Posts tagged ‘groceries’
For the past few months, my newfound love for easy homemade bread got sidelined by my difficulties with excema. Even easy bread sort of requires being able to use both hands. So it was back to the Costco multigrain loaves for sandwiches and toast.
It’s always pained my frugal soul that a certain amount of every storebought loaf is wasted; the younger kidlet balks at crusts, and nobody likes the heels, me included. I tried saving them for breadcrumbs but … I just don’t usually cook things that require breadcrumbs.
Until I got the brilliant idea a couple months ago to try them in bread pudding. Now, I can’t be the first person to have thought of this, but it was quite a leap for me, as I only ate bread pudding for the first time a year or two ago, and had never tried cooking it. (For those of you who, like me, are new to the idea: it’s not actually pudding, but more of a custard. The bread gets very soaked and … un-breadlike in the process.)
I wanted to share my bread pudding technique. I can’t call it a recipe; I tend not to follow recipes unless I’m baking (and sometimes not even then), and I rely more on looks and taste than measurements. Bread pudding is perfect for this, as it’s one of the most forgiving dishes ever.
Bread pudding recipes call for white bread, preferably French, which we don’t eat. But whole wheat and multigrain crusts and heels work quite well. (Not rye though — flavor’s all wrong.) We go through bread quickly enough that I can usually keep the crusts in the fridge, but if you’re worried about mold just keep a container in the freezer and thaw when you’re ready to make the bread pudding.
Never one to pass up an opportunity to get extra vegetables into my family, I went for a pumpkin variation. (I always have canned pumpkin around — I pick up extra when it goes on sale around Thanksgiving and Christmas.)
Pumpkin Bread Pudding Ingredients:
- bread crusts and heels, torn into small-bite pieces
- dried cranberries or raisins (optional)
- butter
- canned pumpkin
- eggs
- cream, half-and-half, or milk
- sugar, brown sugar, or Splenda
- spices: any of vanilla, cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, and/or allspice
I’m not including quantities here because you’ve got a huge amount of leeway in the proportions. If you have fewer eggs, or less milk, or only a partial can of pumpkin, no worries! It’s almost impossible to mess this up.
This latest time I had about ten cups of bread crust bits, which completely filled a 9″x13″ baking dish, so all my listed amounts are relative to that. You could go with as few as four cups of bread or maybe even three, in a smaller dish.
With the ten cups of bread I used an entire 29-ounce can of pumpkin (more vitamin A!), but a 15-ounce can would have worked fine too, or anything in-between. I used four eggs, but you’re safe with anything from two to five. I used two cups of half-and-half, then (because I had so much pumpkin) thinned the mixture with a little extra skim milk. If you’re worried about fat content, use milk alone, or all cream if you want it really rich. Again, the actual amount is highly flexible — ultimately, all that matters is that you can pour the resulting mixture … more like a batter than a dough.
We try to keep a low-glycemic diet around here, so I used pourable Splenda. White or brown sugar also works, of course. One cup made for a lightly sweet pudding, but you can adjust to taste. I also prefer the slight tartness of cranberries over raisins. Generously add spice — whatever from the list above you have on hand, to taste. This last time I used some of everything except the allspice, including fresh minced ginger (because I had roots but no powder).
Preparation couldn’t be easier:
- Melt some butter in a shallow baking dish.
- Put the torn bread bits in, tossing them around a bit.
- If you’re adding dried fruit, sprinkle that on top of the bread.
- Mix everything else in a separate bowl and pour it evenly over the top.
- Bake at 350° until the custard is set — probably between 20 and 40 minutes.
I like it warm with just a touch of maple syrup drizzled over the top. I guarantee even the pickiest kidlet will eat their crusts when served like this!
(Photo by minjungkim.)
The first of my two guest posts is up at Get Rich Slowly. GRS has long been my favorite personal finance blog, and was one of the main inspirations for Pocketmint. (Which is sort of a neat karmic circle, since JD credits my online personal journal of twelve years ago as the inspiration for his own web writing.)
“A visit to the Island of Misfit Foods” is today’s topic: how I set my food snobbery aside and learned to love Grocery Outlet. If you enjoy the post and would like to see more from me, let JD know in the GRS comments. (These articles are ‘audition’ pieces for a regular writing gig over there. There are six other very strong candidates however, so I’m trying not to hold my breath.)
For those of you coming from Get Rich Slowly, welcome! Feel free to poke around in the tags in the sidebar at right for other posts of interest here on Pocketmint, or subscribe to the RSS feed. I also post to Twitter and you’re welcome to follow me there, but it’s a personal account where I talk about everything, not just personal finance.
My fingers seem to be healing, so maybe the worst is over. I hope to return to ten-finger typing — and more Pocketmint posts — soon.
I love fresh homemade bread. Once, in my early twenties, I made a loaf by hand. I had picked up the classic Tassajara Bread Book from a remainder table, and one afternoon I went at it for several hours, kneading and punching away. It made a glorious loaf which we happily devoured straight out of the oven, but the effort-to-results ratio was just too high, and I couldn’t imagine going through that ever again.
Many years later, I bought a bread maker. Aside from an annoyingly difficult-to-clean paddle, the process was vastly simplified, and the results also quite good. That bread maker is still in a box in our garage, but our current kitchen (which we are likely to have for quite a few more years) is too small to make single-use appliances very practical — there’s no place to store something so large either on the counter or in the cabinets.
So I’d given up on homemade bread for the foreseeable future, until sometime last year when I started running across references online to ‘no-knead bread.’ I was skeptical, but positive reports abounded. Last weekend I finally decided to try this miracle for myself.
At his last annual checkup, Jak tripped the alarms for ‘pre-diabetic’ levels of blood sugar, and as a result I’ve made an extra effort to stick to whole grains and low-glycemic foods. Which is why I ignored the very attractive white-flour no-knead options and went straight for the whole wheat ‘bread brick’ introduced by New York Times food writer Mark Bittman.
It worked like a charm. It takes about six hours start to finish, but total active time is only about ten minutes. You need five items: one large mixing bowl, one non-stick loaf pan, a teaspoon, a measuring cup, and a brush for the oil. No expensive appliances, and cleanup is a breeze. It’s so easy that I’m going to use the next loaf to teach our ten-year-old how. (Edit: The kidlet did great; that’s the one she helped with in the photo above. Next time she’ll be ready to do it on her own.)
Here’s the recipe; the only adjustment I made was to use extra wheat flour in place of the rye I didn’t have. It’s arguably not the most beautiful loaf ever, but it sure is yummy.
I worked out the cost per loaf to be around 80¢ at regular price; by watching for sales on flour and yeast I can probably bring that down by a dime or two. The dense whole-grain bread I’ve been buying for Jak at Costco is something over $2 per loaf, though the loaves are slightly larger. Still, at a conservative estimate, switching to the homemade bread should save us $1.20 a week, or about $60 per year.
Frankly, though, homemade bread is so much better than anything storebought that I’d do it even if it didn’t save a penny!
When we bought our house in December 2006, there was a surprise in the garage: the former owners had left us a huge old chest freezer.
Now, Jak and I had a chest freezer already, a smaller model we’d bought at Costco about five years earlier. So this one was a bit superfluous, more than our family of two-and-sometimes-four needed. In the course of the move, however, it was convenient to move our frozen food into the windfall freezer temporarily while our original freezer was in transit.
‘Temporarily’ lasted, as it so often does, almost two and a half years. Last month we finally got around to rearranging the garage and transferring everything to the smaller freezer. I assumed that doing so would save us money — older & bigger versus newer & smaller seemed a no-brainer — but had no actual evidence.
With the model numbers of the two freezers and the kWh cost of local electricity from our bill, today I was able to use the government’s EnergyStar calculator to determine the exact difference:
- 1988 Kenmore 15.8cf freezer: $59.10 per year
- 2001 GE 7.2cf freezer: $24.55 per year
Savings: $34.55 per year, or about $2.88 a month.
(We have some of the country’s cheapest electricity here in Seattle; if we lived in New York, where it’s most expensive, the annual cost difference would be about $80.) I prefer to think of this as $34 we’re going to save every year from now on, rather than $86 we spent needlessly by procrastinating this task since moving in. Ahem.
There’s one more factor, though, that’s not as easy to calculate: with twice the freezer room my tendency was to buy extra food to fill it, which I then often lost in the depths, buried under piles of other food, until it was freezer-burned beyond all palatability. Or I would buy a ginormous bag of frozen peas at Costco, only to excavate a prior unopened bag from the bottom. (I use fresh produce as much as possible, so it can take us half a year to go through a single large bag of frozen vegetables. Having two such bags is just a waste.)
In the month since making the switch, I’ve already seen improvements in frozen-food turnover efficiency. I still think I need a better record-keeping system for both fridge and freezer though; I’ll work on that!
The EnergyStar calculator also tells you how much you’d save in electricity by buying a new freezer that meets current EnergyStar specs. In our case, this is a mere $7 per year — not a patch on the cost of a replacement, not that we were considering one anyway.
I am going to resell the windfall freezer, once I have an afternoon to spend cleaning it out. For someone with no second freezer at all, it could be a real bargain — especially if they have a large family or are carnivores!
(Photos by jonner and Squiggle.)
I had a sort of mini-vacation last week; didn’t go anywhere, but took off work to hang with a visiting friend. I had every intention of posting during the break, but … I was too busy playing. And eating. Stacy and I are both unapologetic foodies, which means we spent much of our time bouncing between restaurants, markets, and kitchens …
I’ve been trying to hit the farmers’ markets as much as possible this summer, but I’m finding those visits increasingly stressful. I am hugely in favor of both buying local and supporting small farms, but that desire is at war with my equally strong tendency toward frugality.
Today I was talking with a friend who lives in the DC metro area; he extolled the cheapness of farmers’ market produce, which he reckons as being about on par pricewise with the budget grocery chains like Safeway, but with consistently superior quality. I was envious to say the least. In the Seattle area, even Whole Foods is often cheaper than the farmers’ markets. This week, a pint container of organic multicolored cherry tomatoes is $4.50 at various farmer stalls, but only $2.99 at Whole Foods.
Last Thursday I tried a different market from my usual, in hopes that maybe it was a neighborhood thing, but no — still expensive. I did walk away with some cheap zucchini (three large for $2!), but otherwise the prices were astronomical. Peaches were $4/pound; I bought four small ones. They were much more flavorful than the ones I got at Fred Meyer for .79/pound, but at a dollar for about six bites, they were no bargain.
Tom reports that in Maryland, eggs at the farmers’ market go for $3.25 or $3.50 per dozen. Last week I saw eggs at the market listed at $5 and $6 per dozen. At the regular grocery they run around $2.50, and by watching for sales I can cut that considerably — this weekend I got two dozen for $2.69 in a buy-one-get-one-free deal. Costco regularly carries two dozen for under $3.
I have no idea why market produce is so expensive here. Perhaps it’s another manifestation of our (relatively) robust local economy, and farmers are merely charging what the market will bear. Perhaps Seattleites have such a green-and-local focus that the demand outstrips the supply — certainly the markets have been mobbed every day I’ve been since June.
Meanwhile, my internal battle rages on. Lately I’ve been compromising by buying certain ‘treat’ foods where flavor quality is most important — the sweet peaches, Rainier cherries, assorted berries — from the farmers’ markets, and getting the bulk of our staples from grocery sales and Costco. But I sure do wish I could satisfy both mandates at the same time instead of having to choose.
(Photos by Sasha Kopf and Chas Redmond.)
