10 Things: Apiaries, Alison, "Always."
My recommendations for things to eat, buy, read, visit, ponder, plan, and experience this week.
Happy weekend! The first three recs are free; the rest are behind a paywall. This week’s paid subscribers get music, an incredible list-within-a-list (trust me), and a personal reckoning that breaks my heart but is nevertheless necessary.
Peanut noodle salad.
I have been rotating my lunch salads lately, and this one is pretty good! The real treasure is the peanut sauce, which I have developed over 20 years of consuming vegan cookbooks. It’s perfect because it’s FAST. There are better, slower peanut sauces, but this is for a weekday afternoon.
For the salad (enough for a week of weekday meals), combine:
2 diced red peppers
1 diced purple onion
1 seeded, chopped jalapeño
1 head of raw broccoli, thinly sliced
1 small head of purple cabbage
3 carrots worth of carrot peels (peel them until they are only peels)
Slivered radishes
1 package of cooked ramen noodles
1/2 cup crushed peanuts
A block of cubed tofu, baked at 350 for 20 minutes, seasoned with at least salt and pepper; black lime if you have it. (If you don’t have it, get it!)
THE PEANUT SAUCE
3 T peanut butter + 1/2 cup sweet chili sauce + the juice of a lime + 1/4 cup tamari + a squirt of sriracha + 1/4 cup WARM water.
The secret to this emulsifying down to the right consistency is using a tiny whisk (OMG IF YOU DON’T HAVE A TINY WHISK, BUY ONE), and warm water.
I’ve always been a fan of the high quality stuff on the Out of Print website (if you’re unfamiliar, they print super soft t-shirts with popular book covers on them), but it’s a little pricy for t-shirts. I discovered, however, that they have an EXTENSIVE sale section, and that the sale shirts are at deep, deep discounts. I bought a bunch of $5 toddler t-shirts for my baby — which is kind of the price I want to spend on a baby t-shirt at the high end, whereas babies grow out of t-shirts constantly.
Planning for spring.
This is the moment to start daydreaming about greener futures. Here are some suggestions:
Order your seeds! I love the heirloom varieties at (and the mission behind) Seed Savers’ Exchange, and I always give them way too much of my money. Last year, I found the Gill’s Golden Pippin Squash to be a surprise delight. It was small and sweet, and produced quite a few little winter squashes just in time for Thanksgiving.
Map out your space. If you have a garden, draw its shape on a big piece of paper, then decide where you’ll plant what. If you want to have a lot of fun learning about how nature works, read about companion planting. You have plenty of time to try on lots of different possible ideas, so dream away.
Choose and prep containers. If you don’t have a yard, vow to build a container garden or two this year. Decide on your container, and choose two or three plants that will coexist well there. This is a good time of year to buy discount containers, too — so go get one!
Start your seeds. My neighbor Eric taught me a few money-saving ways to go high-quantity with your indoor starts. One is this manual soil block maker, which allows you to home-make an infinite number of seed-starting soil pods that are dense enough to not even require containers until much later in the process. The other is to make your own compostable newspaper pots using water, newsprint, and a wine bottle.
Buy your bees. If you’re thinking about having a small apiary this year, know that this is the month to put in your bee order. They’ll be ready by springtime! Don’t wait until April!
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