Jolly green corporate giants, part 2

The latest issue of the InBalance newsletter from the Center for a New American Dream contained several articles that tie in with with topics I've covered before on this blog. For instance, the article "Go Green This Halloween" follows up on my recent Halloween post by proposing additional "ways to celebrate that don’t involve devoting hours in front of a sewing machine or parting with significant amounts of cash," from costume swaps to all-natural decorations. The same article contains a link to the Green Halloween site, the same one I complained about last year because its suggestions for alternative treats were all either really expensive and/or really lame. (The site has since added a few new ideas, such as printed-out puzzles, which seem marginally less lame, but I'm still not sure what percentage of sugar-craving rug rats would perceive them as treats rather than tricks.) There's also an interview with Tammy Stroebel, the blogger whose transition to a minimalist lifestyle prompted me to muse about the distinction between frugality and simplicity, and how it's possible to value one without necessarily wanting the other. If I didn't know better, I'd wonder whether the editors of this site were reading my blog to come up with ideas.

The article that interested me most, however, was this one about "The Scarecrow," a new animated short produced by Chipotle restaurants to draw attention to problems with factory farming and promote their own supposedly more sustainable practices. The video itself, available on YouTube, is both charming and moving, but it's provoked a barrage of attacks from two directions. Supporters of Monsanto have flooded the YouTube site with comments arguing that corporate agriculture is actually the best way to "feed more people while using fewer resources," while environmentalists have denounced the video as an example of greenwashing by a "giant corporation." The author of the article disagrees with both viewpoints, arguing that "Chipotle does have a strong, if imperfect, record on sustainability" and that "'large company' does not always have to equal 'unsustainable.'"

This caught my attention because it's exactly the same argument I made three years ago in response to the protests surrounding the 40th anniversary of Earth Day, which many of the holiday's original founders considered to have been "perverted" from its original purpose by corporate influence. I thought this was a bunch of hooey, because let's face it, there are always going to be corporations, and having those corporations adopt more sustainable practices is decidedly a Good Thing, even if they're just doing it to attract more customers. Heck, especially if they're doing it to attract more customers—because if it works, that will give the other corporations an incentive to do the same thing.

So it's nice to see that there are some folks in the sustainability movement—even some fairly influential ones—who agree with me on this. But seriously, have they been reading my blog for ideas?

Cheap thrills for Halloween

Last month, while paging through Better Homes and Gardens, I came on a statistic that absolutely gobsmacked me: Americans typically spend a total of 8 billion dollars each year on Halloween, making it second only to Christmas for the total shelled out on a holiday. Divided over 114 million American households, that works out to about 70 bucks per family. The National Retail Federation predicts that spending is likely to drop to about $7 billion this year due to the uncertain economic climate, but that's still more than $60 per family. What's it all going for?

A Bankrate article pointed me toward some answers to this question. Candy, it says, can run as much as $10 to $15 for a big bag, and the article claims you might need several bags if your neighborhood is a hotbed of Trick-or-Treating. However, that's just the tip of the iceberg: The article also puts the cost of "decor items" at $25 to $50, kids' costumes at $30 each, and adult costumes as high as $140. Dress up two adults and two kids, buy two bulk bags of candy, and shell out for store-bought decorations, and you could easily rack up a tab of over $400 for a one-night event.

On the other hand, there's no real need to spend nearly this much. Indeed, the fact that the average household spending for Halloween is well below this amount shows that, while some families may be shelling out big bucks for this holiday, others are spending much smaller bucks. Moreover, I suspect that these frugal families are probably getting a lot more fun out of the holiday with their DIY costumes and decorations. So, for anyone who's still scrounging around for some last-minute ideas for either treats or tricks, here's my quick list of suggestions for scaring up all the elements of a great Halloween celebration on the cheap.

• Candy. While Bankrate estimates the cost of a big bag of M&Ms at $10 to $15, I've nearly always been able to score candy for much less during the pre-Halloween sales. Last year, according to my usual custom, I picked up two bags of mini Snickers and Three Musketeers bars for $4—and then we actually got only a handful of Trick-or-Treaters, so most of the booty ended up going to Brian's coworkers. But even if you live in a heavily haunted neighborhood, I think four bags for $8 would certainly be enough to feed the hungry masses. Bankrate also notes that many stores mark their candy down dramatically a few days before Halloween to get it off the shelves, so by procrastinating a bit you might be able to score an even better deal. Or you could take a crack at extreme couponing: the Krazy Coupon Lady site lists several sale-and-coupon combos that can get your final cost per bag down to as little as 45 cents.
• Costumes. Store-bought costumes may run $30 to $60 a pop, but as I've noted before on this blog, I think homemade costumes are not only much cheaper but also a lot more fun. When you make your own costume, you can be pretty much anything you can imagine—as you can see from this recent post on Young House Love, which explains how bloggers John and Sheri fulfilled their 3-year-old daughter's request to dress up as "a fairy queen of the jellyfish." And if your family members don't happen to have any brilliant, bizarre ideas, there's no shortage of additional DIY costume ideas online. Bankrate and Spoonful have some creative ideas for both adults and kids (believe it or not, "jellyfish" is actually among them), while Real Simple offers some whimsical last-minute costume suggestions.
• Decorations. This, even more than costumes, is an area in which I think buying ready-made takes all the fun out of it. Why would you ever want to miss out on the chance to go out as a family to the local farm stand, pick up a pumpkin for anywhere from $2 to $10, and carve it yourself? Plus, how could anything you buy at the store ever come anywhere close to the coolness of hand-carved pumpkins like these? (Okay, these are prize-winning pumpkins that generally took around five hours and a set of specialized tools to carve, but come on, even your basic jack-o-lantern with a real candle inside looks a lot cooler than a plastic one that costs 15 bucks.) Bankrate recommends spraying your carved pumpkin with WD-40 so it will last longer, but as Amy Dacyczyn (all hail the Frugal Zealot!) points out in her Tightwad Gazette books, you get even better value by carving the pumpkin the day before Halloween, bringing it back in the day after, and turning it into puree that you can enjoy in your Thanksgiving pies.
• More decorations. Even if you're after something a little more elaborate than a simple Jack-o-Lantern, surely you can give freer rein to your creativity by building something from scratch than by buying off the shelf from Party City. Once again, there are plenty of sites online just teeming with ideas, from Martha Stewart's elaborate designs to BHG's kid-friendly projects. 
• Party fare. Naturally, Martha Stewart also has some recipes for spooky treats (and creepy cocktails) to grace your Halloween get-together. But even simple classic homemade treats like popcorn balls and roasted pumpkin seeds are classics, and the ingredients for them are super cheap. Heck, if you're carving your own pumpkin, the seeds come free.

Here's hoping that these ideas will inspire one or two people out there to break out of the big box and try doing it themselves this Halloween—if not for the savings, then for the sheer fun of it. Happy Halloween!

Thinking outside the cat box

A few weeks ago, I noticed that our cat was no longer being as conscientious as she used to be about covering her "doings" after using the litter box. This was a bit bothersome, because our litter box sits right out in the open under our wall-mounted sink, so any droppings left uncovered were clearly visible and sometimes smellable as well. I'd thought from time to time about putting up a screen or curtain to conceal the box—which might have the added bonus of reducing the amount of litter that gets scattered out of the box and across the bathroom floor, from whence it migrates into every other room of the house—but I could never come up with an idea for one that wouldn't either look fussy, collect dirt, or get in the way when it was time to scoop out the box.

For a while, I dealt with the problem by simply scattering a little extra litter myself over the top of the box when needed. However, when she actually went so far as to poop next to the box rather than in it, I decided something needed to be done. I did a little research to figure out what might cause the problem, and I found an article that said cats might do this for several reasons:

Maybe the litter's not deep enough or the lining is a pain to negotiate, or the box is too small – it should be 1.5x the length of the cat. Or it's so dirty and stinky that your feline has to hold his breath while watching his step.

Changing the litter and making sure to pile it nice and deep seemed like the easiest fix, so I tried that first. This seemed to solve the second problem, but not the first, so I started wondering whether maybe she could use a bigger box. I measured the one we had and found it was about 18 inches long, and while I had trouble measuring the actual length of the cat (who didn't feel inclined to cooperate with the procedure), it was clearly more than 12 inches. She's also getting on in years—about 12 years old now—and not as spry as she used to be, so I figured she might be starting to have a little trouble maneuvering in the small box.

So the next time we were at PetSmart, I took a look at the selection of cat boxes to see if they had anything a little bigger. I hoped that while I was at it, I might also be able to find something that would be a little more concealed than what we have now, and possibly better at keeping the litter contained. The results, however, were disappointing. Despite what I'd read about the ideal size for a cat box being at least 1.5 times the length of the cat, we didn't find any litter boxes on the shelves that were significantly bigger than our old one, which was a tight fit even for our fairly small cat. And while there were a few boxes with covers or high sides, none of them really looked less obtrusive than the existing box, and all of them looked like they'd be harder for the cat to get into and out of. And on top of that, they all cost at least $20, which seemed like an unreasonable amount to spend for something that might not be any better than what we already had.

As luck would have it, however, I'd recently seen another article on ways to conceal your cat box. Many of them were very clever but wouldn't work for us, because they were designed for a living space rather than a bathroom. However, there was one solution that looked both simple and cheap: a big Rubbermaid storage box. The PetSmart wasn't far from a Target, so we popped in there and found a big, covered storage bin that measured 22 inches long—four inches longer than our existing box—for only five bucks. It also had 14-inch-high sides, which I thought should be much better at keeping the litter contained than our current box's 10-inch sides, and it was a neutral greyish brown that looked like it would blend unobtrusively into the background.

When we got the bin home, the first thing we did was test it to make sure it would fit under the sink. At first it looked like the drainpipe was in the way, but a moment's experimentation showed that the box only had to be tilted slightly to slip under the pipe, so it would still be possible to slide it out for scooping with only a little maneuvering. Now all we needed to do was cut a door in the box for the cat. The original designer of this box simply cut out the hole with an utility knife, but Brian thought it would be a good idea to add a little reinforcement to the bottom edge, both to strengthen it and to blunt it a bit so it wouldn't hurt the cat's paws. Folding over the edge didn't work, as the plastic proved to be too brittle to bend, so instead I proposed instead padding the bottom with a bit of rubber tubing, which we just happened to have lying around the shop. We just cut it to length, cut a slit in the bottom, and slipped it onto the edge of the door. And voilà: an extra-large cat box, complete with padded edge, for only five bucks and about twenty minutes of work.

We haven't deployed the new box yet, but we did bring it upstairs to make sure the cat could get in and out of it easily. Despite her normal penchant for exploring enclosed spaces, she didn't show the slightest inclination to investigate the box on her own, so Brian eventually just picked her up and put her in, and she promptly stepped back out through the door with no difficulty. We'll probably get it set up this evening, and I'll keep you posted on how well it does compared to the old one.

Tangled up in gold

Yesterday, I noted that we planted way too much basil this year and need to cut back next year. The same problem applies in spades to our Sun Gold tomatoes. The problem really started back in the spring, when a lot of the tomato seedlings we'd started didn't survive transplanting. We had extra Sun Gold seedlings, so we figured that rather than let those squares sit empty, we'd just plant a couple of additional Sun Golds to put the space to good use. Big mistake. The Sun Golds, which are the hardiest and earliest of all our tomatoes, spread out and took over each trellis where they were planted, practically strangling the other surviving tomatoes as they grabbed for each bit of space they could get their little tendrils on. (Yes, I know you're supposed to prune the plants so they don't do that, but I can never figure out which parts of the vine you're supposed to cut off and which you're supposed to leave on. I do still want to get some tomatoes off each plant, or there's no point in having them.)

Of course, the sheer size of the plants is only part of the problem. A bigger part is that each plant is immensely productive—and instead of producing a few big tomatoes at a time, it produces lots and lots of tiny little tomatoes. That makes it practically impossible to keep up with the task of harvesting them. You have to go out and pick them practically every day, or else they start dropping to the ground of their own accord. If you're lucky, they fall on the path, where it's easy to spot and retrieve them; if you're unlucky, they land in the bed, which is already littered with numerous other tiny tomatoes that have fallen on their own. Every one of these has to be picked up, whether it's edible or not, because if they aren't, you'll end up with a huge crop of tiny tomato seedlings next year that have to be pulled out before they take over the entire bed.

The fact that the plants themselves are so big and thick makes harvesting even harder, since it's difficult to reach in and grab one ripe tomato, or a handful, without knocking several others to the ground. And, to compound the problem, the little Sun Golds have a tendency to split, especially after a heavy rainfall—so a significant percentage of those you pick end up having to be discarded because they might be contaminated. This slows down the gathering process considerably, as every single tomato you pick has to be examined before you can add it to your collection. So as tasty and hardy as these tomatoes are, they can very, very easily turn into too much of a good thing.

So, as with the basil, we've found ourselves with a huge amount of tomatoes to preserve, since there's more of them than we can possibly eat raw. We've tried turning them into salsa and pizza sauce, but these will only keep for a limited time in the fridge, and we don't have space in the freezer for the amount we'd produce from a crop this size. We don't have a canner, so we decided to try a method proposed by Mark Bittman in his massive tome How to Cook Everything Vegetarian: oven-drying. As he explains it, if you just halve cherry tomatoes lengthwise, lay them out on a cookie sheet, and bake them at 225 degrees for 2–3 hours, they'll come out "soft but somewhat shriveled," much like raisins. In this form, they can be used immediately in a recipe that calls for sun-dried tomatoes. If you keep them baking for about 4 hours, they'll be "shriveled and mostly dry," and they can be stored well-wrapped in the fridge or freezer. If you want them to keep for weeks, then you'll need to cook them for 6 or more hours, until they're "dark, shriveled, and dry." Since our goal was shelf-stable tomatoes, we went for the third option.

Brian has tried this method before and found that he actually gets better results by cooking the tomatoes at 225 for just one hour, then turning the heat down to 175. The first picture here shows the tomatoes as they were when they first went into the oven; the second shows them about an hour into the drying process, when he removed them to make room for some enchiladas that needed to bake at a higher temperature. You can see how they've already shrunk in size, but they're still not at the raisin-like stage. When we finally removed the tomatoes from the oven. they were thoroughly dry and crunchy in texture, almost like a potato chip. In this form, they can't really be used in place of sun-dried tomatoes, which normally have a chewier texture, but they can be reconstituted with water for something vaguely approximating a fresh tomato.

The only snag is that even in dried form, the tomatoes we picked yesterday—which don't amount to more than a few days' worth—were more than enough to fill a quart jar. If the Sun Golds continue to produce at the rate they have been until the first hard freeze, we're going to need a lot more jars to store them all, and a lot more pantry space to store them in.

Bringing in the basil

On Friday, like Joni Mitchell, we awoke to find the frost perched on the town. With the temperature in the house hovering around 60, we fired up the boiler that we'd hoped to keep dormant until November, and then we turned our thoughts to a big job that we knew was coming sooner or later: harvesting and preserving our massive crop of basil. This year we planted our usual four square feet of garden space with basil, but we used a new method of sowing it: instead of planting just four seeds in each square and hoping to get four big plants, we just carpet-bombed the whole area with seeds. As the seedlings popped up, we thinned out the ones that seemed too close together, and then just let the rest grow as big as they liked. And grow they did: by the time autumn rolled around, those four squares of our garden looked like the Everglades. There was enough basil there to measure in kilos, as if we were drug kingpins. (What's the street value of basil, I wonder?) One light frost probably hadn't been enough to spoil it all, but it meant that we couldn't afford to leave it out there another night.

So, that evening, before it got dark, Brian went out and pulled up the lot. Relocated from its native habitat to our sink, the mass somehow looked even more imposing. He spent the next hour just pulling all the leaves off the stems, while I got through nearly half of an Agatha Christie novel I was reading aloud to him. Eventually, he managed to reduce the huge mass of plants to a somewhat smaller, but still imposing, mass of leaves. Our big metal mixing bowl was filled to overflowing, with enough left over to heap our colander high as well.

At this point, however, the work was just beginning. His plan for storing the basil over the winter was to blend it up with a bit of olive oil to make a slurry, which could then be measured out into ice-cube trays in one-tablespoon units that could be doled out as needed in our recipes. His usual preferred tool for making pesto and other sauces of this kind is our Magic Bullet blender (a Freecycle find that turned out to be surprisingly useful), but with such a huge volume of leaves to process, he decided to give the full-sized blender a try. The results confirmed that for this purpose, the Magic Bullet is indeed the better tool. The blender sort of mushed up the leaves without really grinding them, and getting the half-crushed contents out proved to be a huge hassle. So he decided he'd have to use the Magic Bullet after all—but the problem there was that it only has a capacity of about 12 ounces, and we had a couple of gallons of basil leaves to process. After about an hour more of alternately packing, grinding, and swearing, Brian had only made it through a fraction of the pile, and the motor of the Magic Bullet was starting to emit a burning smell.

With both Brian and the blender on the verge of a breakdown, I proposed finding some other way to preserve the basil—or at least store the leaves overnight and deal with them in the morning. A quick search on "how to preserve basil" turned up this Wikihow article, which provided several options for "short-term refrigerator storage." Since we'd already stripped all the leaves from the stems, only one of them was practical: packing them into a zip-top bag and tucking it in the fridge, to be dealt with in the morning. However, the article also mentioned several other ways of preserving basil over the long term, some of which looked intriguing. Considering what a hassle our usual blend-with-oil method was turning out to be, and considering also how long it would take to convert such a large volume of basil slush into frozen cubes, any method that didn't involve the blender looked very appealing indeed. In fact, I thought perhaps we could look on this basil bother as an opportunity to try out a whole bunch of different methods for storing a whole bunch of basil, and see which one worked the best over the long term.

Of the various methods outlined in the article, we decided to try these three:

1) Freezing whole leaves. The Wikihow article says you can simply spread them out on a tray and freeze them, but we'd tried that before and found they were mushy and not very flavorful when thawed. However, a second article from About.com Food Preservation explained that you can fix this by blanching the basil before freezing it, killing off the enzymes that cause it to degrade. Their instructions for blanching involved dipping a whole bunch of basil in boiling water, then in ice water. We couldn't do this since we'd already stripped the leaves off the stems, so Brian instead came up with what he called the "butterfly method": drop a handful of leaves into the water, swish them around with a sieve, then scoop them back out and dunk them into the ice water. This left them wilted but still green. Then he spread them out in a freezer bag, forming a layer as nearly flat as possible, and popped it in the freezer. The idea is that individual clumps of leaves can be broken off as needed, leaving the rest of the mass intact.

2) Salting the basil. One advantage of this method is that it doesn't require any of our limited freezer space. All it calls for is a large crock or jar and a vast quantity of salt. We didn't have a covered crock that could be spared from its normal kitchen duties, so we chose to pack the basil leaves and salt in a Ball jar. Following the instructions, we started with a thick layer of salt, then layered basil and salt over top, stopping now and then to pack it in, and finishing with more salt. The covered jar will get stored in our overflow pantry in the basement, which should meet the requirements for "a cool and dry spot."

3) Packing in oil. Again, a very simple method with no freezing, but it does use up quite a lot of expensive olive oil. We went with a jar again, loading it up with leaves, sprinkling in salt, and then filling the whole thing up with olive oil. Wikihow promises that leaves packed in this way and stored in the fridge "will remain in great condition for use over the coming months" and can be used just like fresh basil in any recipe. The basil-infused olive oil can be used too, so it doesn't go to waste, but you'd presumably have to use it in a recipe that's very heavy on both oil and basil. Maybe processing the basil and oil together into pesto—in small batches—is the way to go.

In addition to these, we have about thirty of our traditional basil-and-oil cubes in the freezer, and about another fifteen cubes' worth in the fridge waiting to be measured out. Brian actually mulched up quite a large volume of basil on Friday night before he packed it in, so we now have more basil cubes than we usually do when starting the winter, plus all the other basil we've preserved in alternative ways.

Only time will tell how well each different batch of preserved basil holds up, but one thing we've definitely learned from this experience is that we needn't plant nearly as much of it next year. Our carpet-bomb sowing method produces such a massive yield per square that we could reduce the area planted from four square feet to two and still have plenty of basil to use all year long.

Now, it's on to figuring out how to deal with the massive quantity of Sun Gold tomatoes our plants are still producing—but that's a subject for another day.

A losing battle

It's been nearly four weeks now since we planted grass on the bare-earth slope that we built up around the edges of our patio. At the time, I was very excited about the seed blend we'd specially ordered at Home Depot, which contained a mixture of fescue and microclover (a specially bred variety of Dutch clover that stays low to the ground). If the claims on the site were to be believed, this stuff could thrive with little water, stay green and lush without fertilizer, and compete with the toughest weeds. When we first planted the slope back in September, after first stripping it of all weeds and preparing it with some compost, it looked like this (including the burlap we put down as a temporary erosion guard).

And this morning, after four weeks of growth and regular watering, it looked like this.

Now, if you look at this picture carefully, two things may strike you about it. First, an awful lot of the planted area is still bare and brown, rather than lush and green. And second, the lushest, greenest parts are not grass but weeds—mostly the mugwort and dandelions that we labored so hard to eradicate before planting the grass in the first place. Turns out that—surprise, surprise—when you prepare a nice, clear patch of ground, add plenty of compost, and water it regularly, the weeds find it just as congenial a spot as the grass does, if not more so. And though we tried our hardest to pull out every last weed, weeds that spread with long underground runners (like mugwort) or grow from extremely deep-rooted taproots (like dandelions) are virtually impossible to dig up completely. Even if there's no trace of them visible above the surface, they're still lurking down there, and they can grow from a fragment of a root into a huge, thriving plant a lot faster than a tiny grass seed can.

So, at least in its first few weeks of growth, this grass blend hasn't been doing such a stellar job of competing with the weeds. But, not being prepared to give up just yet, we decided to go for one more round of pulling and planting and see if we could manage to get a little more actual grass this time. So once again, we pulled out as many weeds as we could, sprinkled grass seed in all the bare patches (a little more heavily this time, in the hopes that at least one seed in five would take root), and top-dressed it with our last bag of compost. Here's how it looked by the time we went in this evening.

Already, with the weeds gone, it's looking a little better, even though it's considerably more bare than it was this morning. But considering how well this stuff did last time, I can't say I'm truly expecting a thick green carpet of lawn to spring up before the ground freezes. Most likely, we'll just end up with a slightly better version of what we had this morning: a little more grass and a little less weeds, but still a fairly high ratio of weeds to grass overall. I guess we can still hope that the weeds will die back over the winter while the microclover continues to spread, so that it will have an advantage against the weeds when they start to grow back in the spring. But still, considering that this is all we now have left of a bag of seed that was supposed to cover 600 square feet, I can't say I'm terribly impressed with this seed blend overall.

Veggie of the Month: Sweet Dumpling Squash

As October crept past its midpoint, I found myself starting to wonder what I could come up with for my Vegetable of the Month. I had picked up some king oyster mushrooms on our last trip to the H-Mart, thinking maybe those would do for a Fungus of the Month, but I made a couple of goofs with those. First, I forgot to get a picture of them before cooking them, and second, they ended up in a savory wild mushroom soup (out of Linda Fraser's Vegetarian cookbook) along with some plain white button mushrooms and a few reconstituted shiitakes—so although the final result was tasty, the specific flavor of the oyster mushrooms couldn't really be distinguished as such.

So all week, I was on the lookout for something else suitable for my October Veggie of the Month. I could have kicked myself when, after a trip to Trader Joe's on Thursday, I picked up a copy of the Fearless Flier on the way out of the store and discovered only after getting home that one of that week's specials had been on Cucurbita Pepo, otherwise known as delicata squash, a winter squash I'd never tried before. The flavor is described as similar to butternut, but richer and creamier, and it has such a thin rind that it doesn't require peeling like most winter squashes, making it much easier to work with. If I'd only taken the time to look through the flier while we were still in the store, we could have tried this new squash variety for only 99 cents—and if we'd liked it, we might even have considered adding it to our garden crops for next year. But alas, I was too late (and since the Trader Joe's is down in the Princeton area, there was no real chance of popping back in over the weekend to remedy my oversight).

I hoped we might manage to locate the delicata squash at some other local store, so during a round of errands this afternoon, we checked several: first the Aldi, where we had to stop in anyway for some mushrooms, then the Asian grocery store in the same shopping center, then the Shop-Rite across the street, and finally the H-Mart on the way home. Not one of them had delicata or any other squash that was new to us. Frustrated, but not quite ready to give up, I stopped in at the Stop & Shop on the way back from another afternoon outing (helping a friend to move the biggest freaking TV set I've ever seen) and discovered this little beauty in the veggie bin. It looked kind of like the pictures I'd seen of delicata squash, but the label on it actually said "Sweet Dumpling." But I figured, well, that might be just another name for delicata—and even if it's not, it is at least a new variety of squash I haven't tried before, so it will do just as well for my Veggie of the Month entry.

Well, the bad news is, Sweet Dumpling turns out to be a different variety entirely from delicata. It's a true winter squash, with a tough rind that you wouldn't want to eat. But the good news is, it turns out to be pretty easy to prepare; a quick Google search turned up ten different, simple suggestions. We went with the simplest of the bunch, halving the squash and roasting it with a little brown sugar, since it could bake right alongside the free-range chicken legs that we were planning to cook up for dinner. Here it is in its baked form, hollowed out and lightly glazed.

So how was it? Well, like the buttercup squash we tried back in January, it was pretty good, but not extraordinary. The flesh was tender and reasonably sweet, but it wasn't as smooth-textured as butternut, and the flavor didn't seem as complex. Overall, I don't see any real advantage to choosing Sweet Dumpling squash over butternut, and I certainly wouldn't want to give up any of my precious garden space to it. So once again, my Veggie of the Month is an interesting experience, but not something I particularly want to make a part of my everyday life.

Meanwhile, I'm still planning to keep my eyes open for a delicata squash if I can find one anywhere. Veggie of the Month for November, maybe?