Recipe of the Month: Maple-Roasted Tofu with Butternut Squash

Brian and I have found ourselves with an unusual problem this year: too many butternut squash. Most years, we've had barely enough to make all our favorite squash recipes—souffle, lasagna, pizza, rigatoni, Roasted Stuff—once or twice each. But after last fall's bumper crop of squash (42 pounds in total), we've already made most of these at least once without making that big a dent in the pile. (The one exception is the lasagna, which we hesitate to make with vegan mozzarella for fear it wouldn't be quite the same.) 

So for the first time I can remember, Brian asked me to look for some new squash recipes. I dug through our recipe files and found a few that looked worth trying, but the one that most piqued my interest was the Maple-Roasted Tofu with Butternut Squash and Bacon I'd printed out five years back from the New York Times Cooking section. (This gift link will allow you to view the recipe without a subscription.) We couldn't include the bacon, obviously, but the author had already provided helpful instructions to "make this dish vegan" by skipping the bacon and adding a half-teaspoon of smoked paprika. (Actually, that doesn't make it vegan, since it also calls for a teaspoon of Asian fish sauce. But with so many other strong flavors in the mix—maple, ginger, pepper, onion, sage, coriander, lime—you could easily replace this minor ingredient with an extra teaspoonful of soy sauce or, as one commenter suggested, half soy sauce and half rice vinegar.)

We tried this dish for the first time last Sunday. Since the recipe didn't offer any suggestions for a starch to accompany the tofu, we just served it up with some of Brian's whole-wheat no-knead bread, left over from an earlier meal of roasted vegetable sandwiches. Since the bread worked with one roasted veggie dish, we figured it would pair okay with the other. In any case, it was only there to provide ballast, as the dish certainly didn't need extra flavor. Between the sweetness of the maple syrup, the brightness of the lime juice, the bite of the onion and scallions, the heat of the red pepper flakes, and all those aromatic spices and herbs, the meal had quite a lot going on. It was not unlike our Roasted Stuff recipe (which we usually now make with Brussels sprouts instead of broccoli), but with an extra kick from the additional spices.

The one thing that wasn't ideal about the recipe was that the thick slabs of tofu were kind of awkward to work with. The recipe calls for them to be "tucked" onto the baking sheet with all the diced veggies and brushed with the maple glaze, then flipped halfway through roasting and brushed again. Well, as several of the comments on the recipe point out, trying to flip large slices of tofu while they're sitting in the middle of a pile of diced veggies isn't the easiest thing to do. Brian managed it, but it was a hassle, and the slabs didn't absorb much of the flavor of the glaze. And because the tofu was in such big chunks, it was unclear how to eat it together with the veggies. You could just alternate between bites of each, of course, but it would have been more satisfying to get everything onto the fork at the same time. I tried arranging the tofu slabs on the bread and covering them with the veggies to make a sort of open-faced sandwich, but that proved impossible to eat neatly.

So, next time he makes this dish, Brian plans to dice the tofu and soak it in the glaze for a while before adding it to the roasting pan with the veggies. He hopes this will make the tofu crisper and more flavorful, as well as easier to cook and eat. We might also try to think of something a bit more interesting than bread to accompany it. Quinoa might be good, or maybe kasha. We may have to experiment a little to figure out what works best. But repeating this recipe several times while we fine-tune it will certainly be no hardship.

108 handkerchiefs

My in-laws are moving. Their new, one-level house will be a lot easier for them to get around in, and it's conveniently close to Brian's brother, so he can visit them regularly and give them a hand with household tasks. However, it also has a lot less space, which means a lot of the stuff in their current house needs to go somewhere else. One item his mom unearthed recently was a whole bag full of dainty handkerchiefs that had belonged to his grandmother and great-grandmother. They were all quite old and mostly quite fancy—embroidered, patterned, lace-trimmed, all sorts—but they hadn't been used in decades and she had no idea what to do with them. So, hating to see them go to waste, I offered to take them off her hands.

This weekend, the hankies arrived, care of Brian's sister and her family, who were stopping by for a visit as part of a trip to New York. (Obligatory brag: they're going to see their daughter perform with her college orchestra at Carnegie Hall.) There were a lot more of them than I'd expected, and they'd all acquired a musty smell from their long years in storage. It was clear they'd all need to be washed before I could put them to use. 

Since our washer is a front-loader, which is gentler on clothes than the old agitator models, I wasn't worried about running these old and delicate pieces through it. (We needed to do a load of sheets anyway, so it didn't even use any extra water.) However, I hesitated to entrust them to the tumble dryer, and today's weather was too wet for outdoor drying. We filled every inch of both our indoor drying racks, along with the towel rack in the downstairs bathroom, and still that wasn't enough room for all of them. Brian had to string a couple of clotheslines from the laundry room ceiling to accommodate the rest. 

As we hung them, we counted them out. We initially thought there were 105, but that total got amended to 108 after we discovered that three of them had hitched rides on our bedsheets and gone through the dryer after all. (Fortunately, they appeared to have suffered no damage.) Which led to a new question: where were we going to put them all? Our current collection of roughly a dozen plain cotton handkerchiefs lives in Brian's underwear drawer, but there was never going to be room in there for this lot.

Then a thought occurred to me. Brian and I almost exclusively use handkerchiefs ourselves, but we do have one box of disposable tissues in the house for guests. Since it's seldom used, we store it on top of the fridge under a whimsical trompe-l'oeil cover. What if we replaced the tissues in that box with a stack of these fancy hankies instead? Then, whenever guests asked for a tissue, we could offer them a nice, reusable alternative. We'd just need a separate container, like a basket, to collect the used ones for later laundering. Being able to discard the hanky immediately after use, just like a disposable tissue, might be enough to overcome any tendency to see the reusable nose rags as gross or unsanitary. We'd also need to arrange the handkerchiefs in the box so that every time one was pulled, a new one would pop up in its place, just like with tissues. Or, alternatively, we could use an open-topped container for the clean hankies and the box with the narrow aperture for storing the used ones, as shown in this Instructable.

When I put this idea to Brian, he suggested taking it a step further: offer the hankies to guests and let them keep them if they liked. Of course, doing this would whittle down our collection over time, but considering that we've been working on the same box of disposable tissues for somewhere between two and six years, those 108 handkerchiefs should last a pretty long time. And we might even make a few converts to the culture of reuse along the way.

Ecofrugal exercise

It will probably come as a shock to absolutely no one that I have never had a gym membership. This is partly because I'm cheap and partly because, frankly, I'm not that into exercise. I wouldn't call myself sedentary, but I like to keep my physical activity low-key. I have my dance practice once a week, and I go for long walks—around an hour a day, weather permitting, which I combine with running any errands I need to take care of in town. And until a few years ago, that was it.

As fitness routines go, this was okay for cardio, but pretty short on strength and flexibility. And the older I got, the more I started hearing about how important it is to include some strength training in your routine so your muscles don't shrivel up and die. (The word the articles typically use is "atrophy," but that basically means "shrivel up and die.") And when COVID hit in 2020 and I found myself stuck at home with plenty of extra time on my hands, I decided to start doing the 7-Minute Workout. 

In case you've never heard of this routine, it's just a sequence of a dozen exercises that you can do at home with no equipment except a sturdy chair, such as push-ups, jumping jacks, and squats. You do each exercise for just 30 seconds before moving on to the next one, working out each part of your body in turn. Serious fitness buffs say that to get a real workout, you should go through the whole rotation multiple times, but I made up my mind at the outset that I wasn't going to listen to them. I knew I could convince myself to spend 7 minutes a day sweating and panting, but if I tried to force myself to stick with it for 14 or 21 minutes, I'd start skipping it because I was too busy, too tired, too depressed, et cetera. The way I figured it, a 7-minute workout I'd actually do was better than a 14- or 21-minute workout I'd keep meaning to do.

I must know myself pretty well, because I have indeed stuck with this routine for the past five years, only occasionally skipping a day due to illness, injury, or lack of time. Over the years, I have made a few minor modifications to the routine. I do the exercises in a different order, building up from the ones I find a bit easier to the harder ones. I've also switched out the crunches and the forward plank, which seemed to aggravate my notalgia paresthetica, for reverse planks, which are supposed to help with it. After reading an article that lauded the one-leg rise as one of the most beneficial exercises for older adults, I subbed it in for the wall sit, which I'd always found somewhere between painful and boring. And I've tacked on a series of stretches to the end of the routine—some for my legs, some for my back. So it's now more like 15 minutes in total, but only 7 minutes of the real high-intensity stuff.

Another advantage of this workout is that I can do it at any time of the year, rain or shine. The same doesn't hold true for walking, which is still my main form of exercise. I manage to fit in a walk most days, but sometimes it's just too cold, too hot, too wet, or too windy. I didn't realize just how often I was skipping or curtailing my daily walk until I signed up last fall for CashWalk, a little app that rewards you for your daily steps with points that you can cash in for gift cards. (In order to claim your points, you also have to view ads, because that's how the app gets the money to pay you with, but you don't have to pay attention to them.) There were a surprising number of days I didn't even hit the 6,000-step mark—and while that's partly because the app only counts steps I take while carrying my phone, and partly because the phone is cranky and sometimes fails to record steps properly, I knew I couldn't blame it entirely on that.

So this year, as one of my New Year's resolutions, I vowed that I would get at least a modest 49,000 steps per week, regardless of the weather. The first day it was too cold to walk outside, I tried walking indoors instead, doing laps around our big downstairs room while carrying my phone. This got boring pretty fast, so I started amusing myself by watching YouTube videos on the phone while walking. That made it more fun, but unfortunately, holding the phone steady so I could see the videos interfered with its pedometer function. I'd watch a 5-minute video, all the while walking at a pace of at least 100 steps per minute, and then pull up the app to find that it had recorded less than 100 steps total.

Eventually, it occurred to me that I should just watch the videos on my office computer instead while walking in place in front of it. When I do it this way, either holding the phone in my hand or sticking it in my pocket, I get a pretty accurate count of my steps. I can trot in place at a rate of around 180 steps per minute, so it only takes me about 40 minutes—two longish videos or five to six short ones—to get in my daily steps. 

This "walk and watch" routine is at least as good a workout as walking on a treadmill at a gym, and a lot less hassle. I don't have to go anywhere, I don't have to wait my turn for a machine, and I get to watch whatever I want while I do it. (My favorites include SciShow, Good Mythical Morning, The Icing Artist, various scam-baiters, and clips from Taskmaster.) And best of all, I'm actually earning a few bucks a month for my efforts with my handy app instead of shelling out $10 to $100 per month to a gym. After all, if I'm the one putting in the work, why should I have to pay someone else for it?

Gardeners' Holidays 2025: First Sowing

Most years, all we do in the garden to mark the spring equinox is put our snap peas into the ground. And we did do that yesterday, but only after putting in a bit of work in an area that we don't usually mess with this early in the spring: the asparagus bed.

Over the past several years, our asparagus crop has dropped off to almost nothing. We never got more than a few pounds a year, but for the past few years we've been lucky to manage half a pound. Last year we picked up a few extra asparagus crowns as an impulse buy at Lidl and tucked them into some bare spots in the bed, but as we'd tried that before without much success, I wasn't optimistic. I was convinced that our fifteen-year-old plants had simply come to the end of their productive life, and we'd have to start fresh this year by digging up the whole bed and planting new ones. To that end, we invested $8 in a set of ten "Jersey Knight" asparagus crowns on our last trip to the Co-Op.

But by the time the weather was warm enough to put them in, it had already become apparent that our existing plants were not quite kaput after all. In a handful of spots around the bed, little purple shoots were already poking their heads up—and shoots of reasonable thickness, too, not like the skinny little spears we've been seeing for most of the past few years. Brian wasn't willing to dig up these obviously healthy plants, but he also didn't want to rely on them as our sole source of asparagus.

 

So he came up with a new plan. We dug out a U-shaped trench along the edges of the bed, leaving the healthy plants in the middle. We transferred the topsoil, including the layer of leaf compost we'd added, to a plastic trash barrel, and when we dug deep enough to hit clay, we put that into a separate bucket. He spread out the new asparagus crowns in this trench, covered them up with a layer of the saved topsoil, and watered them thoroughly. We covered the barrel of soil and left it out in the yard so that we can easily get more to cover up the new asparagus shoots as they start to emerge. We'll keep the new plants well watered over the next couple of years and see how many of them survive.

Once that was done, we were able to move into the garden proper to put down the peas. Brian reminded me that in recent years, the majority of the peas we've planted haven't come up, so he suggested planting two seeds for every plant we hoped to get. I agreed to this on the condition that he'd agree to thin the plants if the seeds did all come up, rather than trying to spare them all and ending up with too many vines to fit on the trellis. However, when I tried to space the holes I was poking in the soil closer together, I couldn't manage it; I would have had to collapse the existing holes before I'd gotten any seeds into them. So instead, I kept the holes two inches apart and dropped two peas in each one.

I then covered them up and watered them all well with a can of water I drew off from our freshly uncovered rain barrel. After that, I covered the entire row with the modified Hudson SQ-X Squirrel Excluder in hopes of protecting the peas from squirrels and birds long enough to give them a chance to sprout.

Meanwhile, Brian was busying himself planting another crop that doesn't usually go in this early: the parsley. For the past couple of years, we've been seeding this directly in the garden in early April, as recommended on the packet. But Brian thought it was taking too long to grow productive plants that way, so this year he went back to starting it indoors. And as it turns out, this variety of parsley (Flat Leaf) grows really fast in our seed-starting setup. The seedlings, which weren't due to go out in the garden for another few weeks, were already so big that Brian thought he'd better get them into the ground before they outgrew their tubes. So in they all went—enough to fill four square feet and, with luck, provide heaps of parsley for making falafel this summer.

This spring planting binge yielded one unexpected bonus. Although March is too early to harvest any of our actual garden crops, some of the wild plants in the yard are already coming up, including the big tufts of wild garlic. I pulled up one particularly large clump that was intruding on the slope where our honeyberries are and discovered that, instead of the tiny little bulbils it usually has on its roots, it had actually produced a few decent-sized cloves. So we may get to enjoy a meal with at least a little bit of produce from our yard even earlier in the year than usual.

The things I can change

I've always hated the Serenity Prayer. You know, the one that's printed all over on greeting cards, on T-shirts, in people's email signatures: "God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference." It always seemed like such a ridiculous thing to say when we live in a world full of so many horrible things that I clearly can't change and that, just as clearly, are not acceptable. Just because I can't stop war, tyranny, wildfires, tuberculosis, or pointless acts of cruelty, I'm supposed to accept them all as facts of life, the same way Energy Secretary Chris Wright has apparently accepted climate change as just “a side effect of building the modern world"? I'm supposed to feel serene about them? 

But lately, I've begun to think about the lines in a different way—particularly with regard to climate change. In less than eight weeks, the Trump administration has already:

• pulled the U.S. out of the Paris climate accords;
• ordered all references to climate change wiped from government websites;
• canceled billions of dollars' worth of climate and energy grants, even withholding funding from projects that were already under way;
• blocked approval for any new offshore wind projects and revoked authorization for some that had already been approved;
• frozen funding for the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Program;
• signed executive orders to increase oil and gas drilling and logging in national forests;
• cut thousands of workers from the EPA, NOAA, and the Departments of Energy and the Interior;
• and, most recently, announced plans to repeal the rule that recognizes greenhouse gases are pollutants at all.

Some of these moves are already being challenged in the courts, and many of them will probably be struck down eventually. But I personally can't change them, and sitting around wringing my hands and gnashing my teeth over them won't do any good. I'm not accepting them, not in the sense of seeing them as in any way okay; I'm merely putting them in the category of things that I, right now, cannot do anything about, and setting them aside so I can focus on the things I actually can do.

So, here are three things I'm doing:

1. Pushing for stricter regulation of methane leaks from natural gas pipelines. 

When it comes to methane, there's good news, bad news, and good news. The good news is, we can significantly slow global warming by ending methane leaks from natural gas pipelines. According to one estimate, quickly curbing methane emissions could slow the rate of near-term global warming by 30% and prevent 0.25°C of warming. This can buy us more time to get off fossil fuels and zero out the rest of our carbon emissions. The bad news is, the federal government is moving in exactly the opposite direction. Congress just repealed the Biden-era methane fee that was meant to provide an incentive for gas suppliers to plug leaks, before it even had a chance to go into effect.

But that fee was only ever going to address the biggest leaks, anyway. There are loads of smaller ones that, collectively, have a huge impact. And that's where the other good news comes in: Those small leaks can be tackled at the state level by Public Utilities Commissions (PUCs), which do not answer to the Trump administration. So Climate Changemakers is leading a big push to get people all over the U.S. to email and call their PUCs and ask for stricter regulation on gas leaks. Its website has a series of "playbooks" that can walk you step by step through the process of finding and contacting your PUC, state legislators, and other policy makers. Each playbook only takes around 20 minutes. And because utilities commissioners don't get nearly as much mail as legislators do, they're a lot more likely to pay attention when they suddenly start getting a lot of messages on the same subject. So this is one of those rare actions that's pretty easy and yet has a chance to make a real difference.

2. Donating to effective climate causes.

Some people like to do all their charitable giving once a year, often around the holidays. Others prefer to break it up into a steady stream of regular monthly donations. I like to take a middle ground: I make just one donation a year to every organization on my list, but I spread those donations out over the year so that I only have to make a few each month. And one of the scheduled recipients for March happens to be the Giving Green Fund, which researches and funds climate nonprofits whose strategies are "particularly promising, overlooked and/or underfunded." This allows me to support the most useful and cost-effective climate organizations without having to research them all myself. Also, as Vox notes, funds like Giving Green can time their donations "right when extra funding is most needed"—for instance, when a group is critically short on funds or needs them for a time-sensitive project.

3. Playing board games.

Tomorrow, Brian and I are hosting a board game party for my chapter of Citizens' Climate Lobby. His gift to me last Christmas was a copy of the board game Daybreak, in which each player takes on the role of a major world power and they all work together to find ways to bring down their carbon emissions before the planet tips over the edge into climate disaster. So when Nadine, the head of my chapter, mentioned that she was looking for ideas for the group to have more social get-togethers this year, I suggested a party to play this game together. She has a copy of the game as well, and if we have more people than those two games can handle, we'll open it up to include other cooperative games as well.

Granted, playing games together, even climate-themed games, doesn't directly tackle the problem of climate change. But it will give us a chance to learn more about all the different climate solutions out there, as well as brush up on our teamwork, communication, and problem-solving skills. All of which will help prepare us for the work we're still continuing, even in the face of an administration that openly denies climate change is a problem at all and a Congress that seems, at the moment, ready to cede its own power utterly to that administration. Because even if we know we can't make any major progress for at least two years—even if we know we're going to be losing ground in a lot of ways during that time—what exactly is the alternative?

We don't, in fact, have the wisdom to know whether our efforts will really change anything. But we know they won't if we don't try.

Tending to organic matters

Last spring, while planting seeds in the garden, I discovered that the soil in our raised beds had become quite hard and compacted. This was very frustrating and confusing, because the beds hadn't been walked on for 15 years and had received regular infusions of compost every spring. But after doing a bit of research, I found that the amount we'd been adding—maybe one bucketful per bed—was far less than the one to two inches gardening experts recommend. Since our little home compost bin couldn't produce nearly that amount, and since bagged compost is costly and requires testing to make sure it isn't tainted with herbicides, we decided our best bet was to pick up half a yard of leaf compost every year from the Belle Mead Co-Op. This stuff isn't as rich in nutrients as homemade compost or manure, but it's still useful for improving the soil texture.

Unfortunately, we never got a good opportunity to do this last fall. As this year's spring planting drew nearer, we kept a nervous eye on the calendar, looking for a weekend that was both free and tolerably warm for outdoor work. Yesterday, we finally got our opportunity. I had to make a trip out to Somerville that afternoon for my Citizens' Climate Lobby meeting, so we combined that trip with a jaunt to Hillsborough—not directly on the way, but not that far out of it—to visit the Co-Op. We brought along a carload of trash barrels and empty birdseed bags and loaded them all up as far as we could while still being able to lift them. (In some cases, in fact, we couldn't lift them and ended up having to remove some. We forgot that that leaf compost was much finer than the bulk mulch we usually buy at the Co-Op, and consequently the volumes we're used to weighed a good deal more.) While there, we also dropped $8 on a new set of asparagus crowns, as the plants we have are now over 15 years old and their productivity has dwindled to almost nothing.

After my meeting and a little hanging out in Somerville, we decided it was too late to bother unloading all the compost from the car. We waited until this morning to suit up in our grubby gardening clothes and start hauling those extremely heavy bags and barrels out to the back 40 (square yards). First, though, we had to go through all the beds and remove the detritus from last year's garden—another chore we hadn't gotten around to tackling in the fall. Brian used both tools and bare hands to dig out the roots of last year's bean and basil plants, while I went along the trellises breaking up and extricating the tangled remains of the squash and tomato vines.

Then Brian, who could manhandle the loaded barrels a lot more easily than I could, began dumping heaps of compost out into the beds. I raked each pile out into an even layer covering the whole bed, and we added extra scoops to fill in any thin areas. By the time we were done, we'd used up the contents of both large barrels and two full bags, and all the beds were filled with dark organic matter to the very brim. 

Since we still had lots of compost left, we used up another bag supplementing the soil in our new outdoor planters. These aren't looking too good after this bitterly cold winter; of all the starter plants we put into them at the end of the summer, the only ones that look like they might still be alive are the heucheras (coral bells) and English ivy, and I wouldn't give heavy odds on either of them. But those plants were more or less just place holders anyway, the odds and ends that we were able to pick up at the Co-Op's end-of-season plant sale. Soon enough, we'll have our pick of a fresh, new batch of nursery plants to choose from, and we should be able to find some that have a better chance of lasting out the year. And when we do, they'll have a nice, new layer of fluffy leaf compost to dig into.

By this time, we were pretty tired, but we found the strength to haul one more bag down into the side yard and spread it on the asparagus bed, preparing it to receive its new batch of crowns next weekend. We stowed about half the remaining bags in the shed and shoved the rest under the planters, where they'll be ready to hand for use on any plants in the front yard that need a little topping up. (In theory, there's nothing to stop an enterprising thief from grabbing one and walking away with it, but we think their sheer weight will be enough of a deterrent.) Then we put away our tools and dragged ourselves inside for a couple of well-deserved showers.

After putting in all this work, I'm trying not to get my hopes up too high about the results. I realize that just one load of organic matter probably won't be enough to make a noticeable difference in the quality of our garden soil, and it will take another few years at least before we see real results. But having the compost layer on top of the beds should make at least part of this year's planting earlier. We'll still have to dig down into the hard-packed soil for transplanting, but most seeds should be able to go directly into the soft, fluffy compost. It won't provide much nutrition for them, but their roots won't have to probe too far to get to the richer, denser soil below.

Recipe of the Month: Vegan Pasta Alla Norma

Several years back, I mentioned in a post that Brian and I had become fans of the Netflix series "Queer Eye," in which five queer powerhouses (four gay men and one "nonbinary fairy," as they call themselves) team up to help others spruce themselves up both inside and out. Along with being energetic, funny, and heartwarming to watch, this show has proved to be a good way to discover new dishes. One of the earliest episodes introduced us to mujadara with fried eggplant, which has since become one of our staple recipes. And in a more recent one, we watched chef Antoni teach a deli owner how to prepare his girlfriend's favorite dish, pasta alla Norma: pasta in a light sauce made from tomatoes, eggplant, garlic, and fresh herbs, topped with crumbled ricotta salata cheese. It looked so tasty that right after watching the episode, I went to my computer and hunted for a recipe.

The one I found at Serious Eats looked pretty simple, but it had one problem: the cheese. According to the description, this particular cheese is a pretty major component of the dish's flavor; the notes on the recipe describe it as "funky as all get out with a punchy barnyard flavor, an intense saltiness, and a savory aroma somewhere in between a good aged pecorino and a feta." So simply swapping it out for some of our vegan mozzarella wouldn't work. 

My first idea for a substitute was to crumble up some firm tofu and spike it with nutritional yeast, lemon juice, and salt, as suggested at Voyo Eats. But when it occurred to me to just look up a vegan pasta alla Norma recipe and see what it used, I found that most of them didn't bother with any of that. The one at Holy Cow Vegan, simply left out the cheese altogether, and at Lazy Cat Kitchen replaced it with two tablespoons of toasted pine nuts. These nuts taste nothing like Kenji Lopez-Alt's description of ricotta salata, but they do have a pleasant taste of their own and would add a nice bit of crunch to the texture. 

So Brian made this simple substitution in the Serious Eats recipe, along with a couple of other minor changes. Kenji Lopez-Alt said to use whole peeled tomatoes and crush them by hand into 1/2-inch chunks; however, since the Lazy Cat Kitchen recipe called for four fresh tomatoes, peeled and diced, Brian figured he could get away with subbing in a can of diced tomatoes instead. He increased the amount of eggplant from 3/4 pound to a full pound and reduced the amount of pasta from a whole pound to half a pound, thereby boosting the veggie-to-pasta ratio. He replaced the fresh basil in the recipe, which we didn't have on hand in early March, with a roughly equivalent volume of our frozen basil. And he dialed back the quarter-teaspoon of red pepper flakes in the recipe to half that amount to accommodate my low heat tolerance.

I don't know if these modifications made a big difference in the flavor, but I found the result something short of extraordinary. There was certainly nothing wrong with it—with a sauce that was essentially just eggplant, tomato, garlic, basil, and oregano, it's hard to see how there could have been—but there was nothing all that exciting about it either. It certainly wasn't the best dish we've made with eggplant; it wasn't even the best pasta dish. I prefer the similar one we call pasta melanzane, which includes fresh mozzarella (regular or vegan) in the mix. 

Thus, this new vegan pasta is unlikely to make the cut to be included in our regular rotation. We'll save our eggplants for dishes we truly love, like our favorite eggplant and pepper sandwiches.

Two clothing repair challenges

It turns out my clever plan to reinforce the thighs of my corduroy pants with a honeycomb stitch really wasn't all that clever. It took me at least two hours to stitch both sides of the pants, and within three months, they were falling apart again. Not only had the threadbare area expanded well beyond the borders of the original darn, but the threads in the darned area itself had worn through and broken off in several places. This left nothing to protect the fabric underneath, which had started to develop actual holes. They were still small, but clearly re-darning the area wasn't going to do much to keep them from growing. If I wanted to save the pants, I was going to need a new fix.

Since darning hadn't worked, I decided to move on to an entirely different technique: patching. I didn't have any fabric remotely similar to the original grey corduroy, so I decided to go for a complete contrast instead. Down in my scrap bin, I had a fairly good-sized bolt of colorful striped fabric in good condition that we'd picked up at a yard sale or somewhere. I cut two pieces of this large enough to cover the threadbare areas on both thighs, right over top of the honeycomb stitching. That saved me the bother of picking it all out (and possibly weakening the fabric in the process). 

I left a little extra space around the edges of each patch so that I could hem them. I folded over the raw edge and sewed it down using a back stitch. They came out a little bit lumpy, but more structurally sound than just a chopped-off piece of fabric. 

Then, using my usual whip-stitch technique, I sewed the two patches in place. My first attempt was a little messy, as I didn't pin the fabric down first; I just followed the line of the seam in the pants. That worked fine along that one edge, but it didn't secure the entire patch well enough to keep it smooth and flat, so the fabric underneath ended up a little puckered. I couldn't bring myself to pick out the seams and do it over, but I did make a point of carefully pinning the second patch before stitching it so that it would come out neater.

All told, this repair took me a couple of hours, about the same as the first one. But I'm hoping it will hold up longer and maybe justify the amount of effort I put into it.

Sadly, I don't think there's any equally simple fix for the wardrobe item that most recently fell apart on me: my two-year-old black ankle boots. They already had cracks in the sole that Shoe Goo had proved unable to fix, making them too leaky to wear in the rain. But when I wore them out on a walk today, one corner of the heel simply disintegrated, leading me to suspect that I won't be able to wear them even in dry weather for much longer. 

You can't replace the heels on a cheap pair of boots like this, and at this point, there's so little left of the sole that there wouldn't really be anything to attach it to anyhow. The only question is whether I can come up with some sort of hack that will allow me to get another couple of months of use out of the boots—long enough to get me through the multiple rounds of trial and error it will no doubt take me to find a replacement.

Recipe of the Month: Kung Pao Tofu (with bonus dessert)

I've had other things to post about the past couple of weeks, so this is my first opportunity to tell you about our new Recipe of the Month: Kung Pao Tofu with Roasted Cauliflower. Brian found this recipe on a site called Eating Bird Food while hunting for new ways to use a cheap cauliflower we'd scored toward the end of January. As usual, he made a few small changes to the recipe:

• Scaling it down from four servings to three
• Substituting canola oil for avocado oil
• Leaving out the fresh cilantro, which we didn't have (and I don't care for anyway)
• Replacing the hot chili sauce, which we also didn't have, by adding a dried hot chili to the marinade instead—and then, for fear that change would make it too fiery, dialing back the crushed red pepper to just a pinch for the two-thirds recipe

As it turned out, he needn't have worried about the heat level; the dish was mild enough that even my delicate taste buds could easily have handled more. In fact, I'd say it was bordering on bland, despite the ample amounts of onion, garlic, and ginger in it. It just seemed like it could have used a little bit more of pretty much everything. Texture-wise, the cauliflower worked better than the tofu, which seemed a little too soft and squishy for the dish. It might have worked better with some Soy Curls, which have a firmer texture closer to chicken. But given how unmemorable we both found it, it's probably not worth making a second attempt.

But that wasn't the only new vegan recipe we tried this month. Last night, as a special Valentine's Day treat, he prepared the Salted Dark Chocolate Tart from Gimme Some Oven. This rich little dessert has a gluten-free chocolate-almond meal crust filled with a dairy-free chocolate ganache made with coconut milk. It's supposed to be served with flaked sea salt on top, but Brian decided to make that part optional. Since the recipe says it makes 8 to 12 servings, Brian cut it down to one-quarter of its size for the two of us.

This dish was much more successful than the tofu. The crust was a bit crumbly and didn't come out of the pan neatly, but the ganache was creamy and delicious. Brian had his with a sprinkling of salt and found that enhanced it still more, but I chose to top mine with a generous portion of coconut whipped cream instead. This actually made it a bit less decadent, tempering the richness of the filling by stretching it out over a larger volume. We ate about half of it up while watching the last bits of Campaign Three of Critical Role, leaving us with two more small portions to enjoy tonight.

So, unlike the kung pao tofu, this dessert looks like a keeper. We might fiddle with the recipe a bit to see if we can keep the crust from sticking, but we can be sure the results will be good enough to justify the effort.

A completed birthday project (and one to come)

Last January, I asked Brian for my most ambitious DIY birthday gift ever: cleaning up our unfinished workshop/laundry room/storage room. I wanted to get rid of all the unnecessary stuff, neatly organize the stuff that remained, and most importantly, cover up the bare insulation that currently served as the wall surface. I knew at the time I asked that this was a big project that might take up to half a year to finish. But as it turns out, that was a serious underestimate. 

It took us a couple of months just to get around to the first stage of the project. In March, we went through all the stuff in the room and identified several things we didn't need: a junker bike we'd picked up off the curb, loads of other bike parts, my unused guitar case, a hanging-file box, a big box full of brown glass bottles that we'd picked up for free at a yard sale and used only a few of, a box of wooden blocks, and a packing tape dispenser. We donated all the bike stuff to the New Brunswick Bike Exchange and disposed of the rest without difficulty on Freecycle. 

After that, we couldn't get started on covering the walls until we'd bought the necessary lumber. But since it came in large sheets and our little Honda couldn't possibly hold more than one, this step required renting a truck. We finally got around to doing that in June, when we were able to use the same truck to pick up a new patio set from Craigslist (along with the lumber for Brian's planter project). The year was more than half over before we actually got the boards cut to size and up onto the walls (first flipping around the batts of insulation so that the moisture barrier was properly positioned on the outside, facing toward the heated space). And it took us all the way until my next birthday—and just a little bit longer—to complete the job of tidying and reorganizing the stuff that remained.

But tidy it we did, and I'm ready at last to unveil the final result. First, as a reminder of what we were up against, here's the "before" picture of the room as it looked when I asked for this present a year ago. 

And here's the "after," as seen from roughly the same angle.

The lighting is still terrible for photography, but everything else is so much better. The two remaining bikes are both neatly hung from the ceiling, the boxes are all neatly stowed on the shelves, the work table has been cleared off, and all the tools have been arranged so that they're visible and easy to access.

Here it is from another angle: the before...

...and the after. In this shot, you can see the neat reorganization of the shelves, the workbench (which has a usable surface for the first time in years) and, most of all, the scrap wood pile. It's now all neatly tucked into the back corner, arranged by size, rather than spilling out onto the floor.

 

Let's come in for a couple of close-ups. Here's one of the wall nearest the door, with its nice new wood covering. In addition to hiding away the insulation, the OSB wood panels make a suitable spot for hanging things. We put up a little hook to hold our clothespin bag (my old purse) and hung up the extra sections of our shoe rack to provide convenient, accessible storage for safety gear and extension cords. This also had the advantage of getting them out of their storage box so we could throw it away, freeing up more shelf space.

And here's a look at our reorganized tool storage. We already had that pegboard and most of the hooks; it was just a matter of arranging them optimally to display most of our tools. The few that don't fit are either tucked in a toolbox or neatly laid out on the cabinet below. (We did buy a few extra tool hooks, but they cost less than $15 total.)

The one problem with this new layout is that I can't quite reach the top row of tools on the board. But Brian addressed that with one more DIY piece, completed just today: a little step stool made out of scrap lumber. (He realized after completing it that the supports were placed too far in, so he added markings to indicate where I could step on it without tipping it over. But he'll probably take it apart and reassemble it at some point.)

Here's one last area that I didn't manage to get a good "before" picture of: the floating shelf over the utility sink. Previously, this shelf was a piece of MDF that was seriously bowed under the weight of all the various detergents and cleaning tools piled on it. Now it's a smaller piece of leftover plywood that neatly holds a pared-down assortment of cleaning supplies we'll actually use.

So how much did the project cost in total? Well, it depends on how you count. We spent $244.56 on lumber at Home Depot, but about half of that was for the planter project, so that's only about $125 for the walls. Add the $15 or so we spent on tool-hanging hardware, and that's around $140 worth of supplies. But if you include the $102 we spent on the U-Haul to get all that lumber home, that brings the total cost to around $242—still less than the cost of the closet doors that were my 2016 birthday present, but not by much. And in terms of time and elbow grease, this project was probably at least as demanding.

After this complicated project, I'm hoping my birthday request for this year will be a lot easier to fulfill. Over the years, the grout in our shower has become increasingly stained, despite my best efforts to keep it clean. Also, bits of it have fallen out, leaving deeper gaps between the tiles, which makes the stains even harder to remove. So, for this year, I've asked to redo all the grout, then seal it so that it will stay put and stay clean. We've done this job once before, so we know we can handle it, but last time we neglected the sealing step. I'm hoping that with a good sealant, we can keep the grout clean and intact for at least a few years, and when it starts to wear off, we can just reapply the sealant instead of having to replace all the grout. I've already invested in a bottle of Aqua-X Grout Sealer, which got good reviews from several professional review sites (including this professional tiler). Now all we need is a tub of grout and—always the tricky part—a free weekend to apply it.

Gardeners' Holidays 2025: Seedfest

Our gardening year starts with a Gardeners' Holiday I've referred to by a variety of names: Festival of Seeds, Pruning Day, Seed-Starting Day, Indoor Growing Day, or simply Renewal. The specific focus varies from year to year, but it's basically about getting ready for the gardening season to come. It's too early to harvest, too early to plant, but not too early to plan and prepare. And this year, our preparations are focusing on a crop that's not usually on the schedule: pawpaws.

We first learned about pawpaws from a landscaper we hired in 2012 who recommended them as an easy fruit tree to grow in clay soil. At the time, we were hesitant to follow up on this advice because neither of us had ever tasted pawpaw and we didn't know if we'd like it. That changed in 2018, when Brian learned of a pawpaw patch near his workplace and started scavenging some fallen fruit there. (Since it's on private land, he scrupulously avoids picking fruit off the trees, but he assumes the fallen ones are unwanted and therefore fair game.) He found them appealing enough to save the seeds and start a few seedlings, which he planted in a back corner of the garden the following spring. Six years later, two of those seedlings have grown into small but sturdy saplings that, according to Fruit Tree Hub, could start producing fruit as soon as this year. 

Technically, two pawpaw trees is enough for fruit set, but Brian has decided he would like to have a couple more if possible—even he has to wait another 5 to 7 years for them to grow up. He saved the seeds from some pawpaws he gleaned last September, and last month he started saving soymilk cartons to plant them in. Yesterday he went out and dug a big chunk of still-frozen soil out of the garden, distributed it among nine of the cartons, and dropped one seed in each. He's still got three more cartons that he plans to fill and plant as well.

Now, if you're doing the math, you'll realize that if all of these seeds come up, that will make 12 new pawpaw seedlings. And if you're looking at the picture above of the corner where our two pawpaws are now, it will probably occur to you, as it did to me, that we do not have room for nearly that many new ones. However, there's no guarantee the seeds will sprout, so Brian's plan is to start plenty in hopes of getting two seedlings healthy enough to plant. If he ends up with extras, he'll try giving them away to friends, coworkers, or strangers on the local Buy Nothing group. But he's not counting his pawpaws before they're hatched.

As for the rest of our 2025 garden plans, they're progressing at a more leisurely pace. We've received our seed order from Fedco (all except the new Pirat lettuce, which is on back order), and Brian has started soaking some parsley seeds so he can put them into seed-starting tubes tomorrow. I've already laid out the plan for next year's beds in my garden spreadsheet, which only took about 15 minutes with my simplified rotate-and-flip method. We still need to prune our plum trees, as well as buying and applying a load of leaf compost to amend the compacted soil in the garden beds (and fill up the gap Brian left by digging out so much soil for the pawpaws). But those jobs can wait until the weather warms up, or at least peeks its head above the freezing point. So we've got another week or so of snuggled-in-for-winter mode before it comes time to start diving into the gardening season in earnest.

What's holding back plant-based protein?

I recently discovered The Tyee, an independent Canadian news site with a leftward bent. Flipping through to see what sorts of stories it covered, I happened on one about a "revolutionary" new plant-based protein made from mycelium, the root-like fibers that connect networks of fungi underground. The company profiled in the piece, Maia Farms, claims it can cultivate and harvest its mycelium protein in just seven days, as compared to 18 months to grow a calf to adult size and slaughter it for beef. Its process produces 84 percent lower carbon emissions per "unit of production" than chicken, which in turn has only about 12% of the carbon footprint of beef. The founder of Maia Farms calls his product "arguably the most efficient form of agriculture that will ever exist" and says it could be a "global solution" to the problem of meeting the protein needs of a growing population. All of which, obviously, sounds fantastic. 

But I was not impressed. Why not? Because I've heard this same story so many times before from so many other producers of plant-based protein—all of which have, so far, completely failed to make a significant dent in humanity's meat consumption. 

In 2023, for instance, the Climate Coach column in the Washington Post ran a story (free gift link for non-subscribers here) about Plantible, a California startup producing a protein called rubisco from fast-growing duckweed. The article touted rubisco as a versatile protein that can easily step in to do the job of eggs, meat, or butter. It also noted how easy the duckweed is to grow, producing "36 metric dry tons per hectare — roughly 10 times more than soy." It sounded like it should be utterly revolutionary. Yet in the 19 months since that article came out, I have not seen Plantible's Rubi Protein, nor any product that contains it, in any store. Obviously, it takes time for a new product to scale up, but based on Plantible's website, I can't find any evidence that its product is available anywhere at all.

If these plant-based proteins are so revolutionary, so efficient, so sustainable, then why aren't they everywhere? The Climate Coach article implies that the main barrier to wider adoption is taste: plant-based proteins, it says, "fall short of the savory appeal of eggs, dairy and meat." But I don't buy that argument. Brian, a longtime fan of beef, says burgers and bratwursts from Impossible are, to him, indistinguishable from the real thing. That is, until you look at the price tag. On Target's website, a bag of six Impossible Burgers (in their new red packaging, designed to appeal more to carnivores) costs $13.59, or $9.06 per pound. A 3-pound bag of store-brand beef burgers costs $13.99, or $4.66 per pound—roughly half as much. At those prices, what reason would anyone who isn't a vegetarian already have to switch?

I can only see two ways that plant-based proteins will ever become more popular than the animal products they're meant to replace. Either they'll have to get a lot cheaper, or the animal-based products will have to get a lot more expensive. And there's some chance that economies of scale will, in fact, drive down the cost of plant proteins. A 2021 analysis from the Good Food Institute (GFI) shows that, while plant-based meats and cheeses were about 40 percent more expensive in 2020 than corresponding animal products, plant-based products in "more developed categories," such as plant milk and butter, had a much smaller price premium of 7 to 11 percent. So maybe, once mycelium and rubisco proteins have been around as long as soy milk, they'll be more affordable. But they won't be doing much to halt the growth of food-driven carbon emissions in the meantime.

But there's also the second possibility: a spike, or even a sustained rise, in the price of animal proteins. We're starting to see it right now with eggs, which have jumped in price to an average of $4 per dozen from $2.50 just a year ago. That inflated price is still considerably cheaper than Just Egg, but it's significantly more than scrambled tofu. One large egg weighs about 2 ounces, so a two-egg scramble would be about 4 ounces' worth and cost 67 cents. Last time we bought tofu, we paid only $1.29 per pound, so a scramble made with 4 ounces of tofu would cost only around 32 cents. Even if you throw in a pinch of turmeric for color and a pinch of black salt (kala namak) to give it an eggy flavor, it won't cost more than about 34 cents—roughly half the price of real eggs.

Honestly, I'm thinking the next time we make a recipe that includes scrambled eggs, like our staple weeknight meal of roasted Brussels sprouts with eggs and potatoes, we should just scramble up a corresponding volume of tofu instead. At both half the price and half the carbon footprint, it's an ecofrugal no-brainer. The only downside is that the leftover tofu in the package won't keep as long as eggs in their individual shells, so we'll need to make sure to use the rest of it up within a few days so it won't go to waste. But with the number of recipes we know that use tofu, that shouldn't be difficult. And it will allow us to save our precious eggs for the jobs that only they can do properly, like holding matzo balls and rice casserole together.

Thrift Week 2025, Day 7: Giving

So far this Thrift Week, I've only looked at the money that the wealthy spend on themselves. But they also spend a non-trivial portion of their income on others. According to the latest Consumer Expenditures Survey, Americans earning over $200,000 per year devote more money to "cash contributions" than those with lower incomes—both in absolute dollar terms and as a percentage of their income. But the gap isn't as big as you might expect. The top income group devotes an average of 3.7% of its budget to charitable donations, as compared to 3.1% for Americans overall. Even the poorest Americans, those earning under $15,000 per year, manage to give away 1.5% of that.

If happiness economists are to be believed, wealthy Americans are making a sound investment when they give to charity, and probably missing a trick by not devoting a bigger share of their spending to this purpose. Multiple studies have shown that spending money on others gives people a bigger happiness boost than spending it on themselves. Wealthy people, who presumably have all the necessities of life already, stand to get more satisfaction out of their money by giving it away than by spending it on luxuries. And for those who aren't rich, giving money away is one of the easiest ways to feel like you are. Just the gesture of giving something, even if it's only a dollar to a sidewalk beggar, reminds you that you're better off than a lot of other people in the world. 

Even if your budget is so tight that you can't manage to squeeze that extra dollar out of it, there are other ways to indulge in what Louisa May Alcott called "the luxury of charity." You can: 

• Shop through charity portals that donate a small percentage of your purchase.
• Use a credit card that does the same thing.
• Raise money for a cause on GoFundMe.
• Donate food, clothing, or other household goods.
• Donate your time by volunteering.
• Donate blood (an especially valuable way to give right now if you live in New Jersey or New York, where blood banks are currently experiencing severe shortages).

Thus, I'm closing out this Thrift Week with a Treat for Today that's a treat both for me and for others: a donation to support SciShow, one of my favorite educational channels on YouTube. Hank Green, one of the channel's hosts (and, in my opinion, a total hottie), recently posted on Bluesky that to make accurate content, they rely on donations from one out of every 10,000 people who watches. So, to reward that special one percent of one percent, they are offering a deal: for a donation of $25, you get a postcard autographed by all the show's hosts containing art, facts, and a QR code linking to "one of four exclusive videos from me discussing my favorite frog facts." And for a donation of $60, you get all four postcards with all four frog videos. Such a deal!

Sure, that $60 is significantly more than I've spent on any of my previous birthday treats. But last year I donated $54 and got only one postcard, and all it had on it was a thank-you message with Hank's signature. So four whole postcards complete with frog videos for a mere $60 seems like a good value to me.

Oh, and I made an appointment to give blood next Tuesday. So even when Thrift Week is over, I can continue to treat myself—both with the warm glow of giving and with free cookies.

Thrift Week 2025, Day 6: Fragrance

Back on Day 3, I named Dom Perignon as a classic example of a luxury good, costing about $330 for a 750-mL bottle. But on a milliliter-for-milliliter basis, that stuff doesn't hold a candle to high-end fragrance. A 2023 article in (once again) Town & Country magazine lists a dozen perfumes that cost hundreds or even thousands of dollars per ounce. The most expensive scent on the list, Haute Luxe by Roja Dove, costs $3,500 for a 3.4-ounce (97-mL) bottle. That's $36 per milliliter—82 times as much as France's most iconic bubbly.

According to T&C, these pricey perfumes are "worth every cent." While the editors concede that "your signature scent doesn't need to cost an arm and a leg," they also claim that an "ultra-luxury fragrance" offers benefits a more "attainable" one can't, such as:

• The "finest ingredients in the world" that went into it.
• The skills of the "master perfumer" who created it.
• The design and "natural materials" of the the bottle.
• A "one-of-a-kind scent" that most people won't have.

All that sounds impressive, but really, a fragrance only has to do one thing: make you smell good. If it doesn't do that, then the luxurious ingredients, the fancy bottle, and the efforts of the master perfumer are simply wasted. And, conversely, if you can get a much cheaper scent that smells just as good to you, then the lack of fancy ingredients and "craftsmanship" matters not one whit. The proof of the perfume is in the sniffing.

So, if you want to "find your signature scent" without spending a bundle on it, where do you look? Well, you could disregard T&C's guide in favor of this one from Cosmopolitan, which recommends the best "affordable fragrances that smell luxe." But its definition of "affordable" is up to $70, which is still a bit much to risk on a scent you don't actually know you'll like. So if you want a chance to try before you buy, you could pick up a few test vials from Microperfumes, which sells tiny samples (just 0.75 mL) of different fragrances for as little as $3 apiece. Or, if you already know what fragrance you like but you don't like the price tag, you can search for a knockoff version at a site like Perfume Parlor. With a quick search there, I found a duplicate of that $36-per-milliliter Haute Luxe that costs only 56 cents per milliliter (with a 2-mL test vial available for just $4). 

Or, if you want a truly "one of a kind scent" that no one else is wearing, you can do what I do and make your own. My signature scent is a blend of three essential oils—sandalwood, vanilla, and cinnamon—mixed with a carrier oil in a little roller bottle. Last summer, the tiny bottles of essential oil that I bought back in 2020 finally started to run low, so I restocked with some bigger bottles from an online supplier: 2 ounces of sandalwood for $4, 1 ounce of vanilla for $6, and half an ounce of cinnamon that looked like an unbeatable value at just $1. Unfortunately, when I cracked it open, I realized why it was so cheap: it had a weird, acrid smell that was nothing at all like cinnamon. Thus, for the past few months, I've been making my perfume with just sandalwood and vanilla—all about those base notes, with no middle or top.

So, as my Treat for Today, I ventured out in the brisk January air to go to the local Rite Aid and drop $9 plus tax on a new bottle of cinnamon essential oil. (As Rite Aid is going through a bankruptcy right now, its shelves are looking a little picked over, but fortunately this particular essential oil is still well stocked.) It's a 1-ounce bottle, so at the rate I use it, I'll still have half of it left when my new bottles of vanilla and sandalwood oil run out. (At that point, I'll have to decide if I want to replace the sandalwood oil, which I've recently learned comes from a rare and over-harvested plant, with something more sustainable—like, ironically, a synthetic fragrance oil.)