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.

Thrift Week 2024, Day 4: Chromecast

When streaming video first became a thing, sometime in the late 2000s, Brian and I used to watch it by hooking up his laptop to our TV set. When that laptop died in 2010, he built a dedicated media computer with around $325 worth of parts. That served us well for several years, but eventually it started to struggle. We'd have pauses of a few minutes each in the middle of a tense moment on Critical Role as the machine struggled to keep up.

Sometime in 2017, we decided to give one of the nifty new set-top streaming boxes a try. We started out by hazarding $5 on a secondhand Roku at the townwide yard sales, but it turned out to be incapable of streaming from Twitch or YouTube, the two sites we relied on most. This experience made us more cautious about which model to choose as an alternative. We realized that products made by certain companies, such as Apple or Amazon, would probably give us easy access to their own content and make it difficult, if not impossible, to watch anyone else's. So we eventually settled on a Google Chromecast, which was capable of streaming anything that a computer could display. (True, it required a computer or other device to stream from, rather than being a self-contained unit, but that wasn't a problem for us.)

In the six years since, our Chromecast has certainly saved us more than the $30 or so we spent on it. But exactly how much depends on what you compare it to. If you consider it to be the thing that allows us to live without TV service, then it's saving us around $40 a month, the price of Optimum's cheapest plan. Even if you deduct from that the $5 to $15 a month we pay for streaming services (depending on which ones we're using at any given time), that's still a savings of roughly $30 per month—over $2,000 for the approximately six years we've been using it.

But it's probably a bit of a cheat to calculate this way, because it's unlikely we'd be willing to pay for TV service under any circumstances. If we couldn't use Chromecast to watch our various shows, we'd have spent $400 or so on a new media computer instead. That's a much more modest savings, but still a pretty good return on a $30 investment.

It's only fair to point out that just like its predecessor, our Chromecast now occasionally runs up against a problem it can't handle. For instance, it can no longer cast episodes of Critical Role on Twitch from Brian's laptop to our TV—quite possibly because Twitch has now been acquired by Amazon, which doesn't like to play nicely with its competitors. This is, of course, exactly the problem we were hoping to avoid by choosing the Chromecast, which was supposed to be able to cast from any browser window, but perhaps Amazon has found a way to block this capability. (Brian can manage to get the "cast" button to appear by opening up YouTube in a separate tab, but when he tries to cast the screen showing Twitch, it simply quits.) 

However, if the behemoth is hoping to force us into buying a new Amazon Fire Stick to stream "its" content, it's going to be disappointed. We've found not one but two work-arounds: we can either cast from the Twitch app on Brian's phone, or we can skip casting entirely and watch Critical Role on the tiny screen of Brian's laptop instead. It's not ideal, but we'd rather sit on the couch and peer at a tiny screen than give even $30 of our hard-earned cash to Amazon.

Thrift Week 2024, Day 3: Costco membership

Brian and I spent a few years waffling over the issue of whether to become Costco members. In 2012, while visiting the store with my in-laws, I was impressed with its prices on eco-friendly staple items like Fair Trade coffee and organic sugar. But the Costco coffee turned out to be terrible, and the following year I found a cheaper alternative at IKEA. I revisited the idea from time to time, perusing articles with titles like "9 Items that Will Single-Handedly Pay for Your Costco Membership" to figure out if we could get our money's worth out of joining, but the answer always seemed to be no.

What tipped us over the edge was Brian's discovery, in 2017, that he needed progressive-lens eyeglasses. He wasn't prepared to trust an online seller for a prescription this complicated, and Costco's prices were miles ahead of any other brick-and-mortar retailer's. The price they quoted us on a pair was over $180 less than our local optician's—enough to pay for a $60 membership more than three times over.

Once we'd become members, we quickly learned which of our staple items were the best deals at Costco. Some, like oats and raisins, were only slightly cheaper than at other stores where we shopped; others, like walnuts and organic sugar, were ahead by a country mile. In addition to these savings, we got considerable value out of our Costco credit card, which earned us 2% cash back at Costco itself, 3% back at restaurants, and 4% gas stations, all paid out annually in the form of Costco store credit. In 2019, I tallied up all these savings and concluded that our Costco membership was paying us back roughly three times as much as it cost us each year, even when we didn't happen to need new glasses.

Mind you, just because Costco membership has proved to be a good deal for us, that doesn't mean it would be for everyone. Some folks we know have tried it out and found that the prices on most items they buy weren't significantly better than the supermarket's. But for us, just these few staple items, plus the cash back from the credit card, are enough to make it a worthy investment.

Thrift Week 2024, Day 2: Raspberry canes

The second item in my "seven purchases that have paid for themselves" series is the topic of one of my most popular posts ever: our raspberry canes. We bought these in January 2013, planted them in March, and began harvesting our first few berries that summer. By September, I calculated that we were collecting about a pint of fresh, ripe, organic raspberries—roughly a $6 value—every week. At that rate, I figured, we'd get back the $41.50 we paid for them and then some in their first year alone, and we'd continue to harvest the same amount year after year.

As it turns out, that was a gross underestimate. The berries were more productive the second year than the first, and more productive still after we switched to a two-crop system. Production varies from year to year, but over the past three years, these canes have produced a total of 47.5 pints of berries. Meanwhile, the price of organic raspberries has more than doubled, reaching $13.85 per pint. That means in the last three years, we've harvested $658 worth of berries—about $219 worth per year. And we're just now getting to the point where we think we might need to replace a few of the 11-year-old plants.

The crazy thing is, these aren't necessarily the most productive crop in our garden. Last year, our plum trees yielded more than 94 pounds of fruit in total: 37.75 pounds of Opals, 21.15 pounds of Mount Royals, and 35.5 pounds of Golden Gages. The local farmers' market was charging about $2.61 per pound for plums at that time ($6 for a 2.3-pound basket), so our harvest was worth roughly $246, exceeding the value of the raspberry crop. 

However, the plums aren't as consistently productive as the raspberries; they seem to have fallen into a pattern of giving us one good crop every two years and nothing at all in the off years. Also, the three plum trees cost more up front than the dozen raspberry canes, and it took them several years to become productive. So we've definitely gotten more bang for our total buck from the raspberries than we have from the plums, though both have repaid our original investment (in money and time) many times over.

Which brings me to that popular post that the raspberry canes inspired. Most of it was about the process of building a trellis to support the canes so that we could more easily reach the fruit (and I'm pleased to say that after six years, that structure is still holding up just fine). But at the end, I waxed philosophical for a bit about the pleasure these raspberry canes had brought into our lives:

I was heading into the house with a bowlful of fresh raspberries I'd just picked for my lunch, and I was struck once again by the thought, "How incredibly lucky am I to have fresh berries there for the picking, right outside my door? What did we ever do to deserve this kind of bounty?"

Only this time, I realized immediately that I knew the answer to that question perfectly well: what we had done was to plant and tend the raspberry canes. With our own hands, we dug the bed; with our own hands, we planted them all in one chilly spring day; with our own hands, we mulched them and watered them and trimmed them and gave them a fresh dressing of compost every spring; and with our own hands, we built this new trellis to support them. And whenever we want to eat some, we go out and pick them with our own hands as well, braving the scratches for the sake of the berries. We earned this blessing.

And that, I think, sums up the ecofrugal life in a nutshell. It's a life full of blessings that have been earned. Home-baked bread, home-cooked meals, home-grown produce, hand-picked flowers, an abundance of clothing and furniture and books acquired by carefully picking through the offerings at yard sales and thrift stores. And I don't feel I appreciate these blessings any the less for knowing that I've worked for them, instead of having them gifted to me by some gracious and unseen Providence; on the contrary, I think being able to recognize in them the loving labor of my own hands makes me value them all the more.

I'll be back to count more of my ecofrugal blessings tomorrow, as Thrift Week continues.