Gardeners' Holidays 2023: First Sowing

By the time spring officially begins, our gardening season is already well under way. The process of starting seeds indoors begins in early February or even mid-January, so by late March, we've already got quite an assortment of seedlings coming up. So far this year, we have strawberries, leeks, marigolds, peppers, and most of our tomatoes. (The new San Marzano paste tomatoes we bought say not to start them indoors until seven weeks before the last spring frost, which means about a week from now). And we're about to add our new Thai basil to the collection, since unlike the regular Italian basil, it's apparently best to start indoors.

But up to this point in the year, all the seeding action takes place indoors. It's not until around six weeks before the last frost—which, here in New Jersey, means right around the spring equinox—that we can begin to put seeds directly into the ground. And for us, the first crop to get this treatment is the snap peas.

The variety we bought this year, Cascadia, is one we've used successfully many times in the past. (In fact, we like it so much that we specifically looked for it when choosing a new seed company last year.) But the Cascadia seeds from our new supplier, Botanical Interests, came with a little bit of extra advice on the packet that Fedco never used to give us: "Soak seed in water for 12 to 24 hours before sowing; this is not required, but hastens germination." It also said the seeds could be planted a mere 2 inches apart, rather than the 3 inches we used to plan for. So we decided to soak 48 of the 68 seeds in the packet, leaving 20 to poke into any holes left by seeds that don't come up or get snatched by birds. We put them into a little jar, added just enough water to cover them, and tucked the jar into a cabinet, where it had another jar full of bean sprouts to keep it company.

The 24 hours of soaking definitely made a difference to the peas. The dry, brownish seeds turned plump and green, looking more like the kind of peas we're used to eating than the ones we're used to planting. I went out yesterday, poked little holes roughly two inches apart into the damp soil with a gloved finger, and dropped one fat pea in each hole before covering them all up. My spacing must have been a little bit off, since I ended up with three seeds left over at the end of the row, so I just stuck them into the soil wherever it looked like they might fit. 

Although it had been raining off and on that morning, I gave the row of peas a bit of extra water just to make sure they got off to a good start. Then we covered them up with chicken wire row covers—a slightly simplified version of the Hudson SQ-X Squirrel Excluder—to protect the newly sown seeds from bird and squirrel attacks. We used this same technique to protect the seedlings last year, and it did manage to keep the seeds alive long enough to sprout, although we eventually ended up losing most of the crop to deer. 

This year, though, we may have a solution to that problem too: our new deer fence, a six-foot extension of the existing garden fence constructed from fishing line and plastic streamers. It's a bit of a mess right now, since some of the streamers have escaped while the rest have slid around and clumped up on the lines, but we'll clean it up as the gardening season progresses. Of course, this flimsy barrier isn't really strong enough to keep out a deer. If one decided to disregard the waving streamers and jump over the wire fence, its weight would no doubt break right through the fishing lines and possibly knock over the poles holding them up. But we're hoping our local deer aren't smart enough to figure that out.

Recipe of the Month: Tofu Soba Noodles

Last week, while poking around the internet looking for more vegan whipped cream ideas, I happened on a recipe at Damn Delicious for a soba noodle salad that got high marks from readers. If I were still on my carb-controlled diet, I would have had to pass this recipe up with a regretful sigh, but now my doctor has given me permission to indulge in carbs again so long as they're balanced by adequate protein and non-starchy veggies. Since this dish contained loads of tofu and shredded cabbage, it seemed to fit the bill admirably. So I printed it out, and Brian gave it a try.

The recipe had two points in its favor right away. First, it didn't call for any ingredients we didn't have on hand already. We'd had a package of soba (a type of Japanese noodle containing a mixture of wheat and buckwheat flour) languishing in our pantry the whole time I was on my carb restrictions, and we'd taken advantage of the St. Patrick's Day sales to grab a cheap cabbage at our local supermarket. (This turned out to be one of the last purchases we made there, as the store shut down just a few days later. But that's a story for another post.) The soba noodles were packaged in little bundles weighing a little over 3 ounces each, making it tricky to measure out the 8 ounces required for a half batch, so he just skimped slightly and used two bundles. For those who don't have soba in the pantry, a half-pound of either whole-wheat or white spaghetti would probably work almost as well.

The other advantage of the recipe is that it was extremely easy to prepare. The hardest part was probably prepping the ingredients: shredding the cabbage, grating the ginger, slicing the scallions, and cubing the tofu. Once all that was done, the recipe came together in no time. Just cook the noodles (which takes less than 10 minutes), whisk together the dressing, and then brown the tofu, cabbage, garlic, and ginger as if you were making a stir-fry. Then toss all that together with the noodles, sprinkle on the scallions, and it's done. Crushed peanuts and Sriracha are listed as optional toppings; we took the option for the peanuts but skipped the Sriracha, as we didn't have any (and I must confess to being a bit of a spice wimp anyway).

Even without the extra spice, this simple recipe was not by any means lacking in flavor. The ginger, garlic, soy sauce, sesame oil, and rice vinegar all added their own piquancy to the dish, and the contrast of crunchy cabbage, soft tofu, and chewy noodles provided plenty of texture interest. If the salad had a fault, I'd say it was a little too heavy on the vinegar; its acidity tended to overbalance and distract slightly from from the other flavors. So next time we make this dish, we'll probably try cutting this ingredient down from a quarter-cup to 3 tablespoons (or half that amount for a half batch).

And there almost certainly will be a next time, because this recipe ticks all the boxes. It's quick, easy, and tasty. It's also healthy, with protein, starch, and non-starchy veggies all in one bowl. It makes a generous amount: even a half batch with less than the full volume of noodles was enough to feed us both and leave a little bit for a lunch the next day. And all the ingredients are readily available and, on the whole, inexpensive. The only one that's at all pricey is the soba noodles, and one package of those goes a pretty long way. With the amount still left in the package we have, we could make it three more times at least.

Another vegan whipped cream attempt

In our attempts to eat ecofrugally, whipped cream has always posed one of the biggest challenges. Even before we started moving toward a dairy-free diet, there was the difficulty of disposing of the cans. Once we shifted away from dairy, we ran into all kinds of problems finding a suitable plant-based alternative. Coconut milk and coconut cream invariably failed to whip; aquafaba worked better, but lacked the creamy mouthfeel of the real thing. Eventually we found a canned coconut whip at Trader Joe's that works well for everyday use, but it's still not good for recipes that use whipped cream in bulk, such as raspberry fool and our anniversary cake.

This weekend, we found ourselves pondering this problem yet again. After our successful experiment last week with making our own plant butter, we'd realized that it would be possible to make this Thanksgiving's rhubarb pie fully vegan, and we were discussing whether it might be feasible to do the same with the pumpkin pie. It turned out that our favorite vegan food blogger does, in fact, have a pumpkin pie recipe, but the vegan whipped cream she suggests serving with it is one of those coconut-based versions that have never worked for us. I decided just out of curiosity to search for other vegan alternatives, and to my surprise, I actually found one at Nora Cooks. Just like our new vegan butter, this recipe relied on a mixture of plant milk and melted coconut oil. And we thought, well, if it works as a substitute for butter, why not cream? At any rate, what did we have to lose by trying it?

The recipe called for "unsweetened, unflavored plant milk" and said that soy worked best. However, we had only sweetened soy milk, so we decided to use some unsweetened almond milk we had left over from my carb-counting period. The other thing in the recipe that gave us pause was the amount of sugar it called for: half a cup to two cups of liquid. This seemed like a lot, and when we consulted Pillsbury, we found that this was actually double the amount recommended for regular whipped cream. We knew there was a chance the cream might not whip properly if we halved the sugar, but we also knew we might find it too sweet to eat if we didn't, so we decided to take the risk.

This recipe has two stages. First, you blend together the melted coconut oil and plant milk and let it chill at least 4 hours. Then you add the sugar and vanilla and beat it until it thickens. The recipe warned that this process would take 5 to 10 minutes, and at first, it looked like this would be right on the money. After 4 minutes, it was just beginning to thicken up and take in air; after 11 minutes, it was showing the first signs of forming ridges. But as Brian continued to mix and mix, it never got to the soft-peak stage. Instead, around the 14-minute mark, it began to look a bit curdled. When we pulled the beaters out, we discovered that the coconut oil had begun to re-solidify and was form lumps in the liquid. It was clearly never going to turn into anything resembling whipped cream.

This was a disappointment, but we weren't prepared to give up just yet. We thought the problem might be that the almond milk we used was too watery and hadn't integrated well enough with the coconut oil. We suspected that a higher-protein, higher-fat plant milk would work better, and we happened to have just such a product in the fridge: Silk high-protein plant milk, which I use as a coffee creamer. (It's expensive as plant milks go, but cheaper than most plant-based products sold specifically as coffee creamer, and it tastes better, too.) We'd actually considered using this the first time we made the recipe, but we decided to go with the plain almond milk since it was cheaper, and we knew that if the recipe worked with that it would work with anything. But since it hadn't worked, we decided it was worth giving the Silk a try.

Right from the beginning, this batch showed more promise than the first. The coconut oil blended well into the Silk, and when we pulled the mixture out after the chilling stage, it hadn't begun to separate the way it had with the almond milk. And as Brian began to whip it, whip it good, it thickened much faster. After only seven minutes, it was looking much closer to whipped cream than the first batch. It never got quite stiff enough to cling to the bowl, the way they always get it to do on "The Great British Baking Show." And the texture still wasn't quite what you'd expect from whipped cream; when we tasted it, our tongues could detect tiny blobs of fat that hadn't fully blended in. It was a bit more like a cheap vanilla ice cream—the kind that gets a bit grainy in the freezer—than like whipped cream. But it went down reasonably well over an apple crisp (which, as I predicted, worked fine with our new plant butter).

Even if this vegan whipped cream recipe isn't quite perfect, it at least serves as a proof of concept. We now know it's possible to get something with a flavor and texture close to whipped cream from readily available, plant-based ingredients. Now it's just a matter of tweaking the process to get something we can work with in our favorite whipped-cream-based recipes.

Now that we know it's possible to get plant milk to whip, perhaps for our next attempt we'll try another method that I found at a site called Milk Pick (independently corroborated at Cake Decoration Products). These sites claim that you can get plain old almond milk to whip if you first heat it in a double boiler with sugar, corn starch, and xanthan gum (or some other thickener such as guar gum). If this works, it would be both quicker and cheaper than the coconut-oil method. And if it doesn't, perhaps some combination of the two—such as adding xanthan gum, which is also an emulsifier, to the coconut-Silk mixture—would be more successful.

A small step away from palm oil

After my epic fail with carb counting, I've received permission from my doctor to go back to my carb-ier plant-based diet. This was a definite win for me, since aside from being much more to my taste, it's generally the most ecofrugal way to eat. Plant foods nearly always have smaller carbon footprints and water footprints than animal foods, and a diet with less meat is generally more affordable and healthier as well. But the green halo surrounding plant-based foods has one tiny little tarnished spot: palm oil. 

If you pay a lot of attention to the eco-news, there's a good chance you've already seen at least one story about how palm oil is the secret villain of the plant kingdom. Made from the fruit of oil palms, this cheap and useful oil finds its way into a huge variety of products. It's particularly handy for plant-based foods such as margarine, since it's one of the few vegetable oils that's high in saturated fat and therefore stays solid at room temperature. 

But unfortunately, the way palm fruit is generally grown and harvested does considerable damage to the environment. Because oil palms grow only in tropical climates, the growing demand for palm oil has led to massive deforestation as rain forests are cut to make way for oil palm plantations. Moreover, according to Food Revolution Network (FRN), the people who harvest the palm fruits typically work in grueling conditions for pitiful wages—if they aren't enslaved outright. Some products are made with certified sustainable palm oil, which is supposed to be grown and harvested in a more eco-friendly way. But according to FRN, these labels are often no more than greenwashing. 

The most obvious solution is to avoid products made with palm oil entirely. However, that's by no means as simple as it sounds. According to one estimate, it's found in as many as half of all packaged products sold at the supermarket. This includes both foods (margarine, baked goods, chocolate) and non-food products (soap, shampoo, detergent). In some categories, it's practically impossible to find any products without it.

Granted, it's a little bit easier if you don't buy that many packaged goods to begin with. If your diet is largely whole foods and you make a lot of your own cleaning and personal care products, you may not find quite as much palm oil lurking on your pantry shelves. When I went through ours, paying particular attention to the categories where palm oil is most common, here's what I found:

• Bread. Not generally a problem, since ours is usually home-baked. However, palm oil is listed as an ingredient on the package of flour tortillas we recently picked up. (Interestingly, the "Carb Balance" tortillas we bought when I was on my carb-controlled diet, though no better for my blood sugar, appear to be better for the earth. They contain no palm oil, only partially hydrogenated soybean oil.)
• Cat Food. Our cats eat IAMS dry food, which contains a whole lot of ingredients, but no palm oil.
  
• Cereal. We seldom buy commercial breakfast cereals, relying instead on Brian's homemade granola. Occasionally, when we can find it on sale at Costco, we'll pick up a box of Kellogg's Raisin Bran, but it appears to be entirely innocent of palm oil (and all other oils as well).
  
• Chocolate. Apparently, the "Way to Go" chocolate bars we buy at Lidl are not only Fair Trade certified but also rainforest-friendly, with no palm oil. Lidl's chcoolate chips, though not certified, are similarly clean.
  
• Cookies and other baked goods. Again, most of ours are home-baked. But we do have one box of Girl Scout cookies in our pantry (purchased when we were waylaid by Brownies while out on a walk), and it contains both palm oil and palm kernel oil. There's also palm kernel oil in the "Fiberful" granola bars we picked up one time at Trader Joe's, though the "Simply Nutty" bars we like better are free of it.
• Detergent. The last brand we bought, All Free and Clear, doesn't list palm oil as an ingredient. However, it does contain sodium laureth sulfate, which can be derived from palm oil. There's no way to tell whether it did in this case or not. As far as I can tell, there are only a handful of very pricey detergents that are certified palm-oil-free.
• Dish soap. We use Lidl's store brand, which also contains sodium laureth sulfate. So, again, impossible to tell from the label. 
• Hand soap. The Oatmeal & Honey bar soap from Trader Joe's lists both sodium palmate and sodium palm kernelate, derived from palm oil and palm kernel oil. as its top ingredients. Here, again, there are very few brands without palm oil, and they're all really expensive.
• Shampoo. Brian's shampoo contains sodium lauryl sulfate (SLS), which also is often made from palm oil. Again, there's no way to tell if it was used in this particular product, but it isn't one of the few shampoos that are certified palm-oil-free. The same goes for my conditioner, Suave Almond and Shea Butter, which contains such potential palm oil derivatives as cetearyl alcohol and cetrimonium chloride.
  
• Toothpaste. Although most toothpastes contain SLS, ours does not. We buy Trader Joe's peppermint toothpaste specifically to avoid this ingredient because it gives Brian canker sores.
• Vegetable oil spread. We use two kinds: Blue Bonnet for toast and Country Crock Plant Butter for baking. Both contain a mix of vegetable oils that includes palm and palm kernel oils. As far as I can tell, the only plant-based spread that doesn't is the highly regarded, but also highly priced Miyoko's.
  

We're probably on the low end of the bell curve for use of palm-oil products. Many foods that use this ingredient, such as chips, crackers, frozen meals, ice cream, instant noodles, microwave popcorn, and bottled salad dressing, simply aren't part of our diet at all. Yet even with our mostly whole-food diet and our generally eco-conscious shopping habits, we still have a handful of products in our home that definitely contain palm oil or palm oil derivatives, and a few more that we can't be sure about.

Now, I'm not prepared to shell out extra for a soap or a shampoo that I can be absolutely certain is palm-oil-free. I'm also not willing to make my own detergent, an endeavor that as far as I can tell offers minimal savings, if any. (Besides, most recipes for homemade detergent start with soap, which usually contains palm oil anyway.) And so far, all my attempts to make my own hair conditioner have been flops. (The one recipe that seemed to work initially did not hold up well as the week went on.)

But there is one palm oil product on this list I thought we might be able to replace with a homemade version: the vegetable oil spread. Doing this could also save us money, since the Country Crock Plant Butter is pretty pricey (usually around $5 a pound, which is more than we pay for real butter on the rare occasions we buy it). And it would eliminate the need to keep separate products on hand for baking and for spreading.

I've seen several recipes for vegan plant butters online, some simpler than others. One, at Fork and Beans, called for liquid lecithin, an ingredient we don't have and can't easily buy; another, from A Virtual Vegan, seemed a bit too fiddly. But the recipe from The Loopy Whisk looked pretty straightforward and called only for ingredients we had on hand: refined coconut oil, a neutral-tasting cooking oil (we used canola), non-dairy milk (we used unsweetened almond milk), and salt, with an optional pinch of turmeric for color. (We declined the option, since we prefer a white spread to one that tastes of turmeric.) The cost of all these ingredients, by my calculations, is about $1.30 for 2 cups—on a par with our Blue Bonnet, and significantly cheaper than the Country Crock.

The process of making the plant butter is simple enough: just whisk these ingredients together, then chill them until they start to firm up, then whip them again for about two minutes. The recipe said the chilling step would take only 10 to 15 minutes, but it took us 20, even with only a quarter-sized batch. But eventually we got something thick enough to beat up (whisking it by hand, since the container we used was too small to accommodate our mixer's whisk attachment) until "super pale and fluffy." Then we chilled it overnight as instructed.

When I tried it on my toast this morning, I found that it was definitely harder than Blue Bonnet, though not as hard as real butter chilled to refrigerator temperature. This made it a little harder to spread, but I eventually figured out that all I had to do was scrape my knife blade along the surface to remove a thin curl of the "butter." This actually melted into the surface of my hot toast more readily than the Blue Bonnet usually does. And once it was melted in, I could barely taste the difference. It was a little less salty, maybe, but that wasn't a problem in the least.

So we have now determined that this DIY plant butter makes a perfectly good substitute for Blue Bonnet on toast. However, the real acid test will be to see how it does in baking. Brian was already planning to make a pot pie at some point this week, so he'll just use the new plant butter in the crust. If it works as well for that purpose as our Country Crock, then we can just cross this pricey product—and with it, the main source of palm oil in our diet—off our shopping list entirely.

 

Postscript: Success! Brian's plant-butter pie crust came out crisp, flaky, and delicious. He noted that it had a less complex flavor than a crust made with real butter, but the texture was just as good, and actually superior to the results we used to get with the plant butter. It was also better than either straight coconut oil or straight palm oil, both of which we've tried in the past. The coconut-oil crust was tender but limp, while the palm-oil one was very crisp and brittle. This was the perfect golden-brown mean. He now thinks we don't even need to buy butter for this Thanksgiving's pies, which means that our rhubarb pie will actually be vegan. (The pumpkin pie, made with eggs and evaporated milk, will remain vegetarian only.)

We still need to test the new plant butter in cookies and fruit crisp, but we have every reason to believe it will perform just as well for those applications. If it can handle shortcrust, it can handle anything.

[UPDATE, 6/19/24: Since writing this, I've learned that palm oil isn't so bad as I thought. It has been responsible for some tropical deforestation, but not all that much: according to Our World in Data, only about 2% of global forests have been lost to palm plantations. And it's gotten much better in recent years: over 270,000 hectares of land in Indonesia were cleared for oil palm in 2009, but fewer than 48,000 in 2015. So it's not as if our insatiable lust for palm oil is the main reason we're losing the rainforests.

Granted, even a little deforestation is bad, especially in the tropics. But the real catch is that most other oilseed crops require more land to grow than oil palms. If we replaced all the world's palm oil with coconut oil, the closest plant-based substitute, we'd need more than ten times as much land to grow it—all of it in tropical regions. Granted, it's a bit of an apples-to-oranges comparison, since the two crops are farmed very differently. Coconut palms produce more than just oil, and they're also often grown alongside other crops. But it's by no means clear that my coconut-oil-based plant butter is better for the planet than the commercial stuff containing palm oil.

The bottom line: boycotting palm oil isn't really a good idea. It makes more sense to look for products containing palm oil that's sustainably grown. The main sustainable certification for this crop comes from the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO). If you can't find RSPO-certified products where you shop, try writing to the store and asking for them.]