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.