Recipe of the Month: Creamy Vegan Cabbage Pasta

Recently, I signed up for the New York Times newsletter "The Veggie," which deposits an assortment of vegetarian (though not necessarily vegan) recipes in my inbox each week. I've downloaded several of these that looked like good potential Recipes of the Month, but for most of them, the timing wasn't quite right. It's already too late for the "Vegan Spring Vegetable Frittata" (made with tofu instead of eggs) and "Soba Salad with Grilled Mushrooms and Tofu," which calls for snap peas. At the same time, it's too early for "Basil Tofu." A disappointing start to zucchini season put the kibosh on "Smashed Zucchini with Chickpeas and Peanuts," and the deer damage to our bean plants ruled out "Spicy Noodle Stir-Fry with Salt and Pepper Tofu," which requires 10 ounces of fresh green beans. You may yet see those enticing titles later in the summer, but for now, we're going with something less time-sensitive: "Creamy Vegan Cabbage Pasta." 

Unfortunately, I can't link to this recipe, as I recently ditched my All-Access New York Times subscription in favor of a cheaper news-only subscription that came as a freebie with my PBS donation. But the gist of it is pretty simple: shred a whole head of cabbage, then saute it in olive oil until it's browning a bit. Add sliced garlic, fresh thyme, and a touch of crushed red pepper (Brian cut the amount from the recommended half-teaspoon to a quarter-teaspoon for just a hint of spice). Whip up a white sauce out of oatmilk or cashew milk, nutritional yeast, olive oil and salt, and toss that with cooked pasta, crushed walnuts, and the sauteed veggies. Season with lemon juice and black pepper, garnish with shredded basil, and serve.

Most of the ingredients in this recipe are things we tend to keep on hand. The only exception was the oatmilk or cashew milk, which the recipe specified should be "full-fat" to make a creamy sauce. Brian was all for substituting a mixture of soymilk and a bit of our favorite plant-based cream, but I argued that for our first time making the dish, we should stick to the recipe as closely as possible. So we grabbed a container of Lidl's organic oat milk, which wasn't too extravagant at $3.99. (As it turns out, "full fat" in the case of oatmilk means it's had fat added in the form of rapeseed oil, a.k.a. canola. But it was certainly rich enough to get the job done.)

This dish looked pretty nice with its garnish of fresh basil, and it tasted pretty good too. There was nothing all that exciting about it, but it was a nice, simple, satisfying meal. Its biggest weakness was that it was a bit short on protein. I remedied this by adding a scrambled egg on the side, but that sort of undermined the spirit of making my Recipe of the Month a vegan dish. If we make it again, we might try topping it with some white beans or tofu, and we'll certainly try our usual soymilk in the sauce. Overall, this Recipe of the Month isn't mind-blowing, but it looks like a useful addition to our repertoire.

I was thinking I might be able to give you a bonus recipe here as well. Having purchased the oatmilk and found that it was as creamy as advertised, I wondered if we should take a crack at trying to use it in a plant-based whipped cream. I did a quick search and found a promising-looking recipe at Green Heart Love, which involved supplementing the already rich oat milk with a nearly equal volume of melted coconut oil and stabilizing it with some cream of tartar. Unfortunately, although Brian followed the recipe's very specific instructions to the letter, this worked no better than any of our previous attempts at making vegan whipped cream from scratch. The chilled mixture almost as soon as he started beating it, forming clumps of fat that steadfastly resisted any attempt to blend them back into the liquid. 

Since we still have plenty of oatmilk left, I might have one more go at trying to whip it using a simpler method, like this one from Chef's Resource. But if that doesn't work, I'm going to throw in the towel and use the rest of the oatmilk for pudding—topped with coconut whipped cream from a can.

Defining frugality

NOTE: This post was originally published in May 2010. I accidentally hit "unpublish" and couldn't figure out how to undo that, so it's now republished as if it were new.

 

I just read what struck me as a fairly pithy definition of frugality. It was in a New York Times article about, of all things, a pharmaceutical company based in Israel. One thing that sets this company, Teva, apart from the giants of the American pharmaceutical industry is the way it uses resources (for example, no corporate jets). The article quotes one of the company's officers as saying, “Frugality doesn’t mean doing less. It means doing as much or more with less.”

The thing I like so much about this line is that it counters one of the most common misconceptions about frugality: that it's the same as deprivation, as going without. That kind of thinking leads people to assume that the only reason to be frugal is that you have no choice—in other words, that frugality is for “poor people.” The point that I've tried often to make, and that the Teva executive made particularly well, is that frugality doesn't mean going without; it means getting the most you can out of what you have. It's about abundance, not scarcity, and it can benefit people on every rung of the income ladder.

The formula that Amy Dacyczyn (all hail the Frugal Zealot!) used to express this idea in her Tightwad Gazette books was, “Frugality without creativity equals deprivation.” If you try to save money without thinking creatively, you'll end up going without. But if you put some thought into using your money effectively, you can spend less without feeling deprived. In fact, your frugal choices may end up enriching your life (as I discussed in my Associated Content piece, “Saving Money Isn't About 'Sacrifice'”). I'm pleased to see that there are at least a few folks in the corporate world who take the same view.

More small solutions

Welcome to the next installment in my quick fixes series, all about the small ways we solve problems in our lives without buying new stuff. This time, I've got not three but five small solutions to talk about (though technically, one of them is still in progress). 

Quick fix #1: Earring storage

This year, Brian's birthday project for me was something I'd been needing for a while: a better way to store all my earrings. I'd been simply hanging them on the edge of a box on my dresser, which had some hair clips and other miscellaneous items stashed inside. This arrangement kept most of my earrings visible and easy to access, but it had some major downsides. For one, it could only hold earrings with shepherd's hook backs, so the few pairs I had with straight posts had to live in boxes. And more seriously, whenever I went to fish something out of the box, I'd dislodge some of the earrings and spend the next five minutes hunting for them.

Brian gave this gift to me in stages. On my birthday itself, he presented me with a sketch of his plan for a freestanding rack that could take the place of the box on my dresser. But when he found out I was actually using the box, he came up with a new design: a wall-mounted rack with several tiers. For the second stage, he built a prototype of this design out of cardboard, hung it up, and let me test it out for a few weeks to make sure it worked for me. Then, during the recent heat wave, he disappeared into the workshop (the coolest room in the house) and emerged with the final version, built out of scrap wood. The three tiers hold all my hook-back earrings, and the small tray at the bottom holds the post-back ones. And there's even a bit of room to spare in case I acquire more.

Quick fix #2: Reinforced sunglasses

About a year ago, my fit-over sunglasses cracked just above the right lens. I made two attempts to repair them with Superglue, but it didn't hold. We then tried reinforcing them with a thin strip of plastic glued across the top to bridge the gap. That repair held for several months, but last month it failed as well. So we decided to get out the big guns: plastic welding. We followed the basic procedure in this video, except we didn't remove the lens because we were afraid we wouldn't be able to get it back in. We just added a dab of glue over the break, dropped on a short length of metal snipped from a paper clip, and melted it into the plastic with the soldering gun. We also didn't go through the lengthy process of concealing the melted patch with multiple layers of glue and powdered graphite; instead, I just added a lick of black nail polish and called it good enough.

With this bit of metal shoring up the weak area, I felt pretty confident that the shades wouldn't break again—at least not in the same spot. So imagine my surprise when, last night, I pulled the sunglasses out of my pocket to find that, once again, they'd cracked right across the top over the lens. My puzzlement was short-lived, however, as I quickly realize that this time it was the left side that had broken in exactly the same way. So Brian has now repeated the entire procedure on the left side of the glasses. They don't look terribly pretty, but they should hold up, at least in this particular area.

Quick fix #3: Car windshield shade

When we bought our Honda Fit 15 years ago, one quirk we discovered was that its windscreen was too large for a standard-size windshield shade. We tried mocking up a shade out of cardboard, but it was unwieldy, so we sent away for a two-piece folding shade specially sized to fit our vehicle. That shade served us well until this spring, when we discovered that the fabric on one corner of one of the pieces had worn clean through, exposing the metal rim. I tried patching it up with duct tape, but after a couple of months in the hot sun, the adhesive melted and the tape started sloughing off.

Looking for a more permanent fix, I went hunting through my scrap bin for something to patch it with. The best candidate I could find was an old cloth face mask left over from the pandemic, which was reasonably sturdy but also flexible. I snipped off the ear loops, wrapped the mask around the corner of the shade, and applied a little hot glue to hold it in place. Then, to make sure it stayed put, I stitched all the way around it: up one side, across the top, down the other side, and across the bottom. 

I realized as I worked that I probably should have skipped the gluing step, as it was a lot of work to force the needle through four layers of fabric plus an extra layer of glue, but I got it to work in the end. The patched shade looks a little quirky, but it's secure now, and it can easily be unfolded to deploy it and folded to stash it away when not in use.

Quick fix #4: Thrift-shop wallet

This is yet another example of duct tape not proving to be a permanent solution. Last winter, after the zipper broke on my wallet, I attempted to cover the torn edges on my spare wallet with electrical tape. Unfortunately, it didn't stick very well, so I switched to black duct tape instead. That held up a little better, but eventually it also started to peel off, leaving the frayed edges not just exposed, but also covered in sticky residue. 

So I decided to give up on this flimsy plastic wallet and invest in a secondhand leather one from eBay. Unfortunately, my new-to-me "The Sak" wallet turned out to be far less sturdy than I thought. Only the outside was made from real leather; all the interior bits were fabric covered with a plastic coating, which began wearing off almost immediately. Within a matter of days, it was in even worse shape than its predecessor.

Luckily, I now have a replacement for it. Yesterday, after my monthly CCL meeting, we stopped by Goodwill, where the accessories bin yielded up this beauty:  a nifty little black quilted number big enough to hold my phone, notebook, bills, coins, and large assortment of cards. With tax, it was only $4.25 (clothes aren't taxed in New Jersey, but apparently accessories are). I was so pleased with my find that I elected to round it up and donate the change, since even at $5 it's a bargain.

Quick fix #5: Pants patching

Last month, I discovered that my pride pants—the blue jeans I'd mended with a little rainbow of embroidery floss—had a threadbare spot on the thigh. Not wanting to detract from my previous visible mending job, I tried to cover this hole as invisibly as possible with a patch on the inside secured by stitches running across both horizontally and vertically. 

Unfortunately, within just a few weeks after this patching job, the jeans developed a new, much larger threadbare area on the same thigh. I'm attempting to patch this one using the same method, but since it's a much bigger area, it's taking quite a bit longer. Because I'm hopeless with a sewing machine and I can't handle more than about half an hour of hand-sewing at a stretch, it's taken me several sessions just to get the horizontal stitches down, and I've still got all the vertical ones to add. 

Even as I'm going to all this trouble, I have to recognize that I probably won't be enough to extend the life of these pants by many months. If one thigh has already worn out, the other one probably won't be far behind, and that one will take another major effort to patch. If it were any other pair of pants, I might just give up and send them to textile recycling, but I'm so attached to my little rainbow repair that I'm willing to put in the effort to keep them alive just a little bit longer.

Stepping up our deer game

Two weeks ago, Brian discovered that a deer had yet again invaded our garden. Somehow, it managed to get into the backyard and through our string deer fence without snapping a single line, whereupon it proceeded to wreak havoc among our beans, peas, and even tomatoes. This brought our snap pea harvest to a premature end, and we knew we'd have to, in his words, "step up our deer game" if we wanted to save any of the beans.

Since time was of the essence, we decided to do this with the quickest and easiest method available: adding a layer of deer netting over our existing string fence. Brian initially hoped we could do this job, or at least part of it, with the extra netting we had stored in the shed. But when we went out into the yard and attempted to wrestle this stuff into place over the posts, it stretched less than halfway around the garden enclosure and gave out in a gap between two posts. Clearly, we wouldn't be able to tackle this project without buying some more materials.

First, we went to Ocean State Job Lot and paid $8 for six more of the 7-foot poles we'd used to construct our current deer fence. These don't quite reach the 8-foot height that most experts say is necessary to block out a determined deer, but even if we could have found longer poles, we wouldn't have been able to haul them home in our little Honda Fit. We'd have had to rent a truck, adding an extra layer of planning to a project we needed to get done now. And as Brian pointed out, deer don't get into our yard all that often, so this fence doesn't have to be truly deer-proof. Like his bike lock, it just has to be good enough to deter casual thieves.

Our next stop was Home Depot, where we shelled out another $26.65 for a 100-foot roll of 5-foot-wide deer netting. This was actually a bit bigger than we would have preferred, since the gap between the ends of the posts and the top of our groundhog fence is only around 3 feet. We had a bit of discussion over whether to let the extra netting hang inside the garden enclosure or outside, so it would drape over the protruding "baffle" of the groundhog fence. I was in favor of leaving it inside, which would probably be easier and look neater. But Brian pointed out that the posts holding up the deer fence aren't precisely aligned with the shape of the garden enclosure. When we put them up, we'd set the ones on the far side about eight inches in from the corner of the groundhog fence so that the lines wouldn't obstruct our clothesline. So if we draped the netting inside those lines now, it would leave a gap on that side that he feared an enterprising deer might exploit. I wasn't quite sure how a full-grown deer could squeeze into such a small space, but I figured it couldn't hurt to do it his way.

To get the netting into place, we worked in tandem. I stood outside the garden enclosure holding the big roll of netting, and Brian stood inside hauling the netting up and over the posts and fishing line. We worked our way slowly around the fence line with me spooling out the netting and him fastening it to the posts and the line with a series of little twist ties. The hardest part of this job was keeping track of the edge of the netting, which kept tangling up and clinging to itself like Velcro. But eventually, inch by inch, we struggled and sweated and swore our way all the way around the outside, from the front corner back to the far edge of the gate. Then Brian took two of the new posts we'd just bought and affixed them to the gate itself, weaving them through the wire lattice to hold them in place. Draping the netting over these two new posts extended its protection all the way around the enclosure while still allowing us to open and close the gate.

That took care of the garden enclosure itself, but Brian wanted to add an extra layer of protection. He figured the deer were most likely getting into the back yard by jumping over the gate in the side yard, since it's the only spot that offers a straight shot to the yard from the street. So, to reinforce this area, he took the other four stakes, draped them with netting, and wove them into the chain-link fence, just as he'd done with the garden gate. With about 6 feet of the posts sticking up above the existing 4-foot fence, this new structure stands well above 8 feet, so we can hope it will be enough to prevent deer from hopping into our yard by this route. And if they somehow manage to get in from the back or from one of our neighbors' yards, we'll have the string-and-net fence around the garden enclosure as a fail-safe.

This netting contraption isn't an elegant solution, nor a permanent one. The plastic netting will eventually break down with exposure to the sun, if the deer and other wildlife don't chew through it first. At some point, we'll probably replace it with a post-and-wire fence: 8-foot metal posts all around the garden enclosure, wrapped in multiple rows of wire. This design is like our original fishing-line fence, but taller and more durable. But we're hoping our quick-and-dirty mesh barrier will at least keep the deer out long enough for us to harvest what's left of this season's crops.