Gardeners' Holidays 2021: Indoor Growing Day

Here in New Jersey, we're just settling in for a big winter storm that's expected to dump anywhere from 13 to 23 inches of snow on top of us between now and Tuesday morning. Yet at the very same time, we're preparing for our first harvest from our 2021 garden. Our indoor 2021 garden.

You see, one of our Hanukkah gifts this year was a gift certificate to High Mowing Seeds, a purveyor of organic herb, flower, and vegetable seeds. However, we knew we didn't want to buy all the seeds for our 2021 garden there, because they didn't carry some of the trusted varieties we normally buy from Fedco. So we checked out the website to see what they had to offer, and we noticed a section dedicated to microgreens — those little baby greens that were so popular in trendy restaurants before COVID shut them all down.

As it happened, I'd just read an article in the New York Times about growing microgreens indoors, and I'd already been musing on the possibility of starting some, perhaps with our remaining arugula seeds. Our garden was one of the few spots of normalcy in our lives that helped get us through the long, isolated pandemic summer, and I thought perhaps bringing a bit of the garden indoors could help get us through an even longer and more isolated pandemic winter. So our gift certificate proved to be just the nudge we needed to get this project started.

We spent our store credit on two varieties of seeds: broccoli, which I'd enjoyed before in sprout form, and basil, which the Times article recommended as a way to "punch up the summery quotient" in winter recipes. The article recommended growing them in "standard nursery flats with drainage holes, called 1020 flats, with trays that fit beneath," and as it happened, we already had three of those that we'd received as a gift one previous Christmas. We hadn't used them for starting seeds, preferring to stick with the seed starting setup we'd already fine-tuned over several years of gardening, so they were just stashed away with the other gardening supplies, ready and waiting to be pressed into service. We decided to start by planting one tray with each variety of greens, and depending on the results, we could opt to plant a second tray of one type or the other. The trays came with their own clear plastic covers, and we already had a spray bottle for misting the seedlings and a lighted tray to set them on. The only other thing we needed was a bag of potting soil, which we picked up at the nearest Home Depot, and we were ready to grow.

So, according to the instructions in the article, Brian moistened the soil and mixed it together with his hands until it could hold its shape when squeezed.

Then he loaded it into the trays and tamped it down, and I gently scattered the seeds on top. I just took a generous pinch between two fingers and sprinkled it across each of the little squares built into the tray, counting the seeds as i went. The article said to aim for 10 to 12 seeds per square inch for "small seeds like basil, mizuna or kale" and 6 to 8 per inch for "larger ones like beets or chard." Since the little squares built into the trays were closer to an inch and a half on a side, I went for about 20 of the little basil seeds and 15 of the larger broccoli seeds.

Then we covered them up with their plastic lids and waited for the seeds to sprout, which took about two days for the broccoli and four for the basil. Once the seeds in each tray were showing their first bits of green, we took the domes off and set them under the lights for the recommended 16 hours a day, misting them regularly but lightly with water from the spray bottle.

After about one week, both trays now display a dense carpet of tiny green sprouts. According to the Times article, they're still not ready to harvest, as neither one has its first "true leaves" yet. So far, they're just large sprouts, not small greens. But I have snitched a couple of the broccoli sprouts from some of the more densely packed squares, and they were both tender and tasty. 

I'm guessing they'll be officially ready to eat sometime this week, so now all we have to do is figure out how we want to use them. So far, my ideas include:

• Additions to a salad (but it's a bit chilly for salads at the moment)
• Toppings for falafel (or any kind of sandwich, really)
• Toppings for pizza
  
• Tossed with pasta
• Broccoli greens added to a soup, such as Mark Bittman's "vastly improved store-bought ramen" (discard the flavor packet and add soy sauce, sesame oil, scallions, and an egg)
• Broccoli greens in a stir-fry 
• Added to scrambled eggs (one of the suggestions from a grower in the Times article)
  

And that's just off the top of my head. I'm sure a quick search could lead me to lots of recipes specifically featuring these varieties of microgreens, and I'm sure you'll be seeing some of those in future Recipe of the Month posts. But for now, I feel like we have plenty to get started with.

It remains to be seen whether any of these microgreen-spiked dishes become regular additions to our winter recipe repertoire. But even if they're never anything more than a novelty, they've already served the purpose of livening up this long, cold, lonely winter. As far as I'm concerned, that alone has made them a worthwhile investment.

Money Crashers: Why Gas Prices Are Rising So High

Earlier this month, a post popped up on my Nextdoor group lamenting about how expensive gas is getting. I honestly hadn't noticed, since we never really go anywhere these days and it's been over a month since we filled up our gas tank. But what struck me about the post was that the comments on it immediately turned political and extremely nasty. Many of the commenters — my neighbors — blamed the rise in gas prices on the incoming Biden administration, even though Biden hadn't actually been inaugurated yet. Others snarled back about Trump, and I guess a lot of people complained about the "unneighborly" tone, because eventually the moderators took the entire thread down.

This experience did more than just reinforce how toxic the combination of politics and any kind of social media can be (and how hard it is to keep them separated). It also showed that most people don't have any real understanding of what causes gas prices to rise and fall. Since they have no way to make sense of it, they just weave it into whatever political narrative they've decided to believe and pin the blame on whichever party they don't like.

I hope my latest Money Crashers post can serve, in some small way, as an antidote to that. It explains the real, complex, and intertwining factors that lead to changing gas prices, including seasonal fluctuations in demand, foreign affairs, changing technology, natural disasters, and shifts in gas taxes (the only one that really has anything at all to do with U.S. politics).

I don't expect most of my Nextdoor neighbors to read it, but if any of them do, perhaps they'll realize that the government can't possibly control all the factors affecting gas prices, and so it's silly to blame any government (especially one that isn't officially in power yet) when they go up. It's much more useful to adapt by driving less: making fewer trips, walking and biking more. And if the price remains high, perhaps even choose a more fuel-efficient vehicle (or even an electric one) the next time you change cars. This not only saves you money but also prevents climate-destroying emissions, so it's a win-win.

Why Gas Prices Are Rising So High – Reasons for Fluctuations

Thrift Week 2021, Day 7: Puzzles

It was below freezing this morning, with a stiff wind, but Brian and I made a point of leaving the house right after breakfast anyway and heading out into the cold on food. With our neighborhood thrift shop now open only in the mornings, except on Sunday, it was our only chance to include it in my local shopping challenge before Thrift Week comes to an end tonight. And it would certainly have made a great dramatic finale if I had scored some amazing find there, like a warm and cozy cardigan or a colorful pullover, for only a buck.

Sadly, that did not happen. I did try on one little jacket that seemed to fit fairly well, but the mirror — once I managed to locate it — told me that it was bunching up in a very unflattering way. And I found a pair of corduroy pants that might have been worth trying on, except the girls' bathroom that passes for a dressing room was completely blocked with boxes. So, alas, no thrift shop bonanza for me.

However, we did not leave empty-handed. While I was looking at clothes, Brian was examining the toy and game shelf, and he emerged with four, count 'em, four 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzles. Well, I did promise him that he could have anything he wanted when his grant application was done, and apparently, what he really wants is to spend some time working on puzzles. (Plus his parents gave us a fancy puzzle mat for Christmas, which makes jigsaw puzzles and cats compatible.) And, once we were able to track someone down to take our money, it was only three bucks for the lot. New, they'd probably have cost at least $10 each.

This experience sort of highlighted the best and worst aspects of this particular thrift shop. You can find occasional gems there at truly amazing prices, but they sure don't make it easy for you. There's been a sort of halfhearted attempt to sort clothes by type and size, but the volunteers clearly can't maintain the organization, so clothes end up in sort of random piles on the table, the rack, even the floor. The one mirror is way in the back where you can't easily find it. There's no proper dressing room, and the space that passes for one isn't always accessible. And you often have to hunt all over the shop looking for someone to take your money.

All of which would seem to be an argument against shopping locally, were it not for one problem: other thrift shops within driving distance aren't really better. There was one really good thrift shop in Pennington five years ago, but it's closed down. And while there are several left that have larger selections, they also have higher prices, and I still can't usually find anything there that looks good on me. And if I'm going to visit a thrift shop and almost certainly walk out with nothing, I might as well do it in town and save gas.

I made one additional purchase to round out the trip: some more medicine from the Rite Aid. I didn't absolutely need to buy it now, but on my last trip there they gave me a $5-off-$20 coupon, and this seemed like a good chance to use it. The pills I needed were actually priced at $19.99 for the biggest bottle — one cent shy of the amount needed to use the coupon — so I added a bag of kale chips to my order to put myself over the limit. But, as it turned out, no dice: the pills were on sale for $17.99, a fact that wasn't advertised on the shelf, so even with the chips I was still under the limit. I could have gone back and looked for something that cost $2.01, but I decided to just cancel the chips, take my $2 savings, and leave. Which I did — with a second $5-off-$20 coupon for this purchase, which I almost certainly won't be able to use either. Oh well.

That wraps up my week of local shopping, so it's time for the final tally:

• Magnesium supplements (Rite Aid): $10 for two bottles. Minimum price elsewhere: $10 each, or $20 for two.
• Groceries (Stop & Shop): $3. Minimum price elsewhere: $1.66. (I checked, and scallion prices at H-Mart were a little higher than I'd guessed. Though technically, those cheaper prices were at local stores too, so I'm not sure if this even counts.)
  
• Flowers (Robert's Florals): $15. Minimum price elsewhere: $10.
• Gin (Pino's): $10 for one liter. Minimum price elsewhere: $9.30 per liter (and again, that's technically local, since the cheaper price was at Rite Aid).
• Groceries (Stop & Shop): $11.03. Minimum price elsewhere: Probably around $11.03 also.
• Socks (dollar store): $8 for three pairs. Minimum price elsewhere: $8 for two pairs, or $12 for three.
  
• Olives (Ellin Kon): $5 for 13 ounces. Minimum price elsewhere: around $7 per pound, or $5.69 for 13 ounces.
• Hazelnut chocolate (Ellin Kon): $0.94. Minimum price elsewhere: around $0.50.
• Calendar (local organization): $20. Minimum price elsewhere: around $8 (assuming you don't count the extra cost as a charitable donation).
  
• Groceries (H-Mart): $39. Minimum price elsewhere: the same, since H-Mart has the best prices on all the items we bought.
• Jigsaw puzzles (thrift shop): $3. Minimum price elsewhere: $40.
• Meds (Rite Aid): $17.99. Minimum price elsewhere: $19.99.

Total for everything we bought locally: $142.96. Minimum price to buy it all non-locally: $169.97. Amount we paid extra for shopping locally: negative $27.01. Yes, our local stores actually gave us better value than we could have found anywhere else.

So what's the takeaway here? Does it mean we're better off doing all our shopping locally from now on?

Well...no. It's true that, on the whole, I got better prices shopping in town on the stuff I was able to shop for in town. But there was lots of stuff I wasn't.

For instance, I got a gift certificate for Hanukkah to Better World Books, a site that's like the anti-Amazon. It serves as a platform for a huge network of local bookstores all over the country; when you buy books through the site, one of those local stores fills them. Buying through this site supports local businesses, but not our local businesses. Since there are no bookstores here in town, it's not even theoretically possible for any purchases I make with that gift certificate to benefit our local economy. But they're not taking business away from it, either, because buying the books in town isn't an option. It's just a purchase I have to make non-locally if I want to make it at all.

Similarly, my computer has been giving me some trouble lately. It just can't seem to handle the demands my work software puts on it, to the point that it takes two to three minutes to do something as simple as opening a file. Given that it's nearly ten years old, this is probably to be expected, but if I need to replace the thing, I can't do it locally. We have places in town that repair computers, but none that sell them.

And there are a few other things that are pretty much impossible to find locally. Shoes, for instance; I was lucky enough to be able to buy my last pair of winter boots in an actual store, but finding a pair that fits me at the thrift shop — the only store in town that sells footwear — would be too much to ask. Even finding clothing that fits me is a long shot.

So, no, I can't really start doing all my shopping in town. But what I can do, and probably should, is to shop in town first.

In other words, if there's something I need, or just want, I can make a point of trying the local businesses first. If I can't find it there, I can always go further afield. But if they do have it and it's just a bit more expensive, maybe I should just accept that as the price of doing business. Especially when I know there's a good chance that the next purchase I make locally will actually be cheaper here at home than anywhere else.

Can I actually pull this off? I don't know. But I think it's worth a try, at least.

Thrift Week 2021, Day 6: Gifts

Throughout most of my Thrift Week adventures, I've been shopping locally for myself — or, in the case of groceries, for me and Brian together. Today, I decided to shake things up a little bit and pick up a few treats specially for him.

Some background: for the past several weeks, Brian has been wrestling with a grant proposal for work. Actually, I probably shouldn't say "wrestling," because that would be much less exhausting. It might be more demanding physically, but it wouldn't be anywhere near as emotionally draining. Picture a man walking around with a fifty-pound pack on his pack and another on his chest, 24/7, and you'll get an inkling of how much this has taken out of him.

As we came into the last week of the project, I promised him repeatedly that we could do absolutely anything he wanted (within current social distancing requirements) to celebrate when it was over. A special dinner? No problem — I'd even watch him eat steak, as long as I didn't have to join in. A dumb superhero movie? I would watch it without complaints. After what he'd been through, he deserved nothing but the best.

The problem was, Brian has made such a habit of self-denial that I feared he wouldn't take me up on it. So I decided to take matters into my own hands. I would go out for my walk today — by myself, while he was stuck at home laboring to push the grant proposal through its last few remaining steps — and pick up some special goodies that he likes and I don't. Then he'd have to eat them or let them go to waste.

I tried to find some marzipan, but the assortment of Valentine candy at Rite Aid didn't include any, and the little independent sweet shop on Raritan Avenue was closed. I also considered a bottle of amaretto, but since I'd bought him half a dozen bottles of his favorite tawny port for Christmas, I figured he wouldn't have that much use for any other drink for a while. So instead, I stopped into the little Greek grocery on Woodbridge avenue and got him a little jar of olives, which I loathe, and some hazelnut chocolate, which I'm fairly indifferent to. Total: $5.94 for both. 

Neither of these is something I normally buy, but I just checked the price of olives online and found they're around $7 for a one-pound jar. This was 13 ounces for $5, or about $6.15 per pound, so once again, the local store was actually cheaper in this case. The $1 chocolate-hazelnut bar would probably only have cost around 50 cents at Aldi, but that still puts me about 19 cents ahead. And in any case, it was a trivial price to pay to treat Brian after all he's been through.

I also made one other impulse purchase. As I was passing through town, I saw a guy recruiting volunteers for a workers' organization in New Brunswick. I knew I didn't have time for that in my schedule, but I had cash to spare, so I blew $20 on of the group's calendars. I'd been wanting a bigger calendar than the dinky one we got this year from the Nature Conservancy anyway, and this was a chance to help a good cause at the same time. I could have bought one on sale for around $8, so my local shopping premium in this case was $12 — the only significant cost I've had so far throughout the entire challenge. But it's not clear if it should even count, since it was really more of a donation than an expense.

As it happened, that wasn't my only shopping excursion today. Once Brian had finished slaying the grant, we made a jaunt out to the H-Mart to pick up some groceries, including the eggs we didn't buy at Stop & Shop earlier this week. But though we spent around $39 bucks on them all told, everything we bought was something we would normally buy at H-Mart anyway, so there's no question of paying anything extra for shopping local there.

So, total spending for today: around $65. Cost premium for shopping local: around $12 if you count the calendar, or negative 18 cents if you don't. One more day to go before we tally it all up.

Thrift Week 2021, Day 5: Socks

Today I discovered one of the biggest flaws in my plan to shop for a whole week at local businesses: Sometimes, they won't let you in.

Since there was nothing in particular I needed today, I decided to try for a purely frivolous purchase instead. I headed uptown to a local chocolatier, thinking I'd browse a bit and settle on something tasty. But when I got there, I found a big sign on the door informing me that the business was open for curbside pickup only. To make a purchase there, I'd have needed to order it online before setting out. I suppose in theory I could have whipped out my phone and placed an order then and there, but I didn't much feel like standing out in the freezing cold waiting for it.

So I headed back downtown along a route that I knew would take me past a bakery. If chocolates weren't on the menu, I figured I'd indulge myself with cookies instead. But that store wasn't just closed to walk-ins; it was closed entirely, dark and shuttered. A sign on the door said "We will be closing at 1:30 on Fridays," but since today is Thursday, that didn't explain why it was closed then and there.

Frustrated, I turned and headed back along Main Street, trying to figure out a fallback option. Brian, who was with me, suggested we just take the car out this evening and fill it up with gas, but that barely seemed to qualify as local shopping, and it certainly wouldn't make a good blog entry. So I decided on one last-ditch attempt: I turned in at the door of our local dollar store. Actually, it's not so much a dollar store anymore as a discount store, with some stuff priced up into the double digits, but the point is, there's a wide variety. This place carries all kinds of stuff, from cleaning products to costume jewelry, so I figured I should be able to find something.

I poked my way up the center aisle, past the makeup, the hair ties, the little kitchen gewgaws, and I found myself facing a display of socks. And I recalled that, while getting dressed that morning, I had noticed that I was running low on clean socks — or at least, the really good clean socks. I have a few pairs of nice, thick wool ones, and then a larger supply of somewhat wussy acrylic ones that don't fit as snugly and aren't as warm. So when I spotted a three-pack of wool-blend socks in assorted colors for $8, I thought, "Bingo!"

I haven't worn these properly yet, but I tried one of them on, and they seem — well, not too bad. Maybe not quite as nice as my top-tier socks, but better than the bottom-tier ones. They're reasonably warm, reasonably thick, and reasonably cushy. And there's even a nice burgundy red pair that matches one of my shirts and should be cheerier to wear than plain black or grey.

At $8 for three pairs, I'd say these were a pretty good value. I mean, heck, last month on a trip to a different discount store outside of town, I spent that same amount on just two pairs of wool socks and considered it a good deal. Granted, these aren't quite as high-quality, but I'd say they're at least two-thirds as good, and they were something I actually needed.

So, once again, local shopping for the win. Can I keep it up for two more days?

Thrift Week 2021, Day 4: Groceries

Today's Thrift Week excursion was more utilitarian than indulgent: just a quick jaunt out to the Stop & Shop to pick up a few necessities. Here's our haul: a bunch of parsley, a head of green leaf lettuce, one cucumber, one plum tomato, two cans of tomato paste, and a bag of coffee. Total cost: $11.03.

Could we have bought any of this stuff cheaper somewhere else? Well, I honestly don't know. Although I keep a price book to track the prices of various food items we buy regularly, most of the items shown here aren't in it. All the fresh produce items fluctuate so much in price that tracking them is more or less pointless, and a single can of tomato paste lasts us so long that it doesn't really qualify as a staple item. (The only reason we bought two this time is that Brian always assumes we have a can to spare, and when he unexpectedly discovered yesterday that we were clean out, he figured he'd better buy an extra. Of course, after we got them home, he discovered that he did in fact have a can in the pantry; it was just in the wrong place. But oh well, it's not like the stuff goes bad, and an extra 79 cents is hardly going to break our budget.)

The only item in this assortment that qualifies as a staple is the coffee. This is one particular item I've had a lot of struggles over in the past, trying to find a brand that meets my ethical and environmental standards at a price that isn't too ridiculous. I used to buy five pounds at a time from Dean's Beans; with shipping, this came to just under $10 a pound, which was a lot, but less than I could find anywhere else. I tried a house brand from Costco that was cheaper, but the flavor was awful, and it's no longer available anyway; for a while I was buying the stuff from IKEA, until they switched to a new brand that doesn't have a decaf option. Even Trader Joe's doesn't offer a decaf that bears any sort of sustainable certification.

However, just as I was about to switch back to buying in bulk online, I made a discovery: The store brand at Stop & Shop, my trusty neighborhood supermarket, is in fact UTZ-certified. And this isn't the fancy, high-end Nature's Promise brand, either; it's just the plain old house brand. The Nature's Promise coffee, which costs a bit more, is organic and Fair Trade certified, but as I discovered five years ago, that's not necessarily better. 

So now, Stop & Shop's modest medium-roast decaf is my go-to coffee. And at $4.79 for a 12-ounce bag, or $6.38 per pound, it's about as cheap as the stuff I used to get from IKEA — for which I had to drive 45 minutes and pay four bucks in tolls each way — and significantly cheaper than any other brand I've ever favored. And I only have to travel ten minutes to get it — on foot.

So, basically, I know for a fact that I could not buy coffee, or at least coffee that's acceptable to me, at any other store for less than I pay at Stop & Shop. And as for the other things we bought, while some of them might in fact be cheaper somewhere else, they would also have required a separate trip that would almost certainly cancel out all of the savings.

Now, in the interest of full disclosure, I'll reveal that we deliberately skipped one item on our shopping list during this trip: eggs. We're currently down to our last two eggs, but the only eggs at Stop & Shop that are Certified Humane cost $5.70 per dozen, and that's more than we're prepared to pay. But even those could still be available locally at a more reasonable price; H-Mart, which is within my local shopping radius, carries several brands that are Certified Humane, and usually at least one of them is on sale. So we can typically find them there for no more than $3 per dozen.

In short, I'm now halfway through my local shopping experiment, and so far, I have only spent a total of $7 more than I would have shopping as cheaply as possible. In fact, if you count my BOGO bargain on Day One, I'm actually ahead for the week. Could it be that sticking to local businesses is actually, on the whole, the most frugal way to shop?

Thrift Week 2021, Day 3: Booze

For the third day of my local shopping Thrift Week, I didn't have any particular shopping needs to fill. But I'd made a promise to get something from a local business each day, so I decided I'd stop by our local thrift shop and browse for a bit. Even if I didn't find any clothes to fit my needs, as I usually don't, I could always grab a couple of dirt-cheap books off the shelves.

The snag with this plan was that I'd forgotten about the thrift shop's new hours. It's now open only from 9am to noon on weekdays, which makes it highly impractical for me ever to shop there during the week — particularly in wintertime, when I prefer not to venture out until the warmest part of the day. And Saturday, with hours of 10am to 1pm, is only marginally better. So it's unlikely I'll make it to the thrift shop at any point during this Thrift Week challenge.

As Brian and I turned away from the store in disappointment, we started running through the list of other local businesses we might try to patronize. A local bakery was right nearby, but sadly, it's closed until February, making it also off-limits for this week's challenge. And outdoor dining isn't a very appealing option right now. So, after considering the supermarket, the drugstore, and the dollar store, we decided to pop into our local liquor store, Pino's, and replenish our supply of gin. Brian pointed out that we could also do this, possibly more cheaply, at the Rite Aid, which carries booze as well as medications. But I figured for purposes of a local shopping challenge, the truly local business should take priority over the chain store.

And, as it turns out, this was a pretty smart decision. Though most of the bottles on Pino's shelves were quite pricey, we found one on the bottom shelf called Gary's Good Gin, which was only ten bucks for a full liter. It wasn't what I'd call fancy, but we liked the name, and the price rivaled the cheapo Crystal Palace gin that we normally buy in a plastic bottle at Rite Aid. (We later went back and checked, and found that it was actually cheaper than the small bottles, which were $8 for 750 milliliters. The larger 1.5-liter bottles were $14 each, for a marginally cheaper price of $9.30 per liter, but 70 cents seems a small enough price for supporting an independent business.) And, after trying it both straight and in an orange blossom, I'd say it lives up to the claim on the label. I don't claim to be an expert, but its piney aroma and flavor strike me as reasonable marks of a good gin, even if not an outstanding one.

So, once again, this is a purchase that wasn't strictly necessary, but if you compare it to what we would otherwise have bought, the extra expense was minimal. So far, local shopping seems to be working out in our favor. I'm beginning to wonder if I should try extending the challenge past the end of the week, just to see how long I can keep it up.

Money Crashers: 13 Best Cheap Cellphone Plans That Will Save You Money

When I finally decided, two and a half years ago, to give in and get a smartphone, I made a point of choosing the most bare-bones plan I could find to go with it. I didn't need or want unlimited data; in fact, I preferred having severely limited data, because it would prevent me from spending all my time in public staring at my phone and ignoring people and events around me. And also, I didn't want to spend the money.

Now, I realize not everyone's priorities are the same as mine. Some people don't have landlines and rely on their cell phone as their primary way of communicating with people; some even don't have computers at home and rely on it as their primary way of getting information. For them, unlimited data — or at least a generous amount of it — is a higher priority. But the one thing I think we can all agree on is that we'd rather not pay any more for it than we have to.

To that end, I've written a piece for Money Crashers on how to spend less on your cellphone plan. I list numerous alternatives to the "big three" (AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon), outline their pros and cons, and offer some pointers on how to choose the best provider for you. Because even if you do want to be glued to your phone in public, there's no reason to spend $100 a month for the privilege.

13 Best Cheap Cellphone Plans That Will Save You Money

Thrift Week 2021, Day 2: Flowers

By now, I have my ecofrugal holiday decorating routine pretty much down to a science. I just trim off some branches from all the evergreen trees in (and overhanging) our yard, fill up all the vases in the house with them, bind some onto the front porch railings, and eke it all out with curls of red ribbon and strings of little white lights. I've been using the same lights and ribbons for years, so I can make the house look appropriately festive without spending any money at all.

The problem comes when the holidays are over and it's time to take those decorations down. Refilling the vases with more evergreens doesn't feel right, because I associate those with Christmas time — but there's nothing else in the garden to fill them with, and even the earliest spring flowers are still months away. And simply leaving the vases empty makes the room feel sort of bare and bleak, right at the very time when the world outside is barest and bleakest and the indoors could really use something to brighten it up.

So when I decided to do this local shopping challenge for Thrift Week, I figured it would be a perfect occasion to throw a little business to an establishment I rarely patronize: our local florist. I usually avoid buying cut flowers, not just because of the price but also the pesticides and carbon footprint — but since I'm trying to help local businesses here, I decided that would take the curse off it some. And I hoped that perhaps the florist could recommend something that was sort of winter-appropriate — maybe grown in a local greenhouse rather than shipped from Argentina.

And that's what I got, more or less. He initially pointed me at some mixed bouquets in the front of the shop, but they looked a little too bright and summery, so I inquired about some white flowers in a bucket, which turned out to be freesias sold by the stem. Not wanting to go too overboard, I just bought five of them. When I got home, I clipped some sage off our not-quite-dormant plant to fill out the vase, and now I have a nice, not too un-seasonal display of flowers and greenery to brighten up our living room. (I guess if I'd been thinking, I'd have accepted the florist's offer of some greens to go with the flowers, since the whole point of the exercise was to give them some business. But my frugal habits were kind of working on autopilot, so I said no to this "extra" expense without thinking about it.)

Now, since this purchase is one I normally wouldn't make at all, I could say the entire $15 that I spent on it is a cost incurred by shopping locally. But on the other hand, I had more or less decided already to splurge on some cut flowers to brighten up the bleak midwinter, so if I hadn't bought them here I would probably have picked up a bunch at Trader Joe's or someplace. On our last trip there, the closest thing I saw to a seasonal bunch of blooms was tulips at $10 a bunch, so my decision to shop local only cost me an extra $5. So far, I'm actually ahead for the week.

Thrift Week 2021: The local edition

The COVID pandemic has been particularly hard on small, local businesses. Since it started, roughly ten stores in our town have closed their doors for good, including our beloved local toy store, our real live record shop, a jewelry store, a vintage clothing store, and a Greek cafe. And while, surprisingly, some new businesses have actually opened, I still feel like I should have done more to help the ones we lost. I did my best to throw a little business their way during the shutdown, but it was only a drop in the bucket.

So I decided that Thrift Week 2021 is going to be my most ambitious Local Shopping Challenge yet: for this entire week, I will buy everything locally.

For purposes of this challenge, I'm defining "local" to mean within walking distance, rather than just within the boundaries of Highland Park. That means I can still go to the nearest Starbucks (in New Brunswick), and we can go to the nearest hardware store (in Edison) if we need to fix something in an emergency. But we have to go to that nearby place, even if Home Depot is cheaper and has a bigger selection. We can buy our groceries from the local Stop & Shop, the H-Mart in Edison, or the George St. Co-Op in New Brunswick, but we can't go to Shop Rite, Coscto, or Trader Joe's for the things that are cheaper there. If we want a book we can't find at the library, we can try the local thrift shop or the small Barnes & Noble in New Brunswick, but we can't just order it online. (Locally owned businesses that no longer have a storefront but still have an online presence, such as Raritan Market, will also count.)

Of course, I could just get around this by putting off any non-essential purchases until the week is over, which wouldn't exactly do our local businesses any good. So to ensure that my local shopping challenge actually involves shopping local, I'm adding another requirement: I must make at least one purchase from a local business each day of the challenge. Yes, even if that means buying things I don't actually need. Brian and I are among the lucky ones who are doing just fine in the middle of this economic crisis, so we can certainly afford to spend a little extra money helping out those who are struggling.

Each day, I'll log in to share what I purchased, how much it cost, and how much (if any) extra I spent to buy it locally as opposed to shopping at my usual venues. At the end of the week, I'll tot it all up, calculate how much my week of local shopping cost in total, and extrapolate to figure out how much it might cost to shop this way all the time — or at least until the pandemic is over — and whether it's worthwhile.

Here's my haul for today:

1. Two bottles of "super magnesium" tablets from the local Rite Aid. This is something I actually needed, and something I would normally buy there, but I was lucky enough to find them on sale today: buy one, get one free. So both bottles together cost me $10, which is half what I'd normally pay.

2. A bunch of organic scallions from Stop&Shop for $1. This is more than we'd normally pay, but we needed the scallions right away and didn't want to make a separate trip to H-Mart just to save 70 cents. 

3. A package of cupcake wrappers, also from Stop&Shop, for $2. Brian told me I could have any kind of cake I wanted for my birthday, and I chose the chocolate angel cupcakes from our "Delicious Desserts" cookbook, so we needed some cupcake liners. This is something we don't normally buy, so I don't know whether $2 for 75 of them (which should be something like a ten-year supply at the rate we use them) is a good price, but again, even if we could have saved a buck somewhere else, it wasn't worth the extra trip.

So my first day of local shopping was pretty successful. We found everything we needed, and we actually spent around $8.30 less in total than we normally would. On the other hand, these purchases were pretty utilitarian, rather than fun or special. But I'm sure that will change as the week goes on.

Money Crashers: COBRA Health Insurance Guide

Just a quick update here to let you know about my latest Money Crashers article. It's about COBRA, which I kind of doubt is all that useful for anyone these days, since an ACA marketplace health plan — even without subsidies — is almost always cheaper than paying for your old workplace plan without your employer's help. But there are some cases in which it could possibly be worth the money, and this article explains what they are, along with other details such as who's eligible for the program and how to enroll. Here it is:

COBRA Health Insurance Guide – Continue Coverage After Ending a Job

Why my New Year's resolution for 2021 is to start sharing good news

Right now, it seems like basically all the news is bad. It's not good anywhere in the world, but the U.S. in particular seems to be a Russian nesting doll of disaster: the crisis of an angry mob storming the Capitol wrapped in the crisis of a disputed election wrapped in the yearlong twin crises of a global pandemic and the biggest depression since the Great one, all wrapped in the decades-long crisis of a looming climate disaster that could literally kill us all. No one's even paying attention to the biggest threats right now because they're too busy dealing with the most immediate ones. So many terrible things happened in 2020 that the word of the year chosen by users of Dictionary.com was "unprecedented." The Oxford English Dictionary couldn't even settle on a single word of the year, instead naming an assortment of words like "Blursday," "covidiots," and "doomscrolling," which has taken the place of what we used to call reading the news.

The thing about that last one is, dwelling on bad news is part of what got us into this mess in the first place. As a recently replayed Hidden Brain podcast pointed out, both social media and conventional media have focused excessively on terrible stories that spark outrage, because that's what attracts the most clicks and likes. Unfortunately, it's also what sows dissension and stokes the fires of partisan rancor, vitriol, conspiracy theories, and hatred — all resulting in outbreaks of violence that make for more bad news, more doomscrolling, and more division.

How can we break the cycle?

I'm not sure, but the best idea I could come up with was this: start sharing good news.

Instead of automatically clicking, liking, and sharing every horrible story that you see, try clicking, liking, and sharing the good ones. Sure, there aren't as many of them out there; because we've been trapped in the doomscrolling cycle so long, they aren't as likely to show up in your social media feed or even on the front page of your local newspaper. But they are out there. Every issue of the Christian Science Monitor features a story about someone who's doing good in the world, and Reasons to Be Cheerful serves up a steady diet of nothing but good news, every week. They're mostly small-scale, local stories about one city, one company, one project — but at least they're something to counter the constant scrolling of doom. And the more of these stories we all click, like, and share, the more popular they will become, and the more incentive both social media and mainstream media will have to offer up more of the same.

So my New Year's resolution for 2021 (along with continuing to try new vegan recipes each month) is to share good news when I find it. If it's good news about the environment, or about money, I'll share it on this blog. If not, I'll share it via social media or email with my family and friends. Basically, I'll just do my best to pass on a little bit of much-needed hope by whatever means I have to hand.

I've started off already this weekend. Just now, I posted on my local Nextdoor group to tell everyone about a local store employee who went the extra mile for me and Brian, rather than complaining about one who was rude or unhelpful. And to my mom, I passed along this summary from Reasons to be Cheerful of the 112 best things that happened, even amid all the chaos, in 2020 — from the expansion of renewable energy worldwide to the virtual eradication of homelessness in the third-largest city in Illinois to the success of community policing in Camden, right here in my home state of New Jersey.

So watch this space for more good news in 2021. If nothing else, it'll give me something to write about when there's no particular news to share in my ecofrugal life — and if it forces me to go searching for positive stories, so much the better.

Money Crashers: 6 Things You Should Maintain & Take Care of to Save Money Long-Term

One of the key tenets of the ecofrugal life is, to inversely paraphrase Aldous Huxley, "Mending is better than ending." In other words, it's almost always better for both the environment and your wallet to keep something you own in good condition than to toss it and buy something new. (Of course, there are some exceptions, like our old microwave that would have cost more to repair than to replace with a good used one, or a threadbare pair of socks that would cost an hour to darn one more time and only a dollar to replace. But it works as a general principle.)

My latest piece for Money Crashers takes that basic principle and turns it into solid, practical advice. I name six items that are particularly useful to maintain, mainly because it makes such big difference in their overall lifespan, along with the key maintenance tasks that matter most for each one. Most of these are high-end items that would cost a lot to replace, like cars and major appliances, but clothing also makes the list because it's so easy and cheap to do. (Remember that pair of pants I repaired two years ago in the hopes of making it last out the winter? I'm still wearing them.) 

This article may not tell you much you couldn't have learned by R-ing TFM. But it condenses all the key info from more than six manuals' into just one place — and it has the advantage of being right in front of you, not buried in a drawer somewhere. See? Here it is:

6 Things You Should Maintain & Take Care of to Save Money Long-Term

Recipe of the Month: Savory Cabbage with Vegan Sausage

According to legend, whatever you do at the start of the new year is what you can expect to be doing all year long. If that's true, we can expect to spend 2021:

• Watching mindless entertainment, like the Dungeons & Dragons game featuring the cast of Stranger Things that we watched on New Year's Eve;
• Repairing broken things, like our D&D Players Handbook and Monster Manual, which Brian successfully restored the broken pages of with bookbinding glue, and my two pairs of old pants that got patched or re-patched; and
  
• Inventing new plant-based recipes, like the cabbage with vegan sausage Brian made last night.
  

Actually, this wasn't so much a new recipe as a meatless adaptation of an old one. Until recently, Brian and I used to be in the habit of buying (free-range, non-factory-farmed) kielbasa sausage from the Amish market. It was handy for a last-minute supper, since we could just fry up a couple of links and cook some potatoes and frozen peas in the microwave, and also for cutting up to add flavor to other recipes. Brian invented one with cabbage, onion, apple, and chunks of sausage all cooked together, which was quite tasty and provided a good dose of healthy fruits and veggies.

However, when we decided to go (mostly) dairy-free, we also started drifting away from the few free-range meat items that were still a part of our diet. This wasn't really a matter of principle; I was okay with them from an ethical standpoint, and chicken and pork don't have as big a carbon footprint as beef, especially when eaten on such an infrequent basis. I think Brian just saw it as an interesting challenge to see how close to vegan we could comfortably get. (As I discovered during last year's Thrift Week, I don't think going full vegan is ever going to be on the cards for us, but the perfect doesn't have to be the enemy of the good-for-the-planet.)

We'd tried several times to find an acceptable plant-based substitute for our favorite sausage, but without much success. Most commercially produced vegetarian sausages are meant to mimic either highly spiced Italian sausage or chorizo; the only Polish sausage substitute we'd ever found was Tofurkey's, which left much to be desired in terms of both flavor and texture. We even tried making our own sausages from seitan, but while these were okay flavor-wise, they were far too dry to eat on their own.

Last night, however, Brian had a brainwave. It occurred to him that we didn't actually need to make big sausage links to replace the little pieces of sausage that we used to use in recipes like his cabbage dish. And since he had a bunch of little broken pieces left at the bottom of a bag of Butler Soy Curls, too small to use as a chicken or tofu alternative in a dish like Garlic Lemon Broccoli Pasta, they seemed like the perfect subjects to experiment on.

To give the soy curl fragments a sausage-like flavor, he simply soaked them in well-salted water with a touch of black pepper, Liquid Smoke, and — a surprisingly important addition — red food coloring. This gave the soy bits the pinkish color we'd expect from the cooked chunks of kielbasa in the original version of this dish, which helped trick our brains into expecting a sausage-like flavor from them. I was in my office working while Brian cooked up this creation, so I didn't know what had gone into it, and when I first tasted it, I couldn't figure out where he'd come up with such a plausible sausage substitute. I knew it wasn't real sausage, because we were all out of it, but it tasted so close to it that if I hadn't known, I might have thought he'd simply located a stray link in the back of the freezer.

Once Brian let me in on the secret, I could analyze the flavor a little more objectively, and I noticed one element that was missing: garlic. I suggested, and he immediately agreed, that the next time he tries this, he should add some to the soaking mixture for an even more kielbasa-like flavor. But even without the garlic, these soaked soy curls really provided the meaty chew and savor this dish needed. Mixed in with all the other flavors of cabbage, onion, apple, and caraway seed, they were almost indistinguishable from the real thing.

This recipe is still a work in progress, so it will probably improve as time goes by, but I think what we have now is good enough to be worth sharing. So, gentlefolks, I give you:

BRIAN'S SAVORY CABBAGE WITH VEGAN SAUSAGE

1. Dissolve 3/4 tsp. salt in 1/2 cup water. Add 2 grinds black pepper, 2-3 drops Liquid Smoke, and 1 drop red food coloring. (Note: for future versions of this recipe, Brian plans to add 1 clove fresh garlic and blend everything together with a hand blender, but we haven't tried that yet.) Zap the mixture in the microwave for 30 seconds.
2. Add roughly 1 ounce crushed soy curls, or enough to fill the container up to the water line. Soak for about 10 minutes, then squeeze out the excess liquid.
3. Fry the soaked soy curls in vegetable oil for about 5 minutes. Set aside.
4. To the same pan, add 1/2 red onion (chopped), 1/2 cabbage (sliced into thin strips), 1 apple (peeled and diced), 1 tsp. caraway seed, and an additional 1/2 tsp. salt. Cook until tender, then add the "sausage" bits back to the pan and heat through.

Serve with bread (preferably rye) or biscuits. Makes two generous portions, with a little bit left over.

You can also cook the veggies on their own, without the "sausage." This is good as a side dish, but not substantial enough for a main course.

This successful experiment has gone even further to confirm our appreciation for Butler Soy Curls. We've already discovered so many handy ways to use them (chili, lemon-garlic sauce, sesame sauce) that we're going through them at an alarming rate. After devouring our first bag of them, we bought a half-dozen more (the minimum order) from the Butler site, and we've already used up nearly two of those bags and given away a third. So, the next time we order, we've decided to go for the 12-pound bulk box. Brian hesitated to buy this big box the last time, since he feared we wouldn't have enough freezer space to store them all, but now that he's seen just how useful they are, he's willing to clear out some of the other things in the freezer (like our homemade veggie stock, which isn't that great anyway) to make room for them. Besides, at the rate we're going through them, we can store some of them in the fridge rather than the freezer and run no risk of having them go off before they're eaten.

Doing this will reduce the cost of the curls in their dry form to $5.41 per pound, even with shipping included. Since each pound of the dry curls cooks up to make about three pounds of meat substitute, that works out to about $1.80 per pound — less than we used to pay for the free-range chicken from Trader Joe's, and significantly less than the Amish-market sausage. So this new, tasty protein substitute will be not only earth-friendly, but economical as well — just what ecofrugality is all about.