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.

Gardeners' Holidays 2025: Summer Harvest

Although the summer solstice is sometimes referred to as Midsummer, this term only makes sense if you think of summer as the six months between the spring and fall equinoxes. The real midpoint of summer falls right around now, at the beginning of August. It's a time when the garden is normally at its peak, cranking out a huge variety of veggies. But sadly, this year's weird weather (including a week of blistering heat followed by pounding rain) doesn't seem to have agreed with our plants. In the past week, we've harvested only:

• 5 cucumbers (one of our old Boston Pickling cukes and four South Winds, our new variety)
• 4 Premio tomatoes, 4 San Marzano tomatoes, and 14 Sun Gold cherry tomatoes
• 7 ounces of bush cherries 
• 1 zucchini 

That's not bad, but it's a lot less than we got last year or the year before. The cucumbers are doing all right, but the tomatoes, peppers, and zucchini have all been a bit sluggish. Worst of all, the plums, which according to their normal two-year cycle should be producing a bumper crop right now, have yielded hardly anything. The Golden Gage plums haven't ripened yet, so there's still a chance of a decent harvest there, but Brian has already picked the Opal tree clean and collected only 9.5 pounds in total—less than one-third of our 2023 harvest and one-fifth of what we got in 2021. And the Mount Royal has done even worse, producing not a single plum that survived to full ripeness. 

More worrying still, the tree itself is looking rather peaky. Its branches, even after two years of diligent pruning, are still heavily infected with black knot, and its leaves have come in small, thin, and riddled with tiny holes. The most likely culprit, apparently, is a fungal infection called shot hole disease. To deal with it, sources recommend removing and destroying every bit of infected foliage, then giving it a dose of fungicide in late fall. Unfortunately, there's pretty much no part of the tree that isn't affected, and the other two trees seem to have it to some extent as well. So to follow this advice properly, we'd have to strip all three trees bare, which is hardly practical. Probably the best we can do is rake up and burn all the leaves in the fall, spray all the trees with our usual copper fungicide, and cross our fingers.

However, there are some plants in our yard that are absolutely loving this weather: the weeds. Between personal travel, business travel, and hazardous weather conditions, Brian and I haven't been able to spend much time in the garden over the past few weeks, and the crabgrass and mugwort took advantage of the lull to invade every planting bed in the yard—flowers, herbs, asparagus—while growing to nearly waist height in the open areas. Brian spent most of yesterday out there with the mower and the string trimmer just beating them back, then we both spent some time on the ground carefully hand-weeding the areas that couldn't be mowed. Brian even put up a new barrier around the flowerbed, using some big pieces of 4-by-four lumber he had sitting out back, to make it harder for the weeds to retake the territory in future. (The phone line insulators that previously marked out the boundaries of the bed went on top.)

So, on the one hand, we don't have much of a harvest to celebrate for this particular Gardeners' Holiday. But we can at least celebrate a temporary victory over the weeds. We can't claim to have defeated them, but at least they're not at risk of eating the house, and that's more than we could say two days ago.