Recipe of the Month: Roasted Leek and Cauliflower Pasta

February's Recipe of the Month came about because of a fortuitous find: sale-priced cauliflower at Lidl. Brian didn't have any particular need for cauliflower, but he couldn't pass it up. As a result, he ended up cruising the Internet searching for vegan recipes that used both cauliflower and leeks, which we also had on hand. And when he came across the Roasted Leek and Cauliflower Pasta recipe at Lazy Cat Kitchen, he decided it looked like a winner.

As per usual, Brian made a few minor modifications to this recipe. He increased the volume of veggies slightly to use up our entire medium-to-large cauliflower and two medium leeks (as opposed to the half a large cauliflower and two "smallish" leeks called for in the original). He also increased the volume of pasta from 7 ounces to 8 in order to use up a half-box of whole wheat penne we had sitting around. He left out the capers, which we didn't have, and cut the amount of black pepper down from a quarter-teaspoon to just a couple of grinds. And since we didn't have either dairy-free cream or cashews to make a homemade cashew cream, he mocked up his own substitute by blending soft tofu with soy milk.

But his most significant change was deciding to frizzle the leeks—that is, sauté them briefly in oil before browning them in the oven, à la Molly Katzen—rather than soaking them in boiling water before roasting them. He put them on a separate baking sheet so he could remove them from the oven when they were done, rather than spreading them alongside the cauliflower and having to remove them once cooked. Besides being less work, this was a technique we were already familiar with and knew would give us good results.

And good indeed were those results. The dish was packed with flavor: tart lemon juice, cheesy nutritional yeast, and fragrant frizzled leeks and garlic. The contrast between the tender veggies, chewy pasta, crunchy toasted walnuts, and silky, creamy sauce added plenty of texture interest. And between the nutritional yeast, the walnuts, and the tofu in the sauce, it provided enough protein to fill us up despite the lack of any meat or meat-alternative component.

Good as it was, I don't know if this dish will become a regular addition to our repertoire. We can't count on finding cauliflower on sale all the time, so we'll probably save this recipe for cauliflower season, which around here is from September through December. Fortunately, leeks are also in season at that time, and this warm and savory meal will be just right for crisp autumn evenings.

The Dress Retro challenge: results

Last April, I announced my plan to take the Dress Retro challenge: purchasing no more than three new garments for myself over the course of 2023. I noted at the time that in the preceding year, I'd bought only four new garments—three if you counted my "sleep shorts" as underwear—without even trying, so I thought I would have no problems limiting myself to three if I worked at it. And I can now officially announce that the number of brand-new garments I bought myself in 2023 was...zero.

That doesn't mean I purchased no clothing at all. I bought a couple of secondhand pieces from thrift shops and ThredUP, but the challenge doesn't place any limits on those. I also bought one new bra, one pair of sandals, and several pairs of boots, most of which I ended up returning because they didn't fit. (I'm currently using a $40 pair from Walmart that doesn't really fit; they're far too long, but at least I can get my feet into them and they don't leak.) But shoes and undies don't count as clothing under the rules, so technically, I passed the challenge with flying colors.

However, zero is only the number of new garments I purchased for myself. After Brian embarked on his wardrobe makeover in September, I splurged on a few new items for him. Although I didn't want to buy everything from fast-fashion sites, I did succumb to the charms of one pair of color-blocked shorts from LightInTheBox because they fit so well with the new style he was aiming for. Unfortunately, summer was almost over by the time they arrived, so he still hasn't worn them. I later ordered him a couple of medieval-style lace-up shirts, neither of which has been worn either. The first one looked cool online but turned out to look, in Brian's words, like "wizard pajamas" in person, and the second was in a linen-like fabric that looks much nicer but is too lightweight for winter. So if you count all the clothing I bought for both of us, not just for me, I only just managed to stay within the three-garment limit. Moreover, I blew the entire budget on items that haven't even been worn yet, including one that will most likely never be worn at all. 

And this, I guess, emphasizes the point that the authors of the challenge were trying to make: fast fashion kind of sucks. With their low prices and vast selections, these websites make it far too easy to buy clothes that you don't really need and may not like at all once you see them in person. And since they're usually shipped from China, it's often too costly to return them—so they either sit around taking up space in your drawers or get discarded and sit around taking up space in a landfill.

So, based on this experience, I think I've learned my lesson about shopping on these sites—for me and Brian both. Hunting through thrift-store racks may be more hit-and-miss, but at least it's possible to tell the hits from the misses. I won't have to pay money up front just to try something on and pay again to return it—or maybe just be stuck with it—if I don't like it.

Gardeners' Holidays 2024: Pruning Day

Every year, one of the first jobs on our garden to-do list is pruning our plum trees. I've been dreading this task somewhat, as over the past couple of years our trees had become badly infected with what I assumed was canker, causing knobbly black growths like giant warts around their branches. All three trees had it to some extent, but the Mount Royal in particular hardly seemed to have a single branch that wasn't affected. 

However, when I tried researching tree canker to figure out the best way to tackle this, I began to realize that the growths on our trees didn't look much like the cankers in the pictures. I started searching for info on other problems affecting plum trees and eventually figured out that what ours actually had was a fungal disease aptly named "black knot." Sources on the Web disagree on how serious a problem this is. The province of Alberta warns, "The fungus continues to grow internally and externally, with the branch eventually becoming girdled and dying," while the University of Minnesota Extension says, "Many Prunus trees tolerate black knot. Tolerant trees have many galls throughout the tree with few negative effects on the health of the tree." Minnetonka Orchards takes a middle ground, saying "The tree may suffer from decreased fruit production, structural damage, and ultimately death if the infection is severe," but adding that "Mature trees are more resilient and may survive without any noticeable ill effects."

Based on the extraordinarily productive season we had for plums last year, my guess was that the disease wasn't affecting our trees too badly. I decided we wouldn't try to remove every single branch that was infected (which would probably be impossible anyway), but we'd take off the worst offenders. And, at the same time, we'd also prune out out any branches that were problematic in other ways: overlapping, inward-pointing, or in danger of impinging on the house, driveway, and sidewalk.

Unfortunately, this measured approach proved hard to stick to. We kept finding more and more branches that seemed to fall into the "worst offender" category, especially on the Mount Royal. We definitely violated the rule against cutting off more than one-quarter of the tree's crown, and eventually we just had to force ourselves to stop before we stripped it completely bare. Even now, in its largely denuded state, it still isn't entirely free of galls, but it looks a lot cleaner than it did before. And since our trees seem to operate on a two-year cycle—incredible productivity one year followed by nothing at all the next—it should have over a year to catch up and produce new, healthy growth before our next plum harvest.

Meanwhile, we had to dispose of the huge pile of pruned-off branches. All the sources I consulted emphasize that it's important to destroy branches infected with black knot as soon as possible, as they can otherwise continue to shed spores and spread the fungus. We planned to burn them in our little backyard fire pit, but the wood was too moist to light. Brian ended up having to supplement the fire with sticks from our stock of seasoned wood to get the plum branches dry enough to burn. Eventually he managed to destroy most of the diseased wood this way, leaving a small pile of healthy wood for later use.

There's still more to be done to prepare for the upcoming gardening season—pruning the rosebush, for one, and laying out the beds for the vegetable garden—but with all the cutting, hauling, and burning of branches, I think we've had enough of a yard-workout for one day.

Recipe of the Month: Aloo gobi

January's Recipe of the Month is a new version of a familiar dish. Aloo gobi is an Indian classic made from potatoes and cauliflower, and we've eaten it many times before, both at restaurants and at home. But none of the recipes Brian had used for it before had particularly impressed him, so this time, he decided to whip up his own. He'd made it enough times to have a good idea what sort of ingredients to use, but he decided more or less on impulse to change his recipe in one key way: rather than boiling or steaming the veggies, he chopped them up and roasted them. He knew from experience that roasting any type of veggie is usually the best way to bring out its flavor, and he wanted to see how much difference it would make in this dish.

As it turned out, the answer was "all the difference." Well, maybe not quite all, because his selection of spices—particularly the omission of ginger, which I tend to find overpowering in all but the smallest doses—also gave it a good flavor, bright and savory and well-balanced. (Some might find the salt a little heavy, but for me that was part of the dish's charm.) But I strongly suspect it was the roasting that really took it over the top from a decent aloo gobi to a fabulous one that we'll make over and over. 

In fact, he's already made it a second time this month—partly because I didn't remember to get a photo of it for the blog the first time, but mostly because we both liked it so much. And I think it's sure to become a regular in our dinner rotation, because it ticks all the boxes: tasty, healthy, vegan, and, if you can find a reasonably cheap cauliflower, inexpensive.

So, without further ado, here is

BRIAN'S ROASTED ALOO GOBI

1 medium head (c. 1 lb florets) cauliflower
c. 1 lb potatoes
1 ½ tsp salt
4 Tbsp canola oil
1 ½ tsp cumin seeds
8 fenugreek seeds
pinch asafoetida
1 small red onion, chopped
3 cloves garlic, minced
½ jalapeno pepper, minced
½ cup crushed tomatoes
1 tsp ground coriander
½ tsp ground turmeric
1 tsp lemon juice
½ cup water
¼ tsp garam masala

1. Cut cauliflower into small florets. Dice potatoes into small (c. ½ inch) cubes. Add 1 tsp of the salt and 3 Tbsp of the oil and mix to coat. Spread on a pan (with silicone mat if possible) and roast at 450 degrees F for 40-45 minutes, stirring once after c. 20 minutes.
2. In 1 Tbsp oil, saute the cumin seeds, fenugreek seeds, asafoetida, onion, garlic, and jalapeno over medium to low heat until onion is tender (c. 5 minutes). Add the crushed tomato, coriander, turmeric, and lemon juice, stir to combine, and saute for an additional 2 minutes.
3. Add the roasted potato and cauliflower to the onion mixture along with the water and the garam masala. Stir until the roasted vegetables are completely coated. Remove from heat.

Serve with parathas, if possible.

Thrift Week 2024, Day 7: My sewing kit

The last item in this Thrift Week series is probably the one that's given me the biggest bang for my buck. But it's also the hardest to calculate the exact impact of, so I'm going to have to guesstimate.

The item in question is my trusty sewing kit. I don't remember exactly when I bought this, but it was somewhere between ten and twenty years ago at a local estate sale. It included a full set of basic sewing supplies: needles of various sizes, straight pins, safety pins, a pincushion, a box of odd buttons, a pair of fabric scissors, and dozens of spools of thread in assorted colors. The entire box cost me a quarter.

In the years since, I have used these supplies more times than I can count. I have replaced buttons on shirts and pants, mended holes in sweaters, sewn patches on jeans, and darned countless socks. I've made Brian a belt pouch and a hat to wear to Renaissance fairs, using only scrap materials. I've made several oversized garments wearable by shortening pant legs and taking in waistbands with either elastic, hooks, or simple stitching. I've even repaired a damaged pair of shoes with a few well-placed stitches. And I did nearly all of it with only the supplies that came with this 25-cent box. (I've bought a few notions like buttons and elastic, and a year or so ago I finally had to spend $4 on one new spool of thread to replace a color that I'd used up. But most of those repairs were covered by my initial 25 cents' worth of materials.)

So how much has this purchase actually saved me? It's impossible to say exactly, because I haven't kept track of every single item I've repaired with this sewing kit and how much it would have cost to replace. But let's take a wild stab and guess that I've repaired at least one garment every month, on average, in the years since I bought this sewing kit. Let's also assume that I've had it for fifteen years, making a total of 180 repairs during that time period. And let's finally suppose that those garments would have cost, on average, $5 each to replace. (Some of them, like socks, would undoubtedly have cost less, but others, like Brian's heavy wool cardigan that I mended just this week, would have cost significantly more.) That works out to $900 in savings, which means that my 25-cent sewing kit has paid for itself 3,600 times over.

Of course, this estimate could be wildly inaccurate. But even if it's off by a factor of ten and this sewing kit has only saved me $90 over the years, that's still a really impressive return on such a tiny investment.

Thrift Week 2024, Day 6: Glad Rags

Today's item is one I've already covered in a previous Thrift Week series: my Glad Rags, a set of reusable feminine napkins. In that post, I observed that the average American woman spends $7 a month, or $84 per year, on "sanitary products," known to the less squeamish as tampons and pads. Meanwhile, I have now successfully made it all the way to menopause with just half a dozen cloth pads that probably cost me around $50 in total. (A comparable set of the same brand purchased today would cost around $110, but there are also numerous other brands available now from stores like Walmart for as little as $10.)

I bought my first set of three cotton Glad Rags some time around 1996 or 1997, and within a year or two I was using them almost exclusively (eked out by a few disposables for travel or tampons for swimming). To make the math simple, let's say that I used them for exactly 25 years. At $7 a month, that means they saved me a total of $2,100 for a one-time cost of $50. That's a hell of a return on such a small investment.

The only problem I've ever had with these is what to do with them now that I no longer need them. I can't quite bring myself to dump them in textile recycling, since most of them are still in usable condition even after 25 years of use. But I hesitate to list them on Freecycle because I think even people who wouldn't be squeamish about reusable pads—and I suspect many women would be—would draw the line at using secondhand ones.

Thrift Week 2024, Day 5: A $30 lock on a $15 bike

To put this Thrift Week post in context, I need to provide a little background. This is a story I never got around to discussing on the blog when it happened, partly because it was a bit embarrassing for us. I told you about how, when Brian's old junker of a bike finally bit the dust in 2012, we bought him a nice, new bicycle to replace it. It cost us $400, but we thought it was a good investment, since he expected to be using it for many years to come. Here's the part you didn't hear: within a year after we bought it, that nice, new bicycle was stolen from the bike rack at his workplace. 

The reason this is embarrassing for us is that it's possible we could have prevented it. At the time we bought the new bike, we didn't invest in a new lock for it, because Brian was pretty confident that the old, heavy chain he was using was sturdy enough to prevent theft. But he was thinking in terms of casual theft, and the thieves who actually came for his bike were professionals. They drove up in a big, black van, parked it in such a way that it blocked the view of the bike rack from security cameras, and then systematically removed all the bicycles from the rack and drove off with them. As far as I know, none of them were ever recovered. His beautiful new ride probably ended up being stripped down for parts. And since its value was less than our insurance deductible, there was no way to recover any of what we'd spent on it.

Well, after that, we weren't about to spend a lot of money on another nice, new bike. Instead, I searched Craigslist and found a seller in Princeton offering not one, but two bicycles in rideable condition for $30. We drove down, checked them out, paid in cash, managed to get both bicycles into the back of our little Honda Fit, and brought them home, giving Brian one bike for everyday use and a spare for parts. (We've since acquired yet another one from Freecycle, which explains why there are three bikes—or more precisely, two and a half—crammed into our back room.)

After that, we had to replace all the equipment that had been on the old bike when it was stolen—including the lock that had so dramatically failed to protect it. So we went back to the same shop where we'd bought the previous bike and invested $30 in a top-of-the-line Kryptonite lock—a purchase that, if we'd made it sooner, might have been enough to deter the thieves and save Brian's old bike. (Professional thieves can get through one of those too, with the right tools, but it takes time, and they might have decided it wasn't worth it.) Thus, Brian's current ride is protected by a lock that cost roughly twice as much as the bike itself. This gives him two layers of protection: a lock that's hard for even professional thieves to get through, and a bike so cheap that it's not really worth the effort. 

This $60 set of equipment—riding bike, spare bike, and lock—is a major money-saver. Each time Brian rides his bike to work or to the grocery stores, he saves money on gas, as well as and wear and tear on our car. One way to estimate the total savings is to use the IRS's mileage reimbursement figure, which is currently 67 cents per mile. Brian's daily commute to work is about four miles each way, and he makes the trip an average of twice a week (roughly four times a week in the summer, about once a week in the winter, and varying amounts in between) for 50 weeks a year. That's a total of 100 eight-mile round trips, or 800 miles, and he probably makes another six-mile round trip to the grocery store every two weeks or so, adding about another 150 miles. That makes 950 miles at 67 cents per mile, for a total of $636.50 in savings every single year.

To be fair, this number is probably a serious overestimate. In the first place, the IRS's mileage reimbursement is based on the average vehicle, and ours is much smaller than average. In the second place, Brian no longer drives to work on most of the days he doesn't ride the bike. The pandemic established that his job could reasonably be done from home, so now he's only required to go into the office once a week. The rest of the time, he only goes in to work on days when he can reasonably ride there. So he's probably only saving himself around 40 trips to the office (the one day a week he would otherwise have to drive, assuming weather permits him to make the trip by bike 80 percent of the time). But according to the government's fuel economy calculator, the gas alone for that trip costs him about 80 cents each way, or 20 cents per mile. So even if Brian is only avoiding 470 miles of driving per year, that's still a savings of at least $94 per year on a one-time investment of $60 nearly 12 years ago. I'd say it has clearly paid for itself many times over in fuel savings alone—not even counting what it could be saving us on medical bills by helping Brian stay in better shape at 53 than he was 30 years ago.