Recipe of the Month: Soba Salad

Before I get into the main course of this Recipe of the Month post, let's start out with a quick appetizer: I was recently interviewed for the Easy Prey podcast, which is about scams, marketing gimmicks, and other ways consumers get manipulated. The host, Chris Parker, got in touch with Money Crashers looking for writers who would like to be on the show, and eventually he set up an interview with me based on my pieces about utility scams and home security scams. If you're interested, you can check it out here.

Now, let's move on to my Recipe of the Month for February. I had to scrabble a bit to
come up with this one, as it was coming up on the end of the month and I had only a few days left to try a new vegan recipe for the blog. On our last trip to Stop & Shop, I had grabbed the latest issue of their-in store magazine, Savory, so I started flipping through it in search of vegan dishes. Near the front of the magazine was a "Vegan Mac and 'Cheese'" recipe made with cashew cheese sauce, but it didn't look all that interesting, so I skipped ahead to the "Take 5" section (five-ingredient recipes), where I found an easy-looking Soba Salad with Edamame and Peppers. The five ingredients were soba noodles, frozen edamame (cooked soy beans), frozen mixed pepper strips, scallions, and Taste of Inspirations Sesame-Ginger Dressing.

We already had three of these ingredients on hand: the soba and edamame (both left over from other recipes) and the scallions. We didn't have frozen pepper strips, but we had fresh red and green bell peppers, so Brian figured we could just use those. As for the sesame-ginger dressing, we could have just gone out and bought a bottle, but then we'd have to figure out what to do with the rest of it after using half a cup for this dish. So Brian dug through our recipe archives until he found a couple of recipes for sesame ginger dressing that he could scale down to make a half-cup batch. I checked them against the ingredient list for the Taste of Inspirations dressing and determined that the best match was this one from Budget Bytes. It calls for honey, so the resulting recipe would be not quite vegan, but it would be easy to replace with agave nectar or simple syrup for someone who wanted a 100 percent vegan version.

Because of the substitutions we made, our salad was probably a bit different from the one in the magazine. For one thing, it has a total of 13 ingredients rather than five (nine in the dressing, plus the two types of peppers, plus the edamame and soba). And the added step of mixing up the dressing added about ten minutes to the preparation time. But the biggest difference was most likely the texture. Based on the picture in Savory, it looks like the bottled sesame-ginger dressing is fairly thin and light, while our homemade dressing was quite thick. Also, we used raw, fresh pepper strips rather than cooked, frozen ones, so their texture was no doubt firmer and crisper — all to the good, as far as we're concerned. But the flavor was probably pretty close to the original version.

So how was it? Not bad, but not extraordinary. The dressing seemed a bit unbalanced in flavor to me, with the ginger kind of drowning out the other flavors. If we make it again I'd probably cut the ginger down a bit and boost the sesame oil, soy sauce, and rice vinegar for a slightly thinner dressing with more sour, salty, and umami flavor. But with a little added salt, this version was okay. The recipe as written made enough for a full meal for the two of us, with about two cups left over that provided lunch for both of us the next day.

All in all, I'd say the dish was fine, but I doubt it will make it into our regular rotation. Neither soba nor edamame is something we buy on a regular basis, and neither of us liked this salad enough to go out and buy them specifically for that purpose. If we ever did get a hankering for something with soba and edamame together, we'd probably make this Winter Soba Noodle Salad, which was one of my first Recipes of the Month, and which has a more interesting blend of flavors and textures. Or, as Brian points out, we could just cook the soba and the edamame and toss them with whatever veggies we happened to have on hand, and it would probably taste fine.

DIY hair care, take 2

Three years ago, I discovered a recipe for a homemade face wash that I absolutely loved. With only three readily available ingredients (aloe vera gel, honey, and olive oil), it achieved much better results at a lower price than any commercial product I'd tried. It was cruelty free and packaging free. And best of all, I knew it would never be discontinued, which is what seems to happen to any product I like.

Ever since then, I've aspired to find a DIY hair conditioner that would offer these same benefits. I use conditioner as my sole hair care product, both in and out of the shower, so neither a deep conditioner nor a simple apple cider vinegar rinse was going to cut it. I wanted a homemade conditioner I could also comb into damp hair for styling. 

But sadly, there weren't many recipes for this type of product online, and none of the ones I tried worked well at all. Straight coconut oil left my hair greasy and did nothing to tame the frizz; coconut milk left it not only greasy but limp as well. A DIY "Honey Butter Balm" made from coconut oil, honey, and shea butter produced pretty good results on day one, but left my hair bedraggled and limp the next day. And both a DIY flaxseed gel and a similar gel made from oats (for which I can't now locate the recipe) turned my curls into a frizzy, sticky puff of cotton candy, just like every other humectant I've ever tried.

And then one day I came upon this recipe from Pistachio Project. It had just four ingredients: boiled or distilled water, coconut oil, guar gum (a thickener and emulsifier), and essential oils (mainly for fragrance. though you can also use specific oils to fight dandruff or dry scalp). It looked like just what my hair needed: something with plenty of oil, but not straight oil that would just sit on top of my low-porosity hair and give it a greasy sheen. And I already had coconut oil and water, so all I needed was the guar gum.

However, this turned out to be an ingredient you can't just go and buy at the store. None of our local supermarkets had it, nor did the natural food stores in the area. Finally I decided to just try the recipe with xanthan gum, which I had on hand following an experiment with homemade Frappuccino. If that worked, I wouldn't need guar gum. And if it completely failed to work, I wouldn't need to waste any more time messing around with this recipe.

As it turned out, the result was somewhere in the middle. The conditioner came out very thin, even though I'd doubled the amount of coconut oil in it because I felt certain a 1:32 ratio of oil to water wouldn't be enough for my hair. I felt like I had to use a lot of it to make any impression on my hair. And yet, it almost seemed to work. It didn't exactly smooth my hair, but it came closer to doing it than anything else I'd tried — and without making it overly limp or greasy.

So I decided it was worth investing in some guar gum to put this recipe to a proper test. Since I still wasn't sure it would work, I purchased a fairly modest amount: 8 ounces for $5.29 at Vitacost. According to the label, that 8-ounce container had 162 half-teaspoon servings, so that would still be enough to make over 160 batches of the conditioner if it worked — and if it didn't, I was only out around five bucks. (I bundled it in with another order, so the shipping cost was negligible.)

I finally got around to trying it last night. This time, I used a whole tablespoon of coconut oil and added some of my favorite essential oils for fragrance. (I've been making a homemade perfume with four parts sandalwood, two parts vanilla, and one part cinnamon, so I stuck to the same ratio in this.) This produced a thickish mixture that was a bit difficult to pour out of the blender, but it was still a lot easier to make than the shea butter gel. And according to my calculations, it only cost 29 cents for the batch: 9 cents' worth of coconut oil, 3 cents' worth of guar gum, and 17 cents for 14 drops of essential oil.

This morning, after my shower, I applied some to my damp-dried curls, the same way I normally do with store-bought conditioner. Thick as it was, it still felt oddly light and slippery in my hands, not creamy like a regular conditioner, but it wasn't too hard to comb into my hair. Then I attempted to take a picture of the result, which proved easier said than done; I hate the way I look in pictures generally, and selfies come out even worse. I finally ended up putting on a mask so that I could show the hair without having to worry about how my face looked.

And here's the result. Not too bad, right? It's not exactly supermodel hair, but it's neither greasy nor frizzy nor limp. The curls are fairly defined, with a decent amount of body, and even a little bit of shine. And they smell like my own signature fragrance, a feature I can't get from even the priciest store-bought products. It took around two tablespoons of conditioner to get this result, so assuming one batch is two-thirds of a cup (equal to the volume of water I started with), each application costs a little over 5 cents. (By comparison, the Suave conditioner I've been using costs $3.99 for 28 ounces, or about 7.1 cents for a comparable volume.)

Admittedly, this is only a preliminary test. The shea butter leave-in also produced good results on first use, but my hair looked dreadful the next day. So I'll have to use this stuff consistently for at least a week to evaluate the results properly. I might end up deciding to tweak the recipe a little, perhaps adding just a tiny bit of the shea butter I still have left to give the conditioner a bit more substance.

But even if this doesn't turn out to be the ultimate, perfect product for my hair, it is at least a product that I know will always be available, on tap, requiring only about five minutes of work and 29 cents' worth of ingredients. The only plastic packaging waste it will produce is the recyclable PETE jar the guar gum came in, and that won't need to go in the bin for another 161 batches. And the Powers That Be can never, ever discontinue it and snatch it away from me. Ecofrugal Principle #5 (Make It Yourself) for the win!

Wind Energy Explained

Here's one more new piece from Perch Energy covering the benefits of wind power. For those who already know the basics, I threw in some interesting bits of news you might not have heard. I cover turbines that can fit in smaller locations to power individual buildings or clusters of buildings, as well as new strategies for recycling turbine blades and reducing bird and bat deaths.

Wind Energy Explained: What is Wind Power & Its Role in a Renewable Energy Future?

Money Crashers: Five pieces

Money Crashers has posted a whole bunch of my articles in the past week, so here's a really quick roundup:

Should You Buy an Electric Car? – 5 Cost Considerations

Here's a topic that's on a lot of ecofrugal people's minds these days: Is it time to switch to an electric car? This piece focuses mostly on the financial side of that question (cost of buying, cost of maintenance, cost of charging at home and on the road), but I also go into the convenience and environmental costs of electric versus gas-powered vehicles.

Best Personal Finance Books for Kids

This is a companion to my earlier piece on personal finance books for teens and young adults. While that one included some books aimed at adults, this one focuses on books that help younger readers (ages 5 through 11) learn the basics about money.

What Is a Debt Consolidation Loan and How Does It Work?

Here's a topic ecofrugal people are unlikely to need, but I'll include it here anyway: debt consolidation loans. I explore how these loans work, what kind of debt you can use them for, who can qualify for one, and their costs and benefits.

Should You Buy a Fixer-Upper House? The Pros and Cons to Consider

And we're back firmly on ecofrugal ground with the costs and benefits of buying a fixer-upper. Does it really save you money? Does it save you enough to be worth the cost in time, sweat, and stress? (Should you decide the answer is yes, check out my earlier piece on how to do it.)

The Best Places to Buy Wine Online of 2022

Finally, here's one for frugal wine lovers. During the COVID pandemic, Americans discovered the benefits of buying our booze online, and many of us have stuck with it. In this roundup, I share eight of the best places to find great wine online.

Ecofrugal climate policy

In the past couple of years, I've written several posts here about the benefits of putting a price on carbon. A carbon tax or carbon fee is a very simple, direct way to bring down fossil fuel emissions by making fossil fuels more expensive. This gives everyone who uses fossil fuels now — individuals, businesses, governments — a clear incentive to use them less. And it doesn't have to hurt low-income families, because you can simply take the money from the carbon fees and distribute it directly and equally to citizens. With a bill designed like this, called a carbon fee and dividend or carbon cashback bill, the majority of Americans — especially those lower on the income scale — would come out ahead.

I've always assumed a carbon fee was the most ecofrugal of all possible climate policies. It has a major impact on climate (as you can see with this simulator tool I tested at the 2021 CCL conference) and it doesn't cost the government one red cent. But according to the latest Weekly Planet (a free climate newsletter from The Atlantic), there's actually something even better: clean energy tax credits.

We already have some clean energy tax credits, of course. But they're kind of a hodgepodge. Each one covers a different, specific type of clean energy project. Some pay developers when they make investments in clean electricity; some pay them when they actually produce it. And a lot of the money ends up going into the pockets of the big banks that finance the loans for these projects.

These new credits are more elegant, kind of like the carbon tax itself. They apply equally to any kind of clean energy project. Developers can take the credit either when they invest or when they produce electricity. And if they're new companies that owe no taxes yet, they can apply the credits to their future taxes.

According to a recent University of Chicago study, these new credits are amazingly cost-effective. Existing clean energy policies can cost as much as $3,064 for every ton of carbon they remove from the atmosphere. These tax credits cost between $33 and $50 per ton. When you factor in the amount of money the government saves by reducing the cost of carbon pollution (costs like health care expenses and dealing with natural disasters), these policies actually pay for themselves. And if you could factor in the cost savings from eliminating all the other pollutants produced by fossil fuels, they could possibly pay for themselves twice over.

And we're not talking about a small cost for a small benefit here. According to the study, these incentives would affect the "entire electricity sector," unlike current credits that affect only "relatively small parts of the economy." They could reduce emissions from the grid by 33% to 45% by 2031, a mere nine years from now.

OK, you may be thinking, but how is all that better than carbon pricing? Wouldn't making fossil fuels more costly, rather than making clean energy less costly, have the same effect? And wouldn't it be even cheaper, since the polluters, rather than taxpayers, would bear the cost?

The paper doesn't address this point. It compares the clean energy credits only to "existing carbon policies," which don't include a price on carbon (at least not in the U.S.). Robinson Meyer, author of the Weekly Planet, says "because their per-ton cost is below the social cost of carbon, the tax credits may in some cases be more efficient than a carbon tax," but he doesn't explain beyond that. To me, it seems that the only real benefit of the clean energy incentives is that they indirectly reduce the use of fossil fuels, and carbon pricing does that directly.

But Meyer does bring up another way in which the subsidies are clearly superior to carbon fees: "they seem unlikely to generate the political blowback that tends to greet a carbon tax." Because, as he pointed out in a previous issue of the newsletter, carbon pricing is a very hard sell. The benefits from reduced global warming are hard to measure or point to directly, but the costs are immediate and affect everyone. And even when you tie the carbon fee to a dividend, as in a carbon cashback program — even when you can tell Americans honestly that this policy not only mitigates global warming in the future but also puts money directly in their pocket, right now — it doesn't increase popular support for the program. (To be fair, the study he cites found that if you make the rewards of the program more transparent — for example, sending people a check in the mail every month instead of giving them a tax credit once a year — people support it more.)

The point is that, whether reasonably or unreasonably (I'd say there's a strong case for "unreasonably"), carbon taxes are unpopular and politicians don't want to touch them. But clean energy tax credits are easier to sell. So the biggest benefit of this policy over a carbon cashback is that it could actually get passed. And a real benefit always beats a larger, purely hypothetical one.

Money Crashers: 3 new articles

A quick update here to tell you about my three latest pieces on Money Crashers. The first is about one of my favorite subjects, books — specifically, books to teach kids about money. I already have a piece on the best personal finance books for adults, and there's an upcoming one about the best books for younger children, but this one focuses on the tween and teen set: ages 11 to 20. 

These days, schools are teaching kids this age the facts of life about sex, but not about money, so it's up to parents to fill in the gap. My folks did this decades ago by giving me a subscription to Penny Power magazine, a version of Consumer Reports for kids. But that magazine is now sadly defunct, so books are the best way to go, and these seven books are the most-recommended of all. Together, they cover every aspect of financial life, from splitting the check at a restaurant from starting a business. With one exception ("Rich Dad, Poor Dad for Kids," which I included because of its popularity but honestly don't think much of), these are all books I wish I'd had the chance to read at this age.

Best Personal Finance Books for Young Adults (Teens and Tweens)

The second is on a topic I've frankly been a little behind the curve on: money transfer apps. The only one I currently use is PayPal, and according to my research, it's a good one overall — but there are lots of other options that can be better for specific uses, from splitting the check with friends to sending money overseas. No matter where and how you want to send money, there's bound to be an app here that works for you.

The Best Money Transfer Apps for Sending and Receiving Cash of 2022

And finally, there's a piece on the boring but highly necessary topic of health insurance. I've written on this subject before, but this piece covers the absolute basics: what health insurance actually does, what terms like "deductible" and "coinsurance" mean, what an insurance policy is required by law to cover, and what kind of limits insurers tend to place on their coverage to keep costs down. It goes into the many different types of health insurance in the higgledy-piggledy U.S. health-care system, from Medicare to HMOs, and answers some basic questions about what health insurance costs and how to get it. It's everything you always wanted to know about health insurance but weren't sure how to ask.

What Is Health Insurance and How Does It Work? 

Gardeners' Holidays 2022: Seed-Starting Day, with a new twist

Our gardening schedule for this year was a bit disrupted by a snowstorm that hit near the end of January. Last weekend, our yard was full of snow, so we had no chance to dig out the dirt we'd need for seed starting. So it wasn't until today, with the snow mostly melted that Brian finally managed to extract some dirt for this purpose. And under normal circumstances, his next move would be to bake it in the oven to sterilize it before adding it to the seed starting tubes with a layer of commercial seed starting mix on top.

Except...we're not actually planning to do that this year.

See, this whole seed-starting method was kind of cobbled together in the first place. We'd had disappointing results using plain seed starting mix, which doesn't provide nutrients for the growing seedlings, and we didn't want the hassle (and the risk of transplant shock) of transplanting them into real garden soil after starting them. So after some research, I dug up a fact sheet from Purdue that suggests two methods that sounded feasible: either start seeds in "a mixture of about one-third loam garden soil and two- thirds vermiculite...sterilized before seeds are planted in it," or "partially fill a flat or pot with sterilized soil mix, and then top it with a layer of vermiculite or milled sphagnum moss." We combined these two approaches, using baked garden soil and sterile potting mix on top, and this gave us pretty good results.

But I'm beginning to wonder whether the baking step is really useful. I came across an article on a gardening blog that claims baking soil in the oven, as Purdue recommends, doesn't truly sterilize it; there are still some microbes remaining that will reproduce fast, and the ones that return fastest are the fungi that cause damping-off disease. So it can actually do more harm than good.

Now, we haven't actually had any problems with damping-off while using this system. And normally I would say, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. But baking the dirt for seed starting really is a smelly nuisance, and if it's not doing our seedlings any good, then I'd be happy to skip it and simplify the process. On the other hand, I don't want to risk all our seedlings on an untested method.

I discussed this with Brian, and he suggested an experiment. He routinely starts twice the number of seedlings we expect to need for each crop, just to make sure we have plenty of healthy ones, so he proposed dividing those seedlings into two batches. Both batches would start in a layer of sterile seed-starting mix, but one batch would have that mix sitting on top of a layer of plain, unbaked garden soil — microorganisms and all. And the other would have a layer of commercial potting soil on the bottom.

This method, we think, would be pretty close to the start-and-transplant method originally suggested to us by the landscaper we hired in 2012. The seeds would sprout in the potting mix, which is (reasonably) sterile and lightweight. Then, as their roots developed, they'd move down into either potting soil (still fairly light and fluffy, but less rich in nutrients) or garden soil (richer but heavier, and containing a mix of microorganisms that could be both helpful and harmful). And as they grew, we could compare the two batches to see which type of soil produced healthier plants.

Unfortunately, to conduct this experiment we need to acquire some potting soil first. We don't have any at the moment, and we didn't come up with this idea until after we'd come home from our weekend shopping. Which means today isn't really Seed-Starting Day; it's just Coming-Up-With-A-New-Idea-For-Seed-Starting Day.

I'll keep you posted as we put this new method into practice, and by the time Planting Day rolls around in March, I should be able to give you the lowdown on how the Battle of the Potting Media turned out. Stay tuned!