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

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

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

Recipe of the Month: Soy Curl Fajitas

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gardeners' Holidays 2021: The Changing of the Garden

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Holiday decor disappointment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not-so-Green Mountain Energy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Money Crashers: Two new articles

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

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

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

Walmart+ vs. Amazon Prime – Which Is Better?