Bad Little Fried Things

While my husband is away on business travel, I'm on my own with leftovers and whatever's in the fridge. So I guess it's no great surprise that I had another batch of milk go sour on me this week. I've had a lot of fun in the past, using up sour milk in various ways. Today's concoction might beat them all for cheap and not totally unhealthy decadence though. I'm not sure what to call these treats, but they sure were good.

Here's what I used:

2/3 cup old fashioned rolled oats
1 cup sour milk
1 1/2 cup all purpose flour (plus a little extra for rolling out the dough)
1/2 cup currants
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon ground cardamom
1/4 teaspoon salt
peanut oil for frying
1/3 cup powdered sugar

I combined the rolled oats and sour milk in a small bowl while I mixed the flour, currants, baking soda, cardamom and salt in a mixing bowl. Then I poured the oats and milk into the dry ingredients and stirred until the dough was uniform. This I turned out onto a floured board. I formed the dough into a ball and then rolled it out into a slab just a little under 1/2" thick.

Then I heated about 1/2" of peanut oil in a saucepan. While that heated, I put the powdered sugar in a small paper bag. When the oil was hot, I cut thin strips of the dough with a pasta cutter (a pizza cutter or aknife would have been fine too) and dropped them into the oil, just enough so that the pan wasn't too crowded. After about a minute, I turned the pieces of dough over to brown nicely on the other side.

When both sides were browned, I used chop sticks to pick up the dough and drop them into the bag of powdered sugar. Folding over the top of the bag, I shook the contents so the fried dough was well coated with the sugar. I put them on some pages torn from an old phone book to soak up the grease, but the pages showed almost no trace of oil.

These were very quick and easy to prepare, and absolutely delicious with my morning cuppa. Too bad I'm the only one here to enjoy them. They look a lot more decadent than they really are, since the dough itself contains no sugar. The dough also contains only a trace amount of fat (from the whole milk) before it's fried, so even in that regard it isn't too bad. The currants and oats give these a faint sheen of nutrition too. I'm very partial to cardamom in lightly sweet things. But you may prefer to substitute the more familiar cinnamon.

Anyway, that's where some of my soured milk went this morning!

Local, Raw, and Bartered

This was my breakfast this morning: yogurt and honey. What makes this simple meal so special to me is that both ingredients are local, sustainably produced, raw, and I bartered for them.

I bartered for a quart of the raw milk yogurt just a few days ago. The texture of the yogurt when I opened the container was slightly lumpy, and the creamy fat had risen to the top. The taste reminded me of the superb yogurt I'd bought at a farmer's market in Europe. It bears absolutely no resemblance to store-bought yogurt. I stirred up the yogurt until it was smooth again and served myself some.

Now I confess that "local" in this case is a bit of a stretch by my standards. This yogurt comes from a farm almost 80 miles (128 km) away. That's very local by US standards, but incredibly distant by average global standards. I don't know of any closer dairy that raises their cows on grass, sells raw-milk products, and avoids hormones and antibiotics. And I would know, because I'm well connected to the sustainable farming network in my area. For the moment, 80 miles is the best I can do for sustainable cow's milk dairy. I don't do the driving myself either. The yogurt arrived at my house by way of the farmer who uses my home as a customer pick-up site for pre-ordered, grass-fed meats, dairy, and eggs every other week. So the food is delivered to my home, and I can barter my bread for it. And yes, I do feel pretty smug about that, in case you were wondering.

The raw honey is produced much, much closer to home, and I know the beekeeper personally. This is the lightest of her three honeys from last year's harvest. I'm almost out of it, but it sure is good. Just eight miles (13 km) away, she has an apple and pear orchard that she sprays only with baking soda, and she keeps hens along with a few hives of bees. Again, I bartered some homemade baked goods for a jar of this pure, raw honey.

Breakfast was absolutely delicious in its own right. Knowing that the constituent parts were produced completely sustainably, and acquired reasonably sustainably, and that I bartered for them, and that they are really healthy for me only makes this simplest of meals that much more satisfying.

I don't manage to prepare many meals in this fashion. But when I do pull it off, I'm inspired to keep trying more and more to live my life this way.

Oatmeal: Cheap, Filling, Healthy, Yummy Breakfast

Now that the weather's turned cold, I'm returning to wintry ways with breakfast. Hot breakfasts are so welcome at this time of year. After an indispensable large cup of tea, I'm eating oatmeal again these days. Even with rising food prices, rolled oats are still an excellent value, and they're a good way to incorporate whole grains into your diet. Steel-cut oats are good as well, but they tend to be more expensive, and I've found that I get hungry sooner after eating steel-cut oats as compared with plain old rolled oats.

I appreciate oatmeal because it can be accessorized in so many delicious ways. I grew up on the sugar bomb instant oatmeal packets, while my husband's family favored rolled oats garnished with salt and butter. Both of us retain those preferences. I still like maple syrup on my oatmeal; he still likes it savory. Right now we have apples coming in from our apple tree. So I've been cutting one up each morning to add to our oats. I used to add sliced bananas before we began trying to eat more locally. Dried fruits are great too. I'm particularly fond of golden raisins, but just about any dried fruit will work nicely.

We're not afraid of fat in our household, so we often add some of that to our oatmeal. I used to favor a tablespoon of heavy cream drizzled over my bowl of oats in the past. More recently, inspired by that wicked idea of Mark Bittman's, I've started adding a tablespoon of cream cheese paired with a small shot of maple syrup.

There are dozens of ways of customizing your bowl of oatmeal or other rolled grains. Here are some of my favorite combinations of ingredients:

banana, walnut, raisin
maple syrup, chopped apple, cream cheese
chopped pear, pomegranate molasses
honey, dried cranberry, a little lemon zest
mixed berry jam, heavy cream, pinch of cardamom
dried cherries, vanilla sugar

Old fashioned rolled oats cook so quickly that there's really no justification for quick oats. Five minutes is all it takes. If you really want to, feel free to cook it for 20 minutes to produce a mushy porridge. The nearly al dente version appeals more to me. I usually add the smallest pinch of salt to the water when cooking the oats, and any other powdered spices I want to flavor it with. The rest of the ingredients can be added after the oats have cooked.

Home cooked oatmeal is a much better choice than breakfast cereal, in my opinion. It's usually cheaper per serving, even if you jazz it up with nuts or fruit. At bulk prices, the organic oatmeal in the photo above cost me 21 cents. True, the additional ingredients cost me something, though the apples came from our tree. But how much could a few raisins and a dollop of maple syrup really add up to? Certainly well under a dollar all together. Additionally, by preparing your own food, you avoid the chemical additives and refined corn sugar that are nearly universal in breakfast cereals. You can control precisely the sweetness and the amount of fat in your food. There's less packaging to throw away. And you get a warm breakfast that delivers sustained energy for several hours. What could be better than that?

What do you like in your oatmeal?

It's Tea Time - Sun Tea Time

I'm a devoted tea drinker. I can't get my morning properly started without it. I know the difference between a teapot and a tea kettle, and I know that hot tea will not brew in a paper cup with kinda hot water. Most of the year, a couple of blisteringly hot cups of tea are welcome in the morning. But right now, I'm waking up to temperatures in the high 70s Fahrenheit (mid 20s Celsius), and the mercury only rises through the day.

So I made my first annual batch of sun tea a few days ago. The process is simple: just put teabags or loose tea in a large glass jar and put the jar somewhere where it'll get a strong blast of sunlight for several hours. The heat of the sun warms the water and brews your tea for you. After that, you put the jar in your refrigerator and enjoy the tea chilled. It keeps for several days and you don't even need to strain it if you don't want to.

Sun tea is one of those tiny tips that I employ to save money. But it's a little unusual in that it saves me tiny amounts of money in several ways. The first and most obvious is that I don't have to pay for any energy to boil water. Not a huge savings, granted. But in the summer months, I also save a little because the heat of that boiling water would make my house warmer too. So if I'm running any fans or air conditioning, I get a tiny savings that way. Thirdly, it seems that I get more tea out of the same amount of loose tea or tea bags when compared to brewing it in a pot. Maybe it's the slow and steady brewing done by the sun, but I can get more than a gallon of sun tea from just three tea bags or a generous tablespoon of loose tea. Ratchet up another savings by making my ingredients stretch farther. Finally, I save (potentially) another tiny amount on cooling by keeping myself cool with a cold drink instead of a hot one.

I have two large glass containers for sun tea. One is specifically a sun tea jug, which I got for 75 cents at a charity thrift store. The other is just a very large (1 1/2 gallon) glass jar with a screw top lid. I picked it up in a bulk foods store for less than $3. I don't need anything else, other than tap water and tea leaves to make the most necessary of morning beverages.

How to save by costing your meals

Yesterday I posted about baking at home to save money on breakfast items. I wrote about comparing the price of my favorite store-bought cereal to morning glory muffins and other goodies I baked at home. Today I'm going to explain the costing process in detail, in case others want to know exactly what a given meal is costing them per serving. To do these calculations, you'll need a kitchen scale and a calculator.

Let's start with costing a serving of breakfast cereal, because with only two ingredients to measure and price, this is a fairly simple cost analysis. I used to eat Special K red berries cereal with organic milk. To figure out how much each serving cost me, I first calculated the cost per ounce of the cereal, which is sold by weight. (I no longer have a copy of my own calculations, so I'll work with hypothetical figures from here on.) Checking my price comparison book, I saw that the best price I could find for this cereal was at a wholesale shopper's club, at $3.41 per pound. That works out to about $0.2131 per ounce. Then I calculated that my organic milk was costing me about $0.39 per cup. This is just a little complicated here, because we're mixing weight pricing with volumetric pricing. But bear with me.

Next, I used my kitchen scale to find out how much cereal I consumed on an average morning. The portion sizes indicated on the side of the box were irrelevant to me. I needed to know what I actually ate - not what the marketing wonks "recommended." My kitchen scale has a tare function on it. That means that I could set my bowl on the scale, and set the weight to zero, so that the scale ignored the weight of the bowl and only paid attention to the cereal I was about to pour in. Let's say that my serving size was 4.6 ounces. Then I poured a cup of milk into a clear graduated measuring cup. I poured milk into the bowl as I normally would and measured what was left: a little less than 1/4 cup. I called that 0.8 cups and sat down to eat my cereal.

When breakfast was over, I ran a couple of quick calculations. Multiplying my 4.6 ounces of cereal by 0.2131, I found my cereal cost of about 98 cents. Taking 0.8 cups of my 39 cents per cup milk, I found that the milk for my cereal cost me about another 31 cents. Thus, my cost for breakfast that morning was $1.29. This of course excludes miscellaneous costs like washing the breakfast dishes or the gas needed to go buy the groceries. It seemed to me that $1.29 per day was a good starting point, and that I could surely find ways to save money on this meal.

I moved on to costing some of my own baked goods. With a lot more ingredients, these items were much more complicated to price out. Some of the items I wasn't able to get an exact price on at all, so I had to estimate for those costs. Below, I've tried to show how I did it.

Morning Glory Muffins

3 cups organic white flour 0.938 lbs x $0.745/lb. = $0.655

1 cup organic whole wheat flour 0.344 lbs x $0.81/lb. = $0.279

2 cups organic white sugar 0.925 lbs x $0.84/lb. = $0.777

1/2 cup organic steel cut oats 0.188 lbs x $0.74/lb. = $0.139

4 tsp. baking soda (unknown price)

4 tsp. cinnamon (unknown price)

1 tsp. salt (unknown price)

4 cups grated organic carrots 1 lb* x $0.798/lb = $0.798

1 large organic apple, grated 0.77 lbs* x 1.99/lb = $1.53

1 cup organic raisins 0.3125 lbs x $2.59/lb = $0.81

1 cup organic walnut pieces 0.288 lbs x $8.51/lb = $2.447

1 cup organic unsweetened coconut flake 0.1 lb. x $2.71/lb = $0.271

5 large organic eggs 5 x $0.241/each = $1.20

1 1/2 cups organic vegetable oil 12 oz. x $0.244/oz. = $2.933

4 tsp. organic vanilla extract 0.660 oz. x $1.998/oz. = $1.33

Spray oil for muffin tins (unknown price)

*Note that I needed to weigh the carrots and apples before I peeled, trimmed and grated them. I didn't use the scraps to cook, but I still had to pay for them. So I needed the entire weight to calculate my costs.

You can see that I had some gaps in my price chart. I didn't have a good way to calculate the exact cost of the small amounts of baking soda, cinnamon, salt and spray oil. I knew that cinnamon is a fairly expensive product, while all the others are relatively cheap. To come up with a figure, I made a wild guess and put down 50 cents for all these ingredients combined. If I come up with a good way to exactly figure these prices in the future, I'll revise my cost analysis.

So adding up all the known costs plus my estimate, I came up with a total cost for the entire batch of muffins of $13.669. When I baked off this double batch of muffins, I got 35 muffins out of the batter. So I divided $13.669 by 35 to come up with my cost per muffin of about 39 cents each. This seemed fantastic to me. By eating one muffin instead of a bowl of cereal, I could save 90 cents each day.

But doing all this analysis also allowed me to see just how much some of these ingredients were costing me. The vanilla and walnuts were among the most expensive ingredients in the recipe. I didn't want to take out the vanilla, because I suspect it adds a lot to the recipe. But I had to admit that the walnuts really weren't all that noticeable in the muffins. So the next time I made the recipe, I left them out. Neither my husband nor I seemed to miss them. I recalculated and found that my price dropped to about 35 cents per muffin.

Since then I've also costed out the recipes for my apricot-oatmeal buttermilk scones and English muffins. The scones come in even cheaper than the morning glory muffins, at about 30 cents each. English muffins on their own cost me only about 11 cents to make, but I haven't yet figured out what the butter and jam costs. And besides, they aren't the healthiest breakfast, so we don't eat them all that often.

I hope this explanation is helpful to someone out there. You can apply the same procedure to any meal you prepare at home, so long as you have gathered the pricing information on the majority of the ingredients. Please leave me a comment if you have any questions or remarks.

Oh, the things you can bake!

Nutrition experts tell us that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. For the frugal set, breakfast is often the last meal considered when trying to trim grocery expenditures. There are good reasons for this: breakfast is usually eaten at home by most members of the family; we're often in a big hurry in the morning, with little time for anything but a convenient meal. Still, there are good ways to economize on this meal without resorting to junk food. In fact, it's pretty easy to improve on the nutrition offered at breakfast with a homemade baked good.

As I became a more frugal person, changes happened gradually. First I looked for the best unit price on the cereal I liked to eat. Then I looked for cheaper cereals. But at some point, I got my calculator and my kitchen scale out and worked out that even at the best prices I could find for cereal and milk, my modest breakfast portions were costing us about $1.30 per day. That's when I decided to find out what a few home baked alternatives would cost.

I started with morning glory muffins, because I knew that my husband and I liked them. I also knew that they contained good things: shredded carrots and apple, dried fruit, nuts and eggs. If your not familiar with morning glory muffins, think of them as something like a gourmet carrot cake in miniature form. After making a double-sized batch of these delicious treats, I divided my ingredient costs by the number of muffins I got, and found that each muffin had cost me about 36 cents. And I had paid for organic products for almost every ingredient. In other words, each muffin represented a savings of almost $1 per breakfast, per person. Now, I'll grant you that these muffins were not huge. And their sheer deliciousness sometimes makes my husband and I want more than one for breakfast, especially if we're gearing up for a day of physical activity. Yet even if we each had two muffins per day, we still saved about $1.16 between the two of us. Assuming that we each ate two of these muffins every single day instead of a bowl of cereal, that's almost $425 saved in our household per year - with organic ingredients.

I soon cut the nuts out of my recipe, because I didn't feel they added all that much to the muffins, and they're a very costly ingredient. This resulted in further savings. If you choose not to bake with organic ingredients, your own savings using this recipe would be even higher. I also started costing out some other baked goods that would be suitable for breakfasts. It was clear that even 36 cents per serving could be improved upon without causing any apparent hardship. In fact, my husband vastly prefers one of my baked goods to breakfast cereal. He can grab a muffin or a scone on his way out the door and he's good to go.

I have started to keep a steady inventory of morning glory muffins, buttermilk scones and also sourdough English muffins in my chest freezer. I've costed out each of these, and the morning glory muffin is by far the most expensive of them. It's true that it takes some time and effort to make all these items. But because they all freeze so well, they can still be convenient breakfasts if you can devote part of a weekend afternoon to making big batches to store away for later in the week or month. So now, instead of looking at home-baked muffins and scones as special treats, we see them as healthy, thrifty and convenient staples of our diet.

Tomorrow I'll post some of my recipes, along with an explanation of how I cost out a recipe.