Recipe of the Month: Spicy Butternut Squash Ribbons

Back in July, I thought I might have hit on the ideal vegan coffee creamer: a blend of homemade oat milk and commercial soy milk from Lidl. But, sadly, after a few weeks of fiddling with the recipe, I couldn't come up with a version found as satisfying as the Silk Protein milk I'd been using. So, reluctantly, I went back to hitting the Stop & Shop every few weeks for a new container of Silk Protein. To get a little more value out of each trip, I'd also add a grab a copy of the store's free magazine, Savory, and flip through it looking for interesting recipes. But most of the time, I wouldn't find anything useful. 

However, the latest issue of Savory yielded one recipe that looked intriguing: Spicy Butternut Squash Ribbons with Chickpea Crumbs. Mind you, we didn't exactly need a new butternut squash recipe, since our harvest this year has been pretty small (just six Waltham squash and three tiny Honeynuts). That's barely enough to do justice to all our favorite go-to squash dishes—soufflé, pizza, lasagna, and the newly veganized version of butternut squash pasta with brown butter. But this one still looked worth trying because it was so different from those other recipes. It was a lighter, healthier dish containing almost nothing but veggies and fruit: ribbons of uncooked butternut squash topped with roasted chick peas and pomegranate seeds. We already had most of the ingredients on hand, and Brian was easily able to pick up the pomegranate and some cilantro at the Shop Rite on his bike.

The dish is pretty simple to put together. The most time-consuming part (and messy) part is extracting the seeds from the pomegranate. Slicing the butternut squash into long, thin strips also takes some time; it probably would have gone faster with our veggie spiralizer, but Brian decided to use a vegetable peeler since that's what the recipe called for. One of our smaller squash ended up yielding about enough ribbons for a half-batch of the dish. These got steeped for one hour in a marinade of olive oil, lime juice, garlic, chili pepper, and cilantro (which the recipe kept referring to as a "vinaigrette" even though it contained no actual vinegar). The one part of the recipe Brian didn't follow exactly was the instructions for the chick peas. It says to pulse them to "fine crumbs" in a food processor before roasting them, but he feared that would make too much of a mess, so he just mashed them up coarsely. They still got reasonably crisp with a 20-minute roasting, and he then sprinkled them on top of the squash ribbons along with the pomegranate seeds.

The finished dish was certainly very pretty to look at, with the bright red seeds and speckles of green cilantro against the golden ribbons of squash. Taste-wise, though, it was less impressive. Although the raw squash strips were as thin as Brian could make them with the vegetable peeler, they still came out crunchy and not very sweet, not at all like cooked squash. (If the dish had been described as a salad, maybe we wouldn't have minded the crunchy texture, but on the other hand, maybe we wouldn't have chosen to make it at all.) With the garlic, lime, cilantro, and pomegranate, the dish certainly wasn't lacking in flavor, but it didn't have the flavor we expect from butternut squash.

On the whole, this recipe was interesting as an experiment, but not really worth using up any more of our few precious butternut squash on.  The one part of the dish we might be interested in making again is the crispy chickpea crumbs, which have a nice texture and could be useful for adding a protein boost to salads or pasta dishes. But unless we get a real bumper crop of butternut squash in some future year, we'll probably stick to our tried-and-tested favorites.

What is Circular Monday?

Some time ago, I visited a site called Climate Hero to check my carbon footprint. (I like to check it on a variety of sites to see how they compare and get a wider range of suggestions for lowering it.) Ever since then, I've been getting occasional mailings from the site offering tips for cutting or offsetting my emissions. Most of these are stuff I already know, but this week I got an intriguing email telling me about something I'd never heard of before: Circular Monday.

Circular Monday, which is celebrated on the Monday before Thanksgiving, was conceived as an alternative to the consumer frenzy of Black Friday. Apparently, it was originally called White Monday, but the name got changed to something that better reflects its purpose, which is to promote the circular economy. A quick primer for those not familiar with this term: A circular economy is one in which all products can be broken down into their original components for reuse or recycling. This is in contrast to our current linear economy, in which most products are created from raw natural resources, used once, and then discarded in a landfill. (You can see a simple diagram of this model on the World Economic Forum website, or a much more complex one on the EPA site.) 

Now, this idea of a circular versus a linear economy isn't a simple matter of either-or. It's a question of degree. The more stuff gets reused, repaired, and recycled, the more circular the economy is; the more stuff gets extracted and discarded, the more linear it is. There's probably no such thing as a perfectly circular economy in which absolutely everything is reused; some things, like food or medicine, are always going to be used up. But the closer you can get to a true circle, the more you improve efficiency, reduce resource use, and limit pollution and waste. Examples of ways to make the economy more circular include:

• Making and buying products built to last, such as a pair of boots that can be resoled, and then keeping them in use longer
• A car-sharing or bike-sharing service that reduces the number of new cars or bikes being produced
• Refilling containers, such as milk bottles or printer ink cartridges, instead of tossing used ones and producing new ones 
• Shopping at thrift stores and yard sales
  
• Giving away unwanted but still usable items on Freecycle
• Upgrading your computer to keep it working longer so you don't need to buy a new one
• Turning old clothes that absolutely can't be worn any longer into rags or putting them in a textile recycling bin
  

Naturally, all this stuff is right up my ecofrugal alley, but I was a bit unclear on how I was supposed to set aside a particular day for it. It seems like you have to do these things whenever they happen to come up: refill your ink cartridges when they run dry, resole your shoes when the old soles wear out, donate your old clothes when you discover they no longer fit, turn socks into rags when the holes in them get too big to repair. The only thing you might be able to schedule on a particular day is a trip to the thrift shop, since you can always hunt for treasures even if there's nothing specific you need at the moment. But surely it would be easier to do that on a weekend than on the Monday of a busy holiday week.

I consulted the Circular Monday website and found that it's primarily a database of businesses that form part of the circular economy in one way or another. The list of U.S. businesses includes Back Market (a seller of refurbished electronics), eBay, Vinted (an online vintage clothing store), Turo (a car sharing marketplace), and Too Good to Go (a marketplace for businesses to dispose of surplus food). So it's really more Circular All Year Round than Circular Monday. However, on Circular Monday itself, most of these businesses have sales and promote them on social media with the #circularmonday hashtag. In this way, they call attention to the concept to help promote circular shopping all year round.

And this, apparently, is what Climate Hero was encouraging me to do next Monday: not necessarily to buy from these businesses right now, but to promote them by posting. "For instance," the email helpfully suggests, "you can inspire by sharing something you chose to buy circularly in the past year instead of new." Then add the appropriate tags for Climate Hero (@climatehero, #climatehero) and Circular Monday (@circularmonday, #circularmonday), and presto, you're part of the event.

Well, I've bought a lot of things secondhand in the past year, but I typically posted about them at the time. So rather than sharing new information, I'll just provide a quick recap of the posts I've done in the past year related to circular shopping:

• Ecofrugal gifting games (December 25)
• The Dress Retro challenge (April 4)
• Why I don't buy everything used (June 5)
• Good hunting at Goodwill (August 20)
• An ecofrugal fashion makeover (September 10)
• Why we're not a zero-waste household (October 8)
  
• Yard-sale haul 2023 (October 15)
• Ecofrugal episodes (November 12)

Here's hoping something on this list can provide a bit of ecofrugal inspiration for you.

Ecofrugal episodes

The ecofrugal life, as I've observed before, is a series of little ups and downs. This past week or so, we've had a series of small wins—including some that started out as losses—and one small win that turned into a loss, but can probably be reversed. Here's a play-by-play:

Ecofrugal Episode 1: The Stealth Vampire

Remember how we got a free home energy checkup back in August that included a bunch of free LED light bulbs? Well, this ended up having an odd secondary effect—one that we didn't notice until the nights started getting longer.

Early one morning, while it was still dark, Brian got up to use the bathroom. On his way back to bed, he passed the spare bedroom and noticed something odd: the lamp in there, which was turned off at the wall switch, was ever so faintly glowing in the darkened room. When he went up to it and turned off the lamp's switch, the light went out. But when he turned it back on, the hint of light came back. (I couldn't get a picture of this phenomenon because the light was so faint, but imagine it as a vague, dim aura, just barely bright enough for the eye to detect.)

We couldn't remember this lamp, or any other lamp ever plugged into that same outlet, ever doing this before. But up until recently, the light in that room has always been a fluorescent bulb, not an LED. So Brian's theory is that the wall switch is faulty, allowing just the faintest trickle of current through even when it's turned off—but in the past, that tiny bit of current wasn't enough to activate the bulb. Only now, with our new ultra-efficient LEDs, is it detectable. He tried plugging the lamp into our Kill-a-Watt meter to see how much current it was actually drawing, but once he did that, the faint light went out completely. Apparently that tiny bit of extra resistance was enough to block the current.

So, this ecofrugal win (free LEDs) turned out to be a bit of a loss (a stealthy energy vampire). But it's not much of a loss, since these LEDs use only a tiny bit of electricity even when fully powered, and presumably an even tinier bit when they're only barely lit. And it should be easy enough to eliminate completely by replacing the light switch, a fix that will only cost a few bucks.

Ecofrugal Episode 2: Vegan brown butter

Back in 2018, Brian and I discovered a really delicious recipe for pasta with butternut squash and brown butter. However, we have mostly gone off dairy at this point, and most plant butters (including our new homemade plant butter) don't brown. And it's the brown butter that really makes this dish special. Without it, it's just pasta with squash—reasonably tasty, but nothing to write home about.

But recently, I found a hack online for making vegan brown butter. The trick is to add a spoonful of nut butter, which provides the proteins and sugars needed for the browning reaction. It sounded worth a try, so we picked up a jar of almond butter at Costco, which we knew we could use up even if the recipe didn't work. 

Integrating this vegan brown butter into the pasta recipe was a little tricky. The protocol is designed to make the brown butter by itself, but the pasta recipe browns the butter in the pan with the squash. Brian compromised by making the brown butter first, then adding it to the pan with the squash as it cooked. And it worked! The vegan version of the recipe had the same rich, complex flavor as the original. Take that, dairy industry!

Ecofrugal Episode 3: Board-game bonanza

This ecofrugal win started out with a loss: Brian's year-old boots, which he was expecting to last him through several winters, have developed a leak that Shoe Goo has proved unable to repair. (The Wolverine name is no guarantee of quality, apparently.) Initially, we thought the ecofrugal solution to this problem would be to buy him a really good pair of boots with Goodyear welt construction, which would allow them to be resoled. I did a little bit of research on Reddit and learned that for this kind of boot, you should expect to pay a minimum of $250. (There's one well-reviewed brand, Thursday Boots, that starts at $200, but it's not available in stores; you can only order it online, which makes finding your perfect fit a real hassle.)

Now, for a pair of boots that will last ten years, this isn't such an unreasonable price. But after his experience with the Wolverines, Brian was feeling a bit distrustful of high-end brands. He thought that before shelling out for an expensive pair of new boots, we should at least make the rounds of local thrift stores and see what they had to offer.

What does this have to do with board games, you ask? Well, the first thrift store we visited was the one at our local Reformed Church, only a mile from our house. Their selection is quite small, but their prices are outstanding, so if we happened on a suitable pair here, we knew it would be a bargain. Unfortunately, we had no such luck; there were very few pairs of men's shoes on the rack, and none in Brian's size. But while we were there, we decided to check out the rack of board games in the back room, and there we hit the mother lode. 

Someone had obviously just cleaned out their board game collection and donated the lot to the thrift store, because in amongst the usual motley assortment of old Scrabble and Monopoly sets, we found several like-new games. Three of them, in fact, were still in their original shrink wrap; two others were open but obviously hadn't been played much. I don't want to disclose exactly what we got for fear of holiday spoilers, but we scored five new, interesting-looking games (two that we'd played before and three that were new to us), for only five bucks. So even though we didn't find what we were looking for, it was well worth the trip.

Ecofrugal Episode 4: Boots made for walking

Exciting as this thrift-store adventure was, it still left Brian without footwear. So, in the afternoon, we set out in the car to check out the Goodwill store in Bound Brook (the same one we visited for our anniversary). And there, Brian found not one but two pairs of boots that fit him reasonably well: a pair of Timberland hiking boots and a dressier leather pair originally from Banana Republic. Both were in excellent condition, and each was priced at a mere $20.

Each of these pairs had its own pros and cons. Brian slightly preferred the look of the Banana boots, but the way they were constructed made them a bit of a hassle to get on and off. The Timberlands were more convenient, but definitely casual in appareance, which meant he probably couldn't wear them for any kind of slightly formal occasion. When I asked him which pair felt more like the boots he'd want to reach for every day, he said the Timberlands were probably better, but he didn't seem happy about it. 

At that point, I proposed the solution he'd secretly been hoping for: just buy them both. That way, he could use the hiking boots as a casual, everyday shoe, and the Banana ones could be his dress boots. And at only $20 a pop, the two pairs together would cost less than half what he'd paid for his current pair of Wolverines that had let him down so dreadfully.

When we got these home, I did a little searching online to figure out just how good a deal we'd gotten. I found that a comparable pair of Timberlands would cost around $120 at full price, while similar boots from Banana Republic would run around $250. In short, we just acquired $370 worth of footwear for a mere $40—about 11% of retail.

Sadly, with my weird feet, I'd never be able to pull off this kind of ecofrugal shoe coup myself. But I can at least bask in the reflected glory of Brian's success. And if we end up having to blow a couple of hundred bucks on my next pair of winter boots, the $200 or so we didn't spend on boots for Brian will balance it out.

Ten climate tidbits for 2023

This weekend was the annual (virtual) fall conference for Citizens Climate Lobby (CCL), a climate group I've been involved with since 2020. Like last year's conference, this one didn't really give me any broad new insights about climate problems and solutions, but it supplied several interesting nuggets of information worth sharing. This year's ten tidbits are:

1. Language matters. The keynote speaker at Saturday's session was commentator and activist Van Jones. He's worked with people on both sides of the aisle and says that both groups often "get hung up on language." He gave the example of police reform: conservatives didn't want to listen to talk about "injustice" in the penal system, but were often open to the same policies when they were framed in terms of "liberty." He argued that similarly, they would be willing to move on climate policies if they were framed as being about "pollution" or "helping farmers" or "protecting God's creation" rather than "climate." He admitted that it's stupid for the word "climate" to be politically charged, but given that it is, it would be even stupider to insist on using it if it makes it harder to address the problem.

2. People do have their own facts. Senator Pat Moynihan famously said, "Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts." But at the time he said it, the media landscape was very different from today's. Everyone got their news from the same local papers and major TV networks. Nowadays, your social media feed and your Google search results will show you different facts depending on your political orientation. Type "gun" into Google and it will auto-fill "gun rights" if you're on the right and "gun control" if you're on the left. Consequently, each side is getting an incomplete picture of every issue and is often unaware that the other group's facts exist. So when you're talking politics with someone who seems blind to the facts, Jones says, you have to remember "They're not in the same movie as you." To communicate better with them, talk less and listen more to figure out what their starting point is.

3. Red states benefit most from IRA incentives. Last year's Inflation Reduction Act was short on sticks and heavy on carrots: subsidies to build and install clean energy infrastructure across the country. And the benefits are accruing overwhelmingly to red states. They have plenty of open land on which to place new solar and wind farms, and their lower taxes and wages make them attractive sites for new battery plants. Jones thinks this is good news, as voters will look more favorably on the clean energy transition if it puts money in their pockets.

4. Politicians respond to RAP. That's Jones's shorthand for "reward and punishment," which he says carry a lot more weight with legislators than logical argument. You're much less likely to convince them by talking about the perils of climate change or the benefits of clean energy than by showing them polling numbers on how popular climate policies are or how many voters are swayed by climate issues. Therefore, Jones suggests, if you have an extra hour to spend preparing for a lobby meeting, spend it learning more about the politics of an issue, rather than the policy. As he points out, "We already know the policy."

5. Van Jones reads graphic novels. As interesting as I found Jones's speech, at once point I found myself distracted by the background on his Zoom screen. I enlarged the picture to get a closer look at his bookshelf and, sure enough, there was a copy of Watchmen and several volumes of The Sandman that I recognized from their distinctive covers. He's not just a policy nerd; he's a nerd nerd!

6. Renewable energy is growing amazingly fast. Following the keynote address, there was a "good news" session with a CCL policy maven who had some mind-blowing stats to share on clean energy. Did you know that nearly half of all solar capacity ever installed in the U.S., since the dawn of time, was added in the last three years? Or that 75% of all electric vehicles ever sold in the country were sold in the past three years? In 2010, less than 1% of all new cars sold in the U.S. were electric; now it's 10%, and if we manage to get permitting reform passed to improve the electrical grid, by 2030 it could be anywhere from 40% to 60%. Likewise, with permitting reform, we could install twice as much new wind and solar capacity in the next three years as we did in the last three—quadrupling the amount we had three years ago.

8. Goofing around is good for your health. The next panel I attended was on "resilient climateering" (a portmanteau word the presenter made from "climate" and "Mouseketeers"). According to her, playfulness has a wide array of mental health benefits. She had sources (which I unfortunately didn't manage to get the links for) to show that it releases endorphins and endogenous (self-made) opioids, which I didn't even know were a thing; stimulates nerve growth in areas of emotion and decision making; and even reduces dementia. I don't know how much of that is true, but it certainly couldn't hoit!

9. Stress can shut you down. One source from the "climateering" presentation that I did find a copy of was this polyvagal chart showing how stress affects the body. Most of the time, when we talk about feeling stressed, we're talking about the effects in the yellow zone: increasing levels of anger and fear, increases in heart rate and blood pressure, dry mouth, heavy breathing. All these are signs of hyperarousal: the familiar fight-or-flight reaction. But when stress is intense or prolonged enough, it can cause just the opposite effect: hypoarousal. At this stage, we stop trying to fight or flee and just give up. This red zone is associated with feelings of despair, numbness, or shame; physically, most of the body's processes slow down as it pumps out extra endorphins to block out pain and, basically, prepare for the end. We all know about the negative effects of spending too much time in the yellow zone, but the red zone is really bad news. Probably best to keep an eye on those yellow signs and avoid getting to that point.

10. Climate deniers can change. Honestly, I didn't feel like I learned that much from the "CCL Group Leaders Tell All" session. It was basically just leaders of several different CCL chapters talking about how they got into the job and how they do it—info I don't expect to need, since I'm not interested in being one. But one of the group leaders had an origin story that interested me. His parents were—to an extent, still are—climate deniers, and he was brought up to think human-made climate change was a big lie. But his parents also taught him to stand up for what he believes in, and in high school he came to realize that he believed in the dangers of climate change. So he became involved with climate and, as a freshman at Michigan, joined the college's CCL chapter, of which he's not a co-leader. And his parents, remarkably, have not only been supportive; they've also been willing to talk with him about the issue. They may not be believers yet, but he thinks they're gradually changing their views, and they even support some of CCL's policies. And the reason for this, he thinks, was their personal connection to him. It's harder to dismiss "the other side" when it includes your kid—or your parent, your sibling, your spouse, or your good friend. When someone you care about is involved with an issue, you may disagree with their views, but you can't just reject them without consideration.

And maybe that's the most important lesson from this year's conference, one that all the speakers echoed in some way or another: build connections first. Build connections with legislators, connections with friends, connections with other climate activists, instead of just leaping into facts and arguments. Because it's much easier to tell your story in a way people will hear if you know who's listening.