Recipe of the Month: (Not Really) Sticky Eggplant and Tofu

Quite often, when I choose a new Recipe of the Month, Brian has to modify it a bit. He might replace an ingredient we don't have available, adjust the level of spice, or swap out animal products for plant-based alternatives. But this month, I found a dish that didn't look like it would require any alterations at all. The recipe, called Sticky Eggplant and Tofu, came from a site called Plant Based on a Budget, so it was fully vegan, and all the ingredients it called for were already in our fridge. And based on a quick scan of the ingredient list, it looked like it would taste great with no modifications.

But as soon as Brian started the actual cooking, it became clear there were some problems with the recipe. First, it called for him to cut the eggplant and tofu into 1-inch cubes, which he knew from prior experience would take far too long to cook. So he went with half-inch cubes (one-eighth of the size by volume). But once he'd prepared the cubes, it wasn't clear how long they were actually supposed to cook. The recipe, rather confusingly, said to spread the cubed eggplant on a baking sheet, then toss the cubed tofu in oil and coat it with cornstarch, and then "bake for 10 minutes." Bake what? The tofu or the eggplant? Based on the next instruction, "remove the eggplant to a plate...[and] continue baking the tofu," Brian concluded that it must mean both together, so he threw everything onto the sheet and popped it in the oven. And when the requisite 10 minutes were up, the eggplant was nowhere near done. Parts of it had started to soften a bit, but most of it was basically raw.

To correct this problem, he added another step to the recipe. After assembling the sauce ingredients in the pan, rather than just "stir until it begins to thicken" (which he knew wouldn't actually happen, since it didn't contain any sort of thickener), he added the eggplant to the pan and let it simmer, covered, in the sauce for 10 minutes. Then he added the tofu and proceeded with the recipe as written. Unfortunately, this meant that we ended up with no sauce at all, since the eggplant simply soaked up all the juice like a sponge. 

The completed dish was nothing at all like the promised "crispy tofu and melt-in-the-mouth eggplant in a super flavorful, sweet, tangy, savory soy garlic sauce." The tofu, after 20 minutes of baking, was not at all crispy; the eggplant, despite its extra 10 minutes of simmering time, did not come close to melting in the mouth; and there was no sauce whatsoever. Instead, it had squishy tofu and spongy eggplant chunks so saturated with vinegar, lime juice, and soy sauce that they were mouth-puckeringly tart. It was edible, but it was so completely different from the picture on the website that I find it hard to believe the chef actually followed her own recipe.

So, clearly, this recipe was not a success. And yet, looking again at that ingredient list, it still seems like it should be possible to make a good-tasting dish from those components. If Brian had started with those ingredients and no instructions, he'd have roasted the eggplant until it was truly tender, pan-fried the tofu until it was truly crispy, added a thickener to the sauce, and ended up with something much closer to that appetizing description and photo. But the fact is, this combination of flavors is so basic that he probably wouldn't have needed the recipe in the first place to come up with it. If he ever gets a hankering for something similar, he can probably create it from scratch, with no need to refer to this recipe at all.

In short, this was a total flop, and we have no reason ever to make it again. And in future, if I'm ever tempted to try another recipe from this website, I'll make sure both Brian and I take a good hard look at the instructions first.

Signing up is hard to do

Thirteen years ago, when we paid off our mortgage, I was surprised to find at how hard it was to make that final payment—not financially or emotionally, but technically. We had the money, and we were ready and eager to hand it over, but getting the bank to accept that final payment was way more complicated than I expected. It took a whole series of transactions online, by phone, and in person at our local branch to get the job done.

Right now, we're having similar problems with another big life transition: Brian's retirement. Specifically, the process of switching over to a new health care plan.

The problems started in January, when Brian chose February 11 as his official retirement date. I got straight to work trying to sign us up for new coverage on Get Covered NJ, only to run into a snag: because it was January, the state was still in the middle of "open enrollment." If I signed up for a new plan during that period, it would automatically start on February 1, while Brian was still employed—and double-dipping on coverage is a big legal no-no. So I had to wait until February 1 to sign up for a new plan that would start on March 1.

Once I'd done that, I still had to take care of all the other details associated with changing coverage, like choosing a new primary care doctor and transferring our prescriptions. To do that, I needed to set up an online account with the insurer. And here I ran into my second snag: Because our new insurance plan was with the same provider as our old plan, I already had an account on their website. I could find no obvious way to add my new plan to that account, so I struggled through the maze of customer support and eventually learned that I'd have to wait until the new plan took effect on March 1 (today) to create an account for it.

So, this morning, right after breakfast, I settled down for what I figured would be a busy day of paperwork (or, since it was all going to be online, pixelwork). I punched in all my details—name, date of birth, member ID—and tried to create an account. And ran straight into snag three: I couldn't create an account using my email address because I already had one linked to my old account. I could still log into that old account, but it only had information about the old plan that had just expired. And because it was Sunday, I couldn't call or chat with customer service to fix the problem. Until the customer service lines open tomorrow morning, I'm stuck in limbo.

Annoying as that situation is, it seems positively straightforward compared to the problem I'm having with the website for our new dental savings plan. I registered on that insurer's site as soon as I bought the policy—or at least, I thought I had. But when I tried logging in today, using my email address and the password I'd selected, it told me either my username or my password was wrong. Okay, no big deal: I just clicked on "find my username" and entered my member ID, name, and date of birth to get my official username. Then I entered that username and the password I'd selected...and once again, the site told me that one of the two was wrong. So I took a different tack and asked to sign in without a password, using my username and date of birth to receive a login code. And I got the same error again. It told me that either the username it had just given me or the date of birth I gave it to get that username was wrong. I must have gone through the same cycle four or five times—check the username, enter the username and password, enter the username without the password—before I gave up. So that's yet another customer service call I need to make tomorrow.

Naturally, all this left me feeling a bit disgruntled. But as I was about to make some snarky remark to Brian about how much technology has "simplified our lives," I thought, well, wait a minute: would this actually have been any simpler before the Internet? And as it happened, I already knew the answer, because the last time I'd signed up for private health insurance was in 1995, before any of this stuff could be done online. To get my policy back then, I had to make an appointment to meet in person with an insurance agent, drive to his office, look at a list of plan options he presented to me, flip through a bunch of paper books to compare them, fill ou the enrollment forms for my chosen plan by hand, and pay my first monthly premium by check. The whole process was a much bigger hassle than this year's online enrollment, even with all the glitches. It just didn't feel like a big hassle back then because there was no simpler alternative. 

This little glimpse back down memory lane has helped me put my #firstworldproblems in perspective. Yes, it's annoying that these websites are so hard to use. But it's also kind of amazing that they exist at all. Looking at the situation through 1995-era Amy's eyes, having to wait until Monday to call customer service—from my own home, most likely in my pajamas—doesn't seem like such a big deal.

[EDIT, 3/2/26: After a frustrating half hour on the phone with the insurer, I'm no longer convinced doing things the old-fashioned way was harder. After working my way through the maze of the automated phone line and spending about 15 minutes on hold, I was informed that it was not possible to set up a new online account with my current email and my only option was to create a new email for this purpose. I gently (okay, maybe not so gently) pointed out that it can't be too uncommon for people to change plans, and it seems unlikely that the system simply doesn't allow for this possibility. The agent then put me on hold again while she presented this argument to the "e-services department," which eventually conceded that it would be possible to unlink my email from the existing online account so I could use it to create a new account. (Doing this would cut off my access to the old plan info, but that wasn't a problem because Brian still had an account linked to his email, so we could use that to deal with any lingering problems.) However, it apparently takes three to five business days to perform this apparently simple operation, so I'm now stuck in a holding pattern until Friday. The call then redirected me to a customer satisfaction survey, which I used to register my customer dissatisfaction. I even pressed the button to add an extra comment, gently (again, not that gently) suggesting that it would have been helpful to warn me about this "feature" when I first signed up for the new plan, so I could have dealt with it ahead of time.

On the plus side, one quick call to the dental plan provider was enough to unlock my account, so that shows competent customer service still exists somewhere in the modern world.]

[EDIT, 3/5/26: Well, there's good news and bad news. The good news: It didn't actually take 3 to 5 business days to uncouple my email from my old account. I got a call back within one day to say it was done, and I took the precaution of keeping the customer service agent on the line until I'd confirmed I was able to sign up for a new account. The bad news: Even with that account set up, I wasn't able to select a new Primary Care Provider online. I went through all the steps to do it and got a message saying, "Your PCP request could not be processed." So I got in touch with customer service again and they made the PCP selection for me—or at least, they said they had. It's now been two days and no PCP is showing up on my account. 

What's odd is that Brian made his PCP selection shortly after I did, using the phone system rather than chat, and his selection has already been processed. I just called Member Services again to sort this out, and as best I could make out from the agent's somewhat incoherent explanation, Brian's request somehow superseded mine. So this agent made the PCP selection for me again, and once again told me it would take 3 to 5 business days to go through.

So I'm now back in limbo, unable to transfer my medical records, see my new doctor, or get new prescriptions for any of my meds until this is resolved. In my ongoing battle with bureaucratic B.S., it's easy to see who's winning.]

Our first seed snails

This week's post was supposed to be all about Highland Park's first Repair Cafe event, which was scheduled to take place on Sunday. But that didn't happen, because this happened instead:

The storm that I imagine future generations will call the Blizzard of '26 blew into town last night, leaving 14 inches of snow in its wake. Brian and I have spent most of our afternoon so far digging out from under it. (This has left me once again cursing our yard's awkward layout and trying to decide if it would be worth dropping a couple of grand on heated mats to keep the driveway clear.)

But before we went out to face the snow, we spent a little time indoors starting seeds for this year's crop of leeks. And this year, we've decided to shake things up a bit. Rather than deploy the extra-narrow seed-starting tubes we generally use for leek seedlings, we're testing out a new method: seed snails.

I learned about this method from a YouTube video that popped up while I was doing my daily "walk and watch" (my ecofrugal exercise of choice in unpleasant weather). The gist of it is, you layer soil on top of a sheet of plastic or paper, roll it into a spiral shape, turn it on its end, and plant your seeds in the top. This takes up less room than pots or seed trays and uses less soil, yet provides plenty of depth for the seedlings to develop long, healthy roots. And when it's time to transplant, you can simply unroll the spiral and lift the little seedlings out. This is the perk that really sold us on trying this method for the leeks in particular. Although we have a dowel that's meant to push the entire soil plugs out of each narrow tube, in practice the soil always falls away. So if all we're going to have to plant is the little seedlings themselves, we might as well extract them the easy way.

To create our first seed snails, Brian went hunting through our stash of reused bubble wrap. The gardener in the video recommended this as the best material for seed snails because it's flexible, it holds moisture well, and the air bubbles insulate the seedlings' roots while adding structural strength to the roll. Since our current seed-starting tubes are 4 inches deep, Brian took a piece of bubble wrap one foot wide and cut it into three 4-inch strips to make the seed rolls. Then, taking another tip from the video, he wrapped each strip of bubble wrap in a layer of baking parchment paper to protect the seedlings from microplastic contamination. Our parchment paper was in individual sheets 16.5 inches wide rather than on a roll, so he cut each sheet in half, folded it over, and tucked the bubble wrap inside. Each bubble-wrap strip took one whole sheet, plus about half of a second one, to cover it.

We then repaired to the basement, where Brian dumped out the garden soil he'd dug up for seed starting into a tub, misted it with water, and mixed it with his hands until it was about as moist as a wrung-out sponge. The YouTube video claimed this would help the soil stick to the sheets of bubble wrap and also "prime" it with moisture so it would be easier to water later. Once he had it moist enough to form a good, solid clump without turning into mud, he patted it into place over top of the parchment paper, creating a soil layer about half an inch thick. However, he didn't extend the dirt quite to the top of the parchment. Instead, he left a gap of about a quarter inch to layer some seed-starting mix on top of the spiral, so the seeds could start their lives in a medium designed to support them.

He then carefully rolled up the soil-covered sheet into a spiral shape and secured it with rubber bands. (The video recommended using painter's tape to hold the loose end in place, but he couldn't get it to stick to the moist parchment.) He nestled the completed spiral into a little plastic tub that had formerly held mushrooms, which he'd gone and fished out of the recycling bin as soon as he decided to try the seed-spiral method. After that, he repeated the whole process with a second strip of bubble wrap and parchment, giving him two neat spirals ready for seeding. He got out the packet of leek seeds and carefully dropped them into the dirt along the top of the spiral, aiming for a spacing of about half an inch. 

Once both spirals were planted, he spread seed-starting mix over their tops and gave them both a good misting to get them thoroughly moist. Finally, following a final tip from the video, he covered each one with a clear plastic bag to help hold in that moisture so they wouldn't need as much watering. The two completed seed snails then joined the parsley seeds that are already (we hope) germinating in their tubes on the seedling table.

To be honest, these two seed snails don't actually take up noticeably less space than the milk carton full of narrow tubes in which we used to start our leeks. On the other hand, they most likely contain more individual seeds than the tubes did. And most important, we hope, they'll give us more healthy seedlings to plant out when spring arrives. That may still be a month or two away, but all this snow has to melt sometime, and when it does, we'll be ready.

How we became financially independent

This week, Brian finally did something he's been wanting to do for years: He quit his job. He is now officially retired, financially independent, a gentleman of leisure. Thirteen years after we officially set our sights on early retirement as a goal, we have now crossed that goal line.

How did we do it? Basically, by following the same plan that I outlined in that 2013 post and later expanded on in a 2016 article for Money Crashers: 

1. Cut your expenses as much as possible to maximize the amount you can sock away each month. (This step is what you've been reading about here for the past 13 years.)
2. Invest those savings in a mixed portfolio of low-fee funds. We've had some help with this step from a reliable finance guy who's sniffed out investments that earn us solid returns while minimizing what finance guys like to call "downside risk." (What exactly would be an upside risk?)
3. Stick with the plan until you've earned enough to retire. Technically, we reached this point a few years ago, but Brian needed a little time to get comfortable with the idea. Last year, he decided he was ready to take the plunge, and his official last day was Wednesday.

Before we could cross that finish line, though, there were a few t's to cross and i's to dot. The most obvious one: health insurance. Luckily for us, we live in New Jersey, which has a well-organized state health marketplace (Get Covered NJ) that makes it quite easy to shop for plans and compare costs. Even more luckily, New Jersey is one of the ten states that have stepped in to pick up the cost of the Obamacare subsidies Congress canceled last year. With our new, lower income (which is based on our taxable investment earnings, not the amount we withdraw each year to pay our bills), we qualified for a discount of over 80%, cutting our monthly premiums to just $318 per month for the two of us. Mind you, this is for a plan with a pretty hefty deductible ($2,100 per person per year), so we'll have to get used to paying out of pocket for a lot of costs that used to have only a nominal copay, such as prescription meds. But with all the practice we've had stretching our dollars over the past 22 years, I'm sure we can manage to keep those costs under control.

The health plan I bought doesn't cover dental or eye care (except for children, which we don't have). With a little searching, I was able to find a separate vision plan that wasn't too expensive (around $21 a month for both of us) and included our current eye doctor in its network. Based on our typical eye-care needs, which are a bit on the high side, it looks like this plan will save us around $300 a year. But dental coverage, at first blush, looked like a completely different story. There were dental plans available on Get Covered NJ, but most of them, once again, offered coverage for children only. The few plans I found that included adult care were not only expensive but had very low out-of-pocket maximums. (The worst of the lot capped payouts at a mere $1,000 per year, which was barely more than the annual cost of the premiums. It was practically guaranteed to cost us more out of pocket than it would ever pay back.) With such limited coverage, these plans would do little to nothing to protect us from ruinous costs, which is what insurance is supposed to be for.

But after looking a little further, I found an alternative that looked much more cost-effective: a dental discount plan. This isn't technically the same as insurance, which pays your bills (or a portion of them) for you. Instead, for a nominal yearly fee (around $125), you get charged a reduced rate for all care from dentists in the plan's network. If the plan's estimated costs for services like cleanings, exams, and fillings were accurate, it looked like it would save us about 65 percent on our average yearly dental costs. The only catch was that it would require us to choose a new dentist, since the trusted dentist we've been seeing for years isn't part of this or any other dental network. But after a little research, I was able to find a dental office with very good reviews from customers that's not only in the network, but also within walking distance of our house. Given how much we stood to save, it seemed like we should at least give the new dentist a try. If we didn't like her, we could always go back to our old dentist, and it would cost us nothing (since the savings just on that one visit would be enough to offset the signup cost).

In addition to the health insurance, there was one other workplace benefit we had to replace: Brian's computer. The laptop he's been using for the past several years belongs to Rutgers, and we knew he'd have to surrender it when he left. The last time we bought a computer, we chose a mini PC, which combined a low price with ease of upgrading. But Brian prefers the portability of a laptop, which he can easily haul into the kitchen for a video chat with his folks, set on the coffee table to stream a show on the TV, or take with him on a trip. So I did a search on Craigslist and found a lightly used Lenovo ThinkPad, which gets high ratings for repairability, for just $200. It's pretty basic, but more than adequate for his modest needs (email, Web surfing, streaming video and audio).

Although Brian is now officially retired, there still are a few more retirement-related tasks we need to clear up. For one, I've scheduled a couple of doctor appointments to take advantage of our current health insurance before it switches over at the end of the month. (One of these is with a dermatologist to see if I can find a cheaper alternative to the cream I'm currently using for my rosacea, which I've just learned would cost me about $100 a month to buy out of pocket.) Then, once the new plan kicks in, we'll need to officially select our new doctor and dentist and arrange to have our health records transferred to these new providers. And there's a bit of paperwork I need to complete to roll over Brian's 403(b) to a new IRA under the care of our trusty finance guy. 

But within a few weeks, we'll be officially set up to live a life of leisure. I'm already more or less retired myself, as all my long-term clients have dropped me one by one over the past few years and I've had no luck finding new ones. I've spent quite a bit of time over the past year or two scouring freelancer job listings and applying for suitable-looking jobs with essentially no results, and since we don't really need the money, I've decided to stop bothering with it. I'm happy to accept a new assignment if it simply falls into my lap, but I'm not wasting any more of my time looking for work. I'll leave it to the younger freelancers who need it more than I do.

Having reached this major financial goal, we don't feel any need to set a new one. All we have to do at this point is make sure our nest egg can carry us through the next 40 years or so. (We'll still have smaller, shorter-term goals, like gradually electrifying our home and, eventually, our car. But we've got ample cash in the kitty to dip in for those expenses as needed without cutting into our income.) So basically, we just need to stick with the same plan we used to get here: keep our expenses low, keep our investments sound, and keep on trucking. Which means that the posts you'll be reading on this blog in the future will probably be along much the same lines as the ones you've read here in the past. We'll still be doing all the same things to save money and care for the environment as we've always done; we'll just have a lot more time now to do them.

Recipe of the Month: Shish Andaz

This month, for a change, Brian and I did not wait until the last minute to squeeze in a Recipe of the Month. In fact, I discovered this recipe at the end of January, and Brian deliberately held off on making it until last Sunday so that it could serve as the Recipe of the Month for February. 

It comes from a website called (for some reason) Hermann, which was featured in my One5C newsletter. Run by chef Julius Fiedler, it showcases "traditional vegan recipes from around the world." This one, called Shish Andaz, is an Iranian stew made primarily from eggplant and walnuts. It caught my eye because we're always looking for new eggplant recipes, particularly ones that pack a good dollop of protein. And we just happened to have everything on hand required to make it, with one notable exception: the pomegranate molasses. Not only did we not have it, I'd never even heard of it before. 

A quick trip to Wikipedia informed me that "molasses" is a misnomer: this "Middle Eastern, Caucasian and Balkan condiment" is actually made from concentrated pomegranate juice. It wasn't something we could whip up at home, and I wasn't even sure where we could buy it—or if we'd want to, since we didn't know of any other ways to use it besides this one untested recipe. Fortunately, someone had already asked in the comment section if there was a reasonable substitute for it, and Fiedler proposed "a tablespoon of sweet molasses of your choice and then 30-40ml of lemon juice." With this substitution, we had everything we needed to make the dish.

The recipe offered two alternatives for preparing the eggplant strips: pan-frying and roasting. Brian opted for roasting, which he'd found from previous experience to be the best way to bring out the flavor of almost any veggie. And since a single big baking sheet can hold all the eggplant at once, it didn't take appreciably longer than frying it, a job that would have needed to be done in two batches. It's not a quick recipe either way, about 80 minutes from start to finish, but about half of that is just simmering time.

The finished dish could not by any stretch of the imagination be considered pretty. It's an amorphous, brownish mass, broken up only by vague blobs of eggplant and gritty particles of walnuts. But it tasted much, much better than it looked. The author said it "might be the richest plant-based stew I’ve ever made," and I'd say that's a fair description, but there was a lot more going on than just the rich, nutty texture. It had hints of all five major flavors: the faint bitterness of the eggplant and walnuts, the acidity of the lemon and tomatoes, savory onion, salt, and a touch of sweetness from the molasses. Layered over that, there were the fragrant, spicy tones supplies by the cinnamon, pepper, and turmeric, all combined into one complex, flavorsome whole. I didn't enjoy looking at it, but I certainly enjoyed eating it, as did Brian.

This dish has just about everything we could ask for in a recipe. It's tasty, healthful, and reasonably easy to make with ingredients we nearly always have on hand. With all those walnuts, it's not particularly cheap, but since Brian only made a half recipe, the 150 grams he used (about a third of a pound) is only $1.44 worth, which certainly isn't going to break the bank. The only downside is the lengthy preparation time, which might make it impractical for a weeknight. But, as I'll discuss more in next week's entry, Brian is about to retire from his job, which means he'll soon have the leisure to cook a slow-paced dish any day of the week. So I think we can count on this Persian stew to become one of our go-to recipes, particularly for cold weather like we're having right now.

Gardeners' Holidays 2026: Seedfest

Well, there's no chance this year of a groundhog predicting an early spring. New Jersey is currently sitting under a foot of snow, none of which is melting in the sub-freezing temperatures we've been decidedly not enjoying all week. And apparently, this weather system is just getting warmed up (or more accurately, chilled down). It looks like New Jersey will escape any further snow, but we're being warned to expect wind-chill temperatures down to 12 below as January rolls into February. (Ironically, global warming is almost certainly to blame for this, as increased warming toward the poles is throwing the jet stream out of whack and pushing all this cold air away from the Arctic and into our yards.)

This poses a bit of a problem for our gardening schedule. No matter how cold and snowy it is out there right now, spring will come eventually, and if we want to have any parsley seedlings to plant when it does, this is the week we need to start them. But to do that, we need some garden soil to form the bottom layer in our seed-starting tubes. And right now, our soil isn't particularly easy to get at.

In theory, we could just hold off on this for a couple of weeks, since the parsley seeds we bought in 2023 can be sowed directly in the garden. We did this last year, and they came up just fine. But it made Brian nervous, and he says he'd be more comfortable starting at least a couple of plants indoors. Which is why he just plowed his way out out into the garden and dug through a foot of snow and into the frozen soil to retrieve a sample. It won't be enough for all our seedlings, but it'll do to get the parsley started.

While he was doing this, I was pulling up my garden planner spreadsheet to plot out this year's garden layout. This is a much simpler job than it used to be, as I now just rotate entire beds rather than trying to optimize the placement of each individual crop. However, there are always a few details that need tweaking. Pepper and zucchini plants have to be shifted from one end of the bed to the other to make sure they're not in exactly the same spot two years running. I need to mark the location of last year's winter lettuce so I know not to plant over it until it's all been harvested. (Luckily, this year it's in a spot that will eventually hold a zucchini plant, which won't go in until mid-May.) And a single square of dill, which doesn't need a whole block to itself, has to get squeezed in somewhere. (This year, it'll be bunking with the other zucchini plant.)

So, the beds have been plotted, the dirt has been dug, and the parsley seeds are now soaking, getting ready to go into their tubes tomorrow. And in the meantime, we can settle in for a cozy evening with a pot of hot soup, some fresh-baked biscuits, and the second half of this week's Critical Role. Tucked up on the couch with our blankets and our kitty cats, we'll be snug and safe against the cold of winter, while the soaking seeds on our kitchen counter breathe a promise of spring to come.

Recipe of the Month: Random Curry

January's Recipe of the Month is a dish Brian improvised last Tuesday to use up a nearly-full can of coconut milk we had in the fridge. (We had opened it and taken out just a few tablespoons to make the "tiramisu mocktail" recipe from this cookbook, which we got out of the library.) He already knew a good cauliflower curry recipe, but he didn't have a cauliflower on hand. So instead, he mashed up that recipe with the one he uses for malai kofta and threw in the hodgepodge of veggies we had available: green peas, chick peas, half a bell pepper, and a smallish butternut squash. He called the resulting dish...

Random Curry

• Saute 10 oz cubed butternut squash, ½ diced red bell pepper, and ¼ tsp salt in canola oil on medium high heat until softened and browned. Remove from the skillet and set aside.
• In the skillet, heat 1 tsp cumin seeds, ¼ tsp fennel seeds, and 8 fenugreek seeds in oil until they start to pop. Add ½ diced medium red onion, 2 large cloves finely diced garlic, 1 tsp finely diced fresh ginger, and ¼ to ½ finely diced jalapeno, and saute until soft.
• Add 1 ½ cups coconut milk, 1 cup crushed tomatoes, 1 tsp ground coriander, ½ tsp ground turmeric, ½ tsp ground cardamom, ¼ tsp garam masala, 1 Tbsp brown sugar, and 1 tsp salt. Whisk to combine and heat until bubbling.
• Add 1 ½ cups cooked chick peas (or 1 can, drained) and 1 cup green peas (frozen is okay). Heat, stirring, until the mixture has reached the desired thickness and is heated through.

This kludge of a dish worked surprisingly well. I liked it at least as much as either of its parent recipes, if not better. The mixture of veggies gave it a nice balance of soft and firm textures. It had plenty of flavors, but none of them was overpowering: tangy tomato and sweet butternut squash, zesty onion and spices offset by the coolness of the coconut milk. 

So would we make this again? We certainly could, but I'm not sure we have to follow the recipe exactly. Given how readily these two coconut-based Indian dishes combined to accommodate what we happened to have in the fridge, I suspect we could just take the base from this dish (the coconut-tomato-spice gravy) and throw in whatever veggies we needed to use up. Cauliflower, broccoli, squash, peas, beans, mushrooms, eggplant—if it works in a curry, it can probably work in this curry. Or at any rate, it's worth a try.

Thrift Week 2026, Day 7: How to Recycle Plastic Bags

I'm going to wrap up this Thrift Week series with a type of waste that's particularly ubiquitous: plastic bags. Actually, here in New Jersey, they're a lot less ubiquitous than they used to be, as the state banned single-use plastic shopping bags in 2022. Now, when we go to the grocery store, we no longer need to rush to bag up our own groceries before the checker starts tossing them into a disposable bag. But plastic bags still make themselves into our home in other ways. The grocery fliers delivered weekly to our door come in a little plastic sleeve, and we occasionally have to grab disposable produce bags (which are still legal) at the grocery store. (We always have at least one reusable shopping bag with us, but if we make an impromptu stop at the store, we might not have our mesh produce bags.) We also end up with small plastic bags that once held foodstuffs like dry beans and popcorn. And occasionally something we've ordered comes in a box with a plastic liner.

Fortunately, there are plenty of ways to put these leftover bags to good use:

• We keep several of them in our shopping bag in case we run out of mesh produce bags. They're also useful for packing up foodstuffs from bulk bins on the rare occasions we visit a store that has any. 
• We save the little plastic sleeves that come with the grocery fliers and pass them on to my parents, who say they make ideal poop bags for walking the dogs. They're actually better than store-bought bags sold for this purpose because they're longer, so one bag can hold multiple poops.
• I often use larger bags to hold items I'm leaving out for a Freecycle porch pickup. The bag protects the item from the weather and gives the recipient a convenient way to carry it. And using a bag marked "Freecycle" eliminates any chance that a passerby will assume an item is simply being thrown away and try to grab it.
• Back in the days before the bag ban, we used to save plastic shopping bags to line our wastebaskets. But since we almost never accepted plastic bags, we usually didn't have enough for all the wastebaskets in the house, and we discovered that most of the time, we didn't really need them. The kitchen trash can is the only place we ever throw away anything wet or messy, and we still use store-bought bags for that.

But these flimsy little bags can't be used indefinitely. Eventually they develop holes, and then they have to be discarded. Our local supermarket used to have a bin where we could drop them off to be recycled, but it hasn't been there for years. So most of the time, damaged bags—along with other types of plastic packaging, like the envelopes that packages come in—just end up in the trash.

However, according to Earth911, that isn't the only option. Based on a quick search, it looks like there are many big-box stores in our area that collect both #2 and #4 plastic bags for recycling, including Target, Walmart, Sam's Club, and Kohl's. So we could simply stash all those unwanted plastic bags in the car and drop them in one of those store's bins the next time we're in the area, were it not for one snag: most of them don't have any sort of label on them to indicate which type of plastic they are. Right now, we have eight plastic bags that are no longer fit for service, and only one of them is labeled as #2 plastic. The rest are anybody's guess. 

 

Now, according to the websites for Target and Walmart, these stores accept all kinds of "plastic bags and films," not just specific numbers. So, in theory, we could just dump all our unwanted bags into one of their bins and let them try to sort them out. Maybe a lot of them would end up in the landfill anyway, but at least we'd be giving them every chance at getting recycled first. I guess it's worth a shot.

Thrift Week 2026, Day 6: How to Recycle Eyeglasses

I don't like to replace my eyeglasses any more often than I have to. This is partly because of the cost, which is over $200 even if you get them at Costco and around double that from an independent optician. (Back when I had single-vision lenses, I used to order them online, which was much cheaper. But with progressive lenses, apparently, you need an in-person fitting to get them lined up right.) But also, I have a really hard time finding frames I like. For a while, the type I prefer—full frame, metal, roughly oblong in shape, and not too big—were in fashion and it was easy to find them everywhere. But nowadays, petite metal frames are out and chunky plastic ones are in, and it's almost impossible to find a pair that I think looks good on me. So when I find some I like, I try to hold on to them as long as possible.

But sooner or later, my prescription changes, and I have to get new ones. (Sadly, I can't function without glasses long enough to hand mine over and wait for them to be fitted with new lenses.) So, over time, I end up accumulating old eyeglasses with outdated prescriptions. And while it makes sense to hold on to the most recent, just slightly outdated pair as a backup in case my current ones break, it doesn't really make sense to hold on to three or four extra pairs. Yet I hate to throw something that expensive in the trash. Even if they're no use to me anymore, it seems they should still be useful for someone.

Apparently I'm not the only one who thinks so, because there are various organizations that collect old eyeglasses for reuse. Our eye doctor's office even has a collection bin right in the waiting room where we can drop our old glasses to be passed on to folks who can use them. Before we switched to this eye doctor, we used to put them in a bin hosted by the Lions Club, which has various collection sites throughout New Jersey. You can drop them off at various Lions Club buildings or in bins at participating Walmart Vision Centers. (This page has more details about the program in New Jersey.)

 

If the Lions Club locations aren't convenient for you, this blog post from Vision Center names several other donation sites. Its list includes Warby Parker, Sam's Club Optical Centers, Costco Optical, Goodwill, and the Salvation Army. I've never personally donated eyeglasses at any of these places, so I can't say how easy they are to use, or even whether they're still valid. But if any of them are on your regular route, it couldn't hurt to pop inside and ask. 

Thrift Week 2026, Day 5: How to Recycle Books

If there's one thing I really can't stand to throw out, it's a book. That's one reason why my bookshelves are so overstuffed, with some volumes stacked horizontally across the tops of others: to make room for them to fit properly, I'd have to get rid of something else. But there's a limit to how many books I can cram in this way, so eventually I have to bite the bullet and get rid of some.

If the books are still in readable condition, the best option is obviously to get them into the hands of someone else who can use them. Ways to do this include:

• Passing books on to people you know. This is my personal favorite if I happen to have a specific book I know a friend or family member will enjoy. The downside is that sometimes they give the book back after reading it, and then I have to find another new home for it.
• Selling them to a secondhand bookstore. I've only been able to do this a few times over the years, as secondhand bookstores never seem to last long in the places where I've lived. I never got much money for them—usually pennies on the dollar against the cover price—but even a dollar's worth of store credit is a nice bonus. It makes me feel better about bringing home a new book (or two or three) to fill up the space I've cleared on my bookshelf.
• Dropping them in a Little Free Library. Our small town has more than a dozen of these, so I can always manage to find space in one of them for any book I need to cull from my collection. And it adds a spice of interest to my future walks to pass by the same Little Free Library and see if it's still there. Of course, there again, the risk is that I end up bringing home more books than I got rid of. But at least they'll be books that are new to me instead of ones I've already read and don't plan to read again.
• Donating them to the library. Our local library holds a book sale once a year as a fundraiser. It spends a week collecting books from the locals, scoops up the best ones for its collection, and sells the rest at bargain prices—from 50 cents for small paperbacks and kids' books to $2 for most hardcovers. We often save up books we're done with in anticipation of this sale, but if it's only been a couple of months since the last one, we try to get rid of them some other way rather than hang onto them all year. Other libraries in our area don't wait for an annual sale; they sell donated books out of a mini-bookstore near the front of the building. Both these little bookstores and the annual sale are good sources of cheap reading material that will eventually become part of the book-overcrowding problem. (It's the ciiiiiircle of books...)
• Giving them to a prison library. I've never personally tried this, but I hear tell that prison libraries are always eager to add to their collections and may even take books other libraries won't accept, like old textbooks. The American Library Association has some info about organizations that can help you get your books into the hands of folks inside.

This is only a sampling of the possible places to donate books. The Local Book Donations site has a tool to search for organizations in your area that will take them. And of course, there are always the old standbys, Freecycle, Buy Nothing, and Trash Nothing.

 

All this is fine for usable books, but what about the ones that are completely falling apart? Well, in many  towns, including ours, the pages can go directly in the paper recycling bin as long as you remove the cover first. If you're not sure about it, you can check with your local waste/recycling/public works department. If your town doesn't accept them, you can always search trusty old Earth911 for paper recycling sites in your area.

 

However, a more entertaining option is to take those old pages and use them for craft projects. There are all kinds of things you can make with paper, including origami, paper mâché, beads, flowers, and decoupage. Heck, with enough pages and enough polyurethane, you could probably cover an entire floor the way we did in our downstairs room. For books that can no longer serve their true purpose as reading material, a second life as a bouquet of paper roses seems like a less tragic fate than the recycling bin.And if you're not of a crafty bent yourself, you can offer up the book pages to friends, or strangers on Freecycle, who are.

Thrift Week 2026, Day 4: How to Recycle Razors and Razor Blades

About four years ago, I gave up on cartridge razors and switched to a safety razor. After some unsuccessful experiments with a cheap one from Target, I bit the bullet and invested in a Twig from Leaf Shave. It cost quite a lot up front, but I'm hoping it will be a lifelong investment, unlike the various cartridge razors I've owned and been forced to discard after a few years of use—either because they broke or because they went off the market and it was no longer possible to buy replacement heads for them. Since it takes single-edged razor blades (which you can make by breaking standard double-edged blades in half), and since my frugal shaving hacks give me at least a month of use out of each blade, it's costing me less than 2 cents per shave. And when those blades finally wear out, all I have to discard is a tiny strip of metal, rather than a whole chunk of plastic.

 

However, I'd rather not discard even that much if I don't have to. So, ever since I made the switch to a safety razor, I've been saving the used blades in an empty candy tin, planning to take them to a scrap metal recycler when the tin got full. The one I initially found in Edison appears to have gone out of business, but a new search for "scrap metal" on Earth911 steered me toward a place in New Brunswick that might be able to take them. However, since the site says only that it takes metal scraps and doesn't specifically mention razor blades, I'm a bit concerned that they wouldn't take them. It seems like they should be able to take the entire steel tin full of blades and treat it as a single lump of metal, but maybe it doesn't work that way.

 

So I'm now thinking it might be a safer bet to recycle my blades through the Gillette recycling program. It takes blades and razors from all brands, and you can drop them off at any public collection site. According to the map on the website, there's one in Princeton that we could easily swing by before dance practice, so we wouldn't even have to make a special trip. Better still, this site takes not just blades but complete razors as well, so I could also use it to get rid of the unused cartridges and the orphaned handle from my last two failed cartridge razors, as well. I'd been thinking it was dumb of me to keep holding onto them "just in case," but now it's actually paid off!

Thrift Week 2026, Day 3: How to Recycle Batteries

As regular readers will know, I'm not a particularly tech-oriented person. I'm a late adopter who only replaces her computer every ten years or so and didn't even own a smartphone until 2018. So I was quite surprised the first time I calculated just how many devices we had that ran on batteries. There were literally dozens—some with their own built-in rechargeable batteries, some with single-use alkaline batteries. Even when batteries aren't included, they're very much required.

In the years since, we've swapped out most of those alkaline batteries for either rechargeable ones or longer-lasting lithium batteries. (We still have a few partially discharged ones lurking in a drawer, waiting for us to eke the last little bit of charge out of them.) Both of these, particularly the rechargeables, are a big improvement on the alkaline ones. They produce a lot less waste and cost less over their lifespan. But sadly, no battery lasts forever. Eventually, like their disposable cousins, they'll need to be tossed.

Fortunately, when their time finally comes, there are plenty of places to recycle them. Our local Department of Public Works takes them, as do many Home Depot and Lowe's stores. But the old-fashioned alkaline batteries pose a bigger challenge. Our local DPW no longer accepts these, telling us we should simply toss them in the trash. But this doesn't sit well with me. Although modern alkaline batteries contain a lot less mercury than they used to, they still have some, along with other metals like manganese and zinc that go to waste when they're discarded. Environmentally conscious areas, like California and most of Europe, don't allow them into household trash, and I don't want to allow them in mine if I can help it. 

 

The Earth911 Recycling Search isn't all that helpful in this particular area. Most of the places it lists in my area for recycling alkaline batteries are municipal programs that are only open to residents. I've had better luck with a couple of sites specifically devoted to battery recycling: Battery Network and Call2Recycle. As far as I can tell, both these sites use the same search tool, which you can customize to find recycling locations near you for multiple types of batteries: rechargeable, single-use, cell phone batteries, and even specialty kinds like e-bike batteries. In our area, there are several Staples that accept single-use batteries, including one that's quite easy to swing by on our weekly trip down to Princeton. It takes only a few minutes to drop them off, and we can even earn reward points for them.

 

So, if you live near a Staples store, or if you pass by one on your regular route, you can dispose of all your depleted batteries there—both rechargeable and disposable—at one fell swoop. If that's not an option and your only choice is the trash, then take the precaution of putting tape over their terminals before tossing them. (Actually, it's a good idea to do this even while they're sitting in the drawer so you don't risk a short-circuit if the terminals come into contact.) 

 

Of course, the best long-term solution would be to switch to rechargeable batteries for everything, so you'd never need to dispose of single-use ones at all. But with most rechargeable batteries still available only in AA and AAA sizes, it may be a while before that's practical.

Thrift Week 2026, Day 2: How to Recycle Electronics

One category of waste that's particularly tricky to recycle is electronics. Electronic waste, or e-waste, includes old phones, computers, and pretty much anything else containing circuits, which these days can mean anything from light bulbs to refrigerators. It's a huge category, over 60 tons a year worldwide, and it poses an even thornier problem than textiles. If worse comes to worst, those old jeans can go into the landfill, where they won't cause any more pollution than anything else in the landfill with them. But old phones and computers contain all sorts of nasty components, such as dioxins, mercury, and lead, which you definitely don't want getting into the environment. At the same time, they contain lots of valuable metals and minerals, such as gold, copper, and lithium, which you definitely don't want to go to waste. That makes recycling them both very difficult and very important.

Because e-waste is also hazardous waste, most places have specific rules about recycling it. In our town, for instance, we're supposed to take it down to the Department of Public Works. This is what we do with any device that's no longer usable, like the old VCR and tape deck we discarded earlier this month. (If your town doesn't have an official collection site, you can drop off most kinds of electronic gizmos at your local Best Buy or Staples store. Check Earth911 for locations near you.) But, just like with clothing, it's much better to keep an object that's still usable in use if possible. 

The most recent case in point for us was my old smartphone. When I replaced it in 2022, it was technically still working; it had just become so unreliable that it was impractical to use. (Not only did the battery drain really fast, even after I'd replaced it with a new one, but it would randomly shut down without warning.) It might have been possible to fix it, but it wasn't within my extremely modest abilities. So, rather than simply take it to the recycling shed, I did a quick search and found an organization called 911 Cell Phone Bank. They take old cell phones, repair or recycle them, and donate them to victims of domestic violence and human trafficking. If my old phone was fixable, they could probably fix it; if not, it would be recycled. So, worst-case scenario, it would be the same as if I'd taken it to the DPW; best-case scenario, I'd not only keep it out of the waste stream but help out someone who really needed it.

Donating my phone through this program was quite straightforward. First I wiped it by going into Settings and doing a factory reset. Then I went to the website, clicked the Donate Phones button, and selected 10 Devices or Less and Print Shipping Label. There was one minor snag when the label didn't print properly, so I had to submit my information a second time and have the label emailed to me as a PDF. But eventually I got it printed out, packed up the phone and the spare battery that hadn't done it much good, slapped on the label, and dropped it off at the post office. Easy peasy.

Computers are a bit trickier to dispose of than phones, mainly because they're bigger. However, they're also more valuable, so if you have a computer that's still usable, you can almost certainly find a new home for it. If it's a reasonably new one, you might even be able to get a little cash for it on Craigslist. We've never sold an old machine this way, but we recently bought one: Brian's new laptop, which will replace his work laptop when he retires this year. (Like his work computer, it's a Lenovo ThinkPad, which gets high marks for repairability, and buying it secondhand will make it even more sustainable. It's far from state of the art, but it's more than adequate for jobs like email and streaming TV shows, and it was only $200.)

But even if your computer is ancient and creaky, you can probably find someone willing to take it on Freecycle (or Buy Nothing or Trash Nothing). I've never Freecycled one of my own old computers, since I tend to keep them until they're effectively unusable, but I've successfully found homes for two old machines that had belonged to my parents. I forget exactly how old they were, but I know neither one was any spring chicken, and I still got multiple offers for each of them within 24 hours.

And if your computer is so old that, like mine, it's barely working at all, you may still be able to find a home for it through Computers4People. Like 911 Cell Phone Bank, they accept both working and nonworking machines. After wiping the data, they refurbish the ones that can be salvaged and donate them to people in need; everything else gets recycled. It's not quite as simple to use, because you can't just pop the device in the mail, but you can drop it off at any of over 10,000 FedEx and Walgreens stores across North America. Most sites only accept laptops, tablets, and smartphones, but there are few that take desktop machines and peripherals.

 

One important caveat: before getting rid of a computer or a phone, make sure to transfer all the files you need from it, then scrub the hard drive to remove all your personal data. PCMag offers guidelines on how to do this with both computers and phones. But if your device is well and truly bricked and you can't get onto the drive at all, don't worry; both 911 Cell Phone Bank and Computers4People promise to clear all data off donated devices before passing them on to new users.

Thrift Week 2026: How to Recycle All the Things (starting with textiles)

I've been writing this blog for over 16 years now (counting from January 2010, when I first decided to give my old blog an ecofrugal theme). In those 16 years, I've published over 1,600 posts. And the most popular of them all, by a huge margin, was a 2014 post on how to recycle whipped cream cans. In the 12 years since I posted it, it's received roughly 31,000 views—blowing away its nearest competitor, my post on building a raspberry trellis, with a mere 5,100 views. Over 160 people have viewed it just in the past week. Evidently, how to recycle hard-to-recycle objects is a topic that interests many, many people.

Hence, this year's Thrift Week is going to be all about that topic. I've already said pretty much all that needs to be said on the topic of whipped cream cans, but there are loads of other recycling challenges that I've explored over the years, and this will be my chance to share what I've learned. I've written about this subject before, most notably in my 2013 post "How to recycle everything (if you can)," but a lot of the info in that post is now outdated. This week's series will expand on that material and bring everything up to date. And I'm kicking it all off with one particular category of theoretically-recyclables that's given me considerable trouble over the years: textiles.

When you look for information on textile recycling, most of what you'll find is advice on clothing donation. And obviously, if you need to get rid of clothes in usable condition, this is the best thing to do with them. There are tons of places that will take old clothes, from local thrift shops to veterans' organizations. I personally just gave a big box of worn but still serviceable garments to the United War Vets Council, which emails me every so often to see if I have anything to donate. You can also give old clothes away on Freecycle (or its close cousins, the Buy Nothing Project and Trash Nothing) or offer them to your friends at a clothing swap. You might even be able to make a little money reselling them at a consignment shop (in store or online) or at a yard sale. In short, there's no shortage of ways to find a new home for wearable garments.

But if you're a frugal person like most readers of this blog, you tend to wear your clothes until you've worn them out. An old pair of jeans with thighs so threadbare you can't even patch them is clearly no longer wearable, yet it may still have plenty of good fabric left on it that could be put to use. Yet most of the sites listed under "textile recycling" won't actually take them. They're not really planning to recycle your garments; they're planning to resell or donate them, so they'll only accept clothes in good condition. And the few that do accept clothes for actual recycling may require you to cover the shipping costs, which can be considerable. Terracycle's prepaid Zero Waste Boxes, for instance, cost between $160 and $379. 

In my area, there are only two places I know of that genuinely recycle textiles. The one I rely on most is Helpsy. It accepts all types of fabric goods, donates the stuff that's still usable, and downcycles the rest into insulation, stuffing, or rags for industrial use. Only about 5 percent of it needs to be thrown out. Unfortunately, this organization operates only in the northeastern U.S., and even within that area, the number of its bins seems to be dwindling. The last time I tried to make a dropoff, both the bin I had been using in Princeton and the one closest to me in New Brunswick had mysteriously vanished. Fortunately, I was still able to find one, but it keeps getting more difficult. (Which is why I currently have a small collection of old socks, tights, and one battered potholder that's been sitting in the bedroom for several months, waiting until I can get it to a usable recycling bin.)

If Helpsy ever disappears completely, I can always fall back on the garment collection program at H&M. The store has bins where you can drop off clean, used garments from any brand, which get sent to its "partners" overseas to be sorted. The usable items are resold, the unusable ones get downcycled, and a small fraction of the material gets fully recycled into new textiles. This isn't an ideal solution for me because the nearest H&M store is in a mall we never otherwise visit (the traffic is awful), and because of the additional carbon costs of shipping the garments halfway around the world. But it's better than nothing.

If neither of these organizations works for you, you might be able to find a better one through Earth911. This handy site has a tool to help you find recycling facilities near you for just about anything, including clothing. Unfortunately, its suggestions aren't always helpful. Many of the textile recycling programs it lists near me either (a) only accept items in good condition, (b) only accept specific items, such as sneakers or bras, or (c) are only available to residents of a particular town. But it's at least worth a check.

Whenever possible, though, we prefer to take the recycling of our clothes into our own hands. Those old trousers too worn to hold a patch usually get tucked away in my scrap fabric bin so I can cut them up to make patches for other garments. If the bin is too full to hold the entire garment, I at least keep the pockets, which make handy ready-made patches for holes in the knees of Brian's jeans. Similarly, when his T-shirts and socks get too worn out to be darned, we rip them up and turn them into cleaning rags. And little scraps too small to get used for anything, if they're made of natural materials, can go into the compost bin, where they'll eventually break down into useful fertilizer for our garden. Now that's truly cradle-to-cradle recycling.

Ring out the old, ring in the older

To my great relief, the pile of stuff we hauled home from our trip to Indiana has by and large integrated itself neatly into our home. The camp chair and the various tools have all found new homes in the reorganized workshop. The table lamp now graces an end table in the big downstairs room. The automated cat feeders haven't been put to use yet, but we found space for them on the shelves in the workshop, so at least they're not in the way.

In fact, many of these new acquisitions have actually helped us fix minor but annoying problems. For instance, in the office, the power strip next to Brian's computer used to keep tipping over because it was so lightweight that the heavy cord plugged into the outlet would pull it sideways. Brian glued a couple of the powerful hard-drive magnets acquired from his dad to the bottom, and now the power strip is firmly secured to the metal filing cabinet it sits on. 

Likewise, most of the glass Ball jars we brought home are now on the top shelf of our pantry, holding various staples that used to be in plastic bags. Actually, most of them were double-bagged, with the bags the products came in tucked inside zip-top bags to protect them from both spillage and spoilage. This resulted in an unsightly jumble of identical-looking bags that made it hard to find anything because they all looked alike. The row of neatly labeled glass jars is a decided improvement. (We still have a few things in bags, but three zip-top bags look much better than a dozen.)

But the biggest transformation has taken place in our media cabinet. We spent the better part of a day hauling out all our old A/V components, testing them and the ones from Indiana, and putting back only the ones that worked best. As it turned out, it was a good thing we were forced to do this, as some of the components—like my 25-year-old VCR and even older cassette player—proved to be entirely kaput. We replaced these with a working VCR from Brian's folks and an old workhorse of a tape deck, and Brian hauled the broken ones down to the recycling shed. (This turned out to be unnecessary, since they were so old that they didn't contain any computer chips and could safely have gone into the regular trash, but the Department of Public Works graciously agreed to dispose of them for us.)

A couple of other pieces were technically still usable, but not really useful for us. The centerpiece of our old stereo system was Brian's old Marantz receiver—older than him, in fact—which we'd hauled all the way across the country when he moved here in 2003. But it had become increasingly cranky over the years, and it had pretty much reached the limits of Brian's ability to repair it. He reluctantly concluded that it should go to someone who had both the time and the skill to bring it back to its full glory, so we listed it on Freecycle as a project "for the audiophile and do-it-yourselfer." The posting immediately got multiple responses from people fitting that description, and we sent it off to a good home. In its place, we hooked up an equally ancient, but still working Dynaco receiver and a smaller, separate amplifier. This addition gave us more plugs than our power strip could accommodate, so we daisy-chained it with the small, square power strip we'd gotten from his folks to fit everything in. We also Freecycled an old set of Pioneer speakers we'd been storing in the back of the cabinet as a just-in-case backup.

One thing our new setup doesn't currently include is a record player. We own two of them—my old one and another we got from Brian's parents—but neither one is working properly. We've stowed them both in the basement until Brian has time to tinker with them a bit more. If he can't fix either of them on his own, perhaps someone at our town's repair cafe event next month will be able to help. (Watch this space for details about that.) In the meantime, we've got all the rest of the components—TV, receiver, tape player, disc player—hooked up to Brian's nice Polk Audio speakers, and everything sounds lovely. Brian also added his Iron Giant figure to stand guard on top of the amplifier and prevent cats from sitting on it, which would definitely create a fire hazard.

So, contrary to my fears, the big pile of junk we brought back from Indiana has not turned into another big pile of junk in New Jersey. In fact, hauling it all home turned out to be quite helpful. It gave us the kick in the pants we needed to test all that stuff in the cabinet we hadn't been using and get rid of the actual junk that wasn't usable at all. If we hadn't had this pile of stuff to deal with, we might not have learned our VCR didn't work until we actually wanted to play one of our old tapes, and then we'd have had to hunt down and spend money on a replacement for it. This way, we have a fully functioning stereo setup (minus phonograph), Brian's parents have less stuff in their garage, and two happy Freecyclers have new toys to play with. Win-win-win.

A quick fix for a damaged wallet

This afternoon, after running a couple of errands, Brian and I decided to unwind with a quick visit to Starbucks. The trip started off on the right ecofrugal foot: I paid for my drink with my store card, which was loaded up with credits from online surveys, and handed over my reusable cup, which the barista pronounced "cool." But things went downhill when I tried to zip up my wallet. The zipper separated, leaving the zipper pull sliding along one edge.

Now, on most articles of clothing, this problem would be pretty easy to fix. I'd just slide the zipper pull down all the way to the bottom, feed the tooth from the separated strand back in, and pull it up to lock the two strands back together. But this zipper was wrapped all the way around the bottom of the wallet and hidden by the outer cover. The only way to get at it would be to cut the whole thing open, which would kind of defeat the purpose.

Fortunately, back when I bought this wallet a couple of years ago (for $3 at Goodwill), I saved my old one in case of just such an emergency. It was still in perfectly usable condition; the only thing obviously wrong with it was that the material on the edge of the flap had worn away and was unsightly. I could have just lived with it, but I figured, why not just do a quick fix with a little black electrical tape?

This fix took all of five minutes, including going downstairs to fetch the roll of tape. First, I cut a length of tape the length of the flap and folded it over. Then I cut two shorter pieces to wrap partway up the edges. At a casual glance, you'd never even notice the repair. Of course, I know it's there, but for me it's a badge of honor—proof that I'm living up to my ecofrugal principles.

I'll still keep my eye out for a replacement wallet, since this one is a bit bulky and doesn't have an outside coin pouch. (Also, as this experience shows, it's a good idea to have a backup.) But thanks to this simple repair, I needn't be in any hurry to replace it. Instead of running to Etsy and shelling out $30 for a new one, I can bide my time until something suitable pops up on another thrift shop trip.