Earth Week Challenge 2020: Meatless Monday

This year, for the first time, I signed up to participate in the Earth Week Challenge set by the environmental Organization Before It's Too Late. This is actually not a single challenge but a series of seven, one for each day of the week. So, this week, instead of doing one long post here on the blog, I'll be doing a series of seven short posts to let you know about each day's challenge as I tackle it.

The week starts off with Meatless Monday. The challenge is simply to avoid meat or dairy and eat "delicious vegan meals" instead. The 7 Day Guidebook on Before It's Too Late's website talks a bit about how meat and dairy production contribute to climate change and about how you can mitigate the problem by choosing plant-based, organic, and locally grown foods. It also touches on the problem of overfishing and how to choose sustainable seafood options.

Now, normally, this challenge would be quite easy for me. Brian and I eat about 90 percent vegan as it is, and we regularly go whole days or even weeks without eating significant amounts of animal products. But, ironically, this particular day happened to be one of the days it wasn't so easy. You see, before Passover, we decided to pick up a pound of real mozzarella cheese — our first in months — since our homemade vegan mozzarella contains soy and yeast, both no-nos for Passover. And since we didn't eat it all during Passover, Brian decided to use the rest last night to make our favorite butternut squash lasagna. We ate about half of it last night, leaving plenty of leftovers for today's lunch — but since it's just loaded with dairy, it's off-limits for a Meatless Monday meal. And the only other leftovers we had in the fridge happened to be an experimental dish Brian had made during Passover with tuna, potatoes, and eggs. (If I'd been thinking this through, I would have eaten that stuff for lunch yesterday, leaving the vegan pasta with eggplant and tomato for today. But I just didn't think about it.)

So, instead, I had to whip up a quick vegan lunch with what we had on hand. Not wanting to cook a whole meal just for this, I resorted to that vegan lunchtime favorite, the classic peanut butter sandwich, made on Brian's Basic Brown Bread. (Lately he's been making it with sugar instead of honey, so it is truly vegan.) I paired this with some baby carrots (also left over from Passover, since my usual afternoon snack of popcorn was off-limits), a clementine, a cup of almond milk, and one of Brian's vegan-friendly chocolate chip cookies. Definitely not a meal to feel deprived over, even if it's not quite as tasty as lasagna.

Fortunately, Brian assures me that tonight's dinner will be chili, which he always makes with Gimme Lean rather than real beef, so no special effort will be needed to make that meatless. He's even gotten into the habit of making the accompanying cornbread with aquafaba rather than egg, so the meal is naturally vegan. And if I feel the need for some dessert, I can simply fix myself a cup of cocoa made with almond milk and topped with Trader Joe's coconut whipped topping.

Not-Quite-Vegan Recipe of the Month: Purple Velvet Cake

Let me get this out of the way first: No, this isn't a vegan recipe. It's meat-free and dairy-free, and therefore low-carbon, but it does contain eggs. But it's just such an interesting dish, I couldn't pass up the chance to share it with you here, and I knew I wouldn't get a chance to do a separate Recipe of the Month for April.

To understand how we came to make this recipe, you need a little background. With social distancing regulations in effect, my family wasn't able to get together this year for a Passover Seder (the traditional meal that kicks off this Jewish holiday). So we decided instead to hold a Seder via Zoom, with each individual household gathered around its own Seder table but broadcasting sound and video to all the others. And that meant that, for the first time, we had to assemble our own Seder plate.

The Seder plate, for all you non-Jews, is the centerpiece of the Seder table. It has several symbolic objects on it, representing different elements in the story of Passover. There's a roasted egg and a green vegetable, symbolizing rebirth, which get dipped in salt water, symbolizing the tears of the Jews during their enslavement. There's a bitter herb, representing the bitterness of slavery (our family always used horseradish for this, although I think technically that's supposed to go in a separate spot on the plate), which you eat along with charoses, a sweet mixture of grated apples, nuts, and wine that represents the mortar the enslaved Jews used to build the Pyramids. And there's a roasted lamb shank, signifying the lamb that each Hebrew household slaughtered, smearing its blood on the door to tell the Angel of Death to "pass over" those houses when slaying the first-born children of all the families in Egypt. (The God of the Old Testament is really not a nice guy.)

Well, Brian and I were not about to buy a lamb shank we wouldn't eat just for this holiday, so I searched online for a vegetarian alternative. Several sites suggested substituting a beet, since its red color can represent blood. So we did that, and then we had to figure out a way to use up the beet during Passover. I personally don't care for this vegetable, but Brian is fond of pickled beets, and so I figured he'd just use it for that purpose. But he decided to get fancy. He started hunting around for a dessert recipe that contained beet — preferably, one that did not use flour, since that would make it off-limits for me until Passover week was over. And eventually he hit on this cake recipe, labeled Purple Velvet Torte, which met both requirements.

This dish is a flourless chocolate cake, which is more like a souffle than a traditional cake. It's got a very light, spongy texture on account of all the egg in the batter, which you need to get it to rise. Brian had made flourless chocolate cakes before, so he knew it was feasible. He modified the recipe somewhat based on what we had in our pantry, substituting canola oil for grapeseed oil, additional vanilla extract for the almond extract, and simple syrup (two parts water to one part sugar) for agave nectar.

Unfortunately, this photo doesn't give you a good idea of how purple this cake really was in person. In the picture, it just looks like a basic chocolate cake — and to be honest, it tasted a lot like one too. To me, it didn't taste like beets at all, although there was a sort of fruity element to the flavor that hinted there was something going on in there besides plain chocolate. If I hadn't known what it was, I'd probably have guessed cherry. It made for a more complex and interesting flavor than our standard vegan chocolate cake, and the flourless construction gave it a lighter and drier texture. But thanks to the moisture contributed by the grated beet, it wasn't too dry, which is the most common problem with flourless cakes. It was just a nice, simple, light chocolate cake that you'd never guess the secret ingredient of.

So, would we make this recipe again? Well, we probably wouldn't go out of our way to. Although we're not aiming for full-superpower vegan, we prefer to avoid animal products when we can, so for most occasions we'd prefer our basic vegan chocolate cake (with or without vegan coconut icing). But if we ever specifically need to make a flourless cake, say for a gluten-free friend, I think this recipe would be a great choice for that purpose. And it'll also come in handy if we ever find ourselves again with leftover beet to dispose of.

Money Crashers: 2 new posts

Two more of my posts popped up on Money Crashers this past Friday. These two are not exactly COVID-adjacent, but they are recession-adjacent — prioritized because there are more people in financial need right now.

The first one is an update to an old piece on the Housing Choice Voucher Program, formerly known as Section 8. I discuss the history of the program, how it works today, who qualifies for it, and its advantages and disadvantages for families and individuals in need. Then I wrap up with a section on how to apply. (Sadly, this probably won't help too many people right now, since the program was already overwhelmed with demand and many areas had waiting lists years long before the current recession started — and with COVID, it's harder than ever to get through to any government agency. But it's still better to have information than not have it.)

Housing Choice Voucher Program (Former Section 8) – Eligibility & How It Works
And second, we have a piece on how to turn all that unused stuff lurking in your home — the clothes you'll never fit into again, the ice skates you haven't used in decades, the tool you bought for one project and never used again — into extra cash. This is something a lot of people are likely to be doing more of as their main sources of income dry up due to COVID. Some of the advice in this article may not be too useful right now; for instance, you probably can't sell your old clothes to a consignment store or your old furniture to an antique store, since these aren't considered essential businesses. But you can still sell it online, and there are lots of different places to do that besides eBay. And, with suitable precautions, selling to local buyers might be an option too.

How to Turn Your Clutter Into Cash

Money Crashers: 2 new pieces

I'm on a roll with Money Crashers, it seems. Yesterday, they published two more of my articles — once again, both of them "COVID-adjacent" material.

Article #1: 3 Ways to Listen to Free Music Online – Downloads, Streaming & Radio

Here's yet another piece about ways to entertain yourself while snuggled in your little cocoon at home. This time, the focus is on music. Streaming is today the most popular way to listen to music — surpassing digital downloads, which long ago surpassed CDs — and there are lots of services that can provide you unlimited access to tunes for free in exchange for a few minutes of listening to ads. However, these services aren't your only option. There are also sites where you can download music for free — not any tune you want, but more choices than you might expect — and listen to old-school radio stations from all over the world.

Article #2: How to Stop Thieves (Porch Pirates) From Stealing Your Packages

Because we can't go to the mall or neighborhood stores anymore, we're doing a lot more shopping online these days and receiving a lot more packages. And if you happen to be out when yours arrives — taking a walk, grocery shopping, or going to an essential job that you can't do from home — it might not be there when you come back. "Porch pirates" are shameless and fast-moving, and they can snatch a package off your doorstep within hours or even minutes. Fortunately, there are several ways to foil them. Some involve modern technology, like Ring doorbells and Amazon Key; others are more old-school, like good lighting, landscaping, and — most old-fashioned of all — relying on your neighbors.

Money Crashers: 4 new pieces

Last weekend, Money Crashers published four of my articles all in a row. Most of these had been on hold for months — over a year in some cases — but got pushed to the front right now because they are "COVID-adjacent content," meaning things that people are more likely to want to know about right now during the COVID crisis. But don't worry: They had me recheck all the old pieces and replace any outdated or unusable info before publishing them.

Article #1: How to Eat Well & Healthy on Food Stamps – SNAP Guidelines & Recipes

The COVID crisis has shut down a lot of businesses — most of them, we hope, temporarily — and put a lot of people out of work. As a result, more people than ever are in need of food aid, such as SNAP (the program formerly known as food stamps). I've already written one article on how to apply for SNAP benefits, which Money Crashers had me update in response to the pandemic. However, after looking at my revisions, the editors decided it would be a good idea to pull out the second half of the article, about how to use your SNAP benefits, and turn it into a separate piece. The first part explains how to use SNAP at the grocery store, and what you can and can't buy with it; the second part offers shopping tips to stretch your SNAP dollars; and the third section offers resources (such as cookbooks) and recipes to get you started.

Article #2: How to Keep Entertained at Home Without Cable TV

With COVID keeping most of us at home nearly all the time, people are looking for more ways to entertain themselves without going out. This puts a lot of us in a bind: With our incomes reduced, we can't really afford cable TV anymore, yet canceling it feels like cutting ourselves off from our only source of in-home entertainment. This article offers some alternative ways to keep yourself entertained without cable, including cheaper streaming services, DVDs, books, computer games, and good old-fashioned tabletop games.

Article #3: Where to Find Cheap or Free Audiobooks to Listen to Online

One good alternative to watching more TV is reading more books. But unfortunately, libraries — the best source of cheap reads — are closed during the pandemic. So, to present folks with an alternative, Money Crashers had me update an old article on how to find cheap or free ebooks and audiobooks and split into two pieces: one for ebooks, one for audiobooks. The one on ebooks hasn't been published yet, but you can read this one to learn where to find audiobooks on a budget. Audible is obviously the best-known source, but there are others that are cheaper or even free.

Article #4: Should You Choose an Online Bank? – Considerations, Pros & Cons

Finally, because we're all living so much more of our lives online these days, Money Crashers decided it was time to publish this old article of mine on whether to choose an online-only bank. These banks are able to offer higher interest rates and lower fees because they don't have all the expenses involved in running a branch, but they can't provide face-to-face interaction. This article presents a complete list of the upsides and downsides of virtual banking, along with some tips on how to choose an online bank.

Our potato planting premiere

As I mentioned back in December, Brian and I are attempting to grow potatoes for the first time this year. And not only are these a completely new crop for us, but so is the method we're using to grow them. Rather than attempting to make space (a lot of it) for potato hills in our garden beds, we're going to be growing them in five-gallon buckets. This method will allow us to keep adding more dirt on top of the potato vines as they grow, thus maximizing the amount that's underground producing tubers, without disturbing the rest of the plants in the garden.

We originally planned to buy our seed potatoes from Fedco along with the rest of our seed order in January, but this turned out not to be feasible. The minimum amount of any potato variety you can buy from Fedco is two pounds, which is way more than we'd ever be able to plant in our miniature bucket garden. So we moved to Plan B, which was to pick up a handful of whatever seed potato looked most appetizing at the Belle Mead Co-Op whenever we went to load up on mulch in the spring. And, luckily, we were just in time to do this, hitting the store on the last day before our governor shut down all non-essential businesses in the state. (Actually, according to the Co-Op's website, it is still open, but operating under very severe restrictions — which is probably just as well, considering how crowded it was the day we went there.)

The potatoes we selected are a fingerling variety that I don't know the exact name of (the receipt from the Co-Op just says "Potato Seed Fingerling"). The clerk at the Co-Op said that for the type of planting we had planned, we'd probably want one potato per bucket, cut into thirds, so we bought just four potatoes — a little less than a pound — for $3.71. Brian prepped them for planting by keeping them in the shop in a bag, open to let air circulate, but covered with a cardboard box to block out light. After about four weeks of this treatment, they had sprouted long green shoots — incipient potato vines — from multiple eyes.

Yesterday, he deemed them ready to plant and got started preparing the buckets. He'd consulted instructions on various sites online, and they all agreed that the first step was to drill multiple drainage holes in the bottoms of the buckets. The three buckets that had previously served as tree waterers already had a couple of small holes each, but he expanded significantly on that, drilling 1/4-inch holes roughly 3 inches apart all the way around the base.

Next, he added a layer of gravel to the bottom of each bucket. This step further improves the drainage, preventing the tubers from becoming soggy and starting to rot int he buckets. He had already amassed a small pile of pebbles outside the garden while he was clearing a spot in a corner of the back yard to plant some pawpaw seedlings (which are still alive, if tiny), so he used all of those, plus all the ones I'd saved in a bucket in the shed for possible landscaping use, plus a few fragments of concrete left over from our patio project that we fished out of the back corner of the yard. With all this material, we were able to line each bucket to a depth of about 1 1/2 inches.

Some sets of instructions said that you should add a layer of plastic, such as a garbage bag, on top of the gravel, with holes poked in the bottom for drainage. However, not all the instructions included this step, and the ones that did never actually explained what it was for. So, to keep our setup as simple as possible, we skipped it and layered compost directly over the gravel, somewhere between 4 and 6 inches deep. The compost had come out of our bin, so we only had a limited amount to work with, but we still have a bag of Black Kow composted manure (tested and found negative for killer compost) that we can supplement with as the vines grow. We then cut up each potato into three pieces and set them into the compost, more or less evenly spaced, with the stems pointing up.

We covered these seed potatoes with a final inch or two of compost and placed the buckets inside the garden enclosure, where our resident groundhog (which made its first public appearance of the year today) can't get at them. So that the buckets wouldn't get in our way as we moved about the garden, we placed one in each corner other than the one where the gate is, plus one more in the corner farthest from the gate. Now all we have to do is keep them watered and top them up with compost every time the green shoots start to poke above the level of the soil. If all goes well, this fall we should be able to harvest close to 10 pounds of potatoes from our four buckets — not enough to make a substantial dent in our grocery bill, but enough for a few good, tasty meals. And, more importantly, it will prove that this method is feasible, so if we want to ramp up our potato production in future years, all we'll need to do is pick up a few more buckets.

And if it turns out not to work, oh well — it didn't take up any of our valuable garden real estate, so all we're out is four bucks for the potatoes.

Which DIY mask is best?

One of the last remaining shreds of normalcy we had to cling to during the Covid crisis has just been ripped away. Until this weekend, I took some comfort in the fact that, even if we couldn't go out to work or eat or shop for anything but food, we could still at least go out for walks. But on Friday, the CDC made an official recommendation that all Americans should cover their faces in public — particularly "in public settings where other social distancing measures are difficult to maintain," like the grocery store. Which means now, we can no longer leave the house without at least bringing along some sort of mask to don in case we find ourselves among other humans.

When this happened, Brian and I had a few respirator-style dust masks on hand down in the shop. We'd already donated all our unused ones to a collection for local health care workers, but Brian had figured they wouldn't want the ones that had been used, so he cleaned those up as best he could and we donned a couple for for our first masked foray out in public on Saturday. What we learned from this is that those things are really darned uncomfortable to wear for any length of time. Even for the ten minutes or so that we spent in the grocery store, they were really itchy and unpleasant, and I kept wanting to reach under the mask and scratch my face, which would have kind of defeated the purpose of wearing it. (Well, not entirely, since the mask would still have served to protect other people from my germs, if I had any — which is the main point of making everybody wear them. But it wouldn't have protected me any.)

So we quickly concluded that wearing these things everywhere for the remainder of the shutdown — which will surely continue for weeks, if not months — was not an option. We'd have to come up with some kind of DIY alternative that we could actually stand to have on our faces.

Fortunately, there's no shortage of instructions online for making homemade face masks. In fact, I'd seen a story in the New York Times Tuesday about how to construct one from "common household materials," saying it could even be sewn by hand if necessary. I looked over the directions and it didn't look too complicated, and I had an old floursack towel that was big enough to make two complete masks according to their plan, so I decided to give it a try.

Well, it didn't take me long to discover that this simple mask was actually not simple at all to make. We ran into our first difficulty in Step 1 when we tried to construct the fabric ties to hold the mask on. The article said to cut "4 thin pieces of material, about 18” long and ¾” wide," fold them in half "twice lengthwise, then once more to tuck the rough edges inside," and sew down the middle. All I can say is, you try doing this with a ¾-inch strip of fabric and see how easy you find it. Brian, who is much better on of the sewing machine than I am, struggled to work his way down this relatively short seam on the multi-folded strip of fabric, while I tried the much simpler approach of folding the fabric in half only once and stitching the edges together by hand. This was quicker but not nearly as neat, and neither piece came out looking exactly professional. We discovered that we got much better results with much less effort by simply cutting a side seam off the towel, so we repeated that process with another seam to get our fourth tie.

After that, we had to figure out a way to secure all the ties to the corners of the fabric and bunch them up in the middle to keep them out of the way while we (or rather Brian) stitched the seams. This, too, was much harder than the article made it sound. It merely says to pin them down and "Make sure that the ties are gathered in the center of the fabric layer," with no indication at all about how to do the gathering. An 18-inch strip of fabric isn't all that easy to just tuck out of the way. We ended up sort of rolling them up and bundling them with rubber bands, which made the whole "sandwich" of fabric rather bulky and hard to work with. Brian was eventually able to sew all the way around it and invert it, but then we ran into yet another snag: trying to form three pleats in the fabric and pin them in place while he stitched yet again around the whole thing. The whole finished mask was less than 6 inches high, so I only had an inch or so to work with for each fold, and it was very difficult to fit three of them into the available space. And once I had them all pinned, the whole mask was very thick, making it difficult to stitch all the way through it.

Eventually, we managed to produce one complete mask. It wasn't too hard to put on, and while it wasn't exactly comfortable to wear (and like every mask I've ever worn, it caused my glasses to fog up, making it hard to see), it was at least better than the dust masks. Still, the whole process was so exhausting that we couldn't even contemplate making a second one that night. Our conclusion was that this simple-looking mask is actually a lot harder than it looks, and it's definitely not a project for a novice sewer.

So, for our second attempt, we decided to hunt around for another design that might be simpler. And apparently, lots of people have been tackling this type of project, because we found lots of plans to choose from:

• A fitted cloth face mask with a space to insert a filter, which this user made from a sanitary napkin. I never seriously considered this one, since it looked a lot more complicated than the first one, which was already pushing the limits of our abilities. 
• A fitted mask that covered in a New York Times editorial requires the use of a template. It's not as elaborate as the other fitted one, but probably still more than we could handle.
• A design recommended in Marketwatch that seemed a little too simple in some ways and not simple enough than others. It requires no sewing, using staples and safety pins to hold it together instead, which struck me as (a) uncomfortable, (b) not very sturdy, and (c) difficult to wash. At the same time, it does require the addition of an unfolded paper clip to make a "nose pinch," which may improve the fit if you manage to get it positioned just right, but also makes it a lot more fiddly to construct.
• A triangular mask made from a fleece blanket, which requires no sewing at all as long as you have some long strings to use for the fastenings. I thought this one would probably be too warm, and I wasn't eager to sacrifice a blanket for the purpose. But I might revisit the idea if another wave of this pandemic hits next winter (or maybe even if it doesn't, just for warmth).
• A disposable mask from a paper towel. This obviously wasn't suitable for us, since we don't have any of these in the house, and anyway, if we're going to all the trouble of making a mask, we'd like to be able to use it more than once.
• A pleated mask similar to the first one we tried, but with a more detailed set of instructions found online my brother-in-law (who has plenty of experience with face protection, being a firefighter). He also sent a link to a set of video instructions.

Brian eventually decided to try this last one, largely because he was determined at this point to sew something that would actually work well and look decent. This second attempt went much better than the first. He used more fabric from that same dishtowel, but this time he ironed it all first to get it as smooth as possible, which made it much easier to work with. He also figured out that it was much easier to make the ties if he started with much wider strips of fabric, folding over the seams and ironing them flat before stitching them.

Aside from that, he basically followed the instructions in the document, with one variation: after making his straps and folding them around the edge of the mask itself, he stitched them together first, rather than starting at one end of the strap and stitching all the way up the strap, the mask, and the strap on the other side. It made for a little more backtracking, but it ensured that the thing stayed together. As you can see, this finished mask came out much neater-looking than the first, and when he tried it on, it stayed put reasonably well.

Although this second set of instructions was definitely easier than the first, I also discovered directions in several places online for an even simpler mask — one that requires no sewing and even, if you have a suitable piece of fabric, no cutting. All you need is a good-sized piece of fabric (a scarf, towel, or even an old T-shirt will do) and two elastic bands (hair ties or just plain rubber bands). Versions of this incredibly simple mask appear on the CDC website, on Vox, and on Domino.

I tried whipping up one of these new-sew masks from another spare dishtowel, and it took literally one minute to complete. It was kind of bulky and didn't stay in place as well as the sewn masks, but it had one big advantage: since we have plenty of these dish towels, it would be very easy to wash the mask after each use. Just take off the rubber bands, toss the towel in the laundry, and use a fresh one to make a new mask next time you need it.

So, all things considered, I'd have to say this ultra-simple, no-sew mask is the best DIY design for ease of construction and ease of use. It also has the advantage that you can make it with nearly any piece of fabric as long as it's big enough, so you can make a different mask to coordinate with any outfit you wear if you're so inclined. However, if you'd prefer something sturdier and better fitting, I'd say give the second pleated mask a try. Both designs qualify as ecofrugal, since you can most likely make out of materials you have on hand. But the no-sew one is probably a bit more ecofrugal, since it doesn't permanently alter either the material—so on that distant, glorious day when this whole crisis is over, you can just return it to its original use.