Recipe of the Month: Spicy Noodle Stir-Fry

In my last Recipe of the Month post, I noted that I'd been building up a stash of vegetarian recipes from the New York Times Cooking section, which were just waiting for the necessary produce to be in season. Last week, we got a chance to try one of them out. Our green beans have finally recovered enough from last June's deer damage to provide the 12 ounces required for Brian to whip up Nisha Vora's Spicy Noodle Stir-Fry with Salt and Pepper Tofu.

As usual, he had to make a few minor modifications to the recipe—some approved by the author, some not. She said right in the ingredients list that it was fine to replace tamari with soy sauce, arrowroot with cornstarch, and black sesame seeds with white, and a note below the recipe suggested substituting dry sherry for Shaoxing wine. The canola oil he used to fry the tofu more or less fits her description of a "neutral high-heat cooking oil," and it's a lot cheaper than the avocado oil she recommended. His homemade five-spice powder was probably a reasonably close approximation for a bottled blend, and since this ingredient was optional anyway, it presumably wasn't crucial to get the proportions exactly right. And while soba noodles weren't one of the types she specifically suggested in the ingredient list, they do qualify as "dried noodles" (and her three choices—ramen, udon, and "egg-free wheat noodles"—were all different enough from each other to suggest that it didn't matter that much).

However, in other cases he had to take more liberties. The tofu we've been buying at H-Mart doesn't come in an extra-firm variety, so he substituted firm tofu, but took the optional step of freezing and then thawing it to improve the texture. He also used table salt in place of kosher salt in the salt and pepper tofu, while dialing down the white pepper from 1/2 teaspoon to 1/4 teaspoon to accommodate my sensitive palate. For the same reason, he cut the ginger by an even bigger margin, using just a half-inch chunk instead of 2 inches, and cut the cilantro out altogether. But his most dramatic change was attempting to whip up a homemade substitute for "chili-garlic sauce or sambal oelek," neither of which we had available. He replaced this ingredient with two crushed garlic cloves and one dried red chili, leaving out the vinegar, salt, and sugar these sauces usually contain.

After all these changes, it's safe to say Brian's dish probably tasted quite different from the original version. For one thing, these "spicy" noodles were actually quite mild, even for me. The substitution of finer-ground table salt meant the tofu was probably saltier, while the makeshift chili garlic sauce made the whole dish less acidic. But none of these changes stood out that much, because the flavors that really caught our attention came from the five-spice powder. 

This isn't an ingredient we've used in anything else, and the blend of cinnamon, pepper, fennel, anise, and cloves gave the noodles a unique, striking flavor. The only word I could come up with to describe it was "musty," but it wasn't necessarily unpleasant, just unusual. I couldn't quite decide if I liked it or not and kept trying to figure it out with another bite, and then another, until I'd polished off my bowlful and gone back for a bit more (so the answer was probably yes). Brian was less ambivalent; he considered it a definite success and would happily make it again. I told him next time he could be a little more ambitious with the spice, since I found the pepper level more than manageable and the ginger barely detectable. And if we can get our hands on some real chili-garlic paste, that would probably improve the dish too.

But even if we don't repeat this recipe, Brian feels like he's learned a few useful things from it. He now knows how freezing and thawing affects tofu, making it firmer and extra porous, so it absorbs flavors better. He's also now familiar with Chinese five-spice powder, and it's safe to say he's a fan. So if not this exact dish, other recipes containing it will probably be in our future.

So *that's* why I hang my laundry

This week, I responded to a post in the r/Frugal forum on Reddit asking, "What's your lowest payoff frugal tip?" That "lowest" is not a typo; the questioner was interested not in learning tricks to save a bundle of money, but in hearing about frugal habits that are "more about principle than the actual savings." Comments included things like reusing plastic bags, cutting dryer sheets in half, and saving packaging items like twist ties and rubber bands—a habit one commenter said has saved them "tens of cents."

I chimed in to talk about how I always hang my laundry, weather permitting, even though the savings are minimal. Each load I hang instead of running it through the dryer saves about a quarter-therm of gas, which is currently worth about 40 cents—more than the 24 cents it cost when I first wrote about it in 2012, but still far from impressive. Since it takes at least 15 minutes to hang the laundry in the morning and take it down in the evening, that works out to $1.60 an hour. That's barely 10 percent of New Jersey's current minimum wage of $15.92 an hour, making line-drying an even worse financial deal than it was in 2012. And it reduces my carbon footprint by a mere three pounds.

In my 2012 post, I concluded that the real reason I hang laundry is because it makes me feel good, even if the practical benefits are small. But when I commented about it on Reddit, another Redditor replied to point out that there is another practical benefit as well: "you’re extending the life of your clothes by hang drying them instead of blasting them in the dryer." Now, in theory, I knew this already, but I'd never been sure just how significant a perk it really was. After all, how could I tell how much longer my clothes were lasting as a result of being hang-dried? Short of buying two identical garments and line-drying one while tumble-drying the other, how would I even test it?

But just one day after seeing that Reddit post, I hit on what economists call a natural experiment. I was darning up some holes in my blue knit shorts, the pair I'd bought at Sears back in 2015 when there still was a Sears, and it occurred to me that at the time I bought them, I hadn't expected them to last very long. In college, I'd owned a few pairs of sport knit pants from the same company, and I'd quit buying them because they always developed holes within a matter of months. But now, here were these shorts just getting their first little holes after 11 years. So either Lands' End had started using much sturdier fabric some time between 1995 and 2015—not a very likely scenario—or line-drying had made the difference. 

However, it isn't quite fair to say these shorts lasted 11 years when their predecessors lasted less than 1. Being shorts, they were only worn during the summertime, or about 3 months out of every 12. Still, that means they remained intact over 33 months of use, while the knit pants I owned in college never made it more than 6 months. In other words, line-drying the shorts had prolonged their lifespan more than fivefold.

I wouldn't go so far as to extrapolate from this that all my clothes are lasting five times as long thanks to line-drying. These shorts are a knitted cotton fabric, like a T-shirt, and some of the other comments in the Reddit thread suggest these are particularly vulnerable to dryer damage. However, probably about half the garments in our typical laundry load are knitted items, including T-shirts, socks, and undies. If all these garments are lasting five times as long, we're saving 80 percent of what we'd otherwise spend on them. That's roughly a 40 percent savings on clothing as a whole, even if the other half of our clothes gains no benefit at all from line-drying.

How much is this in dollar terms? Well, according to my budget spreadsheet (yes, of course I have a budget spreadsheet), Brian and I spend an average of $389 per year on clothing and shoes. Let's assume shoes, which don't go in the laundry, account for $89 of that, leaving us a nice round $300 a year for clothing. If this figure has had 40 percent knocked off it by line drying, that means our clothing budget without line-drying would be $500, or $200 higher. We do a little over one load of laundry per week—say 60 loads per year—and we line-dry about three-quarters of them, or 45 loads. So that means each load I hang on the line is saving us not just a measly 40 cents on fuel, but also about $4.44 on clothing costs. Add it all up, and that's a savings of $4.84 per load for roughly 15 minutes of work, or $19.36 per hour—well above our state minimum wage, and more than 2.5 times the paltry federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour.

Mind you, knowing all this isn't likely to change my behavior in any meaningful way. I'll still line-dry my clothes in nice weather and resort to the dryer only if it's freezing cold or rains for days on end. But now, each time I do it, I'll have the satisfaction of knowing that it actually is saving us money. Spending 15 minutes out in the sun and fresh air will be just the cherry on top.

Cost Plus Drugs is great...until it isn't

Once again, my apologies for being late with the blog. I do have a good excuse this time; my sister's family was visiting from Sunday through Tuesday, and I spent more or less the whole time with them at my parents' house in Hopewell. So I didn't get a chance to finish up this post until Wednesday. Now, on to a few words about health care costs.

When Brian retired last February, I did a lot of number crunching to find the best prices on the health coverage his job would no longer provide. The state's Get Covered NJ website helped me compare basic health plans quite easily, and a little online searching helped me find a separate plan for vision care. (Side note: the dental discount plan I chose turned out to be a complete bust. The dentist we'd been going to for years wasn't in the plan's network, and the local dentist we decided to try instead charges way, WAY more than the estimates Aetna provided for "average costs" under the plan. Unfortunately, we didn't learn this until we showed up for our appointments, so we ended up paying $100 in cancellation fees and going back to our old dentist. Add in the $145 we paid for the discount card itself—counting the extra $20 I decided to pay for prescription drug discounts that turned out to be worthless—and that's $245 wasted instead of saved.) 

Then, since our new plan had a high deductible, I also used its website to help me check out-of-pocket prices for all our prescription drugs. For most of them, I found that it would be significantly cheaper to buy from Cost Plus Drugs, a Mark Cuban venture that offers generic drugs at rock-bottom prices. The way it works is right there in the name: They charge you the wholesale cost of the drugs from the manufacturer, plus a 15% markup to pay for their overhead, plus a $5 dispensing fee for the pharmacy that makes up the prescriptions, plus shipping, which is a flat $5.25 for most orders. 

All that can add up to a substantially lower price than you'd pay at a retail pharmacy. For example, one of my rosacea medications, a 15% azelaic acid gel, would cost $81 a tube if I bought it from the nearest in-network pharmacy. If I bought it through my health plan's mail-order pharmacy, that would drop the price to just $26.14 per tube plus shipping—but that pharmacy is Amazon, which I don't want to use unless it's the only option. If I used a free discount card from GoodRx, I could get the medicine from a local chain pharmacy (which isn't in our plan's network) for around $36 a tube. But at Cost Plus, the total price including shipping is just $24.27.

This sounds great, and it is, but there are a few downsides. One is that Cost Plus only offers a limited selection of medicines. However, all of ours are on this list, so that wasn't a problem for us. The second is that they aren't in the networks of most health insurers, including ours, so we have to pay the full costs out of pocket. But I didn't consider that a deal breaker because, in the first place, our plan's high deductible meant we'd be paying for most of our meds out of pocket anyway. And even if we happened to hit our deductible in a given year, the plan would only cover 60 percent of medication costs after that. At our local, in-network pharmacy, just our 40 percent copay on the azelaic acid would come to $32.40, which is still higher than the total price from Cost Plus.

The third problem is the difficulty of transferring prescriptions to Cost Plus. Most pharmacies will happily transfer a prescription from another pharmacy for you. So, if I'd been using Amazon or another in-network pharmacy, I could have simply transferred over the prescriptions I had at OptumRx, our old plan's mail-order pharmacy, and used the refills I had remaining. But Cost Plus doesn't do this. You have to ask your doctor to send them a new prescription for each medication you use—and if the meds were prescribed by different doctors, you have to do this multiple times. It took several attempts to get in touch with my new doctor, as well as my dermatologist, and get them to send in my prescriptions to Cost Plus, but I managed it in the end for most of my meds. And once Cost Plus had the prescriptions, it was perfectly straightforward to use. They sent me a notice to say the prescriptions were ready to fill, I went on the site and placed the order in a few minutes, and the meds arrived in about a week.

The fourth problem came up with the last remaining medication I hadn't transferred over yet. This was partly my fault; I thought I had an extra tube of the azelaic acid on hand, which would have been enough to get me through to my next appointment with the dermatologist, so I was planning to ask for a new prescription then. But that extra tube in the drawer was actually a different medication, something we were no longer using. So, with just a few weeks' worth left, I reached out to the dermatologist last month and said, "Hey, I don't have enough of my meds, can you send a new prescription to Cost Plus?" and they obligingly did so. Within a day, I received a message from Cost Plus saying they had the new prescription...but unfortunately, the medication was out of stock. They promised to notify me as soon as it was back in stock, but they gave no indication when that would be.

For a couple of weeks, I waited, keeping a wary eye on my supply, to see if the medicine became available. I considered calling the doctor again to ask to have yet another prescription sent to a different pharmacy (since you can't transfer prescriptions away from Cost Plus either), but the high cost deterred me. Finally, I tried getting in touch with Cost Plus customer service to ask if they had any idea when the meds would be back in stock, and here I ran into the fifth problem: You can't. There's a FAQ on the website and a chatbot who doesn't know anything that isn't in the FAQ, and there's a feedback form on the site you can use to email them a question and hope someone answers. (I tried it over the weekend and got a response on Monday, but all it said was, "We don't have an ETA at this time. You will get an email when it's back in stock," which is exactly what they'd told me already.)

I finally settled on a solution I'd used once before when I ran out of this medicine while on vacation: I bought an over-the-counter preparation of azelaic acid instead. It's only 10 percent azelaic acid instead of 15 percent, but it should be good enough to get me through to my appointment next week. If Cost Plus doesn't have the prescription strength back in stock by then, I can ask the dermatologist to send a new prescription to another pharmacy (ideally one where I can use my GoodRx coupon). But the whole situation made me kind of nervous. If they could simply run out of this medication, could it happen with others as well? Could I log on one day to refill my prescription for, say, my thyroid medication, only to see that it's out of stock and there's no indication when it will be available again? 

I went searching online to see if anyone else had experienced this problem, and I found not one but two Reddit threads where people complained that their medications—much more essential ones than mine—had been out of stock for weeks or even months, with no indication when they'd be back. I also found a bunch of negative reviews on both Reddit and Trustpilot accusing Cost Plus of still graver errors. Some people said their doctors had sent their prescriptions to Cost Plus multiple times and they still weren't showing up on the site. Others said they'd been charged for medications they never received or had orders canceled with no notification. Worst of all, some said they'd ordered medications that were supposed to be temperature-controlled, and Cost Plus had shipped them in a regular envelope in the blazing summer heat, making them unusable. And all of these people said that they were unable to get a satisfactory response from customer service, if they got any response at all.

All this makes me feel torn about relying on Cost Plus in future. On one hand, it's much, much cheaper than the alternatives for some of our meds. But that's assuming we can actually get them there, and that seems far from guaranteed. Right now, my inclination is to keep using Cost Plus when possible, but make sure to have a backup available. I plan to refill all my meds as early as possible, and if they aren't available within two weeks of the time I need them, call the doctor and ask to have the prescription sent somewhere else. I'm not worried about the cold-chain problems, since Brian and I don't take any medications that require temperature control, but if we ever do, I'll make sure to get those somewhere else.

In the course of writing this post, I also learned about a couple of other alternatives. There are two other online pharmacies operating on a cost-plus model that can ship to my area: Blueberry Pharmacy and Midtown Express Pharmacy. (Reddit mentioned the first one, and I found the other through a search on CostPlusPharmacies.com.) Unforunately, Blueberry doesn't offer most of the medications we use in the appropriate dosages, and Midtown Express doesn't let you check prices online. So for now, it looks like my Cost-Plus-plus plan is the soundest one.

Gardeners' Holidays 2026: Tomatofest

This has been a summer of extremes. So far, we've had two triple-digit heat waves, both followed by powerful storms and flooding, interspersed with a multi-day stretch of nose-stinging wildfire smoke. Right now the temperature isn't too bad (a mere 88 degrees Fahrenheit, according to our little weather station), but the humidity is at a wilting 55 percent. 

All this has been rather unpleasant for us, but it seems to suit our tomato plants just fine, because they've been producing like gangbusters. What you see here is just a small fraction of what we've picked in the past week or so. (The little round ones are our trusty Sun Golds, the larger round ones are Premios, and the knobbly yellow ones are a new variety we're trying called Goldie.) Not shown are all the cherry tomatoes sprinkled on salads and falafel wraps, the bigger ones served sliced on top of veggie burgers, and the couple of pounds of mixed Premio and San Marzano paste tomatoes that went into a batch of the Roasted Tomato Fettuccine from The Clueless Vegetarian. (Brian used only a half-pound of pasta for this, rather than the full pound the recipe calls for, making it extra tomatoey.) We're eating tomatoes at almost every meal, and we still can't keep up.

Fortunately, our other veggies are producing at a more measured rate. So far we've harvested just 14 cucumbers, evenly split between our Boston Pickling and South Wind varieties. A few of these got sliced up for salads and falafel, but most of them have been turned into pickles. Luckily, we were able to use home-grown dill for these as well, as not all of it has flowered yet. We've got one half-full quart jar in the fridge right now and one just-started one, which should be ready just in time for a visit from my pickle-loving sister and her family next week. Our pepper plants, likewise, have produced only two fruits so far. And our zucchini plants, which according to tradition ought to be burying us in produce right around now, have so far yielded only three modest-sized squash—though we're hoping that just means they got off to a slow start.

This certainly seems to be the case for our raspberry canes. Normally, they'd be all done with their first crop by now, and possibly even starting to gear up for the second. This year, it looks like the early crop is barely half over. The canes in the front half of the bed seem to be picked clean, but the ones in the back still have loads of berries on them that aren't even ripe yet. As a result, we were actually able to top this year's anniversary cake with fresh home-grown raspberries for the first time. If the delayed harvest continues, this first crop may last us throughout the month of August, and the second could conceivably keep going until the frost hits.

Alas, we can harbor no such hopes about our plum trees. After getting only a modest harvest from them last year, this year it looks like we'll get nothing at all. There's not a single fruit to be seen on the branches, and even the foliage is looking a bit feeble. I'm starting to fear that the black knot, which we've been fighting so diligently for three years with fungicide and heavy pruning, is taking over, and even if the trees survive, they'll no longer be fruit producers. I hate the idea of replacing these cherished trees after 13 years and starting all over, but the thought of having them just sitting sitting in our yard for decades looking gnarled and barren seems even worse.

In short, our garden is currently serving up a mixture of wins and losses, which I guess is pretty much par for the course. It can be frustrating at times, but at least it's never dull.