Thrift Week 2021, Day 2: Flowers

By now, I have my ecofrugal holiday decorating routine pretty much down to a science. I just trim off some branches from all the evergreen trees in (and overhanging) our yard, fill up all the vases in the house with them, bind some onto the front porch railings, and eke it all out with curls of red ribbon and strings of little white lights. I've been using the same lights and ribbons for years, so I can make the house look appropriately festive without spending any money at all.

The problem comes when the holidays are over and it's time to take those decorations down. Refilling the vases with more evergreens doesn't feel right, because I associate those with Christmas time — but there's nothing else in the garden to fill them with, and even the earliest spring flowers are still months away. And simply leaving the vases empty makes the room feel sort of bare and bleak, right at the very time when the world outside is barest and bleakest and the indoors could really use something to brighten it up.

So when I decided to do this local shopping challenge for Thrift Week, I figured it would be a perfect occasion to throw a little business to an establishment I rarely patronize: our local florist. I usually avoid buying cut flowers, not just because of the price but also the pesticides and carbon footprint — but since I'm trying to help local businesses here, I decided that would take the curse off it some. And I hoped that perhaps the florist could recommend something that was sort of winter-appropriate — maybe grown in a local greenhouse rather than shipped from Argentina.

And that's what I got, more or less. He initially pointed me at some mixed bouquets in the front of the shop, but they looked a little too bright and summery, so I inquired about some white flowers in a bucket, which turned out to be freesias sold by the stem. Not wanting to go too overboard, I just bought five of them. When I got home, I clipped some sage off our not-quite-dormant plant to fill out the vase, and now I have a nice, not too un-seasonal display of flowers and greenery to brighten up our living room. (I guess if I'd been thinking, I'd have accepted the florist's offer of some greens to go with the flowers, since the whole point of the exercise was to give them some business. But my frugal habits were kind of working on autopilot, so I said no to this "extra" expense without thinking about it.)

Now, since this purchase is one I normally wouldn't make at all, I could say the entire $15 that I spent on it is a cost incurred by shopping locally. But on the other hand, I had more or less decided already to splurge on some cut flowers to brighten up the bleak midwinter, so if I hadn't bought them here I would probably have picked up a bunch at Trader Joe's or someplace. On our last trip there, the closest thing I saw to a seasonal bunch of blooms was tulips at $10 a bunch, so my decision to shop local only cost me an extra $5. So far, I'm actually ahead for the week.

Thrift Week 2021: The local edition

The COVID pandemic has been particularly hard on small, local businesses. Since it started, roughly ten stores in our town have closed their doors for good, including our beloved local toy store, our real live record shop, a jewelry store, a vintage clothing store, and a Greek cafe. And while, surprisingly, some new businesses have actually opened, I still feel like I should have done more to help the ones we lost. I did my best to throw a little business their way during the shutdown, but it was only a drop in the bucket.

So I decided that Thrift Week 2021 is going to be my most ambitious Local Shopping Challenge yet: for this entire week, I will buy everything locally.

For purposes of this challenge, I'm defining "local" to mean within walking distance, rather than just within the boundaries of Highland Park. That means I can still go to the nearest Starbucks (in New Brunswick), and we can go to the nearest hardware store (in Edison) if we need to fix something in an emergency. But we have to go to that nearby place, even if Home Depot is cheaper and has a bigger selection. We can buy our groceries from the local Stop & Shop, the H-Mart in Edison, or the George St. Co-Op in New Brunswick, but we can't go to Shop Rite, Coscto, or Trader Joe's for the things that are cheaper there. If we want a book we can't find at the library, we can try the local thrift shop or the small Barnes & Noble in New Brunswick, but we can't just order it online. (Locally owned businesses that no longer have a storefront but still have an online presence, such as Raritan Market, will also count.)

Of course, I could just get around this by putting off any non-essential purchases until the week is over, which wouldn't exactly do our local businesses any good. So to ensure that my local shopping challenge actually involves shopping local, I'm adding another requirement: I must make at least one purchase from a local business each day of the challenge. Yes, even if that means buying things I don't actually need. Brian and I are among the lucky ones who are doing just fine in the middle of this economic crisis, so we can certainly afford to spend a little extra money helping out those who are struggling.

Each day, I'll log in to share what I purchased, how much it cost, and how much (if any) extra I spent to buy it locally as opposed to shopping at my usual venues. At the end of the week, I'll tot it all up, calculate how much my week of local shopping cost in total, and extrapolate to figure out how much it might cost to shop this way all the time — or at least until the pandemic is over — and whether it's worthwhile.

Here's my haul for today:

1. Two bottles of "super magnesium" tablets from the local Rite Aid. This is something I actually needed, and something I would normally buy there, but I was lucky enough to find them on sale today: buy one, get one free. So both bottles together cost me $10, which is half what I'd normally pay.

2. A bunch of organic scallions from Stop&Shop for $1. This is more than we'd normally pay, but we needed the scallions right away and didn't want to make a separate trip to H-Mart just to save 70 cents. 

3. A package of cupcake wrappers, also from Stop&Shop, for $2. Brian told me I could have any kind of cake I wanted for my birthday, and I chose the chocolate angel cupcakes from our "Delicious Desserts" cookbook, so we needed some cupcake liners. This is something we don't normally buy, so I don't know whether $2 for 75 of them (which should be something like a ten-year supply at the rate we use them) is a good price, but again, even if we could have saved a buck somewhere else, it wasn't worth the extra trip.

So my first day of local shopping was pretty successful. We found everything we needed, and we actually spent around $8.30 less in total than we normally would. On the other hand, these purchases were pretty utilitarian, rather than fun or special. But I'm sure that will change as the week goes on.

Money Crashers: COBRA Health Insurance Guide

Just a quick update here to let you know about my latest Money Crashers article. It's about COBRA, which I kind of doubt is all that useful for anyone these days, since an ACA marketplace health plan — even without subsidies — is almost always cheaper than paying for your old workplace plan without your employer's help. But there are some cases in which it could possibly be worth the money, and this article explains what they are, along with other details such as who's eligible for the program and how to enroll. Here it is:

COBRA Health Insurance Guide – Continue Coverage After Ending a Job

Why my New Year's resolution for 2021 is to start sharing good news

Right now, it seems like basically all the news is bad. It's not good anywhere in the world, but the U.S. in particular seems to be a Russian nesting doll of disaster: the crisis of an angry mob storming the Capitol wrapped in the crisis of a disputed election wrapped in the yearlong twin crises of a global pandemic and the biggest depression since the Great one, all wrapped in the decades-long crisis of a looming climate disaster that could literally kill us all. No one's even paying attention to the biggest threats right now because they're too busy dealing with the most immediate ones. So many terrible things happened in 2020 that the word of the year chosen by users of Dictionary.com was "unprecedented." The Oxford English Dictionary couldn't even settle on a single word of the year, instead naming an assortment of words like "Blursday," "covidiots," and "doomscrolling," which has taken the place of what we used to call reading the news.

The thing about that last one is, dwelling on bad news is part of what got us into this mess in the first place. As a recently replayed Hidden Brain podcast pointed out, both social media and conventional media have focused excessively on terrible stories that spark outrage, because that's what attracts the most clicks and likes. Unfortunately, it's also what sows dissension and stokes the fires of partisan rancor, vitriol, conspiracy theories, and hatred — all resulting in outbreaks of violence that make for more bad news, more doomscrolling, and more division.

How can we break the cycle?

I'm not sure, but the best idea I could come up with was this: start sharing good news.

Instead of automatically clicking, liking, and sharing every horrible story that you see, try clicking, liking, and sharing the good ones. Sure, there aren't as many of them out there; because we've been trapped in the doomscrolling cycle so long, they aren't as likely to show up in your social media feed or even on the front page of your local newspaper. But they are out there. Every issue of the Christian Science Monitor features a story about someone who's doing good in the world, and Reasons to Be Cheerful serves up a steady diet of nothing but good news, every week. They're mostly small-scale, local stories about one city, one company, one project — but at least they're something to counter the constant scrolling of doom. And the more of these stories we all click, like, and share, the more popular they will become, and the more incentive both social media and mainstream media will have to offer up more of the same.

So my New Year's resolution for 2021 (along with continuing to try new vegan recipes each month) is to share good news when I find it. If it's good news about the environment, or about money, I'll share it on this blog. If not, I'll share it via social media or email with my family and friends. Basically, I'll just do my best to pass on a little bit of much-needed hope by whatever means I have to hand.

I've started off already this weekend. Just now, I posted on my local Nextdoor group to tell everyone about a local store employee who went the extra mile for me and Brian, rather than complaining about one who was rude or unhelpful. And to my mom, I passed along this summary from Reasons to be Cheerful of the 112 best things that happened, even amid all the chaos, in 2020 — from the expansion of renewable energy worldwide to the virtual eradication of homelessness in the third-largest city in Illinois to the success of community policing in Camden, right here in my home state of New Jersey.

So watch this space for more good news in 2021. If nothing else, it'll give me something to write about when there's no particular news to share in my ecofrugal life — and if it forces me to go searching for positive stories, so much the better.

Money Crashers: 6 Things You Should Maintain & Take Care of to Save Money Long-Term

One of the key tenets of the ecofrugal life is, to inversely paraphrase Aldous Huxley, "Mending is better than ending." In other words, it's almost always better for both the environment and your wallet to keep something you own in good condition than to toss it and buy something new. (Of course, there are some exceptions, like our old microwave that would have cost more to repair than to replace with a good used one, or a threadbare pair of socks that would cost an hour to darn one more time and only a dollar to replace. But it works as a general principle.)

My latest piece for Money Crashers takes that basic principle and turns it into solid, practical advice. I name six items that are particularly useful to maintain, mainly because it makes such big difference in their overall lifespan, along with the key maintenance tasks that matter most for each one. Most of these are high-end items that would cost a lot to replace, like cars and major appliances, but clothing also makes the list because it's so easy and cheap to do. (Remember that pair of pants I repaired two years ago in the hopes of making it last out the winter? I'm still wearing them.) 

This article may not tell you much you couldn't have learned by R-ing TFM. But it condenses all the key info from more than six manuals' into just one place — and it has the advantage of being right in front of you, not buried in a drawer somewhere. See? Here it is:

6 Things You Should Maintain & Take Care of to Save Money Long-Term

Recipe of the Month: Savory Cabbage with Vegan Sausage

According to legend, whatever you do at the start of the new year is what you can expect to be doing all year long. If that's true, we can expect to spend 2021:

• Watching mindless entertainment, like the Dungeons & Dragons game featuring the cast of Stranger Things that we watched on New Year's Eve;
• Repairing broken things, like our D&D Players Handbook and Monster Manual, which Brian successfully restored the broken pages of with bookbinding glue, and my two pairs of old pants that got patched or re-patched; and
  
• Inventing new plant-based recipes, like the cabbage with vegan sausage Brian made last night.
  

Actually, this wasn't so much a new recipe as a meatless adaptation of an old one. Until recently, Brian and I used to be in the habit of buying (free-range, non-factory-farmed) kielbasa sausage from the Amish market. It was handy for a last-minute supper, since we could just fry up a couple of links and cook some potatoes and frozen peas in the microwave, and also for cutting up to add flavor to other recipes. Brian invented one with cabbage, onion, apple, and chunks of sausage all cooked together, which was quite tasty and provided a good dose of healthy fruits and veggies.

However, when we decided to go (mostly) dairy-free, we also started drifting away from the few free-range meat items that were still a part of our diet. This wasn't really a matter of principle; I was okay with them from an ethical standpoint, and chicken and pork don't have as big a carbon footprint as beef, especially when eaten on such an infrequent basis. I think Brian just saw it as an interesting challenge to see how close to vegan we could comfortably get. (As I discovered during last year's Thrift Week, I don't think going full vegan is ever going to be on the cards for us, but the perfect doesn't have to be the enemy of the good-for-the-planet.)

We'd tried several times to find an acceptable plant-based substitute for our favorite sausage, but without much success. Most commercially produced vegetarian sausages are meant to mimic either highly spiced Italian sausage or chorizo; the only Polish sausage substitute we'd ever found was Tofurkey's, which left much to be desired in terms of both flavor and texture. We even tried making our own sausages from seitan, but while these were okay flavor-wise, they were far too dry to eat on their own.

Last night, however, Brian had a brainwave. It occurred to him that we didn't actually need to make big sausage links to replace the little pieces of sausage that we used to use in recipes like his cabbage dish. And since he had a bunch of little broken pieces left at the bottom of a bag of Butler Soy Curls, too small to use as a chicken or tofu alternative in a dish like Garlic Lemon Broccoli Pasta, they seemed like the perfect subjects to experiment on.

To give the soy curl fragments a sausage-like flavor, he simply soaked them in well-salted water with a touch of black pepper, Liquid Smoke, and — a surprisingly important addition — red food coloring. This gave the soy bits the pinkish color we'd expect from the cooked chunks of kielbasa in the original version of this dish, which helped trick our brains into expecting a sausage-like flavor from them. I was in my office working while Brian cooked up this creation, so I didn't know what had gone into it, and when I first tasted it, I couldn't figure out where he'd come up with such a plausible sausage substitute. I knew it wasn't real sausage, because we were all out of it, but it tasted so close to it that if I hadn't known, I might have thought he'd simply located a stray link in the back of the freezer.

Once Brian let me in on the secret, I could analyze the flavor a little more objectively, and I noticed one element that was missing: garlic. I suggested, and he immediately agreed, that the next time he tries this, he should add some to the soaking mixture for an even more kielbasa-like flavor. But even without the garlic, these soaked soy curls really provided the meaty chew and savor this dish needed. Mixed in with all the other flavors of cabbage, onion, apple, and caraway seed, they were almost indistinguishable from the real thing.

This recipe is still a work in progress, so it will probably improve as time goes by, but I think what we have now is good enough to be worth sharing. So, gentlefolks, I give you:

BRIAN'S SAVORY CABBAGE WITH VEGAN SAUSAGE

1. Dissolve 3/4 tsp. salt in 1/2 cup water. Add 2 grinds black pepper, 2-3 drops Liquid Smoke, and 1 drop red food coloring. (Note: for future versions of this recipe, Brian plans to add 1 clove fresh garlic and blend everything together with a hand blender, but we haven't tried that yet.) Zap the mixture in the microwave for 30 seconds.
2. Add roughly 1 ounce crushed soy curls, or enough to fill the container up to the water line. Soak for about 10 minutes, then squeeze out the excess liquid.
3. Fry the soaked soy curls in vegetable oil for about 5 minutes. Set aside.
4. To the same pan, add 1/2 red onion (chopped), 1/2 cabbage (sliced into thin strips), 1 apple (peeled and diced), 1 tsp. caraway seed, and an additional 1/2 tsp. salt. Cook until tender, then add the "sausage" bits back to the pan and heat through.

Serve with bread (preferably rye) or biscuits. Makes two generous portions, with a little bit left over.

You can also cook the veggies on their own, without the "sausage." This is good as a side dish, but not substantial enough for a main course.

This successful experiment has gone even further to confirm our appreciation for Butler Soy Curls. We've already discovered so many handy ways to use them (chili, lemon-garlic sauce, sesame sauce) that we're going through them at an alarming rate. After devouring our first bag of them, we bought a half-dozen more (the minimum order) from the Butler site, and we've already used up nearly two of those bags and given away a third. So, the next time we order, we've decided to go for the 12-pound bulk box. Brian hesitated to buy this big box the last time, since he feared we wouldn't have enough freezer space to store them all, but now that he's seen just how useful they are, he's willing to clear out some of the other things in the freezer (like our homemade veggie stock, which isn't that great anyway) to make room for them. Besides, at the rate we're going through them, we can store some of them in the fridge rather than the freezer and run no risk of having them go off before they're eaten.

Doing this will reduce the cost of the curls in their dry form to $5.41 per pound, even with shipping included. Since each pound of the dry curls cooks up to make about three pounds of meat substitute, that works out to about $1.80 per pound — less than we used to pay for the free-range chicken from Trader Joe's, and significantly less than the Amish-market sausage. So this new, tasty protein substitute will be not only earth-friendly, but economical as well — just what ecofrugality is all about.

Recipe of the Month: Simplified Malai Kofta

Last year during Passover, I bought a box of instant mashed potatoes, thinking perhaps I could use them for a cheaper alternative to the potato-based hot cereal I usually eat for breakfast during that week. That experiment didn't work out, so most of the box ended up just stashed away in the pantry. Then, earlier this year, we suddenly discovered a use for them. In a thread on the Frugal forum on Reddit about things that are much cheaper to make or do for yourself, one Redditor mentioned making homemade gnocchi with instant mashed potatoes. This caught my attention because gnocchi were one of the few convenience foods Brian and I bought regularly, since they came in so handy for a last-minute meal on a busy evening. We'd once tried making our own using the recipe in Mark Bittman, but it was a big hassle, and the result wasn't as tasty as the store-bought stuff. So we (or, more accurately, Brian) decided to give it a go with the potato flakes, and it turned out to be much quicker and easier, and produced better results, to boot. Since then, it's become a staple in our recipe collection.

That's not what this post is about, however. It's just an intro to explain how, once we'd discovered this use of instant mashed potatoes, Brian got to thinking about other recipes in our collection that we might be able to simplify through the use of these handy little flakes. And that's how he came to develop this recipe for easy malai kofta.

Malai kofta, for those not familiar with them, are Indian potato dumplings with bits of chopped veggies in them, served in a creamy tomato gravy. Brian already had a recipe for vegan malai kofta made with coconut milk and ground cashews in place of cream, but he didn't make it often because it took about an hour all told, with 30 minutes of hands-on work. The substitution of instant for fresh mashed potatoes simplified the recipe considerably and inspired him to tinker with it more. He adjusted the spices, tweaked the amounts of other ingredients, and started using grated rather than chopped carrot. He first substituted ground almonds (which we usually have in the pantry) for the ground cashews (which we usually don't), and eventually simplified the recipe still further by using almond flour.

Brian's simpler version of this dish cuts the prep time from about 30 minutes to 15 or 20. It still needs around half an hour of cooking time, so it's not ideal for a busy weeknight, but it's easily doable for a weekend. It's also tasty, with a rich creamy sauce that's full of flavor but not overpoweringly spicy, and makes a dinner for two with a couple of lunches to spare. And I consider it to be different enough from the original to count as a new recipe. 

So here it is:

    SIMPLIFIED MALAI KOFTA 

1. Preheat oven to 450°F.
2. Combine 1 1/2 cups water, 1/2 cup frozen peas, and 1/2 cup grated carrot in a pot. Bring to a boil and simmer about 10 minutes.
   
3. While veggies are cooking, heat 1 tablespoon oil in a deep skillet. Add 1 teaspoon whole cumin seeds and cook until they begin to sizzle. Then add 1 cup finely chopped yellow onion, 1 teaspoon peeled and chopped ginger root, and a pinch of cayenne pepper. Cook 3-4 minutes, until onion starts to brown. Add 1 cup tomatoes (chopped, crushed, or pureed) and cook another 3-4 minutes.
   
4. When veggies are done, stir in 1 cup potato flakes and mix until water is all absorbed. Transfer to a large mixing bowl to cool.
5. Transfer tomato mixture to a blender or food processor and blend until smooth. Return to pan and stir in 2 tablespoons almond flour, 1 cup canned coconut milk, 1/4 teaspoon garam masala, 1/4 teaspoon turmeric, 1/4 teaspoon ground coriander (no more! Be careful!), 1/4 teaspoon cardamom, and 1 teaspoon salt (or more, to taste). Add enough water to make a nice gravy consistency, up to 1 cup, keeping in mind it will continue to thicken as it cooks. Stir well and let it bubble gently over low heat as you prepare the koftas. If it's too watery, add more almond flour.
6. Add another 2 tablespoons almond flour to the potato mixture, along with 1/4 cup chickpea flour, 1/2 teaspoon salt, 1/3 teaspoon turmeric, 1/4 teaspoon ground cumin, and a pinch of black pepper. Stir to form a thick dough.
7. Oil a metal baking sheet. Form dough into balls, about golf ball size, and place a few inches apart on the sheet. Bake at 450°F for 10-12 minutes until crisp on the bottom. Flip balls and bake another 10-12 minutes until crisp on all sides.
8. Drop the baked dumplings into the heated gravy. Serve immediately with rice or your favorite Indian bread. (If you cook your rice in the pressure cooker, as we do, you can prepare it in the time it takes the kofta to bake.)
   

And that wraps up my first full year of vegan Recipes of the Month! I'll return with more in 2021.