Recipe of the Month: Butternut Squash Mac & Cheese

When Brian asked me to look for new recipes to use up our plentiful supply of butternut squash, I recalled one I'd seen a while ago on It Doesn't Taste Like Chicken: Vegan Butternut Squash Mac & Cheese. We'd previously tried the Vegan Mac & Cheese Powder from the same site, and it hadn't at all successful, but I thought this squash-based "cheese" might be more successful. Most of the ingredients in it—onion, garlic, butternut squash, veggie broth, nutritional yeast—were things we liked and already knew would go well together, so it didn't seem like it could go too wrong.

However, there was one ingredient the recipe called for that we didn't have: white miso paste. We assumed this would be easy to find at our local H-Mart, which carries all kinds of Asian foods at affordable prices, but Brian couldn't find it there—nor at the Ranch 99, another Asian grocery store a little way down the street. Our local SuperFresh had some, but it was $9.99 for a 14-ounce package, which seemed a bit much to spend on an ingredient we'd never used before and might never want to use again. We finally managed to locate a smaller package for $2.99 at Trader Joe's—a 5-ounce resealable tube that we hope will help the stuff keep long enough for us to use it up.

Making the "cheese" sauce was simple enough: just saute the onion and garlic, then add the cubed squash and broth and cook it until tender, and then puree the lot in a blender with the nooch, miso paste, and a little salt. However, the volume the recipe produced seemed like far too much for the three cups of cooked macaroni it was supposed to cover. Fortunately, Brian had decided to cook a whole half-pound of elbows, which came out to about four cups cooked, because even this larger volume of noodles was more or less swimming in the sauce. It was more like a soup than a pasta dish. 

As far as I was concerned, these messed-up proportions more or less ruined the dish. There was nothing really wrong with the flavor of the squash sauce (although, like the other mac & cheese recipe from the same site, it tasted nothing at all like cheese), but there was just too much of it. I tried to eat it carefully so that the noodles were distributed as evenly through the sauce as possible, but I still ended up with a significant volume of cheese-sauce soup in the bottom of my bowl that I had to spoon up by itself. This wasn't at all agreeable and left me with no appetite for the leftovers. 

Fortunately, Brian didn't mind it as much, so he was able to finish it off over the course of the next few days. But neither of us feels much inclination to try it again. In theory, this dish might be okay if we just made a smaller volume of sauce. But why bother making a squash-based pasta dish that's only okay when our Brown Butter Butternut Squash Pasta recipe (and the new vegan variation we've created) is already delicious without any tinkering?

The gift of less stuff

We're in the middle of a busy couple of months. Between events with Citizens' Climate Lobby (CCL), Morris dance performances, and stuff we're doing with family and friends, we don't have a single free weekend until June. And some weekends, including this one, are crammed full of events on both days. Today, I was "tabling" (staffing a table at a street fair) for CCL in the afternoon, and we're going to the opening of our local outdoor movie series tonight; tomorrow, we have a Morris performance down in South Jersey during the day and a CCL get-together in exactly the opposite direction in the evening. With all that going on, this hour before dinner is about the only time I've got to update my blog, so you're only getting a quickie post this week.

One of the things that kept us busy last weekend was Mother's Day. My mom is a difficult person to buy gifts for, because her house is so full already that she doesn't need any more stuff. On the contrary, she's always saying she wants to get rid of the stuff she has. So, last year, I had a brainwave: I offered, as my Mother's Day gift to her, to come to her house and spend the day helping her clean out one room of her choice. I didn't suggest this because she had any heavy boxes to move, nor because I thought I could do a better job than she could deciding what to throw away, what to keep, and where to put it. The main advantage of having me there all day was that it would force her to sit down and do the work of going through things, instead of wanting to do it and never finding the time. And it seemed to work pretty well. She chose her office, and by the end of the day we'd cleared away all the piles of paper in there, removed some old things of mine that had been sitting in that room since it was my bedroom, and put all her computer equipment in places where she could easily find it.

Since that was such a success, I decided to give her the same "gift" this year. This time around, she decided to get a bit more ambitious and tackle the sun porch, which is a repository of all kinds of miscellany: decades-old toys, plants and garden supplies, old sporting equipment, a big bookshelf full of board games and puzzles, and a huge stack of my old notebooks from high school and college. Mom seemed to think we could go through this stuff quickly and maybe have time to move on to another room, but I suspected we wouldn't even make a dent in the contents of the the porch itself. 

It turns out the answer was somewhere in the middle. We didn't clean out the whole porch, but we did get through a lot more of it than I expected. I spent a large portion of the day going through my old notebooks, pulling out the few things I wanted to keep (mostly stories and poems that I didn't have digital copies of), then breaking down the notebooks themselves so the contents could be recycled. I discarded so much paper that I had to split it between two separate bins so they wouldn't be too heavy for my dad to haul to the curb. But I also found time to review the contents of several bins and shelves with my mom. She opted to keep a lot more of the games and puzzles than I would have in her place, but we still set aside quite a lot of them to give away. We also cleared out things from the bins I'd had no idea were in there: a couple of giant "magic bubble wands," several old tennis rackets, a baseball bat and a few balls, multiple Frisbees, an old model airplane kit, and even an old jump rope of mine that I hadn't seen in decades.

All that stuff went downstairs into the storage room, where it will sit until Hopewell holds its next town-wide yard sale. My parents aren't planning to host an official sale, but they'll haul out a folding table, set it up on the lawn, and put out all their unwanted items with a big sign saying that everything (barring the table itself) is free. They hope that the yard-sale shoppers, always eager for a bargain, will snap up most of it, leaving them with only a few items to either Freecycle or discard.

All in all, I'd say this was a pretty ecofrugal present. It was something my mom actually wanted, and it cost nothing and used no natural resources to produce. Better still, it helped get all this unwanted stuff out of the house and, hopefully, into the homes of people who can use it—people who might otherwise have spent their own money, and the planet's resources, on new products. In fact, it worked so well I'm thinking of offering the same gift to my dad for Father's Day next month. (That will result in one more rather full weekend in June, but at least it will be only one weekend out of an otherwise quiet month.)

A Big Fat Cheap Wedding in the 2020s

One of my favorite areas to browse on Reddit is the Weddings Under 10K subreddit. I think planning my own wedding, nearly 21 years ago, was the starting point for my ecofrugal journey, and I'm always happy to help other brides-to-be (and the occasional bridegroom) try to plan weddings in similar style. So when I saw a post there last month asking about wedding venues in New Jersey, I cheerfully chimed in to mention the state park where we got married. Back then, it cost only $50 to reserve the picnic grove we used (though we also spent $130 to cover our guests' parking fees); today, according to the NJ State Park Service, it costs $100 for New Jersey residents or $150 for out-of-state guests. Better still, you can pay an extra $25 to reserve the site "with no parking fee," meaning that the total cost would actually be less than we paid back in 2004.

This got me wondering: If the site was still so cheap, how much would it cost to recreate our entire wedding today? Back in 2004, we spent a total of $2,685 on the ceremony and reception—about 12% of the $22,360 CNN reports as the average wedding cost for that year. Punching that number into an inflation calculator, it looks the cost in today's dollars should be roughly $4,545. Given that the Weddings Under 10K sub itself has expanded its mission (though not its name) to cover weddings costing up to $20,000 on account of inflation, is it really possible to have a wedding like ours—a Quaker-style ceremony and a lunch reception for 80 guests in a beautiful outdoor setting—for that amount? 

Well, being me, I naturally couldn't let that idea go. I dived down a rabbit hole of price-checking, trying to work out the 2025 cost of every item on our 2004 wedding budget. Luckily, I still had the Excel spreadsheet in which I had (again, being me) recorded all our wedding expenses, so I knew exactly what prices to check. And after a day or two of immersing myself in online research, I've come up with a reasonable ballpark estimate—one that you might find surprising.

Here's the item-by-item breakdown. (All prices have been adjusted to account for 7% New Jersey sales tax.)

Invitations

2004 cost: $50. We printed our own invitations using a $20 set of blank cards and envelopes from Staples and spent about $30 on the postage. 

2025 cost: $49. We only used cards and envelopes in 2004 because that's what we could find a kit for; if we were getting married today, we could buy a set of 100 printable postcards for about $15.30, saving both money and paper. This would also allow us to use cheaper postcard stamps, reducing the postage cost to $33.60.

Rings

2004 cost: $95. I bought a secondhand set of his-and-hers wedding bands on eBay for $73 and we spent $22 to have them resized. I didn't have an engagement ring, though I did wear my great-grandmother's ring as my "something old."

2025 cost: $50 to $155. Returning to eBay, I found rings in many materials besides gold. There was one set in tungsten for $50, but they're probably impractical because this hard metal is so difficult to resize. There was also a $31 set in sterling, a material that's quite easy to resize (a job that costs around $20 per ring). It would also be possible to avoid resizing by buying new bands in a non-gold material, such as this basic set in stainless steel ($117) or, my favorite, this very nifty pair in recycled silver ($155).

Clothing

2004 cost: $128. I was the only person who needed a wedding outfit, as we had no wedding party and Brian just wore his one good suit. However, I had to make several attempts at finding a dress and shoes, and a couple of the gambles I made on eBay ($15.50 for a dress, $16.84 for a pair of ballet flats) didn't pay off. I eventually ended up in a Renaissance-style bodice I bought from an eBay shop for $34.24, paired with a skirt my mother-in-law-to-be made for me with $24.95 of fabric from Joann (may she rest in peace). I paired that with a pair of white fabric Mary Janes that cost $26.75 on eBay, plus $5 for a set of insoles to make them more comfortable. My headpiece was a wreath of ivy gathered from my parents' house, put together with $4 worth of baby's breath, $1 worth of floral wire, and some of the dollar-store ribbon.

2025: $63 to $143. Although secondhand clothing would be the most ecofrugal, it's also generally impossible to return if it doesn't fit, as I discovered in 2004. So, instead of combing eBay for outfit ideas, I turned to some of the sellers I discovered in my 2023 post on where to find ecofrugal wedding wear. I found several promising choices, including the $95 Danu Maxi ($110 with shipping) from Holy Clothing; a bodice and chemise from Etsy seller Echoes of Time ($93.50 with shipping); and the $44 Vanilla Cream Summer Dress or $41 Short Renaissance Dress from The Little Bazaar ($6.30 for shipping). Shoes are always a challenge for me, but there's a $25 strappy sandal from Costco that might work, and I could at least try that one on before buying. And if those didn't fit, I could always fall back on $9 foldable ballet flats ($13 with shipping) from Etsy. A wreath like the one I wore in 2004 would cost about $8.30 today: $4 for a bunch of baby's breath from Lidl and $1.25 per spool for floral wire and ribbon at Dollar Tree.

Wedding venue

2004 cost: $180. As I said above, we spent $50 to reserve a picnic grove with a covered pavilion at Washington Crossing State Park and paid $5 per car to cover our guests' parking fees.

2025 cost: It now costs only $125 for NJ residents to reserve a picnic facility at this park "with no parking fee in effect." Bargain!

Flowers

2004 cost: $53. I bought all our wedding flowers at our local farmers' market: 35 pots of double impatiens for only $1 a pot. We repotted some of these small plants into larger pots ($9.38) to flank the entrances of the park pavilion and dressed up all the pots with $9 worth of ribbon from Michael's & Dollar Tree. I used some of that same ribbon for my own bouquet—two blossoms snipped off my parents' hydrangea bushes on the morning of the wedding.

2025 cost: $96. I couldn't count on scoring a $1-a-pot bargain today, but Lowe's has small pots of flowering annuals for only $1.98 each; 35 of those, with tax, would come to $74.53. I could buy the four large planters at Dollar Tree, as well as 12 spools of ribbon to decorate them, for $1.25 a pop, or $21.40 total after tax.

Rehearsal dinner

2004 cost: $388. Since we didn't have an actual rehearsal, we reserved a meeting room at the hotel where most of our out-of-town guests were staying and threw a game party for about 50 people. It cost $150 to rent the room, around $200 for pizzas, and $37.50 for drinks, snacks, and disposable tableware from Dollar Tree.

2025 cost: $758. It's almost impossible to find the actual cost of a meeting room if you're not actually planning to book it, but Peerspace says its prices for conference rooms range from $25 to $185 per hour. So, assuming ours was somewhere in the middle of that price range, it would be around $105 per hour, or $420 for 4 hours. I estimated that we'd need 17 pizzas for 50 guests at around $16 per pie, for a total of $291 after tax. Then I took a little shortcut: Everything that cost a dollar at Dollar Tree in 2004 is now $1.25, so I just added 25% to the amount we spent for supplies, drinks, and snacks and came up with $47 for the lot.

Ceremony

2004 cost: $141. We paid $28 for our marriage license, $4.54 for postage to send it, and $108.89, including shipping, to have a calligrapher create a handmade Quaker wedding certificate for us and our guests to sign. (This was one of our few splurges, but it's now a treasured keepsake, bearing the signatures of all our friends and loved ones, including several who are no longer with us.)

2025: $49 to $100. A New Jersey marriage license still costs only $28, and nowadays you can get it directly from the local registrar, with no need for shipping. As for wedding certificates, there are loads of sellers on Etsy offering customizable certificates that can be delivered in digital form. This means you need to pay for printing, but you don't need to pay for shipping—and you don't risk having your certificate held up for over a week because it was sent to the wrong state, as ours was. Sellers include UnmeasuredEvents (just $13 for an editable template), ImagineDigiCreations (several beautifully illustrated designs for around $25, but most can't be customized), and KatiraDesigns ($60 for a lovely illustrated design with customizable text). If we were marrying today, we could order any of these and use Rutgers printing services to print it as a poster for $7.79. Or we could create our own design from scratch in Canva and have it printed and shipped to us for $28.

Photos

2004 cost: $229. We scored a bargain on our wedding photos because the two friends who introduced us had a side gig doing wedding photography, and their gift to us was to provide all our photos at cost. They charged us $207 for the shoot, including a CD and a full set of prints, and $22 for reprints of our favorite shots. 

2025 cost: $113 to $137. I couldn't figure out what "at cost" would mean today, when photography is fully digital. But I know that before our friends offered to do our photos for cheap, we weren't planning to hire a photographer at all; we were just going to ask all our guests to bring their cameras and send us copies of their favorite candids. Nowadays, that would be even easier, since everyone has a phone to shoot with and there are services like GuestPix ($97 for a one-year subscription) and Flickr Pro ($73 per year) for sharing the photos. We could select the 100 photos we liked the best and print them off at 32 cents each, plus one 8x10 portrait for $4.79; the total cost for prints, after tax, would be about $40.

Music

2004 cost: $0. We had no band and no DJ, just our many talented musician friends jamming.

2025 cost: $0. Homemade music is still free.

Food

2004 cost: $1,136. We found a caterer in Blawenburg that put on a lunch spread with sandwiches, fruit, cheese, punch, water, coffee, tea, and a truly amazing cake for only $11 a head. We also paid $45 per hour for two servers and gave them each a $20 tip.

2025 cost: $1,778. Our former caterer is no longer in business, and other caterers in our area generally don't provide their prices unless you call for a quote. The only place I could find price info was on a couple of supermarket sites. One of them, Wegman's, has a lunch package similar to our reception menu for $12.95 a person, or $1,036 for 80 people. Add on $13 for plates, $69 for utensils and napkins, $32 for water and juice, and $72 for coffee and tea, and 7% for tax, and that brings it up to $1,308. This doesn't include the cake, but the exact one we had is still available at Chez Alice in Princeton. They don't sell full sheets like we had, but they do half sheets for $100. Two of those, with tax, would come to $214, bringing the total to $1,522 for the food. For wait staff, I checked Thumbtack and found hourly rates in the $40-$50 range—amazingly, around the same as what we paid in 2004. So the total cost for service, including tips, would be about the same $256.

Rentals and supplies

2004 cost: $162. Our caterer took care of the rentals for us: $126.14 for 80 folding chairs and 2 tables. We also spent $16 on dollar-store plastic tablecloths and $20 on drop cloths and bricks to cover the sides of pavilion in case of rain.  

2025 cost: $362. Miller's Rentals, the contractor our caterer used in 2004, is still in business. At $3.25 per chair and $15 per table, the total would come to $310.30 with tax, and based on their contract, it looks like delivery is included. Dollar Tree has picnic table covers for $1.25 each, which comes to $21.40 after tax for 16. I don't remember exactly how many drop cloths and bricks we bought in 2004, but I'd guess it was around 6 drop cloths ($11.78 at Home Depot) and 24 bricks (68 cents each at Home Depot). After tax, the total for that lot would come to $30.07.

Attendants'  gifts

2004 cost: $40. Technically, we didn't have any attendants, but we ordered a couple of $20 decorative prints from the calligrapher who did our certificate and gave one to Brian's brother-in-law, who signed the marriage license as the officiant, and one to the friends who shot our photos.

2025 cost: $10 to $60. Just like the wedding certificate, art is readily available and quite cheap in digital form on Etsy. But since digital art is so easy to find these days, it doesn't feel like much of a gift. I think I'd rather go with something else cool and unique from an Etsy seller, like this 3D-printed dragon planter ($10 to $38 depending on size). The seller has lots of other interesting designs as well. Two of them, with tax and shipping, would be around $60.

Favors

2004 cost: $12. We considered skipping the favors entirely, but instead we opted for something cheap and simple: homemade packets of forget-me-not seeds. We spent $2.79 on bulk seeds, about $6.71 on printer paper and ink, and $2 on glue sticks to put them together. 

2025 cost: About $31. I couldn't find forget-me-not seeds in bulk, but I found a four-ounce bag of wildflower seed mix for $18.99. Rutgers print service could run off the envelopes at 25 cents per color sheet, or $6.75 for 27 sheets, and the glue sticks would cost about $3.50.

Incidentals

2004 cost: $60. Most of this is supplies for the scavenger hunt activity we did at our reception. (It was designed to help guests get to know each other by asking them to find other guests with different characteristics.) We spent $6.77 on copying, $5.70 on pens, and $10 on prizes for the winners (a pair of Cheapass Games). We also spent $2 on a dozen or so small bottles of bubbles from Dollar Tree and $36 on various wedding planning books.

2025: $59. Once again, Rutgers print services could provide the necessary printing at 4 cents per black-and-white sheet, or $3.20 total. Two bulk packs of pens at $14.39 would come to $30.80 after tax. Cheapass Games are only available in digital form now, so the prizes could be a couple Pack O Games ($7.99 each, $17.10 with tax for both). Six packs of bubbles from Dollar Tree would cost $8.02, and the books wouldn't be necessary because you can find pretty much anything online nowadays.

TOTAL

Adding this all up, the grand total for a 2025 version of our wedding comes to somewhere around $3,800. That's a little lower than what the inflation calculator predicted, but as it turns out, still around 12% of the 33 grand The Knot reports as the average cost of a wedding in 2025.

In short, even in today's economy, an ecofrugal wedding is still possible. I hope this post is helpful, or at least heartening, to anyone currently planning a wedding, and an interesting exercise for everyone else.

Gardeners' Holidays 2025: Spring Planting

May the Fourth be with you! This month is only a few days old, but it's already shaping up to be a busy one. We've been running around so much the past few days that we barely managed to squeeze in an hour for our big spring planting. In fact, so far this month, we've spent more time working on someone else's garden than our own. To explain why, let me start by giving you a bit of background.

My parents have an arbor in their back yard made of white plastic. It used to have grapevines on it, but they died of black rot, and my folks haven't been able to get any other vines to climb up the smooth plastic poles. Seeking a solution for this problem, I did a bit of research and found a source that suggested wrapping the columns in twine to give the vines something to cling to. Based on this advice, I gave them a two-part Hanukkah present: a spool of garden twine and a packet of scarlet runner beans, plus a promise to help them "install" the new setup in the spring. 

Since we already had to be in the area to dance up the sun with our Morris team on May Day morning, we figured that would be a good day to deliver on the second half of our present. So, after our morning dance performances (and a quick trip to the Whole Earth Center, since we seldom get a chance to visit while it's open), we headed up to my folks' house, bringing our gardening gloves and a bag of leaf compost left over from the load we picked up in March at the Belle Mead Co-Op. 

We started by giving the trellis a big of a scrub to remove the layer of organic matter that had formed on it during its years of disuse. Once they were clean enough, we began winding the posts with twine. I tied a loop around the base of each one, spiraled it all the way up, and tied it to the crossbeam. Lastly, we dug a good-sized hole at the base of each of the posts, filled it with a mixture of soil and compost, and planted the beans. We put four in each hole, leaving just five in the packet. Dad offered us the extras, but we left him three as just-in-case backups and took only two for ourselves. (Brian has a notion to plant them next to a traffic sign on our curb and see if we can get them to grow up the post. This may not be quite legal, but it's easier to get forgiveness than permission.) Then we stayed for lunch and a bit of chat with my folks, ran a few more errands, and headed home.

Although there was still plenty of daylight left at that point, Brian and I were both much too tired after a long day of dancing, gardening, and shopping to go back out and work in our own yard. Friday was too busy, as Brian had work in the morning and a platelet donation in the afternoon, and Saturday was mostly taken up with another dance performance. So it wasn't until this morning that we finally had a chance to tackle our own major spring planting. And with rain in the forecast, we only had a narrow window to do it in. So we ran straight out after breakfast and spent the next hour putting in our tomatoes, peppers, green beans, basil, dill, and cucumbers, finishing up as the first drops of rain were coming down.

This year, we made a couple of changes to our usual planting methods. For one, we gave each tomato plant a dose of crushed eggshell to provide calcium in the hopes of fending off blossom end rot. (This didn't leave us with much to use for the same purpose on our zucchini plants, but we can always eat eggs in the next week to produce a bit more.) Also, Brian decided to put in the Thai basil seedlings he'd started a week early. The planting schedule calls for them to go in one week past the last frost date, which I usually assume will fall around the beginning of May. But on account of global warming, our last frost date is probably at least a week earlier now, and the Thai basil seedlings were so big that Brian didn't want to leave them in their pots any longer.

Lastly, we put in nearly twice as many pepper plants as usual. Brian always starts extra tomato and pepper seedlings, but usually we only plant the healthiest ones and set the rest aside. This year, he decided to double them up in the two-by-two-foot squares we'd set aside for them. I've always set aside four square feet for each pepper plant based on the advice in one of my gardening books, but they've never come close to filling the space, and most sources—including my dad—seem to think one square foot per pepper is plenty. So we've put in all seven of our pepper seedlings (the extra Banana seedling didn't survive), and if they do well, we may squeeze in even more next year. 

So, that's the bulk of our 2025 garden crops in the ground. All we have left to do next weekend is the zucchini and winter squash. And, thanks to the rain, we didn't even have to water anything.