Recipe of the Month: General Tso's Cauliflower and Tofu

May's Recipe of the Month came about because on our last Lidl trip, Brian picked up a cauliflower without having any specific plan for it. When he asked me if there was any particular cauliflower dish I'd like, I suggested that he kill two birds with one stone by trying a new recipe that I could post on the blog. So he did a little search and came across one called General Tso's Cauliflower and Tofu on the Cinnamon Society website. As far as he could tell, we had all the ingredients for it except the chili sauce, and he figured he'd most likely want to cut way back on that anyway to accommodate my sensitive taste buds. So he decided to just omit it and see how the recipe turned out.

As he started preparing the dish, however, he discovered he'd made a mistake. The recipe called for "baked tofu," which he had assumed meant that it would involve baking some cubed tofu in the oven. But apparently, what the author had in mind was commercial baked tofu that comes in a package. She warned that you could not simply substitute pressed tofu, as it "falls apart too easily." Rather than run out to the H-Mart for some baked tofu, Brian opted to cut his pressed tofu into cubes and pan-fry it to give it a firm, golden outer skin. He also made a few minor adjustments to the seasoning: cutting the amount of canola oil tossed with the cauliflower from a quarter-cup to 2 tablespoons, increasing the teaspoon of sugar to one and a half teaspoons, and cutting the quarter-teaspoon of red pepper flakes down to a mere eighth of a teaspoon. And he disregarded the direction to separate the white and green parts of the scallion, simply slicing up the whole thing and tossing it in the wok as he always does.

Most of these alterations, as far as we could tell, worked fine. The tofu did not fall apart during cooking, and the sauce, though mild, was far from bland. The one thing we both noted was that its flavor was rather bright. Although it contained only half a tablespoon of rice vinegar, which is milder than many other types of vinegar, the combination of that and the tomato paste gave it quite a strong acidic tang. Brian suspected part of the reason was he'd left out the 2 to 3 tablespoons of chili sauce, which would otherwise have increased the volume of the sauce and diluted the other flavors. I suggested that next time he could make up the extra volume with water, but he feared that would thin the sauce too much. My other idea was to replace some or all of the sugar with molasses, adding a darker note to balance out the brightness of the other ingredients.

In any case, the extra acidity wasn't a major drawback, particularly after the first few bites. We both enjoyed the dish enough to take second helpings and happily gobbled up the leftovers for lunch. We'll definitely be adding this recipe to our stable of cauliflower dishes, which means we'll have plenty of opportunities to tinker with it further. One note I gave him for next time is that so long as he's leaving out the chili sauce, I think he can safely increase the red pepper flakes to the full quarter-teaspoon the recipe calls for. Even my wussy palate should be able to handle that much.

More quick fixes

Well, here I am again, updating the blog on a Monday after a busy weekend. After being away in Virginia last Sunday, we spent Friday in Hopewell having a delayed Mother's Day celebration with my mom, this time tidying up the patio area in the back yard. We topped that off with back-to-back dance gigs on Saturday and Sunday, each at least an hour long and at least 45 minutes away, and the latter of the two in blazing noonday sun and 90-degree heat. I'd originally planned to come home and write the blog entry after that, but all I had the energy to do was drink a quart of water and spend the rest of the afternoon playing puzzle games. 

With all this going on, we didn't have time to tackle any big projects, so instead I'm writing about three small ones we've done over the past few months. These are all the sort of quick fixes that are a mainstay of our ecofrugal lifestyle: solving problems by substituting a bit of time and creativity for new, store-bought items.

Quick Fix #1: Free wall art

Our house is a...well, I don't know what style it is, exactly. It was built around 1970, so it has neither the charm of an old-fashioned Cape Cod or bungalow nor the practicality of a modern open-concept home. Instead, it has a single narrow hallway connecting the office at one end to the bathroom at the other, with entrances leading off it into the living room, bedroom, hall closet, and kitchen. It's a pretty drab space, and until this year, we hadn't done much of anything to it. We'd hung one piece of art—actually, six small nature sketches in one long frame—but since they were all in black and white, it didn't do much to liven up the area.

But the thing that bothered me most about the hallway was the two small, rectangular bumps on the side wall. One, located about at my eye level, is the thermostat, and the other, higher up the wall (just barely visible in the photo) is our doorbell. They don't even line up neatly with each other, but since they're both wired into the wall, there's no way to move them. They're just two randomly placed horizontal rectangles sticking out of the wall like warts.

So, last year, I came up with an idea to make those two oddly placed rectangles look intentional by surrounding them with a bunch of other rectangles: an array of small art pieces hung horizontally on the wall. To this end, we picked up a set of four small picture frames (roughly 6" by 8") for 50 cents each at a thrift shop. The problem then was what to put in them. We had only one piece of art the right size, a tiny abstract oil painting done by one of our niblings as a grade-school project. Should we try to thrift some artwork to fit the other frames? Should Brian draw some pictures to fill them? Or should we perhaps make enlarged prints of some family photos?

We continued dilly-dallying until last March, when Brian had a brainwave: If all we wanted was to make those awkward rectangles on the wall look intentional, it didn't matter what was in the frames. He hung the two pieces of horizontal art we had—the little abstract oil painting and a colorful David Goodsell painting of a virus that he got as a retirement present at work—and then simply filled up the rest of the frames with sheets of origami paper in coordinating colors. They're just blocks of solid color, but seen as part of a group, they look intentional. And we can always swap them out later if we find some other art we like better.

Quick Fix #2: A hands-free phone stand

I like to do the Wordle and other New York Times puzzles on my phone each morning while I eat my breakfast. The problem is, using one hand to eat and one to type leaves none free to hold the phone. I've tried propping it up against something, but it isn't very stable that way and tends to topple down with any stray movement. 

When we went to IKEA last March to pick up a new set of window shades, Brian spotted a little phone stand that he thought could solve this problem. The design was quite elegant: just a small slab of bamboo with a slot cut into it to hold the phone at the right angle. It was compact enough that it wouldn't be in the way on the kitchen table, and the price tag was a mere $5. But then he thought, why spend even $5 on something he could probably make himself for free?

He cut a scrap of plywood to approximately the same size as the IKEA stand, then set about gouging a slot in it with his Dremel tool. It wasn't set up to make angled cuts, so he had to place a triangular block of wood on top of the plywood scrap and use that to line up the cut. This awkward arrangement made it difficult to control the tool, and he ended up making the slot too big and having to nail a little shim to the inside. The finished piece isn't exactly elegant, but it serves its purpose: allowing me to eat my toast and solve the Wordle at the same time.  

Quick Fix #3: Not-so-visible mending

One of my most successful visible mending projects to date was the rainbow of stitches I added to my lightweight blue jeans last year to cover up the wear along the thigh inseam. I later added a similar row of stitches along the inseam of the other leg and eventually, as the worn areas spread, expanded both rows by adding a row of darker red stitches to the end. But last time I washed the jeans, I discovered a new threadbare patch farther in on the thigh. I've repaired holes like this before by adding colorful patches, but I didn't want to do that here because I feared it would clash with the colorful stitching I'd already added. How could I patch the hole in a way that wouldn't distract from my rainbow repair?

To solve this problem, I adapted a method I read about on the Wonderfil blog. I patched the jeans not on the outside, but on the inside, using a small fabric scrap a little bigger than the threadbare area. Then, to reinforce the patch, I put in several rows of stitches through both layers of fabric (the denim of the jeans and the patch underneath), running all the way across the hole. Not being proficient with a sewing machine, I couldn't do as thorough a job of this as the Wonderfil blogger did, but I ran multiple rows of stitches across the patch horizontally, then multiple rows vertically. When I was done, I trimmed away all the excess fabric from the patch, leaving a piece just big enough to cover the hole.

The finished repair is far from perfect. My hand-stitching is nowhere near as neat or precise as stitches put in by machine, and the navy thread I used isn't an exact match for the fabric of the jeans. But it should keep the hole from expanding, and it blends in well enough that a casual observer probably wouldn't spot it. And even if someone happens to notice the repair, it blends into the background well enough to let my rainbow stitching stand out as the real star of the show.

Hell strip purgatory

For the second week in a row, I must apologize for being late with this blog entry. This time it's because we were away for the weekend visiting our friends in Virginia, and after driving home and unpacking, I didn't have the energy to tackle it. (I'm starting to think I should just switch to updating the blog on Monday every week, rather than over the weekend. We've been a lot busier in retirement than we expected to be, but the weekends seem to be even busier than the weekdays. Or at least, they're more likely to be busy for whole days at a time.)

Anyway, remember how we decided last summer to tear out the grass from our hell strip, that narrow sliver of turf between the road and the sidewalk, and replace it with some native wildflowers? And how we put in a bunch of seeds last fall and were just waiting for spring to see what came up? Well, spring is now here, and the answer is officially, "Not much." Here's how the hell strip looked as of last week: just a long patch of lightly mulched dirt with a few rogue tufts of grass and weeds. There were a few surviving salvia plants down at the far end, and the one yarrow we put in next to the street sign was actually looking pretty healthy. (Yarrow, as far as I can tell, is literally impossible to kill.) But none of the stuff we'd started from seed appeared to have germinated at all.

Disappointed but not deterred, Brian spent an hour or so last Thursday clearing out the patch. He didn't want to till the whole thing up for fear of disturbing any flowers that might still decide to germinate, so he sat on the sidewalk and painstakingly pulled out the weeds by hand. That got it back to its baseline state of a bare bed with a thin covering of mulch, which looks dull but at least reasonably neat. Then he put in a few rudbeckia seedlings (black-eyed Susans) that he'd started over the winter, using our new seed snail method. 

However, these are so tiny that he's not that confident they're going to survive, so we're on the lookout for additional plants that might be suitable for this difficult area. They need to meet several fairly stringent criteria:

• Perennial and low-maintenance
• Small enough to fit in a one-foot strip of dirt
• Tolerant of full sun and clay soil
• Able to withstand some exposure to road salt
• Unappetizing to deer

It's a tough order to fill, but I've found a few possible candidates, including catmint, creeping thyme, and something called antennaria (commonly known as pussy-toes). And if we can't find any of those, well, we can always fill in the whole thing with yarrow. We'll have to go out there with the string trimmer to beat it back occasionally, but that's less work than mowing.

In the meantime, I can offer one update on a project that's been resolved a bit more satisfactorily. Around the same time we finished planting out the hell strip last fall, we also had to fix several other things in our yard that got damaged by our neighbor's sewer-line repair. We were able to put most of it to rights, but we couldn't repair our flagstone path because that area of the yard was still torn up—and it stayed torn throughout the winter and most of the spring. But this month, our neighbor finally managed to get the sunken area filled in and planted with clover seed. This covered up the new sewer access that the workers had put in, but Brian went back in and uncovered it so that in case they ever need it again, they won't have to rip up the yard to find it. To make the pipe a bit more sightly, he constructed a hex-shaped wooden frame for it, then carefully fitted in the flagstones around it. So now we have a direct path from the street to our door again, and soon enough we should have some nice green clover to fill in the area around the stones. Based on how well it's coming up so far, we expect this area will be fully filled in a lot quicker than the hell strip will.

Gardeners' Holidays 2026: Spring Planting

Once again, this blog entry has been slightly delayed due to a very busy weekend. From Friday through Sunday, we had not one but two RPG sessions and not one, not two, but three dance gigs. So it wasn't until today that we had a couple of free hours to take care of our big spring planting: peppers, tomatoes, climbing beans, bush beans, cucumbers, basil, and dill.

We ran into an unexpected challenge with the Climbing French beans. This is a variety we can't get from our normal seed supplier, so we save and dry some of the beans from each harvest to plant the following year. Unfortunately, when Brian opened up the jar in which he'd been storing last year's beans, he discovered they'd grown some kind of fuzzy mold in storage. It was only on the surface, but we still weren't sure how it would affect their viability. Fortunately, we still had some dried beans left from our 2024 crop, so to be on the safe side, we planted one of the old beans next to each of the newer, fuzzier ones. If we end up with too many plants as a result, we can always thin them.

We also decided, on the fly, to shake up the way we plant our dill. We don't use very much of it, so in previous years, we've set aside a single square for it in the garden. Not only does this create an awkward little asymmetry in our garden plan, it doesn't do much good, since the dill almost never comes in where we actually planted it. Instead, we get little rogue plants popping up all over the bed, as you can see here. To get around this problem, this year we intended to put in the dill toward the north edge of one of the large blocks set aside for zucchini. The zucchini plants, though large and sprawling, never actually fill this entire block; they tend to stretch themselves out southward, toward the sunlight. So we thought we could easily tuck the dill in next to one without impinging on it.

However, as Brian was transplanting the pepper seedlings, he had a better idea. Last year, we started doubling up our pepper plants, putting two into each four-square block. To give each plant as much room to spread as possible, Brian puts them in diagonally across the block rather than side by side. This leaves a little gap in the corner of each bed where a dill plant could probably nestle quite comfortably in the shade of the nearby peppers. So instead of planting all our dill in one square, I dropped a few seeds into each of these little corner spaces. If they all come up, that'll give us three dill plants, which should be more than enough for our modest, mostly pickle-oriented needs.

As we were getting these crops into the ground, we discovered that we might have a whole new crop to look forward to this year. Eleven years after we first planted our hardy kiwi vines, we finally have flowers on both the male and female plants. The female vine first flowered in 2020, and we initially hoped that the male would follow a year or two after. But sadly, before it ever got the chance, it was brutally murdered by the landscapers who work at the apartment building behind our house. (Brian had caught them snipping at the kiwis before, so he'd put up a sign on the fence reading "This is a plant, not a weed. Please do not cut it!" in both English and Spanish. But apparently the landscapers either couldn't read either language or couldn't be bothered to try, because not long after, we saw them stick their shears right through the fence, onto our property, and cut off the male plant at the root.) 

So, two years ago, we put in a new male plant (and protected it with a layer of hardware cloth behind the fence, too narrow for the gardeners to stick their shears through). And today, that new male plant flowered for the first time. The male and female vines are pretty closely intertwined, so I had to check carefully to confirm that these flowers were on the male and not a stray branch of the female. But I traced the vine all the way down to the base and confirmed these flowers definitely belong to the male. So, if nothing else goes wrong, we might finally have some berries to harvest in late summer or early fall. Of course, there are never any guarantees in gardening, so I'm not counting my kiwis before they're hatched. But at least there's a chance, which is more than we've had for the last eleven years.