Three quick fixes

A big part of living ecofrugally is finding ways to fix problems without throwing a lot of money at them. Just in the past week, we've had three problems that most people probably would have solved by purchasing something—possibly something quite expensive. Instead, we fixed them with minimal expense, plus a little ingenuity.

Problem #1: The Unkindest Cut

During one of our afternoon walks, Brian and I decided to pop into the supermarket and see what kind of Hanukkah candles they had available. (Answer: the cheap kind that drip all over the place.) On the way back out, Brian bumped his arm against the railing that runs along the pedestrian pathway leading up to the store—right at the spot where there was a small gap in the railing. And apparently that little, innocuous-looking break was pretty sharp, because it slashed right through the sleeve of his winter coat, leaving a right-angled gash a couple of inches long.

If this had happened to any other garment, I'd just have whipped out my trusty sewing kit and stitched it up as soon as we got home. But because it was his winter coat, I had some doubts about whether I could sew up the tear securely enough to make it watertight. Brian thought maybe the best fix would be to darn it first, then add a patch to protect the stitches, and then, as a final layer of protection, give it a coat of waterproofing spray. But as it turned out, once I'd finished darning it—going over the entire length of the rip twice, first with a back stitch to fasten the torn pieces together, then with a whip stitch to tack down the raw edges—Brian thought it looked secure enough to wear as is. If it turns out not to be, we can still go over it with the waterproofing spray, but it seems to be good enough for now.

Obvious fix: a new winter coat for around $200. Ecofrugal fix: a few cents' worth of thread and about 20 minutes of work.

Problem #2: The Dark Room

In order to stitch up Brian's coat, I had to take it into the bedroom, which is the only place I can reasonably sew without being interrupted by cats. (This is not only a hassle but a hazard, since eating a length of thread—something they would definitely do if they got the chance—could literally tear up their insides.) Unfortunately, this room isn't really ideal for the purpose. The only place to sit is the bed, which is also the only surface to work on, but the worst problem is the light level. Like most of the rooms in our house, the bedroom has no built-in lighting, and there's no spot in the room that could accommodate a floor lamp like we use in the office. So for the past 18 years, it's been lit solely by a table lamp on Brian's dresser with a single 1600-lumen bulb. This might be enough to light up the whole room if it were more centrally placed, but as is, it leaves the bed largely in shadow. Several times while working, I had to haul the bulky coat over to the dresser and maneuver the sleeve up next to the light to see my work, then take it back to the bed to continue sewing.

From time to time over the years, Brian and I had discussed ways to get more light into that room, but we'd never settled on anything. But this time, I decided I'd had enough. I told Brian I really, really needed more light in there, and he proposed a trip up to the Habitat for Humanity ReStore in Manville. I was hoping to find a table lamp there that could accommodate two bulbs, like the one we currently have in the guest room, but their limited lamp selection didn't include any. What we did find was a little desk lamp with a flexible neck that we could set up on my dresser as a secondary light source. It was marked at $5.49, but because it had a half-price orange tag, the final price was only $2.74.

Since the lamp didn't come with a bulb, and since we didn't have any spares at home that were bright enough, we made a side trip over to the nearest Home Depot. There we discovered that LED light bulb prices, after falling steeply for years, had apparently shot back up. A four-pack of soft white, 1,600-lumen LED bulbs would set us back a minimum of $16, or $4 per bulb—twice as much as we'd paid in 2016. Fortunately, there was a Target right next door, so we checked there and found a 4-pack of soft white, 1,340-lumen bulbs—not quite as bright, but probably bright enough—for only $10. With one of these installed, our new lamp provides perfectly good task lighting on the bed surface. It can also be angled up to splash light against the ceiling for more general illumination. And with three bulbs left over, we were able to upgrade the two-bulb fixture in the guest room to get a bit more light in there too.

Obvious fix: a brand-new two-bulb lamp for around $107 plus $16 for new bulbs, for $123 total. Ecofrugal fix: Around $13 for the lamp and bulbs together.

Problem #3: The Face Monster

For about five years now, Brian has been using a CPAP machine for sleep apnea. And hating it. He hates being tethered to it while he sleeps. He hates the way the mask feels on his face. He hates having air literally forced down his throat. He hates having to haul it with him whenever we travel. After a lot of effort, he's trained himself to fall asleep while wearing it, but if he wakes up at any point during the night, he can't get back to sleep with it on. So he ends up unplugging for the rest of the night, which means he's often just teetering on the edge of the minimum four hours a night required to be a "compliant" patient (a loathsome term that strips the patient of any agency in their own care and replaces it with a duty to obey orders without question).

But perhaps the most annoying thing about it is that it was kind of forced on him. When he was first diagnosed with sleep apnea, his doctor told him that he "needed" a CPAP, without so much as mentioning other options like positional therapy (side sleeping). True, positional therapy doesn't work for everyone, but neither does CPAP; as many as 50 percent of patients give up on the machine because it's more unbearable than the symptoms that sent them to the doctor in the first place. Wouldn't it make sense to let patients at least try the cheaper, less intrusive method first?

Brian has tried a couple of DIY solutions to force him to sleep on his side, like attaching a tennis ball to the back of his T-shirt and wearing a backpack to bed, but neither one worked very well. The tennis ball didn't stay put, so he'd wake up on his back with the ball twisted around to the side of his body. The backpack did a better job of keeping him in place, but it was too uncomfortable to wear all night.

Still, in light of how much he dislikes the CPAP, I thought it was worth another try. I was going to suggest he try a commercial device like the Rematee "bumper belt," which is basically a mini backpack filled with inflatable air pillows. But then it occurred to me that we actually had something that might serve the same purpose: a mini backpack Brian picked up years ago as conference swag. I fished it out of the box where we'd stowed it and experimented stuffing it with different things. First, I tried some old T-shirts from the pile bound for textile recycling, but Brian said those were too soft; if he had that squishy pack on his back, he'd just roll right on top of it. Then I tried it filling with books, which offered more resistance but tended to slide around a bit. Finally I went to the stash of old boxes we keep for wrapping gifts and found a couple that filled the bag snugly: one large flat one and one smaller one in front, shimmed up by an old pair of sandals (also from the textile recycling pile) on either side. When Brian tested the pack with these in, he found that it fit on his back without sliding around and was rigid enough to prevent him from rolling over.

So far, this is just an untested prototype. We still have to see how it performs in an actual sleep situation: whether it can manage to keep him on his side, and if so, whether that's enough to keep him from snoring and sputtering. But if it does, it may allow him to finally free himself from the face monster.

Obvious fix: a $125 commercial device. Ecofrugal fix: a makeshift gadget that took only a few minutes to assemble and cost nothing at all.

Recipe of the Month: Smoked Cauliflower Soup

This is going to be a very full weekend. Tomorrow I'm spending the entire afternoon with my Citizens' Climate Lobby chapter, watching CCL's Fall Virtual Conference (which technically has already started, but tonight's session is just a "reception" that I don't consider important). On Sunday, we've got a role-playing game session scheduled in the afternoon, after which we'll just have time to grab some dinner before dashing off to a rehearsal for the Cotillion Singers—an ad hoc group that forms once a year and learns four or five pieces for a single performance at the Princeton Country Dancers Winter Cotillion. So tonight is about the only time I have free to dash off a quick blog entry about November's Recipe of the Month: the Smoked Cauliflower Soup from Everyday Happy Herbivore.

This is the fifth recipe we've tried from this cookbook, which we picked up at Half Price Books last Christmas, and all the others were varying degrees of lackluster. The Spicy Orange Broccoli was decidedly lacking in orange flavor, the Chickpea Tenders were dry and crumbly, and the low-sugar, high-fiber Glazed Pumpkin Biscuits and Apple Fritter Cups were both stodgy and insufficiently sweet. So I was feeling a bit disillusioned with the book, but I decided to give it one more try, this time with a simple recipe that looked like it could hardly go wrong. Then, if that one proved as disappointing as the others, I'd pass on the book to someone else.

The Smoked Cauliflower Soup recipe certainly looked straightforward enough. The first step is chopping up a whole cauliflower and boiling it until tender. While that's going, you whip up a soup base from a cup of nondairy milk (we used soy) seasoned with onion powder, garlic powder, Cajun seasoning, salt, paprika, and liquid smoke. Then you add the cooked cauliflower, blend it all together, and heat it through. 

It seemed pretty foolproof, and yet Brian was wary. Based on his knowledge and our previous experiences with this cookbook, he was convinced the amount of seasoning in the recipe was going to be woefully inadequate. So he doubled the liquid smoke from an eighth of a teaspoon to a quarter, tripled the Cajun seasoning from a half-teaspoon to a half-tablespoon, and bumped up the salt from a tiny dash to a robust teaspoon and a quarter. He also decided the meal needed more protein, so he supplemented the dish with some roasted chickpeas. These were even simpler than the soup itself: he just drained a can of chickpeas, tossed them with a half tablespoon of canola oil and a teaspoon of Cajun seasoning (to match the soup), and baked them at 450F for 20 minutes. 

Both these alterations turned out to be wise choices. The thick soup had a texture rather like Cream of Wheat, and without Brian's additional seasonings, it would probably have tasted pretty much like it too. Instead, it was reasonably flavorful, and sprinkling the chick peas on top gave it a bit of textural interest as well. In fact, I thought the chickpeas were by far the best part of the meal, and I saw the soup as little more than a vehicle for carrying them. Brian liked it better than I did, enough to take seconds at dinner and willingly polish off the leftovers for lunch the next day, but he didn't absolutely love it. All in all, we both agreed that while there was nothing wrong with the soup recipe, it wasn't nearly as interesting as most of the other things we do with cauliflower, such as his aloo gobi and the roasted cauliflower dish that was our Recipe of the Month for June. So while we both liked it all right, we don't see any compelling reason to make it again.

All in all, I'd give this dish a solid C, maybe a C plus. It's a passing grade, but I'm not sure it's a good enough one to bring up the cookbook's GPA to a reasonable level—particularly when you consider how much Brian had to amplify the seasoning in the recipe just to get it up to that passing score. So I can't decide if we should keep tinkering with the cookbook or give up on it. Maybe we should pick out just one more interesting-looking recipe, give that one a try, and let that be the deciding vote. If that dish is a keeper, so is the cookbook; if not, it's time to write the book off as a loss.

Taming the hell strip, part 2

So, I realize there's not much to see in this photo. But there's a lot more going on below the surface. 

Remember how, four months back, Brian first embarked on his project to transform our hell strip (the narrow sliver of land between the sidewalk and street) from a ragged patch of weeds to an actual planting bed? At that time, we planted about one-third of it and assumed the rest would have to wait until spring. But on further consideration, Brian thought it would make more sense to plant seeds now, in the fall, rather than start seedlings indoors and transplant them in springtime. That way, they'd get a head start on germination, the same way the weeds do, and they wouldn't have to deal with transplant shock. 

Last weekend, we started the process. Brian used our King of Spades shovel to chop up the turf into blocks, which I turned over and whacked with a trowel to knock as much dirt off the roots as possible before dumping the top layer into a bucket destined for the compost bin. Then, while Brian went to empty the buckets and fetch his supplies, I set to work with the trowel excavating a narrow channel running along the edge of the road. When he returned, he set down one of the two-by-fours he'd brought into this channel, forming a boundary for the bed. (The main reason he had to do this is that there's a curb cut along that stretch of sidewalk, so he couldn't rely on the curb to form a boundary. But the two-by-fours will also form an extra barrier to keep the plants from impinging on the sidewalk and make the bed look more defined.) 

We then worked together to dig out a similar channel along the other side, next to the sidewalk, and fill it in with a second two-by-four. After that, Brian had to get out his big tape measure and measure the exact distance from the end of this section to the end of the bed, right at the property line, and go inside to cut the boards to the right length. Actually, he had to break one of them up into two smaller pieces, because there's a sewer access pipe right at the edge of the sidewalk. So he fitted two shorter pieces around it, one on either side, and capped the whole area off with a short piece at the end.

At this point, we had a nice, empty planting bed, but we weren't quite ready to plant in it. We'd used up all the free mulch we got last summer, and Brian didn't think it would be a good idea to put the seeds in without a layer of mulch to protect them. We could have used leaves, as we do in some of our other beds, but he wasn't confident they'd stay put in such an exposed area. And by that point, it was getting a bit late in the day to run out to the store and buy some. So we left the bed empty until we had a chance to pick some up at Lowe's (along with a few other things I'll tell you about shortly).

Yesterday, with mulch in hand, we were ready to finish the job. We had three kinds of seeds to plant: salvia, which we already have some of in the first part of the bed; rudbeckia, or black-eyed Susans, which we'd picked up a couple of packets of at Ocean State Job Lot; and golden ragwort, a native plant that we got a small packet of as a freebie at a town fair. It combines low-growing foliage with tall flower spikes that bloom in April and May, making it a good complement to the salvia and rudbeckia, which bloom from midsummer into fall. And all three are supposed to be reasonably deer resistant, a key requirement if we want the plants to survive in an area where deer stroll right up the street browsing on anything they can reach. (It's less clear how the new flowers will fare against groundhogs, but we'll have to wait and see.)

To ensure a good mix of the three varieties throughout the bed, I worked out a staggered arrangement for planting them: ragwort on the near side of the bed, then salvia about four inches along on the opposite side, then back to the near side for rudbeckia, then across to the other for another ragwort, and so on. Brian marked up a ruler with pieces of masking tape to indicate the lengthwise spacing, then placed the roll of masking tape on the ground at one end to mark the spot where his seeds would go. He added a small pinch of seeds in the circle formed by the tape, moved it to the next spot, added a pinch of seeds there, and continued the pattern along the whole length of the bed. My job was to scoot along beside him, handing him the packets of seeds in the correct order, so he wouldn't have to juggle all three. He had to be pretty sparing with his pinches—no more than three or four seeds at a time—to make the ragwort and salvia seeds last the whole length of the bed, but he managed it with a tiny bit to spare. I sprinkled the remaining ragwort and rudbeckia seeds in amongst the existing salvia plants in the older portion of the bed so everything would eventually have the same mix of flowers. Once that was done, we covered everything up with a nice layer of mulch to protect the seeds from wind and hungry birds (and, equally important, make it clear that the hell strip is now a planting bed and not merely a bare patch of ground). Then, as a finishing touch, I took one of the phone line insulators from the edges of our other flowerbed and set it over top of the sewer pipe opening. Besides looking nicer, this will keep the pipe from getting covered up by mulch, so it will be easy to locate.

All told, yesterday's portion of the job took about an hour, and we had lovely weather for it. Then, not content to rest on his laurels (or ragworts), Brian went on to tackle a couple of other jobs that needed doing in the front yard. To put this in context, I need to go back a month or so. One morning in early October, Brian and I noticed a lot of hustle and bustle going on in our next-door neighbor's yard, which turned out to be a bunch of workers attempting to unclog a blocked sewer line. They eventually worked out that to do the job properly, they'd have to dig up and replace the entire line, all the way out to the curb. And although it was technically his sewer line, a good portion of it was on our property. (Apparently these two lots used to be one larger lot, which would explain that unused curb cut in the middle of our curb.) To get at the pipe, they'd have to tear out the hedge on that side of our yard and rip up the underlying ground.

Unfortunately, we were about to head off to Virginia for a weekend with friends, so we couldn't stick around to supervise this process. We told him to do whatever he needed to do and not worry about replacing our hedge, which wasn't in such great shape anyway. And the workers took us at our word, because when we returned home, one whole side of our yard was missing. There was just a big crater in the ground, surrounded by caution tape and plastic sheeting.

Over the next couple of days, the workers filled in the hole, leaving a huge patch of bare dirt, and cleared away the plastic. At that point, it became apparent that a lot more than just the hedge was missing. The excavation had torn up part of the slate flagstone path that led from our front door to the street, and at least three stones were completely gone. It had also damaged our raspberry trellis, shearing off the lines and ripping out both the U-post at the near end and the anchor stake we'd secured it to. Brian was able to find the post, but it was too badly bent to reuse, and one of the three turnbuckles attached to it was missing. And, since the lost post had also been one corner of the invisible deer fence around our front flowerbed, that was damaged as well.

Luckily, none of this damage is terribly difficult or costly to repair. We were able to pick up a new U-post and another turnbuckle for about $26 at Lowe's, and we already had one additional anchor post left from the set of four we'd bought to stake our plum tree in 2020. After finishing up the hell strip on Saturday, Brian drove the new U-post into the spot where the old one had been, and I held the trellis wires in place while he tightened them up. He secured the new anchor into an undisturbed patch of ground a little farther back from where the old one had been and fastened another length of cable, which we still had left over from last time, around the anchor and up to the top of the post. We also had some of the fishing line we'd used for the deer fence left, so fixing that was a simple matter of tying a piece to the new post.

As for the flagstones, Brian wants to hold off on replacing those until the disturbed patch of dirt in the yard has fully settled. By the time that happens, the ground may be frozen, so it's possible it will have to wait until spring. But whenever we're ready, we have a couple of extra flagstones in the back yard, half buried next to the clothesline, that we can unearth and add to the damaged end of the path. And for the third, Brian thinks he can cannibalize one from the rainwater channel he added to the side slope in our backyard last year. If we find that the channel doesn't work so well without it, we can always replace it with one of the leftover tiles from our downstairs bathroom renovation.

Gardeners' Holidays 2025: Late Harvest

With the days growing shorter and temperatures dipping ever lower, Brian and I have spent a lot of the past few weeks getting ready for winter. We've had our boiler tuned up, put our warm comforter on the bed, and gotten our flu and COVID jabs. I've stashed away my light cotton socks and filled up my sock drawer with my warmer wool and acrylic ones. My wearable blanket and pressure cooker space heater have already been pressed into service. And, out in the garden, we've harvested all the tender crops and pretty much everything else.

Sadly, this didn't take very long. Our gardening year appears to be ending not with a bang, but with a whimper, particularly in the squash department. After last year's 42-pound bumper crop, we thought we'd hit on a winning strategy by sticking to the Waltham variety, but this year it fell completely flat. Our four vines produced only six squash, including one so small you can't even see it in the photo. In total, they weighed just 14 pounds, one-third of what we got last year. 

This has me questioning whether our all-Waltham approach is so wise after all. Maybe next year, it would be a good idea to hedge our bets by adding a second variety, such as Burpee's Butterbush. Even if it's less productive overall, it could be something to fall back on if the Waltham is a flop again. Or perhaps we should upgrade to Fedco's new "primo strain," Wig Out Waltham, which promises "the best in yield and consistency" for only marginally higher cost.

However, there is one bright spot in our fall harvest. We currently have a pretty good haul of one crop that we didn't actually plant: black walnuts.

Every fall since we moved to Highland Park, I've noticed the ground in certain areas being strewn with these odd sort of greenish balls, roughly the size of an egg. Sometimes, I'd see one split open and what looked like a blackish nut poking out. However, I vaguely assumed they probably weren't edible because no one seemed to be gathering them. It wasn't until this year, when there were so many of the green balls underfoot that I had to kick them off the sidewalk to keep from slipping on them and tumbling arse-over-teakettle, that I bothered to investigate the matter. After a little research, I learned that the green balls are indeed the fruit of the black walnut tree, and while they aren't themselves edible, the nuts are.

Mind you, it takes a bit of work to get at them. First, you have to strip off the husk—carefully, as it can stain almost anything it touches. Then they need to cure in their shells for a couple of weeks to develop their flavor. And once they're ready to eat, you can't just crack them with an ordinary nutcracker; to get through their extremely hard shells, you have to bang them with a hammer, crush them in a vise, or even back over them with your car. But according to aficionados, their strong, earthy, bittersweet flavor is well worth the effort.

So, over the course of several walks, both in our neighborhood and while visiting friends in Virginia, we gathered up a whole bunch of these little walnut balls. I removed the hulls from a few of them by stepping on them and rolling them under my foot, but Brian threw caution to the wind and tore most of them off with his hands, which, just as the article warned, retained greenish-brown smudges for days afterwards. Then he spread them out in small batches in front of the dehumidifier in the laundry room to dry. It took a few weeks, but eventually we ended up with a quart or so of cured nuts in their shells—about 40 in total.

Then came the really hard part, both literally and figuratively: getting those shells open. Brian cracked the first one by putting it in a vise and tightening it until it snapped (the shell, not the vise, although it felt like kind of a close call which would give first). We each sampled a bit of the nutmeat and found it...odd. It was a bit like a regular walnut, but with a sort of funky, musty flavor underneath. Not bad, exactly, but weird. I kept nibbling at mine, trying to figure out what to compare it to, and the best I could come up with was to say it's a bit like a strong cheese but without the saltiness. Brian tried cracking a few more (taking about ten minutes to get through four nuts) and toasting them to see how that affected their flavor. The toasted nuts smelled absolutely lovely, powerfully nutty and rich, and their flavor was a bit darker, but that odd mustiness was still there. 

These nuts were so different from anything else we've tasted that we weren't quite sure what would be the best way to use them. I did a bit of searching and found several recipes at Southern Living, both savory and sweet: an ice cream, a pasta dish, a sweet bread, a pie, and a salad. To get a better idea of how the walnuts might taste in a sweet dish, I tried sprinkling some cinnamon sugar over one and found that the combination worked quite well: the sugar and spice seemed to soften the funkiness of the walnuts, making it just one element in a more complex blend. Then, for a savory counterpart, I tried one with a bit of our homemade spaghetti salt, and the effect was much the same: the mustiness blended into the background instead of dominating the flavor. So I think that will be the key to enjoying these walnuts: blend them with other strong-tasting ingredients so that their musty, earthy quality will become an interesting element of the flavor rather than the primary note. This recipe for maple-Dijon roasted Brussels sprouts with walnuts might be a good place to start.

I've been plagiarized

I just did a search on the term "gazingus pin," trying to see if there was a better way to explain it than the way I did in this 2014 post. One of the first hits I found was from a blog called Simple Vegetarian Concept, and it looked oddly familiar. I didn't quite realize why until I saw the photo accompanying it, which I immediately recognized as one that I had taken. Turns out, this blogger had lifted the entire post—text, photo, and all—from my 2014 blog post.

And it wasn't just this one post. Looking at the "popular posts" listed in the sidebar, I realized that every single one of them was lifted directly from my blog. "Holiday Tour of Highland Park": my blog, December 2012. "A Futile Gesture of Protest": November 2014. "Gardeners' Holidays": February 2013. The entire blog was nothing but posts copied from my blog, verbatim.

Naturally, I'm rather irked that this person is appropriating my words without giving me credit for them, and possibly diverting traffic from my blog in the process. (Given that the plagiarized post showed up in my search results while my original post did not, I rather suspect that's the case.) But even more than that, I'm baffled. The Simple Vegetarian Concept blog doesn't appear to be monetized in any way: there are no ads on it at all. So what is this person getting out of stealing my words? 

Right now, the best idea I can think of is that maybe this person intended to create "a blog about simple vegetarian tips," but after setting it up, they never quite got around to posting anything. Then, perhaps, Blogger warned them that they had to post something or lose the site, so rather than come up with something to say, they stole from me, and they've been doing it ever since. But that doesn't make a whole lot of sense. I mean, why would they care about losing the site if they're not actually using it?

The other thing I can't figure out is what I can possibly do about it. The "Contact" link on the Simple Vegetarian Concept blog just leads to a blank page, so I can't send this so-called blogger a polite request to take down all the posts they blatantly stole from me. I could report the blog to Google for copyright violation, but I'd have to report every single post that was plagiarized separately, providing a direct link to the specific article on Simple Vegetarian Concept and a direct link to the original on Ecofrugal Living. Since this blogger has stolen literally hundreds of posts from me (I stopped counting after page 75), this would take hours if not days (particularly since Google won't let you report more than ten violations in a single report).

For now, I've settled for reporting the gazingus pin article that I found with my search, as well as nine others that were listed in the "Popular posts" sidebar on Simple Vegetarian Concept. If Google responds to that report, I'll see if I can get in touch with anyone there to simplify the process of reporting the entire blog.

Recipes of the Month: Tofu Sushi and Apple Fritter Cups

Brian and I tried two new vegan recipes in October, one sweet and one savory. Technically, the savory one doesn't qualify for the Recipe of the Month slot, since it doesn't have a whole lot of veggies in it. But since I grew up with the rule that you have to finish your dinner before you can have dessert, I'm going to tackle it first and set aside the fruit-forward sweet dish for later.

The savory recipe was a variant on one Brian has been making for years: homemade sushi. Normally, he makes this with the fresh sushi-grade salmon they sell at H-Mart. It's very tasty, but also quite pricey—as much as $30 per pound. He always buys the smallest package he can find, but it's still $10 to $15 worth of fish for a single meal. Of course, that's still much less than the cost of going out for a sushi dinner, so we look on it as an affordable luxury. But it's not one we're willing to indulge in very often.

So, when I decided on a whim to spend $2 on a half-pound package of surimi (faux crabmeat) at Lidl, Brian thought he'd try experimenting with it as a cheaper sushi filling. Not surprisingly, it didn't have the same melt-in-the-mouth texture as the salmon, but bundled up into little rolls, it worked well enough to scratch the sushi itch. That got him wondering: if it was the rice and nori that really mattered, did the filling tucked inside them even have to be fish? Could he make reasonable sushi rolls out of tofu?

To find out, he pressed the tofu and cut it into narrow sticks. He marinated these briefly in a vegan fish sauce he'd found a recipe for at the Minimalist Baker. (He found it pretty weak, not nearly as flavorful as real fish sauce, but he thought it could work for this purpose.) Then he browned the tofu sticks in a pan, added thin slices of cucumber and avocado, and rolled them up in nori with sushi rice and sesame seeds on the outside.  

The resulting "tofushi" was...not bad. I can't say it was as good as the salmon sushi, but it was a damn sight better than the carrot salmon we tried as a vegan alternative in 2020. The tofu, even after its dip in the faux fish sauce, didn't have a lot of flavor, but it had a firm texture with a satisfying chew, and the soy sauce and wasabi supplied the missing taste component. And because the tofu provided protein, it stuck to the ribs much better than the veggie-only carrot rolls. It was satisfying enough that Brian definitely intends to make it again, possibly tweaking the recipe next time to amp up the flavor. (Come to think of it, treating the tofu the same way we did the carrots in the carrot salmon recipe might work well for that purpose.)

The sweet recipe came out of the Happy Healthy Herbivore cookbook we bought at Half Price Books last Christmas. We've already tried a few dishes out of this book and found them rather a mixed bag. The Spicy Orange Broccoli was okay, but not as orangey as we would have liked; the Chickpea Tenders, contrary to their name, were dry, crumbly, and disappointingly bland. We also tried a sweet recipe called Glazed Pumpkin Biscuits, which called for "white whole-wheat flour." After a little research, I found out that this stuff is more commonly called golden wheat flour and managed to track down a bag of it at Shop-Rite for around seven bucks. It was a big investment, but I figured it could be worthwhile if it allowed us to make healthier desserts without compromising on texture. Sadly, the pumpkin biscuits didn't really provide this payoff; while their lightly sweet, spicy flavor was okay, the texture was rather stodgy, not at all what I expect from something described as a biscuit. 

Hoping that this disappointing result was a one-off, I decided to try another dessert recipe from the same book, the Apple Fritter Cups. This one actually called for whole-wheat pastry flour, but Brian decided to try making it with the golden wheat flour, since we'd already sprung for the bag. He skipped the optional sugar glaze and went with just the basic recipe: a simple, lightly sweetened batter (just a quarter-cup of brown sugar for 14 little muffins) topped with diced apples fried with cinnamon and a touch of brown sugar. They smelled good, and Brian thought they tasted pretty good too, but I found them no better than okay. Like the pumpkin muffins, they were dense and doughy, and they didn't have enough sweetness to make up for these defects. The apple part wasn't bad, but it wasn't much better than a plain raw apple, which is healthier and requires no cooking at all.

After this experience, I'm feeling a bit disillusioned both with the golden wheat flour and with this cookbook as a whole. I'm willing to give them both one more try, but I think our next selection from Happy Healthy Herbivore should definitely be a savory dish and not a sweet one, such as the Smoked Cauliflower Soup from the "Soups, Stews & Dal" chapter. And next time we try the golden wheat flour in a dessert recipe, it should probably be a real dessert with actual sugar, like the Cinnamon Whole Wheat Scones from the King Arthur website. Or maybe we should forget about desserts and try them in a bread recipe we'd normally make with white flour, like Brian's Granola Bread.

Yard-sale haul 2025

This weekend was one of the biggest events in the frugal calendar: Highland Park's annual town-wide yard sale. Unfortunately, it happened to overlap with the local No Kings protest, which was scheduled for 11am to 1pm on Saturday. Not wanting to miss either one, we compromised by getting up and out the door by 9:30 on Saturday, planning to shop our way across town and end up at the protest site. Unfortunately, this start time appeared to be a little too bright and early for most of the yard-sale sellers. Many of the sale sites marked on the town's yard-sale map were still just getting set up as we passed by, and some showed no sign of setting up at all. Even when we got to Felton Avenue, usually the epicenter of the town's sale activity, the sales seemed to be thinner on the ground than usual. Maybe it was the chilly weather, or maybe after years of annual sales, all the locals are running out of things they want to get rid of.

Although the field wasn't as crowded as usual, we still managed to score a few bargains. By the time we reached the protest site, we'd dropped a total of one dollar on a handful of items: one small gift, a cheap plastic recorder, and a promising-looking fantasy novel called Bookshops & Bonedust with a cover featuring a strapping female orc. We arrived at the protest only a little after 11am and spent the next hour and a half in a sign-waving, slogan-chanting crowd that stretched for more than two blocks along both sides of Raritan Avenue before heading home for some lunch.

After a bit of refreshment, we were ready to plunge back into the sales again. This time we tackled the north side of town, once again working our way westward. Here, though the sales were still sparse, they tended to be of higher quality. We spotted quite a few interesting items, including lots of well-made tools and, most intriguing of all, an old Atari console complete with several classic games—Space Invaders, Pac-Man, Breakout—for $60. Unfortunately, we didn't happen to need any of these, so by the time we'd made it across town, we'd found only one small item worth buying (which I won't mention by name in case it ends up as a stocking stuffer for anyone who might be reading.) 

Once we hit Second Avenue, we decided to pop back across Raritan Avenue to visit the central sale area behind the Reformed Church, and there, at last, we hit the mother lode. Amid the many tables full of clothing and knickknacks was one set up by a chatty young fellow with a fascinating assortment of items at bargain-basement prices. For a grand total of $10, we picked up some art supplies, a bag of dice, a few miscellaneous doodads that looked suitable for stocking stuffers, and the pièce de resistance: another cheap ukulele, the cousin of the one we found two years ago. This one was an Ohana, bright teal in color (to match the flowing hair of the guy who sold it to us) and it came complete with a soft-sided case, a strap, a basic chord chart, and a new-in-package digital tuner. The church thrift shop was also open, so we popped in and picked up a game off the sale rack (which will likely be featured in this year's Christmas gift exchange). 

In addition to the stuff we actually bought, we managed to pick up quite a few items at no cost from the various free boxes, tarps, and tables people had set out along the streets. Our free finds included a sturdy shop apron for Brian, a couple of pieces of ultra-thin plywood for craft projects, a new cat litter scoop to replace our beat-up old one, a three-foot extension cord, a miniature basket, several blank notepads, and a couple of cute little stuffed critters. All told, our haul from Saturday comprised 23 items and cost a total of $14.

Sunday morning, we set out early again, but our hopes weren't high. Sunday's sales are generally far less busy than Saturday's, so after such a slow Saturday, we figured Sunday's pickings were likely to be slim indeed. But the reality failed to live up to even our low expectations. Taking a different route along the north side, back to the central pavilion, and home along the main drag, we didn't pass more than a dozen sales in total. After a couple of hours on our feet, we came home with only a few small items. Fortunately, the prices were small too. We spent a buck fifty for one game and one little toy from a table staffed by the Moonladies (former proprietors of a local toy and gift shop that closed down during the pandemic), fifty cents on a few magnets for my office magnet board, and fifty cents on two much-needed pairs of black tights for me. We also scored a few more free items: another small game, a few paintbrushes, a pen, and strangest of all, a carton of coconut water from someone who'd left a case of them out on the curb. 

With these few items, our grand total for both days comes to 31 items for $17. It's not a huge haul, but with a few stellar bargains (most notably the ukulele and accessories, which I've learned would cost $120 new), I'd say it was a pretty good return on the six or so hours we spent shopping. Plus, we got plenty of October sunshine, racked up 30,000 steps on my step counter, and gathered a lovely assortment of colorful leaves for my fall basket, all for free.