never managed to get out to the Belle Mead Co-Op for seed potatoes, so he just bought a little bag of fingerling potatoes at Trader Joe's, planted a couple in a pot, and ate the rest. And since the frost set in, he still hasn't gotten around to digging them up and seeing if we actually managed to get anything off them. Given the disappointing performance of the previous year's crop, I'm not expecting much, but even if we get no potatoes at all, at least we didn't spend much on them. And if we actually do get more off them than we put in, we'll know that we can pick up seed potatoes the same way next year, rather than making a special trip to buy them.

And that's about all there is to say about our 2021 garden. We're hoping 2022 will bring us fewer deer, more beans and peas, more honeyberries, and an equally good crop of raspberries. And while we wouldn't complain about having not quite as many plums next year, we're hoping to still get enough to try experimenting with some plum wine. At this point, we've already given (or are about to give) plum jam to everyone on our holiday gift list, so we'd like to have something new to offer them next year.

Holiday decor disappointment

My simple DIY holiday decorations keep getting harder and harder to create. For years, I did just fine with just one strand of outdoor lights, some festive ribbons, and some evergreen trimmings that I picked up for free from the local Christmas tree vendors in Sears' parking lot. I'd generally tip them a buck or two, but with all the rest of the decorations reused from year to year, it was still very cheap. And since I was only putting to use what would otherwise go to waste, it was very eco-friendly as well.

Two years ago, this got more difficult. Sears had gone into bankruptcy, and the Christmas tree vendors had stopped setting up shop there. And when I searched online to see where the nearest tree vendor was, it was about a twenty-minute drive away in an area we never visit for any other reason (and would particularly avoid visiting at Christmas time). Plus there was no guarantee they'd even have evergreen trimmings available when we got there. So I scaled down my decorations a bit and made do with what I was able to trim off the one evergreen tree in our yard and the bushes that overhung our driveway from the neighbor's yard.

But this year, that option too became unavailable. Our neighbor cut down all the bushes in his yard, and the one tree in our yard couldn't possibly yield enough greenery to make any sort of show. So at this point, we could think of three options:

• Make the trek up to the nearest tree vendor, with no guarantee of finding anything;
• Shell out for pricey greenery from a local store; or
  
• Don't put up decorations.

The first two options didn't seem very ecofrugal, but the last was just too depressing, particularly after a year with so little cheer in it. So I did a little research and found that I could get a 20-foot rope of pine garland at the local supermarket for 12 bucks — not as cheap as the greenery I used to pick up from the tree vendors, but still reasonably affordable. And I thought maybe the pine garland would justify its price by being easier to work with than the individual branches that had to be carefully trimmed and fitted and bound to the railings piece by piece.

This turned out not to be the case. The long, heavy rope of pine garland was actually more unwieldy than the branches; I had to use one hand to hold the end on the railing and one to tie the ribbon on while trying to pin the rest of the bundle in place so it didn't drag the piece I was working with off the railing. Also, 20 feet proved not quite long enough to go all the way up one railing, over the door, and down the other railing, so I had to hack off two lengths for the two railings — which was a lot harder than it sounds, because the pieces of pine were attached together with sturdy wire that I had to cut through,

But the biggest problem with the pine garland is that it just doesn't look as good as the ad hoc arrangements I used to make with miscellaneous evergreens. Because I was trying to work with a pre-made rope, I couldn't arrange the individual branches to cover over bare spots, so I was left with stretches of exposed wood with no greenery. Also, because I was trying to run the garland up one railing and down the other, the pine needles are all pointing in opposite directions on the two sides. And worst of all, the pine dries out a lot faster than the assorted branches of yew, spruce, cypress, and whatnot that I used to work with. It's only been up there for two weeks, and already it's starting to look brown and drab — not cheery and festive at all.

All in all, I can't really consider the $12 I spent on this pine garland to be money well spent. I'm not prepared to tear it all down, but I'm certainly not inclined to shell out another $12 for the same thing next year.

Fortunately, there may be other alternatives. For one, I discovered this year that there were Christmas tree vendors setting up shop at our local farmers' market, starting the Friday after Thanksgiving. They didn't seem to have a pile of discarded trimmings anywhere, but I could try going up to them next year and asking if they have any they'd like to get rid of. The downside of this plan is that, first, they might say no; and second, the farmers' market doesn't open until 11am on Friday, so if we tried to make it there the Friday after Thanksgiving we wouldn't be able to join the rest of the family in Hopewell until noon at least. We'd either lose out on a couple of hours of Thanksgiving fun or have to wait another week to get our decorations up.

But there is another possibility. My parents live on a half-acre lot with a whole bunch of spruce trees on it, and we could probably glean more than enough greenery from them to decorate our house without doing the trees any damage. And since we're always there for Thanksgiving weekend anyway, all we'd have to do is bring our clippers with us, and maybe some sort of bag to store the branches in.

If we could manage this, it would bring our holiday decorations back to their original ecofrugal roots. We'd be using only local, sustainably harvested evergreens, and paying nothing at all for them. And with our new battery-powered LED lights (running off rechargeable batteries) both outdoors and indoors, they'd be even more festive and easier to set up. The best of all ecofrugal worlds.

Not-so-Green Mountain Energy

For as long as I can remember, I've been buying my electricity through a third-party supplier. Obviously, this doesn't mean that I have a direct line from my home to this company and they're feeding in only the particular stream of electrons that they generate; rather, it means that I pay a fee for that provider to feed a certain amount of power into our local electric grid. On my electric bill, there are two separate charges: one to the third-party supplier for generating the power, and one to my local utility, PSE&G, for delivering it via the grid.

Unlike most people, I don't do this to save money. I do it because it's the easiest way to power my home with renewable energy. (We've considered installing solar panels, but at first we hesitated due to the price, and eventually we learned that we don't qualify for solar because our power usage is too small.) 

For many years, I used a supplier I chose through the NJ Clean Power Choice program. Then, a few years back, the state of New Jersey canceled that program and required anyone who wanted to switch providers to do it through NJ Powerswitch instead. This was much more complicated, because there were a lot of providers to choose from and no indication as to which ones used renewable energy, but eventually I managed to find a supplier called Ambit Energy that offered plan with 100 percent renewable-generated electricity for only about a penny more per kilowatt-hour than we'd have paid through PSE&G.

But last year, I received a notice from Ambit informing me that they would be switching me over to their new regional power plan. They included an environmental disclosure showing what energy sources went into producing the power for this plan — and lo and behold, it was mostly fossil fuels. It actually had a larger carbon footprint than the power sold directly by PSE&G, which is mainly nuclear.

So I went back to the drawing board again and found a new power supplier: Green Mountain Energy, which I'd used before in the old Clean Power Choice days. It offered a plan with 100 percent wind energy for just a little more than we'd been paying with Ambit. So, problem solved.

Or rather, so I thought. Because last month, I received an Environmental Information Disclosure (EID) from Green Mountain, informing me that their power mix was more than half fossil fuels: 22 percent coal and 38 percent natural gas. Less than 5 percent of it came from renewable sources.

Hoping this was a mistake, I called up Green Mountain Energy to ask for an explanation. The person I got didn't seem to know what was going on and put me on hold several times, but eventually she came back with an explanation: that EID didn't apply to me, because the plan I was on included the purchase of RECs, or Renewable Energy Certificates. These are tools a power provider can use to buy its energy from a green energy supplier — which is exactly what I thought I was doing directly by using Green Mountain. But it turned out Green Mountain was not itself generating power from wind, as it had specifically claimed; it was merely paying some other provider (not necessarily in New Jersey) to do so.

When I expressed some frustration over this, the person on the phone tried to explain to me that, well, look, RECs are the only way you actually can buy renewable energy, because it's all going into the same grid. When I replied that yes, I knew what RECs were, but I thought I was buying my clean energy directly from the supplier, and not from a middleman who was paying money to the supplier, she had to admit that, well, no, that was not the case.

So for the third time, I had to go through the incredibly cumbersome process of trying to compare power suppliers on the NJ Powerswitch site, clicking through to each supplier's website and hunting until I found information about both its rates and its energy sources. It took me about an hour of work to figure out that the best available price for a plan with 100 percent renewable energy was 13.24 cents per kWh from North American Power — just a fraction of a cent more than we'd been paying with Green Mountain. 

But when I clicked on "more details," I found this little tidbit of info:

NAP purchases and retires renewable energy certificates (“RECs”) to match the applicable percent of your electricity usage, above and beyond any state renewable portfolio standard requirements. Your energy consumption for this product is offset by RECs from eligible sources including, but not limited to a mix of hydro and wind.

In other words, if we switched to NAP, we'd be getting essentially the same deal we were getting from Green Mountain. Rather than paying the supplier to put green energy into the grid directly, we'd be paying a broker to buy RECs from other renewable energy suppliers. So logically, it made no sense to switch. If we simply stuck with Green Mountain, we'd be doing the environment exactly as much good as we would with NAP, and we'd pay a little less per kWh.

But I decided to switch anyway, and for one very simple reason: NAP told us the truth about what they were doing. They disclosed right up front that they were not generating clean power themselves, but paying someone else to do it. Green Mountain, by contrast, gave us a contract promising that our energy would come from 100 percent renewable sources, then sent us an EID saying that, well, actually, it came mostly from fossil fuels, and only after I called them up and spent half an hour on hold admitted that they were just buying green energy from someone else.

Maybe it's irrational to be willing to pay an extra three-quarters of a cent per kWh to a company just for being honest with us upfront. But it's a kind of irrational I can live with.

Money Crashers: Two new articles

Two more of my articles popped up on Money Crashers today. The first is about how to decide when it's time to ditch your old car in favor of a new (or at least newer) one. I outline the factors to consider, from car payments and fuel costs through safety and gas mileage, and how to decide what's right for you.

Keep Driving an Old Car or Buy New – What’s Better?

The second is a head-to-head comparison of the features of Walmart+ and Amazon Prime. I don't actually subscribe to either myself, but I compare them point for point — cost, delivery options, other shopping perks, and entertainment — to demonstrate which (if either) could be a better value for you.

Walmart+ vs. Amazon Prime – Which Is Better?

Money Crashers: 2 new articles

A quick post to let you know about two new articles of mine that have popped up on Money Crashers in the past week:

9 Best Books to Read Before Buying a Home

From the author who brought you "7 Best Personal Finance Books to Read of All Time," a new piece on the best books about home buying. These volumes cover every aspect of your biggest purchase ever, including real estate agents, mortgages, inspections, title insurance, negotiation, and closing costs. It's everything you've ever wanted to know about home buying but were afraid to ask.

How to Get the Best Price on a Rental Car – 10 Simple Steps

The second  article is a companion to my earlier piece on avoiding rental car fees. This one focuses not on the fees, but on the base price you pay for a rental car. It lets you in on the secrets to getting the lowest possible price, from avoiding upselling to taking advantage of discounts.

Recipe of the Month: Butternut Squash Soup with Apple and Leek

Whew! Over this past weekend, I have probably eaten more meat than I did during the rest of the year combined. My folks always get a free-range turkey for Thanksgiving, mostly to accommodate me, and from Thursday through Saturday I consumed parts of it for at least four meals: Thanksgiving dinner itself, then turkey sandwiches for lunch on Friday and Saturday, and Thanksgiving leftovers for Saturday dinner. Of course, I wouldn't have eaten so much turkey if I didn't enjoy it, but still, it was kind of a relief to get back to my more normal plant-based diet tonight with a new vegan recipe. And, of course, it also allowed me to slip in this month's Vegan Recipe of the Month just under the wire.

This recipe, or at least the inspiration for it, came out of the Fix-It and Forget-It Vegetarian Cookbook, which I picked up cheap a few years ago. I forget just where it came from; maybe it was the library book sale, or maybe it was part of our regular December trip to Half Price Books. But whatever its source, it went onto our cookbook shelf and basically just sat there. Whenever I was looking for a recipe, I skipped right over it and went straight to the more familiar cookbooks we've worked with before. As far as I can recall, we've never actually made anything at all from it. 

This month, I got to thinking it was a bit silly to have this cookbook taking up space on our shelf if we weren't going to use it, so I decided to take it out and put it to the test. I paged through it and found that most of the recipes in it wouldn't be all that useful for us, as they have a fairly heavy emphasis on dairy, which we've largely given up. But I happened to hit on one recipe for Acorn Squash Soup with Apples and Leeks that I thought could be converted to vegan without too much difficulty. The only dairy ingredient in it was a half-cup of half-and-half, and I believed a substitution of canned coconut milk would fit in perfectly well with the rest of the ingredients (acorn squash, vegetable broth, apple, leeks, and a touch of ground nutmeg).

We also replaced the acorn squash in the recipe with butternut squash, which tastes much the same and which we always have on hand. As I noted last month, last year's crop lasted us over a year, because we always grow a lot of it and we have a limited number of recipes that call for it. We seldom make our beloved butternut squash lasagna anymore because it requires so much dairy, and so far, we haven't dared to risk making it with our new vegan mozzarella and almond milk for fear of mucking up the texture. So that leaves only a handful butternut dishes we make recipe: butternut squash souffle, black bean and butternut quinoa bowl, butternut squash pizza with sage, and roasted fall veggies with eggs. So I figured this new soup recipe, if we liked it, could provide an opportunity to expand our repertoire.

Making the soup was pretty easy. The recipe calls for baking the squash in the oven for half an hour, but Brian skipped that and used the microwave method we follow when making souffle or lasagna: zap the entire squash in the microwave for about 20 minutes, let it cool, and peel and mash it. He did that ahead of time in the afternoon, and come dinnertime, all he had to do was stir the soft squash into a big pot with a chopped apple (skin and all), a sliced leek, and three cups of veggie broth. Then all it needed was 15 minutes of simmering, a half-cup of coconut milk, a quick blending in the pot with our stick blender, and a sprinkle of nutmeg before serving.

And the result was...interesting. It's quite unlike most of our other soup recipes, because the butternut squash and apple together give it a distinctly sweet flavor, while the leeks and vegetable broth (from our favorite Penzey's vegetable stock) provide a savory background. It's sweet, tart, salty, and savory, all at once. And as I suspected, the coconut milk blends in quite unobtrusively with the other ingredients. Eked out by Brian's half-wholemeal biscuits, it made a perfectly enjoyable meal, but I wouldn't say I prefer it to any of the other butternut recipes we make regularly. So I don't know if it will earn a place in our regular rotation.

As for the Fix-It and Forget-It Vegetarian Cookbook, I'm not prepared to keep it solely on the strength of one recipe that we thought was fairly good. But based on the quality of this one dish, I'm prepared to spend a little more time delving into its pages and see if there are any more hidden gems to be unearthed.

DIY almond milk from scratch

Two weeks ago, I blogged here about how I'd discovered a new, simple method for making your own almond milk at home by blending almond butter in water (with a little salt and sugar). We tried this with some commercial almond butter from Costco, and the result wasn't bad, but it didn't work well for cocoa; the toasted-almond flavor was so strong that it completely drowned out the flavor of the cocoa powder. But I wondered if it might be possible to produce a homemade almond milk with a milder flavor, more similar to the commercial stuff, by making our own almond butter from blanched rather than roasted almonds.

I can now say definitively that the answer is yes. But it's still not perfect, and it's a bit of a hassle.

Making this completely-from-scratch almond milk last weekend was a multi-stage process:

1. 
   First, Brian blanched the almonds using the process outlined by Alpha Foodie. The blog claims this process only takes five minutes, but it takes rather longer if you're processing a cup of almonds at once. As the recipe notes, peeling them is quite easy: just pinch them and they shoot right out of their skins (and go skidding across the table if you're not careful). But you can only do that to one almond at a time, so it takes a good while to get through a cupful.
2. Then, he ground the almonds into butter using Alice Waters' recipe. Here's where he encountered his second snag: The almonds wouldn't grind easily. He tried it in both the Magic Bullet and the food processor, and in both cases, the motor started to burn. He ended up having to add roughly a quarter-cup of canola oil to the almonds just to reduce them to a paste, and he would have added more if he hadn't been afraid of mucking up the texture. Maybe our little food processor doesn't qualify as the "sturdy" model that Waters recommends.
3. He took a tablespoon of this blanched-almond butter and blended it up with two cups of filtered water, a teaspoon and a half of sugar, and an eighth-teaspoon of salt. That's roughly equivalent to the pinch of salt and single date recommended in the Nest and Glow recipe.

As you can see here, the resulting almond milk had a much lighter color than the stuff made from commercial almond butter. It had a much lighter flavor, too, very close to the almond milk we buy in cartons at the store. The big difference between this and the commercial product was texture. 

Brian ground the almond butter as finely as he could and then blended it very thoroughly with the water, but it still didn't blend completely. There were tiny solid particles suspended in the liquid, which precipitated out when it sat overnight. Getting them back into suspension wasn't a big problem; I just gave the bottle a good shake, the same way I do with the carton of commercial almond milk. But the little flecks of almond in my breakfast cocoa gave it a rather chewier texture than I'm used to.

Mind you, this was only our first attempt, and it's possible we might be able to get the almond milk a little smoother with a little tweaking. Maybe processing the almonds in our big blender on the "grind" setting would work better than using our little Magic Bullet or our little food chopper. Or maybe we could simply strain the almond milk after blending it. But that would also add a fourth step to the process, making it more work than before.

So we're going to need to fiddle with this recipe a bit more before we decide if it can really take the place of our packaged almond milk from Lidl. It comes down to two questions: (1) can we come up with a method that produces a reasonably smooth homemade almond milk, and (2) if we do, is the process simple enough to make it worth the effort. We've still got most of our initial batch of homemade almond butter to work with, so we'll definitely be making at least a few more batches, and perhaps by the time we're done we'll have come up with a method that's workable.

If we do, we'll have the ultimate ecofrugal plant-based milk: half the price of dairy milk, with practically no packaging. But even if we don't, it's good to know that we always have this DIY almond milk as a backup. Now if we're snowed up for days at a time and can't make it to the store, we can always produce a tolerable version of almond milk from ingredients we always have on hand — just so long as the power stays on, that is.

Money Crashers: secondhand shopping and free e-books

Money Crashers has popped up two new articles of mine, both on topics close to my heart.

The first is about secondhand shopping. Since I always prefer to buy secondhand when I can, I felt particularly well qualified to cover this topic. The article compares the various types of venues that sell secondhand goods, from thrift shops to eBay to yard sales, and offers strategies for getting the most for your money. Much of it will be familiar to regular readers of this blog, but here it's all conveniently organized in one place.

Second-Hand Shopping: How to Save at Thrift Stores and Consignment Shops

And the second is about another favorite subject, books. Specifically, it's about e-books and about how and where you can get them for cheap or free. The article runs through all the best sites for finding digital reading material at little to no cost, from digital libraries to the collection of free Kindle books on Amazon. (Okay, a lot of them aren't very good, but they'll do to pass the time in a waiting room.)

10 Best E-Book Download Sites to Find Free or Cheap Books Online

Money Crashers: 2 health care articles and one on debt settlement

Money Crashers has published three of my articles in the past week. The first is not so much a new article as a spin-off from an old one: my piece on debt settlement from last year. The editors decided to split this into two articles, one on when debt settlement is a good idea and one on the nuts and bolts of how to do it. So the old URL now directs you to the article on the "how," and the new one on the "why" is here:

When Is Debt Settlement a Good Idea – Disadvantages and How It Works

The other two pieces are on health care, and they approach it from two different angles. The latest one is on how to choose the best health insurance plan out of the array of options that your insurer or your state health exchange offers. I walk you through the various factors to consider — premiums, out-of -pocket costs, provider network — and how to balance them to choose the best plan for your family.

How to Choose the Best Health Insurance Plan for Your Family

And the other attacks the problem from the other side of the coin: what to do if you're one of the nearly 30 million Americans without health insurance. I outline the various places to get care without it — including subsidized health clinics, retail clinics, direct primary care, telehealth, free health screenings, Hill-Burton hospitals, urgent care centers, and hospital ERs — with their costs, pros, and cons. And I examine some other ways to save, from the common (discount medical plans) to the obscure (clinical drug trials).

How to Get Affordable Medical Care Without Health Insurance

 

Top takeaways from the Citizens' Climate Lobby conference

Yesterday, I attended the Citizens' Climate Lobby's fall conference via Zoom. (Matter of fact, the conference is still going on today, with seminars on topics from the climate features of the budget reconciliation bill to a panel discussion between left-leaning and right-leaning CCL members — because yes, there actually are folks concerned about climate on the right, not that you'll ever find any of them in Washington. But I decided one day in front of my screen was enough for me.)

I spent the whole afternoon listening to talks about strategies for making progress on climate change, by the keynote address by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson (marine biologist and co-host of the How To Save a Planet podcast) to the closing remarks by CCL president Madeline Para. That's four solid hours of talks. And I can honestly say that by the end of the day, I knew a few useful things that I didn't know before. 

Now, I'm about to teach you those same few useful things in a blog post that I imagine will take you far less than four hours to read. Here are my top takeaways from the conference — the most interesting, useful, inspiring, and "actionable" points of the whole day.

1. Regenerative ocean farming is a big deal.

The top question Dr. Johnson got asked at the end of her keynote was about the potential of regenerative ocean farming. I had heard a bit about this already in an episode of Freakonomics about the potential for raising food in the oceans. The guy he talked to, Bren Smith, is an aquaculture farmer who raises clams, oysters, mussels, and kelp: all "things that don't swim, that you don't have to feed." You can do all this on long lines that hang below the surface of the water, so they don't interfere with the view the way, say, an offshore wind farm does. 

And apparently, their potential is enormous. Smith says you can grow 10 tons of kelp in one acre of ocean. This is not only a huge amount of food, but also a huge carbon sink. He cites a World Bank study saying that if you turned less than 5 percent of all U.S. waters over to seaweed farming, you could sequester "the carbon-output equivalent of 20 million cars." And the portion of that seaweed that isn't suitable for food can be turned into fertilizer for land-based farming, reducing the need for synthetic fertilizers involved in the release of nitrous oxide (a greenhouse gas 300 times as powerful as carbon dioxide).

According to Dr. Johnson, this could be a pretty major piece of the solution to the climate-change puzzle. And the beauty part is, there's really no downside. Oysters and seaweed are delicious, so getting more of our food supply from them is all to the good. 

2. The world isn't divided into climate change "believers" and "deniers."

One of yesterday's speakers was from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. It has come up with a model it calls "Six Americas" to visualize how Americans really feel about climate change. We fall into six groups:

1. 26% of the population is Alarmed. These are the people, like me, who think that climate change is a true crisis and we as a species need to be doing a lot more about it than we are now. This is the group that's grown the most over time as major problems, like the California wildfires, have been in the news more and more.
   
2. 29% are Concerned. These folks think climate change is a problem, all right, and we should definitely do something about it, but it doesn't need to be our top priority.
3. 19% are Cautious. They're not 100% convinced yet of the science on climate change: whether it's happening at all, whether it's caused by human activity, and how big a problem it is. This group has shrunk the most in the face of the growing evidence on climate.
   
4. 6% are Disengaged. They don't know much of anything about global warming, and they don't care.
   
5. 12% are Doubtful. They incline to the view that global warming is either not happening or not a real problem.
6. Only 8% are Dismissive. These are the folks you see screaming on the Internet about climate change being a hoax. They're a small minority of the population, but they get all the attention.

There's not much point in trying to talk to Dismissive folks about this issue. Their minds are made up, and they refuse to let you confuse them with facts. But it's possible to influence others if you go about it the right way.

3. The right way to talk about it is not to hammer people with facts.

This comes from speaker Katherine Hayhoe, a leading climate scientist who has addressed our group before. One of the fascinating things about her is that she's also an evangelical Christian, and she sees no contradiction whatsoever between these two things. And because she's talked to so many of her fellow evangelicals and others in the "doubtful" group about climate, she's learned that it does no good to throw a lot of facts at them to prove their views are wrong. Doing this just makes them dig in their heels and hold tighter to what they already believe.

Her approach? Start not with what you disagree on, but with what you have in common. Start with, "Look, you and I are both (Christians, moms, gardeners, whatever," and go on from there to, "And so we both believe (that God made us stewards of the earth, that we want to leave a better world for our children, that soil health is important...)." And once you've established that common ground, then lead into how that ties into climate. People are more willing to listen when you can frame the issue with something that's already important to them.

4. You can build your own solution to climate change, right now.

The single most fascinating thing I discovered at the conference was En-ROADS, an interactive climate simulator from Climate Interactive and the MIT Sloan Sustainability Initiative. It has all kinds of sliders you can adjust to see how different policies will affect the climate. The best thing about this is that it can show you, right on your computer screen, that climate action is not hopeless. You can sit there and play with the various levers and see for yourself that is is indeed possible, with the right policies, to keep global warming down to 1.5°C. 

I attended a breakout session on how to use this tool, and our group came very close to hitting this target with just a handful of policies:

1. A carbon price that starts at $15 per ton and rises to $850 per ton over 58 years
2. Building and energy efficiency improvements of 3.5% per year
3. 100% electrification of road and rail travel (coupled with a greener energy grid powered by renewables, which can be achieved through the carbon fee)
4. Eliminating emissions of methane and other potent greenhouse gases
5. "Medium growth" of technological carbon drawdown solutions — essentially, machines removing carbon from the atmosphere

With just these five changes, our group got global warming down to 1.6°C, as compared to the 3.6°C of warming (!) we can expect if we continue on our current course. Mind you, knowing what to do isn't the same as being able to do it, and getting leaders to take meaningful action is by far the hardest part (as we saw this week in Glasgow). But by proving that a solution — indeed, multiple solutions — are possible, this tool offers an antidote to climate despair. So rather than throwing up our hands and declaring the whole thing hopeless, we can roll up our sleeves and start pushing for the actions we know will work. And better still, we can see which actions work the best, so we know where to push.

5. Fun (?) fact: Fossil fuel subsides are bigger than the Pentagon's entire budget.

Yes, you heard that right. In 2017, our government spent more subsiding coal, oil, and gas production ($649 billion, counting both direct and indirect subsidies) than it budgeted for defense ($639 billion). And since climate change is probably the biggest threat to our national safety, we are effectively paying more to promote threats against our country than to protect ourselves from them.

6. To get letters to the editor published, you have to hunt for opportunities.

Most papers will only publish a letter to the editor if it's a direct response to a recently published story. So if you want to get your letters into the paper, you have to read the paper every day, looking for stories you could respond to with, "This just proves how much we need action on climate." Unfortunately, the only paper I currently read regularly is the New York Times, which has a very large circulation and thus is notoriously hard to get a letter published in. (I've only achieved it once, and that was on the topic of grammar.) So I guess if I want to make any progress in this area, I'll need to subscribe to more papers, and make the time to read them regularly.

7. I have the right to vote today thanks to Harry Burn's mom.

This final fact comes from the closing remarks by Madeline Para. To illustrate how one person can really make a difference on a big issue, she told the story of how the passage of the 19th Amendment, extending the franchise to women, came down to a single vote in the Tennessee House of Representatives. The deciding vote was cast by Harry Burn, who had voted against ratification twice before under pressure from anti-suffragists. But on the eve of the third vote, he received a long letter from his mother urging him to "be a good boy" and vote for suffrage. And the next day, he stood up in the House with that letter in his hand and voted yes, making Tennessee the last state needed to pass the 19th Amendment into law.

I don't have a son in state government, so maybe I can't have as momentous an effect as this. But I'll keep using what I do have — this blog, social media, conversations with friends, calls to Congress, and any letter I can manage to get into any paper — to exert as much leverage as I can toward pushing our climate, and the future of our species, back from the brink.

Money Crashers: 12 Things You Should Never Buy Used

As I've noted, I'm generally a big fan of secondhand shopping. It's a smart move both for the environment and for your wallet — in most cases. But even I will admit that there are exceptions.

Some products, such as bike helmets, can pose a health or safety risk if you buy them used. Others, like vacuum cleaners, tend to be so worn out that they're not a good value, even if the price is low.

These items are the focus of my latest Money Crashers article. The title (which I didn't choose) is a bit misleading, since I'm not actually saying you should never buy these things secondhand. For almost every item on the list, there are special cases in which it can still be a good buy. But you do have to take extra precautions to protect yourself and your money.

12 Things You Should Never Buy Used (Worst Secondhand Purchases)

Money Crashers: 10 Things You Should Always Buy Used (Secondhand)

My latest Money Crashers article is on a topic I have a fair amount of experience with: secondhand shopping.

Shopping secondhand is nearly always the most ecofrugal choice. Nearly, not always, because some items — appliances, for instance — are likely to be more fuel-efficient if you buy them new. But in general, buying used is a way to save money and natural resources at the same time: an ecofrugal win-win.

However, I admit that some secondhand deals are better than others. So in this article, I discuss which types of products make the best secondhand buys of all — from wedding dresses to musical instruments. Nearly everything on this list is something that Brian or I or both of us have bought used at least once, and we've generally been satisfied with our bargains.

10 Things You Should Always Buy Used (Secondhand)

Plant-based milk experiments follow-up

Three years back, when I was first toying with the question of whether to switch from dairy milk to a plant-based milk of some kind, I did a little experimenting with homemade milk alternatives. I hoped one of these would provide the ultimate ecofrugal alternative to dairy milk: a lower carbon footprint, minimal packaging waste, and low cost, all in one.

Unfortunately, none of the "schmilks" we tried at the time was able to clear this bar. Homemade oat milk, made from rolled oats blended with water, was cheap and easy to make, but it turned into glue when heated, making it useless for hot cocoa. Diluting canned coconut milk with water was just a big mess; the coconut milk didn't dissolve, leaving big lumps of oil floating on a watery base. And most recipes for homemade nut milks were both expensive and complicated to make. 

So I ended up deciding that store-bought almond milk wasn't too bad a deal — especially once we discovered Lidl, which sells it for just $1.89 per half-gallon carton. That's only $3.58 per gallon, only about 20% more than the $3 per gallon we used to pay for dairy milk.

But recently, I found myself growing frustrated with the amount of waste our new, otherwise green habit was producing. Almond milk cartons now make up the bulk of our household trash, and they require us to empty the kitchen bin much more often than we used to. 

So one day, I started casually searching online to see if I could find a brand that came in some kind of recyclable container. And in the process, I came across this page on Nest and Glow arguing that all packaged plant-based milks are unsustainable and the best alternative is to make your own. And moreover, it claimed to offer a way of doing this that "costs pennies and takes 30 seconds."

The key? Ready-made nut or seed butter. By simply blending this with water and an appropriate sweetener, it claimed, you can get a perfectly acceptable schmilk that's both cheaper and more sustainable than any store-bought alternative. True, it only lasts three days in the fridge, but it's so easy to make, that's no big deal. You can always whip up more in under a minute.

So, on our next visit to Costco, we grabbed a jar of almond butter to try this experiment with. (Even if it didn't work, we figured, we could always use it up in sandwiches.) The recipe said to sweeten it by blending a date into the mixture, but we didn't want to spring for dates as well, and anyhow, we suspected it would make the milk lumpy. So we just threw a teaspoon of sugar into the Magic Bullet along with a tablespoon of almond butter, a pint of water, and a pinch of plain salt (not the sea salt the recipe rather snobbishly calls for), and blended it up.

The result, as you can see, didn't look much like milk. And it didn't taste much like milk, either. In fact, what it mostly tasted like, not surprisingly, was almonds. It had a much stronger almond flavor than the commercial almond milk we've been buying, probably because it has a lot more actual almond in it. But the almond flavor wasn't unpleasant, and when I tried the DIY almond milk on cereal and in a glass with a cookie, the flavors seemed compatible enough. So far, so good.

Cost-wise, it wasn't too bad either. The 27-ounce jar cost us about $8 and contained 48 tablespoons for $8, so each cup of the milk contains about 17 cents' worth of almond butter. The sugar, even organic sugar, adds less than a penny per cup, and the cost of the water and salt is negligible. So all told, it's $0.18 per cup, or $2.88 per gallon — actually cheaper than dairy milk. The packaging waste is minimal: just the plastic jar from the almond butter, which is recyclable. The effort involved in making it is fairly trivial. And it's even lower in added sugars that the commercial almond milk we buy now (4 grams per cup as opposed to 7 grams).

However, I wasn't ready to commit to the DIY almond milk yet. It still had to pass the Cocoa Test. So the next morning, I mixed some of the homemade schmilk with sugar and cocoa and heated it in the microwave. The resulting brew looked like cocoa, smelled like cocoa, and unlike the gluey oat-milk version, stirred like cocoa. But what it tasted like...was almond. The stronger almond flavor of the DIY schmilk completely overpowered the taste of the cocoa.

This almond non-cocoa didn't actually taste bad. It made a perfectly acceptable accompaniment to my morning slice of toast. But it wasn't cocoa, and cocoa is what I want with my breakfast. If I wanted to switch to this DIY almond milk permanently, I'd have to give up my morning cup of cocoa in favor of a morning cup of hot almond beverage. And that's a sacrifice I'm just not prepared to make yet.

Still, I haven't altogether given up on the nut butter milk as a concept. Doing a little more research, I discovered that you can buy a commercial "nutbase" for almond milk that's made from blanched almonds, rather than roasted almonds like the almond butter we bought at Costco. (At $20 for 27 servings, it's definitely not ecofrugal, but it's a proof of concept.) I suspected this might give it a milder almond flavor, and sure enough, this MasterClass article by chef Alice Waters notes that "Raw almonds will yield a milder taste" in a homemade almond butter.

So maybe the ultimate ecofrugal approach to plant-based milk would be to make it a three-step process. Step one, make homemade almond butter from raw or blanched almonds, roughly three cups' worth at a time, and store it in the fridge. Step two, blend a quarter-cup of this almond butter up with water and sugar every evening or two to make a quart of homemade almond milk. And step three, heat the homemade almond milk with cocoa and sugar every morning to make my breakfast cocoa.

Better still, we could use the method proposed by Alpha Foodie: make the DIY almond butter from blanched almonds, then freeze it in an ice cube tray. Then, any time we wanted almond milk, we could skip step two and simply dissolve one of the frozen cubes in warm or cold water. This might not work so well for cold almond milk (I imagine they'd take quite a lot of stirring to melt), but it would probably work fine in hot water for my morning cocoa. If it worked, it would be barely any more effort than pouring commercial almond milk out of a carton. The only part that would be time-consuming would be making and freezing the almond butter, and we would only have to do that every couple of months.

Plus, since almonds at Costco are even cheaper than almond butter — about $4 per pound, or $1 per cup — DIY almond milk made from scratch would be the cheapest plant-based schmilk of all. It would only cost around 8 cents a cup, or $1.28 per gallon. That's less than half the price of dairy milk, and virtually no packaging waste, to boot. It's hard to get more ecofrugal than that.

Money Crashers: Two car-related articles

Money Crashers has posted two of my articles this week, and as coincidence would have it, they're both about cars.

The first deals with car rentals. If you've rented a car recently, you most likely found that the price you actually paid was nowhere near the price advertised. And if you asked about it, the clerk no doubt pointed out that the list price did not include (insurance, toll fees, satellite radio, a second driver fee, a late fee, or what have you). My article identifies these various fees that car rental companies tack on to pump up their bottom line and offers a few tricks to counter them.

How to Avoid Rental Car Fees – 12 Steps to Stop Extra Hidden Charges

The second article is about the car you own — or, to be more exact, your family's second car, and whether you could save money by getting rid of it. I go into the nuts and bolts of what it costs to own a second car, the various ways of getting around without one (walking, cycling, transit, ridesharing, etc.), and what they cost. YMMV (your math may vary), but I can at least help you figure out what to add and subtract.

Should You Become a One Car Family?

Gardeners' Holidays 2021: Late Harvest

Usually, the last Gardeners' Holiday of the fall is all about getting in what's left of the produce in our garden before the first frost. But this year, as October winds into November, there's still no sign of frost on the horizon. It's supposed to get down into the upper 30s on Tuesday night, but that's the coldest it's going to be all week. 

So, for the time being, we're continuing to pick tomatoes and peppers, though at a slower rate than we did last month. The one crop we decided to go out and harvest in its entirety was the butternut squash. True, they weren't likely to come to any harm sitting out on the vines, even if there was a frost. But they also weren't getting any bigger, as the vines themselves had mostly died back at this point, so there was no reason not to bring them in.

The total harvest for the year was a slightly disappointing eight squash. That's about on par with what we used to get with our old Waltham and Ponca Baby plants, but less than half of the 21 squash we got last year planting only Little Dippers. Perhaps last year was an outlier and we shouldn't expect results like that on a consistent basis. But on the plus side, these Little Dipper squash aren't all so little. Even the smallest of the lot is about a pound, and the largest weighs in at over three pounds. All told, we've got over 16 pounds of squash here.

But before we can start in on eating them, we need to finish up the last of that super harvest from last year. We generally eat these gradually throughout the year so they'll last us through to next year's harvest, and apparently we didn't step up the pace enough this year to use them up. So there's still a little bit of the final squash of 2020 left to use up before we can start on the squash of 2021.

We had part of this ultimate squash in a quinoa bowl earlier in the week, followed by some last night in a roasted root vegetable medley that's loosely based on this roasted sprouts and potatoes recipe. (I'll share the recipe for it some time, but it's basically potatoes, onions, Brussels sprouts, and squash roasted in the oven with a drizzle of homemade pancake syrup and a touch of smoke flavoring to take the place of the bacon.) That leaves just one little end that we can slice up to top Brian's butternut squash pizza with sage.

As for the upcoming year, these eight squash may not see us all the way through to next fall like this year's harvest did, but they should get us comfortably through the winter, at least. And between these squash, all the plum preserves we've socked away, the warm comforter we just put back on the bed, and our recent COVID booster shots, I think we're just about set to get snuggled in for the cold season.

Money Crashers: Hyperinflation

Money Crashers recently recruited me to write an article they wanted turned around in a big hurry. Earlier this week, Jack Dorsey — chief Twit at Twitter and occupant of the corner office at Square — tweeted that the hyperinflation was coming "soon" to the U.S. and would “change everything.” This, apparently, caused a big enough stir that the editors thought we'd better cash in on it quickly with an article about hyperinflation.

In my piece, I cover how economists define hyperinflation, some notable examples from world history, what causes it, and what it can do to the economy. I use a hypothetical example to illustrate how out-of-control price growth in the U.S., could affect spending and saving, debt, businesses, investments, and government spending. (Short version: it's very, very bad.)

So does that mean it's time to panic and put everything into Bitcoin, as Jack suggests? Absolutely not. The modest inflation we're seeing at the moment — about 5% over the past year — is certainly higher than it's been in the past couple of decades, but it's far from the highest it's been in my lifetime, and it's not even remotely like the nightmare scenario of hyperinflation. And there's been essentially nothing to indicate that's about to change.

Yes, inflation is rising, and yes, there are things you can do to protect yourself from it. (I've already covered some of them in previous articles.) But hyperinflation is not, repeat not, happening now, and is not remotely likely to happen in the near future. Get a grip, Jack.

Hyperinflation - Definition, Cause, What Happens to Investments and Debt

Seeking a cleaner, greener shave

For quite a few years now, I've had trouble finding a razor I was entirely satisfied with. I've tried cartridge razors from all kinds of brands, including Gillette, Schick, Harry's, the Dollar Shave Club, and the store brands at the drugstore, some designed for men and some for women. And every single one of them had at least one, and usually several, of the following problems:

1. They didn't give me as close and long-lasting a shave as I wanted. With most of them, I could get my legs tolerably smooth with a little work, but the roots were still visible, and the smoothness never lasted. By the end of the day, they'd feel like 60-grit sandpaper.
2. The cartridges were expensive. Even the so-called Dollar Shave Club actually charges $8 for a 4-pack (so $2 each) of its 4-blade refill heads, the cheapest type it still offers. And you can't comparison shop for refill blade cartridges the way you can for other products, stocking up whenever you find a good deal, because cartridges for different razor brands — and in most cases, even different models from the same brand — aren't interchangeable. You have to buy the specific cartridges that go with whatever razor you have, and pay whatever the store is asking for them.
3. They were wasteful. Not as much as disposable razors, of course, but the cartridges still ended up in the trash because there was no way to recycle them. To reduce this problem, I got pretty good over the years at making the cartridges last a long time. By drying them off between shaves, lubricating them, even stropping them occasionally, I could go for weeks or even months on a single cartridge. But that didn't help me that much in the long run, because...
4. They broke. Occasionally, the razor would get dropped in the shower — sometimes during use, sometimes while I was cleaning or whatever. And while most razor handles would survive this once or twice, sooner or later they would break, rendering both the razor itself and all the remaining cartridges for it unusable. (The much-lauded Harry's razor actually broke this way after only its second use. The company offered me a free replacement, but I was so unimpressed with the quality — as well as the shave I got from it — that I didn't consider it worth the effort.)

Over the years, I've toyed with the idea of going back to an old-fashioned safety razor, the kind I first learned to shave with. I always used to get a pretty good shave from one, at least as close as anything I've ever achieved with two, three, four, or five blades. The individual blades are both smaller and cheaper than a multi-blade cartridge, and they don't produce any plastic waste. And, better still, they're all the same: any blade you buy will fit any safety razor, regardless of brand. And best of all, the handle itself is made of nearly indestructible metal, so dropping it won't damage it significantly (though it could damage you if the exposed blade lands on your toe).

Safety razors aren't perfect, of course. They pose a bigger risk of nicks and cuts (the main reason I stopped using one in the first place). Also, they're much harder to find in stores, where cartridge razors have pretty much taken over. Because of these problems, I always ended up replacing a broken cartridge razor with a new cartridge razor that looked like the best available value, hoping that it would be the one that finally lived up to my expectations.

The last one I bought this way was a no-name brand from Costco that came with a dozen refills. I made it through eleven of them before the handle broke, and I decided that was it — I was going to take the plunge on a safety razor. The local drugstore didn't have any (I know it used to, but when I went back this week they had all disappeared), but I was able to pick up one up for $17.50 at Target — a Van der Hagen complete with five blades and a limited lifetime warranty. That looked like a pretty clear solution to problem #4 on my list, and I hoped it would solve problems #1 through #3 as well.

That hasn't quite proved to be the case — at least, not yet. I shaved with it for the first time this morning, and not only did it not leave my skin silky smooth, it didn't even provide as close a shave as I used to get with my crappy Costco cartridge razor. Still, I knew it's possible to achieve this kind of smoothness with a single blade, because I've done it in the past. So I figure perhaps I simply need to make some changes to my shaving technique.

I consulted a couple of guides online to find out how to shave legs with a safety razor, and they seemed to agree on a few points. First, wet the skin and lather it well (something I always do anyway). Second, hold the blade at an angle, which various sources put at anywhere from 30 to 45 degrees. And third, use short, light strokes with very little pressure. I'm hoping that once I get the hang of this, I'll be able to get a shave from my single blade that's at least equal, if not superior, to what I got from the cartridge.

The fourth tip most sources give is to change the blade frequently, saying it's only good for three to six shaves, seven at most. But I'm hoping to stretch that out a bit longer, since a 50-cent blade that lasts only a week is more costly and wasteful than a $2 cartridge that lasts a couple of months. The tricks for making safety razor blades last longer seem to be pretty much the same as for cartridge razors: Clean and dry after each use, keep it oiled, and strop it as needed to restore the edge. (You can use an old pair of jeans for this purpose rather than a specially designed strop.) Many sources also recommend against keeping the razor in the bathroom, since the moist air can cause rust, but that's a problem for me since I like to have it ready to hand when I step into the shower. So I'm thinking I might eventually try storing it in a small jar of oil, which I could keep upright in the shower caddy. That would also eliminate the need for oiling as a separate step.

And when those blades finally do wear out, I'm looking to recycle them rather than simply toss them in sharps disposal. There are apparently a few ways to do this now. Gillette and Terracycle have joined forces on a razor recycling program that accepts both razors and blades of all types and brands; you can either mail the blades in at your own cost or drop them off at a designated collection site. A company called Albatross also accepts blades by mail. Leaf Shave sells a metal blade collection tin for four bucks that you can mail back to them (again, at your own cost) or drop off at local recycling center; I've found one in Edison, only a few miles away, that shouldn't be too inconvenient to visit once or twice a year.

Cheaper still, you can make your own razor blade bank from a steel container that the recyclers can take blades and all. And I just happen to have a whole bunch of tins from Newman's Own ginger mints (which I'm hooked on) that I held onto because they were so cool-looking I hated to throw them out. So those should work nicely for the purpose.

I'm hoping that my new safety razor and accessories — blades, oil, denim "strop," and blade bank — will finally be the ecofrugal shaving solution I've been hoping for. But if I just can't figure out how to get a decent shave from this razor, I'm not giving up hope. There are now razors such as the Leaf that combine the multiple blades and pivoting head of a cartridge razor with standard single-edge razor blades, so I might be able to have my close shave and less waste too. They're rather pricey, but what the heck, I'd only have to buy it once.

Money Crashers: Short-Term Health Insurance Plans

Just a quick post to let you know about my latest Money Crashers post on the pros and cons of short-term health insurance plans. Spoiler alert: it's mostly cons.

Pros and Cons of Short-Term Health Insurance Plans – Is It Right for You?

 

Local deforestation

This was a sad week for the environment in our neighborhood. We just lost two big, beautiful, healthy trees — and as far as I can tell, for no good reason.

Some background: on the opposite side of our street, there used to be a small ranch house. It wasn't in great condition and couldn't find a buyer for a long time. But when the real estate market went nuts during the pandemic, a developer bought it up and started trying to sell, not the house itself, but two new houses that they planned to build on the property. Both of which were quite a big bigger than the original house, and presumably quite a bit more expensive. 

Now, the catch was, the developer apparently couldn't get approval to begin construction on the new houses until they had buyers lined up for both of them. And a house that big on our street, which is kind of out on the edge of town, is a tough sell. But eventually they must have found a couple of buyers desperate enough to pay what they were charging, because over the last few weeks, they got to work demolishing the existing house.

To me, of course, knocking down a perfectly good house in order to build two new ones seemed like an unfortunate waste. But at least there was one encouraging thing about the process: the demolition crew carefully worked around the two mature oak trees in the front yard instead of knocking them down. We assumed this meant that the developer was planning to keep the trees on the new property, since we couldn't see why they'd go to such trouble otherwise. And it made sense, since a big healthy tree like that would surely be a nice selling point for the house.

But apparently, in this market, the developer didn't need actually a feature like that to sell an as-yet-unbuilt house on an out-of-the-way street. Because when we got up on Tuesday morning, we saw that there was a crew of workers across the street preparing to take the trees down.

This was not just depressing to me but also puzzling, since Highland Park has an ordinance dictating that you can't remove any tree above a certain size (which these two definitely were) without a permit. And I couldn't figure out why the borough would grant one for two beautiful, healthy trees like this, especially when it was clearly possible for the construction to proceed without them.

I tried calling up the borough's code enforcement officer to find out if these folks actually had a permit, but I couldn't reach anyone. Then I went out and asked one of the workers, and he assured me they did. The owner, who was there to supervise, even came over to show it to me when he saw me out there with my camera taking this picture. He showed me the plan of the property and explained that the two trees "had to" come down because they were planning to install two gas lamps in the exact spots where they stood. But he assured me that there would be new trees planted in the rear of the property to make up for it. (Of course, these new trees will be little dinky ones, rather than hundred-year-old oaks, and won't be visible from the street anyhow. But the ordinance says as long as you plant one new tree at least 2 inches in diameter for each one you cut down, no matter how large, that's good enough.)

So I'm forced to admit that the developer did indeed have permission from the borough to take down these trees. What I can't figure out is why. Why, why, WHY would the borough give this guy permission to remove two irreplaceable trees in order to install two gas lamps — a feature that clearly isn't necessary, isn't anywhere near as desirable as an old-growth tree, and oh yeah, burns fossil fuel and produces carbon emissions rather than removing them? Does the local government consider gas lamps more important than trees? Or does it care more about the needs of developers than those of local homeowners? Is it just so desperate for more property owners to pay taxes that it's willing to grant any concession at all to get more homes built?

To make matters worse, our next-door neighbor also just decided this week to cut down all the bushes in his front yard. So on both sides of the street, the area to the south of our house is now a bleak, bare, clear-cut expanse. And the absence of the shrubbery merely draws attention to the half-rotted fence between our yard and his.

But this, at least, is a problem we can potentially do something about. Brian already has plans to ask him if we can replace the fence (which we think is technically on his property) with some trellises. If he says yes, he plans to break up those crumbling concrete bars currently lining our driveway and replace them with some trellised planter boxes (sort of like these), in which we can plant some sort of climbing vines to grow up the trellis. He also has a notion to add another trellis to the end of the planter nearest the house, so it can partially conceal our trash cans from view. If this works, it will add a little shade and greenery back to our landscape and help block out that desolate view to the south. 

We can even use the concrete chunks from the broken-up bars to provide drainage on the bottom of the boxes, so nothing will go to waste. Because unlike some people, we don't believe in wasting perfectly good resources.

Recipe of the Month: Roasted Eggplant and Pepper Sandwich

October's Recipe of the Month came about more or less by accident. Brian had made Pasta Romesco for dinner the week before, but the roasted red peppers he used in the dish had come from Ocean State Job Lot, which sells them in a larger jar than Trader Joe's. Consequently, he had about a third of the jar left over and was wondering how to use it up. So I started searching through our cookbook collection for recipes that use roasted red peppers as an ingredient, and I came across one in a tiny booklet from Better Homes and Gardens called Easy Vegetarian Dinners. 

The dish was called "Grilled Eggplant & Sweet Pepper Sandwiches," and that was almost a complete description in itself. Basically, all it involved was grilling slices of eggplant and quartered bell peppers, then serving them on thick slices of French bread spread with soft goat cheese and Dijon mustard. We didn't have any goat cheese and didn't feel inclined to buy any, since neither of us cares for it much, but the recipe sounded like it would work just fine without it, so we decided to give it a go. 

We already had an eggplant, and Brian made a loaf of no-knead bread to use in lieu of the French bread. He usually bakes it in our big Dutch oven, which produces a rather flat loaf that makes short, wide slices that he thought wouldn't be ideal for this recipe. So instead, he baked it in our smaller cast-iron pot, creating a boule that was more ball-shaped and made nice wide slices. 

Then, since the peppers were already roasted, all he had to do was grill the eggplant. He cut it into slices between a quarter-inch and a half-inch thick, brushed them with olive oil, and grilled them on our outdoor charcoal grill for about 15 minutes, until they were tender and looked well browned. Since the peppers hadn't been grilled along with the eggplant, I put them on a plate and warmed them up for about 20 seconds in the microwave so everything would be warm when it went onto the bread.

As I expected, this combo was very tasty. The smoky flavor of the grilled vegetables went well with the vinegary Dijon mustard, and the tender veggies balanced well against the chewiness of the bread. But I did find, as I chewed, that the sandwich seemed like it could use a bit more body, a bit more substance. I had to admit that some cheese would probably have improved both the texture and the flavor, as well as giving it a bit of much-needed protein. 

However, I didn't think the goat cheese we'd omitted from the recipe was really what it was crying out for. To my taste buds, a smoked mozzarella with a firmer texture would really have been the ideal thing to complement the veggies, bread, and mustard. And it was really the smokiness, not the cheesiness, that I thought would contribute most to the dish. In my judgment, thin slices of smoked tofu would probably serve just as well to round out the dish in terms of both flavor and texture.

Not having any of that on hand, I must confess that I opened up a tin of smoked herring out of the pantry and added a bit to my sandwich, thereby de-veganizing it, just as a proof of concept. And sure enough, the smoky fish went very nicely with the veggies and gave the sandwich the extra substance it was lacking.

We've checked the tofu aisle at our local H-Mart and determined that it does carry smoked tofu, but it ain't cheap. I think it was something like five bucks for a half-pound package, or ten bucks a pound. Adding that to this dish would make it a lot more expensive, but it would also make it a much heartier and more satisfying dish while still keeping it vegan. 

Alternatively, we could just go ahead and include the smoked herring in the sandwich along with the veggies. It's still a bit expensive (about two bucks for 4.4 ounces, which works out to $7.27 per pound), but it's something we keep on hand all the time, which means we could make this sandwich pretty much any time in the summer without having to make a special trip to H-Mart. And if it's no longer vegan, well, we're not trying to be 100 percent vegan anyway. As long as it's low-carbon and doesn't come from an inhumane factory farm, that's good enough for us.

Yard-sale haul 2021

After being called off in 2020 on account of the pandemic, the annual Highland Park town-wide yard sale returned this year in all its glory. The planners even added a new twist: this year, people who for some reason couldn't host sales on their own property had the option of booking a space in the big downtown parking lot where our Friday farmers' market takes place in the summer. So Brian and I knew as we planned our weekend excursions that we could count on finding a good cluster of sales in one spot there.

Although we weren't hunting for any large items at this year's sales, there were a few smaller items I was on the lookout for. One was shoes of all kinds, since I currently have multiple pairs in my closet that are either due or seriously overdue for replacement (and as regular readers will know, finding shoes is always a struggle for me). And although I knew it was a long shot, I hoped I might chance on a copy of The Weekend Garden Guide for a friend who has recently acquired his first house and is planning to plant his first garden. Other than that, we were just keeping our eyes peeled for anything that looked like a good bargain, either for ourselves or as a holiday gift for anyone on our list.

And on this score, I'd say we did pretty well. On Saturday, we started out on the north side, working our way up one avenue and down another before crossing town to visit the market area and the cluster of sales that show up every year along Felton Avenue. We were out for about three hours all told and came home with the haul you see here:

• Two shirts for me. One is a practical plaid that can be worn as a layering piece; the other is a more fanciful lacy blouse that can be incorporated into period costumes.
• 
  One pair of hiking boots in a boys' size 5 1/2. That's actually a little big for me, but they're wearable and intact, and that's more than I can say for any of the three other pairs of winter boots I currently have at home. These can definitely take the place of my old Timberland hiking boots, which I was keeping around at this point solely for grubby outdoor jobs. And if I can't find a more appropriate pair of winter boots by December, they may end up becoming my everyday shoes this winter.
• Four books. One of them, a Ngaio Marsh mystery, is for our own enjoyment. The other three are fantasy novels we have already read and plan to present to one or more of our niblings.
• Two board games. Some of the sellers in the market area turned out to be not homeowners getting rid of stuff, but vendors who are normally there on Fridays. One of these stalls belonged to The Moonladies, two sisters who used to run a local gift and toy store. After losing their premises last year, they've been making do with a booth in the market, and they had taken advantage of yard-sale weekend to unload some clearance merchandise. The prices were much higher than you'd normally expect to pay at a yard sale, but still well below retail. Brian picked up one board game there, which we won't name since it's likely to be a gift for someone who reads this blog. We also found another small game — suitable for a stocking stuffer, perhaps — on a table full of items marked "free."
• Two bottles of masala sauce from the Moonladies booth. We usually make sauces from scratch, but Brian calculated that the marked-down price was approximately what we'd pay for the ingredients for a similar sauce. And anyway, it was a way to support a local business.
• A fold-up camping chair (the big blue thing in the background). We already had one of these that had come in handy at various outdoor events, and picking up this one gives us a matched pair.
  
• A bracelet (not visible in photo) that will make a nice gift for a niece.
• An alarm clock. This was another freebie. Brian grabbed it even though it was held together with a rubber band because he already had an identical clock that was broken, and he thought he might be able to scavenge the parts from it to repair the old one.
• A replacement seat for Brian's bike. He nearly didn't buy this, arguing that he didn't really need it because the one he has now isn't falling apart that fast. But eventually he saw the logic of securing a replacement now for $3, rather than having to buy a brand-new one when this one finally gives up the ghost.
  

By the time we'd collected all this, we were feeling pretty footsore, so we decided not to go out again after lunch. Instead we spent the afternoon running errands at actual stores, picking up food for ourselves and the kitties.

Sunday morning we ventured out again, heading up to the far north edge of the town to take in a different set of sales. As usual, the sales weren't nearly as thick on the ground on Sunday as they had been on Saturday. Some sellers who had signed up for both days had packed it in after Saturday, and even some who had signed up for Sunday only apparently decided not to bother setting up shop at all. So after about two and a half hours, we came home with only three items:

• A bag full of apples. We didn't buy these, but scavenged them near the home of a neighbor with several large apple trees. The trees had been picked clean to about the height that could be reached with a standard ladder, but a lot of the fruit on the higher branches had fallen off onto the ground and had been left to rot. Most of the apples were too damaged to eat, but we gleaned enough intact ones to fill up one of our reusable produce bags. And, as we discovered later when we cut one up to eat with our lunch, they're very good apples. (Maybe next year we can work out a deal with this neighbor to swap some of them for some of our plums.)
  
  
• A board game called "Fog of Love," which looked amusing enough to risk a dollar on.
• A book called Debt: The First 5,000 Years, by David Graeber. Books about money are an interest of mine, and I read enough of this one to confirm that it looked both interesting and intelligible to an ordinary reader.
  
• Yet another alarm clock identical to the one we got on Saturday, except that this one was clearly in working condition. Brian felt a bit silly picking up the same clock again, but it was exactly what he wanted and it was only a dollar, so he decided it would be even more silly to pass it over.
  

The total amount we spent across both days of sales was $53.87, with most of that going to the Moonladies. It's more than we usually spend at these sales, but it enabled us to check at least three people off our holiday gift list, as well as providing several handy and/or amusing items for our own use. And since at least one of those items (the boots) was something that I absolutely needed, and that probably would have cost at least $53.87 to buy new, I consider everything else we bagged over the course of the weekend to be pure gravy.