Gardeners' Holidays 2023: Late Harvest

The 2023 harvest season isn't quite over yet, but the clock is ticking. According to the weather forecast, the first frost of the year is likely to hit on Wednesday night, so we need to make sure all our tender crops are gathered in by then. That means all the lettuce and arugula (both in the beds and on the paths); all the parsley and basil; all the peppers and tomatoes, both ripe and unripe; all the French beans on their little trellis. We'll also have to pick all the tiny fruits off our new strawberry plants and get them properly bedded down for winter with a layer of leaf mulch. And on top of that, we still need to get next year's garlic crop into the ground.

Unfortunately, we weren't able to get all that done this weekend. Yesterday we had perfect weather for it, sunny and remarkably warm for late October, but we spent the entire day at a Renaissance fair with friends and didn't get home until after dark. Today, by contrast, we were free all day, but the weather was uncooperative: dark, damp, and chilly, with heavy rain for most of the afternoon. Only around dusk did it let up enough for Brian to pop outside and collect a small load of produce: all the beans and lettuce big enough to pick, a handful of arugula, a few Banana peppers, some ripe Sun Gold tomatoes, and a big bunch of rhubarb. But the rest of the gardening chores will have to be squeezed in as best we can over the next two evenings.

Once they're done, the garden won't be completely empty. The dozen or so leeks still in the bed can stand to stay put a little longer, as can the butternut squash. Frankly, though, no matter how much longer we leave those on the vine, it won't be enough to give us an impressive harvest. We've already harvested the four squash of decent size that our Waltham plant has produced, and there are only two smaller ones left that might grow ripe enough to harvest before the first hard freeze. As for the new Honeynut squash that we tried this year as an experiment, the two vines we planted have produced exactly one ripe squash between them, probably less than four ounces in weight. Granted, all of that is edible (you don't even have to peel it), but it's still not much to show for the four square feet of our precious garden space we devoted to this crop. Next year we'll most likely drop it and plant two extra Walthams instead.

But even if our squash harvest isn't much to celebrate, we can still take satisfaction in what we have. We'll saute the beans tonight to accompany our mushroom tourtière. We'll combine the lettuce, arugula, and Sun Golds tomorrow in what will probably be our last homegrown salad of the season. We'll use the rhubarb on Wednesday to make chicken in rhubarb sauce for some friends coming to dinner. With each bite, we'll savor the last of summer's bounty, even as we prepare ourselves for the winter to come.

Recipe of the Month: Savory Soy Curl Pasta

October has been a busy month for us. We've had something on our schedule at least one day every weekend: a football game on the 7th, yard sales last weekend, an outdoor show this weekend (which ended up being rained out, but we didn't know that until a few hours beforehand), the Folk Project's Halloween Show next Friday, and a trip to the Renaissance Faire with some friends next Saturday. And that's in addition to our regular board game nights and RPG sessions. With all that going on, we haven't had as much time as usual for shopping and cooking, so I wasn't sure when we were going to find time to squeeze in a Recipe of the Month for October.

Fortunately, Brian came to the rescue last Saturday with this improvised dish. After a day of shopping at the town-wide yard sales and socializing with a friend, he whipped up a last-minute dinner out of what we had on hand: Soy Curls, pasta, broccoli, and a few odds and ends. 

He started by soaking the Soy Curls in a mixture of water, salt, and nutritional yeast, then pan-fried them until crisp. He then used the same pan to cook the broccoli and to make up a sauce from red onion, garlic, mushrooms, and the soaking liquid from the Soy Curls, thickened with cornstarch. He even fancied it up with a touch of sherry and lemon juice before tossing everything together with a half-pound of whole-wheat penne. 

For a totally impromptu meal, this was quite tasty. It's not so surprising that it had plenty of flavor, since all the ingredients that went into the mix did, but they complemented each other better than you might expect. The meaty texture and umami flavor of the yeast-soaked Soy Curls played off against the brightness of the lemon and sherry, the earthiness of the mushrooms and whole-wheat pasta, the piquancy of the onion and garlic, and the green, ever-so-faintly bitter taste of the broccoli. It was an agreeably complex mixture without anything overly fancy. (It's also a dish that an unsuspecting carnivore would probably never guess was vegan. Under all the other flavors, the Soy Curls were almost impossible to distinguish from chicken.)

When I asked Brian, he said the only thing he might change about this dish is to add the lemon juice to the mix earlier, perhaps even putting it into the soaking liquid for the Soy Curls. But he liked the first iteration of the recipe well enough to write it down and even give it a name:

Savory Soy Curl Pasta

1. Soak the Soy Curls. Add 1 tsp salt and 1 Tbsp nutritional yeast to 1.5 cups water and microwave for 1 minute. Mix thoroughly, then add 3 oz Butler Soy Curls and allow to soak for 5+ minutes. Squeeze liquid out of softened Soy Curls and reserve all liquid. 

2. Prepare the veggies. Cut 8 oz broccoli crowns into small florets. Chop ¼ red onion and mince 3 oz mushrooms. Mince 4 cloves garlic.

3. Make the pasta. Combine 8 cups water and and 1 Tbsp salt and heat to a boil. Add 8 oz whole-wheat penne and cook for about 10 minutes, then drain. Try to time this so the pasta is done after the sauce is finished.

3. Saute the Soy Curls. Heat about 3 Tbsp canola oil in a nonstick or cast iron skillet on high heat. Add Soy Curls and cook, stirring frequently, until browned. Remove from the skillet and set aside.

4. Cook the broccoli. Add another ~1 Tbsp canola oil to the skillet with the broccoli. Saute until florets are bright green and slightly browned. Remove from the skillet and set aside.

5. Saute the veggies. Saute onion over medium heat until soft. Add the garlic and mushrooms. When the mushrooms begin to release liquid, add 1 Tbsp sherry. Continue to saute until mushrooms begin to brown. Lower heat. 

6. Finish the sauce. Suspend 1 Tbsp cornstarch in a small amount of water and add to the reserved soaking liquid. Add the mixture to the contents of the skillet and cook over low heat until the sauce thickens. Add 2 tsp lemon juice.

7. Combine. Add the Soy Curls to the sauce and stir to coat thoroughly. Add to drained pasta, along with the broccoli, and toss to combine all ingredients. Add additional lemon juice to taste.

 

Yard-sale haul 2023

This year's town-wide yard sale was a bit of a mixed bag. As usual, it was scheduled for both Saturday and Sunday, with some people signed up for both days and others for only one. However, Saturday was chilly and damp, with predictions of steady rain throughout the day. It wasn't actually raining when Brian and I set out around 9am, but apparently the forecast had scared off a lot of potential sellers, because very few of the sales marked on the map were actually there. We walked all the way across town and encountered only two or three, and none of those had nothing of interest. Even Felton Avenue, which is usually teeming with sales, had only a sign alerting shoppers that they wouldn't be setting up until Sunday.

However, when we made our way to the central sale area—the big public parking lot behind the Reformed Church—our luck changed. Under the public pavilion, there was one table set up by The Moonladies, the proprietors of our town's former combined toy and gift shop, and another belonging to a local artisan. Together, these yielded a wealth of small gift items suitable for Christmas stocking stuffers, as well as a couple of mini rolls of novelty duct tape—one with rainbow stripes and one that glows in the dark—for a mere ten cents each. (We don't know exactly what we'll do with them, but we're sure they'll come in handy for something.) 

There were also a few hardy souls braving the rain to staff tables in the parking area itself. One had nothing of use, but the other had a bargain I just couldn't resist: a working ukulele for a mere five bucks. As far as I can tell, this uke is from the beginner-friendly Mahalo Rainbow series and would sell for about $45 new. Admittedly, it doesn't sound as good as my current ukulele (a bottom-of-the-line Lanikai), and I don't particularly need a spare, but I just can't pass up a musical instrument in playable condition for only $5. With three siblings, three siblings-in-law, and nine niblings between me and Brian, I'm sure we'll be able to pass it along to someone who's interested in learning to play. 

On top of this, at the time we hit this sale, the thrift shop in the church basement was also open. We seldom manage to get to this store during its limited hours, so we seized the opportunity to go in and found that the place has been cleaned up quite a lot. They've moved everything except clothing out of the big main room, making it much easier to move around in there and view the selection. We didn't find anything we needed on the clothing racks or bookshelves, but Brian snagged one jigsaw puzzle off the game shelf for his parents. So, in the two hours of shopping we were able to get in before the rain got heavy, we managed to bring home about as much stuff as we typically do in a whole day. (I won't show a picture of Saturday's complete haul to avoid spoiling any holiday surprises.)

This morning, Sunday, the weather was bright and sunny, and the sales were much thicker on the ground. They also seemed to be better attended than Sunday's sales usually are, probably because Saturday had been such a washout. Shoppers weren't already tired out from a day of shopping on Saturday, and they were more enthusiastic about viewing sales that hadn't already been picked over. In the few hours we spent out and about on Sunday, we hit dozens of sales—but, surprisingly, we didn't come home with much more stuff than we had on Saturday. In total, we scored five books, another short-sleeved shirt for Brian (who declared after buying it that he was officially fully stocked for shirts of that type), another puzzle for his folks, a few spools of thread for a dime, a handful of small gift bags, and a board game that looked worth trying because it was free. Not exactly a bad haul, but not nearly as impressive as our finds from previous years. There were no big scores like our $70 futon, Brian's $10 kneeler chair, our $3 camp chair, or the previous day's $5 ukulele.

So, across both days, we shopped for about five hours and came home with:

• Six books
• Two puzzles
• One board game
• One shirt
• One ukulele
• Four spools of thread
• Six mini gift bags
• Two mini rolls of novelty duct tape
• A whole mess of stocking stuffers

Based on my back-of-the-envelope calculations, that's about $210 worth of stuff that we acquired for $21.40 total. That's a savings of $188.60, or $37.72 for each hour we spent shopping. Not as much as we make at our jobs, but a lot more fun.

Why we're not a zero-waste household

It's been nearly ten years since I discovered that the rule I'd come to think of as the Law of Beverages—namely, don't pay for water when you can add it yourself—was not always true. In some cases, I learned, fresh juice and milk were actually cheaper than frozen concentrate and dry milk powder. In fact, within a few years of that post, we began to find that the fresh forms were almost always cheaper, and it's now been years since we bought either powdered milk or frozen juice. (To be fair, it's now been years since we bought fresh dairy milk, either, but powdered soy milk is even less of a bargain than powdered cow's milk.)

So I was a bit skeptical when a recent Climate Coach newsletter opened with the headline, "Shampoos and soaps are mostly water. Here’s why you should buy them without it." In the column, author Michael Coren explains how he realized one day that his bathroom was full of plastic containers, and most of the stuff in them had water as its #1 ingredient. Rather than "spending so much money on plastic containers filled with water," he concluded, he should just buy the "active ingredients" in a more concentrated form.

In theory, I'm all for this idea. Shipping water all over the globe—or at least to those parts of the globe where clean water comes out of a tap—is clearly a waste of fuel, and shipping it in plastic containers contributes to the growing problem of plastic waste. But eliminating this waste isn't so simple as Coren makes it sound. In my experience, waste-free versions of products like shampoo, conditioner, and toothpaste aren't easy to find in stores, and the ones you can find online are considerably more expensive. In cases like these, there is no obvious ecofrugal choice that's better both environmentally and cost-wise. The best you can do is balance the costs and benefits—price versus plastic waste—and figure out which matters more to you.

So far, Brian and I have generally come down on the side of saving money. We might be willing to spend a little more for the more concentrated, lower-waste products, but a little more is not what we're talking about here. Here's how the math works out for the personal care goods we use most often:

• Shampoo. Brian uses a store-brand shampoo from Target that costs $6 for a 1-liter bottle. He uses it maybe three times a week, and I also use it daily as a body wash, since I read somewhere that it was good for dry skin. One bottle of it lasts us three or four months—say 15 weeks—so that works out to around 4 cents per use. The bar shampoo that Michael Coren recommends as an alternative, Sustainabar, costs $10 and lasts "about 80 washes," or 12.5 cents per use. If we switched to this shampoo full-time, we'd be paying an extra $44.20 per year to avoid tossing three or four #2 plastic bottles in the recycling bin. Basically, we'd be paying around $13 to save each bottle.
• Conditioner. I use Suave Almond and Shea Butter conditioner, which costs around $5 for a 28-ounce bottle. Although I use a generous dollop every day on my dry, curly hair, that bottle still lasts me around three months, for a price of around 5.5 cents per use. Sustainabar's jojoba conditioner, like its shampoo, costs 12.5 cents per use ($10 for an 80-use bar). That's not as bad as the shampoo—only about 2.3 times as expensive—but it would still add up to an extra $25.55 per year, or $6.39 per bottle of avoided waste.
• Toothpaste. This is by far the worst of the lot. Currently, we pay $3 for a 6-ounce tube of toothpaste from Trader Joe's that lasts us about two months. Since we both brush our teeth twice a day, that's about 1.25 cents per brushing. The Unpaste toothpaste tablets Coren recommends cost $9.50 for a bag of 125, or 7.6 cents per brushing—more than six times as much. Switching to Unpaste would cost us a whopping $92.96 per year extra to avoid tossing six empty toothpaste tubes—$15.49 per tube. (And incidentally, these prices don't include shipping, which would make the numbers even worse.)

Now, for some folks, these expensive products are well worth the cost. They're willing to pay whatever it takes to achieve a "zero-waste" home, where virtually nothing ever goes into the trash can. But for me, spending this much money to avoid such a small amount of waste doesn't seem ecofrugal. I'd rather, for instance, spend $13 per year for a Snap toothbrush and toss four worn-out toothbrush heads in the trash than buy the completely waste-free Everloop toothbrush, with its removable and compostable bamboo bristles, for—wait for it—$155. Plus shipping. Even with a two-year supply of bristles, that's over $70 extra per year to avoid less than an ounce of waste. I honestly can't see this as a good use of resources.

To be clear, I'm still entirely in favor of reducing waste when the cost is reasonable—or, better yet, when it actually saves you money. In fact, the very same day I read that Climate Coach newsletter and grumbled over all its pricey product recommendations, I eagerly snapped up a new shampoo bar that we discovered at Trader Joe's, which cost just $4 for 4 ounces (113 grams). Since the 80-gram Sustainabar shampoo is supposed to last 80 uses, this one will presumably be good for about 113 uses, which works out to 3.54 cents per use—less than Brian's paying now for his Target shampoo. It comes with no plastic waste, just a little cardboard box (which could potentially be reused). And, like Brian's current shampoo, it contains no obvious palm oil, even if a couple of its ingredients could potentially be palm oil derivatives. In short, assuming this stuff works well on Brian's hair, it will be better in every possible way than the shampoo he's using now—an ecofrugal win-win, rather than a tradeoff of cost versus virtue. (And if I can't use this stuff on my skin the way I'm now using the Target shampoo, that's okay; our Trader Joe's bar soap—another inexpensive, lightly packaged product—should work fine.)

 

UPDATE, January 2024: An additional wrinkle where toothpaste is concerned. According to a 2022 life-cycle analysis, toothpaste tablets are actually more harmful to the environment than toothpaste in a tube. The benefit of having less packaging is more than offset by the impact of their ingredients and the size of a single portion. (If you don't want to read the study, you can watch this glamorous sustainability influencer explain it on YouTube.) So instead of paying significantly more for a tiny environmental benefit, I'd be paying significantly more to cause more environmental damage. Forget that.

Recipe of the Month: Vegan Butternut Squash Pasta

It's the last day of September, so I have just enough time to get in my Recipe of the Month. This one has a bit of a story attached to it: I occasionally watch a webseries on YouTube called "Good Mythical Morning," which is a little bit like "Mythbusters" without all the elaborate construction work. In one of these videos, the two hosts conduct a blind taste test in which they try vegan and non-vegan versions of the same food and try to guess which was which. One of the foods they had the easiest time identifying correctly was macaroni and cheese (compared against two vegan versions, one made with cashews and one with coconut milk). This got me wondering: is it really that hard to make a vegan mac and cheese that's convincing? I mean, the mac and cheese I grew up with came in a box, and the "cheese" was an orange powder in a little envelope that was only distantly related to dairy. How tough would it be to simulate that?

I started searching around, and I came across an intriguing-looking recipe on my favorite vegan food blog, It Doesn't Taste Like Chicken, which used butternut squash in the sauce. It looked interesting and not too complicated, but it called for one ingredient we didn't have: white miso paste. It didn't seem worth buying a whole container of that just to use one tablespoon in this recipe, and I assumed leaving it out would remove an essential element of the dish's "cheesiness." So, on the whole, it didn't seem worth the effort.

However, there was a note on the recipe saying it had been "adapted from my butternut squash pasta recipe." Clicking through to that one, I found that it did not require white miso paste or anything else we didn't have on hand. There was only one catch: the butternut squash we had was cooked and frozen, rather than whole. But since the squash eventually ends up as a puree anyway, Brian figured that wouldn't matter too much. He just sauteed the onion and garlic as the recipe required, added the cooked squash to the pan with the other ingredients, and let it all simmer together before pureeing it and mixing it with the pasta. And for the finishing touch, he fried some fresh sage leaves in veggie butter until they were crisp and sprinkled them on top.

The finished product looked and smelled good, but the taste was somewhat underwhelming. There was nothing objectionable about the flavor; there just wasn't much to it. Even the sage didn't contribute much. Frying the sage leaves made them smell very aromatic, but it seemed to rob them of most of their actual flavor. As an experiment, Brian picked a few more fresh sage leaves and sprinkled them into the dish raw, and he found they made a much bigger impact that way.

I wouldn't go so far as to say this dish was a disappointment. I certainly had no trouble eating it up or polishing off the leftovers the next day. But it wasn't good enough to earn a place in our regular collection of butternut squash recipes—particularly with a squash harvest as pitifully small as the one we expect to get this year. If we were simply rolling in butternut, the way we were the year we let the squash vine grow wild in our side yard, maybe it would be worth making this simply for the sake of variety. But with only a handful of squash to get us through the winter, I think we'll want to save them for our favorite dishes, like pizza, lasagna, and soufflé. If we really crave a butternut squash pasta, we'll pull out this old recipe for Brown Butter Butternut Squash Rigatoni and have a go at making that vegan. (This technique from A Virtual Vegan for convincing plant butter to brown might do the trick.)

Gardeners' Holidays 2023: Harvest Home

The Gardeners' Holiday in mid-September is based on a traditional holiday in the English folk calendar: Harvest Home, also known as Ingathering, marking the end of the grain harvest. (This is when John Barleycorn traditionally gets murdered, only to rise again the following year.) Our garden doesn't contain any grain, but this holiday nonetheless marks the height of our harvest season, when our tomatoes, peppers, and second crop of raspberries are all at their peak.

This year's September harvest, though, is a bit of a mixed bag. We're getting plenty of tomatoes off our trusty Sun Gold and Premio plants, as well our new San Marzano plum tomato, which definitely looks like a keeper. (Some of the fruits it's produced are not just tasty but also entertaining: little conjoined twins that Brian has dubbed "tomeeples.") The Pineapple tomatoes have produced only a handful of fruits, but they're nice, big, juicy ones. But the Carmen and Banana peppers have provided only a handful of fruits so far, and while the new Biquinho chilis have yielded dozens of little pepperlings, each one is so tiny that the total volume is barely a couple of handfuls. Our Provider green beans have utterly failed to live up to their name, giving only a few ounces worth, and the later-producing Climbing French beans have so far produced only a few ounces as well. And while our raspberry canes are giving us a little something to pick every day, it's not much compared with the spring crop (and certainly not compared with the massive harvest of plums we had this summer).

But there is one crop that's proving surprisingly productive for this time of year: the arugula. And what's all the more surprising about it is that we didn't actually plant a fall crop of arugula. We put some in last spring, but we harvested only a few cups' worth before it all bolted, and we figured that was the end of it. But apparently those plants have somehow reseeded themselves—and not just in the beds where we originally planted them, but all over the paths surrounding the beds. In fact, the plants in the paths look even bigger and healthier than the ones in the beds, and all of them look better than the ones we planted in the spring. (We've observed this sort of thing with arugula before. It seems to perform best when it sows itself at random, rather than being carefully planted and tended in a well-prepared garden bed.)

We've already enjoyed some of this unexpected harvest in the warm chickpea salad that we learned from Mark Bittman, which makes a reasonable light supper when accompanied by some hearty bread. And there's plenty where that came from to use in other arugulacentric dishes, like arugula-mushroom pasta and pasta with arugula and dried cranberries. There might even be enough for experimenting with some new recipes once we've been through all those old favorites.

So, while we might not have that wide a variety of crops to harvest for our Harvest Home celebration, we still have enough fresh veggies to have fun with. And since this is only the beginning, not the end, of our fall harvest, we can hope there's more where that came from.

Vegan "pepperoni" pizza

So, this probably won't be my official Vegan Recipe of the Month for September, but I thought it was worth sharing. Last weekend, Brian made a pizza using our homemade vegan mozzarella, as he's done this many times since we found the recipe. But this one had a new twist: it was a vegan "pepperoni" pizza. After his success making a facsimile of Polish sausage from Soy Curls, he started wondering if he could also turn them into a close approximation of pepperoni. He searched online for "vegan Soy Curl pepperoni" and found a recipe for exactly that on a site called Courtney's Homestead, and since he happened to have all the ingredients on hand, he decided to give it a try. 

The recipe was pretty straightforward. After hydrating the Soy Curls, he tossed them with oil and a mixture of ground spices—fennel, garlic, smoked paprika, and crushed red pepper—and roasted them on a baking sheet. The recipe called for a whopping two teaspoons of crushed red pepper, but Brian halved this to keep the spice down to a manageable level. He also made only a half batch, using one cup of Soy Curls instead of two, and found that to be a sufficient amount for a whole pizza. However, since he wasn't sure how I would like it, he hedged his bets by putting it on only two-thirds of the pie.

As you can see, this vegan substitute doesn't look that much like real pepperoni. It looks a little bit more like sausage, and to me, it also tasted much more like it. Granted, it had been a long time since I'd had any kind of meat on a pizza, so my memory might not have been accurate, but the main flavor I could taste was fennel, which I associate more with Italian sausage. If garlic and paprika had been the dominant flavors, I might have found it a bit more convincing as pepperoni, but it would still have lacked the "characteristic tangy flavor" that, according to The Spruce Eats, comes from Lactobacillus bacteria. (It also wasn't greasy enough to be a really convincing copy of either sausage or pepperoni, but I didn't consider that a bad thing.)

Although I wouldn't call this a very close facsimile of pepperoni, it was still an enjoyable addition to the pizza. It provided a little added flavor and texture variety, as well as a welcome dose of protein (which our vegan mozzarella doesn't really provide). So, on the whole, I'd say this vegan pizza topping is worth trying, but maybe don't call it "vegan pepperoni." People who are expecting pepperoni will most likely find this disappointing, but if it's labeled as something like "Soy Curl sausage," they'll probably eat it up quite happily.