What we're doing for Earth Day

This year, Earth Day overlaps with the start of Passover—which means, ironically, that we're going to spend it being a little less ecofrugal than usual. Normally we wouldn't drive anywhere on a Monday; Brian would either bike to work or work from home. But tomorrow, we'll have to drive to get to my parents' house for the Seder, and since my family isn't kosher, that meal will include both meat and dairy (a free-range chicken for dinner and ice cream with fruit compote for dessert). And our menu for the following week will also include more meat and dairy than usual, since many of the Passover-friendly recipes we know include either one or the other. 

Fortunately, Brian and I are making up for that by increasing our efforts in the lead-up to Earth Day itself. Over the past week or so, our earth-friendly activities have included:

1. Trying a new vegan restaurant. Last weekend, we went to a show with some friends in the nearby town of Metuchen, and they suggested meeting for dinner beforehand. I did a little investigation online to find a vegetarian-friendly restaurant in Metuchen and discovered one called Red's Leaf Cafe where the menu is 100 percent vegan. The place is quite small, with just a handful of tables, but everything we ordered—the shared oyster mushroom appetizer, Brian's sesame seitan, my orange lion's mane mushrooms over coconut rice—was very tasty. Unfortunately, it was also pretty pricey; the bill for our party of four, including tip, came to $160. So I don't think we'll want to visit there on a regular basis, but if we have guests we want to impress, it could be worth another trip.
2. My monthly Citizens' Climate Lobby (CCL) meeting. Most months, this group holds its monthly meeting on Tuesday night, with only a few people meeting in person and the rest joining via Zoom. This month, for a change, it met at a Unitarian church in Somerville on Saturday afternoon. (Brian helped make my trip up there more eco-friendly by driving me there and spending the time while I was at my meeting running errands in town.) My favorite part of the meeting was watching the monthly presentation from CCL's national organization, which featured an interesting speaker: Ernesto Alcantar of Potential Energy, the self-described "marketing team for planet Earth." His presentation focused on eight principles for having productive conversations about climate with people who don't live in our climate-activist bubble. His tips include "talking like a human" (avoiding jargon like "carbon footprint" and even "greenhouse gas"), avoiding partisanship, and focusing on "humans, not concepts."
3. More visible mending. After my success fixing the holes in Brian's socks with Scotch darning, I decided to try a new technique called honeycomb darning for reinforcing some worn areas that didn't have holes yet. This method involves putting in a series of blanket stitches running all around the edge of the worn spot, then looping through those stitches to add another row of stitches farther in, and repeating the process until you get to the middle. This video on YouTube does a good job of explaining the process, including what to do with the dangling "tail threads" at the end. One thing it doesn't show is what to do if, like me, you misjudge how much thread you need and end up running out before you've finished the job. I had to guess how to work in a new piece of thread to pick up where the first one ran out. But I later found a second video on the same subject that does show what to do, and its method is pretty much the same as mine, so apparently I guessed right.
4. Joining a stream cleanup. Several members of our CCL chapter took part in the
   
   Raritan Headwaters 34th Annual Stream Cleanup yesterday. (Since this blog is technically social media, I'll throw in the tags @raritanheadwaters and #RHAstreamcleanup here.) The area we were assigned to was Spruce Run Recreation Area in Clinton, which is actually along a reservoir rather than a stream. Our team of seven didn't go into or near the water itself; instead we donned yellow vests and combed the verge along a half-mile stretch of road near the park entrance. By far the most common type of trash we found was cigarette butts—over 150 of them—followed by plastic bottles and wrappers. (Little mini liquor bottles and cigarette butts were particularly likely to be found together.) The most unusual item we found was a piece of hardware that no one in our group, or in the larger group running the event, could identify. It's a...well, some sort of knob bolted to some sort of hinge, sort of? If you can figure out what it's for, please let me know.
5. Secondhand shopping. The stream cleanup happened to fall on the same day as the town-wide yard sales in Metuchen, so we couldn't spend the entire day strolling around and browsing sales as we normally would. But after coming home and having some lunch, we headed up to Metuchen to get in a couple of hours of yard-saling in the afternoon. Between the huge rummage sale at the First Presbyterian Church and a few other sales we visited in that same neighborhood, we managed to pick up three items of interest—a Fairport Convention CD, a peacock-blue T-shirt for me, and a Ngaio Marsh mystery—for $2.50 total. (Unfortunately, we then spent twice that amount at a local cafe on a cup of coffee for me, since I was practically falling asleep on my feet after our early morning and busy day.) Not a very impressive haul, but I followed up on it just now by ordering us a secondhand garlic press on eBay to replace the one that just fell apart as Brian was cooking dinner. (Since this one has a one-piece "rocker" design, with no moving parts, we know it won't break like its predecessor. And The Spruce Eats says it can mince ginger, too.)

Add all that in to our everyday earth-friendly activities, such as eating meatless meals, hanging our laundry, and Brian's regular bicycle commute, and I'd say we're not doing too badly.

These darned socks

Brian and I don't tend to spend a lot of money on clothing. Even our "investment pieces," like my fall coat and Brian's one good suit, typically come from thrift shops. But one item we don't cheap out on is winter socks. We both splurge on $22-per-pair Smartwool socks, which keep our feet cozy and warm without itching, and then wear them until they literally fall to pieces. I've always done my best to extend their lifespan by stitching up small holes as they formed, but eventually the holes would get too big to close up this way. At that point, our pricey socks would be fit only for the rag bin.

Once or twice, I attempted to salvage the socks by darning them. The only way I knew of to do this was the traditional weaving technique: make long stitches across the hole horizontally, then follow up with vertical stitches that weave in and out of the horizontal ones. Unfortunately, this never worked very well. If I put the horizontal stitches far apart, the weave was too loose, and if I put them close together, it was too hard to weave in between them. And in either case, it always came out lumpy.

That's why I was intrigued to learn about a visible mending technique called Scotch darning. With this method, you put in only one row of stitches at a time, as if you were knitting rather than weaving. Each row of stitches is secured to the row above it and is secured at either end to the good fabric outside the hole. (It's a bit hard to explain in words, but this YouTube video illustrates it quite clearly.) With this method, there's no worry about how to space the long stitches and no fiddling with weaving in and out between them. And if you make your thread too short and it runs out midway through the process, that's okay; you can just  start a new row and keep going, securing it to the one you just finished.

So I decided to give this method a try with one of Brian's Smartwool socks that had reached the limits of my normal darning abilities. I started out using some fine grey yarn that I'd had sitting around for years, but it kept breaking, so I switched to a heavier blue yarn that I'd received as part of a learn-to-knit kit. (All my attempts to make sense of the instructions in the knitting book had so far come to naught, so I figured there wasn't much sense in saving the yarn for a project I'd probably never manage to complete.)

It was a bit difficult to thread a needle—even my biggest "sailcloth" needle—with this thick yarn, but once I managed that, the actual stitching process went fairly smoothly. I quickly got the hang of the pattern: under the top row, under the bottom row, over the thread, pull it tight, and repeat. As one of the comments on the YouTube video observed, it was almost meditative. After I got the entire hole stitched up, I had Brian try on the sock, and while he could feel the difference between the darned area and the rest of the fabric, he said it wasn't uncomfortable. So I carried on, stitching up holes and worn areas in three more socks.

I ran into only two problems as I worked my way through this lot. First, the yarn kept getting twisted up as I tied it into loops, and I had to stop periodically and let it unwind itself. Second, I had trouble gauging how much yarn I needed to cover a hole completely. On my first attempt, I ran out of yarn and had to sister in a new length of yarn halfway down. The next time, I deliberately cut my yarn much longer than I thought I needed—far longer than the length of my arm, so that I had to stop after every stitch and spend a minute pulling the long strand through with both hands. This proved to be far more than I needed, leaving me with over a foot left over once the hole was completely covered. So I cut it off and used the extra yarn to get started on the next hole, only to find that it was once again too short and I had to re-thread the needle halfway through. I worked my way through four socks without ever really figuring out how much was the right amount.

Although this Scotch darning technique was a smooth enough process once I got going, it wasn't a quick one. I didn't time it, but I'm sure I spent at least an hour and probably over two hours getting through all four socks. It might have gone faster if I'd been using a finer yarn that was easier to get through the needle or if I'd known what amount to use, so that I wouldn't have to keep re-threading it in the middle of a hole. But even if I were doing it perfectly, it would still require a fairly significant investment of time. (Even the experienced sewer in the YouTube video takes nine and a half minutes to stitch up one medium-sized hole.) 

Given the time involved, this probably wouldn't be worth doing for cheap everyday socks. But taking an hour to repair a $22 pair of Smartwool socks is like earning a $22 hourly wage, and that beats New Jersey's minimum wage by nearly $7 an hour. Plus, it keeps them out of the landfill. And there's a certain satisfaction in sticking it to The Man by fixing my own darned socks (ha ha) instead of shelling out for a new pair like a good little consumer.

Recipe of the Month: White Bean and Mushroom Stew with Dumplings

Brian and I are currently visiting my in-laws in Indianapolis for the solar eclipse. We'll be away a total of five days, so one of the things we had to do before leaving was to eat up all the leftovers in the fridge. We managed to do this by lunchtime on Friday, which left us with a slight dilemma about what to have for dinner. Whatever we made needed to use up a container of mushrooms we had in the fridge, since we weren't sure they would survive until next Thursday. But all our existing mushroom-based recipes—mushroom-barley soup, pizza, stir-fry—made large batches that would create new leftovers. And we couldn't just use the shrooms in an omelet, because we had only two eggs in the fridge. (For the past several weeks, Lidl has been all out of Certified Humane eggs, and we haven't been desperate enough to pay $8 a dozen for them at the farmers' market.)

To resolve this problem, Brian decided to improvise a mushroom stew. He sauteed the mushrooms first to release their juice, then sauteed some onion and garlic as well. Then he added the mushrooms back in, along with a can of cannellini beans for a protein source. He thickened the liquid from the beans and veggies with a little flour to make a gravy and flavored it with nutritional yeast, salt, and fresh thyme. And then, rather than serve it over pasta or rice, he whipped up some dumplings to go on top.

This thrown-together dish worked surprisingly well. It wasn't much to look at, being a sort of uniform beige color with a lumpy consistency. But the mushrooms and nutritional yeast provided plenty of umami, and the white beans and dumplings made it hearty enough to stick to our ribs. The texture was a bit stodgy, but still, for a totally ad-hoc recipe, it was remarkably satisfying.

That said, I'm not sure this stew will become a regular addition to our dinner repertoire. As I noted before, we already have quite a few other recipes that use mushrooms, most of which we like better than this one. And under normal circumstances, a recipe that makes lots of leftovers is a feature, not a bug. We'll file this dish away in the memory banks in case there's any future occasion when we need a quick, one-night-only dinner with no leftovers, but we probably won't haul it out very often.

Further experiments with visible mending

After my first successful visible mending experiment last month, I decided to get a bit more ambitious. I went to Michael's and invested five bucks in 36 skeins of embroidery floss in assorted bright colors, allowing me to add more techniques—darning, embroidery, and sashiko—to my mending repertoire. 

The first repair I attempted with the new thread was darning another threadbare patch on one of Brian's jeans pockets. I already knew the basic idea—make long stitches going in one direction across the hole, then make perpendicular stitches that weave in and out through the first set—but I also watched a couple of videos about it online and did my best to copy their technique. Unfortunately, I didn't quite get the hang of it right away. I ended up placing the vertical stitches too close together, making it difficult to weave through them when going horizontally. As a result, the darned area came out a bit uneven and lumpy. Brian said he liked it anyway, but I'm not as happy with it as I was with my previous patching repair. 

So for my next repair, I decided to move away from darning and try a hybrid technique: a patch on the inside of the garment, secured in place with decorative stitching. The garment in question was my old pair of black jeans that had worn out in the thigh area. I'd already patched it once before, but the area around the patch had now worn out, leaving little sections of skin exposed. I thought at this point there was nothing to do but downgrade them to "grubby" pants for doing dirty jobs around the house and yard. But since I had nothing to lose at this point, I figured I might as well attempt a visible mend on these as well. 

First, I removed the old patches and tidied up the edges of the holes with scissors. Then I went back to that same old striped flannel shirt I'd used for patching Brian's pants and cut out a couple of pieces from the sleeve, large enough to cover the new, larger holes. I sewed those colorful patches to the inside of the pants using my usual whip-stitch technique. Then I turned the jeans right-side-out, selected a dark blue embroidery thread that coordinated with the fabric, and began top-stitching the patch to the intact parts of the jeans. 

I started out attempting to make a neat, decorative running stitch, as shown in this NPR article, but it came out too wonky-looking. My stitches were uneven in length and my lines had a tendency to wobble. So I picked all that out and started over using the seed stitch technique shown in this video, which is supposed to look random and chaotic. This came much more naturally to me. It was actually kind of fun pushing the needle in at a random spot, then taking off in a random direction from there, making stitches of varying length and even doubling back as needed to cover bare patches. It took quite a while, but eventually I ended up with a unique-looking repair that I wouldn't be embarrassed to flash a glimpse of to strangers while walking down the street. 

But while the patch-and-embroider technique worked well for these large holes, it didn't seem like it would be much use for the small holes in Brian's jeans pockets. For one thing, there's no good way to sew a patch to the inside of the jeans pocket without removing it. So for his last damaged pocket, I went back to exterior patching. I still had one more pocket flap on that old trusty flannel shirt that I could have used, but instead I decided to try repurposing an old, colorful fabric mask leftover from the early days of the pandemic. (I didn't think we'd be needing it again, since even if a new wave of COVID should strike, we now have some of the much more effective N95 masks to use instead.)

After cutting off the ear loops, I experimented with different placements for the patch that wouldn't require cutting it. (Having a piece of fabric that was already neatly hemmed on all four sides, I didn't want to mess with it.) I considered placing it vertically up the length of the pocket and tucking the end inside, but I feared the doubled-over fabric might be too bulky and interfere with the use of the pocket. So instead I just stitched it across the entire width of the pocket, overlapping it on both sides. Only after I had it in place did I realize I'd actually sewn it on upside down, with the folds of the mask pointing up instead of down. But since it didn't have to function as a mask, that didn't really seem to matter. I just tacked the flaps down with a set of loose stitches so they wouldn't flop around.

Unfortunately, after all these successes came a not-unexpected setback. The original pair of pants that started me off on this visible-mending kick, which already had patches on both knees as well as the back pocket, developed a visibly threadbare patch on the thigh. I didn't think adding a pocket patch in this area would work very well, and I feared that the patch-and-embroider technique I'd used on my own jeans would be a little too messy for such a visible spot. But I also couldn't bear the idea of seeing these jeans retired when I'd just managed to get them patched so nicely.

Hunting around for a way to mend the threadbare patch, I found myself turning yet again to that old striped flannel shirt. When cutting up the sleeve to make the patches for my jeans, I'd saved the cuff—a nice, long strip of fabric, ready-hemmed on all sides. What if I removed the cuff button on one end, stitched up the buttonhole, and sewed this long piece across the entire width of the jeans leg? It sounded kind of nutty, but Brian okayed the idea, so I gave it a go. 

The result isn't perfect. Even though I carefully positioned the patch and pinned it in place before stitching, it still somehow managed to come out a bit askew. But Brian doesn't mind it. In fact, he seems rather tickled with his new Franken-pants with their motley assortment of patches. And I'm quite pleased that he's willing to be a walking showcase for my  visible mending efforts.

Gardeners' Holidays 2024: First Sowing

Spring is officially here, which means it's about time to get our first crop, the snap peas, into the ground. I figured I could easily handle this on my own while Brian was out for a bike ride, but it turned out to be more difficult than I expected. The problem wasn't planting the seeds; it was finding them.

We keep all our seeds and seed-starting supplies in a big box labeled "seed starting," which is on one of the lower shelves in our overcrowded storage room. When I hauled out this box, the first place I looked for the seeds was in the wooden crate that Brian refers to as our "seed library," which contains all our seed packets from the current year and previous years, sorted by category. There was a section at the front labeled "This year," so I supposed that was where this year's seeds would be. However, a quick search plainly revealed that it was not. I then went through all the other sections and, while I did find some packets of snap peas, none were more recent than 2018. Clearly these weren't the seeds I was looking for.

Then I spotted a little box from Botanical Interests, our 2023 seed supplier, which was labeled "The good stuff (2024)." Ah, presumably the current seeds would be in here. And when I rummaged through, I did indeed find a packet of snap peas from last year's order—but there were only about 15 seeds left in it. That was less than half the number we would need to plant a full row of peas. Surely we would have ordered more if that was all we had left, wouldn't we? When I consulted my garden chart, it said that yes, we had ordered more from True Leaf Market this year. But where were they? And where, for that matter, were all the rest of the seeds from this year's order, which hadn't been in either of the two boxes I'd checked?

I went back to the big box and eventually found, tucked in near the front, a large brown-paper envelope, well camouflaged against the brown cardboard of the box itself. This was the package in which our seeds had been delivered, which Brian had apparently stuck into the box with all the seeds still in it. So I retrieved that, fished out the seeds, and planted them in the right rear garden bed, which we'd already cleared of weeds the week before. (Side note: we discovered in the process that our "Marvel of Four Seasons" lettuce truly lives up to its name. There's a head growing in that same bed that apparently overwintered from last fall's planting and is already large enough to start harvesting.) 

But my work was not done. Given that it had taken me about five times as long to find the seeds as it had to plant them, I was convinced we needed a better organizational scheme for our seed collection. We had saved far too many packets of seeds, some of them clearly far too old to germinate at this point, and they had turned into a haystack in which the seeds we actually needed were hard-to-find needles. So as soon as Brian got home, we brought up all the seeds and started going through them, removing the unusable ones and filing the current ones. We discarded anything that was over 5 years old—including a few packets that were over 15 years old—and anything that had been a spectacular failure, such as the Apple pepper seeds that completely failed to germinate.

By the time we were done, we had a huge pile of empty seed envelopes and two bowls of expired seeds, one for flowers and one for veggies. Keeping them separate was Brian's idea. He plans to scatter the expired flower seeds in some neglected corner of the yard and see if anything came up. We're still figuring out what to do with the vegetable seeds. If we toss them in the compost bin, there's a danger that some of them could defy the odds and sprout, creating unidentifiable rogue plants that take over our side yard. (Brian tried to argue that this could be "an adventure," but I vetoed the idea. Gardening with plants you can put a name to is enough of an adventure as it is.) 

My idea was that maybe we could scatter all the vegetable seeds in a shallow dish, set it out in the yard, and see if the birds and squirrels would eat them. However, many of them were beans, and it turns out that uncooked beans are unsafe for birds to eat. So for now, we've just poured them all into a jar, where we'll keep them until we either think of a use for them or give up and toss them in the trash. In the meantime, they make a rather fetching little decoration. Too bad I don't have an Instagram account to post them on.

After clearing out all the old and useless seeds, we had plenty of room in the seed library to file all the usable ones. In the process, we discovered that there weren't quite as many of them as we thought we had. Even though we'd gone through the entire collection before placing our seed order for this year, we somehow overlooked the fact that we didn't have enough of either our Provider green beans or our Marketmore cucumbers to fill all the squares we'd allocated for them. More startling still, we'd failed to notice that we didn't have any usable scallion seeds at all. I had to place a hasty second seed order with True Market—one packet of Provider beans, one new cucumber variety called Boston Pickling Cucumber, and a new scallion variety called Flagpole—to rectify the situation.

So in the end, I guess it was a bit of a blessing in disguise that our seed library was such a mess. If it hadn't looked like a disaster that needed to be cleaned up immediately, we might not have discovered that we were missing some seeds we needed until the time came to plant them. Then we'd have had to make do with whatever variety was available at the nearest store or, worse still, leave valuable space in our garden empty. But on the other hand, maybe if it hadn't been such a mess back in December, we would have been able to tell which seeds we needed and avoid the whole problem.

In either case, I think we're best off not letting it get to that level again. Moving forward, we plan to go through all the seeds when we place our order in December or January and remove any that we think we're unlikely to use. Maybe, if we're really on the ball, we can even cull the varieties that we don't want before they expire and donate them to our local seed library. That way they'll have a chance to be of use to someone instead of ending up as decorative objects in a jar.

Recipe of the Month: Peanut Tofu with Cabbage Noodles

A few weeks ago, the It Doesn't Taste Like Chicken newsletter recommended a recipe that looked intriguing: Easy Peanut Tofu. Most of the ingredients were things we normally keep on hand, and the method looked pretty simple. At first, though, I didn't think this dish would work as a Recipe of the Month. It's vegan, but it's a protein-centered dish with no vegetables in it, which would defeat these recipes' stated purpose of getting more fruits and veggies into my diet.

Brian, upon examining the recipe, came up with a novel solution to this problem. Rather than serving the tofu up over rice as the recipe suggests, he proposed to serve it with a mixture of rice noodles and thinly sliced cabbage. He knew this combination would work because he regularly uses it in pad Thai—a modification he made to that recipe to up its veggie content when I was on my reduced-carb diet. This accompaniment sounded both healthier and more interesting than plain white rice, and it would eliminate the need for a separate vegetable side.

As usual, Brian made a few alterations to the peanut tofu recipe, but only small ones. He left out the Sriracha and cilantro, which we didn't have. He used plain peanuts instead of salted peanuts, which we also didn't have. And since the tofu we had on hand was firm rather than extra-firm, he baked it longer than the recipe specified—about 25 minutes instead of 12 to 18—to make sure it wouldn't be too moist. While it was baking, he cooked a third of a package of rice noodles (about 5.5 ounces) and sauteed 14 ounces of thinly sliced cabbage, together with a couple of sliced scallions and half a teaspoon of salt, until it was tender. Then he tossed the cabbage and noodles together and served it alongside the sauced tofu.

This turned out to be a splendid combination. The cabbage noodles had more flavor and texture interest than plain white rice, but not so strong a flavor as to clash with the real star of the show, the tofu. It had a sticky outer coating and a chewy texture that contrasted nicely with the soft, slippery noodle mixture, and its flavor was a dazzling blend of peanut, sesame, garlic, ginger, and salty soy sauce, with hints of tangy rice vinegar and sweet maple syrup. And the crunchiness of the chopped peanuts on top added still more texture interest. It's possible the dish would have been better still with the missing cilantro and Sriracha, but don't think it suffered at all from their absence.

In short, this recipe is a definite keeper. It's easy, it's healthy, it's delicious, and all the ingredients are cheap and readily available. On top of that, it's both vegan and gluten-free. It's a recipe anyone who doesn't have a peanut allergy can love.

A cheeseless adaptation attempt

Before Brian and I started cutting back on dairy at home, we used to be very fond of a recipe we called Cheesy Rice Casserole. This was a slightly modified version of the "Hellzapoppin' Cheese Rice" from Peg Bracken's I Hate to Cook Book, slightly lighter on the cheese and butter. It was a staple in our kitchen repertoire because it was both easy and cheap and required only ingredients we routinely kept on hand, making it perfect for those what-should-we-have-for-dinner occasions.

But since we stopped buying cheese at the store, this trusty recipe has fallen by the wayside. Our homemade vegan mozzarella has allowed us to keep making some of our cheesy favorites, but it doesn't have the right flavor to take the place of the cheddar cheese in this dish. And the one time we tried making it with a dairy-free cheddar we found at Lidl, the result was so weird and unsatisfying that I didn't even think it was worth mentioning on the blog.

A couple of weeks ago, though, I got to wondering if we could replace the cheese in this recipe some other way. Since it already had eggs to serve as a binder, it didn't really need the melted cheese to hold it together. Maybe, I thought, we could just throw in some nutritional yeast for flavor and some tofu to up the protein content and see if that was good enough.

Brian was willing to take on this experiment, but he wasn't entirely convinced that the nutritional yeast alone would give the dish enough flavor. So he found a recipe for a vegan cheddar cheese at Minimalist Baker and borrowed the seasoning mix from that: tapioca starch, nutritional yeast, apple cider vinegar, garlic powder, salt, and a smidgen of mustard. He blended all those ingredients with silken tofu and soy milk to replace the cheese and milk from the original recipe, then mixed that with the eggs, rice, spinach, and seasonings. He also threw in a little lemon juice to increase the brightness a bit. He could have used some of our homemade plant butter to replace the melted butter that would normally be poured over the top, but he thought there was no point in wasting it on something that didn't need to be solid, so he simply whisked together some canola oil, soy milk, and salt. 

The modified casserole came out quite a bit lighter in color than the original, but texture-wise, it seemed pretty close to the original. It held together nicely when sliced, coming out of the pan in even squares. The flavor, however, was severely lacking. It didn't taste bad or weird, like the version we made with the fake cheese from Lidl; it just didn't taste like much of anything. We both had to sprinkle it pretty liberally with our homemade "spaghetti salt" (12 parts nutritional yeast ground up with 1 part salt) to get it down. I found that a dash of smoked paprika was also helpful.

Clearly, this modified recipe isn't ready for prime time. However, we think it has potential. All it really needs is more flavor, and we should be able to give it that by bumping up the proportions of all the flavorful ingredients it already contains. The simplest way to do this would be to double the amounts of nutritional yeast, vinegar, garlic powder, mustard, and lemon that go into the dish and maybe throw in a quarter-tablespoon of the smoked paprika as well. Alternatively, we could try adding a dose of all those ingredients to the water the rice is cooked in, along with the amount that goes into the tofu sauce. With the flavor cooked right into the rice, maybe it won't need so much extra seasoning added on top.

For now, I'm going to refrain from sharing this recipe while we tinker with it some more. If and when we come up with a version that I think is as useful as the original, I'll pass it along to all of you then.

[UPDATE, 3/20/23: We tried this again last night, and we think we've got it fixed. Brian basically doubled the proportion of all the flavorings he'd used to replace the cheese: nutritional yeast, vinegar, garlic powder, and salt. He also added a half-teaspoon of smoked paprika. (He accidentally left out the mustard powder he used the first time, but upon tasting it, neither of us minded its absence.)

This revised recipe had a darker golden color than the previous version—partly from the extra ingredients and partly because it browned better. It also had a much fuller, more savory flavor. With plenty of salt, tartness from the vinegar, and umami from the nutritional yeast, it was well-balanced and satisfying. It wasn't the same as the original version made with cheddar cheese, but it wasn't in any way lacking. We both happily ate up one piece and went back for seconds.

This may not be the absolute final version of this recipe, as Brian is always adjusting and tinkering to optimize the dishes he makes. But it's good enough to be worth sharing. So here, without further ado, is what we are now calling...

HELLZAEFFINPOPPIN CHEESE RICE

Cook 1 cup white rice in 1.5 cups water for approximately 6 minutes in the pressure cooker. (Or use 2 cups water and cook it on the stovetop. Or just use 3 cups leftover rice.)

Briefly cook 8 oz. frozen spinach in boiling water to thaw. Drain completely.

Blend together 8 oz. soft or silken tofu, ¼ cup soy milk, ¼ cup tapioca flour, 6 Tbsp. nutritional yeast, 1 Tbsp. apple cider vinegar, 1 tsp. salt, 1 tsp. garlic powder, and ½ tsp smoked paprika.

Beat together 3 large eggs. Add the tofu mixture, 1/2 chopped onion, 1 Tbsp. Worcestershire sauce, 1 tsp. salt, 1 pinch dried thyme, 1 pinch dried marjoram, ½ Tbsp. lemon juice, and the drained spinach. Mix, then add the cooked rice and mix again. Spread mixture into a greased 9" by 13" casserole dish, smoothing the top with a spatula. 

Whisk together 4 tsp. canola oil, 1 tsp. soy milk, and ¼ tsp salt. Pour evenly over top of the rice mixture.

Bake at 375 F for 45 minutes. Let cool slightly before serving.]