Gardeners' Holidays 2025: Late Harvest

With the days growing shorter and temperatures dipping ever lower, Brian and I have spent a lot of the past few weeks getting ready for winter. We've had our boiler tuned up, put our warm comforter on the bed, and gotten our flu and COVID jabs. I've stashed away my light cotton socks and filled up my sock drawer with my warmer wool and acrylic ones. My wearable blanket and pressure cooker space heater have already been pressed into service. And, out in the garden, we've harvested all the tender crops and pretty much everything else.

Sadly, this didn't take very long. Our gardening year appears to be ending not with a bang, but with a whimper, particularly in the squash department. After last year's 42-pound bumper crop, we thought we'd hit on a winning strategy by sticking to the Waltham variety, but this year it fell completely flat. Our four vines produced only six squash, including one so small you can't even see it in the photo. In total, they weighed just 14 pounds, one-third of what we got last year. 

This has me questioning whether our all-Waltham approach is so wise after all. Maybe next year, it would be a good idea to hedge our bets by adding a second variety, such as Burpee's Butterbush. Even if it's less productive overall, it could be something to fall back on if the Waltham is a flop again. Or perhaps we should upgrade to Fedco's new "primo strain," Wig Out Waltham, which promises "the best in yield and consistency" for only marginally higher cost.

However, there is one bright spot in our fall harvest. We currently have a pretty good haul of one crop that we didn't actually plant: black walnuts.

Every fall since we moved to Highland Park, I've noticed the ground in certain areas being strewn with these odd sort of greenish balls, roughly the size of an egg. Sometimes, I'd see one split open and what looked like a blackish nut poking out. However, I vaguely assumed they probably weren't edible because no one seemed to be gathering them. It wasn't until this year, when there were so many of the green balls underfoot that I had to kick them off the sidewalk to keep from slipping on them and tumbling arse-over-teakettle, that I bothered to investigate the matter. After a little research, I learned that the green balls are indeed the fruit of the black walnut tree, and while they aren't themselves edible, the nuts are.

Mind you, it takes a bit of work to get at them. First, you have to strip off the husk—carefully, as it can stain almost anything it touches. Then they need to cure in their shells for a couple of weeks to develop their flavor. And once they're ready to eat, you can't just crack them with an ordinary nutcracker; to get through their extremely hard shells, you have to bang them with a hammer, crush them in a vise, or even back over them with your car. But according to aficionados, their strong, earthy, bittersweet flavor is well worth the effort.

So, over the course of several walks, both in our neighborhood and while visiting friends in Virginia, we gathered up a whole bunch of these little walnut balls. I removed the hulls from a few of them by stepping on them and rolling them under my foot, but Brian threw caution to the wind and tore most of them off with his hands, which, just as the article warned, retained greenish-brown smudges for days afterwards. Then he spread them out in small batches in front of the dehumidifier in the laundry room to dry. It took a few weeks, but eventually we ended up with a quart or so of cured nuts in their shells—about 40 in total.

Then came the really hard part, both literally and figuratively: getting those shells open. Brian cracked the first one by putting it in a vise and tightening it until it snapped (the shell, not the vise, although it felt like kind of a close call which would give first). We each sampled a bit of the nutmeat and found it...odd. It was a bit like a regular walnut, but with a sort of funky, musty flavor underneath. Not bad, exactly, but weird. I kept nibbling at mine, trying to figure out what to compare it to, and the best I could come up with was to say it's a bit like a strong cheese but without the saltiness. Brian tried cracking a few more (taking about ten minutes to get through four nuts) and toasting them to see how that affected their flavor. The toasted nuts smelled absolutely lovely, powerfully nutty and rich, and their flavor was a bit darker, but that odd mustiness was still there. 

These nuts were so different from anything else we've tasted that we weren't quite sure what would be the best way to use them. I did a bit of searching and found several recipes at Southern Living, both savory and sweet: an ice cream, a pasta dish, a sweet bread, a pie, and a salad. To get a better idea of how the walnuts might taste in a sweet dish, I tried sprinkling some cinnamon sugar over one and found that the combination worked quite well: the sugar and spice seemed to soften the funkiness of the walnuts, making it just one element in a more complex blend. Then, for a savory counterpart, I tried one with a bit of our homemade spaghetti salt, and the effect was much the same: the mustiness blended into the background instead of dominating the flavor. So I think that will be the key to enjoying these walnuts: blend them with other strong-tasting ingredients so that their musty, earthy quality will become an interesting element of the flavor rather than the primary note. This recipe for maple-Dijon roasted Brussels sprouts with walnuts might be a good place to start.

I've been plagiarized

I just did a search on the term "gazingus pin," trying to see if there was a better way to explain it than the way I did in this 2014 post. One of the first hits I found was from a blog called Simple Vegetarian Concept, and it looked oddly familiar. I didn't quite realize why until I saw the photo accompanying it, which I immediately recognized as one that I had taken. Turns out, this blogger had lifted the entire post—text, photo, and all—from my 2014 blog post.

And it wasn't just this one post. Looking at the "popular posts" listed in the sidebar, I realized that every single one of them was lifted directly from my blog. "Holiday Tour of Highland Park": my blog, December 2012. "A Futile Gesture of Protest": November 2014. "Gardeners' Holidays": February 2013. The entire blog was nothing but posts copied from my blog, verbatim.

Naturally, I'm rather irked that this person is appropriating my words without giving me credit for them, and possibly diverting traffic from my blog in the process. (Given that the plagiarized post showed up in my search results while my original post did not, I rather suspect that's the case.) But even more than that, I'm baffled. The Simple Vegetarian Concept blog doesn't appear to be monetized in any way: there are no ads on it at all. So what is this person getting out of stealing my words? 

Right now, the best idea I can think of is that maybe this person intended to create "a blog about simple vegetarian tips," but after setting it up, they never quite got around to posting anything. Then, perhaps, Blogger warned them that they had to post something or lose the site, so rather than come up with something to say, they stole from me, and they've been doing it ever since. But that doesn't make a whole lot of sense. I mean, why would they care about losing the site if they're not actually using it?

The other thing I can't figure out is what I can possibly do about it. The "Contact" link on the Simple Vegetarian Concept blog just leads to a blank page, so I can't send this so-called blogger a polite request to take down all the posts they blatantly stole from me. I could report the blog to Google for copyright violation, but I'd have to report every single post that was plagiarized separately, providing a direct link to the specific article on Simple Vegetarian Concept and a direct link to the original on Ecofrugal Living. Since this blogger has stolen literally hundreds of posts from me (I stopped counting after page 75), this would take hours if not days (particularly since Google won't let you report more than ten violations in a single report).

For now, I've settled for reporting the gazingus pin article that I found with my search, as well as nine others that were listed in the "Popular posts" sidebar on Simple Vegetarian Concept. If Google responds to that report, I'll see if I can get in touch with anyone there to simplify the process of reporting the entire blog.

Recipes of the Month: Tofu Sushi and Apple Fritter Cups

Brian and I tried two new vegan recipes in October, one sweet and one savory. Technically, the savory one doesn't qualify for the Recipe of the Month slot, since it doesn't have a whole lot of veggies in it. But since I grew up with the rule that you have to finish your dinner before you can have dessert, I'm going to tackle it first and set aside the fruit-forward sweet dish for later.

The savory recipe was a variant on one Brian has been making for years: homemade sushi. Normally, he makes this with the fresh sushi-grade salmon they sell at H-Mart. It's very tasty, but also quite pricey—as much as $30 per pound. He always buys the smallest package he can find, but it's still $10 to $15 worth of fish for a single meal. Of course, that's still much less than the cost of going out for a sushi dinner, so we look on it as an affordable luxury. But it's not one we're willing to indulge in very often.

So, when I decided on a whim to spend $2 on a half-pound package of surimi (faux crabmeat) at Lidl, Brian thought he'd try experimenting with it as a cheaper sushi filling. Not surprisingly, it didn't have the same melt-in-the-mouth texture as the salmon, but bundled up into little rolls, it worked well enough to scratch the sushi itch. That got him wondering: if it was the rice and nori that really mattered, did the filling tucked inside them even have to be fish? Could he make reasonable sushi rolls out of tofu?

To find out, he pressed the tofu and cut it into narrow sticks. He marinated these briefly in a vegan fish sauce he'd found a recipe for at the Minimalist Baker. (He found it pretty weak, not nearly as flavorful as real fish sauce, but he thought it could work for this purpose.) Then he browned the tofu sticks in a pan, added thin slices of cucumber and avocado, and rolled them up in nori with sushi rice and sesame seeds on the outside.  

The resulting "tofushi" was...not bad. I can't say it was as good as the salmon sushi, but it was a damn sight better than the carrot salmon we tried as a vegan alternative in 2020. The tofu, even after its dip in the faux fish sauce, didn't have a lot of flavor, but it had a firm texture with a satisfying chew, and the soy sauce and wasabi supplied the missing taste component. And because the tofu provided protein, it stuck to the ribs much better than the veggie-only carrot rolls. It was satisfying enough that Brian definitely intends to make it again, possibly tweaking the recipe next time to amp up the flavor. (Come to think of it, treating the tofu the same way we did the carrots in the carrot salmon recipe might work well for that purpose.)

The sweet recipe came out of the Happy Healthy Herbivore cookbook we bought at Half Price Books last Christmas. We've already tried a few dishes out of this book and found them rather a mixed bag. The Spicy Orange Broccoli was okay, but not as orangey as we would have liked; the Chickpea Tenders, contrary to their name, were dry, crumbly, and disappointingly bland. We also tried a sweet recipe called Glazed Pumpkin Biscuits, which called for "white whole-wheat flour." After a little research, I found out that this stuff is more commonly called golden wheat flour and managed to track down a bag of it at Shop-Rite for around seven bucks. It was a big investment, but I figured it could be worthwhile if it allowed us to make healthier desserts without compromising on texture. Sadly, the pumpkin biscuits didn't really provide this payoff; while their lightly sweet, spicy flavor was okay, the texture was rather stodgy, not at all what I expect from something described as a biscuit. 

Hoping that this disappointing result was a one-off, I decided to try another dessert recipe from the same book, the Apple Fritter Cups. This one actually called for whole-wheat pastry flour, but Brian decided to try making it with the golden wheat flour, since we'd already sprung for the bag. He skipped the optional sugar glaze and went with just the basic recipe: a simple, lightly sweetened batter (just a quarter-cup of brown sugar for 14 little muffins) topped with diced apples fried with cinnamon and a touch of brown sugar. They smelled good, and Brian thought they tasted pretty good too, but I found them no better than okay. Like the pumpkin muffins, they were dense and doughy, and they didn't have enough sweetness to make up for these defects. The apple part wasn't bad, but it wasn't much better than a plain raw apple, which is healthier and requires no cooking at all.

After this experience, I'm feeling a bit disillusioned both with the golden wheat flour and with this cookbook as a whole. I'm willing to give them both one more try, but I think our next selection from Happy Healthy Herbivore should definitely be a savory dish and not a sweet one, such as the Smoked Cauliflower Soup from the "Soups, Stews & Dal" chapter. And next time we try the golden wheat flour in a dessert recipe, it should probably be a real dessert with actual sugar, like the Cinnamon Whole Wheat Scones from the King Arthur website. Or maybe we should forget about desserts and try them in a bread recipe we'd normally make with white flour, like Brian's Granola Bread.

Yard-sale haul 2025

This weekend was one of the biggest events in the frugal calendar: Highland Park's annual town-wide yard sale. Unfortunately, it happened to overlap with the local No Kings protest, which was scheduled for 11am to 1pm on Saturday. Not wanting to miss either one, we compromised by getting up and out the door by 9:30 on Saturday, planning to shop our way across town and end up at the protest site. Unfortunately, this start time appeared to be a little too bright and early for most of the yard-sale sellers. Many of the sale sites marked on the town's yard-sale map were still just getting set up as we passed by, and some showed no sign of setting up at all. Even when we got to Felton Avenue, usually the epicenter of the town's sale activity, the sales seemed to be thinner on the ground than usual. Maybe it was the chilly weather, or maybe after years of annual sales, all the locals are running out of things they want to get rid of.

Although the field wasn't as crowded as usual, we still managed to score a few bargains. By the time we reached the protest site, we'd dropped a total of one dollar on a handful of items: one small gift, a cheap plastic recorder, and a promising-looking fantasy novel called Bookshops & Bonedust with a cover featuring a strapping female orc. We arrived at the protest only a little after 11am and spent the next hour and a half in a sign-waving, slogan-chanting crowd that stretched for more than two blocks along both sides of Raritan Avenue before heading home for some lunch.

After a bit of refreshment, we were ready to plunge back into the sales again. This time we tackled the north side of town, once again working our way westward. Here, though the sales were still sparse, they tended to be of higher quality. We spotted quite a few interesting items, including lots of well-made tools and, most intriguing of all, an old Atari console complete with several classic games—Space Invaders, Pac-Man, Breakout—for $60. Unfortunately, we didn't happen to need any of these, so by the time we'd made it across town, we'd found only one small item worth buying (which I won't mention by name in case it ends up as a stocking stuffer for anyone who might be reading.) 

Once we hit Second Avenue, we decided to pop back across Raritan Avenue to visit the central sale area behind the Reformed Church, and there, at last, we hit the mother lode. Amid the many tables full of clothing and knickknacks was one set up by a chatty young fellow with a fascinating assortment of items at bargain-basement prices. For a grand total of $10, we picked up some art supplies, a bag of dice, a few miscellaneous doodads that looked suitable for stocking stuffers, and the pièce de resistance: another cheap ukulele, the cousin of the one we found two years ago. This one was an Ohana, bright teal in color (to match the flowing hair of the guy who sold it to us) and it came complete with a soft-sided case, a strap, a basic chord chart, and a new-in-package digital tuner. The church thrift shop was also open, so we popped in and picked up a game off the sale rack (which will likely be featured in this year's Christmas gift exchange). 

In addition to the stuff we actually bought, we managed to pick up quite a few items at no cost from the various free boxes, tarps, and tables people had set out along the streets. Our free finds included a sturdy shop apron for Brian, a couple of pieces of ultra-thin plywood for craft projects, a new cat litter scoop to replace our beat-up old one, a three-foot extension cord, a miniature basket, several blank notepads, and a couple of cute little stuffed critters. All told, our haul from Saturday comprised 23 items and cost a total of $14.

Sunday morning, we set out early again, but our hopes weren't high. Sunday's sales are generally far less busy than Saturday's, so after such a slow Saturday, we figured Sunday's pickings were likely to be slim indeed. But the reality failed to live up to even our low expectations. Taking a different route along the north side, back to the central pavilion, and home along the main drag, we didn't pass more than a dozen sales in total. After a couple of hours on our feet, we came home with only a few small items. Fortunately, the prices were small too. We spent a buck fifty for one game and one little toy from a table staffed by the Moonladies (former proprietors of a local toy and gift shop that closed down during the pandemic), fifty cents on a few magnets for my office magnet board, and fifty cents on two much-needed pairs of black tights for me. We also scored a few more free items: another small game, a few paintbrushes, a pen, and strangest of all, a carton of coconut water from someone who'd left a case of them out on the curb. 

With these few items, our grand total for both days comes to 31 items for $17. It's not a huge haul, but with a few stellar bargains (most notably the ukulele and accessories, which I've learned would cost $120 new), I'd say it was a pretty good return on the six or so hours we spent shopping. Plus, we got plenty of October sunshine, racked up 30,000 steps on my step counter, and gathered a lovely assortment of colorful leaves for my fall basket, all for free.

Protein hacking

About a month ago, I went to the doctor and had some bloodwork done. The thing I was concerned about (blood hemoglobin) was fine, but the my blood sugar level had started creeping up again, from an A1C of 5.7 to 5.9. (Considering what's been happening in our country for the past nine months, I'd guess the culprit is probably stress, but short of avoiding the news completely, there's not much I can do about that.) My doctor's offhand advice was to "cut sugar and carbs," but if he'd taken a look at my medical records, he'd have seen that I tried that a couple of years ago and it was an epic fail. So I concluded it would once again be up to me to find a solution myself.

After hunting around on the Internet and even going so far as to consult ChatGPT (and verify that what it told me was true, since you can't count on that), I decided to start with a couple of small hacks that had some solid data behind them and didn't look too difficult:

1. Walking right after meals, especially high-carb ones, and

2. Adding more protein to meals and snacks.

The first is simple enough. Even if I'm not fully dressed or the weather is uncongenial, I can just step into the office for a quick session of walk and watch. But the second is trickier. Since breakfast is usually the carb-heaviest meal of the day, I've started adding a dozen almonds to accompany my toast and cocoa. That adds about 3 grams of protein to the meal, bringing the total up to about 16 grams. But that's still well short of the 20 to 25 grams ChatGPT said would be ideal. (According to Cleveland Clinic, that's kind of on the high side for someone my size, but it's not enough to do harm.)

So when I spotted a two-pound bag of hemp hearts on a trip to Costco today, something rang a little bell. I checked the nutrition info and found that just two tablespoons of these puppies have a whopping 10 grams of protein, along with significant doses of iron (the thing that sent me to the doctor in the first place) and magnesium. I wasn't sure how I'd use them, but I decided to hazard $13.50 on the purchase and figure it out once I got them home. 

Brian and I started out by opening the bag and nibbling one hemp heart each. They had a strong, nutty, somewhat grassy flavor with a faint bitter undertone—not unpleasant, but definitely not something that would work with every kind of food. Brian also tried sprinkling a few in a little cup of his homemade granola and found they harmonized with it pretty well. He considered substituting them for the flaxseed he normally uses in that recipe, but since they're considerably more expensive ($6.75 per pound as opposed to about two bucks), it didn't seem worth it. He's the main consumer of the granola anyway, so making this swap wouldn't help me much.

I then decided to try something a little more ambitious: homemade hemp milk. I found a simple recipe at The Minimalist Baker that called for a half-cup of hemp hearts blended in a high-speed blender with three to four cups of water and a pinch of salt, plus some optional add-ins for sweetness and flavor. I did some back-of-the-envelope (actually, margin-of-the-crossword-puzzle) calculations and found that if I used four cups of water, this hemp milk would have 10 grams of protein per cup, beating out the 7 grams in my Lidl soy milk. However, it would also be significantly pricier: about $3.60 per half gallon, even with no add-ins, as opposed to the $2.75 we pay at Lidl. However, when I compared it to my current coffee creamer, a half-and-half blend of Trader Joe's coconut creamer and Lidl soymilk, it looked much better. Assuming I used only three cups of water to make a thicker milk, it would cost only $1.20 per pint, as compared to $1.34 for the coconut-soy mixture. And it would have about 3.3 grams of protein in a quarter-cup serving, rather than just under half a gram.

The question, though, was how it would taste. To find out, I mixed up a quarter-sized batch in our little Magic Bullet blender. I used the smaller volume of water and left out the sweetener and vanilla, figuring I could always adjust it from there. I started by pulsing the hemp seeds by themselves to turn them into powder, then added the water and blended it for about a minute as the recipe directed. The mixture was a bit grainy, but I didn't bother straining it; I just dipped a spoon in and gave it a taste. In liquid form, that nutty, grassy flavor was very pronounced, and I had a hard time imagining it as a real substitute for milk. I then tried sweetening it with maple syrup and adding a few drops of vanilla to see if that would soften the taste. The answer: not appreciably. Like the hemp hearts themselves, it wasn't exactly unpleasant, but it was quite strong, and I seriously doubted it would blend at all well with coffee. Brian also tasted it and thought it might be compatible with a cup of cocoa, but given that I found the nutty flavor of Aldi almond milk too strong for that purpose, I couldn't imagine this much stronger-tasting mixture being suitable.

But we're not out of ideas yet. For our next experiment, Brian plans to try adding some hemp hearts to his Basic Brown Bread recipe. He's already modified it somewhat from the original by adding a quarter-cup of flaxseed to give it a little boost of fiber and healthy fats; swapping that out for hemp hearts will up the fiber still more, along with the protein. Spread across two whole loaves, the added protein won't amount to much per slice, but every little bit helps.

I also tried, just for the hell of it, sprinkling a pinch of hemp hearts over the tuna casserole we had for dinner tonight, and I found that their taste blended quite seamlessly with the fairly strong flavors of tuna and mushrooms. Based on that experiment, these hemp hearts may prove more useful as an add-in for savory dishes rather than sweet ones. I'll continue playing around with them over the coming weeks and see what works.

Our first barrel-grown garlic crop

In my September Gardeners' Holiday post, there was one fall crop I didn't mention: our garlic. That's because I didn't actually know at that point how much our harvest would be. As you may recall, last fall we decided to try planting garlic in our old rain barrel, which we'd already filled with soil in an unsuccessful attempt to grow potatoes. All that garlic got harvested in late summer and hung up to cure. It was immediately apparent that we'd gotten more garlic from the barrel than we did last year from the ground, which yielded only six puny heads—barely enough to seed this year's crop. But we didn't know yet how much of that garlic we'd get to eat and how much we'd need to set aside for planting.

This week, my garden calendar reminded me that it was time to plant the garlic, so we took down the dried stalks, trimmed them, and started counting them up. In total, the 20 cloves we'd planted had produced 14 heads, ranging from in size dinky to substantial. The smaller heads had only about four cloves apiece, while the larger ones looked like they'd yield six or seven. We set aside five heads, totaling 24 cloves, for planting, leaving us with nine heads—perhaps 45 cloves—as our harvest. That's obviously not enough to make a serious dent in our garlic consumption for the year, but it's not bad for a crop that required practically no effort to grow.

Before I could break apart those five little heads and plant them, though, I had to prepare the "ground." In the month or so since we'd harvested the previous garlic crop, the soil in the rain barrel had somehow been taken over by mint plants. I have no idea how they got in there, since we certainly never planted them, and the barrel is in the back yard, nowhere near the fully contained herb bed in the front yard that's the only place on our property where mint runs free. But those persistent little plants managed it somehow, so we had to yank them all out before we could plant anything else. Fortunately, the soil in there is quite soft and crumbly, so the plants came out easily.

Once those were gone, it was apparent that the level of the dirt in the barrel was rather low—a good foot or so below the rim. This, too, was puzzling, since we'd filled the barrel pretty well up to the top when planting the potatoes and hadn't removed any. Apparently the soil, loose as it felt, had become compacted over time. To replenish it, Brian helped me haul out a big bucket of topsoil that we'd dug up while planting things around the yard. I shoveled that all into the barrel, then topped it off with the last few handfuls of the compost we'd bought for our flower planters.

After that, all that remained was to break apart the heads and put the cloves in the soil. I had to consult a book to remind me how to do this, since I did the planting during my Yom Kippur Internet fast. I had to do a bit of hunting, since not many of our gardening books mention garlic, but eventually I found one that said the cloves should go in one inch deep in rows two to four inches apart. Since the container is round, I made my "rows" a series of concentric circles, going from 13 cloves in the largest down to just three in the smallest. Then I poked them all in with my thumb to what I estimated was a depth of about an inch and covered them.

Unfortunately, I couldn't do the final step of the process: covering the barrel to protect the garlic from frost. We'd already run through all the free mulch we acquired last summer, and we don't yet enough fall leaves on the ground to use those. But the first frost is at least a couple of weeks away, so we should have time to either acquire some mulch or rake up some leaves before it hits. Then we can just sit back and wait for next year's garlic harvest, while we enjoy this year's for...well, maybe a month or two.

Return of the Master Tinkerer

Way back in 2011, I dubbed Brian the Master Tinkerer after he successfully fixed up three items around our house using mostly materials we already had. In the 14 years since, apparently, his skill has not deserted him. Just in the past month, he's repaired three items that were so badly broken any normal person would just have thrown them away—all using only the materials we had on hand.

Repair #1: Toilet brush handle

The toilet brushes from IKEA seem, in principle, like such a good idea. They come in three pieces: a sturdy metal handle, a separate brush attachment, and a nice-looking metal container to hold it. That way, when the brush part wears out, you can just remove it and swap in a new one, rather than having to replace the whole thing. 

But in practice, this system tends to break down—literally. The first IKEA toilet brush we had, the LILLHOLMEN, became unusable when the store stopped carrying the inserts for it. When we tried replacing ours with the store's newer brush model, it worked for only a few uses before snapping off. Our attempt to repair it with Sugru (a moldable adhesive) didn't hold up, and we ended up springing for one of IKEA's newer toiler brush systems that would work with the new inserts. And that worked okay until a couple of months ago, when the handle of the newer one came off too.

In this case, though, it wasn't the plastic piece that had broken. The problem was with the handle, which was designed to snap into place over the brush insert and hold it in place by friction. See that tiny dimple there in the photo? That's the part that was supposed to hold the brush, and over time it had simply lost its grippiness. We could put a new brush insert into the handle, but it wouldn't stay put. Both the brush and the metal collar that fits over it would simply slip out.

Brian initially tried to solve this problem by wrapping the end of the brush insert in plumber's tape. He hoped that little bit of extra volume would be enough to keep it wedged into place. This sort of worked for one use, after which the brush came loose again. So he tried a new tack: He took the handle down to his workbench, lined up his center punch over the metal dimples, and banged on it with a hammer. This expanded them just enough to keep them snapped in place on the metal collar. The brush assembly now feels slightly wobbly, but it's usable. And if it comes loose again, he can simply apply the same fix at no cost.

Repair #2: Toaster oven door

Our toaster oven is an old trooper. We don't know exactly how old it is because Brian inherited it from his grandfather, and we don't know how long it had belonged to him before his death. But it's clearly old enough to qualify as "vintage." 

Despite its advanced age, this toaster oven never gave us a single problem until this month, when the door hinge stopped working. The door would still open and close, but it wouldn't stay closed. Brian assumed the spring had given out, but to replace it he'd have to take the whole toaster apart, a time-consuming job that would have to wait for a free weekend. So for a couple of weeks, we made our toast by propping the door shut—first with a heavy pot, then with a long-handled wooden spoon jammed through the door handle.

When Brian finally got the sides off the toaster and took a look at it, he was pleased to discover that the spring itself was actually fine. What had broken was a thin piece of bent metal that connected the spring to the door. Unlike the actual spring, this was something he figured he could easily cobble together from scratch. After a little trial and error with different types of wire, he found that a heavy-duty paper clip made the perfect substitute: flexible enough to bend into just the right shape, thin enough to fit through the holes, and strong enough to hold the door open. With this new part in place, the toaster oven is just as good as new—or perhaps I should say just as good as old.

Repair #3: Headphone cable

Brian owns two pairs of over-the-ear headphones, and until this week, neither of them was usable. The culprit in both cases was the same: the wire that connects the earpieces to the main cable, which had lost its outer insulation. Without it, the wire kept kinking and sound wouldn't come through clearly. He'd tried wrapping the wire in electrical tape, but it always slipped off. He wasn't too bothered about losing the use of the cheaper set of headphones, but the other pair was a nice Sennheiser model that he hated to discard over such a trivial problem. 

I did a little research and found that there's an inexpensive fix for this problem called heat-shrink tubing. You slip it over the wire, then heat it up with a lighter, heat gun, or blow dryer, causing the plastic to shrink until it fits snugly in place. Brian thought this sounded like the simplest solution, so he picked up a small package of this stuff for $3 at Lowe's. However, when he attempted to use it, he quickly realized there was a problem: the place where the cord was stripped was above the point where it split into two separate ear wires. He couldn't feed the wire into the tubing without detaching it from the earpiece, and he wasn't confident of his ability to reattach it.

So, instead, he decided to try the electrical wire again, but with a twist: instead of wrapping it around the wire horizontally, he'd do it vertically. He cut a piece long enough to cover the bare section, laid the wire down on top of it, carefully folded it over to enclose the wire, and trimmed off the excess. Then he reinforced the seam with a line of hot glue to keep it from unfolding. This jury-rigged solution isn't exactly pretty, but it seems to be secure. When you plug in the headphones now, you get clear sound in both ears, rather than fuzzy crackling.  

One thing that definitely is secure, though: Brian's Master Tinkerer status. With these three low-cost fixes, he's proven yet again that he is worthy of the title. 

Gardeners' Holidays 2025: Harvest Home

The fall equinox is one of the few dates in the year that has a traditional agricultural holiday associated with it: Harvest Home, marking the end of the grain harvest. I kept the name for my Gardeners' Holiday because normally, this is a time of year when our garden is producing at its peak. In previous years, we've celebrated it with buckets of tomatoes, peppers, and raspberries, eked out by the first few French beans and winter squash and the dregs of the summer's zucchini and basil.

But over the past few years, that pattern has started to break down. More often than not, when the fall equinox rolls around, it seems to coincide with a lull in our harvest. This year is a case in point. Our tomatoes have been reasonably productive this year (4 big Pineapples, 54 Premios, 32 San Marzanos, and 121 Sun Golds to date), and our trusty Carmen pepper plants have yielded 26 juicy peppers. But just at the moment, none of the plants has a single fruit on it ready to harvest. The raspberry canes are still popping out ripe, juicy berries, but it's a trickle, not a flood: maybe a quarter-cup to a half-cup per day. 

We did have our zucchini plant surprise us this week with a massive "stealth zucchini," which cunningly hid itself among the leaves until it had grown to a whopping four pounds—large enough that the Brits would call it a marrow rather than a courgette—and we've still got about half of it left. But it seems to have expended all its resources on that one, because right now there's nothing on the vine larger than a fingerling. So tonight's table will feature only two homegrown items: the thyme in a mushroom tourtiere, and the fresh green beans that will accompany it. 

Fortunately, this pause in production appears to be only temporary. There are plenty of green tomatoes on the vines, ready to be picked as soon as they blush. There are young peppers on the pepper plants that we can expect to grow bigger and riper in the coming weeks. There are only six winter squash on the vines, but two of them are absolute giants, so the crop shouldn't be much below par in terms of poundage. And the winter lettuce I planted last month has already sent up several tiny shoots that are set to turn into mature heads. So while we may not be gleaning much right now, we can look ahead to a good harvest in the season to come.

Recipe of the Month: Spiced Healthy Broccoli Soup

We're in the middle of another busy weekend. Between the library book sale this morning, my Citizen's Climate Lobby meeting and a series of errands this afternoon, and a dance performance tomorrow, this evening is just about the only time I have free to dash off a blog entry. So this post is just going to be a quickie to tell you about our Recipe of the Month for September.

Like so many of these Recipe of the Month selections, this one came about because Brian had a bunch of things he needed to use up—a head of broccoli, a few mushrooms, a tomato—and went hunting for a recipe to do that. The one he found on this occasion was the Spiced Healthy Broccoli Soup from Beauty Bites, which billed itself as "not your regular, average, broccoli soup" (sic). Instead of blending the broccoli with milk or cream and topping it with cheese, it leaves it in chunks and surrounds it with lots of other chunky ingredients (onion, mushroom, chick peas, tomato) in a well-spiced broth loaded with garlic, cumin, mint, paprika, and red pepper.

As usual, Brian made a few minor modifications to this recipe. To accommodate my wussy palate, he cut the red pepper flakes from a full teaspoon to a mere eighth-teaspoon. He didn't have a bell pepper, so he used a couple of our Carmen frying peppers, which he diced finely rather than grating them as the recipe instructed. He didn't have any dried mint, so he substituted roughly triple the amount of fresh mint from our herb bed. And finally, after tasting the finished soup, he decided to throw in a tablespoon of nutritional yeast and some extra salt to punch up the flavor. He served it with extra mint on the side and a batch of half-white, half-whole-wheat biscuits.

The end product didn't look much like a typical broccoli soup. It was visibly chunky and predominantly orange in color, speckled with red from the bell pepper and green from the mint. Yet the odd-sounding combination of ingredients proved surprisingly harmonious. After a few mouthfuls, we both figured out why: it tasted more or less like a bowl of chili. Take Brian's usual vegan chili recipe and swap in chick peas for kidney beans, broccoli for eggplant, and mint for oregano, and you'd end up with a rough approximation of this dish. 

While these aren't major changes, they made this soup feel different enough to be a nice change of pace from our usual chili. And it was certainly handy for its intended purpose, using up the extra veggies left over in the bin. So, all in all, we think it'll make a useful addition to our soup repertoire as the chilly weather sets in.

Why buy when you can rent, borrow, and share?

The sharing economy appears to be having a bit of a moment. Within the past few weeks, my inbox has presented me with two articles on ways to get things without buying them. The first was part of the NEw York Times' 50 States, 50 Fixes series, which highlights small-scale projects to benefit the environment from all across the U.S. The August 20 story focused on the town of Brunswick, Maine, where the second floor of the local library hosts a 1,500-plus-item "library of things" for residents to borrow. The collection includes kitchen and garden tools, toys, musical instruments, sporting goods, electronics, and an actual loom. In the past year, residents borrowed from it more than 3,700 times.

Although Brunswick's library of things is only seven years old, it's been such a hit that the idea has already spread to other towns in Maine: South Portland, Cumberland, Windham. It's easy to see the appeal, because there are loads of things that are really handy to have just once in a while. The most popular items in Brunswick's library of things include a grain mill, a blueberry rake, and a tool for gathering nuts—all things you're only likely to need a couple of times a year. Even more frequently needed tools, like an electric lawn mower, only see an hour or so of use each week, so it makes all kinds of sense to share just one with your neighbors instead of shelling out cash and devoting space in your shed to one of your own. Other items, like the musical instruments, are things you might want to own, but you can't be sure until you've tried them. By checking out a mandolin or a ukulele (both available from the collection) and playing with it for a couple of weeks, you can figure out if it's the instrument for you before investing a minimum of $50 in a new one. 

Ever since I read this article to Brian, we've been speculating about whether it would be feasible to start a library of things here in Highland Park. We personally have several seldom-used tools we'd be happy to contribute to such a collection. The tamping tool we bought for our patio project, the tile cutter we used for our downstairs bathroom renovation, the frozen dessert maker I took a flier on at our neighbor's yard sale: we wouldn't really need to own any of these if we could borrow them whenever we happened to have a use for them. There are all kinds of tools and resources available online for starting a library of things from scratch; the problem is where to put it. Our local library is far to small to host it, and we couldn't think of any other public building that would have the space. And while there are plenty of unused storefronts in town, they'd cost far too much to rent.

Fortunately, this isn't the only way to get stuff without buying it. A second article, from One5C (currently available only to folks who shell out at least $54 a year for membership), lists several other alternatives:

• Social sharing apps. The article recommends two of these, though neither one is for sharing per se. Olio, which started out as a tool for curbing food waste, is similar to Freecycle: you list your unwanted stuff for others to request. Yoodlize is more like Airbnb, but for renting out all the stuff in your house rather than the house itself. (The app supports itself by taking a small cut of all rental fees.)
• Freebie marketplaces. The article names Freecycle, Buy Nothing, Facebook Marketplace, and Nextdoor as places to give away or get secondhand items for free. One site it doesn't mention is Craigslist groups, which often have a "free" section.
• Rental services. The bulk of the article is devoted to these. It recommends FunFlicks and Guitar Center for AV gear; Rent a Bike Now for bicycles; Boatsetter and GetMyBoat for watercraft; Lens Rentals for camera gear and electronics; Rent the Runway, Armoire, Nuuly, Tulerie, and Nova Octo for clothing; CORT and AFR Furniture Rental for furniture; Lindrs, Lowe's, and Home Depot for tools; and REI, Kit Lender, XScape Pod, Lower Gear Outdoors, and Outdoors Geek for camping and outdoor sports equipment.

All this is potentially useful, but not what we were really hoping for: a platform to actually share stuff with our neighbors, not just rent it. Something kind of like the magical Share Spray in this old video from Center for a New American Dream. Is there an app for that?

As far as I can tell, there isn't—but there's about to be. An app called LendLo, supposedly launching "soon," promises to help you borrow and lend stuff within your community. The website says the app will let you list items, browse and request things you need, arrange for pickup, and keep track of who has what. If we got enough people in town signed up on this app, we could create something like a library of things, only the collection would be distributed across all our homes instead of in one central location. So we wouldn't just be sharing the items, we'd also be sharing the storage space for the items.

I've put my name on the mailing list, so I guess that means I'll be one of the first to hear whenever the app becomes available. Then we can download it, check it out, and if it looks useful, start touting it to everyone we know in Highland Park. Who knows—we might just end up building our own library of things the easy way.

Shedding deadweight

Over the past year, Brian has been slowly collecting shipping pallets and odd bits of lumber from various spots around town. He didn't have any particular use in mind for them, but he knew they could come in handy for projects like our DIY compost bin, so whenever he happened to spot a piece in good condition, he'd just grab it and stow it away in our shed. All these new acquisitions sat snuggled up against the top from our old patio table, which Brian had also squirreled away "just in case" after we replaced the patio set last summer. Since the shed isn't very big and already contained quite a lot of stuff, useful and otherwise, it gradually became harder and harder to get around in there.

So, Saturday morning, he decided it was time to haul out all that wood and "do something" with it. He hadn't actually figured out what he wanted to do with it, but he thought he'd retrieve it first and take it from there. But in order to haul out the wood, he had to first haul out all the other stuff in the shed that was blocking his path to it. And once he'd started doing that, he realized that some of the stuff in question was in pretty bad condition and really should be disposed of. So when I came down to join him, about 20 minutes after he'd gone out (saying vaguely that he'd "be outside"), I found the yard looking more or less like this and Brian in the process of breaking apart an old plastic trash barrel—which we'd somehow managed to get stuck inside another trash barrel—with his bare hands.  

Well, once I saw this project in progress, naturally I had to jump in. What started out as just a general notion of dealing with the wood pile turned into a full-scale clear-out and reorganization of the shed contents. Over the next few hours, we dragged out pretty much everything that was sitting on every horizontal surface in that shed—floor, table, shelves—and decided what was worth putting back and where it should go. (Since I'd come late to the party, I didn't manage to get a "before" picture of the shed in its cluttered state, but I took several of the "during" and "after.")

We kept the big pile of old birdseed bags that we use to haul bulk compost and mulch home from the Co-Op, but we discarded most of the smaller cat-food bags that were too small for this purpose. (We brought a few indoors to use as trash bags, and we kept a couple as material for tree bands to foil pests like squirrels and lanternflies.) We sorted out our tangled piles of rope and deer netting, removed the damaged ones, bundled the rest up neatly, and tucked them into one large bin together. We went through our huge collection of plant pots, removing any that were damaged and culling some of the ones in less useful sizes. (The remaining collection is still huge, but at least it's now been neatly sorted into stacks that won't fall over.) We tossed several items that had clearly ceased to be useful, such as torn gardening gloves and the aforementioned big trash barrel, which Brian divided into two large pieces so it could fit inside our even larger trash bin. And we swept off all the exposed surfaces, clearing away years' worth of accumulated dust, straw, and desiccated rat droppings (though, fortunately, no fresh ones).

Among the trash, we also found several items that were possibly useful to someone, just not to us. These included:

• A set of very nice garden tools (a fork and two trowels) that were still sitting unused in their original box. We'd received them as a gift and never used them because we were so used to our old ones. Fortunately, these quickly found a new home on Freecycle. 
• A grill basket too large to fit on our grill and a couple of other grilling tools (a long spatula and fork) that we'd picked up somewhere and never used. These will go on Freecycle as soon as we've cleaned some of the rust off them.
• The pan and funnel we used for changing the oil in our old Honda, which we haven't used in over 14 years. (The oil pan on our "new" car, bought in 2011, proved much harder to access, and we decided it wasn't worth the hassle.) These will also go on Freecycle.
• An old trowel that's not as nice as our three other trowels. This went out by the curb with our discarded plant pots, where it was quickly snapped up.
• An  unidentified electrical device that plugs into a car charger. Brian thought it was meant for defrosting a cold engine block, but when I searched "engine block heater" online I couldn't find anything that looks like it, and I hesitate to list it on Freecycle if I can't even put a name to it.
• An old rolling cart that had been sitting in the corner of the shed ever since we bought the place. When we dragged it out, we discovered that it was apparently meant to hold electrical appliances, because it had a crude power strip built into one side: a couple of small outlets connected to an ancient electrical cord with no grounding plug. That feature probably isn't useful anymore, but the cart itself could be, so we set it out on the curb as well. If that doesn't work, we'll try Freecycle.

Once all the junk was gone and the surfaces were clear, we could find better spots for the things we wanted to keep. Our Hudson SQ-X Squirrel Excluders, two useful but unwieldy chicken-wire constructions, found a new home on a high shelf with a couple of tarps and a spare garden hose. The PVC pipes we use to make cages for our honeyberry bushes got tucked away on a lower shelf behind some smaller pots and tools. A couple of tools that had previously sat on the floor got hung up on the wall, now that we had access to the wall to hang them.

The reorganized shed is much cleaner and airier than the cluttered space we started out with. We didn't actually get rid of that much stuff, but it all fits in much better, giving us much better access to the things we use regularly. And there's enough room left over to put away the charcoal grill and the patio chairs once winter comes.

Ironically, one thing that ended up going back into the shed was that big stack of pallets. We spent so long on the cleanup that, in the end, Brian didn't have the time or the energy to break them down. But at least they're out of the way now, tucked into the corner where that rolling cart used to be, so they're no longer impeding our movement.

Individual action vs. collective action

Yesterday I spent most of the afternoon at an event with my Citizens' Climate Lobby (CCL) chapter. When I got home, I found that in my absence Brian had:

• Washed all the dishes from lunch.
• Made a batch of coffee ice cream base with our new vegan cream.
• Ridden his bike to three different local stores and brought home four pounds of tofu, one pound of broccoli, a bottle of ibuprofen, a bottle of digestive enzymes, and a bottle of gin.
• Uprooted a large tree of heaven sapling behind the shed.
• Weeded the strawberry bed and the asparagus patch, which was so heavily overgrown that it probably contained more weeds than asparagus ferns.

In the same amount of time, I had:

• Driven to a town about half an hour away, filled out about 40 postcards for the Environmental Voter Project (EVP), and driven home. 

But when I commented to him about how much more productive his day had been than mine, his response was along the lines of, "Yeah, but the one thing you did was more important than all the stuff I did."

That brought me up short. Was it? 

Obviously I thought sending the postcards was important, since I was willing to devote a whole afternoon to it. And I had some basis for that belief, since the EVP has plenty of data to show how effective its efforts are in getting environmentalists to the polls. In some elections, the number of additional voters they calculate they've turned out has actually exceeded the winner's margin of victory. If the 300 postcards our chapter mailed out to voters in Virginia convince 300 environmentalists, or even half that number, to vote in the upcoming gubernatorial election, that could potentially tip the election in favor of a pro-environment governor who will enact pro-climate policies in that state. And if that happens, obviously it will make more difference to the planet than all of Brian's smaller eco-friendly actions.

But that seems like an awful lot of ifs. Brian's actions, by contrast, are guaranteed to have an impact. No matter what happens in Virginia this fall, it won't change the fact that Brian has removed one invasive plant from our yard, kept around 10 vehicle-miles off our car, and (literally) churned out one vegan dessert for the two of us. Each of those things may only make a tiny difference to the world as a whole, but they make a big difference to our household—and these effects, big and small, don't depend on anyone or anything else to bring them to fruition.

And that's why I think both kinds of action are important. It's true that nothing I do for the environment as an individual, from darning a sock to replacing our heating system, can possibly have as big an impact as government policies like a carbon fee or subsidies for clean energy. But it's also true that all the effort I've put in over the past 5 years with CCL, and indeed all the effort CCL as a whole has put in over the past 18 years, has so far failed to get a carbon fee enacted. And the clean energy subsidies we did manage to get just a few years ago have now evaporated and certainly won't be restored under this administration, if they're ever restored at all. So right now, if we want to make things better, those tiny, individual-level changes—in what we drive, what we eat, what we buy—may be the best we can do. 

Of course, we still need to keep pushing for the big policy changes. Even if it seems like we're getting nowhere right now, enough drops of water will eventually wear away a stone, and who can say which drop—which letter to a Congress member, which postcard to an environmental voter, which conversation at a street fair—will be the one that finally breaks through? But while we're working toward those few big, distant, difficult goals, it's also good to have a few smaller, closer goals that we can actually achieve, like biking to the store and picking up some groceries for a healthy vegan meal. That way, we at least have some small gain to point to at the end of the day. And those little wins can give us renewed strength for the bigger battles that we're still fighting. 

Recipe of the Month: Coconut Cauliflower Curry (with bonus bread and dessert)

As I've noted before, my husband has a bit of a cauliflower problem. When he spots a cheap cauliflower at the store, he just can't resist buying it, even if he has no idea what he wants to do with it. Last week, he found himself in this position once again, and rather than fall back on an old standby like aloo gobi, he decided to look for something new. On a site called Rebel Recipes, he found a cauliflower and chick pea curry recipe with coconut milk, which he adores, so he decided to give that one a try. He didn't modify it much, aside from scaling dialing back the chili flakes to just a pinch and adding a teaspoon of salt, which the original recipe lacked entirely.

Visually speaking, this curry wasn't very appealing. It was a sort of orange, gooey mass, without much contrast in color or texture. The flavor, on the other hand, had a lot going on—a bit too much for my taste. Against the tang of tomato and the sort of musty coolness of the coconut milk, there was a huge array of spices—onion, garlic, ginger cumin, coriander, turmeric, garam masala, cinnamon, cardamom, fennel, chili—all fighting for attention. I found it a bit overwhelming, and I felt no urge to go back for more when I'd finished my bowlful. Brian, on the other hand, absolutely loved it. He's promised not to "subject me to it too often," and I've agreed to put up with it once in a while for his sake. Perhaps it'll grow on me after a while. And if it doesn't, he can have all the leftovers to himself.

But this was not the only new recipe we tried in August. We're only halfway through the month, and we've already tried two others: a simple bread that wasn't a stunning success, and a dessert that was.

The flatbread recipe was something I discovered while browsing Reddit. On the r/Frugal forum, a Redditor posted with great enthusiasm about a two-ingredient flatbread that he swore was a "gateway drug" for baking. To hear him tell it, this recipe could work for just about anything: pizza crust, burger buns, wraps, even crackers. It sounded interesting, but the original recipe called for Greek yogurt, which wouldn't fit our mostly dairy-free diet. So I hunted around and unearthed a vegan version that also called for only two ingredients: soy milk, which we had, and self-rising flour, which is easy to make by adding three teaspoons of baking powder to two cups of regular flour. (A third ingredient, salt, was listed as optional.) 

I showed the recipe to Brian and he agreed to give it a try with the next night's dinner, falafel. Making the flatbreads was pretty similar to the process he uses for the homemade tortillas he usually serves with this meal: mix the dough, knead it briefly, form balls, roll them out, and pan-fry them. However, since the dough got to rise a bit before cooking, the flatbreads came out larger, puffier, and more substantial than the tortillas. And at first, that seemed to be a good thing. The sturdier flatbreads could hold a larger volume of falafel and veggies without letting any spill out, and they felt more secure in the hand. And I found their chewy texture quite enjoyable.

But after a couple of days, the weakness of this recipe became apparent. The flatbreads that had been so firm and flexible when fresh out of the pan grew drier and more brittle with each day they stayed in the fridge. By the time I tried to use the last one four days later, it was so crumbly that it couldn't wrap around the falafel at all; it simply fell to pieces, leaving me to finish up the meal with a fork. Since the tortillas are about as easy to make and stay good much longer, it makes more sense to stick with those for all our sandwich-wrapping needs.

But on the dessert front, there is good news. For background, a couple of months ago, we discovered a vegan whipping cream at Trader Joe's that worked beautifully for plain whipped cream, in a fruit fool, in ice cream, and even in our anniversary cake. So we were devastated to discover on our next trip to the store that it had been discontinued. (This is an ever-present danger with Trader Joe's products we get too attached to, like their toothpaste and shampoo bar.) I thought maybe we could make our own plant-based cream using the TJ's product as a model, and I came up with what seemed like a promising recipe combining soy milk, coconut oil, and canola oil, with guar gum as an emulsifer. But apparently there was some key element of the alchemy missing, because the stuff stubbornly refused to whip.

But then the story took a happier turn. Last weekend, Brian stopped by Shop-Rite to use up a gift card, and while there, he noticed a plant-based cream from Country Crock in the refrigerated section. Both the package and the ingredient list looked pretty similar to the Trader Joe's product, suggesting that the taste and texture might be also. And when we tried whipping some, we found that was indeed the case. It needed more sugar, since it wasn't as sweet as either the TJ's cream or real cream, but the texture and mouthfeel were just fine.

After that, of course, we had to test it in an ice cream. Brian asked me to pick a flavor, and I suggested a fruity ice cream made from some of our frozen or preserved fruit. That reminded him that last year, he'd tried making a batch of raspberry jam that hadn't set up very well, so it was more of a raspberry sauce. And, recalling a particularly tasty black raspberry chocolate chip ice cream he'd had once at a place in New Hope, he decided to add chocolate to it as well. Solid chocolate chips aren't ideal for this purpose since they don't melt that quickly in the mouth, so he decided to use a technique he'd seen in another recipe: melt the chocolate with a little oil, then drizzle it into the ice cream base as it mixes.

The result: a truly delicious vegan ice cream. The flavor had the perfect balance of sweetness and tartness, and the mouthfeel was just as smooth and creamy as you'd expect from real dairy cream. It's good enough that, unlike the other two vegan recipes we tried in August, I think it's worth sharing in full. (This is a small batch sized for our baby ice cream maker, so adjust the proportions as needed).

Vegan Raspberry Chocolate Chip Ice Cream 

Combine ½ cup Country Crock vegan heavy whipping cream, 3 Tbsp. soy milk, 5 Tbsp. seedless raspberry jam, and ¼ tsp. vanilla. Refrigerate the mixture (if most of the ingredients are already cold, a couple hours should be fine). Place in ice cream maker and run for 10-15 minutes. Melt 1.33 oz. chocolate chips and 1 tsp. canola oil in a double boiler until liquid. When the ice cream is soft-serve consistency, slowly pour in the chocolate either while the maker is still running or while stirring. Run the ice cream maker for a little while longer, then freeze the mixture for a couple hours before eating.

Darn, not so tough

See this picture? What you are looking at is something that, in theory, you should never see: a darned Darn Tough sock. To understand how this came about, I'll have to start at the beginning and explain how Brian and I became aficionados of Darn Tough in the first place, and why we aren't any longer. 

For several years, Brian and I were big fans of Smartwool socks. We both relied on them throughout the winter because they were warm, non-itchy, and machine washable. True, after a couple of winters they would start to grow threadbare and eventually develop holes that required darning, but we assumed the same would be true of any brand.

Then, a few years ago, we learned about Darn Tough. This brand also offers washable, itch-free wool socks, and folks in the Reddit Buy It for Life forum consistently claimed theirs were far superior. Some Redditors said they'd been wearing the same pair of Darn Tough socks for five, six, even ten years with no sign of the thinning and holes that had plagued our Smartwool ones. The company even backs up all its socks with a lifetime guarantee: if they don't live up to your expectations, it will replace them, no questions asked.

So, rather than buying Brian more Smartwool socks for Christmas in 2022, I decided to spend a few extra dollars per pair on Darn Tough socks. And for the first couple of years, they seemed to live up entirely to the hype. They were warm, comfortable, and as far as we could tell, super sturdy. We were both so impressed with them that I invested another $30 in a third pair for him last year and was planning to spring for a couple of pairs for myself as soon as my old socks wore out.

And then, last week, while hanging up a load of laundry, I discovered a tiny hole in the foot of one of Brian's two-and-a-half-year-old Darn Tough socks. If it had been any other sock, I'd just have whipped out the old sewing kit and darned it in a minute or two. But in a sock that I'd paid $13.50 for (half of a $27 pair) less than three years ago, and that I'd been assured would last at least five, it seemed like an insult.

Small as the hole was, it shook my confidence in the brand. I began to wonder if it was worth buying any more of them in future, or even keeping them on my list of holiday gift ideas for Brian. Going back to Reddit to look into the matter, I discovered numerous posts suggesting that Darn Tough's quality had been slipping in recent years. One thread from six months ago argued that, while they're good socks, they're not really $30 socks, and the lifetime warranty is simply a "marketing strategy" to get away with selling them at that price. The author linked to a YouTube video testing Darn Tough's wool hiking socks against several less expensive brands, and the reviewer found that their overall performance was "pretty average." Darn Tough was in the top half of the pack, but four less expensive brands did better—and one of the absolute top performers was Costco's Kirkland Signature, which costs only one-eighth as much. Many Redditors responded by defending the brand, but others agreed that it's overrated, and a few piped up to say they prefer the Costco socks.

This answered one question. If we could get socks of equal or better quality for $3.75 a pair, clearly there was no point in spending $30 on Darn Tough anymore. But it left the question of what to do with the old pair. Should we attempt to take advantage of the unconditional warranty and see how good the brand really was about honoring it? Or should we just darn them and be done with it?

After some consideration, Brian suggested we should give the warranty a go. It would be more work and it would mean being without the socks for a few weeks, but he felt like the company ought to be held to account for its lapse in quality. So I went online and filled out the paperwork to do an exchange. The process was quite easy, but the last step pulled me up short: The site informed me that to get a new pair, we'd have to return the old ones at our own expense. So the "free" replacement wouldn't truly be free; it would cost at least $3 for shipping, almost as much as a whole new pair from Costco. Given that we could simply darn them and carry on using them for the cost of only a few cents' worth of thread, it didn't seem worth it.

So our plan now is to treat these Darn Tough socks the same way as all our other socks. We'll keep them in service until they wear out, darning up the holes as long as it's reasonably possible to do so, and when that stops working, send them off to textile recycling. But we see no reason ever to invest $30 in another pair. Instead, we've shelled out $15 for four pairs of the Kirkland socks. We hope they'll prove at least as durable as their predecessors, but even if they start to develop holes after just one year instead of two and a half, they'll still be a better value.