Gardeners' Holidays 2022: The Changing of the Garden

I really should have posted this last weekend, but I forgot all about it in the excitement of talking about our holiday gift exchanges. So here, just a little late, is my annual post on how we did with this year's garden, and what we plan to keep or change for next year. Spoiler alert: Most of the news isn't good.

Our most productive crops this year were our lettuce and our trusty Sun Gold tomatoes. Between the spring crop of Bronze Mignonette and the summer lettuce mix, we got a total of 52 cups. Our fall planting of winter lettuce, on the other hand, didn't really give us anything before winter hit, though we might still get something off it in the spring from plants that have overwintered. (This seems to be a widespread problem, as lettuce has become ludicrously expensive at the store right now.) The Sun Golds were far and away the most productive of our tomato plants, giving us 525 tiny tomatoes from just two plants—not our best yield ever, but much better than an average year. And the Carmen peppers put in a decent showing, giving us an average-ish yield of 15 small and 6 medium peppers.

But all other crops and varieties were lackluster at best. Our new Banana pepper gave us only four fruits, and the Caballero chili pepper never produced any. Our Pineapple tomato, which produces such magnificent fruits when in good form, yielded only one small tomato, and the Premio and the new Grandma Mary's were both complete busts. The Provider green beans barely lived up to their name, yielding about a pound and a half of beans, and the Climbing French beans gave us a measly 2 ounces. We got just 8 cups of arugula, 14 ounces of snap peas, six smallish butternut squash, and a handful of cucumbers. And even though both our zucchini plants successfully fended off the borers with the help of some Bt spray, they provided only nine small, three medium, and five large squash between them.

We're assuming that that these disappointing results were mostly down to the weather conditions we had this year—a late spring, a lot of really hot days, and not much rain—rather than some sudden failure on the part of our seeds. So, for next year at least, we're planning to stick with the vegetable varieties that have performed well for us in the past. But since our former supplier, Fedco Seeds, has become increasingly unreliable, we need a new one that sells as many as possible of our trusted varieties.

To choose our new seed supplier, I started by searching for recommendations online. I found six companies with positive reviews: Botanical Interests, Harris Seeds, High Mowing Seeds, Johnny Seeds, Seed Savers, and True Leaf Market. Then I visited each of their websites looking for one that carried all the crops we wanted and all the specific varieties we were most attached to (Marketmore and Cross Country cucumbers, Provider green beans, Carmen peppers, Cascadia snap peas, and Pineapple, Premio, and Sun Gold tomatoes). Sadly, no company had all of them, but Botanical Interests and True Leaf had most of them at prices that weren't too outrageous. However, of those two, only Botanical Interests offered a printed catalog, so that's the one that ended up accompanying us on our trip out to Indiana.

From that catalog, we picked out the following varieties to try next year:

• Basil. We have a sufficient supply of sweet basil seeds that aren't too old, so for now all we need is Thai basil. There was exactly one variety of that available (Sweet Thai), so this was an easy choice.
• Leeks. Once again, Botanical Interests offered only one variety: King Richard. It's described as frost-tolerant and early-producing, with a "subtle onion flavor" and "extra-long stems." We'll see if it does better than the Lancelot variety we planted this year, which gave us six fairly scrawny leeks.
• Lettuce. This past year, we planted three kinds: Bronze Mignonette, a butterhead variety, in the spring; summer lettuce, a heat-tolerant mix; and winter lettuce, a cold-hardy variety. When I perused Botanical Interests seeking replacements for these, I discovered a single variety called Marvel of Four Seasons that might actually be able to take the place of all three. According to the catalog, it is both heat- and cold-tolerant and has a "delicate, buttery flavor." It says the harvest window is "21-55 days," which I assume means it will mature 21 days after planting and will bolt after 55 days, so to make it last through three seasons we'd need to do several plantings a few weeks apart. However, Botanical Interests also sells a heat-tolerant leaf lettuce called Salad Bowl, so we're thinking about doing a summer planting of that flanked by spring and fall plantings of the Marvel of Four Seasons. That won't put the Marvel to as thorough a test, but it will allow us to hedge our bets and give us more variety.
• Parsley. Botanical Interests has just two varieties to choose from, one flat-leaf and one curled, so we picked the flat one.
• Peppers. The one vegetable variety we particularly like that Botanical Interests doesn't have is our trusty Carmen frying pepper. However, we still have five seeds of it left from this year's packet, and Brian thinks that should be enough to get us through the next growing season. So for next year, we are going to plant those and also give this year's Banana pepper a second try. The only new variety we've picked out is a chili called Biquinho, which is described as "mild, tangy, and sweet, followed by a touch of heat." Just about my speed, in other words.
• Winter squash. For the past several years, we've planted two varieties. Waltham is fairly reliable and produces large squash, but not always very many of them, so we like to include a smaller variety like Ponca Baby or Little Dipper as a hedge. Botanical Interest doesn't offer any butternut varieties other than Waltham, but they do have a "cousin" of butternut that they call Honeynut. It's described as a compact vine that produces smaller, smoother squash with a "richer, sweeter flavor," which sounds worth a try.
  
• Zucchini. Botanical Interests doesn't sell the Green Machine variety we've grown for the past two years. They have the Black Beauty variety we've grown in the past, but we were more intrigued by a hybrid called Emerald Delight, which is described as compact and "extremely productive" with "great disease resistance." All that sounds pretty hard to argue with, so we're giving it a go.

The only other crop we need to replenish our stock of is snap peas. Botanical Interests carries the Cascadia variety that performed so well for us in 2020 (not so well last year or this year, but that was the fault of deer invaders), so we're sticking with that. We're already trying eight new vegetable varieties as it is, which is quite enough experimentation for one growing season.

There's one more type of seed I'm tempted to throw into our cart: strawberries. I've been thinking for some time about adding a strawberry bed to our yard, but I've always assumed this would require us to terrace the slope in the backyard to create a flat growing surface. Then we'd have to put in the plants, mulch them, and cover them up with netting in the summer to keep the birds from getting all our fruit. And they'd have to be either thinned to remove excess runners or chopped down entirely at the end of each season so they didn't grow into a big tangle. All in all, it seemed like a pretty big project, so I've kept putting it off.

But Botanical Interests has seeds of the Alpine or woodland strawberry, which is a rather different creature. It's not nearly as productive as a traditional strawberry, which is why the landscaper we consulted ten years ago didn't recommend them; the fruits are tiny and, according to her, difficult to harvest. But on the other hand, they're pretty easy to grow. They tolerate shade better than big strawberries, they don't require thinning, and they don't really need mulch. They don't even need a dedicated bed; you can just let them run wild as a ground cover, which is something we could use in our yard anyway. And since the similar barren strawberry is the one ground cover that has really thrived in our yard, they would probably handle the conditions pretty well.

A packet of Red and Yellow Wonder Blend, described as "wildly delicious—packed with flavor and fragrance," costs only $1.99 for 130 seeds. According to Epic Gardening, growing them from seed is "not always successful," but even if we don't end up with many plants, we haven't lost much by trying. So I'm inclined to pick up a packet, take a crack at starting them indoors, set down whatever plants we manage to grow, and see if we can get any "wildly delicious" fruit off them.

And that, in a nutshell, is our garden plan for next year. Watch this space to see how the new varieties work out and whether we end up sticking with Botanical Interests for the long haul. Happy New Year to all, and here's to good harvests in 2023!

Ecofrugal gifting games

Happy holidays, everyone! This year, in place of my usual Green Gift Roundup, I'm going to talk about two specific ways our family exchanged secondhand gifts this year. Both of these were gift swaps of a sort, but each involved a different type of gift and was run according to different rules.

The first gift exchange was Brian's solution to the always tricky question of what to give the seven niblings (the delightful gender-neutral term for nieces and nephews) on his side of the family. They range in age from 13 to 19, and we only really see them at Christmastime. Thus, all we really know about their current activities and interests is what Brian hears secondhand from his parents throughout the year. This makes it difficult to select gifts tailored to their tastes. The one thing we know they're all into is reading, but we have no way of knowing which specific books would appeal to each of them and which ones they've already read.

So this year, Brian came up with a clever workaround. He went through the collection of secondhand books we had stashed in our "possible gifts" box and selected five he thought would appeal to a broad range of tastes. (All of these were books we had read ourselves and deemed enjoyable.) The authors represented included Neil Gaiman, Jane Austen, Jasper Fforde, P.G. Wodehouse, and Alexander McCall Smith. Since all of the works were fiction, he also ordered two nonfiction books we had read and liked—How Not to Be Wrong by Jordan Ellenberg and Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing by Jacob Goldstein—from Better World Books to add more variety to the mix.  His idea was to wrap these seven books and have all the kids take turns choosing books according to the rules of the classic Yankee swap.

However, he decided that one book per nibling, especially with most of them being yard-sale and library-sale finds we'd acquired for under $5, wasn't quite enough of a present. His original plan was to enclose a gift certificate to Half Price Books with each one so they could add a second book (or two) of their own choice. But when he discovered that the smallest available denomination was $25 and multiplied that by seven kids, he decided that was a little too big a present. Instead, we went to the bank and got a bunch of $5 bills and he stashed three of them inside each book. And to make things more interesting, he decided to choose the pages where the bills were hidden so that the first letters of the verso pages—read in alphabetical order based on the author's names—would spell out the hidden message, "Read a book for Christmas." Then he would offer an additional prize (the three books we had left in our box) to whichever kid managed to crack the code first.

This plan underwent a slight change at the last minute when we learned that one of the niblings was bringing their girlfriend along for Christmas. Since we didn't want her to feel left out, we decided to wrap up one of our three extra books and add it to the mix. We didn't have three more $5 bills between us, so instead we enclosed a $5 and a $10 and changed the secret message to "Read a book for Christmas, eh?" (He gave them the additional hint that the addition of the eighth book had made the message Canadian.) To randomize the order in which kids would choose books, he gave each of them a state quarter and had them go in alphabetical order by state.

By nearly all measures, this exchange was a great success. All eight kids ended up with books they liked, and they had great fun choosing books, stealing each other's selections, and solving the riddle. Since they all worked together to find the solution, Brian just offered the two extra books to the group as a whole, along with the additional cash prize of a $2 bill he had in his wallet that he knew he'd never be able to bring himself to spend. And with all seven books being secondhand (and five of the seven wrapped in reused wrapping paper), they were eco-friendly gift choices as well.

The one area in which this gift idea fell down slightly was on the frugality front. When you add together the $15 cash hidden in each book, the $53.52 we spent on the books themselves, the $2 additional prize, and the $2 worth of state quarters he doled out as tokens, the total cost of the book exchange was $177.52, or $22.19 per kid. That may not sound like much, but it's more than the average amount we typically spend on gifts, many of which are usually secondhand or homemade. Adding the books plus cash to our gift list made this our most expensive holiday season yet by a significant margin. And based on the kids' reactions, I don't think the hidden cash made the books that much more exciting as a present than they would have been on their own. So I'm hoping we haven't set a standard with these gifts that we'll now be expected to live up to in future years.

The other gift exchange was the brainchild of my mother-in-law. She had done a Yankee swap with us last year, using a variety of small but useful gifts (the most coveted present was a set of earbuds, but we were equally happy with the giant box of brownie mix we ended up with), and it was such a hit that the kids specially requested some version of the same thing this year. So she obliged, but with a twist: She called this year's gift exchange "the heritage edition." She wrapped up one box for each family member, each containing some heirloom item that had been part of the family for some time. Some of these items dated back to my husband's childhood, some to his parents' childhood, and some went back several generations. Some of them—such as a big milk can that used to store all the family's gloves, hats, and scarves next to the door—were too big to fit in boxes, so she instead wrapped up a small trinket to represent the actual gift. And each box also contained a card outlining the provenance of that particular item and its place in the family history.

Rather than randomize the order, she had us choose boxes in reverse order by age, starting with our 13-year-old nephew and working our way up the line to Brian, her firstborn. Once we'd each opened one box, we had the opportunity to trade with each other to get each item to the person who had most interest in it. The family heirlooms included old quilts, whimsical pieces of porcelain, one grandfather's old slide rule, and another grandfather's truly hardcore kite-flying kit, complete with two large kites, a massive reel, and thousands of feet of string. I drew a vintage set of stainless-steel drafting tools that had once belonged to Brian's engineer grandfather (still in mint condition, though the case was damaged), but swapped it for an antique hat rack that's sitting beside the desk where I'm typing this now. And the youngest nibling ended up with his great-great-grandmother's old "potato bug" mandolin—an instrument he had never played before, but on which he was doing a creditable rendition of "Rocky Road to Dublin" within ten minutes of picking it up.

This gift exchange was even more ecofrugal than ours. The gifts themselves didn't cost a cent, yet they were all more meaningful to the recipients than something from a store could ever be. And as one niece slyly pointed out, the exchange also helped our in-laws clear some unused stuff out of their home—a nice little bonus gift for them.

Merry Christmas to all, and to all an ecofrugal new year!

Why green Americans should want permitting reform

Way back in 2016, I posted about how I was hunting for a magazine with an ecofrugal spin. Unfortunately, I never really found one I was happy with. But over the years since then, I've searched again from time to time, and last January I thought I might have found a solution. By becoming a member of Green America, I'd automatically get a subscription to its Green American magazine, which covers a range of topics related to climate, social justice, and green living. Even if it wasn't exactly what I wanted, at least my subscription fee would go to support a worthy environmental organization.

So, the year went by, and I was reasonably satisfied with the magazine—not utterly delighted, but I thought it was good enough to be worth the membership fee. Being a member also meant that I would periodically receive emails urging me to take action on various environmental issues, but I didn't really mind that. I'd occasionally click through if I thought the issue was worthy of attention, and if I didn't, I'd just hit delete. Until this week, when this message from Green America brought me up short:

Tell Your Senator to Block Manchin's Dirty Deal

Senator Joe Manchin’s “Dirty Deal” is back and, if passed, would put front-line communities at greater risk and increase greenhouse gases by “streamlining” the approval process for fossil fuel projects. The senator wants to dismantle the policies in place that are meant to protect communities and mitigate the climate crisis. We need to stop it ASAP.

So, you may ask, what's wrong with that? Shouldn't an environmentalist like me want to stop new fossil fuel infrastructure? I mean, if we want to transition to a clean energy economy, isn't blocking fossil fuel projects a crucial part of that?

No. No it isn't.

The fact is, fossil fuel projects are already on the decline. And it's not because environmentalists have been vigilant about blocking them; they're just too expensive. At this point, the cheapest ways to generate electricity are solar and wind. In 2021, 85% of all new energy capacity came from clean sources, mostly solar. And of the new projects currently in the "queue"—that is, proposed projects waiting to be approved—over 92% are wind and solar. Natural gas accounts for only 7.5% of the total, and coal for none whatsoever.

But here's the catch: Most of these proposed clean energy projects will never be built. And the main reason why is problems with permitting—not just for the plants themselves, but for the power lines they need to carry their energy.

You see, the best places to put new solar and wind farms are out in the country, where there's lots of room for them. But in order to get the energy from these facilities to cities, where it's needed, you need new transmission lines—a lot of new transmission lines. According to Princeton University's Net Zero America project, we need to more than triple the rate at which we're building new transmission lines in order to support a fully renewable power grid by 2050. If we continue to build them at our current, slow rate, we'll miss out on about 80% of all the emissions cuts promised by the Inflation Reduction Act. In fact, fossil fuel use in the U.S. will actually increase, because we'll have to burn more coal and gas to meet the increased demand for electricity from all those electric cars and heat pumps.

But right now, getting those new power lines built is a long, slow, cumbersome process. On average, getting a new long-distance transmission line built takes over ten years. And over four of those years are spent just getting all the necessary permits. If a transmission line runs between states, you have to get separate permits from each state government—and often from municipal governments too—before you can even start building. Each of these governments has its own rules about permitting, usually involving extensive environmental review. And a project can be challenged at any step of the process, tying it up in court for years.

Approval for fossil fuel pipelines tends to go significantly faster. These can be approved at the federal level by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). The Energy Independence and Security Act would have allowed FERC to approve interstate transmission lines and also to intervene in fights over who should pay for them. But because the same bill also contained some provisions that would have helped fossil fuel suppliers, environmental groups—including Green America—have labeled this a "dirty deal" and lobbied heavily against it, blocking it not once but twice. Even though the bill's benefits would have gone overwhelmingly to clean power projects, and even though failure to improve the grid will actually make emissions worse, they decided that it was the principle of the thing that mattered.

Consequently, I will not be renewing my membership in Green America after all. Even if I really liked the quarterly magazine—and frankly, it was just okay—I'm not giving one penny of my money to any group that is actually working to stop the reforms we desperately need to achieve a carbon-free economy.

Recipe of the Month: Homemade Cauliflower Rice

My Recipe of the Month posts started out as a 2013 New Year's resolution. In the interest of getting more fruits and veggies in my diet, I resolved to try a new fruit or vegetable each month. Over the years, that goal morphed into a more general one of trying new veggie-focused recipes on a monthly basis. And in recent years, that's often meant recipes that used plants as a substitute for animal products — like Soy Curls for sausage, oyster mushrooms for steak, or tofu for mozzarella cheese.

But in the past month, we've found ourselves having to eat quite differently. Vegetables are still essential, but now we're using them more often to take the place of starchy foods rather than protein-rich meat or dairy. In place of pasta, we've tried kelp noodles and heart of palm lasagna (both of which sort of worked, but are much too pricey to use on a regular basis). Brian also attempted a cauliflower crust pizza, which was another limited success; there was nothing wrong with the taste, but the crust lacked crispness and fell apart if you tried to pick up a slice in your hands. And this week, he decided to tackle one of the trendiest of all starch substitutes, cauliflower rice.

With all the folks out there these days on low-carb diets (most of them by choice, not dragged kicking and screaming like me), low-carb versions of everything are in high demand. Consequently, cauliflower rice — which is simply cauliflower cut up into small enough pieces that it resembles rice — has become easy to find ready-made in stores. You can go into Walmart right now and pull a 7-ounce bag of it out of the freezer case for about $2.50. But between the plastic packaging and the $5.60-per-pound price tag, it's not exactly an ecofrugal option. Instead, Brian picked up a whole head of cauliflower (about a pound) for $3.27 at Lidl, grated it coarsely, and lightly pan-fried it with a touch of salt. (The instructions he found online actually called for it to be cooked in a covered pan, so that the cauliflower rice would be more steamed than fried, but he didn't bother with that.)

He served this homemade cauliflower rice as an accompaniment to a Moroccan chicken stew. We normally dish this up over regular rice, quinoa, or couscous, but since the stew contains chick peas, eating more than a third of a cup of any of these as an accompaniment to it would put me over my carb allotment. Spooning the stew over cauliflower rice instead worked on one level: the mild flavor of the cauliflower blended into the background and didn't clash with the flavors of chicken, onions, chick peas, parsley, and cinnamon. But it didn't really add anything, either. Unlike real rice, the cauliflower substitute didn't soak up the gravy, stretching the stew across a bigger volume of food. The added vegetable matter was effectively just another ingredient in the stew, one that increased its bulk a little but added nothing to either its flavor or its substance. (Fortunately, Brian had also made a pot of quinoa, so I was able to add my allotted third of a cup of that to my bowl of stew as well.)

Although the homemade cauliflower rice wasn't ideal as an accompaniment to this stew, I still think it could be useful for other applications. It might work well with stir-fry or fried rice, either on its own or as a way to eke out regular rice and make a single portion go further. It wouldn't add any real substance to an all-vegetable meal, but these days we always include bulk up our stir-fries with tofu or Soy Curls anyway. So the cauliflower rice would simply make the meal feel heartier, even if it didn't actually make it any more filling. Or at least, that's the theory. At any rate, it can't hurt to try.

Ten climate tidbits

This weekend marks the December conference of Citizens' Climate Lobby (CCL), an organization I've now been part of for close to three years. For most of that time — in fact, for most of the time it's existed — CCL has been focused on one specific policy goal: putting a price on carbon in some form or other. But since our pet policy didn't make it into the landmark Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), the organization has decided to expand its approach to climate legislation. Thus, the main purpose of this conference was to unveil our new multi-pronged approach. We're planning to continue the fight for carbon pricing (perhaps at the state and local level for a while), but we're also going to be working toward three additional goals:

• Permitting reform. Remember how I said last summer that the IRA would get our carbon emissions down to about 40% below their 2005 level? Well, it turns out that number was a little fuzzy. The bill's provisions will allow us to build enough green energy infrastructure to get to that level — but whether we actually build them will depend largely on whether the projects can get the necessary permits. Right now, there's a lot of red tape holding them up. So cutting through that tape is one of our new policy priorities.
• Building electrification and efficiency. It's not enough just to make the power grid greener. There's a lot of other stuff out there that currently runs on fossil fuels, such as vehicles and home heating systems. To eliminate those emissions, we need to convert all that stuff so that it runs on electricity, while at the same time making sure the electricity it runs on is green. (Efficiency is part of this because the more energy-efficient we can make homes and other buildings, the less green electricity we'll need to power them all.)
• Nature-based solutions. Trees are an ecological two-fer: They suck up carbon, and their shade helps make it easier to survive on a hotter planet. To make the most of these benefits, we need to manage existing forests better so we don't lose so many trees to development and/or wildfires. And we need to add more trees everywhere we can: whole new forests, trees on cropland (silvopasture), and trees in cities.

This, then, is the broad overview of our agenda. But as always, God and the devil both are in the details, and it was these details that most caught my attention at the conference sessions I attended. Here, in order of appearance, is a quick rundown of the ten most interesting tidbits that I learned:

1. Most climate bills are bipartisan. Anyone who was paying attention knows that the IRA passed without a single vote from Republicans. But this actually made it an exception to the general rule. Up until now, every major environmental bill— the ratification of the Kigali Amendment, the 2021 infrastructure bill, the Murkowski-Manchin energy and water bill — has had significant Republican support. Which means there's good reason to hope that we can continue to pass climate legislation in the upcoming, closely divided Congress.
2. Permitting reform, though boring, is absolutely vital. To achieve our climate goals, we need to triple our capacity to transmit clean energy within the next 30 years. But right now, we're only expanding electric transmission at about 1% per year. If we continue at that slow rate, we will only realize about 20 percent of the emissions reductions from the IRA. In fact, U.S. emissions will actually increase, because if we can't connect cities to the wind farms and solar farms being built in rural areas, we'll need to burn more coal to make up for increased demand for electricity.
3. Fossil fuels are already on the way out. In the U.S., we've pretty much stopped building new fossil fuel plants already. About 90% of all proposed electricity capacity in the queue is wind or solar. Global demand for fossil fuels is projected to peak by 2025.
4. Weatherization is a huge money-saver — especially for low-income households, which spend a bigger share of their income on fuel. It can cut their energy bills by as much as 35%.
5. Forests sequester up to 12% of all carbon emissions in the U.S, and we could potentially boost that number as high as 22%. (The linked article says 21%, but it's from 2018, and our total emissions have fallen since then.)
6. Urban trees literally save lives. They improve air quality and help cool urban "heat islands." Neighborhoods with trees have measurably lower mortality rates than neighborhoods without them, even when you control for the fact that these neighborhoods tend to be richer and whiter.
   
7. Building with wood is a win-win. Replacing materials like steel with "durable wood" can cut the emissions from construction by 25% to 33%, while also sequestering carbon within the wood.
8. Electrifying buildings automatically makes them greener — even if the electricity comes from fossil fuels. That's because modern electric appliances are a lot more energy-efficient. Heat pumps are two to three times as efficient as a traditional heating system.
   
9. It also saves a ton of money. Replacing an old-school heating system with a heat pump can save a family anywhere from $100 to $1,300 per year. (Households with oil heat or electric resistance heaters see the biggest savings.) Electrifying everything — space heating, water heating, cooking, transportation — could cut the cost of powering our economy in half.
10. If you're not ready to go electric, you can still get your home "electric ready." This means putting in the necessary circuits so that when you are ready to replace your heating system, your water heater, your gas-burning car with a plug-in electric, you can just do it. There's information about what this entails on the Rewiring America website, which also offers a detailed guide to how the IRA can help pay for it. The Carbon Switch site also has lots of useful info on how to go electric. 

I'm sure I'll be diving deeper into these new topics (reforestation, building electrification, urban forests, permitting reform) over the coming weeks and months. But for now, these ten fun (and useful) facts are my top takeaways.

Recipe of the Month: Roasted Broccoli with Lemon and Garlic

Choosing a Recipe of the Month for November was a challenge. Brian and I have tried a lot of new recipes this month, but many of them weren't veggie-centric, and most weren't vegan. My new lower-carb regime has required me to shift in just the opposite direction, eating a lot more animal products in order to get the required ratio of protein and fat to carbohydrates. Brian has experimented with reduced-carb versions of lots of foods, from pumpkin bread (a big success, not just with me but with pretty much everyone who has tried it) to pancakes (much less successful; they weren't as filling as real pancakes and not nearly as filling as my standard breakfast of high-fiber toast and cocoa). But making these treats low-carb generally means using almond flour, which doesn't rise without a lot of eggs to help it along. I was beginning to wonder whether I might have to abandon the idea of making my Recipe of the Month vegan, as I've done for the past three years, and go back to posting any kind of recipe that features vegetables or fruits (most likely vegetables, since even fruit is too high in carbs for me to eat much of anymore).

Well, it may still come to that, but I can put off the decision for one more month, at least. And that's thanks to a new veggie side dish we added to this year's Thanksgiving menu: Roasted Broccoli with Lemon and Garlic.

I knew Thanksgiving was going to be a challenge for me this year. My folks always get a free-range turkey so I can partake of it, but my favorite part of the meal has always been the side dishes, and most of those are pretty high in carbs. My dad's stuffing is mostly brown rice with apples, mushrooms, onions, pecans, and herbs. We also have white and sweet potatoes and whole-berry cranberry sauce. Usually, the only vegetable on the table is herbed carrots, which not only aren't really my favorite, but are also pretty high in carbs as non-starchy vegetables go. So filling half my plate with those wasn't really going to work for me.

When I voiced this concern to Brian, he said he would be happy to add another vegetable dish to the feast if I could come up with one I liked. And when I brought up the idea with the rest of the family, I heard a lot of support for the idea of adding a green veggie to the meal. So I did a quick search on "low-carb Thanksgiving sides" and found a very simple-looking roasted broccoli recipe at Taste of Home. When I proposed this to the family, my aunt requested that we leave out the pepper, which she can't eat. So instead, Brian decided to do the broccoli with lemon and garlic, which is how my uncle said he usually makes it.

We bought about a pound and a half of broccoli, cut it into florets, and brought it to my parents' house. We also brought a jar of marinade made from 2 crushed cloves of garlic, 1 tablespoon of fresh lemon juice, 2 tablespoons olive oil, and about a quarter-teaspoon of salt. As soon as the bird came out of the oven, Brian quickly tossed the broccoli with the marinade and spread it out on a large baking sheet topped with one of our silicone baking mats. He popped that in the oven, turned it up to 450F, and let it cook for about 20 minutes, stirring it once. By the time we'd finished taking our annual family photo, it was tender and flavorful. He transferred it to a bowl, sprinkled it with a little more salt and about 1 teaspoon of lemon zest, and added it—with some difficulty—to the array of dishes already crowding the table.

This simple recipe was a hit with most of the family. My dad didn't care for it, saying he prefers his broccoli only lightly cooked. But all the other adults at the table ate it with gusto, leaving none left over at the end of the meal. Fortunately, I was able to get enough to fill a quarter of my plate, which was the point of the exercise. 

So will we make this dish again? Maybe, maybe not. This is really a side dish, and we don't tend to follow the main-dish-plus-sides style of eating. We're much more likely to use broccoli as a component of a dish like sesame tofu or lemon-garlic Soy Curls. But it might make a suitable companion to a protein-forward main dish like vegan Swedish meatballs. (Although these meatless balls are rather carb-heavy, I could still have them as long as we stick to carb-light side dishes, like mashed cauliflower instead of potatoes.) Or better yet, it could accompany something else that needs to be baked, such as the low-carb version of our favorite butternut squash lasagna (made with sliced hearts of palm in place of noodles), and take advantage of the already-hot oven.

Shelter from the cold

Somehow, in less than a month, we've gone from summer to winter. Two or three weeks ago, it was so warm out that I was too hot in just a single layer of clothing; this week, I've been piling on four layers, including my winter coat and long johns, and still feeling like the wind is blowing right through me. It's the kind of weather that you can best enjoy by observing it from indoors, snuggled up on the couch with a blanket and a hot drink.

But there are other creatures in our yard that don't have a cozy indoor space to retreat to. Such as, for instance, the family of stray cats, a mother and two kittens, that Brian and I have been feeding throughout the year. (Yes, I know you're not supposed to feed strays because they kill birds, but the way I figure it, they won't kill as many birds if they have something else to eat.) As far back as last summer, Brian and I were discussing whether we wanted to try to provide "our" outdoor cats with some sort of shelter during the winter. But when Brian looked into what kind of shelter would be appropriate, it started to seem kind of complicated. Ideally, it would have at least two sets of walls, inner and outer, with a space between them for insulation. It would need two separate entrances, since cats don't like to be trapped in a place with only one exit. And the entrances would either need to be covered with some sort of door or else turn a corner to keep the wind from blowing in. It wouldn't be simple to construct, and unless we could find a corner of the yard where it would stay tucked away all year, we'd have to store it once spring came.

I was thinking about this one day while I was out on the patio, moving around the outdoor furniture and wondering how long we should wait before storing it away in the shed for winter. I wasn't looking forward to this task, since it's a bit of a hassle to cram it in there, and once it's in you have basically no access to anything else behind it. And it occurred to me that maybe if we just covered the table and chairs up with tarps, not only could they stay out all winter, but they could also serve as a sort of tent shelter for the outdoor cats. It wouldn't be as warm as a properly insulated shelter, but it would be a lot better than nothing.

Originally, I thought we wouldn't even need to buy anything for this project, since we already had a couple of old plastic drop cloths stashed away in the shed. But when Brian pulled them out, he found that the outdoor conditions had taken their toll on the plastic, which tore like tissue paper at the slightest pressure. Fortunately, the sale flier for the nearby Ocean State Job Lot was advertising outdoor tarps at fairly low prices. They were sold out of the 8x10 size, and Brian thought 5x7 would be too small, so we ended up buying one "basic" tarp in size 10x12 and one "tear-resistant" 12x16 one for a total of $32.

Assembling the shelter was a bit of a puzzle. First, we pushed the table up against the side of the house to take advantage of its thermal mass. (The wall warms up in the sun during the day and radiates that heat away at night, so it's a little warmer right next to it than it is out in the open.) Next, we took all the cushions off the chairs and stacked them under the table to provide a layer of padding and insulation from the cold ground. 

Then we covered the entire table with the smaller of the two tarps. It was bigger than we actually needed, so we doubled part of it over and still had enough to reach down to the ground on all sides. We tucked it under the feet of the table and added a couple of bricks to help weigh it down. On my end, I simply tucked up a fold of the fabric to make a tent-flap kind of entrance, but Brian decided to create a more defined entrance on the other side by tucking up part of the fabric and holding it in place with a clamp. 

After that came the trickiest part: piling all the chairs on top. Brian thought maybe we should just settle for two chairs and leave the other two loose, but I thought it we were going to cover the furniture we should try to cover all of it. So after some maneuvering, we found a way to interlock the chairs so that they'd all fit with only the legs of two of them hanging off the edge. We attached them together with some small bungee cords to keep the pile stable.

Then we took the larger and sturdier tarp and put it over this entire pile. Once again, we had way more fabric than we needed and ended up partly doubling it over before securing it under the table legs and adding a row of bricks to hold it down. And even then, there was still a lot of loose fabric overhanging at one end. We spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to tuck all this excess material out of the way before I had the idea to incorporate the metal trash can we'd already put out on the patio, lying on its side, to keep the cats' food dish from getting wet when it rained. So we sort of wrapped all the extra tarp material around this to make a sort of vestibule. This had the added advantage that next time the cats came looking for their food, they'd be sure to find and investigate the entrance to the tent. And indeed, the next day, I spotted one of the kittens emerging from it, so now we know that the cats have found the shelter and feel comfortable using it.

This, along with a restock of the bird feeder, took care of the animals in our yard. But we still had the plants to consider. Our parsley, which never minds the cold, is still looking green and healthy, so we haven't touched that, but we harvested what was left of the arugula, along with all the winter squash from the volunteer vine in the side yard. We got half a dozen of varying sizes, but some weren't fully ripe yet, and a couple of them had split open in the cold. So we're not counting this squash as part of our official harvest until we figure out how much of it will turn out to be edible.

Brian also went out and dug up the horseradish roots that he planted last spring. These were a bit of a disappointment; although at least one of the plants had been large and flourishing, the actual roots were only about twice the size they'd been when we planted them. After spending $12 and putting in all the effort required to plant and harvest them, we only ended up with a few ounces of horseradish — and we're not even sure how much of that will be usable. So while growing these was an interesting experiment, it's not one we're planning to repeat.

Lastly, we decided to make some effort to winter-proof our outdoor rosemary plant. Where we live, in USDA Zone 7, growing rosemary year-round is a dicey proposition; according to most gardening sites, you can't reasonably expect it to survive the winter unless you dig it up, put it in a pot, and bring it indoors. But ours was too big for that, and we'd occasionally had rosemary plants make it through the winter before, so we decided we'd at least take a crack at keeping it alive. 

Rather than trimming it back to three inches and burying it in compost, as most gardening sites recommend for growers in Zone 8 and higher, we decided to try a tip from Gardeners' Path: covering it with plastic. We didn't have any "floating row covers," but Brian happened to have a large plastic bag stashed away that he thought would be big enough to enclose it. He poked some holes around the edge of this and threaded through a piece of thick string to make a drawstring top, and then we sort of wrestled the plant into it and pulled the string snug to hold the bag in place. Then we piled leaves around the base for insulation, and we'll hope that keeps the plant warm enough to keep it alive until spring.

And with that, we are fully prepared for winter, indoors and out. When the wind kicks up and it's just too unpleasant to venture outside, we can snuggle up with our blankets and hot drinks without guilt, knowing that we've done our best to keep all the other critters on our property comfortable too.

Eggplant is the new black

For quite a few years, Brian and I have both been big fans of eggplant. It's not the most flavorful of veggies, but it makes a good carrier for other flavors, and it has a tender, melt-in-the-mouth texture. Brian had a handful of trusty eggplant recipes that he made over and over again, like grilled vegetable sandwiches, mujadara with eggplant, baingan bharta (Indian-spiced eggplant), pasta melanzane (pasta with eggplant, tomato, and mozzarella), and eggplant with string beans in garlic sauce. Every so often he'd try something new, like quinoa-eggplant salad, tofu with eggplant, or Thai eggplant with Soy Curls, but most of these recipes weren't interesting enough to make it into his regular repertoire.

Unfortunately, all his tried-and-true favorites had one thing in common: carbohydrates. Either they were themselves high in carbs, or they had to be served over a starchy bed of rice. So when I had my new reduced-carb diet thrust upon me, most of these old favorites became unusable. If Brian wanted to keep cooking with his favorite vegetable, he'd need to find some ways to work it into dishes that were lower in carbs and higher in protein and non-starchy vegetables.

So, in the past two weeks, Brian has developed a new use for eggplant: Put it in basically everything.

What he figured out is that eggplant's mild flavor and soft texture allows it to melt rather unobtrusively into the background of all kinds of other dishes. So if he wants to add more veggies to any existing recipe, throwing in some eggplant is an easy way to do it. In the past week alone, he's successfully added eggplant to both pad Thai and chili, boosting their non-starchy vegetable content without compromising their flavor. I could tell the eggplant was there — every now and again I'd come across a tender little morsel of something and go, "What's this? Oh, eggplant. Hm, interesting." But it had no significant effect on the meal as a whole. It was just...there.

So it looks like eggplant is going to become a staple food on our shopping list from now on. Rather than something we buy when we have a specific recipe in mind we want to make, it will be something that we always have on hand to throw into any dish that needs a little vegetable boost. It'll be an extra in the background of the crowd scene, rather than the star of the show.

Of course, I would like it if I could still find a way to enjoy some of our old favorites that use eggplant in a starring role, as well. But unfortunately, adapting those recipes isn't as simple as just increasing the proportion of eggplant to other ingredients. Because while eggplant can certainly be delicious, it isn't very solid. There's only so much of it you can cram into a sandwich or a bowl of pasta before it kind of loses its structural integrity. So in order to adapt our old eggplant dishes, we'll need to find lower-carb substitutes for the bread, pasta, and rice that used to provide the bulk of the meal. Cauliflower rice, maybe?

Ecofrugality versus carb counting

This week, my life got a lot more complicated. Especially where food is concerned.

As I've mentioned here before, I've been making an effort lately to control my carb intake. My doctor advised me to avoid sugar and other low-fiber carbs and to balance out carbohydrates with protein and healthy fats, and I've been diligently following this advice. But after several months of this, my blood sugar was higher than it had been when I started. So she told me to see a nutritionist, and the nutritionist told me that I was going to have to start actually counting carbs. From now on—and, apparently, for the rest of my life—I have to make sure I don't consume more than 30 grams of carbohydrates at a meal or 15 grams for a snack. And on top of that, I'm supposed to balance out carb-rich foods at every meal with an equal volume of protein-rich food and, for lunch and dinner, double the volume of non-starchy vegetables. (I'm allowed occasional cheat meals, but not more than once a week.)

Add all of this to my preference for humane and low-carbon foods, and planning every meal has now become a puzzle with lots of pieces. And it's got me wondering: is it even possible to eat ecofrugally on a carbohydrate budget?

Back when I did the SNAP Challenge, one of the conclusions I reached was that a low-budget diet was heavy on grains and light on meat. And conveniently for me, a low-carbon diet was exactly the same, since plant-based foods have a much lower carbon footprint per pound than animal foods. But now, this type of diet is exactly what I'm not supposed to eat. The dietician gave me a list of carb-heavy foods I need to limit my intake of, and it includes most of the foods that used to form the bulk of my diet. Brown rice, whole-wheat pasta, quinoa, all kinds of beans, potatoes, popcorn, all kinds of fruit, even winter squash—all these foods I used to think were good for me are now "bad" foods that need to be rationed.

Meanwhile, a separate list shows the protein-rich foods I need to get more of. And they're nearly all animal products: eggs, chicken, turkey, pork, fish, shellfish, beef, lamb, Greek yogurt, cottage cheese. I can count beans and lentils toward my protein requirements for a given meal, but since they also count toward my carb quota, I can't eat more than a cup of them. She also listed plant-based protein powder as an option, but holy cow, have you seen how much that stuff costs? The brand she recommended, Nuzest, is $26 for 20 servings, and as far as I can tell, that's one of the most affordable options. I found some recipes for homemade protein powders, but they were all too high in carbs; for balancing out my carb intake, they'd be no better than beans or lentils, and considerably more expensive. Pretty much the only ecofrugal options on the list were eggs, tofu, and possibly some varieties of fish.

So it looks like I'm going to have to dial back my attempts to make my diet more plant-based. Replacing dairy milk with soy milk or almond milk is okay (in fact, the unsweetened varieties of both have fewer carbs than milk), but I'm certainly going to have to add back in at least some animal products. For instance, according to the recipe calculator at My Fitness Pal, our favorite vegan mozzarella has 10 grams of carbs and only 3 grams of protein per serving, so we'll have to go back to real mozzarella if we want it to serve as a protein source. And eggs, fish, and free-range chicken are all likely to play a much larger role in our diet moving forward.

These choices aren't that bad in terms of their carbon and water footprints, but they're all really expensive right now. The free-range chicken legs at Trader Joe's have skyrocketed from $2 to $6 per pound, and even the whole free-range chicken at Lidl is $4.50 per pound—nearly $25 for a 5.5-pound bird. Free-range eggs, which we used to find at Lidl for around $2.40 per dozen, have not been available there for weeks, and the best price we could find anywhere else was $3.50 per dozen. Fresh fish and seafood ranges from $5 to $15 per pound. 

Fortunately, I do have one big advantage: a husband who is willing to cook and bake for me. The changes Brian has already made to his bread and cookie recipes have made these foods considerably lighter in carbs than the standard versions. According to my "carbohydrate portions" handout, most breads have about 15 grams of carbs per slice, but when I entered his homemade fiber-rich bread (similar to this recipe, but with some adjustments in the proportions) into the calculator at My Fitness Pal, it came out to just 7 grams for a small slice. That means I can eat up to three slices for breakfast and still have 9 grams of carbs left over for a cup of (sweetened) soy milk in my cocoa. Likewise, his low-sugar chocolate chip cookies have just 6 grams of carbs each, so I can still enjoy one or even two of them for a snack (provided I supplement them with some extra protein.) But to work these miracles, he's had to invest in a lot of pricey ingredients like almond flour and flaxseed and a variety of low-carb sweeteners like stevia and xylitol, all of which jacks up our food bill still more.

But Brian is rising to the challenge.  In the the five days since I was given these new orders, he has plunged headlong into the low-carb fray. He adapted his cabbage and Soy Curl sausage recipe to achieve the proper balance of cabbage to soy to carbs (apples and roasted potatoes). He invented a new "hash" of eggs and green veggies, which we ate with his homemade bread. He dismantled a whole chicken, turning the thighs and drumsticks into our favorite Chicken and Rhubarb Sauce (accompanied by polenta and a large green salad) and the bones into stock. When the green leaf lettuce we bought for the salad proved to be rather tough and bitter, he perked up the leftover leaves by topping them with a new variation on vegan caprese. And even as I write this, he's constructing a chicken pot pie with an almond flour crust, using all the little extra bits of meat he strained out of the stock.

In short, eating ecofrugal on a carb budget is likely to be the biggest challenge I've taken up yet. It's already proving much harder to adjust to than the SNAP Challenge, the Live the Wage Challenge, or the Rationing Challenge—and unlike any of those, it's not something I can just wash my hands of at the end of a week. But on the plus side, that means if at first I don't succeed, I can try, try again. Rather than declaring it a failure, I can keep at it as long as necessary to make it a success.

Gardeners' Holidays 2022: Late Harvest

Autumn is now at its peak. The weather is pleasantly cool, the trees are ablaze with fall colors, and out in the garden, production is starting to wind down. We're still getting some tomatoes (mostly Sun Golds) and the odd handful of raspberries, but nearly everything else is finished. Brian is leaving the few Climbing French beans still growing on the trellis to dry so he can harvest them for seed to plant next year. And a frost warning a week or so ago prompted him to harvest and process most of the basil, zucchini, and peppers, along with all the tomatoes — blushing or not — that were reasonably large enough to harvest. So most of what remains is the stragglers: the cold-hardy parsley, the few tomatoes and peppers that survived that first frost, a few leeks, and a couple of tiny zucchini that may or may not get big enough to pick before the next frost hits.

Most years, our biggest crop in October is butternut squash. But this year, our squash crop is in an odd half-harvested state. The vines out in the garden itself have all died, but the volunteer plant out in the side yard is bigger and more rambunctious than ever. So, as a compromise, Brian decided to pick all the squash off the garden vines and the two fully ripe ones off the volunteer plant, while leaving the others on the vine in the hope that some of them will ripen before the frost gets heavy. Thus, we presently have a pitiful harvest of six squash — just one small squash off each of the four Little Dipper vines we planted and two larger ones off the volunteer plant, whatever variety it may be. And that's in spite of the fact that the volunteer got a much later start than the ones we grew from seed, only growing large enough to attract our attention around August. This is a truly pathetic performance for Little Dipper, which gave us eight squash from four vines last year and 21 the year before. At this point, I'm starting to feel like I won't particularly regret having to drop this variety next year when we replace Fedco as our seed supplier.

At the same time we harvested one crop, we planted another: the garlic. As I mentioned back in June, our yield of this has not been at all good this year either. We ended up getting just a couple of scapes and seven tiny heads, not even enough to sow for next year's crop. So we had to buy two new heads of hardneck garlic from the farmers' market at an exorbitant $2 each. Brian got a total of 15 cloves from those two heads and about 25 from the home-grown ones, and he planted the lot in the long bed in front of the fenced garden area, next to the rhubarb. This plot currently has asparagus in it, but we didn't get so much as a single spear off it this year, so Brian has decided to write it off and turn that spot into our new garlic patch. We'll hope the plants prosper a little better in their new home, away from the trampling feet of groundhogs and whatever else has been hanging out in our yard.

That's about all that's going on in the garden right now, which means we didn't have much in the way of home-grown produce to celebrate this Gardeners' Holiday with. We used a few of our home-grown tomatoes in the sauce for an Indian shrimp dish on Friday, and last night Brian tossed a couple of our peppers on the grill for some grilled vegetable sandwiches — kind of a last hurrah before the weather gets too cold for outdoor cooking. But today, the only thing I got to celebrate the transition to colder weather was a flu shot. Not as enjoyable as a butternut squash lasagna, perhaps, but probably better for me.

Recipe of the Month: Vegan Swedish Meatballs

Some months, I have to scramble to come up with a Recipe of the Month before I run out of days to post it in. I often have to make do with something that isn't really a brand-new recipe, but a variation on something we've made many times before, such as our favorite pasta a la Caprese. So it came as a pleasant surprise when this month, I actually found myself with numerous new recipes to choose from. 

Some of these were simply variants on older dishes. For instance, one night Brian tried tinkering with his usual recipe for corn bread, throwing in some almond flour and a little leftover tofu to make it less carb-heavy.

 Another evening, he altered a pasta recipe we'd made many times before, Cavatelli with Arugula and Dried Cranberries, by replacing the pasta with quinoa. (This worked surprisingly well.)

He also tried a new variant on the no-knead bread recipe he uses for our favorite Roasted Eggplant and Pepper Sandwiches. He'd already made this quite successfully with whole wheat flour in place of white, so he decided to take it a step farther and add all the extra ingredients he uses in my breakfast bread to make it healthier, including rolled oats, wheat bran, and flax meal. This made for a very heavy, chewy loaf that, unfortunately, didn't bake quite all the way through in the middle. But he thinks that was because he made the loaf too big, so it had too high a volume compared to its surface area. He plans to try it again using either a smaller batch of dough or a larger pot to cook it in.

A couple of other recipes we tried were brand-new, but fairly simple. For instance, a "Blue Hawaiian Shake" we discovered in the "mocktails" section of a mixology book had only four ingredients: blueberries, coconut cream, milk (we used soy), and ice. The result was more of a smoothie than a mocktail, but quite satisfying.

And then there were the little date balls Brian whipped up as a healthy snack for me — kind of like a homemade energy bar. These were a little less successful. The mixture of chopped dates, chopped walnuts, oats, and a little cocoa powder was reasonably tasty, but it didn't hold together very well.

But the most elaborate new recipe we tried this month was the Vegan Swedish Meatballs from It Doesn't Taste Like Chicken. This recipe caught my attention when it was first published at the end of August, so I printed it out and put it on the pile of ideas for future use. And this month, Brian fished it out of the pile and tried it.

This recipe was fairly involved. The author of the blog says she used canned lentils to make it, but we've never seen such a thing, so Brian had to cook the lentils before he could do anything else. And as it turns out, even in the pressure cooker, dry brown lentils take about 20 minutes to cook. Moreover, even though he used about three cups of water to one cup of lentils, it turned out to be not nearly enough, and the volume of cooked lentils he ended up with was much smaller than he expected. But having invested so much time already, he didn't want to backtrack and try making something else for dinner, so he forged ahead with what he had, combining the cooked lentils with wheat gluten and seasonings and pulsing it all in the food processor to form a "crumbly dough" — perhaps a bit more crumbly than intended.

After that, he had to form the dough into balls and steam them. This part of the process was also time-consuming: he had to bring the water to a boil first, then load the meatballs into a steamer basket and cook them for 25 to 30 minutes. (It might be possible to cut the time by starting to heat the water before preparing the dough.) And once that was done, he had to fry them in a pan with oil.

While the balls were steaming, he was working on the side dishes. IKEA always serves its meatballs with mashed potatoes, lingonberries, and a creamy gravy, but Brian decided to substitute oven-roasted potatoes (with skin) as a slightly healthier alternative to mashed. The meatball recipe included a creamy gravy, but it called for "vegan "beefless" broth or mushroom broth," which he didn't have. So he whipped up his own by simmering together about 1/4 pound of chopped mushrooms, a clove of crushed garlic, a teaspoon of nutritional yeast, and half a teaspoon of salt for about 20 minutes. Then he mixed this with the vegan butter and flour called for in the recipe, substituting coconut cream (which we had left over from the blueberry shake) for the "vegan culinary cream." And finally, he cooked up some green beans as a vegetable side.

Considering all the difficulties Brian had with these meatballs, they turned out surprisingly well, with an umami-rich flavor and a satisfyingly chewy texture. In fact, they were remarkably similar to the "plant balls" from IKEA — which is somewhat surprising, since they have almost no ingredients in common. (Their HUVUDROLL plant balls are made with "pea protein, oats, potatoes, onion and apple," so pretty much the only ingredient they share is onion.) They paired quite well with the lingonberries, potatoes, and beans. I found the gravy a little less successful, since the coconut cream gave it a distinct coconut note that didn't seem to me to fit in with the rest of the flavors in the dish. But it kind of grew on me after a while and I not only finished up my portion but even went back for one extra meatball, gravy included. And the hearty dish was satisfying to the tummy as well as the palate; I didn't find myself wandering back to the fridge for a snack later in the evening, the way I usually do a few hours after dinner.

Although we both enjoyed these vegan Swedish meatballs, I wasn't sure if it was worth making them again, considering the effort involved. However, Brian thinks they will go more easily next time. Being familiar with the recipe, he'll have a better idea of how long everything takes, and he'll be able to avoid problems like the too-small volume of lentils. So he plans to try it at least once more. It may be too elaborate a recipe to become part of our everyday rotation, but it will be nice to have in the repertoire for those slow, lazy weekends.

Small victories: Closing the clothing cycle

The ecofrugal life is not without its frustrations. One of them cropped up for me earlier this fall, when I discovered that my trusty lightweight coat — the one I've been wearing every spring and fall since 2009 — had developed a hole near the right shoulder too big for me to repair. (It was probably my purse strap rubbing on it for all those years that did the damage.)

Now, given that I bought this coat for a mere ten bucks at Goodwill and got roughly 25 seasons of use from it, you might say I have no real grounds for frustration here. But there was an additional wrinkle: after using the same coat for roughly ten years, I finally succeeded in finding a tailor to shorten the sleeves for me. This job cost me roughly $40, but it seemed justified given that the coat itself had cost so little to begin with and had served me so long already. I thought I'd probably be wearing it for another ten years at least, so it would be worth the expense to have it fit like it was made for me. And now, within a few years of making the investment, the coat had ceased to be presentable.

Adding to my frustration, I couldn't seem to find a decent replacement for it. True to my ecofrugal principles, I tried shopping secondhand first, but a search of two local thrift shops and several online ones turned up nothing suitable. I searched the sites of clothing retailers that got high marks from The Good Shopping Guide and Better World Shopper, but they either had no coats for sale or had none I liked as well as my old one. Some of them could have done an acceptable job, but they all would have cost me a minimum of $170, and my ecofrugal soul rebelled at paying that much for something that wasn't really what I wanted.

At the very same time I was having so much trouble finding a garment I actually needed, I was also having trouble getting rid of several that I didn't need. Some of these were in decent condition and could probably have been donated to the local thrift shop, but others were so old and worn they were fit only for textile recycling — something that we've discovered isn't that easy to do around here. There are a lot of places to drop off clothes in good condition for resale, but almost none that will take worn-out ones for repurposing.

With the help of the Helpsy website, I'd managed to locate a bona fide textile recycling bin within five miles of our house, but unfortunately it was in a direction we almost never go. We couldn't drop off our clothes there as part of our everyday errands; we'd have to make a special trip just for that purpose. So for a few months, these unwanted garments were just taking up space in a bag on my bedroom floor, and it wasn't until today that we finally got around to dropping them off. 

It was at this point that my frugal fashion luck started to change. Because, as it happened, the route to the textile bin took us right past the Goodwill store in East Brunswick — the very one where I'd bought my fall coat all those years ago. I'd mostly given up on going to this store, since its organizational scheme is such a mess that it's incredibly frustrating trying to find anything that fits. But since we were driving right by it, I figured it would be silly not to at least stop in and have a look.

The store was as disorganized as ever — so much that I nearly walked out empty-handed because I couldn't find the rack with the winter coats on it. But at last I located it and quickly started trying on coats right there in the aisle, not bothering to take them to the dressing room. And, amazingly, the third one I tried seemed pretty close to a perfect fit. The sleeves were a bit too long, but that was a flaw I could easily fix by just rolling them up. The price tag: $20, more than I'd paid for the old one (even accounting for inflation), but considerably less than any of the new ones I'd been considering.

So, after an unpromising start, this trip turned out to be the kind of ecofrugal victory that makes all the little frustrations seem worth it. In just one trip, I managed both to unload a bunch of garments I didn't want and acquire one I truly needed. My new-to-me coat is just as good as my old one, it cost less than one-eighth the price of a new one, and since it's secondhand, its green credentials are impeccable. And my old, unwanted clothes will now go on to new lives of their own. Perhaps some of them (the ones in good condition) will end up on thrift store shelves where they'll be just as great a source of frugal delight to some future buyer as this coat is to me. It's the ciiiiiiiiircle of clothes!

How weird are we?

I originally intended for this week's post to be about some more possible climate solutions that I've heard about in the past few weeks. (No doubt I'll cover these eventually, but just as a teaser, they include artificial trees that absorb carbon, small-scale nuclear reactors, carbon-negative concrete, advances in solar panel and wind turbine blade recycling, new battery technologies, and ultrawhite paint that makes surfaces absorb much less heat.) But yesterday morning, as I was hanging out the laundry, it occurred to me that there was another topic I'd rather discuss: Just how weird are we?

I don't know if ours is the only house on our block that has a clothesline in the back yard, but as far as I've ever been able to tell, we're the only people who actually use one. So for over ten years, our neighbors have been watching me hang our laundry on the line and have, quite possibly, been wondering why these weirdos take the time to hang their clothes when they could, duh, use this amazing modern device called a dryer that can get them dry in a fraction of the time, with much less work. And on top of that, if they're observant, they may have been wondering as well about some of the specific items in our wash that can be observed fluttering from the line. Handkerchiefs? Who in the world still uses cloth handkerchiefs when we have disposable tissues now? And rags? Bits of old socks and T-shirts that are clearly no longer wearable garments, yet these weirdos for some reason not only hang on to them, but apparently take the trouble to keep washing them over and over? What's up with that?

Thoughts like these have run through my mind on laundry day before, but this time they particularly resonated because of an article I'd been reading just before going out to hang the wash. It was a piece in the New York Times about how Uruguay is managing, practically alone among the nations of the world, to combine prosperity with sustainability. (Their population is overwhelmingly urban, and their electricity is 98 percent renewable.) It's an interesting read, but one thing that really stuck with me is the way the author opened the piece. As a contrast to what life is like in Uruguay, he outlines the lifestyle of a "typical American household," which according to him includes:

• A house of around 2,200 square feet
• Yearly energy use of 11,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity and 37,000 cubic feet of natural gas
• Six or seven plane flights every year
• Two cars, at least one of them an SUV
• At least one child
  
• A total of 25,000 miles of driving each year ("most of which you barely register anymore, as you listen to Joe Rogan or Bad Bunny")
• A couple of trips to Target each month for "six or seven things: double-sided tape, an extra toothbrush, an inflatable mattress"
• A carbon footprint of 25 tons per person
  

As I read those paragraphs, my jaw was, if not literally hanging open, certainly feeling a bit wobbly. I knew our ecofrugal household was a bit atypical, but are we really that far out of the mainstream of American life?

Our house is, in theory, a three-bedroom measuring just 936 square feet, although the finished basement expands the usable living space to more like 1,400 or 1,500 square feet. Our yearly energy use is 2,113 kilowatt-hours of electricity (all from renewable sources) and about 404 therms of natural gas. (That apparently works out to 40,390 cubic feet, so we're actually a little above average there.) The last time I went anywhere on a plane was for my grandmother's funeral 11 years ago. We have one car, which we drive about 11,000 miles per year (and we've never listened to either Joe Rogan or Bad Bunny, ever). We do go to Target occasionally, but more like a few times a year than a couple of times a month. And while estimates of our household carbon footprint vary widely, they're all between 4.5 and 12 tons per person per year — nowhere close to 25.

So, if the Times article is right about what a "typical" American lifestyle looks like, then we are indeed pretty far out of the mainstream. But is it? The author doesn't cite any sources for any of the statistics in his opening paragraphs, so can we be sure they're right?

Digging around on my own, I found that the true picture is a little more complicated than the author's figures suggest. Take housing, for instance. The article says says a typical American family has a 2,200-square-foot house in a "middle-class suburb." And Census data confirms that the average new, single-family house built in 2021 measured 2,273 square feet. But there's a problem with this statistic — two problems, in fact. First of all, not all homes are single-family houses, and second, not all homes are newly built. And anyone who lives in an apartment, or a townhome, or an older house like ours, almost certainly has less than 2,273 square feet of space.

For more accurate figures, I went to the 2021 American Housing Survey and ran a search based on square footage. And after a few minutes with a calculator, I worked out that the average reported home size (at least among households that did report it) was around 1,440 square feet. Pretty close, in fact, to the size of ours with the basement included. So as far as housing goes, we're not actually out of the mainstream at all.

Now, not all the statistics were this far off base. For instance, the Energy Information Administration says average household electricity consumption in 2020 was 10,715 kWh, close enough to 11,000 for government work. The average number of cars per U.S. household, according to Statista, is 1.88, which rounds off to two. And SUVs and other trucks do indeed account for most new car sales.

But some of the other figures were pretty farfetched. Gallup says that in 2021, 62% of Americans did not travel by air at all, and 23% made only one or two trips. (These numbers were a little lower than they had been before the pandemic, but even when Gallup asked the same question in 2015, only 10% of Americans said they had flown five or more times in the past year.) A majority of US households have no children living at home. And the average U.S. driver put 12,724 miles on their car in 2020 (down from 14,263 in 2019, but that's still far less than 25,000). So on balance, it seems like our ecofrugal lifestyle is actually closer to the norm than the "typical" American lifestyle described in the Times article.

As for line-drying laundry, it was hard to find statistics on that. The best bit of data I could find was from a 2009 Pew poll, which found that roughly two-thirds of Americans consider a clothes dryer a necessity. That puts us line-dryers in the minority, certainly, but not such a small minority as all that. Using handkerchiefs appears to be a bit farther out of the mainstream; based on this Reddit thread, the general consensus seems to be that they're gross and unhygienic (though based on my prior research, paper tissues aren't really any better). But hankies do still have their staunch defenders. And as for the use of cloth rags in place of paper towels, an informal survey by Family Handyman found that respondents actually prefer cloth dish towels by nearly two to one.

The bottom line? Being ecofrugal may be a little bit weird in 21st-century USA, but it's not that weird. And if Forbes and the Good News Network are to be believed, it's getting more normal all the time.

Now, if you'll excuse me, a bunch of those socks I just washed yesterday need darning.