Recipe of the Month: Coconut Mushroom Pizza

During last year's weeklong vegan challenge, I observed that there are three kinds of vegan dishes. Some are naturally plant-based and don't need any modification; some require minor changes, like leaving out the meat or substituting tofu; and some requires out-and-out imitations of animal-based products.

In general, we prefer the first and second kinds. This is mostly because dishes that are inherently vegan, or that require only minor changes to make them so, usually taste better than dishes that are trying to imitate meat or dairy. The latter kind tend to taste like inferior substitutes for the original, something you'd have no reason to eat if you weren't trying to eat vegan.

However, if the alternative is giving up a favorite dish entirely, we'd rather put up with a substitute and just make it the best substitute we can find. That's why we were so happy to discover the homemade vegan mozzarella recipe from It Doesn't Taste Like Chicken; it allowed us to continue enjoying dishes like Pasta a la Caprese and pizza, which we assumed would be impossible to make without cheese.

Or so I thought, at least, until It Doesn't Taste Like Chicken served up this recipe: Creamy Vegan Mushroom Coconut Pizza. It's a fully vegan pizza that doesn't call for any kind of cheese substitute: just heaps of sauteed mushrooms and onions and a creamy white sauce made from coconut milk, flavored with lemon and thyme and thickened with flour. It looked like it would at least be interesting to try as a change of pace, and if we liked it, maybe it could become our go-to recipe, reducing the need to mess around with veggie cheesemaking.

So I printed out the recipe for Brian, and this week he gave it a try. And while trying, he noticed two problems right away:

• The volume of mushrooms was huge — far more than we'd normally put on a pizza. That in itself wasn't a problem, since we both love shrooms; the difficulty was cooking them. The recipe says to just throw them all in a large skillet and saute them for "about 5 minutes," but that didn't work at all when Brian tried it. Even in our biggest pan, the volume was simply too large to expose all the mushrooms to the heat at once, and so he couldn't manage to cook all the water out of them. Rather than risk burning some while he tried to cook the others down, he took them off the heat, but he didn't feel at all confident about putting them on the pizza.
• The directions for the coconut sauce had a similar problem. They said to make a roux, then add the coconut milk and seasonings and whisk it for, again, "about five minutes" until it thickens. Brian kept it on the heat quite a bit longer than that, but it still wasn't anywhere close to the thickness he considered appropriate for a pizza sauce. It was more like a soup.

Based on prior experience, he feared that putting these two liquid-heavy ingredients on top of the crust would result in a soggy pizza, and sure enough, it did. There was nothing really wrong with the flavor; it was quite different from an ordinary pizza, but very savory, with the coconut and the faint tang of the lemon making an interesting background to the earthiness of the mushrooms. But the texture was nothing like a pizza. As Brian put it, it was more like a mushroom soup served in a very shallow bread bowl. I actually ate part of my slice by breaking pieces off the crust and dipping up the shrooms with them, and I ended up giving up on the rest.

We hoped that perhaps the sauce would thicken up more if it were left for a day to set, but no such luck. When Brian heated up the leftovers in the toaster oven, the crust crisped up beautifully, but the topping was still as sloppy as ever.

However, despite these shortcomings, Brian doesn't want to give up on this recipe. He really liked the taste, and he thinks the problems with the texture can be fixed. Next time he tries it, he plans to cook the mushrooms in small batches so that they lose all their liquid and also brown a bit, enhancing their flavor. He also intends to reduce the volume of coconut milk in the sauce from a full can (about a cup and a half) to around one cup, limiting the amount of liquid that goes into it — which will also reduce the amount of fat. The resulting pizza won't have as strong a coconut flavor, but personally, I think a heavier balance of mushrooms to coconut would probably be an improvement.

So we will try this pizza at least once more, with these emendations, and see if it comes out with a more pizza-like consistency. If it works, this might become a regular addition to our repertoire — at least as an alternative to, if not a replacement for, more traditional pizza. And if not, we can always try to adapt the filling as a soup.

Money Crashers: Where to Buy Cheap School Uniforms for Kids and Save Money

Schools in most U.S. states will reopen this fall, if they aren't open already. That will be a relief in many ways for parents who can resume their own work lives once the kids are back in school. But for some, it raises a new problem: getting their kids out of their PJ's and back into some classroom-appropriate clothes. This is especially tricky in schools with uniforms, which can cost anywhere from $100 for a school wardrobe to over $100 per outfit.

However, for smart shoppers, there are ways around this cost. My latest Money Crashers article outlines several of them, including shopping secondhand, buying the minimum number of pieces, choosing cheaper stores when possible, shopping sales and clearance, sizing up, and making pieces last as long as possible.

Where to Buy Cheap School Uniforms for Kids and Save Money

Money Crashers: Latte Factor

My latest Money Crashers article takes on one of the great myths of personal finance: the Latte Factor. This phrase, coined by financial guru David Bach, signifies the idea that the key to financial independence is to cut out small, unnecessary expenses and steer that money into investments instead. And you must admit, as a sound bite, it's sheer genius. It's easy to grasp, and it's such a comforting idea — that the only thing standing between you and retiring rich is something so trivial as a latte. All you have to do is cut out coffee, and you've got it made! What could be easier?

In fact, there's only one thing wrong with the Latte Factor: it is, to borrow a phrase from "The Good Place," bullshirt.

In the article, I explain exactly why Bach's calculations don't work, and why they trivialize the problems that are really holding people's finances back — much more complex problems like overpriced real estate, skyrocketing health care costs, and punishing student loan debt. Then I go on to outline some approaches that actually can help you solve these problems, such as rethinking housing, refinancing debt, maximizing your income, and boosting your investment returns.

Spoiler alert: These fixes are nowhere near as simple as giving up a daily latte. But they're a lot more likely to work.

Latte Factor – Giving Up Lattes Won’t Make You Rich But Here’s What Will

DIY towel-to-mat conversion

This year, I decided it was time to retire our old, threadbare green bath mat. I'd had it ever since I moved into my first solo apartment, over 20 years ago, so I thought it was ready for a well-deserved retirement. And we already had a much nicer one that we got shortly after we were married (a mere 17 years ago), so all we needed was a spare mat to use when the nice one was in the laundry. I figured we could just pick one up at Bed, Bath & Beyond, or some such place.

Turns out, not so much. When we got to the store, we found that terry cloth bath mats like ours — basically like a smaller, thicker towel — simply weren't on offer. They had hand towels, bath towels, and wash cloths, but the only things labeled as "bath rugs" were more like, well, rugs: thick, heavy pieces with a rubber backing to hold them in place. Not only were they between $20 and $30, rather than the $10 or so we'd expected to pay, but they clearly were too heavy to just toss in the laundry with our other clothes. They might be technically machine washable, but they'd need a load all to themselves, which would be terribly wasteful.

We thought perhaps this was simply a limitation of this particular store, but no. We also checked at Target and HomeGoods as well, and the situation was exactly the same. Plain terry cloth bath mats apparently just weren't sold in stores anymore.

At this point, most people would probably just have ordered one online. (Actually, these days, most people would probably have done that first without going to a store at all.) But something in me rebelled at the idea of paying $6 or more in shipping for something that should only cost around $10 to begin with. I recalled that, tucked away in the linen closet, we had an old bath towel that I'd bought years ago but never really used because it was too small. (I like the giant "bath sheets" that I can drape around myself completely.) It was basically the same material as a bath mat, just the wrong size and shape. But maybe it could still serve the purpose somehow.

I experimented with folding the towel in various ways and found that if I sort of folded it in thirds, I could get a symmetrical shape with the edge trim on both sides and a thicker portion in the middle. Of course, it obviously wouldn't stay put if I just set it down on the floor like that, especially with two energetic cats around. But maybe I could stitch it down and have a serviceable bath mat at no cost.

Rather than get out the sewing machine, which frankly intimidates me, I just grabbed a needle and some sturdy nylon thread and started whip-stitching along the line between the folded fabric and the edge fabric. It took me several changes of thread to get all the way through it on both sides, so the whole project may have taken me around 20 or even 30 minutes, but that was much less time than I'd already spent looking through the entire selection of bath linens in multiple stores without result. At least I knew when I was finished with this project I'd have something, even if it wasn't ideal.

And here that something is in place on the bathroom floor. Seen from a distance, it doesn't even look out of the ordinary. Up close, of course, you can tell it's not just a regular mat; in particular, when you stand on it in bare feet, you can distinctly feel the difference in thickness between the center section and the outer edges. And if you shuffle your feet back and forth on it, the inner layers sort of wrinkle up, because I didn't stitch it closed on the sides. But it's easy enough to smooth back out again.

I'd say the moral of this story, as with so many of my stories, is that ecofrugality isn't at all about doing without. In many cases, in fact, it's about getting more than you could by following society's normal spending habits. If we were normal people, when we couldn't find the type of bathmat we wanted at the store, we'd either have bought one that wasn't what we really wanted or spent a lot of money to have one shipped to us. But because we're ecofrugal people who try to make the most of what we have, we were able to get something much closer to what we wanted for just a little bit of effort and no money at all.

Our Little Free Plant Library

As I mentioned two weeks ago on planting day, Brian generally starts twice as many seedlings of each variety as he expects to need for our garden. This ensures that he'll have at least one healthy seedling to plant (a strategy that proved crucial with our new Apple pepper) and leaves him with backup plants to put in the ground in case any of the starting lineup don't make it. He typically waits about two weeks to make sure all the plants are okay, then takes the extras to work and gives them away to his coworkers.

Well, obviously that wasn't an option this year. Brian's workplace is still entirely remote, with no indication of when they might be able to start going back into the office. He even has one coworker hired last year whom he'd never actually met in person until this week. (They were scheduled to have a meeting on Zoom, and Brian suggested that, since they live in the same town and are fully vaccinated, perhaps they could meet in person instead. Because that is the kind of reckless wild man he has turned into after 15 months of being cooped up at home with me.)

We were able to give away all our extra flower seedlings to my parents, who have plenty of room in their yard, but they didn't have enough garden space to accept any tomatoes or peppers. We gave one pepper plant away to one of our fellow RPG players earlier this month, when we had our first live, in-person game session in over a year. But that still left us with eight tomato plants and two peppers that needed a good home.

Now, as it happens, there are quite a few Little Free Libraries around our town. These are simply boxes full of books that you can install somewhere on your property where your neighbors can get to them. You put all your unwanted books in there, and passersby can help themselves — and, if there's room, drop off some of their extra reading material as well. We know of at least five of these within walking distance, and we've browsed all of them in turn, sometimes picking up books and sometimes dropping them off. And more recently, we've seen at least one neighbor adapt the same idea to plants, setting up a little table in the front yard and stocking it with extra seedlings. So Brian wondered, could he unload our extra seedlings in the same way?

Yesterday after knocking off work, he put the idea to the test. He ducked into the workshop and started rummaging through his piles of scrap wood, eventually digging up a rectangular wooden frame that had originally been the base for one of his squirrel excluder cages and a piece of particle board that was exactly the right size to attach to the bottom. No cutting required; he simply nailed the two pieces together to make a flat tray, then used screws to affix it to the wooden stake we initially used to secure our plum tree after it keeled over in a storm last summer. He pounded the stake into the ground in a corner next to the driveway, then affixed a little sign reading "Free!" that he'd drawn on a little scrap of wood with a Sharpie.

By the next morning, it was clear that his plan was yielding fruit — or, more accurately, getting rid of it. As we sat at breakfast, we spied through the window two passing pedestrians who stopped, examined the collection of plants, and selected one each to take with them. After the first 24 hours, we're down to just four tomato plants and one pepper.

This whole scheme is one of the most ecofrugal projects we've ever undertaken. It's preventing waste, putting our extra seedlings to good use. It's helping our neighbors to grow their own food and eat more sustainably. And it was all done with reused materials, so it didn't cost a penny.

In fact, it's working out so well, Brian is already wondering what else he can use the table to give away after all the seedlings are gone. Having gone to the trouble of setting it up, it seems like a shame to just take it down straightaway. We're wondering if maybe we could interest any of our neighbors in the two board games we culled from our collection and haven't had a chance to take to the thrift shop. If that works, we might just keep the Little Free Plant Library on permanently as our own personal free store.

Money Crashers: Where to Donate Used or Old Clothes to Charity

I've mentioned before how difficult it is to find places to recycle textiles — really recycle them, that is, not just donate them. Most thrift shops and charities only accept donations of clothing in good condition, so it's hard to get rid of garments too worn to be wearable, even if they still have quite a bit of usable fabric on them.

But if what you want to get rid of is clothing in good condition, that's a different story. There are tons of different organizations that accept them, from local thrift shops to the Red Cross to organizations that focus on specific types of clothing, like Dress for Success (business wear) and Becca's Closet (prom dresses). 

 In my latest Money Crashers article, I list the top organizations that accept clothing donations, what they take, where they operate, and how to give. Through these organizations, you can keep your unused garments out of landfills and get them into the hands of people who can really use them — an ecofrugal win-win.

Where to Donate Used or Old Clothes to Charity

 

Everything's coming up asparagus

Just a quick post this week to tell you about an unexpected and welcome success in our gardening endeavors.

Remember how last week I mentioned that we had picked up some cheap asparagus crowns at the Ocean State Job Lot and tucked them into the gaps in the asparagus beds? There were seven of them in a package that was supposed to have only six, but Brian found room to squeeze them all in, and he figured if only one or two of them actually produced asparagus, that would be a pretty good deal for four bucks. After all, with all the carefully chosen hybrid varieties we've purchased before, first online and later from the Belle Mead Co-Op, probably only two-thirds of the crowns have actually produced any asparagus, so we probably shouldn't expect to get more than one-third germination from these cheapo crowns we don't even know the name of.

But yesterday, when Brian went out to water, what did he find? Tiny little asparagus shoots poking up from not one, not two, not three, but all seven of the crowns he'd planted. They're so small you can't see them very well yet, but here's one resting against his finger.

Now, of course, since these crowns only went into the ground, we won't be able to harvest any asparagus from them this year, or even next year. As long as they all stay healthy, we can probably start gleaning from them lightly in their third year, and after that we can harvest them at will. So it will be quite a while before our new plants actually become a food source for us. 

But still, given what lackluster results we've often had from the varieties we selected especially for their vigor and good production, the fact that they're coming up at all — and especially so soon after planting — is an incredibly hopeful sign, and far more than we could have expected. If all of them survive, they could increase our asparagus yields by 50 percent — maybe even more, considering how well they're starting out compared to all our other asparagus plants.

The only downside of this serendipitous job-lot find is that we still have no idea what variety it is that's thriving so well in our garden. If I knew, I'd make sure to buy more of it the next time we need replacement plants. (We could just grab whatever's on the shelf at Ocean State Job Lot at that time, but we have no guarantee it'll be the same variety.)

Money Crashers: 3 new articles

Money Crashers has popped up three of my articles in the past couple of days, all on quite different topics. The first is about reuse centers like the Habitat for Humanity Restore, which served us so well when we remodeled our downstairs bathroom ten years back. The piece explains how reuse centers (and architectural salvage stores, a related type of store that focuses more on unique, high-end pieces) work, the pros and cons of shopping there, and how to find one near you.

How to Shop at Reuse Centers & Architectural Salvage Stores to Save on Home Improvement

The second piece is about another topic we have some experience with, refurbished electronics. When I bought my old Mac (the one I finally replaced this year), I bought a refurbished one-year-old model, not as a way to save money, but because it was the only way to get a Mac with a CD drive, which I still needed, and without the latest OS, Lion, which was full of bugs. However, "refurbs" offer other benefits too, including the warranties and tech support you'd expect on a new device with prices up to 50% lower. In my piece, I explain how refurbs differ from both new and used goods, where you can find them, and how to get the best deals.

Should I Buy Refurbished Electronics? – How It’s Different From New & Used

Finally, a piece on a somewhat less gripping topic: bank accounts. This is simply a primer on the four common types of bank accounts — checking accounts, savings accounts, money market accounts, and CDs — and how they differ. I cover the pros and cons of each account type in detail, plus the subcategories within each type, and how to decide which type of account you need.

4 Different Types of Bank Accounts Explained

Gardeners' Holidays 2021: First Planting

Yesterday we were busy dancing in the May (actually in person this year, though we had to adapt some of our dances for social distancing), but today we celebrated the spring Gardeners' Holiday at home by planting all our garden seedlings. These weren't actually scheduled to go in the ground until next weekend, but the weather has been so balmy, and the seedlings (with one exception you'll hear about later) looked so big and healthy, that we decided to jump the gun and plant them now. And, since we were doing that, we just went ahead and got the crops we're starting from seed off to an early start as well.

Here you see our array of seedlings: tomatoes, peppers, and marigolds. We did not actually plant all of these; Brian habitually starts at least twice as many seedlings as we expect to need to ensure that we have enough healthy ones to put in the ground. And to make assurance double sure, he generally puts two or three seeds into each seedling tube, then thins out the extras when they come up. And as you can see, with most of the seeds we started this year, this plan worked almost too well, leaving us with an embarrassment of riches, particularly in the tomato department. We planted two each of Opalka, Premio, Pineapple, and Sun Gold, and we have two of each left over. (The extras usually go to his coworkers, but since he's still working from home, this year we're planning to give them away to members of the local gardening group.)

However, there was one new variety that, even with all Brian's extra-careful efforts, still was not ready for planting. That's our new Apple pepper, an allegedly "dependable and problem free" frying pepper that we selected from Fedco after our first choice, the faster-growing Banana, turned out to be unavailable. Brian started three seeds in each of two seedling tubes, and of those six seeds, only one actually germinated — and not until three weeks after all the rest of the pepper seedlings. So, while we do now have one Apple pepper seedling, it's had three weeks less to grow than all its fellows, and Brian feared it might not survive out in the wild. He's going to hold it back for another week or two at least, and if it still doesn't look hardy enough at that point, he might just skip it and plant one of the backup Carmens instead. And we certainly won't attempt to grow this variety again next year.

Along with all the seedlings, we started several crops from seed. We planted two zucchinis, six squares of sweet basil, three of Thai basil, one of dill, and six of Provider green beans, and along the trellises, we put in winter squash, climbing French beans, and cucumbers. (We made a slight boo-boo with these; we forgot that we had planned to put in extra Cross Country plants this year and only one Marketmore, so we ended up with an equal number of Cross Country and Marketmore plants, same as usual. And since the seeds are now in the ground, it's too late to correct the error. Oh well.) By the time we were done, practically every square in the garden was planted out. Only the final planting of summer lettuce is still to come.

And our work didn't stop in the garden proper. We also added one new echinacea plant to our flowerbed in the front yard. As you can see, the plants have all grown quite a bit since we put them in last year. However, they suffered some deer damage early on, before we added our new invisible fence to keep the deer out. Nearly all the plants got munched on to some extent, and while most of them eventually recovered, one of the coneflowers did not. So along with the rest of this year's seedlings, Brian sprouted a new one to replace it. It's now installed in the back corner of the flowerbed, temporarily covered by a chicken-wire cage to protect it until it gets a bit bigger. (We also need to replace most of the violas, but those will go in later.)

After we finished planting, we filled the watering can several times from our rain barrel to give all the plants, new and old, a good soaking. And, while we were at it, we added some water to a few other newcomers in our garden. The first is a new honeyberry bush, which we purchased this year after realizing that one of our five existing bushes hadn't survived the winter. Most of the plants had begun forming new leaves, but this one, one of the two Tana plants, showed no signs of budding at all. In fact, we debated buying two new bushes, because we weren't entirely sure whether the other Tana bush was still alive either, but after examining it carefully, we thought it was just a little later budding than the others. So we bought just one new plant. We considered trying a new variety, since the Tanas had not performed so well, but we decided to take our chances on another Tana, since it was available as a two-year-old plant and the other variety came only in a smaller size that we feared would not be mature enough to pollinate our two Keiko plants. Here is the new one, already larger and healthier than the one it replaced — and, as you can see, it has indeed blossomed, so we hope it and the Keikos may all produce berries this year. (As it turns out, we really should have bought two, since the other Tana turned out to be dead after all. But oh well, we can always replace it next year.)

And we also have several new asparagus plants in both the backyard and side-yard beds. We could see that there were some spaces in the beds where no plants were growing, and we had planned to go back to the Belle Mead Co-Op and buy some new asparagus crowns to fill in the gaps. However, on a recent trip to Ocean State Job Lot, a big discount store where we like to shop mainly for interesting foodstuffs, we found a big section in the front devoted to garden supplies. To our surprise, among the seeds and trowels were packages of asparagus crowns, containing six crowns each for just four bucks. The label didn't say what variety they were, but we figured at that price, we didn't have much to lose by giving them a try. In fact, it turned out to be an even better deal than we thought, since the package actually contained seven crowns, not six. Brian managed to squeeze the extra in by digging a second row in the side-yard bed so the plants could go in one behind the other. The indentations you see here in the backyard bed are the spaces where the new plants were added.

So, in short, there are quite a lot of new plants in the yard at the moment. If all of them are successful, we can look forward to a summer filled with beans and greens, squash and cucumbers, crisp peppers, ripe tomatoes, and sweet, juicy honeyberries. And for now, there's the satisfaction of looking out at the garden and seeing it green and growing and full of promise thanks to our efforts. Something attempted, something done, has earned an evening of relaxing on the couch watching Critical Role before bed.