Homemade hand sanitizer / deodorant

One of the challenges of the ecofrugal life is that it can make simple things more complicated. For example, this past week I ran into a very simple problem that most people would solve by just running to the store and buying something. But because that wasn't an ecofrugal option, I ended up having to make something instead.

About six years ago, after a series of experiments with different homemade deodorants, I started using alcohol-based hand sanitizer as my primary deodorant. This was a more ecofrgual option than most store-bought deodorants, because (1) it wasn't tested on animals, (2) it produced less non-recyclable packaging waste, and (3) it was considerably cheaper. An 8-ounce bottle of the stuff lasted me several months, and it only cost about a buck.

Until now, that is. With the rise of COVID, hand sanitizer has become a hot commodity, and stores just can't keep the stuff in stock. Ever since the outbreak started, I've been keeping a nervous eye on my one bottle of hand-sanitizer deodorant as the level crept lower and lower. Eventually it reached the point where I couldn't get any more out with the stupid pump top (which I hate anyway because it's not recyclable and it prevents me from turning the bottle upside down to drain it). I had to start removing the top and attempting to extract some with my fingers each morning, which was a pain.

I tried my local drugstore and supermarket, one other supermarket, and two other drugstores, and most of them had no hand sanitizer at all in stock. One store had some, but in 750-milliliter bottles (clearly from a distillery that's switched gears during the pandemic) for $10, which is about three times the normal price. Of course, all these stores had deodorant, which hasn't been in short supply, and I could have just bought some, but I hated the idea of letting the pandemic force me into less ecofrugal habits. So instead, I decided to try something I'd heard about from a friend: mixing up my own hand sanitizer. The main ingredients were rubbing alcohol and aloe vera gel, both of which I already had at home, so it wouldn't cost me anything to try.

A quick search turned up several recipes online from sources such as Healthline, Wired, Popular Science, and Everyday Health. Most of these called for a ratio of two parts isopropyl alcohol to one part aloe. They also stressed that it was important to use alcohol with a concentration of at least 90 percent in order to achieve a mixture with 60 percent alcohol, which is the level needed to kill the coronavirus. The stuff I had at home was only 70 percent alcohol, but since I was only relying on the stuff to deodorize rather than sanitize, I figured it didn't matter if it was a little weak. So I just measured two tablespoons of alcohol and one tablespoon of aloe vera gel into the nearly-empty container I was already using.

Most of the recipes also called for essential oils, such as tea tree, lavender, or citrus. However, it wasn't clear whether these were supposed to enhance the antibacterial properties of the gel or just make it smell nicer. I didn't have any of these handy, but we did have a lemon in the fridge, and the peel of that is a perfectly good source of nice-smelling essential oil. So Brian helpfully took off just a little bit of the zest for me — maybe a quarter-teaspoon — and I added that to the mix as well and shook it up.

So far, I've only used this DIY deodorant once, but it seems to work about as well as the commercial hand sanitizer did. And I've still got about half a bottle of rubbing alcohol left and most of a bottle of aloe vera gel, so I'm hoping this will be a sufficient supply to continue mixing up my homemade deodorizing gel as needed until the shortage resolves itself.

But if it isn't, I can always revert to one of the other DIY deodorants I tried during my series of experiments: milk of magnesia. This stuff worked reasonably well for me, and it's not one of the things there's been a run on during the pandemic. The only reason I stopped using it the first time around was that I discovered it to have an unwelcome laxative effect. However, since then, I've actually developed a magnesium deficiency and started taking supplements for it daily — so if I find the topically applied magnesium is having the same effect this time around, I can simply cut down on the amount I take orally to compensate. In fact, who knows — using the magnesium topically as a deodorant might just eliminate the need for the supplements entirely, killing two birds with one stone. That's what I'd call an ecofrugal solution.

Vegan Recipes of the Month: Three spring dishes

In last week's entry, I mentioned that our asparagus was one of the brightest stars in our May garden, and I promised you'd be seeing one of the new asparagus recipes we'd tried recently as our Recipe of the Month for May. But as it turns out, I was wrong. You're getting that recipe plus two more featuring spring crops: another type of asparagus pasta, and a strawberry-arugula salad. All three are vegan, and all three were tasty enough to be worth making again, should we have the opportunity.

Recipe #1: Asparagus, Leek, and Mushroom Pasta
Adapted from Cooking Light

Years ago, my sister-in-law got us a subscription to Cooking Light as a Christmas present, and before it expired, we clipped out and filed a bunch of recipes that we meant to try. Unfortunately, once they were in that overstuffed file, they kind of got lost, and so we never got around to most of them. So, when Brian asked me to look for some new asparagus recipes, I went through the "pasta" section of the accordion file and unearthed one called "Asparagus, Spring Onion, and Mushroom Pasta" from the April 2004 issue.

The recipe suggested using pappardelle, dry white wine, and expensive, exotic mushrooms — "morel, cremini, oyster, or a mixture" — but he went with linguini, cooking sherry, and plain old white button mushrooms, which were what we had. It also called for either spring onions, scallions, or baby leeks; Brian was able to extract only one small leek from our vegetable garden, where it had somehow overwintered successfully from last year, so he scaled down the recipe to roughly half its size for every ingredient except the pasta. This allowed us us to get a full meal out of it with leftovers to spare, and it didn't seem to us like it was short on the veggies.

His adapted version looks like this:

1. Trim and thinly slice 1 small leek. Cut the ends off 1/2 pound of thin asparagus and slice into two-inch pieces. Cut 1/2 pound of mushrooms into bite-size pieces. Chop 1 1/2 teaspoons parsley.
2. Heat 1 tablespoon olive oil in a large skillet over medium-high heat, add the mushrooms, and cook while stirring for about 5 minutes.
3. Add leek and cook another 1-2 minutes, or until softened.
4. Add asparagus pieces and saute another 2 minutes.
5. Add 2 tablespoons sherry and simmer until liquid evaporates, about 1-2 minutes.
6. Add 1/4 cup vegetable broth and bring to a boil.
7. Add 2 Tbsp. plant-based butter and toss until melted into veggies.
8. Meanwhile, cook 1/2 pound linguine or fettucini in a large pot of boiling salted water until al dente. Drain.
9. Add veggies to drained pasta, with 1 1/2 teaspoons chopped parsley. Add salt and pepper to taste.

Early as it is in the gardening season, this adapted recipe contained an impressive three ingredients from our garden: the asparagus, the leek, and the parsley, which he was able to trim from this year's plants. And, although we obviously haven't tried the dish with the fancy ingredients the original recipe called for, we didn't feel our cheaper version lacked at all for flavor. With mushrooms, leek, sherry, and broth, it had plenty of umami, plus the distinct flavor of the asparagus that's unlike any other vegetable. It's definitely worth putting into our rotation for asparagus season in years to come.

However, it will have some competition from this other new asparagus pasta dish:


Recipe #2: Garlic Lemon Asparagus Pasta

Brian cobbled this one together from his recollections of various other pasta dishes he's made over the years that used some combination of asparagus, garlic, and lemon. Some of these had a cream sauce, so he substituted thickened almond milk. Here's what he ended up with:

1. Zest and squeeze 1 lemon, mince 4 cloves garlic, and break 8-10 ounces of fresh asparagus into 1-inch pieces. Be sure to remove any tough parts from the bottoms of the asparagus stalks.
2. Cook 1/2 pound of penne or other pasta al dente in 8 cups of water with 1 Tbsp salt. Try to time it to finish at the same time or just after everything else is done.
3. Thoroughly mix 1 cup unsweetened almond milk (regular might be okay, but avoid the vanilla stuff), 1 tablespoon flour, 1/2 tablespoon nutritional yeast, and 1/4 teaspoon salt. I put everything in a jar, close the top, then shake vigorously. It also helps to sift, sieve, or sprinkle the flour in so that it doesn’t get lumpy. Set aside.
4. Sauté the garlic in 1 tablespoon olive oil in a skillet over low heat for a few minutes. Try not to let it get brown.
5. Turn the heat up to medium-high and add the asparagus. Sprinkle the lemon juice on top and sauté until the asparagus is bright green. Should only take about two minutes or so.
6. Add the almond milk mixture and stir vigorously. It should thicken quickly. Add the lemon zest, stir briefly to combine, and then remove from heat.
7. When the pasta is cooked and drained, combine it and the asparagus mixture and stir to coat thoroughly. Serve immediately.

As you can see reasonably well from the picture, the resulting pasta had a creamy sauce, and the bright flavor of the lemon complemented the asparagus nicely. We sprinkled it with a little "spaghetti salt," a Parmesan substitute Brian makes by combining a tablespoon of nutritional yeast, half a tablespoon of flour, and a quarter-teaspoon of salt, and grinding it all up together with a mortar and pestle — but it would also be fine with just a touch of ordinary salt and pepper. So this one's another keeper.

Recipe #3: Strawberry and Avocado Salad
From Savory

This one was simply lifted from the April 2020 issue of Savory, the freebie food magazine from Stop&Shop. We made only one significant change to the recipe: it called for 6 cups of arugula, which was more than we could manage to glean at this stage from our just-started spring garden. (Waiting until we had more arugula available wasn't an option because the strawberries we'd picked up at the supermarket wouldn't have lasted that long). So we replaced half the arugula with winter lettuce, which we had a patch of in the garden from last year. All the other ingredients — strawberries, avocado, red onion, scallion, and lemon-mustard-poppy-seed vinaigrette — were just as specified in the recipe.

Of the three new recipes we tried this month, this is probably the one we'd be least likely to make a regular part of our repertoire. It's not that it wasn't tasty; the tangy-sweet strawberries and peppery arugula complemented each other nicely (though it would probably have been better still with all arugula instead of a mixture), and the creamy avocado, crunchy red onion, and tender greens created a nice contrast of textures. It's just that this dish calls for both fresh strawberries and avocado, two fairly expensive produce ingredients we can't grow ourselves. So we're likely to make this one again only if we can find both of those things fairly cheaply at the store at a time when we have plenty of arugula in the garden, or possibly if we're having guests for dinner that we'd like to impress (a situation that isn't likely to come up any time soon, sadly). And if we do make it again, I might be inclined to leave out the poppy seeds in the dressing. They add interesting flavor and crunch, but they also invariably get stuck in your teeth, and to me, the annoyance outweighs the benefits.

So there you have it, folks: not one, not two, but three tasty, vegan recipes that take advantage of the first early produce of the spring garden. Next month, as more of our crops come in, you can probably expect to see recipes or other content featuring such late-spring delicacies as snow peas, lettuce, and basil — and possibly even a few of our new honeyberries, which Brian noticed today were just starting to ripen. (Of course, that meant that he had to get some netting over the bushes in a big hurry before the birds got to them, which was kind of a hassle. In future years, we'll know to do this in early May, so we won't need to rush.)

Money Crashers: 10 Nutritious Family Dinners You Can Make for Under $10

For my latest Money Crashers article, the editors asked me to update a piece on inexpensive family dinners. I thought this would be a breeze, since as you know, I have tons of recipes for those — and, indeed, many of the dishes in the article have previously appeared here on the blog, particularly in my post on the One Harvest challenge. But as it turned out, I had to adapt my recipes quite a bit to make them fit Money Crashers' preferred recipe style, which requires everything — the size and weight of ingredients, the size of pans and bowls, the heat level, the amount of time something should be cooked, how it should look when it's done — to be spelled out in as much detail as possible.

So if you choose to make any of these dishes, please know that you have my permission to deviate from these highly precise instructions if necessary. If you want to use a large potato instead of a medium one, or use a pan that isn't the exact size specified in the article, I promise you can do so without ruining the dish. With the exception of the two baking recipes (cornbread and biscuits), these recipes are really much more flexible than the article makes them sound.

10 Nutritious Family Dinners You Can Make for Under $10 – Recipes

Household Hacks: An ecofrugal soap-dish solution

Since the COVID outbreak started, Brian and I (well, mostly Brian) have been washing our hands more regularly and more thoroughly than we used to. As a result, our bar of soap was more or less constantly damp, and left to soak in its own juices in the soap dish, its outer surface rapidly disintegrated into mush. Not only did it look disgusting, a lot of the soap was going to waste, building up as muck on the soap dish rather than actually being used on our hands.

I could have solved this problem by switching to liquid soap, as Millennials have supposedly done, but that approach seemed even more wasteful. Not only does it come in a plastic bottle rather than a simple wrapper, it usually has a non-recyclable pump top that makes it impossible to get all the soap out of the bottle — so we'd end up wasting even more of it. And besides, I knew it was possible to use bar soap without having it all disintegrate in the dish; after all, we'd done it for years before COVID hit. All I had to do was find some way to drain the water off it so it wouldn't stay wet all the time.

Now, there are lots of little soap dish inserts designed for this very purpose, made of everything from silicone to stainless steel. But finding one the right size for our little built-in soap dish posed a difficulty, especially when it isn't possible to go to a store and browse. So I thought about what materials we had available, and I remembered those little mesh tubes that our garlic comes in. Brian always saves these rather than throwing them out, even though the only use we've found for them is improvised cat toys, so he has quite a large collection at this point that isn't being used for anything else. So I simply picked out the three that seemed most snugly rolled up, tucked them into the soap dish, and rested the bar of soap on top of them.

This worked reasonably well. The plastic mesh material allowed the liquid to drain off the soap, so it didn't turn to goop, and it didn't accumulate soap and dirt residue so fast that it quickly became gross-looking itself. Cleaning it once a week, when doing the rest of the bathroom, was sufficient, and reasonably easy to do (just rinse under the tap). The only problem was that the little tubes had a tendency to stick to the soap bar, coming up with it whenever we lifted it to wash with. But I mitigated this problem by stitching the three tubes together, using just a few stitches at each intersection point, with waterproof dental floss rather than thread.

This simple DIY solution seems to work as well as anything we could have bought in a store, it fits our odd-sized soap dish, and it didn't cost us a cent. And, since it used up something that would otherwise just have gone to waste, it's the perfect example of ecofrugality.

Gardening hits and misses

As I've observed before, sometimes our ecofrugal life seems like a series of little ups and downs. For each thing that goes unexpectedly wrong due to some combination of bad luck and bad planning, another goes unexpectedly right. So, instead of sharing one big story this week, I decided to talk about a bunch of these little hits and misses — the warp and weft of the ecofrugal life. And, as luck would have it, all of them involve plants.

Miss: A vegetable do-over

We'll start with our biggest miss this week. Remember all those seedlings we put in last weekend? Well, for some reason that we still aren't quite sure of, they didn't fare well at all. Brian had done his best to harden them off (expose them to outdoor light and temperature) over the week or so before planting them, but once they were actually in the ground, their leaves started to turn pale and dry — a sure sign of sunscald. Our seedlings have experienced a touch of this in past years, but never to such a degree. Brian could only guess that the problem was that the weather before planting was mostly cloudy, while the week after was particularly sunny. On top of this, we had a couple of unseasonably cold nights (though no actual frost) that probably didn't do our tender pepper plants any good.

Fortunately, Brian always starts twice as many seeds of each type as we actually need so that we'll have backup plants for situations like this. So we spent a big chunk of yesterday morning replacing all the pepper plants, as well as one of the new Opalka tomatoes, with their backups. The other plants, though not as healthy as usual, looked stronger than the seedlings that had been confined to little tubes all week, so we left them in place. Brian added little cages of chicken wire over the new peppers to protect them from critters (since one of the four lost plants had been bitten off rather than merely wilted) and to filter the sunlight that reaches them until they're a little bigger.

Meanwhile, Brian is holding on to all the remaining extra seedlings, rather than giving them away as we usually do (which would be a challenge anyway on account of social distancing). That way, if the new Opalka tomato doesn't make it either, we can still replace it with a different variety. He's dug out a new bed for them all next to the house, which he's calling "the burn ward."

Hit: Potato plants 

However, there's one crop in the garden that's looking incredibly robust: our new potato plants. The buckets are now full to the very top, with a layer of mulch on top of the dirt, and the plants are spilling out in a burst of exuberantly green foliage. I don't know whether the health of the plants is any indicator of how many actual potatoes we can hope to get off them, but it's quite encouraging to look at.

Hit: Asparagus

Another crop that's producing well is the asparagus. After a late start, it's now producing in abundance. We've already eaten about a pound and a half of it, and we've harvested this much more just in the past week. We've had so many meals featuring asparagus that Brian actually asked me if I could find some new asparagus recipes, since we were already getting a little tired of the ones we had. So I obligingly dug out an asparagus and mushroom pasta recipe that had been sitting for years in our recipe file, which you'll most likely be seeing later as our Recipe of the Month for May.

Miss: An ill-fated plant

In order to start the seeds for my new flower bed this year, we had to clear a larger space for seedlings than usual in our south-facing guest room window. Thus, the houseplant that normally lives there, a cat-friendly aluminum plant, had to be moved to a downstairs window for the duration. I was sorry to displace it, because the plant itself was so handsome and healthy-looking, and it was also in a really neat-looking pot from Ten Thousand Villages: vaguely dodecahedral in shape and made of unglazed terra cotta.

But well before the seedlings were ready to plant, it became clear that neither the plant nor its pot was doing at all well in its new home. Not only was its foliage drooping, no matter how much water it got, but the outer surface of the clay pot was starting to come off in big flakes. Once we had room for it again, I brought the pot back upstairs, but the plant's condition didn't seem to improve. Large clumps of it were simply dead, and when I tried to remove those clumps, pieces of the little healthy foliage remaining came off with them. Plus, the pot was still a mess, and we feared that eventually it would fall apart altogether.

So, yesterday while on a walk, I popped into the Rite Aid and picked up a new pot for the aluminum plant (marked down to $5, as spring is nearly over). But when Brian tried to transfer what was left of the plant to the new pot, he got a nasty shock: None of the healthy-looking foliage that was left on the plant was actually connected to the soil at all. No wonder it wasn't looking well.

We pulled off what pieces of the plant we could salvage and put them in water to see if we can get any of them to take root, but we aren't pinning our hopes on it. The good news is that, after a little bit of work, Brian was able to remove most of the damaged parts of the clay pot and found that the structure of it was still intact — so, for the time being, he's planted two leftover Johnny Jump-Up seedlings from our flowerbed in it. Sources list these as only "mildly toxic" to cats, and our cats have never been in the habit of nibbling on the aluminum plant when we had it in the guest room, so we're hoping if we put the violas in the same place, they and the cats will be able to coexist.

Hit: Rose is arose

Although we're currently down one houseplant, we're certainly not lacking for fresh flowers. Our rosebush, after weeks of teasing us with buds that looked almost ready to bloom, has finally burst into full, riotous blossom. Just look at these beauties! We've got one in our cat-safe vase now, and if these keeps up, we may soon be harvesting whole bunches of them to display in all our rooms.

Our aluminum plant may not survive, and perhaps this year's tomato crop won't be everything we'd hoped for. But between this abundance of beautiful blooms and the ten pounds of flour we were fortunate enough to find at the supermarket yesterday (despite shortages), we'll have both bread and roses — everything you really need for a fulfilling ecofrugal life.

Money Crashers: 2 articles on financial advisors, and 1 update

Two new articles of mine have just popped up on Money Crashers, and one older piece has been updated. The two new pieces both deal with financial advisors, and they approach the advisor-client relationship from two ends: starting and ending. The first piece, 14 Questions You Should Ask a Financial Advisor Before Hiring, talks about how to find a financial advisor who's right for you by knowing what questions to ask at the job interview. And the second, 5 Signs It’s Time to Fire Your Financial Advisor, talks about how to know when your financial advisor isn't meeting your needs and it's time to find someone else.

The third piece is an update of my article on price matching policies from 2016. One of the seven chains covered in that original piece (Toys 'R' Us) is no longer around, and the other six (Walmart, Target, Best Buy, Home Depot, Lowe's, and Staples) have all made significant adjustments to their policies. So with this freshly updated piece, you can get all the details you need before you decide where to shop.
6 Retail Stores That Offer Price Match Guarantees & Adjustment Policies

Inch by inch, square by square

Today isn't an official Gardeners' Holiday, but it's one of the biggest days in our gardening calendar. It's the last frost date — the day after which there's deemed to be no significant danger of frost in our climate zone. And that means it's also the day the majority of our crops can go into the garden.

So Brian and I spent the better part of this morning transplanting the remaining seedlings that had been started indoors (four varieties of tomatoes, three varieties of peppers, and our Vanilla marigolds) and also starting new crops from seed (two kinds of basil, two kinds of cucumbers, two kinds of green beans, just one variety of butternut squash, and some dill). Plus one new square of lettuce. Plus the zucchinis, which were supposed to go in a week ago but got overlooked because they were way down at the bottom of the list. Our garden went from less than 13 percent planted to 99 percent planted, with only one square of summer lettuce left to go in next week.

Here's a shot of the garden as we left it, fully planted and freshly watered. Of course, you can't see the crops that are currently just seeds in the ground, but you can see patches of green where the new seedlings went in, and where our arugula, lettuce, scallions, and leeks are already growing. I was a little concerned about the fact that some of the tomato and pepper seedlings looked so weak and floppy, but Brian reminded me that we've had some in the past that were even punier than these and still went on to be healthy, productive plants. We'll just have to wait and see.

Speaking of productive plants, one crop that's already growing at an incredible rate is the new potato plants in their buckets at the corners of the garden. Since we started them, Brian has been topping up the buckets with compost to keep the stems buried, since you want as much stem underground as possible to encourage tuber growth. Pretty much every time he went out in the garden for anything, the plants had made their way to the top of the buckets and needed another helping of compost, and now, less than a month after we started them, they've reached just about to the top. So it won't be long before they outgrow the buckets, and then we'll need to figure out which direction to train the actual potato vines in — out through the garden fence so that we won't step on them, or into the garden area to protect them from hungry groundhogs. We've never done this before, so we have no idea which is better. Maybe we'll do two plants inside and two outside to see what works.

While working out in the garden, I noticed one other plant that looked like it was gearing up to produce something: our hardy kiwi vines. It's been six years since we planted these, and this year, for the first time, they've developed buds that suggest they're ready to flower. However, Brian urged me not to get too excited: after examining both plants, he'd determined that the flower buds were only on the female kiwi plant (Anna), not on the male (Meader). And since it takes two to do the pollination tango, that means we won't be getting any actual kiwis this year.

This isn't too surprising, since Burpee says, "Male plants need to be older than the females to perform their function" (i.e., girls grow up faster than boys do). But since the site also claims the vines normally take only one to three years to begin producing fruit, and we've had these for six years, it is a bit of a disappointment. But still, between our potato plants and the honeyberry bushes that are showing their first fruits, we won't lack for new flavors from the garden to enjoy.