Gas or clothes? A math problem for a hot day

Here's a hypothetical situation (or maybe it was real...) that weighs the cost of having the wrong clothes. You work at an office 12 miles north of your home, a 25-minute drive in normal workday traffic. Today, it's 100 degrees out and your office space is under remodeling (i.e. the office is rather dusty right now); therefore, it is appropriate to show up to work in a t-shirt and shorts. There's an evening meeting taking place at another office location, another 12 miles and 25 minutes north of your office (i.e., twice as far from home). Midday, you find out that the dress code for the evening meeting is "business casual." There is unmistakably no "business" about your currently casual clothes.

There are several possible solutions to this problem, really. But, let's say showing up under-dressed is not a good one, and you aren't lucky enough to be able to borrow clothes from an officemate. We'll instead narrow it down to two main choices: retrieve clothes from home or go shopping? You must decide how to best spend your time and money this afternoon.

Do you drive home, change clothes, and then drive back, passing your office and continuing on to the evening meeting's location?

Do you purchase an outfit from somewhere near the office?

Do you spend on gas or clothes? Let's do some calculations.

At today's gas prices of close to $6/gallon, and your car averaging a decent 30 miles or more per gallon in suburban driving, the extra 24-mile home and back will cost around $5 in gas.

Buying a brand new outfit costs much more than that of course, but one shirt and a pair of pants from a thrift store can be less than $10. With the luck of a few thrift stores within a 3-mile radius of your office, you can spend less than $1 on gas getting to one or even two of them.

In dollars alone, driving home beats buying an outfit. But, we should also calculate time. The round trip from office to home and back to office is going to cost you about an hour. A trip to a nearby store, with a few minutes shopping and another few trying on... Let's say you might successfully purchase an outfit in under 20 minutes.

We're at 50-60 minutes and $5 on gas vs. 20 minutes and $10 on clothes. Are those 30-40 minutes worth more or less than $5 to you?

Let's think about other hidden costs here. Calculating wear and tear on the car is not precise, but we'll guesstimate about $7 for the trip home and back, using a rough average of $0.30 per mile based on various charts. And how about the fact that you simply burn the gas, adding pollution to the air and getting nothing in return except the privilege of wearing clothes you already own.

You can argue that you don't need more clothes, so it is impractical to buy a new outfit, but at least you're getting something for your money! You get to keep the clothes and wear them again -- if you happen to find something you like. It's possible the thrift store will offer only choices you find tolerable to wear for one night, in which case you can donate the clothes back later. You'll be out ten bucks, but you'll have saved at least 30 minutes and won't have degraded the air quality or added anything to a landfill. (Someone may suggest buying a new outfit from a regular store, wearing it with the sales tags intact, and simply returning it the next day to spend $0 on the clothes, but I will remind you -- beyond the fact that you'd be committing a form a fraud -- it is 100 degrees out! That outfit will certainly appear used.)

Can you tell I've reached what I consider the most logical conclusion? Thrift-store clothes win over gas. Do you disagree? Tell me why.

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Adventures in Cake Decorating #14 - Spider-Man Cake 2

It's really more of a building cake or a city cake, and you certainly could top it with any superhero (or no superhero at all), but let me tell you the story of how this so-called Spider-Man cake came to be.

Once upon a time, I made a Spider-Man-Batman cake...

and afterward vowed never again to use red icing as the main color...

only to do it again on a Mickey Mouse cake.

The next time I included Spider-Man on a cake, I used red as the main color but only for his small section of the cake. That's right, it was the Multi-Hero cake!

A new Spider-Man cake request came up this year. Because the birthday boy and his mom had no specific design in mind, I had the perfect plan for using no red icing: a Spider-Man scene, instead of a cake that looked like the hero himself. 

I remembered that small toys make handy cake decorations (a competing interest with my preference for everything on the cake to be edible, but a much easier option than sculpting a Spider-Man figurine out of modeling chocolate!). And so I had a vision -- two skyscraper cakes, with a Spider-Man swinging from his web between them!

OK, in reality, two moderately sized city building cakes, with some spiderwebs piped here and there and Spider-Man standing atop one building, shooting a white chocolate web to the other. A white cardboard cake board underneath it all would provide a canvas for drawing city streets below to complete the scene. What follows is how I executed this plan, with a photo of the finished product, of course. One note: As with many of my cakes, I rushed to finish.

It started with one vanilla cake and one chocolate cake, each baked as large, thin rectangle. I used baking sheets rather than cake pans so I could simply cut squares out for stacking multiple thin layers of the two flavors:

I froze these stacks overnight. In the morning, I trimmed, shaved, and sculpted the uneven sides of the frozen cakes with a serrated bread knife. I spread a thin layer of light chocolate buttercream on all sides (the "crumb coat"), and froze it again just to harden the icing faster.

The light chocolate buttercream became the main frosting for the brownstone-like buildings. Fudge chocolate icing right out of the can is what's top. A little white buttercream with yellow coloring made the windows, with the remaining white used to pipe a couple of spiderwebs on the building corners.

The web coming from Spider-Man's hand is white chocolate. I melted white chocolate morsels and piped a web pattern onto wax paper (it turned out more like a net or a lattice, but within the scene it works). I propped the wax paper into a slight curve -- how I wanted the white chocolate to cool and harden, rather than just flat. It worked but was very delicate and broke when I moved it. Not to worry -- I melted the extra white chocolate and used it as glue to hold the web pieces back together... But I didn't have time to let the repair solidify before we needed to transport the cake to the birthday party. So, toothpicks are holding the broken web in place.

Ta-da!

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Homemade tomato paste and a sun-drying experience

Don't underestimate the power of tomato paste umami. The times I leave tomato paste out of recipes that call for it ("oh, it's only 2 tablespoons"), the recipes turn out just fine, but... they lack a depth I know should be there, having tasted them with tomato paste before. I've come to know which of my recipes benefit the most from tomato paste and, for these, try to keep some handy in the pantry or freezer.

There isn't a huge need to make your own tomato paste, because the little cans are inexpensive, and you can repackage and freeze the leftovers. 

However. 

If you have an abundance of tomatoes, and you're looking for a way to use them besides tomato sauce or salsa, homemade tomato paste is another way to preserve and intensify the tomatoey taste of summer.

I usually make my tomato paste in the oven -- a great method, except that recently we had a string of 90-degree, sunny days at the same time I was dealing with a ton of tomatoes. No way was I going to sabotage my efforts to keep the house cool on a hot day by oven-roasting for three-plus hours. I considered the crock pot, a somewhat energy-conscious alternative, but it cannot duplicate the roasty flavor from oven heat. While looking for my usual recipe (just instructions, really), I discovered the eco-friendliest alternative that was shining right in front of me: sun-drying.

Hot diggity! I had the sun, the heat, and the time (it can take a few days).

Ultimately, I used a combination of sun-drying and slow cooker methods to make tomato paste this time.

Different recipes online use different amounts -- 8 lbs tomatoes, 10 lbs, 11 lbs. Whatever. I quartered an armload of Roma tomatoes until they filled my large pot. It happened to total about 8 pounds.

I cooked the tomatoes for a short time until the skins started to peel and juice started to ooze. 

Then, I processed the tomatoes through a conical food mill (a.k.a. chinois, a.k.a. "china cap"), stirred in a sprinkling of salt, and spread the puree across a baking sheet. You may need more than one baking sheet to keep the layer of puree fairly thin.

Out into the sun it went, protected from bugs and everything the maple tree drops by a rigged picnic net and cheese cloth.

Just because of the configuration of our fence, our house, and the surrounding trees, no one spot in our back yard gets full sun all day long, so I did have to move the setup a couple of times throughout the day so it maintained maximum sun exposure.

Besides protecting sun-dried foods from critters and debris, you also must protect it from overnight humidity, which can reintroduce moisture you had spent all day evaporating and promote spoilage. Temperatures were falling below 80 each night, and it was somewhat humid, so I brought the tomato-paste-in-progress inside each night, where I transferred it to the crock pot on low for continued slow reduction. In the morning, I spread it back out on a baking sheet and put it back outside.

On Day 3, my paste had reduced into a thick, brick-red paste.

Lesson learned: When I make this in the oven, I check it every half hour and stir or scrape the puree as needed to keep a nice even layer. Out in the sun, I didn't need to check it as frequently as that, but I should have checked on it a few times to scrape the thinnest edges in toward the center. Not having done this, I ended up with some areas that were more like fruit leather than paste (see the darkest smears where the metal really shows through).

Nevertheless, the portion I could scrape into a jar tasted great and is now in my freezer, awaiting its proper place in my next Zucornchile Rajas Bake.

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Adventures in Cake Decorating #13 - Dinosaur Cake and Cookies

Three years after I made it, let me tell you about this dinosaur cake and cookies. It's a good example of combining two simple decorating components into one impressive overall look -- a frosting petal technique and cutout sugar cookies.

Sure, the dinosaur-shaped cookies on their own could suffice as a dino-themed party treat. There was indeed a plate of the dinosaur cookies served alongside the cake. But, by using the cookies as part of the cake's decoration, an otherwise nondescript (albeit colorful) cake got a thematic upgrade with a fun edible topper.

The color theme came from the party invitation or its paper decorations. I'm pretty certain the idea for the frosting "scales" look came from the images of cakes my sister-in-law sent me for inspiration. You know, the standard "I like this. Can you do it?" text messages that occur before each birthday. It was a new technique for me, and one I haven't used again but would like to.

To create these buttercream petals/scales, you pipe a vertical line of fat dots and then smear them to the side with a small offset spatula or the back of a spoon. Pipe your next line of dots over the tail of the previous line. When you've come full circle around the cake and make the final row of dots, you won't be able to smear it underneath the first set for an infinite overlap. Just smear enough to close the gap and make that the backside of your cake! You could of course pipe these petals/scales all in a single color simply for the interesting texture or arrange multiple colors in any other pattern.

For the cookies, just pick your favorite sugar cookie recipe, preferably one intended for cutouts, meaning it won't rise or spread very much while baking. My go-to sugar cookie icing is just powdered sugar, vanilla extract, and milk, combined in that order and starting with as little milk as possible, adding no more than a tablespoon of milk at a time until the icing is the consistency you need.

There are a couple of things I would do differently if I was making this cake again, and they both have to do with neatness.

1. I would have baked a few of the sugar cookies on sticks (like cookie lollipops), which I could then just poke down into the cake to hold the cookies more neatly upright on top of the cake, rather than nesting the cookies in little piles of frosting. (I guess these dinos look like they're trudging forward through a swamp.)
2. I would have been more patient when decorating the cookies so each base icing color was fully dry before I tried adding the icing accents (eyes, spots, etc.), which would prevent color seepage and help with neater, more defined details on the cookies.

We can take a brief look at the baking of this cake, in which pure happenstance resulted in rave reviews from those eating it. Something was wrong with the oven. The two 8-inch chocolate rounds were taking forever to bake. It turned out to be fudgiest cake I'd ever made, thanks to cooking low and slow and probably being a bit underdone. I also was running out of frosting ingredients and didn't want to make a late-night run to the store. I stretched what little chocolate frosting I had (for between the cake's layers) by whipping some heavy cream into the buttercream base. It whipped up fluffy and cool, and people thought it was delicious.

In addition to finding a reason to pipe petal-scales onto another cake because they look cool, I am also on the lookout for more opportunities to incorporate decorated sugar cookies into celebrations because I have so many cookie cutters I haven't used yet -- playing card suits, sports items, air/land/sea transportation, several holiday shapes... 

These are some of my previous cake-cookie combos:

Bowling cake – sugar cookie bowling pins bursting behind a bowling ball cake (baked in a bowl)

WordWorld cake – a few animals made of letters (it makes sense if you've seen the show) served beside the cake

Cookie Monster cupcakes – mini chocolate chip cookies in the "mouth" of each Cookie Monster as well as ABC and 123 sugar cookie sets served beside the cake

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A new old furniture thing

Someone was throwing out this cool piece of furniture. Of course we carried it home, where Len got to work refurbishing.

The drawers didn't fit -- they were separating at their corners, and the wood had probably also expanded from humidity or something. Len tightened up the seams and sanded the sides until the drawers once again fit their slots. An interesting thing about the drawers is the type of pulls they have -- I've never seen drawer pulls like these, and they're tacked into place with cotter pins instead of screws.

A drawer front and inside, respectively.

The piece had a naturally distressed appearance thanks to old woodworm holes, and it was already lightly whitewashed in country chic style, but it had a pinkish hue. So, Len redid the finish to our tastes by starting with a dark undercoat and then whitewashing over that.

Tada! I'm not sure if this qualifies as a side table or a half dresser or what, but it's my new favorite unique antique chic thing to collect our random clutter near the front door.

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Say yes to less

Earth Day was last week, and so my question to you is, What were your Earth Day Resolutions? Oh, you didn't make any? It's not too late -- let's resolve to change something now. I propose a resolution of less.

Popular Science recently published an article on how to go zero-waste at the grocery store. I have to edit this idea from simply "go zero-waste" to "go zero-waste personally" because by the time your food gets to the grocery store, some of it has already been wasted -- about one-fifth of the 40 million tons of discarded food in America never even touched a grocery store shelf; it was thrown out by the farmer, manufacturer, or distributor for a variety of reasons. The retail stores themselves then discard another fifth of that 40 million tons. Your mission, then, is to waste nothing on your end.

The Popular Science article suggests a circular-use mindset for achieving zero waste, rather than the typical linear product lifecycle of buy-use-trash-repeat. For example, you can reuse glass jars, and even if you don't, glass is more easily and infinitely recyclable as opposed to single-use plastic bags (which some cities--and now the state of New Jersey--have already banned stores from providing).

Just ask yourself, "Can I keep this out of the landfill?" If the only way to avoid answering "no" is to bury the thing in your backyard, choose an alternative product/packaging -- unless we're talking about a compostable item (like an apple core), in which case disposing of it in your backyard actually is a circular use. Metal, glass, and cardboard are all better packaging options than plastic.

But let's back up a second. The real first step in wasting less is buying less. Use what you have first--and use all of it. In tandem with the zero-waste grocery article, Popular Science also put out this handy tutorial on what the expiration dates on products actually mean. Instead of throwing things out of your pantry on autopilot, understand which foods can generally be consumed safely after longer storage. And, prevent things from expiring on your watch in the first place with proper storage and first-in-first-out usage. 

The advice of using what you already have also applies to the items that will help you reduce your grocery waste, like reusable shopping bags. Do not go out and buy new cloth grocery bags when I bet you already have some at home. Or you could even use an old pillowcase, like you're trick-or-treating in the produce department. I dare you.

Let's not let our resolutions of less stop at the grocery store. 

Drive less -- To do so, you'll combine multiple errands into one streamlined route or you'll use alternative transportation (public transit, your bike, your own two feet). When you do drive, use less fuel by driving more efficiently. Besides driving patiently on properly inflated tires and with a lighter load, you might like to try some more advanced techniques of hypermiling, a term that pops up whenever gas prices rise. Be forewarned: I've posted about it before, and you'll see in that post as well as the much newer article linked earlier in this paragraph, some hypermiling techniques may not be legal or safe. Drafting, for example, requires you follow the vehicle in front of you much more closely than the standard one car length for every 10 mph; however, you do not have to outright tailgate. Len stayed behind large trucks for as much time as possible during our last drive from St. Louis to Aurora. This method combines drafting and slightly lower highway speeds, and it resulted in our spending less than half a tank of gas -- a record low for this route.

That trip leads me to another resolution of less -- Buy fewer new clothes. It's not unusual for our family get-togethers to include a going-through of bags of clothes. An aunt or a cousin will have purged their closet, and so the other aunts and cousins sift through the outcast shirts and sweaters before the clothing continues on to some donation drop-off. I guess my style is whatever my younger cousins were wearing 5-10 years ago.

Speaking of clothes, I'll now advocate that you resolve to wash your clothes less often. Fewer washings will not only save water but also reduce wear and tear on the fibers of your garments. I tend to stick to the sniff-stain-ick test to know when it's time to throw an item of clothing into the laundry hamper. Sniff: Does it stink? Stain: Does it have food or dirt on it that I cannot simply brush off or spot clean? Ick: Did it touch something gross (e.g. raw chicken juice on an apron, a used handkerchief, sweaty gym clothes)? Many items, especially outerwear, will pass all 3 tests for at least two wearings if not more.

While we're conserving water, will you also resolve to shower less often? Or how about just shower for less total time? If your typical routine is a 10- to 15-minute shower every day, that could mean aiming for one 10-minute shower every other day or taking a shorter, 5-minute shower every day -- either way, you just cut your shower water usage in half. Maybe you could use the sniff-stain-ick test on yourself, as well as some common sense -- i.e., why would I shower in the morning before running a 10K when I know I will want to shower my sweaty self afterward?

OK, I'm ending it here. There are so many other ways we can consume less, use less, and waste less, and you get the gist. Less is more impactful.

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Last Thursday, we had 45 mph wind gusts as the temperature slowly climbed from the 30s into the upper 40s. And, it was sunny. Time for the first line-drying of 2022. 

As the laundry basket became emptier, the wind started pushing it around the patio. I had to chase a few socks -- thank goodness for a fenced-in yard. Although, you can see the clothes were whipping around in every direction. I was pleasantly surprised to find most items still clipped to the line later in the afternoon -- and relieved that the few things blown loose were at least still in our own yard and not, say, in a tree down the block.

If it had been warmer, I'd have expected the first pieces of clothing to be already blown dry by the time I got to the end of the line, but even in these high winds, everything needed a few hours in the chilly air. There's nothing like some good flapping in the breeze to shake the wrinkles out of the laundry and infuse the fibers with fresh spring air. 

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