Recipe of the Month: Summer Fruit Smoothie

First of all, apologies for not managing to get a blog entry up last weekend. I was planning to write one on Sunday, but on Sunday morning we got a call from my dad asking to borrow our wet-dry vacuum. In the aftermath of Hurricane Henri, the lower level of my parents' house had flooded for the first time in the 47 years they'd lived there. The carpet was completely soaked, along with everything else within an inch of the floor. And the damage wasn't confined to their house; as of that morning, all the cars parked on the main drag were up to their axles in water. This is global warming in action, folks.

So we ending up spent that whole afternoon and well into the evening literally bailing him out. Fortunately, our little Shop-Vac (which Brian has dubbed "Artoo") didn't have to do the job on its own; a contractor friend of theirs came by with a much larger one. He also advised Dad to get the carpet out of there as soon as possible, before mold could develop. So we spent much of the day moving furniture and accessories off of the carpet (hauling them outside to dry when possible), sucking water out of it and the padding below, cutting them both into strips, rolling them up, and removing them. But little Artoo proved handy for squeezing in between the cars in the driveway, which had also become waterlogged in the flood.

Anyway, by the time we got home, it was too late to do much except tumble into bed. So it wasn't until this weekend that I got around to trying the new recipe I'd had in mind for August: a summer fruit smoothie.

After about a month and a half and close to 95 pounds in total, our plum harvest is finally tapering off. The red Opal plums are gone, and Brian has picked as many as he could reasonably reach with the aid of a stepladder from the Mount Royal (blue) and Golden Gage (yellow) trees. We might still manage to shake a few more ripe ones down from the Golden Gage, but by the time this week is out, we shouldn't need to make room in the fridge for two or three baking pans full of plums anymore.

But at the same time, another summer fruit is just getting started: our fall crop of raspberries. We already got around 15 pints off the canes in June and July, and now production is ramping up again. With both plums and raspberries in the fridge, I realized we were going to have trouble keeping up if we didn't find some way to use them both up in bulk. And the best way I could think of to do that was to blend them all into a smoothie.

Making this was super simple. The last time he picked plums, Brian had found several that were partly damaged, so he cut out the bad spots and piled a quart container in the fridge full of the bits that were good. I just filled up a cup measure with those, aiming for about half blue and half yellow plums, and tossed in in the blender. Then I added half a cup of raspberries, about all we had at this point, and half a cup of orange juice (the extra-pulpy variety Brian likes). I then turned it to the Smoothie setting (the highest it has) and ran it until everything looked blended.

The mixture was an appealing shade of bright pink and surprisingly thick, considering that I hadn't added banana or yogurt to thicken it as most smoothie recipes recommend. The flavor, to my taste, was a bit on the tart side, certainly not as sweet as straight orange juice — though Brian, who is the main consumer of OJ in our house, said the sweetness level tasted just right to him. But it was certainly bursting with summer fruit flavor, and it made short work of a cup and a half of fruit.

This simple recipe should make it easy to use up the remainder of those miscellanous plum fragments, and to use up any whole plums that might be in danger of going bad before we can use them up. And better still, as we have both plums and raspberries in the freezer at this point, we can probably make this smoothie again even when the plum and raspberry crops are long gone. In the dead of next winter, a little taste of summer fruit will be a welcome change of pace.

One last chance for a price on carbon

This week we got some very bad news about climate change. The latest report from the IPCC tells us that, no matter what we do, the earth is going to continue to get hotter for at least the next 30 years. We're in for overall warming of at least 1.5 degrees Celsius, complete with life-threatening heat waves, crop-destroying droughts, increasingly powerful hurricanes, coral reef die-offs, and one to two feet of sea level rise. And that's the best outcome. If we don't take immediate and dramatic action to curb carbon emissions and start drawing down existing carbon — within the next four years — we could see warming of up to 4 degrees, which is pretty much game over.

But there was also some good news: our government is closer than ever before to doing something about it. The budget bill that just passed the Senate includes plans for a clean electricity standard, tax incentives and research grants for renewable energy, and tariffs on goods from countries with weaker emissions standards.

However, there's one piece that's missing: a carbon fee.

As I explained last year, this is an incredibly simple and powerful idea to reduce carbon emissions by simply making them more expensive. It requires no complicated government oversight and allows polluters to choose their own approach to reducing emissions, using existing technologies or developing new ones. It would let the market find the most cost-effective solutions automatically. And better still, the money collected from the carbon fee could be distributed directly to taxpayers as a carbon dividend, offsetting the increased costs of fuel (while still giving consumers an incentive to cut their usage and save still more). So it helps the climate and puts money straight into your wallet. Who could say no to that?

You can read more details about carbon taxes in my Money Crashers article on the topic, but according to The Atlantic, you'd be wasting your time. Last month, that publication declared the carbon tax — an idea it described as "straightforward, perhaps even beautiful" and "a particular favorite of the economics profession" — to be officially dead, saying President Biden had demonstrated an "utter lack of interest in passing it" in the face of overwhelming opposition from the fossil fuel industry. This despite the fact that lots of other countries already have them, and Europe is now planning an extra tax on imports from countries that don't.

But it doesn't have to be that way.

See, the infrastructure bill was just the appetizer. The main course is the budget bill the Senate also unveiled its plan for last week. It's going to include a lot of the clean-energy provisions that got cut from the infrastructure bill, and a price on carbon could be one of them — if enough people tell their members of Congress they want it. And you, yes, you, could be one of those people.

It's very simple. Just go to the website of the Citizens' Climate Lobby (CCL) and click on "Take Action" to "Write Congress" or "Call Congress," or both. It will find you the names and contact into of your Senators and Representative and even provide a message to include in your call or email. The CCL suggests wording the request slightly differently depending on whether your member of Congress is a Democrat ("I'm a constituent, and I’m calling/writing to urge you to support and advocate for a carbon price in the reconciliation package") or a Republican ("I'm a constituent, and I’m calling/writing to urge you to enact a federal carbon price so that U.S. businesses can avoid paying Europe’s border tariff and remain internationally competitive"), but either way, it takes five minutes.

If members of Congress are absolutely deluged with requests for a carbon fee, there's still a chance it can make it into the final budget. The CCL calls this the best chance we've had to get a carbon price through Congress in over a decade.

It's just five minutes of your time, and it could make all the difference for the future of our species.

My first made-from-scratch garment

My sewing skills are fairly rudimentary. I can replace a button, mend a torn seam, or darn a hole, but I've never considered myself up to making an entire garment from scratch. Even when it comes to alterations, I'm limited to small fixes that can be sewed by hand. (I do own a sewing machine, but I'm pretty much hopeless with it.)

But recently, I found myself in need of a garment I couldn't easily pick up at the store: a hat to go with Brian's Renaissance garb. It's been nearly eight years since we last went to a Ren Faire, but last year, as the weeks in pandemic isolation dragged into months, I found myself longing for that festival atmosphere. I mentioned this to a friend I play role-playing games with, and he expressed a similar hankering. Right then and there, we cooked up a plan to go to the Pennsylvania Renaissance Faire as soon as conditions allowed — which turned out to be not until this fall. And eventually, we managed to get our entire RPG group on board.

So I started reassessing my garb and Brian's to see if we still had everything we needed. My outfit still fit, if a bit more snugly than it used to, but his was in need of some upgrades. His old pair of sweat pants had worn out, and he no longer had a pair that could pass muster as Renaissance breeches, so we had to find him a replacement, which turned out to be an adventure in itself. (It's all but impossible these days to find sweat pants in stores with the traditional gathered ankle, so we ended up having to order a pair online.) And the bedroom slippers he wore with his costume last time had proved unsuitable for serious walking, so we replaced those with a pair of slip-on leather shoes we'd picked up at a yard sale a few years back. (The tan shoes look a bit incongruous with his grey-and-black clothes, but I'm hoping to add a tan belt that will make the outfit a bit more coordinated.)

Looking this outfit over and comparing it with the costume guides on sites like RenFaire.com and FairsandFestivals.net, I realized there was still one key piece missing: a hat. A Renaissance gent can reasonably walk around in just a tunic and hose, but if he's outdoors with his head uncovered, he's going to look out of place.

Unfortunately, this wasn't a piece we were likely to be able to pick up in a thrift store. There are many hat styles appropriate to the Renaissance, from the Tudor flat cap to the tall hat associated with the Puritans, but there's not much overlap between them and the hats sold for men in the modern era. I did pop into the local thrift shop to see if by any chance they had a beret, which could potentially pass for a Renaissance muffin hat, but no such luck.

Still, I thought, at least some of these hat styles looked pretty simple, as hats go. Could it really be that hard to sew one from scratch? Could I find a pattern or a guide that would tell me how?

It turned out I could, eventually. The first few tutorials I found under "DIY Renaissance men's hat" made it seem really complicated. The Garbmonger's guide to making a Tudor flat cap had one whole page just explaining all the terms she was going to use, followed by four pages for the actual instructions — way more than I was going to be able to follow. A guide by Renaissance Tailor was a bit simpler, but it called for three layers of fabric, plus a layer of buckram (stiff lining) for the brim. That was more than I could scrounge up, and more than I was prepared to buy for a project that I might make a complete hash of. Especially when the cost of all those materials put together could come to more than a ready-made hat.

But eventually, I found a tutorial that looked like my speed — one that promised a "dead easy" method for constructing a "Kinda 15th Century Renaissance Hat." The material used in the pictures looked fairly substantial, so an old T-shirt wasn't going to serve the purpose, but I happened to have an old towel that I was planning to drop in the textile recycling bin because it had a stain on one end I couldn't get out. But there was still more than enough good material there to make the two pieces the tutorial called for: a band slightly longer than the circumference of the wearer's head, and a big circle with a diameter equal to three-quarters of that circumference measurement, or more if you want it "super floppy." (In my case, it ended up being just slightly more, since the only object I could find to trace around that was close to the right size was the brim of a witch hat I'd picked up for another costume.)

I didn't take any pictures during the assembly process, because it all went pretty much as outlined in the tutorial. The only part I had a bit of trouble with was Step 4, where you're supposed to "Put the two pieces of material together, so the correct sides of the material face inwards." Since the towel material was pretty much the same on both sides, it wasn't immediately apparent how this was supposed to work. But I eventually figured out that the bottom of the circle and the bottom of the band had to be lined up, back to back and edge to edge, and I managed to get the whole thing pinned into place (using large safety pins, since I didn't have any straight pins substantial enough to hold all those pleats of bulky fabric).

Sewing it up was a fairly laborious process, since I was working by hand and the fabric was quite thick. It took me several changes of thread to make it all the way around the hat and get the circle stitched to the band and the ends of the band stitched to each other. But the whole process didn't take more than an hour, and I felt certain it would have taken me at least that long just to set up the sewing machine and try to remember how to thread it, so I persevered.

And when I was done, lo and behold, I had a perfectly passable Renaissance muffin hat. Maybe the tufted terry cloth fabric isn't exactly period, but the shape is generally right (kind of like a shorter version of a chef's toque), and I doubt even the toughest period-apparel snob will raise an eyebrow at it. 

The entire project cost me nothing, since I used fabric I was just going to discard anyway. Brian's whole homemade outfit still clocks in at under twenty bucks: $1 for the thrift-shop shirt, $5 for the yard-sale shoes, and $13 (including shipping) for the new pair of sweat pants we had to order. And best of all, I now know that I can in fact make an entire garment — at least a small one — with my very own hands.

Which may come in handy, since if the Delta variant is still raging across Pennsylvania at the end of September, I'll probably need to figure out some way to make a face mask look period-appropriate, too (vaccine or no vaccine).

Gardeners' Holidays 2021: The Return of Squashmas

For the past few years, Brian and I haven't had much occasion to celebrate our summer squash harvest. The squash vine borers didn't always kill our zucchini plants outright, but they did enough damage to reduce the expected flood of zucchini to a trickle. So the resulting meager harvest ended up being eclipsed by other crops: cucumbers in 2018, plums in 2019, and tomatoes in 2020. 

Well, we're still getting those things this year; so far, we've gathered nine cucumbers, 53 Sun Gold tomatoes and one Opalka, and a whopping 51 pounds of plums off our Opal tree (with the Mount Royal and Golden Gage plums still left to harvest). But all that pales in comparison to the zucchini crop. Our attempts to fend off the borers with Bt spray proved so successful that, with the two plants in the garden and one in the "burn ward" near the house, we've been practically drowning in squash. What you see here is just a fraction of the harvest to date, which has comprised seven little fingerling zukes, 10 medium, 11 large, and one monster so huge that it took us three meals to dispose of it entirely. 

So for the past week or two, we've been eating zucchini pretty much every day, sometimes multiple times a day. In addition to baking two loaves of zucchini bread (one to eat and one to freeze) and making multiple batches of the zucchini pasta aglio olio (with olive oil and garlic) from Vegetariana, Brian has started sneaking zucchini into as many of our other standby recipes as he could think of. He has served it up in a stir fry with Soy Curls and Thai basil. He has turned the Savory Corn Cakes from Mollie Katzen's Vegetable Heaven into Savory Zucchini Cakes. He has eked out the grated potatoes in his Skillet Kugel with as much grated zucchini as he could stuff in there — plus a little bit more, slightly compromising the structural integrity of the dish. And not once but twice, we have breakfasted on Zucchini Waffles, topped with our homemade plum jam, which proved to be an even better complement for the dish than the orange syrup we tried originally.

But at present, Brian's favorite way of preparing zucchini is to grill it. He cuts the zucchini into quarters lengthwise (or, if they're really big, cuts it once crosswise first to make eight pieces), then marinates them in a mixture of soy sauce, onion and garlic powder, olive oil, and a touch of sesame oil for anywhere from five minutes to an hour. Then he pops them on the grill, accompanied by some sliced onions and potatoes, and cooks them until tender. For protein, he usually adds a couple of veggie burgers, soy dogs, or perhaps some tofu skewers.

With all these zucchini recipes at our fingertips, we can celebrate the return of Squashmas in style. We started off the day with zucchini waffles, and we'll be feasting on grilled zucchini (along with its friends) for dinner. And if I really want to do justice to the occasion, maybe I'll pull that second loaf of zucchini bread out of the freezer and have a slice for dessert.