Small potatoes

It didn't occur to us until recently that, when we planted potatoes for the first time this spring, there was one thing we didn't pay enough attention to: how to know when it was time to harvest them. After thriving throughout the spring and summer, the vines started to wilt and die back, and we weren't sure whether that meant it was time to harvest the potatoes or not. Eventually I checked on it and found that potatoes grown in this way are supposed to be ready to eat after 12 to 20 weeks — which meant we were anywhere from one to three months late gathering them in.

So, yesterday, Brian decided to investigate. He pulled one of the buckets out of the garden and started rummaging through it, searching for spuds.

The first one he found was a tiny little fingerling — maybe half the size of the ones we'd bought as seed potatoes to start with — and he thought, "Gee, I hope the rest are bigger than that." But he kept digging, and eventually he found about a dozen more...all smaller than that first one. The entire harvest from that bucket was small enough to fit into the palm of his hand. When we took them in and weighed them, they came to about an ounce total.

We haven't checked the other three buckets yet, but based on this one, it seems clear that our potato-growing experiment, to put it mildly, hasn't been a huge success. The volume of potatoes we got out of this one bucket may actually be smaller than the total volume of seed potato that went into it. If the others are similar, then the $3.71 we spent on seed potatoes will yield us around a quarter-pound of fingerlings, for a total cost of $14.84 per pound. (Sure, fingerling potatoes cost a lot more at the store than other kinds, but they're nowhere near that much.)

So, in theory, we should just eat the tiny volume of potatoes we have and write off the $3.71 we spent on the experiment as the cost of a lesson learned. (The buckets can be reused, and the compost can go back into the bin, so there weren't any other expenses.) And yet somehow, I hate to let it go at that. I can't help thinking there must be something we could do to get a decent crop of potatoes out of these buckets. Not a huge volume — maybe just a few meals' worth — but at least enough to make a profit on the endeavor. I mean, other people have apparently been able to pull this off successfully, so we know it's theoretically possible. Maybe with a few changes to our technique, we could make it work.

I checked out this YouTube video on bucket potato growing from an urban homesteader by the name of Hollis, and I can definitely see a few things he did differently from us. For instance, he added a 4-inch layer of stones for drainage to the bucket, while we only put in an inch and a half. Then, and this is probably more important, he added just enough compost to cover the stones and put the seed potatoes directly on top of them before layering on 6 inches of compost over top. We put in 4 to 6 inches of compost before adding the potatoes, and looking back on it now, it seems obvious that by doing this, we deprived them of 6 inches' worth of growing space. And obviously, the more underground space your potato vines have to grow in, the more tubers they have room to produce. (Brian confirmed that when he was rooting around in the bucket, he noticed that once he got below a certain level, there just were no more potatoes. So it seems clear that the vines grow only up, not down.)

Also, the growing medium Hollis uses is different. He said he combined equal parts topsoil, peat moss, and composted manure, rather than using all compost as we did. Now, given our druthers, we'd prefer to keep using our own compost, since it's both cheaper and more sustainable (as peat moss is technically a nonrenewable resource). However, it looks like we might not need to use pure compost; a ratio of two parts compost to one part ordinary garden soil would be closer to his mixture and might produce better results.

Third, the video recommends using two whole potatoes per bucket. We followed the advice of the folks at the Belle Mead Co-op and cut ours into pieces, then used three pieces in each bucket. However, it's possible that this actually overcrowded the vines, giving them less space for growing good tubers. Using fewer seed potatoes per bucket, could actually end up giving us a larger yield. (Hollis also used ordinary supermarket potatoes, which he sprouted by setting them in an egg carton and putting them in a sunny window. We'd prefer to grow the fancier fingerlings, since that gives us a better monetary return on our time investment, but it looks like there's no need to go to the co-op for them; we could just pick up a pound at Trader Joe's for two bucks, sprout a dozen of them, and eat the rest.)

Fourth, we set our potato buckets directly on the ground, but Hollis recommends keeping them elevated a couple of inches. His are set on top of what looks like a section of a shipping pallet. This improves the drainage and also keeps any harmful critters from crawling into the bucket from below.

Fifth, the video recommends giving all the buckets a good, thorough soaking with the hose — enough that there's water standing on top of the growing medium, which quickly drains through — right after planting. We watered ours pretty regularly, but I don't think we gave them this much water to start with, and it's possible we could have given them a better head start that way. Hollis also adds a dusting of bone meal on top to give the plants some extra phosphorus, which he says promotes root growth, and soaks them again after that. I don't know if we'd want to add this step, since it's not vegetarian-friendly, but one of the references on our gardening shelf (The Natural Garden Book) says you can boost phosphorus levels with compost, which is what we'd be using, or by raising the pH of the soil — and since our clay soil has a pretty high pH, that's another good argument for adding some of it to the mix.

Using these methods, Hollis claims he can usually get one to three pounds of potatoes out of a single five-gallon bucket. Now, the yield for fingerlings might not be as high in terms of weight, but still, if we can get even the low end of that range, our four buckets could give us four pounds of potatoes — $8 worth — for an initial investment of under a buck. (We'd use less than half of a $2 bag of potatoes for sprouting, and we'd supply the buckets, rocks, dirt, and compost ourselves.) That's definitely a result worth trying for.

Gardeners' Holidays 2019: The Changing of the Garden

I was unable to put this blog entry out on the actual winter solstice, yesterday, because Brian and I spent that day in our car, making our way across parts of five states on our annual winter trek to Indianapolis. But, as usual, we took advantage of this one-on-one time to go through the new Fedco seed catalogue and decide which of our garden crops we wanted to keep, drop, or replace next year.

I thought this conversation would be a pretty short one this year, since most of the crops we've grown this year were pretty successful. Running down the list—arugula, regular basil, Thai basil, cucumbers, dill, two kinds of green beans, leeks, three kinds of lettuce, marigolds, parsley, two kinds of peppers, scallions, snap peas, two kinds of butternut squash, and four kinds of tomatoes—we found that most of them had provided decent yields and given us very little trouble. We found only a few that we thought we'd like to replace, such as the new King Sieg leeks, which produced only a few scrawny specimens. Rather than go back to our previous Lincoln variety, which was never a big producer either, we're taking another stab at finding a better variety—most likely the autumn-producing Lancelot, which is billed as "a dependable heavy-yielding, virus-tolerant bolt-resistant leek." We're keeping both our trusty Carmen peppers and our new Cabellero chilis, but we're dropping the old Jimmy Nardellos (which didn't even give us one healthy seedling) in favor of a new frying pepper, most likely the early-producing Takara Shishito.

Among our tomatoes, we're keeping the Premio for early production, the Pineapple for late-season production, and the Sun Gold for tons of tiny cherry tomatoes all season long. However, we're dropping the other cherry variety, Honeydrop; it was indeed less prone to cracking than the Sun Gold, but not quite as tasty and not nearly as productive. And we're definitely dropping the Heinz paste tomato, which produced only a meager crop of small tomatoes, barely enough for one good batch of sauce. We've identified two candidates for a paste tomato to replace it: Opalka, touted for "copious yields" and ability to withstand hot, dry summers, and Vilms, a massive producer resistant to many tomato diseases. However, given that Heinz is the second or third plum tomato we've tried without success, I'm not getting my hopes up too much.

So I thought those minor changes would be it for next year's garden. Then, however, Brian threw me a curve. He said that next year, he'd like to try adding an entirely new crop to our repertoire: potatoes.

Brian's newfound interest in potatoes was motivated less by a desire to eat them—since, after all, they're readily available and pretty cheap at the supermarket—than by curiosity about how to grow them. He has a coworker who grows potatoes in his garden, and his descriptions of the process piqued Brian's interest. Plus, he says half-jokingly, being able to grow a crop that can actually supply a reasonable amount of our daily calories will come in handy during the global-warming-induced End Times.

However, when I turned to the "Potatoes" section in the Fedco catalog, it looked like we'd hit a snag. I read through the section on potato culture, and the way they described it made it sound like this crop requires a lot more work than most of the veggies we grow. You have to plant at just the right time, when the soil is at 55 to 60 degrees and dry enough to work easily; and earlier or later, and you risk having your seed potatoes rot in the ground. You're supposed to plant them four to six inches deep, then "hill them up" (mounding dirt over the stem, so it can turn into a tuber underground) when they reach 6 inches tall and again at 12 to 15 inches tall. And you have to water them consistently, an inch or so each week. And ideally, you should give them a good coating of mulch after the second hilling to keep them moist and control weeds. And you have to wait two to three weeks after the vines die before harvesting them, and keep them chilly—55 to 60 degrees—for several weeks before putting them into storage in exactly the right conditions: 38 to 40 degrees, 85 to 90 percent humidity, and complete darkness.

But the most serious problem was the amount of space needed. The minimum amount of seed potatoes you can buy from Fedco is two pounds, and according to the catalogue, each pound will fill 5 to 8 "row feet"—so to grow our potatoes in the traditional way, we'd need a minimum of 10 feet, and up to 16 feet, of potato hills. In our tiny square-foot garden, that just wasn't going to be an option.

Fortunately, we'd both heard of other ways to grow potatoes in containers, such as barrels or bags. I pulled out my phone and Googled "grow potatoes small space," and I found several articles about these methods. One, from A Modern Homestead, was very enthusiastic about the "potato tower" method: making a cylinder of chicken wire, lining it with newspaper and mulch, and planting your potatoes in that. The writers claimed this method could produce "hundreds of pounds of potatoes in less than 30 square feet." This seemed a bit iffy to me, given that Fedco said you needed to plant your potatoes at least 8 inches apart for fingerling varieties and 10 to 12 inches apart for full-size ones. However, the Ontario Potato Board was more optimistic, saying you only needed to space the seed potatoes 5 to 7 inches apart. It also said you can use other kinds of containers, such as a burlap bag, a garbage can, or any tall container with drainage holes drilled in the bottom.

Now, as it happens, Brian and I already have some large buckets with drainage holes in them: the ones we used as tree-watering buckets when we first planted our plum trees. According to Instructables, each of these should hold about three potato plants, so with five buckets, we could accommodate fifteen plants, or just about two pounds' worth. We're not going to attempt anything on a bigger scale than that just yet.

As for which variety of potato to grow, Fedco sorted its offerings into four types: early, mid-season, late, and fingerling. We confined our search to the fingerling type, since we've found this type of potato to be both particularly tasty and particularly expensive to buy. Fedco had nine fingerling potatoes on offer, with intriguing names and descriptions such as the deep purple Magic Molly, the red-fleshed AmaRosa, and the Austrian Crescent, with its "unearthly yields" of pale yellow potatoes up to ten inches long. The best one for newbies like us appeared to be the Pinto, described as a "real workhorse with high yields and excellent resistance to pests and disease. They're pretty, too, with "striking bicolor skins" of yellow and red, and their flavor is described as "buttery and decadent with a creamy texture." For a first experiment with potato growing, it sounds like a sure winner.

So, as our 2019 garden settles in for the winter, we're looking ahead to another year of doing more of the same stuff that worked so well this year—plus a little something new that may or may not work. Only one way to find out!

Recipe of the Month: Celery Root and Potato Puree

Our Recipe of the Month for March involves a vegetable we've never tried before: celery root, otherwise known as celeriac. Despite the name, celery root isn't simply the root part of a normal celery plant; it's a related plant grown mainly for its edible roots. These roots smell and taste quite similar to stalk celery, but like most root vegetables, celeriac keeps much better in cold storage than green celery. It's also rich in vitamins B6, C, and K, as well as phosphorus, and it has a not unreasonable amount of fiber and protein.

Despite these benefits, however, Brian and I never had a really good reason to try it until we picked up the most recent issue of Stop & Shop's Savory magazine. In a section on recipes for Passover, there was one for Garlicky Celery Root and Potato Puree, touted as a "creamy side dish [that] goes well with any meal." This versatile dish looked like it might make a good addition to our veggie repertoire, so we decided to stop by the Whole Earth Center and pick up the necessary ingredients. In addition to the celeriac, we'd need some gold potatoes, which are a better variety for boiling than the white or russet potatoes we usually buy.

These ingredients proved to be quite a bit pricier than we'd expected. Even though we were only making a half recipe, we still needed a pound of celery root, which was priced at $2.99 a pound. (We actually bought slightly less than a pound because it was sold in fist-sized knobs, and two of these knobs weighed in at 0.84 pounds. At that price, we didn't think it was worth buying a third one.) We also needed a pound of the Yukon Gold potatoes, which were much pricier than our usual variety at $1.69 a pound. Perhaps we could have paid less per pound by buying a larger bag somewhere else, but we would still have paid more in total, and we would have had to figure out what to do with all those extra potatoes. So the ingredients we bought specifically for this recipe came to $4.20, not counting the olive oil and garlic we already had at home. At that price, this was going to have to be one hell of a side dish to justify the cost.

Making the puree wasn't difficult. Instead of boiling the celery root and potatoes on the stove as the recipe specified, Brian cooked them together in the pressure cooker on his usual potato setting, which worked just fine. Then he browned the garlic in the skillet (using just a bit more than the recipe called for, as is his wont), added the cooked veggies, and mashed it all up together. The resulting mixture had a distinctly different texture from regular mashed potatoes, noticeably thinner and less starchy, but still reasonable to serve in the same position on the plate. Since the dish was new to us, we decided to serve it up as part of a simple meal of baked whiting (seasoned with lemon pepper) and green beans, and let the new recipe be the star of the meal.

The mashed mixture of potatoes and celeriac was definitely more interesting than regular mashed potatoes, though the celery flavor wasn't nearly as strong as we'd expected based on the smell of the celery roots. Perhaps cooking it mellowed the flavor, or perhaps the taste just isn't very strong to begin with, but it was merely a faint hint of celery's usual sharpness in the background, playing off the creamy mildness of the gold potatoes and the mellow flavor of the cooked garlic. It was tasty enough to bring us both back for seconds, but, to be honest, not so amazingly tasty that we thought we'd be eager to make it again. It's not that much work to make, but it's still more work than a plain baked potato, which is almost as good and a hell of a lot cheaper. Maybe not quite as healthy, but there are other veggies you can add to the meal that would be just as healthy without the added expense.

So I'd have to say this Garlicky Celery Root and Potato Puree is interesting mainly as a curiosity. It was definitely worth trying once, but it's not something I feel any need to include in our collection of staple dishes. Maybe if we could find both celery root and gold potatoes a lot cheaper, this lighter and lower-carb variant on mashed potatoes would be worth making more often, but at the prices we pay around here, it's not a good investment.

First harvest of 2021

When it comes to gardening, perennial crops are the most ecofrugal kind of all. Our rhubarb plants and asparagus crowns cost more initially than a packet of seeds the garden, but they've kept producing year after year, giving us much more food per dollar than the ones we plant yearly. Plus we only had to go through the work of planting them once to get many years' worth of crops.

But at this time of year, the nicest thing about perennial crops is that they're already producing. The parsley and leek seedlings are only just ready to set out, the lettuce and arugula haven't even been planted, but our asparagus patch has already produced six ounces of tender green spears. It's not a huge amount, but it's enough to celebrate the arrival of spring officially.

Brian and I have a few go-to asparagus recipes we could have used these for. During asparagus season, we regularly make the Polenta with Mushrooms and Asparagus recipe from Easy Vegetarian Dinners (which also works quite nicely with gnocchi). We also recently discovered two new pasta dishes with asparagus, one with mushrooms and leeks and the other in a garlicky white sauce. But for this first asparagus harvest of the year, we decided to go with a simple dish we've made many times before: asparagus, potatoes, and eggs.

This dish is a combination of two different recipes from Easy Vegetarian Dinners. The first, "Potatoes & Eggs," is a frittata made with new potatoes, asparagus, tomato (which isn't in season at the same time as asparagus), and Parmesan cheese. The second, "Roasted Asparagus with New Potatoes," also calls for new potatoes, but you roast them in a pan with the asparagus and finish it by sprinkling on fresh rosemary, Parmesan, pepper, and toasted pine nuts.

Over the years, Brian has merged these two recipes to eliminate the tomato, reduce the amount of egg required, and minimize the cooking time needed. And, more recently, he replaced the Parmesan with our standard substitute, a mixture of salt and nutritional yeast. His current version looks like this:

Asparagus, Potatoes, and Eggs

Cube 2 medium potatoes, spread them in a pan, and roast in a 450-degree oven for about 25 minutes.

Snap 6 ounces of asparagus spears into 1-inch pieces. Saute them in olive oil with 1 Tablespoon pine nuts and 2 teaspoons snipped fresh rosemary for about 3 minutes, or until the asparagus is bright green and tender.

Add the potatoes to the pan. Sprinkle on 1 teaspoon nutritional yeast and 1/2 teaspoon salt. Beat 3 eggs and stir them into the mix. Scramble until the eggs are as firm as you like them, then remove from heat.

This version of the dish is perfectly simple and perfectly satisfying. The tablespoon of pine nuts is just enough of an extravagance to make it feel special without putting a real burden on the budget. It's quick, easy, and delicious. In short, a perfect way to kick off the gardening season.

Smaller and larger potatoes

So, remember how we harvested our first bucket of potatoes last month, and the total potato content inside came to roughly one ounce? And how I concluded that if the other three were equally disappointing, our harvest would come to only four ounces total?

Well, they were and they weren't. Brian harvested the other three buckets today and laid out the contents of all four buckets for comparison. The contents appear here in the same relative positions as their buckets in the garden. The two piles at the upper left were from the two buckets at the northeast corner of the garden, the tiny pile at the upper right was in the southeast corner, and the one at the bottom left was in the northwest corner. However, it actually got far more light than all the others, as the other three are all partly shaded by trees. That's presumably why it yielded so much more than the others, and probably also why it was the only one of the four buckets that still had some living greenery in it.

This gives us another useful piece of data: potato plants apparently need significantly more light than ours were getting. So, along with the other changes we plan to make with next year's crop (placing the potatoes directly atop the drainage stones, mixing soil with the compost, sprouting fewer potatoes, raising the buckets for better drainage, and watering more thoroughly after planting), we'll want to find a place for the buckets where they'll get as much light as possible. Brian was concerned that if we moved them outside the fenced garden area, the groundhogs would go for them, but Laid Back Gardener claims they don't, which makes sense if they're a member of the generally toxic nightshade family. So perhaps we'll try putting the buckets along the edge of the patio instead (possibly dressing them up with burlap to make them look a bit nicer).

The two other buckets on the eastern side of the garden barely doubled the harvest from the first one, but the fourth bucket, the one from the western side, increased it considerably. When Brian weighed the contents of all four buckets together on our kitchen scale, he found that we had a total of roughly eight ounces — about twice as much as I expected to get, and exactly the right amount to make a nice batch of roasted Brussels sprouts with potatoes and eggs for tonight's dinner.

So, all in all, our potato-growing experiment was not a total failure. True, the half-pound of potatoes we actually harvested would only have cost us about a buck to buy at the store, as opposed to $3.71 worth of seed potatoes and a whole season of work tending the plants. But we'll get one good meal out of it, and plenty of useful information about what to do differently next year.

Recipe of the Month: Greens, Beans, and Mashed Potatoes

As the days ticked down toward Christmas and our annual trip to Indiana, I realized I had one task to complete before the trip that had nothing to do with holiday gifts: finding a Recipe of the Month for December. I had a couple of downloaded recipes I'd been meaning to try, but none that were both vegan and vegetable-forward. So I turned to our shelf of cookbooks and started flipping through them, looking for inspiration. On page 69 of Mollie Katzen's Vegetable Heaven, I found what looked like just the thing: a dish called "Green And White Beans Under Garlic Mashed Potatoes." It was a casserole of white beans, fresh green beans, and spinach topped with a layer of mashed potatoes, in the manner of a shepherd's pie. All the ingredients were either in our kitchen already or easy to get hold of. It did have a rather lengthy preparation time (an hour and 45 minutes, with 30 minutes of hands-on work), but since Brian had three extra days off before we had to leave for our trip, he'd have plenty of time to make it.

As usual, Brian modified the written recipe in several ways. First, he had to swap out a few ingredients to make it vegan. That wasn't difficult: he just replaced the butter and milk in the mashed potatoes with oil and soy milk and the gruyere cheese that was supposed to go on top with a spritz of oil and a sprinkling of nutritional yeast and salt. He also replaced the olive oil used to saute the veggies with cheaper canola oil and the fresh green beans, which are quite expensive in December, with frozen. He boosted the 10 ounces of frozen spinach the recipe called for to a full pound and dialed down the half-teaspoon of nutmeg the recipe called for to just a quarter-teaspoon to avoid overpowering the other flavors. And rather than simmering the white beans and boiling the potatoes on the stove, he did them in the pressure cooker, thus saving a good chunk of time and energy.

Even with that change, this recipe was fairly time-consuming. First, he had to cook the soaked white beans and set them aside. Then he cooked the potatoes and mashed them (skins and all) with soy milk, oil, garlic, and salt. The next step was to saute two chopped leeks in oil with salt, thyme, and more garlic, then add flour, pepper, nutmeg, and water to make the sauce. When all that was done, he integrated the cooked white beans into the dish with the green beans and spinach, cooked it briefly, and spread it in a casserole dish with the potatoes and his improvised nutritional-yeast topping layered on top. And finally, he loaded the whole thing into the oven to bake for around 40 minutes.

The finished casserole didn't look much like a vegan dish. Between the golden-brown topping and the white sauce that had bubbled over the sides, it gave a very good impression of something rich and cheesy. Unfortunately, its flavor and texture didn't live up to the hype. The biggest problem was the green beans; after nearly an hour of cooking between the stovetop and the oven, they were mushy and bland, doing nothing to relieve the stodginess of the bean-and-potato mixture. (Fresh ones might have stood up better to the long cooking time, but even they might not have survived it.) And while the leeks, garlic, nutritional yeast, and spices did their best, there just wasn't enough of them to perk up such a vast mass of greens and starch. Unfortunately, Brian had decided to make a full batch of the recipe (six servings), so we had quite a lot of it left over after that first meal. We managed to get through it all before leaving for our trip, but we were pretty sick of it by the end.

Despite these shortcomings, I think this dish has potential. If you left out the green beans altogether and made it with only spinach and leeks, it would basically be a variation on colcannon, a classic Irish greens-and-beans mixture, but with an added pop of protein from the white beans. Another variant of this dish, called Rumbledethumps, was a staple meal of ours for years until we gave up cheese; this beany casserole, with a little more nutritional yeast to boost the flavor, could potentially fill the same role. (But if we decide to try it this way, we'll probably go with just a half recipe.)

Our potato planting premiere

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gardeners' Holidays 2015: The Age of Asparagus

Apologies to all for being a bit late with this Gardeners' Holiday post. Technically, the Age of Asparagus holiday falls on May 1, the cross-quarter day, but that's also May Day, which my Morris dance team celebrates by dancing from the crack of dawn until mid-afternoon, and drinking together after that. So by the time we made it home, I was so tired that I'd forgotten all about the blog.

Fortunately, our asparagus has not been too tired to produce for us throughout the past week. In fact, after getting off to a sluggish start in April, it came into its own right around the start of May, sending up spears so fast that we're picking new ones every day, sometimes twice a day. Once or twice, I've snapped off the tallest spears in the morning and passed over two or three others because they were too short...only to pass by the bed again in the late afternoon and see that those same spears have now shot up higher than the ones I picked in the morning.

Although the asparagus is growing fast, we still don't have a huge volume of it, because we just don't have that many plants. So the amount we pick in a single day usually isn't enough for a meal. Simply leaving the spears in the bed longer isn't an option, because left to their own devices, they will branch out into big fronds no longer suitable for cooking. In fact, some of the spears we didn't get to fast enough—or considered too small to be worth picking—have already gone to fern. (After a few weeks, we'll need to stop picking the spears and let them all turn into ferns, so they can spend the rest of the year gathering nourishment for the roots to produce next year's crop.)

To keep the asparagus fresh until we have enough to use, we harvest the spears not by cutting them off at ground level, but by snapping them off at their natural breaking point, leaving the ends in the ground. Then we stick the broken spears into a jar with a bit of water at the bottom and store them in the fridge. This keeps them firm and green until we're ready to turn them into a meal.

And turn it into meals we have. One of the cookbooks on our shelf, Easy Vegetarian Dinners from Better Homes and Gardens, contains several recipes that call for asparagus, and this is the only time of year we really get the chance to make them. So we've picked a couple of our favorites and enjoyed them multiple times in the past couple of weeks. The first, appearing in the "Bravo Beans and Grains" section, is Polenta with Mushrooms and Asparagus. The hardest part of this recipe is actually making the polenta; once that's done, you just keep it warm while you sauté some chopped onion in a pan. As soon as it's tender, toss in the sliced mushrooms and asparagus with some minced garlic, cook it a few minutes more, and stir in a little white wine and salt. Then ladle that over the polenta and top it with some toasted chopped nuts and a bit of Parmesan for a simple, elegant meal.

Good as this recipe is, it's a bit time-consuming. On Friday, after returning from our Morris-dancing adventures, we didn't want to wait for the polenta, so instead we cooked up a pound of gnocchi from Aldi and tossed that with the asparagus-mushroom mixture instead. We quickly discovered that we like this version even better than the original. The tender texture of the gnocchi makes a wonderful foil for the tender-crispness of the veggies, and the little potato pillows soak up the flavor of the sauce much more effectively than the polenta. I think we will definitely have to pick up some more gnocchi at the earliest opportunity so we can make this recipe at least once more before asparagus season ends.

The other asparagus recipe we've been eating lots of is Roasted Asparagus with New Potatoes, from the "Bumper Crop" section of the cookbook. Last month, we actually tried this for the first time with real new potatoes, since we picked up a bag of little fingerling potatoes as a splurge on a recent trip to Trader Joe's. These tiny potatoes can be roasted whole, side by side with the asparagus, drizzled with a little olive oil and salt, and they'll come out tender in under 15 minutes. The recipe says to stir in a bit of fresh rosemary and pepper, then garnish with toasted pine nuts and Parmesan and call it a meal—but we've taken to adding the extra step of dumping the whole mess into a pan and cooking it up with a couple of beaten eggs for a bit of additional protein. This makeshift frittata is both hearty enough and flavorful enough to make an all-around satisfying meal. And while it's particularly delicious with those buttery little fingerling potatoes, if you don't happen to have any, you can just dice plain old baking potatoes into chunks and it'll be nearly as good.

The other crop that's at its height right now is the rhubarb. Last year around this time, the four plants started sending up long flower spikes, which looked fascinating, but seemed to slow their production somewhat as they diverted energy from leaf and stalk production to the important business of germination. (Kind of like human adolescence, when the reproductive urge becomes so overpowering that it's hard to concentrate on anything else.) So this year, we've been ruthless about seeking out and snipping off those flower stalks before they get too tall, and the plants have rewarded us by developing into massive bushes of greenery. This week, we harvested the first crop of the year and turned it into Skillet Chicken and Rhubarb for last night's dinner—and there's still plenty out there to be enjoyed in the form of pies, crisps, and crumbles.

For summer is a-coming in, and winter's gone away, o!

The One Harvest challenge, part 2

As I noted in yesterday's post, figuring out how our regular grocery budget compares to a package deal from One Harvest Food Ministries turned out to be a lot more complicated than it looked at first blush. My first thought was just to take all the items in the organization's $36 Family Box and figure out how much we'd spend on the equivalents (including free-range versions of all the meats). But I quickly realized this wouldn't be an accurate comparison at all, because their Family Box contained far more meat than our two-person family would normally eat in a month. So figuring out how much we'd pay for that much meat wouldn't give a realistic picture of our actual grocery spending.

So instead, I decided it would make more sense to figure out what meals a hypothetical family would make from the food in this box, and then calculate how much we'd pay to make comparable but not identical meals. For example, if the family used its 1.5 pounds of boneless chicken breast to make two meals—stir-fry with chicken and chicken pot pie—then I'd figure out how much we'd spend to make a stir-fry with tofu and a chicken pot pie with free-range chicken legs. And since our family has only two people in it, I'd count each of the imaginary family's dinners as being equivalent to two dinners for the two of us, and double our recipes as necessary.

However, when I started trying to make menus out of the ingredients in the Family Box (reiterated below), I ran into a snag:

• 1.5 lb Boneless Skinless Chicken Breast
• 1.25 lb Homemade Style Salisbury Steaks
• 1.5 lb Flounder Fillets
• 1.3 lb Kielbasa Sausage
• 1 lb Premium Ground Beef
• 12 oz Ground Turkey
• 1 lb Lee Breakfast Sausage
• (2) 8” Deep Dish Pepperoni Pizzas
• 32 oz Crinkle Cut Fries
• 1 lb Fresh Frozen Green Beans
• 1 lb Fresh Frozen Stir Fry Veggies
• 1 lb Fresh Frozen Shoe Peg Corn
• 1 lb Fresh Frozen Sliced Carrots
• 1 lb Fresh Frozen Sliced Peaches
• 8.5 oz Jiffy Cornbread Muffin Mix
• 1 Dessert Item

See the problem? There aren't nearly enough veggies in this box to balance out the amount of meat you're getting. Even if you served traditional American-style meals, with a big hunk of meat accompanied by smaller hunks of potato and vegetable, you wouldn't have enough veggies to go around, and there certainly aren't enough to stretch the meat out into a month's worth (or even half a month's worth) of meals. So I figured, to make this a more reasonable test, I'd add a Fresh Frozen Veggie box, for $25.50, into the mix. That gives us this much extra material to work with:

• 1lb FF Strawberries
• 12 ct Frozen Southern Biscuits
• 1lb FF Sliced Carrots
• 1lb FF Corn on the Cob
• 1lb FF Broccoli Florets
• 1lb FF Green Peas and Carrots
• 1lb FF Mixed Vegetables
• 1lb FF Vegetable Gumbo
• 1lb FF Sliced Yellow Squash
• 1lb FF Breaded Okra
• 1lb FF Speckled Butter Beans
• 1lb FF White Shoepeg Corn
• 1lb FF Field Peas with Snaps
• 1lb FF Stir-Fry Mixed Vegetables
• 1lb FF Green Peas
• 1 lb FF Green Beans

With this, we can begin to make some menus. I tried to stretch the meat out to about 3-4 ounces per person per meal, augmenting with at least twice that amount of veggies and other material, such as rice. (Since this wasn't included in either of the boxes, I tacked on a few bucks to my budget to cover it.) I also didn't bother to diversify the menu as much as I probably would in real life: I just came up with as many meals as needed to use up all the stuff in both boxes and didn't worry about repeating some of them.

So, in this corner, here is the Harvest Food Ministries menu:

1. Chicken-veggie stir fry: ¾ lb. chicken breast, 2 lbs. stir fry veggies, served with rice
2. Chicken pot pie: ¾ lb. chicken breast, 1 lb. mixed veggies, 1 lb. beans, biscuit crust
3. Salisbury steaks, served with carrots and corn (I figured this was a bit too much food for one dinner for four and not quite enough for two, so I counted it as one meal plus leftovers)
4. Fried fish, with fries, squash, and peas (enough for two dinners for four)
5. Broiled sausage, with carrots and corn (enough for two dinners for four)
6. Meat loaf, with corn and mixed carrots and peas (in real life I'd probably try to stretch the ground beef more by making chili, but that would have involved bringing in too many ingredients that weren't in the Harvest Food boxes)
7. Pasta with ground turkey and broccoli (I found the recipe for this online after a quick search on "ground turkey recipes")
8. Sausage with biscuits, gravy, and peas
9. Vegetable gumbo, served with rice
10. Pepperoni pizza, served with green beans
11. Butter beans and corn muffins, served with okra

In addition to these main meals, we have three desserts. I assumed that the "dessert item" in the Family Box was something like a pie or a cake that would serve eight (so it would stretch over two nights). I also used the frozen peaches and the frozen strawberries, which didn't fit into any of the dinner menus, to make two additional desserts: a peach cobbler and a strawberry shortcake. I figured the additional ingredients for these (flour, sugar, etc.), as well as the rice, pasta, and other ingredients added to the dinner menus, would cost between $4 and $5, so that brings the total cost of our two boxes' worth of meals up to $66. Now, can we do better cooking from scratch?

I came up with a menu that I thought was roughly equivalent to the one above, using recipes that Brian and I actually use at home. As I noted above, in most cases, I multiplied our usual recipes as needed to make an equivalent volume to the ones from the Harvest Food boxes. However, I made a couple of exceptions. For instance, kielbasa sausage is one meat that we do occasionally eat straight up, with potatoes and veggies on the side. However, there's no way we'd ever have this meal four times in a single month; the free-range sausages we buy at the Amish market are just too expensive for that. So instead of assuming we'd have this meal four times (four meals for two equals two meals for four), I figured we'd have it only twice and increased the volume of the next meal on the menu (chili) to compensate.

I assumed that we'd buy all the ingredients for our meals at the price we usually pay in the store, regardless of whether that's a regular price or the sale price at which we generally stock up. I also didn't include any of our own garden produce in our meals, since I figured that wouldn't really be a fair comparison. The Harvest Food boxes provided all the veggies for the first batch of meals, so I included all the veggies for the second batch in our grocery list. The one exception I made was for the dandelion greens included in the final meal on the list. These aren't usually sold in stores, and I think it's safe to assume that most people could manage to pick a bunch of them somewhere if they looked.

So, in this corner, here is the Ecofrugal Living menu. I've included the ingredients for each meal, along with their cost.

1. Stir fry: 18 oz. tofu $1, 1 lb. broccoli $1.50, 2 peppers $1, 1 jar sprouts $.20, 1 bunch scallions $.30, rice $.40: total $4.40
2. Chicken pot pie: ¾ lb. free range chicken legs $1.50, 1 lb. potatoes $.40, ½ lb. organic frozen peas $1, ½ lb. organic mushrooms $1.15, 1 large leek $1.50, 2 carrots $.20, milk/butter/flour/baking powder/salt $.50: total $6.25
3. Tuna potato cakes, with applesauce and peas (this was my equivalent to the Salisbury steak, so I made enough for three meals for the two of us): 2 cans tuna $2, 1 lb. potatoes $.40, 2 carrots $.20, 1/2 bunch scallions $.15, 4 free-range eggs $.80, 1 sm. jar applesauce $1, flour/mayo/oil/seasonings $1: total $5.55
4. Fish tacos with slaw (this was my equivalent to the fried fish above, so I made enough for four meals for the two of us): 1.5 lb. catfish nuggets $3.75, 1 pkg. corn tortillas $1, 3 lbs. cabbage $1.20, ½ lb. tomatoes $1, 1 bunch scallions $.30, other ingredients $.25: total $7.50
5. Broiled sausages, with baked potatoes and peas: ½ lb. sausage $3, 1 lb. potatoes $.40, 1 lb. organic peas $2: total $5.40
6. Chili and corn bread: 1 tube Gimme Lean beef $4, 2 peppers $1, 2 onions $.30, 1 lb. beans $1.60, 2 cans tomatoes $2, 1 c. corn meal $.45, 1 c. flour $.20, 1 egg $.20, 1 c. milk $.17, ¼ c. organic sugar $.21, garlic/spices/lime/baking powder $.30: total $10.43
7. Pasta with chick peas and spinach: 1 lb. pasta $.80, 1 lb. organic frozen spinach $2, ¼ lb. tomatoes $.50, 2 c. chick peas $.80, garlic/pepper/salt $.25: total $4.35
8. Casualty Eggs (this is my equivalent to the sausage and biscuits above: a recipe from the Small Potatoes Cookbook, containing eggs, bacon, potatoes, and veggies all fried up together): 4 oz. free-range bacon ends $1, 1 lb. potatoes $.40, 8 free-range eggs $1.60, 1 pepper $.50, 1 onions $.15, garlic $.10: total $2.95
9. Mushroom/barley soup with biscuits (this recipe I actually cut in half so it would make an equivalent volume to the vegetable gumbo above): ½ lb. organic mushrooms $1.15, ½ c. barley $.30, 2 onions $.30, 2 carrots $.20, celery/garlic/spices $.20, milk/butter/flour/baking powder/salt $.50: total $2.65
10. Veggie pizza: 2 c. flour $.40, 1 can tomato sauce $.40, 1 onion $.20, 1 pepper $.50, ½ lb. organic mushrooms $1.15, ½ lb. mozzarella cheese $1.25, yeast/spices $.10: total $4.00
11. Butter beans and cornbread, served with wilted dandelion greens: 1 lb. butter beans $1.50, 1 onion $.20, 1 bunch scallions $.30, 1 c. corn meal $.45, 1 c. flour $.20, 1 free-range egg $.20, 1 c. milk $.17, ¼ c. organic sugar $.21, 4 oz. free-range bacon ends $1, flour/butter/garlic/spices/baking powder/brown sugar/vinegar $.30: $4.53

For my three dessert items, I chose these three simple recipes we use often:

1. Wacky cake (an extremely simple, vegan chocolate cake that you can whip up in about five minutes): 1½ c. flour $.30, 1 c. organic sugar $.85, 5 Tbsp. cooking oil $.15, cocoa/baking soda/salt/vinegar/vanilla $.15: total $1.45
2. Apple crisp: 2 lbs. local apples $2.50, 1 c. oats $.20, ¾ c. flour $.15, ¾ c. organic sugar $.63, ½ c. butter $.50, lemon juice/cinnamon $.05, $4.03
3. Chocolate pudding (four batches of it, to make four nights' worth of dessert for the two of us): 4 c. milk $.68, 1 c. organic sugar $.85, 6 Tbsp. organic cocoa $.60, 4 free-range eggs $.80, oil/salt/corn starch/vanilla $.10: total $3.03

And the total for all these dinners and desserts together is...$67.32, virtually the same the price as the Harvest Food Ministries menu. And moreover, we spent the same amount while using only free-range meats and eggs, organic sugar and cocoa, and some organic and/or locally grown produce. So if you believe that organic foods are better for you (or, as I believe, better for the world as a whole and thus worth the extra money), then you're getting better value for about the same dollar amount—and if you don't, you could substitute conventional meats, eggs, and other ingredients and make the Ecofrugal Living menu for even less.

So I'd say the takeaway from part 2 of this challenge is this: Harvest Food ministries does, in fact, offer pretty good value for money, particularly for heavy meat-eaters. But it's certainly possible, and not even that difficult, to get just as many meals for the same amount by eating less meat and cooking everything from scratch. Moreover, by doing so, you can enjoy free-range meats and at least some organic ingredients on a limited budget. So for those who care about such things, the Ecofrugal Living menu is the better deal, hands down. (P.S.: If you'd like to know how to make any of the specific dishes I included in this menu, say so in a comment and I'll post either the recipe itself or a link.) 

Bonus Recipe of the Month: Potato-Leek Gratin

Yesterday, Brian came home from work and greeted me with the question, "What do you want for dinner?" I gave my usual reply, which is, "Ummmmm....", since he's the one who does most of the cooking and I have very little idea at any given time what we have in the fridge to work with. So after a little discussion, we concluded that we'd probably have to make a quick trip to the store to pick something up.

We headed out to the local H-Mart, which has the best selection and prices for produce in our area. Brian scouted around the veggie bins and ended up selecting three leeks, which were on sale for $2 a pound. When I asked what he planned to do with them, he said, "It's an experiment." Since I knew from experience that (1) Brian's culinary experiments, while varying in quality, are invariably at least edible, and (2) anyone who complains about the food is just asking to be stuck with the cooking, I decided to trust his judgment and not probe the matter further.

Well, Brian's experiment turned out to be not merely edible but quite satisfying indeed. The basis of it was a recipe for frizzled leeks from Molly Katzen's Vegetable Heaven, which we've made many times before and either tossed with pasta or eaten straight. It's simple enough to make, if a little time-consuming: after washing the leeks, you cut them into "paper-thin" slices, sauté then in olive oil for five minutes to soften them up, and then arrange them on a foil-lined cookie sheet and bake them for 15 minutes, giving them a quick stir every 5 minutes or so to keep them from burning. Then you take them out, sprinkle them with salt, and let them cool for 15 more minutes. (She says to transfer them first to a plate lined with paper towels, but we don't keep paper towels in our house, so we don't bother with that step. If they get a little crispy sitting in the hot pan, so much the better.)

Now, these by themselves are very tasty—sort of like potato chips, but much healthier—and I could quite happily eat them straight from the pan. But for what Brian had in mind, it turned out, frizzling the leeks was just the first step. He then tossed them into a baking dish with a bunch of stuff that he pulled out of the pantry, fridge, and freezer—a few potatoes, a pint container of shredded mozzarella that we had in the freezer, half a can of mushrooms that we happened to have left over from an omelet I cooked for myself while he was away—and baked the whole into a hearty, solid mass that was somehow far greater than the sum of its parts. Sure, it would be hard to go too far wrong combining potatoes, leeks, and mozzarella in any fashion, but this particular combination had some sort of alchemy that made it taste like far more than the improvised hodge-podge it was.

I've dubbed the result Brian's Potato-Leek Gratin. Here's the recipe, with some suitable modifications (such as allowing for the use of fresh cheese, in case you don't happen to have any sitting around in the freezer):

Brian's Potato-Leek Gratin  

5 medium potatoes
3 smallish leeks
2 cups shredded mozzarella cheese
3 oz. canned mushrooms (about half a small can)
2 medium eggs, beaten
3 Tbsp. mayonnaise
1/2 tsp. salt
olive oil 

1. Frizzle the leeks, as described above.
2. At the same time (if you're organized enough to manage it), cook the potatoes in their skins in a pressure cooker.
3. Dice the mushrooms and the potatoes.
3. Mix together all ingredients except 1/2 cup of the cheese, or a little more. Dump mixture in a casserole lightly greased with olive oil and top with the rest of the cheese.
4. Bake at 400 for 20 minutes.

The only problem with this recipe is that it involves several stages. Frizzling the leeks takes about 20 minutes, and then you have to assemble the rest of the casserole before baking it. So probably the ideal way to make this would be to do a really big batch of frizzled leeks one night, use half of them in some pasta or what have you, and store the rest to make this casserole the next night. But if you don't mind waiting an hour for dinner, then you can do it just as described. Or, if you don't mind waiting an hour and a half, you can dash out to the H-Mart for the leeks before you start.

For those who care about such things, this recipe is vegetarian (though not vegan, obviously) and gluten-free. Though it naturally can't make any claims to being either low-fat or low-carb. Oh, and although it will be nearly a year before anyone has to worry about this, it's suitable for Passover as well.

Recipe of the Month: Roasted Mushroom Salad (plus bonus taters)

This Friday, while deciding what to make for dinner, Brian took note of three cogent facts:

1. We had some mushrooms in the fridge that needed to get used pretty soon.
2. We also had plenty of lettuce out in the garden (so far, the one crop we have that's doing well).
3. I still needed a Recipe of the Month for June to put on this blog.

Putting those items together, he searched the Internet for recipes that included both mushrooms and lettuce, and he found this recipe for Roasted Mushroom and Romaine Salad on the Cookin Canuck website. He had to modify it slightly, since the lettuce in our garden was Boston lettuce rather than Romaine, and the mushrooms we had were white button mushrooms rather than creminis. (Side note: did you know these are actually the same species, Agaricus bisporus? The only difference between them is that creminis are older before they're harvested. Leave them on the ground still longer, and they grow up to become portobello mushrooms. So the only reason portobello mushrooms cost so much more is that it takes longer to grow them. Well, I thought it was interesting.)

Anyway, we figured these changes wouldn't make too big a difference. We both like Boston (butterhead) lettuce better than Romaine anyway, and surely any kind of mushrooms sautéed with olive oil, garlic, and fresh rosemary could only be good. And since we liked all the other flavors in the salad as well—balsamic vinegar, Dijon mustard, and pecans—putting them all together had to be a guaranteed winner, right?

Well, not really. It only took us a few bites of this salad to conclude that, while all the ingredients of it were good individually, they just didn't play together well. In my opinion, it was the juxtaposition of the mushrooms and the lettuce that didn't work. Adding a hot, cooked ingredient over top of fresh greens wasn't the problem; we'd tried that before with this Warm Chick Pea Salad with Arugula, and we quite liked the combination. It was just the flavor of the seasoned mushrooms that didn't seem to combine well with the salad and dressing. We probably would have enjoyed either the dressed greens or the mushrooms by themselves (or possibly as an accompaniment to pasta or polenta), but the two together weren't satisfying. We managed to finish off the dish, but we felt no interest in trying it again.

Fortunately, one thing saved the dinner from being a total bust. Rather than just slice some bread to accompany the salad, Brian decided to fix some potatoes. And since he was using rosemary on the mushrooms, he thought it would make sense to put some on the potatoes as well, along with a little olive oil and parmesan. And these turned out to be not just good, but fantastic. Roasted alongside the mushrooms in a 450-degree oven, they cooked up crisp on the outside, tender on the inside, and full of flavor. Brian used a pound and a half of potatoes, and we ate up most of them at dinner time and then kept going back to the fridge all evening long to sneak pieces of the leftovers. Even cold, they were still tasty.

So, even if the official Recipe of the Month was a disappointment, we still have one new dish that we'll definitely be making again. If you want to do the same, here's the very simple recipe:

Cut 1 1/2 pounds baking potatoes into good-sized chunks. (Small potatoes can be quartered, larger ones halved and cut into thick slices.) Toss the pieces with 3 Tbsp. olive oil, 2 Tbsp parmesan, 1 Tbsp. chopped fresh rosemary, and 1 tsp. salt. Spread them out on a baking sheet lined with parchment or a silicone liner (like the ones Brian got for Hanukkah last year) and bake in a 450-degree oven for about 40 minutes, or until they're golden and crispy. Then try not to gobble them up too fast.

Recipe of the Month: Aloo Gobi

Apologies for skipping my regular blog entry last week. It was a pretty busy weekend, with lots of activities (mostly gaming-related), and I discovered on Sunday that the post I was planning to do—a Recipe of the Month based on sweet potato noodles—was basically the same thing I'd posted as my Recipe of the Month last April. So I decided to just put up a post about my new Money Crashers article and let it go at that.

But now, I have an actual, legitimate Recipe of the Month to post. Last week, on a trip to the H-Mart, we decided on a whim to pick up some cauliflower that was selling cheap—even though we had no specific idea what to do with it. As the week progressed, Brian realized he'd have to come up with some way to use it, so he dug out a cookbook we seldom use called Heart Smart Flavours of India and turned to the recipe it calls "Aaloo Gobi," or cauliflower and potatoes (which is more commonly spelled as "aloo gobi," with just one "a"). We actually had nearly everything that it called for on hand, including a complex spice blend called Sabzi Masala, which Brian had mixed up over a year ago for another recipe and hadn't used since. (It also called for a much simpler blend called Dhania-jeera Masala, but since that contains nothing but cumin and coriander, it was easy to mix up on the spot.)

Anyway, as we were eating it, Brian noted that he'd actually never made this particular dish before. He'd made the "Aaloo Mattar" (potatoes and peas) on the facing page, but since we're not normally in the habit of buying cauliflower, this was the first time he'd done the aloo gobi. So, since this was definitely a vegetable-based recipe—in fact, containing pretty much nothing but vegetables and various seasonings—I decided it would do just fine as a Recipe of the Month.

There are many versions of aloo gobi, and the only ingredients all of them have in common are the potatoes and cauliflower. This version also called for onions, tomatoes, green chilis (which we didn't have, so Brian substituted a bit of diced bell pepper and a touch of cayenne), garlic, ginger, turmeric, the Dhania-jeera Masala and Sabzi Masala spice blends, salt, and chopped scallions for garnish. It made a very colorful dish, bright yellow from the turmeric with touches of red from the tomatoes and peppers. It was quite flavorful, too, with all those spices going on. And since we had the complicated spice blend prepared ahead of time, it wasn't all that hard to make.

Its only weakness was that, with nothing much in it but veggies, it wasn't all that filling. The recipe suggested serving it with a bread of some kind, either parathas or chapatis, and adding that probably would have made a much heartier meal—but it would also have taken a lot more time to cook, and we figured that with the potatoes in there, it should have enough starch by itself. However, with only two potatoes to a whole head of cauliflower, it actually wasn't that substantial. So if we make it again, we'll probably either do it on a night when we have time to make bread also or simply serve it over rice.

But will we make it again? Well, I guess it depends. Cauliflower isn't a veggie that we grow, and it's not one we're normally in the habit of buying—but that's mainly because (1) it's a little pricey, especially when out of season, and (2) by itself, it's not very interesting. However, when combined with potato, tomato, and lots of different Indian spices, it's very interesting. And the dish also has the advantage of being both vegan and gluten-free, which means it's something we can serve to pretty much anyone who ever comes over to dinner.

So I'm thinking this dish isn't something we'll make all that often, but it will be handy to keep on hand, sort of in our back pocket. That way, any time we spot a great deal on cauliflower again, we'll know of something to do with it aside from just blending it up in macaroni and cheese. And, should we ever need to feed some vegan and/or gluten-free friends, we'll have one more dish on our list that will work for them.

Gardeners' Holidays 2024: Harvest Home

Usually, the crop we're most excited about in September is the tomatoes. And they are doing pretty well this year; to date, we've harvested 9 big Pineapples, 61 Premios, 66 San Marzanos, and 490 little Sun Golds. But all summer rolled into fall, we found ourselves focusing more on a new crop: the potatoes Brian planted this spring in our old rain barrel. The plants, which were green and healthy at midsummer, began turning yellow and dry in August, and Brian figured he'd harvest them once the foliage was completely gone. But a little quick research showed that they're actually ready to harvest a couple of weeks after they start yellowing. In short, they were now as ready as they were going to get, and we might as well go for it.

After scooping all the mulch off the top of the plant and setting it aside, Brian began digging into the dirt itself, transferring it into an empty trash can as he went. And just a few inches in, he saw the first little tuber peeping out of the dirt. Unfortunately, it was green on top, meaning it probably wouldn't be safe to eat. (The green itself comes from chlorophyll, but it's a sign that the spud may also contain high levels of solanine, which is poisonous.) But we took it as a sign that there was probably plenty more where that came from.

Sadly, this was not the case. As he kept digging deeper and deeper into the barrel, he found almost no further spuds. Brian burrowed right down to the layer of rocks he'd put in the bottom of the barrel for drainage and unearthed only a scanty handful of potatoes—far less than we'd harvested from our 5-gallon buckets in 2020. The total weight of spuds we produced was probably less than that of the seed potatoes we put in.

So what had we done wrong? Why had such lush, healthy green potato vines produced so few usable tubers? We put this question to the Internet, which told us that the most likely culprit was over-fertilization—particularly the over-application of nitrogen at the time the potato vines were in flower. But that didn't make sense, since the only fertilizer we'd added to the potato barrel was a single bag of aged manure that we mixed in at planting time. Other possible explanations—poor soil, insufficient sunlight, too little water—also didn't fit the data. The plants had gone into rich, crumbly soil; we'd given them plenty of water; and their patio location provided a good 6 to 8 hours of daily sunlight. And the plants themselves looked healthy and vigorous, with no signs of disease or pest infestation.

But after a few dead ends like this, I hit on a site called Growing Produce. The author said her neighbor had a situation exactly like ours: his potato plants "looked great all summer, with vigorous and healthy tops," but produced "only a few small tubers." She immediately diagnosed the problem: His spuds were grown in containers, which "can yield poor results when high daytime temperatures warm the soil." The high temperatures "promote leaf growth at the expense of tubers," resulting in lush plants that are scarce o' tatties. According to the article, "The optimal temperature for tuber growth is said to be about 59°F, while for leaf it’s about 75°F." And according to my home energy use spreadsheet (yes, of course I track our home energy use on a spreadsheet. Are you really surprised?), the average daily temperature throughout June, July, and August of this year was consistently over 75—much more conducive to healthy leaves than abundant spuds.

In short, this potato-barrel experiment was probably doomed from the start. We might conceivably have better results growing potatoes in the ground where the soil would stay cooler, perhaps in the sloped part of the yard where they'd have a big thermal mass to protect them. But we'd have to plant them early, and there's still a chance that too much heat or too much rain would ruin the crop. We might give it one more try just for the hell of it, but we won't be getting our hopes up.

Fortunately, we have other crops in the garden that definitely won't be letting us down. Along with our trusty tomatoes, there are plenty of green beans, peppers, and, surprisingly, zucchini. Normally these summer plants are entirely played out by the time fall comes around, but this year they're still growing, spilling over the edges of the beds and into the paths, and producing healthy squash. And if we still want potatoes, our new local supermarket (which just opened this weekend, about 18 months after the old one shut down) has them on sale for just 30 cents a pound.

Eco Thanksgiving vs. frugal Thanksgiving

The latest batch of supermarket fliers to arrive at my door included one from A&P that prominently advertised frozen whole turkey at an amazing 49 cents a pound. I remember my dad describing 59 cents a pound as a good price for turkey when I was a kid, back in the 80s, so 49 cents a pound today seemed like a truly incredible deal, and it got me thinking: with all the talk about how much food prices have risen lately, just how cheaply is it possible to put together a Thanksgiving dinner if you buy everything on sale? Three years ago, in a post on the Dollar Stretcher forums, I calculated the cost of my family's traditional Thanksgiving meal—turkey, stuffing, gravy made from the drippings, potatoes, veggies, cranberry sauce, and apple and pumpkin pies, for about 10 people—at about $34. Would it still be possible to get the meal for that price?

After examining all the store fliers, I concluded that the deal I'd spotted at the A&P was the best available price for turkey. ShopRite store was offering a free turkey, but you had to spend $300 at the store in a single month to get it, while the A&P deal had no strings attached (except that you could only buy one bird at this price). Using the estimate of 1.5 pounds per person (before cooking), I concluded that a 15-pound bird would be enough to feed 10 people. Thus, at this price, the turkey would cost only $7.35, and that would include the cost of gravy made from the drippings.

However, Shop Rite appeared to have the best deals on all the other components of the meal. I figured that with a little planning, it should be possible to hit both stores—if not in one trip, then at some point during the week—so as to combine the cheap turkey with these other deals:

• Stove Top stuffing is 99 cents for a 6-ounce package. This is possibly not as cheap, and certainly not as tasty or healthful, as homemade stuffing—but it makes the math a lot easier if I just assume that the stuffing will come from a box. Two boxes, which should feed 10 people, will cost $1.98.
• Cranberry sauce, on the other hand, appears actually to be cheaper if you buy it in a can. Store-brand cranberry sauce costs only 77 cents a can, or $1.54 for two cans, while whole cranberries cost $1.99 a bag, not even counting the cost of the sugar.
• You can get either sweet potatoes or white potatoes for $2.50 for 5 pounds (which would work out to 8 ounces of potato per person). Ironically, this makes the potatoes marginally more expensive per pound than the turkey.
• For veggies, you can get fresh broccoli crowns at 99 cents a pound. Figure on 2 pounds for 10 people, making $1.98.
• Lastly, we have the pies. I tried to calculate the cost of making the pies from scratch, as we always do, but I couldn't find sale prices in the flier for some of the ingredients, such as canned pumpkin. (Perhaps the pumpkin shortage has driven up the price to a level the stores don't care to advertise.) So I took a shortcut here and just used the price for Mrs. Smith's Pies: $2.24 each. One each of apple and pumpkin would come to $4.48, quite possibly less than it would cost to make them from scratch.

So, the total cost of the meal—not counting extras, such as drinks and ice cream or whipped cream for the pies—comes to $19.83. This is pretty impressive, especially considering the American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF) today estimated the cost of Thanksgiving dinner for 10 at $49.20—nearly 2.5 times as much.

However, there's one snag. The ultra-cheap Thanksgiving meal I've described here is one that I wouldn't actually eat, because I only eat meats that are humanely farmed. I also prefer to buy organic produce when possible (though I don't do so exclusively), and I have a preference for homemade dishes (stuffing, cranberries, pies) that don't contain a bunch of unpronounceable chemicals. So this raised a new question: what's the lowest amount it's possible to spend for a virtuous, organic, free-range Thanksgiving meal that even hard-core liberals like Lou and Peter Berryman's Uncle Dave wouldn't turn up their noses at?

This question is, of course, trickier to answer than the first one. My grocery store fliers didn't include organic versions of most items, so I had to do a little research. I found that prices on humanely farmed turkeys, at least in our area, vary considerably. A 15-pound turkey from Griggstown Quail Farm costs a jaw-dropping $149.85 ($7.99 per pound plus a flat $30 per bird), yet Stolzfus' Poultry at the Pennsylvania Dutch Farmers' Market offers "fresh-killed farm-raised turkeys" for only $2.69 a pound, or $40.35 for a 15-pound turkey. Although this is less than a third as much as the Griggstown Farm turkey, it's still more than 5 times as much as the cheap one from the A&P. So for an organic and humane Thanksgiving dinner, it looks like the bird alone will cost more than twice as much as the entire meal for the ultra-frugal Thanksgiving.

Fortunately, the markup for the other ingredients isn't as high. I checked prices for these at our local Stop&Shop, Trader Joe's, and at the Whole Earth Center in Princeton. Here's what I found:

• Organic sweet potatoes are $3.69 for 3 pounds at Trader Joe's. We'll say we can make do with one bag, since there will be stuffing as well.
• For veggies, we can get organic frozen peas for $1.99 a pound at Trader Joe's. Assume we'll need two pounds to feed everyone, so that's another $3.98.
• My dad makes a stuffing based around brown rice. A two-pound bag of organic brown rice is $2.99 at Stop&Shop, and we'll probably use about half of it, for $1.50. I'm going to cheat and not do the calculations to figure out the exact prices of the other ingredients (apples, onions, celery, chestnuts, and mushrooms); I'll just guess that it's another $2 or so.
• I didn't find organic cranberries anywhere, so I had to go with the price for canned organic cranberry sauce at the Whole Earth Center: $2.79 a can. That comes to $5.58 for two cans.
• Although I did find canned organic pumpkin at Whole Earth, I couldn't find organic versions of the other ingredients (specifically, evaporated milk). So I decided to change the menu to include two apple pies. Organic Granny Smith apples at Trader Joe's are $2.49 for 2 pounds; for two pies, we'll probably need two bags for $4.98.
• We also need flour, sugar, and butter for the pies. Organic white flour is $1.50 a pound at Stop&Shop, and organic sugar is $1.65 a pound. I'm guessing we need a pound of each. Organic butter (for the pie crust) is $4.79 at the Stop&Shop; we'll use probably half a pound in the two pies, for $2.40.

That brings the total for all the other ingredients to $27.28, and the grand total for the meal to $67.63. This is more than 3 times as costly as our rock-bottom budget Thanksgiving meal, but interestingly, it's not even 50 percent more expensive than the AFBF's estimate. So while frugal folks who are used to buying everything on sale may experience major sticker shock when they try to go free-range and organic, those who normally pay full price may be pleasantly surprised to find that an organic version of the same meal needn't be that much more expensive.

The other takeaway from this exercise, I think, is that the organic markup is much higher for meat than for most other products. With our eco-Thanksgiving meal, the turkey accounts for nearly three-fifths of the total cost; for the budget Thanksgiving meal, it's less than two-fifths. In fact, a vegetarian version of the organic meal—all the "trimmings" without the turkey—would cost barely more than the ultra-cheap meal complete with the bird. Of course, Thanksgiving comes but once a year, and maybe for this one occasion it's worth paying extra to have the traditional meal in all its glory. But certainly on a day-to-day basis, eating vegetarian is the most obvious way to go organic without taking a big hit to the wallet.

Gardeners' Holidays 2021: The Changing of the Garden

After one year of celebrating the holidays exclusively over Zoom, Brian and I have resumed our annual visits to his folks in Indiana for Christmas. And as usual, we spent part of the 12-hour trip going over the Fedco seed catalog, deciding which of the crops in our garden to keep and which to replace. But this year, that discussion didn't take all that long, because most of the crops we planted in this year's garden performed reasonably well. 

That's not to say we got a good harvest of everything we planted. But most of the crops that failed did so through no fault of their own, like the pea and bean plants that were all eaten by that pesky deer before we got a chance to harvest anything off them. The seeds can't be blamed for that, so we're going to keep buying the same varieties next year (Cascadia snap peas and Provider and Climbing French green beans) while doing our best to shore up our anti-deer defenses. (I checked to see if Fedco offered any products that could help with that, but alas, it does not.)

The only crop we tried this year on which the actual seeds let us down was our new Apple peppers. Or perhaps I should say our complete lack of new Apple peppers, since not a single one of the seeds Brian started actually germinated. So we ended up planting three of our trusty Carmen pepper plants instead, along with one Caballero pepper to provide a bit of heat. And while they all performed fine, they didn't provide that much variety.

The sad irony here is that we didn't really want the Apple pepper in the first place. We only bought it at all because our first choice, an early producer called Banana, was sold out. So this year we're going to try again to buy the Banana pepper seeds, and in case those are sold out again, we've selected a later-producing but apparently quite tasty pepper called Aconcagua as a backup.

The one other new variety we're planning to try next year is another paste tomato called Grandma Mary's. The Opalka variety we grew this year did okay, but it suffered a bit from blossom end rot. The Grandma Mary's also has the advantage of being an early producer, so we'll have more opportunities to harvest them.

We're also planning a few other changes in the garden layout. We're thinking about dropping the Vanilla marigolds, which we originally got because they're supposed to help deter pests around the tomatoes. But we can't actually tell if they're doing any good in that regard, and they haven't proved to be very useful as cutting flowers. If you try to cut off just one bloom, it's too short to stick in a vase, and if you cut off a whole step, you get a lot of unformed buds and dead blossoms along with the few full-blown ones. Also, they're one of the most expensive seed varieties we buy. So if our supply of these seeds is depleted, we probably won't bother to replenish it. Instead, we'll use their square to plant some extra parsley.

We're also thinking about doing the same with the square where we used to plant dill. It never seemed to grow where we actually planted it, though we often got little volunteer plants all over the garden beds where we hadn't put in any seeds. And even these volunteers didn't produce much dill at the time when we needed it most, which is while the cucumbers were producing and we wanted fresh dill for pickles. We managed to put up just one or two jars of dill pickles before the dill all bolted and we ended up doing plain garlic or mustard pickles for the rest of the season. So in 2022, we think we might try planting some dill out in the herb bed in the front yard instead. Perhaps it will grow better there, and if it doesn't, we're not really any worse off than we were before.

One final change we're contemplating is to stop using our "carpet seeding" method when planting arugula. We originally started doing this because the thickly planted seedlings crowded out most of the weeds, and it's worked fine with the basil and even the lettuces, which we can gradually thin out as they come in. But with the arugula, the individual seedlings are too tiny to pick right away, and by the time they get big enough to have any good eating on them, they don't get in much growth before they bolt. So Brian thinks we might actually get a better crop by planting fewer seeds and giving them a little more space to grow.

There's one new technique we tried this year that we'll definitely be keeping: spraying the zucchini plants with Bt to deter squash vine borers. This worked where all our previous methods - yellow cup decoys to lure away the parent bugs, wrapping the stems in tin foil, covering them with dirt - have failed. Our two new Green Machine zucchini plants produced a steady stream of zucchini all through the growing season this year, ranging in size from medium to huge. And the huge ones hadn't simply escaped our attention before they could grow to that size; they actually seemed to get that big overnight, going from tiny to whopping while we slept. So we'll absolutely be sticking with this variety, and this method of growing it, in 2022.

One crop I can't report on the success or failure of is the one pot of potatoes Brian planted this spring. They were kind of an afterthought, as we never managed to get out to the Belle Mead Co-Op for seed potatoes, so he just bought a little bag of fingerling potatoes at Trader Joe's, planted a couple in a pot, and ate the rest. And since the frost set in, he still hasn't gotten around to digging them up and seeing if we actually managed to get anything off them. Given the disappointing performance of the previous year's crop, I'm not expecting much, but even if we get no potatoes at all, at least we didn't spend much on them. And if we actually do get more off them than we put in, we'll know that we can pick up seed potatoes the same way next year, rather than making a special trip to buy them.

And that's about all there is to say about our 2021 garden. We're hoping 2022 will bring us fewer deer, more beans and peas, more honeyberries, and an equally good crop of raspberries. And while we wouldn't complain about having not quite as many plums next year, we're hoping to still get enough to try experimenting with some plum wine. At this point, we've already given (or are about to give) plum jam to everyone on our holiday gift list, so we'd like to have something new to offer them next year.