The CSA season begins

Our community-supported agriculture (CSA) subscription started delivering last week, so my projects over the next several months will be to post (1) cheap, simple recipes to use up the produce, and (2) notes about canning. The recipes will be mostly about vegetables, and the canning will be mostly about fruit.

My past experience with CSA's: every week, we'd get a handful of strawberries here, a small sack of green beans there, and six pounds of kale. But that was in the Pacific Northwest, where there's an endemic blight that makes it hard to grow tomatoes. (Man, did I miss Jersey tomatoes while I was living in Seattle. Now that I'm back in Philadelphia, though, I miss getting apples for under $1.00/lb. This mid-Atlantic cheapskate can't win.) Word on the street from a friend who did this particular CSA last year was that the quantity of tomatoes can approach overwhelming levels, and fall can become Carrot Time. So if the same bounty occurs this year, maybe I'll try pressure-canning carrot slices for use in quick winter soups.

We've paid $640.00 up-front for a half-share of vegetables plus a full share of fruit. This amount is comparable to what we would pay for produce at the local farmers market from May to October -- but we'll be getting a larger quantity of produce. We'll still hit the market, though, for local cheeses and wines, plus occasional gifts. I'll look at the math again at the end of the season and see how we did. But with careful, complete use of the produce through immediate consumption and home-canning, I'm almost certain we'll be ahead, and into the winter as well.

Here's a recipe to kick off the season: CSA frittata, using what else? Kale.

Ingredients:

1 bunch CSA kale

1 bunch (or less) CSA spring onions, chopped

2-3 tablespoons butter

2 ounces shredded Cheddar cheese

6 eggs, well beaten

Method:

Wash kale and chop into bite-sized pieces. In a large skillet, sautée onions in butter over medium heat until tender. Add kale in batches and wilt. Season with salt and pepper and cook until tender. (Add a little water if necessary. If you do so, let the water cook off before proceeding.) Spread the kale evenly over the skillet, and place shredded cheese in an even layer over the kale. Pour beaten eggs over kale, reduce heat to low or medium-low, and cook until done, 10-15 minutes.

Serves 2 as a main dish, 4 as a side dish.

There's what in my bagel?

On Saturday I needed picnic fixin's for a hike, so we headed to the supermarket. We found some bananas, picked out a small tub of hummus, and wandered toward the bakery racks to find rolls. Since we couldn't fit a whole baguette into the cooler we were carrying, and the supermarket's little sandwich rolls were all white flour, we looked at the mass-produced, pre-packaged options in the bread aisle. And a lot of them had cellulose in them.

I was taken aback. Isn't cellulose wood fiber? As in, the raw material they use to make rayon fabric? Isn't it the main component of cotton, as in cotton balls and Q-Tips, denim jeans and t-shirts? Why would I ever want to consume cellulose? I am not a termite! I am a human being!

Cellulose is the new thing, I understand, for texturizing ice cream and upping the amount of fiber in processed foods. I guess it's gotten to be cheaper than bran or oat fiber, or the psyllium seed husk they put in Metamucil. You find it in white-flour products that want to boast a high fiber content. We found it in some otherwise suitable-looking bagels, as well as some pre-sliced flatbreads, but not in some whole-wheat rolls.

Fiber is important, for reasons I'd rather let other people explain. But is it really so hard to add a couple of pieces of fruit to your daily diet that you decide to resort to eating sawdust instead? An adult should get some 25 to 35 grams of fiber every day. An orange gives you 3 grams; an apple gives you about 5. Add a couple of carrots for another 3 grams. Now you've had 11 grams of fiber over 5 pieces of fresh produce, and you're well on your way to those 25 grams as well as gettng your "5 to 9 for better health" or whatever the current guideline is. And all without eating wood.

Our next idea was to try for crackers. We found a million varieties of American crackers, but they all had funky ingredients, didn't have much whole grain, or seemed more like junk food chips than a grain product. In the end, we gave up and found some imported crispbread to dip into the hummus.

And a timely link that was going around my circle of friends today, a collection of portraits of households with their weekly grocery haul: "What the world eats." Which photo looks like what's in your grocery cart?

Coffeecake on the cheap

Brunch-time family visit over the weekend means I made a coffeecake. I don't know why I used to think coffeecakes are complicated. They're basically a butter cake -- the same as any ordinary sheet cake you'd make for a birthday -- but a little more forgiving, since you want it to be dense and homey, not bake-shop perfect. The batter can take a lot of abuse and inexpert preparation. I like to boost the nutrition and fiber a little by using some whole-wheat flour, but I wouldn't go so far as to skip all the white flour.

I find that they're an opportunity to use up some fruit I've stashed in the freezer. This time, I used blueberries (natch), pulling them out of the freezer a day ahead of time, letting them thaw in the fridge, and tossing with about a tablespoon of sugar before starting to prepare the batter. Rhubarb is an excellent choice as well.

I'm ballparking that the cake here cost about $2.50, including cooking gas. You can shave about 50 to 75 cents off that cost by using non-organic ingredients.

Here goes:

Ingredients:

1 cup white flour

1/2 cup whole-wheat flour

2 teaspoons baking powder

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 stick (1/4 pound) unsalted butter

1 cup sugar

1 egg

2/3 cup milk

1 cup chopped fruit

Sugar for the fruit (optional)

Method:

Pre-heat oven to 375 F, and grease a small cake pan. Sift together the flours, baking powder, and salt. In a large bowl, beat the butter until light. Gradually add the sugar and cream until light. Add the egg and milk and mix well. Add the flour mixture and stir until smooth.

Scrape the batter into the cake pan and smooth it out. Toss the chopped fruit with sugar, if desired, and spread onto the top of the batter. Bake about 25 minutes. Let rest at least 20 minutes before serving.

Bon apétit!

Surplus jars of jam

According to the date scrawled on the lid of a jar of last year's strawberry jam, and according to the itchiness in my eyes, it's springtime and we're about six weeks away from starting up the 2013 home canning season.

And I am nowhere near using up what I canned last year.

This doesn't necessarily indicate poor pantry planning. In fact, it's lovely to have a well-stocked pantry during the time of year when, traditionally, people would be scrounging for food from half-rotten potatoes and livestock that had grown thin over the winter. And we aren't too many generations removed from the food insecurity that occurred annually in the gap between using up the last of the stored harvest and bringing in the next year's harvest. April, May, and June -- in the northern hemisphere -- used to be very scary months. (There's a phrase for that period of time, but I can't recall it at the moment. Comments welcome.)

Furthermore, what looks like poor planning can simply be the odd result of windfalls and good deals during canning season. Recall that I went nuts on blueberries last summer, taking advantage of an opportunity to u-pick 12 pounds cheaply, and canned six half-pints of jam. By the end of the summer fruit season, I'd finished three batches of jams, a batch of marmalade, and a batch of apple butter. In retrospect, it was enough for about a year and a half, not a single year.

Not to beg the question that I should make only enough jam for a single year. Some jams get better with a little more age. Certainly the blueberry jam did: the slightly tart berries mellowed into a rich, intense blueberry flavor. And it's an opportunity to work more protein into my mostly vegetarian diet by adding a tablespoon or so of jam to a teacup of yogurt, yum.

Anyway, our community-supported agriculture subscription starts up in a few weeks, but I still have a few months' worth of jam left in the pantry. Yikes!

On Drexel Law's two-year J.D. program

So Drexel University is launching a new two-year J.D. program. Usually, it takes three years to get a law degree in the U.S. Six of the 200-odd American law schools offer a two-year path; Drexel's first two-year grads will start in 2014. It seems like a good deal -- you don't have to get loans for a third year of living expenses, and you can get a job one year more quickly -- but I did the math and found that it's an even better deal for Drexel, where I earned my law degree with the inaugural class in 2009. From e-mail I sent to a fellow alumnus:

I think the premise is that Drexel's two-year J.D. program addresses the assertion that the third year of a J.D. program isn't necessary. That is, a person should get their two years done (some even say only one year), be awarded a J.D., and then get experience through an internship or apprenticeship, and then sit for the bar. But a two-year J.D. doesn't address that problem, because you still need all the credits of a three-year program. That issue won't be fixed until the A.B.A. and/or state supreme courts allow a two-years-plus-apprenticeship path to attorney licensure.

Until then, the law schools with two-year J.D.'s reap the rewards of graduating three classes, instead of just two, every six years. Notice that Drexel's two-year J.D. will still cost almost $112,000 in tuition, because it's the same 85 credits as the three-year J.D. (85 credits x $1,315/credit). Yes, the candidates save a year's living expenses and the opportunity cost of being unemployed that third year. But the real answer to cui bono? is the law school. The Class of 2015 (three-year program) is 140 students. If 140 get past the no-refund point in their third year (minus a few for attrition and transfers out, plus a few for transfers in), then that's over $15 million in tuition and fees, or $5 million/year. If one class of a two-year J.D. program is 1/3 the size of a regular three-year program, then a law school gets $5 million every two years, or about $2.5 million every year. But note that that's not 1/3 the amount they get from one year of a three-year program; it's 1/2. Drexel's bottom line is that they gain half a class's worth of tuition every year by adding this program.

Note: here's where I have to Emily Litella a little bit. Dean Dennis explains that the law school will keep its "current class size of about 130 students, but with a quarter of them enrolled in the new program." However, when I did the math before, I started with the assumption that the two-year students would be in addition to the full classes of three-year students. Rather, they will be a sub-set of the incoming class. To re-do the math, this means that every year once the program is fully implemented, about 33 students will be paying half their $112,000 total tuition, while about 97 students will be paying one third of their $112,000 total. Every year, this means (33 x $112,000 * 1/2) + (97 x $112,000 * 1/3), or ($1.848 million) + ($3.621 million), or $5.469 million/yr. Without a two-year program, all 130 students simply pay one third of their $112,000 total tuition: 130 * $112,000 * 1/3, or $4.853 million/yr. Each year, the school takes in $616,000 more in tuition per class -- it's like growing the class by some 15 students while adding zero bodies to the student body. You can hire at least four law professors with that kind of change.

To [one colleague's] point, I'm a little concerned about the loss of value in Drexel's J.D. brand. It appears to me that the two-year J.D. is not a trend among top-tier schools (except for Northwestern), even though it's probably inevitable in the very long run. I think the lowered prestige in a Drexel J.D. is a big risk for the school, and not a good deal for the graduates. But Drexel must have done the math and decided that there is a sufficient financial advantage for Drexel to be on the vanguard of this type of program.

As I concluded to my fellow alumnus, there's a huge reason why I'm certain this is all about the benjamins for Drexel, and not about the students or the profession, which is super-saturated and unable to employ new graduates. Drexel isn't offering a night or part-time program, which would increase enrollment of "students who are a little bit older," as Dean Dennis says. But since a night program takes longer than a three-year program, it doesn't infuse the school with extra cash up front the way an accelerated program does.

My fellow alumnus wondered if there were any other industry that responds to decreased demand by increasing supply. My answer: one where an invisible hand brings it an extra $616,000 every year.

Welcome, surprise readers; and proposed SEPTA fare hikes

After a link from Atrios yesterday, I got over 3,500 views of my post unfavorably analyzing an NYTimes opinion piece on downsizing. (TL; DR: The author has a privilege blind spot preventing him from seeing that he's able to "outsource" his living space because of his wealth.) For the record, that's roughly 3,500 page views more than normal. But what fun! Before yesterday, I had never had a post so popular that I could play Blog Comment Bingo. I got quite a few of them: the reasonable interlocutor; the childfree zealot; the mansplainer; and the one-upmanshipper. The only thing missing was a spammer.

Moving along, and moving to something local to my region, our beloved public transit agency SEPTA has announced a proposed schedule of fare hikes effective in July. Monthly TransPasses, which I get for myself and the household's teenager, will go up by $9.00, or about a day's worth of food. (Cue one-upmanshippers commenting that they feed themselves more cheaply. In response, $9.00 is a ballpark amount. We can and do eat more cheaply, but $9 includes "luxury" items like out-of-season produce, local cheeses, and non-nutritive beverages like coffee and tea. The teenager is a fiend for herbal teas. Cue the childfree zealots telling me they'd never put up with that.) More subtly, the TransPasses will no longer be valid for in-city trips on regional rail, in two ways. One, the North Philadelphia and North Broad stations are shifting to Zone 1; and two, the passes will simply not be good any more for trips to Eastwick and the airport.

These changes are more significant than they seem. Eastwick is an important destination for city residents with blue-collar jobs, and for airport-area residents with Center City jobs. Come July, TransPass users will have to switch to the 36 trolley (or a long, 2-stage trip using the El to 69th Street and then a bus), since the shorter, direct trip via the Airport Line will cost more. And it used to be one of SEPTA's best-kept open secrets that a TransPass gets you to the airport for free. The airport is a destination for workers, too, of course; but this change is irritating for bourgeois professionals like myself who go on trips for business or pleasure a few times per year, or want to meet an incoming visitor and help them save a few clams by taking the train rather than a taxi into town.

My point, and I do have one, is for houseguests after July: You're on your own, kids!

The Zone 1 shift for the North Philadelphia and North Broad stations will work similarly. Residents and workers who need to use those stations will either switch to slower City Division ground transportation, or they'll have to buy Zone 1 passes. And the math you've been waiting for. Currently, a TransPass is $83.00/mo. The proposed TransPass will be $91.00/mo. But people who need to use North Philadelphia, North Broad, Eastwick, or the Airport will have to get a Zone 1 TrailPass, which is now $91.00/mo. but will be $101.00/mo. While I'm whining about a price increase of $9.00/mo., there are others in the city who will have to find $18.00 more in their monthly budgets. And, as a social worker friend of mine put it, these changes will disproportionately affect people who can least afford the changes.

And did you catch the other change in the proposal? Seniors and the disabled will have to use a state-issued photo ID to get a discounted or free ride. Currently, seniors can get a free ride by showing a Medicare card. The proposal is to require seniors to show a state-issued photo ID for their free rides, and for the disabled to acquire a "Photo ID Smart Media," presumably issued by SEPTA, for their discounted rides. I won't go into the politics here, except to note dispassionately and factually that photo ID for voting was a huge problem here in Pennsylvania last fall. Some seniors had a devil of a time getting their photo IDs when an issuing agency employee would deem that their supporting documentation was insufficient. So cynically I'm waiting for the first news reports of a 90-year-old, 88-pound great-grandmother denied her free bus ride because she has her Medicare card but hasn't gotten a state-issued photo ID.

In closing, welcome new readers via Eschatonblog. Please poke around my back catalogue of posts and enjoy yourself. And if you find yourself in Philadelphia sometime, I'll be happy to meet you at the airport and show you how to take regional rail into Center City, unless you're visiting after the first of July.

The NYTimes "Living With Less" opinion writer is silly, privileged

A fluff piece in the New York Times explains that living in a tiny, sparely furnished bachelor pad is better than living in a big house full of stuff.

Here at Rowhouse Livin', we had a few thoughts. To begin with, it sounds as though the author doesn't have any family members living with him. I don't necessarily mean children -- I'm not "mommyjacking" -- but I'll start there. Clearly, kids need stuff, and in a lot of ways they need more stuff than adults do. You may be fine with a minimalist wardrobe, keeping all your reading material on an electronic device, and working out at the gym. But a kid will need a variety of clothes for multiple seasons and activities; they'll have schoolbooks and homework; and they may choose gear-intensive sports like lacrosse or football over cross-country and swimming. As for other family members, though a number of people do shoehorn families into tiny homes, it's probably not realistic for most families. And what if you're the primary caregiver to an invalid?

Is adopting the tiny home lifestyle one way to avoid being the family member tasked with caring for elderly parents, or a close family member who needs extraordinary care?

It also sounds as though the author doesn't keep a lot of emergency supplies, or really much of anything, on hand. I mean, unless he's storing food and sundries on shelves along his ceiling, I can't figure out where he'd put everything he needs in 420 square feet. This choice raises two issues. One, for meals he has to go to the market, get take-out dishes, or eat at restaurants every day. This lifestyle will end up costing him far more than would preparing all his meals at home. The author is a dot-com millionaire and serial entrepreneur, though, so presumably costs are not as pressing a concern for him as they are for me. And two, he's not ready for an emergency where he loses utilities, or where he's too ill or injured to leave the house for a time. Again, if you're not keeping supplies on hand, then you're choosing expensive contingency plans -- stay in a hotel until the problem is fixed; hire a helper until you're feeling better. Outsourcing these kinds of things is expensive. The author has a blind spot: he has ready-cash privilege.

To look at this personal outsourcing another way, I used to have a neighbor who hated doing dishes and enjoyed a pristine kitchen. He bought a paper cup of coffee from the coffee shop every morning on his way to work. No coffee maker taking up space on the counter, no coffee mug to wash every night. While he supported a local business with his daily custom, every year he generated over 200 dirty paper cups and spent about $500.00 on this coffee. This is "living with less"? Less what?

Further, the author's wardrobe of "six dress shirts" suggests that he doesn't have a job where he has to worry too much about his clothing. He's not getting filthy doing manual labor. He's not working in an environment where dressing the same every day would be objectionable (a lot of business offices) or weird (teaching). He's not required to wear a uniform. He's not coming home covered in food, chemicals, paint, or axle grease. In short, he's a guy who doesn't have to change his clothes when he gets home from work. A person who has only a half-dozen dress shirts to cover his torso is not a person who has to work outdoors or wait for buses in the winter, either. Does he have a car in his building's garage, or a doorman to call taxis for him? Not to set up a false dichotomy. He likely has both.

Of course, there's a happy medium between the huge house full of consumer goods and the 420-square-foot studio apartment. But the author's opinion that anything more than the tiny home is "inessential" and "excess" is flat wrong for those of us who don't have a wallet full of platinum cards and a streak of dot-com successes behind us. And I don't buy his assertion without proof, at the end of his piece, that he's "limit[ing his] environmental footprint" merely by living in a small space. Is he purchasing carbon offsets for his take-out and restaurant meals in addition to his airfares?

The happy medium at the Rowhouse Livin' homestead is two-fold. You can take my wall of books when you pry the shelves out of the studs we screwed the uprights into. And: "If you want a golden rule that will fit everybody, this is it: Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful."

Fool-proof method for keeping horsemeat out of your house

So in Europe they're dealing with a food supply scandal where an abbatoir in Romania may or may not have sold horsemeat that may or may not have been labeled as such to a French food processor that may or may not have mixed the horsemeat with beef, where it may or may not have been included in steeply discounted single-serve lasagnas, meat pies, and other microwave-ready boxed meals in supermarket freezer aisles.

Now, horsemeat isn't intrinsically a poor food, unless the horse was treated with a drug not otherwise allowed in horse destined for human consumption, the detection of which was one clue that led to the scandal. But generally, it's my understanding that it tends to be less fatty and richer in iron, magnesium, and phosphorus than the grain-finished beef that Americans usually get. And I'm told it has a grassy flavor somewhere between that of beef and venison, which is at worst unobjectionable and at best mighty tasty. But if you don't want to eat it, you shouldn't have to; and if a package of food doesn't list horsemeat on the label, you should be able to trust that there's no horsemeat in the package. Anything else is fraud, pinching money out of your pocket.

But evidently you can't trust labels, even from high-profile international brands like Nestlé. This is because the path that ingredients take from the field or stockyards to your table is a circuitous one, crossing state lines (or national frontiers) over and over again. Ingredients pass through multiple hands, literally and metaphorically, as they're processed into the end product. And at every step, a processor needs to take its cut and make a profit on the value they're adding to the foodstuff. How do they do it? By using the cheapest ingredient or method possible before they finish touching the product and moving it to the next actor.

Then the final vendor does their balancing act with pushing down the retail price as low as possible while still eking out a profit. One of the problematic products in the U.K. was a bolognese sauce that retailed for £1.00/500g, or about $1.75/lb., or about $1.75 for a pint jar of red pasta sauce with meat. Think about it: that's an extraordinarily low price. If you were to make a pint of red sauce with ground beef in it, you'd need a couple of pounds of fresh tomatoes, perhaps a quarter pound of beef, a little bit of onion and other flavorings, a little oil, and some lemon juice and/or sugar, depending on the tomatoes.

Let me try to price it out if I were to make this sauce today at home. Winter is an awful time to buy fresh tomatoes, but it looks as though I get get a couple of pounds of tomatoes for $5.00; a quarter pound of beef for $1.25; enough onion for $0.25; and let's say another $0.25 for everything else in the ingredient list plus cooking fuel. My version of the sauce costs $6.25. It would likely be cheaper in the summer, when I can get deals on tomatoes. I could save some more by starting with a cheap cut of meat and grinding it myself, or teaming with another household and buying an entire side of beef to share. I think, though, that it would be very difficult to get my pint of meat sauce under about $3.00 while still using quality ingredients.

How to manufacturers do it, then? By buying their tomatoes in quantities larger than six items at a time, of course, with long-term contracts the scale of which I haven't seen since I studied the UCC in law school. The difference between what Campbell's pays for the tomatoes it puts in its soup and juices and what you pay for the tomatoes in your salad is, shall we say, disheartening. Same with the beef they put in their ravioli versus what you put in your sloppy joes. A single producer, a cooperative of farms, or an agribusiness operation will give Campbell's a better price than you'll see at the grocery or farmers market, because you can't possibly match the soup company's economy of scale.

That's only part of the story, however, because there are other actors between you and the tomato field when it comes to industrially produced food. Different components in the package's ingredient list may come from different suppliers, and the food may be only partially produced in one location before it's shipped elsewhere to be finished. Everywhere along the line, the actors will seek to maximize their profits. They'll opt for cheaper raw materials, which may not be as high-quality as what you would buy for your household. What kind of quality do you think you'll get when you pay $1.75 for a 16-ounce jar of pasta sauce?

A butcher in a BBC article explains that it's about "knowing and trusting the people [you] do business with." You can get to know your producer, abbatoir, transporter, and vendor; or you can learn a few languages and travel all over Europe trying to figure out which processor or factory is looking to save a few euro here and there by cutting the ground beef with ground horsemeat:

How's your French, German, Turkish, Greek, Dutch, and Romanian?
See the BBC page for a clickable version of the map with more information.

So, the Rowhouse Livin' fool-proof method for keeping horsemeat out of your house? Don't buy pre-packaged food with a price that's too good to be true. In fact, avoid pre-packaged, processed food whenever you can, because what you gain in price you lose in quality, nutrition, and trust, every single time. If time is a problem, try these: (1) use weekend downtime to make larger batches of food and freeze leftovers in smaller containers for later meals; (2) regularly prepare an extra portion of dinner in the evening, and enjoy it for lunch the next day; and (3) dust off the crockpot and use it at least once per week.

And with that, I'm off to lunch: a couple of slices of home-made pizza left over from Sunday dinner with friends. Absolutely no horsemeat in this pizza. Bon apétit!

Visualize . . . wasting no food

The Natural Resources Defense Council has issued a report (PDF) about the amount of food that Americans waste every year. Now, not all of it is wasted in the home; a good deal is wasted all along the line, according to the report, from the field to the factory, the distribution chain, and the end points of restaurants and our dining tables.

There's not much, if anything, you can do about how much food is lost before you put your groceries away, I don't think. One should probably assume that the invisible hand will prevent farmers, middlemen, restaurateurs, and grocers from wasting too much food in the interest of maximizing their profits. I guess the invisible hand has done the math and figures that there's an acceptable amount of food that it can allow to slip through its fingers to keep its profits up. That is, at some point it must cost more to save or continue handling some amount of food than it costs to lose or dispose of it.

But here at the homestead, it's essentially 100% unacceptable to waste food, where "to waste food" means to throw it out or let it go bad before I use it. It costs almost zero dollars for me to lose or dispose of food. My trash collection is free, because it's a no-cost-added service from the City of Philadelphia, paid through my taxes. (I don't compost because I don't garden, for architectural reasons.) Now, how much does it cost me to put food down my sink disposal? I blush to confess I've never done that math. I use some amount of water, some amount of heating gas if the water going down is warm, and some amount of electricity. Outside of the cost of the food itself, if I run the disposal for 10 seconds, I will ballpark and say it costs me 2 cents. Some days I run it twice, some days I don't run it; so let's say that I run it once per day, and thus it costs me $7.30 per year to run my disposal. I'm fine with this cost, and here's why. The way I run my disposal is to cram the waste and food trimmings into the drain before I wash the dishes. Then I run the disposal as I drain the sink after doing the dishes. Not only does this get the garbage down without splashing odors into the kitchen, but it also serves to really flush out the disposal and maintain it in a clean condition. In fact, I run the disposal when I drain the sink whether I have garbage down in it or not, for that cleaning effect. And I'm OK with paying $7.30 per year to keep my kitchen smelling a little better than kitchens I've lived in that didn't have sink disposal.

That figure, though, doesn't include the food I'm throwing into the disposal. The most important thing for me to remember here is that the Rowhouse Livin' invisible hand works differently from that of the farmers, middlemen, restaurateurs, and grocers mentioned above. For me, when I don't use food that I buy, it's squarely a problem of throwing money away.

What to do? The Unclutterer blog suggests buying a dry-erase marker notetaking solution, but I'd rather do something that doesn't require whipping out my credit card. Instead, I visualize actually throwing money away. Two pounds of potatoes have turned irretrievably green and sprouted in a back corner of the kitchen? That's two crisp dollar bills floating out the door and into the sanitation truck. A can of beans went all bulgey after I missed it during my last emergency food rotation check-in? That dollar makes a loud "thump" when it lands on the bottom of the kitchen garbage can. Kiwi fruit were 3 for $2 but I ate only two of them before the last one shriveled and got moldy? That's two quarters, a dime, a nickel, and two pennies clinking around the disposal blades with the kiwi's core.

It doesn't seem like much; but if you saw 67 cents in a little stack on the sidewalk, wouldn't you pick it up? After all, you could buy a kiwi fruit with it.

Potatoes are cheap

Every summer I quit baking potatoes because it's so hot and I don't want to heat up the house by using the oven. Then it's well into winter before I remember, hey, potatoes are cheap and the house is cold, so why don't I bake or roast potatoes for dinner tonight?

Cookbooks and the internet discuss the difference between waxy and starchy potatoes. I tend to get whichever variety is least expensive. This week it was ordinary russet potatoes. I coarsely chopped them into dice, tossed them with a little olive oil, salt, pepper, and oregano, and baked for about 45 minutes at something like 375 F.

Served with grated cheese, it makes a decent light dinner with fresh vegetables like sliced bell peppers.

Baking bread right afterward saves me a few pennies in cooking gas, too.

And of course we had leftovers. I did a sort of a gratin, spreading the potatoes in a Pyrex pie dish and dropping a few ounces of mozzarella cheese on them. I had an acorn squash already in the oven, baking away -- so when it was about 15 minutes from being done, I said "Move over, bacon" and slid the potatoes in until the cheese was melted and a little browned.

But zounds! Still more leftover potatoes! But just a little bit. I'll have 'em with eggs for breakfast.

Pricey pasta follow-up

Yesterday I complained that pasta at my local supermarkets is stubbornly refusing to get down to my price point, which is $1.00 or under per pound. I checked a second grocery store today, and no luck: the lowest price was still $1.19, and I'm too stubborn-headed to cave and buy a box to make my shelf look better stocked.

What do I do now, then? Mostly, I'll go a little easy on the pasta until I see it again at my price point, which I'll hopefully see soon in a clearance sale. I feel as though we're overdue for one. I probably make pasta for dinner too frequently anyway; we could use more variety in our dinners. I know I have some corn flour masa kicking around, so perhaps I'll make corn tortillas one night this week.

As for tonight, it's semi-potluck dinner with friends. I host a pizza dinner once or twice a month, asking guests to bring sides, desserts, and bottles. I'll make two pizzas: one plain and ordinary (or maybe with one non-challenging topping, like sweet peppers), and one a little more interesting. Tonight, I'll top the interesting one with baked acorn squash purée and caramelized onions, flavored with some sage:

Bon apétit!

Cold weather, pricey pasta

Here in mid-Atlantic Philadelphia -- very squarely outside of New England -- we dodged the big nor'easter just as we did Superstorm Sandy in the fall. It's stupid cold outside (I don't tolerate the cold well at all) but other than some icy sidewalks we don't have much to complain about.

Except for the price of pasta. I remember seeing sometime last year that wheat prices were going to go up permanently, and the price rise seems to have taken hold. Lately I haven't found pound boxes of pasta for less than $1.19 locally. (Barilla on "sale" at 4 boxes for $5.00 doesn't cut it for Rowhouse Livin', though that's our preferred brand for taste and texture reasons.) Now, I have a good supply here at the homestead to wait a little longer, in case a deal does come along. I mean, I think I'm low, because I have two full half-gallon jars, which is about 4 pounds' worth of pasta. But we do go through pasta really quickly, being mostly vegetarian and totally cheapskates: main dishes, side dishes, starchy stretchers in a crockpot full of soup, and so on.

So I'll try the supermarket again tomorrow when I go on a quick run for some items I missed at the store today, but I'm afraid I'll be disappointed again. And not just at the cold, cold wind blowing tears out of my eyes. I guess I should have invested in wheat futures last summer!