Recipe of the Month: Roasted Stuff

As I noted last week, these past couple of weeks have been insanely busy for us. Between medical appointments, home maintenance, and special events like last weekend's game fest and this weekend's trip to the Renaissance Faire, I wasn't sure when we'd manage to squeeze in a Recipe of the Month for October. But as always, Brian came to the rescue. He looked at what we had on hand—some broccoli in the fridge, canned beans in the pantry, some leeks and butternut squash harvested from the garden—and decided to toss it all together and roast it. We'd already tried roasting all these ingredients separately and knew they cooked up well that way, so it was just a question of how well they worked together.

The answer turned out to be "pretty well." The sweet squash, starchy white beans, and crispy, flavorful leeks all complemented each other nicely, and the soy curl "bacon" Brian threw in added a salty note and made the dish more substantial. The only element that wasn't quite on pitch was the broccoli. Its flavor was okay, but its fibrous texture didn't mesh well with the other textures in the dish. We think it would probably work better with a different vegetable, such as Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, or even cabbage. All of these roast well and would probably play nicely with the other ingredients.

All in all, we considered this recipe good enough to write down, but we're treating it as a work in progress. For lack of a better idea, we're calling it:

ROASTED STUFF

Peel and dice 1 lb. butternut squash. Toss it with 1/4 tsp. salt and 2 Tbsp. canola oil. Roast at 400F for 15 minutes.

Chop up 5-6 oz. broccoli (one small head) and one medium leek. Drain and rinse two 15-ounce cans cannellini beans. Add these to the squash, along with 1/4 tsp. salt and 1 Tbsp. canola oil, and toss to combine. Roast another 15 minutes.

Prepare the Soy Curl bacon. In a medium bowl, combine 2 Tbsp. water, 2 Tbsp. soy sauce, 1 tsp. nutritional yeast, 1 tsp. Dijon mustard, 1 tsp. maple syrup, and 1/4 tsp. Liquid Smoke. Microwave the mixture 20 to 30 seconds. Soak 1 to 1.5 oz. Soy Curls in this mixture for 10 to 15 minutes, then toss with 1 tsp. canola oil to coat. Add the curls to the mixture in the roasting pan and roast another 20 minutes.

If you decide to try making this, consider replacing the broccoli with an equivalent amount of cauliflower or one of the other veggies I named. Then let me know how it turns out.

More kicks for free

It's been a very busy weekend for us. Luckily, it wasn't work or other obligations tying up our time, just a bunch of different for-fun activities that all happened to fall on the same couple of days. And, more luckily still, they were all free.

We started off the weekend with the International Games Day event at the Piscataway library, just a few miles up the road. Brian was quite familiar with this library, since it's within easy walking distance from  his office; he has often spent his lunch break strolling there, checking out the graphic novels, and walking back to work. He's also occasionally stopped by on his bike on the way to or from work. But he'd never driven there before, and the trip was complicated by the fact that there was a Rutgers football game scheduled for the same afternoon. Since this invariably snarls up traffic everywhere near the stadium for hours before and after the game, he planned an alternate route that skirted around the edges of campus rather than taking us right past the stadium. Even from this path, a mile or more from the stadium, all the campus parking lots we could see were packed with tailgaters, but luckily they hadn't discovered (or at least hadn't filled up) the library lot.

At the library, there was one large room devoted entirely to board games from around the world, each with one person in charge of teaching the game to newbies. The selections included kiddie games like Chutes and Ladders (India) and Candy Land (USA); board-game classics like Hanabi (France) and Wingspan (USA); and role-playing games like For the Queen (Canada) and Blood on the Clocktower (Australia). There were also separate areas devoted to traditional games, including chess (India), checkers (Iraq), and skittles (Ireland). We spent some time chatting with a pal from a local board-gaming group, who was there to teach Hanabi, and with the designers of a game called Shaolin, which is based entirely on the works of Wu-Tang Clan. Passing on this since we both know next to nothing about the group, Brian elected to play Wingspan instead, while I joined a game of For the Queen led by another board-gaming buddy of ours. I also tried Carom, an Indian game a bit like pool played with flat discs, and skittles, a pub game in which you try to knock down little bowling pins with a spinning wooden top. I never felt like I had much control over it, but when I showed it to Brian after he'd finished his Wingspan game, he recalled having played it years before, most likely at his grandparents' house. Apparently he hadn't lost his touch with it, since he gave it two attempts and scored over 600 both times.

In between games, I checked out the library's maker space, which features a variety of tools such as a 3D printer, thermal transfer machines, and sewing machines. The host there told me they sometimes have scheduled events, but you can also email them to schedule a one-on-one appointment for your own pet project. She offered me a choice of freebies from previous crafting events; I settled on a button reading, "So many books, so little time." I also spent a bit of time browsing the library's mini bookstore, which included a small selection of both kid and adult books for a dollar or less. Luckily, I didn't find any new books to add to our towering to-read piles, but I selected one item to add to our holiday gift exchange and a nice assortment of greeting cards to be deployed on future birthdays, all for just $1.20.

All that occupied a good chunk of the afternoon, so we headed home for an early dinner (taking an even more circuitous route on the way back to avoid the football crowds) before heading back out to check out R.O.T.-Tober Fest, a Halloween event being put on by the RAC-on-tour bookmobile. The owner of the RAC-on-Tour, Alex Dawson, is an English professor at Rutgers who believes in promoting weirdness of all kinds, and this event was no exception. We browsed the flea market and artists' booths, caught the end of a performance by "Bruce Frankensteen" (a local busker with multiple personas), watched a sideshow performer called The Reverend Thom Odd contort himself through a series of tennis rackets, and heard a reading of a spooky story by one of Dawson's students before heading home.

And that was just on Saturday. Today, after we had a late breakfast and Brian made a call to his parents, we headed out a third time to a native plant giveaway run by our local eco-group, Sustainable Highland Park. We've received free native plants from this organization before, including bee balm and hyssop, but this time we were looking specifically for something we could put in our new planters. We filled these in initially with a mixture of plants bought on clearance at the Belle Mead Co-Op: four salvias, two heucheras, two English ivies, and four begonias. Of these, we knew we'd need to replace at least the begonias in the spring, since they're annuals; as for the rest, we figured we'd see how they did and replace them if necessary.

The results were middling. The two salvias in the rear planter have absolutely thrived, but the two in the front planter—with identical soil and water levels—grew weak and spindly. Both heucheras are doing okay, but they look a bit dry and papery. The two ivy plants thrived initially, putting out long tendrils that hung over the backs of the planters, but just this past week something (presumably a deer) came along and ate a bunch of their leaves, making them look a bit lopsided. As for the begonias, they've all been repeatedly munched right down to the dirt line, and one of them has gone entirely missing.

After consulting with the folks from Sustainable Highland Park and debating the merits of the various native plants they had on offer, we settled on a narrowleaf mountainmint (Pycnanthemum tenuifolium). Being part of the mint family, it's a tough little plant that's hard to kill, and its shallow root system makes it suitable for container growing. Brian dug up the stubs of the begonias from the front planter and put the new mountainmint in their place, where it will have a month or so to get settled in before winter arrives. As for the remains of the begonias, he brought them in and put them in pots. If any of them manage to put out new growth, we can give them away or add them to Brian's workplace plant collection. (They shouldn't stay around our house, since they're toxic to cats.)

So that was our busy weekend, sandwiched in the middle of two equally busy weeks. Between volunteer activities, game nights, musical events, and other appointments, we've had something going on almost every day last week, and we'll have the same next week. After that we'll be able to slow down to maybe one thing every other day, and by mid-November we might actually get a few days in a row to catch our breath before plunging headlong into the holiday season.

A stitch in time

When Brian's jeans wear out, it's usually the knees that go first. This is a fairly easy area to repair: I simply sew on one of my pocket patches, salvaged from an older pair of jeans. This simple fix enables him to get another year or two of use out of them before they wear out completely.

With my own pants, however, it's a different story. The area most likely to get holes is the inside of the thighs, a much harder spot to repair. The best method I've come up with is to sew a patch over the inside, but it usually doesn't take too long before I wear through the patch as well. (Just this week, a patch I put in my black jeans last spring blew out completely, forcing me to consign the entire pair to the rag bin.)

Clearly, it would be much better if I could find some way to prevent, rather than repair, holes in this area. So when I noticed that my grey corduroys had developed two bald patches on the inner thighs where all the ribs had worn off, I wondered, could I reinforce the fabric there before holes developed? Would the same honeycomb darning technique I'd used on my old wool socks work over this much larger area?

I didn't know the answer, but I figured I didn't have much to lose by trying. If I did nothing, the pants surely wouldn't last the winter, so even if my attempt was a complete failure, I wouldn't be taking much off their lifetime. I went through my stash of embroidery floss, selected a nice bright turquoise that I thought would contrast well with the grey, and proceeded to stitch. 

Not surprisingly, repairing this large worn area was a much bigger job than darning the socks had been. The painted rock I use as a darning egg was much smaller than the area I needed to patch, so I slipped a hardcover book inside the leg of the pants and tucked the fabric under that. I threaded my needle with the longest length of floss I could manage, but it still was only enough to complete three rows of stitches, covering only a fraction of the bald patch. I had to thread it several more times before I was done, using up nearly an entire skein of floss.

I realized at this point that I'd made a tactical error in choosing the turquoise floss. I knew the assortment I'd bought at Michael's contained two skeins of every color, but apparently this was an extra I'd picked up somewhere else, and I didn't have an exact match for it. To do the other side, I had to choose another skein of a slightly different blue. I'll just have to hope that no one ever sees both repaired sides at once and notices the mismatch.

All told, the whole process took a couple of hours, spread out over two or three days. To most people, that may seem like an awfully big investment of time to save a pair of pants that cost me less than $10 at a thrift shop. But considering how hard it is for me to find new pants that fit, if this prolongs the cords' lifespan by at least a year, it will save me many frustrating hours of shopping to replace them. And if it doesn't, I'll know not to bother with it next time.

If at first you don't succeed, try something else

In the words of my favorite wizard, Harry Dresden, if you have one problem, all you have is a problem. But if you have two problems, you may also have an opportunity, because one problem can sometimes provide a solution to the other. A case in point: two failed crops in our garden.

I've already told you about how our attempt to grow potatoes in our old rain barrel was an abject failure, producing only a literal handful of potatoes. But that wasn't the only crop that gave us a very disappointing harvest this year. Of the 30 cloves of garlic we put in the ground last fall, only six grew into garlic heads—and pretty small ones at that, with only four to five good-sized cloves each. As with the potatoes, the total weight of the harvest was probably less than the amount we planted.

Frustrated by this failure, I checked out an article in Mother Earth News on garlic growing, looking for some pointers that might improve our results next year. And the one piece of advice that jumped out at me was, "Plant in crumbly, light soil that drains well and that is high in organic matter." Our rich, heavy clay soil does not, by any stretch of the imagination, fit that definition—which might explain why even in a good year, our garlic harvest comes to only around 25 small heads. 

However. we did happen to have some soil sitting around that fit the description perfectly: the mix of bagged topsoil and aged manure in which we'd attempted to grow the potatoes. Brian had originally intended to dump this out into the garden beds to add more organic matter to the soil, which has grown compacted over the years. But after reading the Mother Earth News article, we thought, well, why not try repurposing the potato barrel as a garlic barrel? Growing garlic in a container would also prevent groundhogs romping through the crop and crushing all the scapes, so it could remedy two problems at once.

The Mother Earth News article recommended planting garlic cloves 2 to 4 inches deep, 4 to 6 inches apart, in rows 12 inches apart. Trying to figure out how to adapt this spacing to a round barrel about two feet in diameter, I looked up "grow garlic in containers" and found an article in The Spruce that said putting them "at least 3 inches apart" would be sufficient. Working my way around the edge of the barrel and spiraling into the middle, I was able to fit in a total of 20 cloves. Since the soil was so light, I didn't bother digging holes for them; I just pushed them in with my fingers until they were about 2 inches deep.

The Mother Earth News article recommended mulching the garlic with "several inches of leaves or straw" to protect it from the winter cold. We don't have enough leaves in our yard yet to cover it that deep, but I added one layer, and I'll continue adding more as fall progresses. I left the lid off the barrel to let rain in; if we don't get much rain, I'll water by hand to "keep the soil moist but not soggy," as The Spruce recommends. In the spring, we'll pull the leaves off and give the barrel an extra top-dressing of compost. And in the fall, we'll see if this container-grown garlic yields a better crop than what we planted in the ground this year. One thing we know for sure: it can't be much worse.