The planter project, part 2

Ever since Brian started working on his planter project, I've been doing research on my own trying to figure out what sort of plants to put into it. I definitely wanted to use perennials rather than annuals if possible—partly to save money and partly to save ourselves the work of having to replant every year, but mostly because perennials get a head start. When you grow annuals, you can't do your spring planting until the soil is thoroughly thawed and the stores have spring plants available, but perennials can start to poke their heads up out of the soil as soon as they think it's warm enough. 

So I did a search for something like "best perennials year round container garden," read through the first several articles that popped up, and compiled a list of the plants that earned the most recommendations. Top picks included heuchera (coral bells), boxwood, bergenia, sedum, yucca, creeping Jenny, coreopsis, salvia, asters, camellias, Japanese andromeda (Pieris japonica), and some varieties of juniper. Unfortunately, by the time both planters were ready, most of these plants—in fact, most plants of all sorts—were no longer available at local nurseries. We were able to find some coral bells and a few salvias, and we filled up the rest of the planters with filler plants—some English ivy and a couple of begonias—just to provide a bit of color. We figured we'd see which of those survived until spring and fill in around them.

For a while, it looked like the answer to that was going to be "none of them." By this week, it was apparent that the coral bells had survived, but we weren't confident anything else had. So we set out yesterday for the nursery planning to get at least four new plants for each planter—enough to replace all the ones we knew or suspected were dead. This time around, we had much better luck finding what we wanted. We got a couple of dwarf boxwood shrubs, some asters, and one bee balm. (This wasn't on my original list, but we knew it was deer-resistant—a key feature in our heavily deer-ridden landscape—and we already had another one of them in the back yard that Brian could dig up and transfer it to the other planter). We spent about $75 on that lot, and Brian planned to fill in the rest of the space with some salvias he'd been growing from seed.

But when we got the plants home, there turned out to be another wrinkle. On closer examination, it became apparent that the ivy plants at the ends of both planters were still alive, with a few tiny, yellowish leaves sprouting from each plant. In light of this development, we reworked our original layout. We put the boxwood shrubs at the other end of each planter, opposite the end with the ivy, and placed the aster and bee balm plants in between those two evergreens and the heucheras in the middle. Then Brian poked in four of the tiny salvia plants in a square around each central heuchera as filler. Assuming all these survive, they should give us a mixture of spring, summer, and fall blooms, plus some evergreens to provide winter interest.

While we were at the nursery, we also grabbed one extra plant: a small pot of "elfin" creeping thyme. We've made a couple of attempts in the past to use creeping thyme as a ground cover in our hard-to-mow front yard with mixed results. One of the plants didn't survive; the other is still pretty green and healthy, but it hasn't succeeded it keeping down the grass and weeds the way we hoped it would. But the elfin thyme looked extremely dense and thick, and I recalled having seen it described as an excellent choice for ground cover. So we picked up a little pot of it for $4 and planted it in a bare patch in the front yard. (This was the spot where our cherry tree used to be; removing it had left a hollow in the ground that we eventually decided was too hazardous and filled in with dirt, but the grass never covered it properly.) If this spreads out nicely to fill in the bare spot, perhaps we'll invest in some more and deploy them elsewhere around the yard—particularly the space in between the two stakes that are supporting our plum tree, which is even harder to mow than the rest of the yard. I've tried to establish some barren strawberry in there, but they didn't grow well enough to keep down the grass. Perhaps the thyme will do the trick.

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.