Eventually, my father stopped doing this. Part of the reason was that the ceiling in our basement was pretty low and he had to stoop constantly when he was down there working and I think it began to bother his back.

The other reason, though, is that he began to really wonder if it was worth doing it compared to just buying vegetables at the store in the winter.

Lately (particularly as winter has descended upon Iowa), I’ve found myself thinking about those grow lights in the basement and wondering if I couldn’t clear out a spot in our basement for a small winter garden.

The question, of course, is whether this would be worth it. Would I actually be saving money growing my own vegetables in this way?

Grow lights This is where the real cost of the system comes in. Let’s say I decide to grow about 80-100 square feet of vegetables in my basement. This could be covered by an array of small grow lights or a single large grow light. After looking at a lot of options, it seems that the best choice is a single industrial-strength grow light like this one. The problem is that such a light costs around $300 depending on where you buy it. There are lower-cost alternatives, of course, but those have their own problems.

This single light would allow me to convert an 80 square foot room in our basement into a greenhouse, more or less.

Energy use of grow lights The grow light described above uses 1,000 watts of energy. If you ran the grow light 12 hours a day for three months, that’s 1,080 hours of use. The energy cost of this would be about $120 for a season of vegetables.

Pots We’d also need a collection of pots to grow the vegetables in. Thankfully, these can be found pretty cheaply and would be a one-time investment of about $100 or so.

Soil I’m lucky to have access to adequate soil and compost, so the cost here is negligible for me. However, if you’re made to use potting soil, the cost would be rather high for 80 square feet of vegetables.

Seeds The seeds for this project would be relatively inexpensive on the whole, totaling perhaps $3 per growing session (assuming that you’re not using heirlooms, in which case this would be a one-time cost of $4 or $5).

Water The cost of the water would be negligible. We’ll figure a dollar’s worth of water per season.

So, let’s figure up the costs here for ten “seasons” of growing.

One grow light, costing $300.
Ten seasons of electricity, costing $1,200.
Pots, costing $100.
Seeds, costing $30.
Water, costing $10.
(You’ll also need soil if you don’t have access to it.)

The total cost of all of these elements is $1,640, or $164 per season.

There’s also the housing cost of having 80 square feet to devote to such a project, plus the cost of heating and cooling the room (I’d just keep it at our house temperature plus the grow light), which would add some additional cost to the equation.

Using this as a guide for vegetable square footage, I could plant a lot of vegetables in 80 square feet.

Without getting into the complexities of a diverse collection of vegetables, let’s just say I could plant a single tomato plant per square foot and that tomato plant would provide ten pounds of tomatoes. This would mean I would get 800 pounds of tomatoes out of this room every growing season, assuming that because it is indoors, I’ll minimize or eliminate pest or disease problems.

This would give me a cost per pound of tomatoes of about $0.20. Compared to the cost of tomatoes at the store this time of year (about $2.99 a pound), that’s quite a deal.

The problem is that pulling this off is a tremendous amount of work and planning. I would be installing grow lights, hauling tubs of dirt into my basement, planting lots and lots of seeds, and performing all sorts of regular maintenance. I would easily estimate that I would spend 100 hours per growing season cultivating these plants.

There’s also the issue of dealing with that much fresh food coming in at once. Much of it would have to be canned or frozen, adding to the cost and time, or given away to friends, increasing the cost per pound of production but also providing a gift to friends, or perhaps even sold in small amounts if an arrangement could be found.

In the end, this type of gardening can save you some money, but it’s going to be a labor of love along the way. If gardening is something you’re passionate about, you will save money with this effort. I would estimate that you could even approach minimum wage with it for the time invested if you canned all of the excess vegetables along the way.

Still, the question really is whether you find personal value in doing this. If you do, this can certainly be a great project for an extra room in your home.

Erin writes in: I have a question for your “Saving Pennies or Dollars?” series. It’s about dried beans, like pinto, great northern. Would it be worth the time to buy dried beans and can them myself, or am I better off just buying the cans at the store when they are on sale. I have a pressure canner and a simple recipe for canning my own beans.

First of all, it’s pretty easy to find canned beans at the store for $1.50 per can or even a bit less than that. Canned beans are not a particularly expensive item.

Having said that, you can easily find dried beans for $1.40 per pound or less.

So, how much does that equate to? Beans approximately double in weight during the cooking process due to the absorbed water. A 15 ounce can of cooked beans, in other words, equates to about 7.5 ounces of dried beans. Thus, the cost of an equivalent amount of dry beans is about $0.65. You’ll save about $0.85 per can cooking them yourself, in other words.

However, that accounts for just the cost of the beans. If you wish to can them, there is significant cost to the canning process – a pressure cooker (for non-acidic items), a large pot (for water-bathing acidic items), jars, lids, and rings are all required to make this work, and these items all eat into the $0.85 per can you’re saving by canning yourself.

Lids can vary greatly in cost. If you want reusable plastic lids, you’ll be spending about a dollar each to get started, but you can reuse them a few dozen times before dings begin to make them not work, bringing the cost down to $0.03 per use. Other lid options have a lower initial cost, but are one-time use.

Jars and rings often come together for approximately $1 apiece in twelve packs. Again, you’re going to reuse these things many times, so the cost quickly goes down into the range of $0.05 (given my own history of breaking jars, 20 uses seems like a reasonable number).

A pressure cooker is going to be your big cash outlay. You can get a decent pressure cooker for about $40, which should last you a long time. Let’s say you use it 100 times with 6 jars each, though. That’s still a cost of about $0.07 per jar for the canner.

These costs quickly knock down the savings you get from canning. In fact, it’s going to take several batches of canning for you to reach a point where you’re breaking even on the supplies compared to buying cans of the food in the store.

If you notice, the cost per jar for each of the items above assumes a lot of uses, so if you’re only canning a few times a year, it’s probably not cost effective to do it.

From my own experience, I find that the time invested per jar canned across a lot of different things is about eight minutes. In other words, if I’m canning six jars of something, the time to actually can the items versus just making the items and putting them in the refrigerator is about forty five minutes or so.

Now, if I’m saving $0.65 per jar (the $0.85 in savings from using my own beans minus the $0.20 in costs for canning) and it’s taking me eight minutes per jar, I’m saving about $4.88 per hour of canning. Frankly, it’s not worth it at that price for me just as a savings method. There is savings there, but not enough to make up for the lost time.

However, the food quality is a factor, too. I’d far rather eat a food item I canned myself than a canned food item from the store. The quality of garden-fresh salsa I made myself and canned versus a jar of salsa from the store is huge, for example. The same is true for almost anything else – including beans.

So, are you doing this to save big money? No. You’re saving a little, but not a lot. You’re doing this because you’re turning out high-quality food for your pantry and saving a little bit of money, too. For me, that adds up to a worthwhile deal.

Here’s exactly how we do it.

The Basic Tools
Obviously, the most basic thing you need to have is a soup pot or two. We often make soup in these 5 1/2 quart enameled cast iron pots, but any pot that ranges from five quarts or so on up will be sufficient for making soup. I highly recommend having a lid.

You’ll also need to have a ladel, as it makes serving the soup into bowls much easier. You’ll also, of course, need bowls and spoons for eating and a spoon for stirring the soup.

That’s really all you need in your kitchen (aside from a stovetop) to make soup pretty much any time you want.

The Basic Ingredients We Always Have on Hand
We keep a steady supply of a few key ingredients on hand at all times for soup making.

Our three most frequent soup ingredients are barley, egg noodles, and dried beans. These form the backbone of many of the soups we make, plus they store quite well in the pantry in their dry form. When we find a sale on these, we stock up every time.

We also keep a few basic seasonings on hand, such as salt and pepper. In addition, we also usually keep some homemade vegetable stock around for the liquid of the soup. We also keep some vegetable boullion around in case we’re out of stock.

If you like beef soups, use beef stock or boullion instead. If you like chicken soups, use chicken stock or boullion instead. Keep whatever it is that you like around.

In addition, we keep a few basic spices around: thyme, sage, and bay leaves, for starters. These work well in most soups.

We also keep oyster crackers around as a condiment for the soup.

This is actually all you need to make a flavorful passable soup at the drop of a hat. Just cook the main ingredient, add some herbs and pepper, and simmer for a while until it smells too good to resist.

Varying Things Up
Of course, you’re going to want to vary this for variety’s sake. How do you do that?

The way we do it is that we simply watch for vegetables that are on sale at our local grocery stores. If potatoes are on sale this week, we use potatoes in a batch of soup. The same goes for almost any vegetable, from turnips to kale to spinach to corn. Whatever’s fresh and inexpensive, we try it and use it.

You can also include meat in your bargain hunting, too. If you find chicken or beef or pork on sale, pick it up and use it as an ingredient. If it sounds good to you, it probably is good.

How do you cook it? The first step is to simply boil your liquid ingredients – water and/or stock. You’ll start with this, then likely add more liquid during the cooking process if the soup gets too thick. Don’t worry about evaporated water – the flavor will just get richer over time.

The easiest way is just to search for your ingredient on Google with the addition “time to boil.” So, if you want to know how long to make soup with, say, turnips in it, you’d search for “time to boil turnips.” You’ll find that turnips take 25-30 minutes to boil.

Then, just make a list of all of your ingredients and how long they take to boil. Add the ingredients in order so that they all finish cooking at the same time. So, for example, if you have beans that take two hours, turnips that take 30 minutes, and potatoes that take 20 minutes, you’d start the beans, let them cook for an hour and a half, add the turnips, and then ten minutes later, add the potatoes.

The exception to this is the meat. If you’re adding meat (I actually also do this with onions and a few other things, too), I suggest cooking it separately until it’s done, then adding it with about ten or fifteen minutes left to go for the soup. Take some of the soup broth you have going, pour it in the pan that you cooked the meat in while the pan is still hot, then pour it back into the soup pot to add some delicious flavor.

It’s incredibly easy, incredibly tasty, and incredibly inexpensive – my kind of meal!

I plan on continuing the series on an irregular basis, but doing the series each week has taught me some worthwhile lessons about food, frugality, and time management.

Experimentation has rewards
One of the big reasons for us to start doing this series was that we both enjoy experimenting with our cooking. We love trying new meals and, believe it or not, our food adventurousness has rubbed off on our children as well. I’m amazed when we have friends with children over (or visit them) and their children refuse to eat most of the items on the table. Our children try them with relish.

The biggest reason why I love experimenting is that I am constantly discovering new ingredients. For example, I would have never even thought of getting fresh tarragon, chopping it up, and putting it into scrambled eggs. I tried it on a whim due to a suggestion of how to use tarragon – and I found that it made the eggs wonderful. Now, whenever I can find some fresh tarragon, I make some amazing scrambled eggs.

Try a new vegetable or a new fruit or a new herb or spice or a new type of cheese. You might find something that you really enjoy that you never expected. Even better, you now have something new to look for during food sales as well as a broader repertoire of ingredients you feel good using in your kitchen.

At the same time, there’s always another meal
Of course, the immediate drawback that many people point to with such experimentation is that you might wind up with a meal that you don’t like at all.

My philosophy on that is this: I usually try new ingredients when I can get a good discount on them. That way, if it turns out that I don’t like it, I’m not out very much money. Most of the time, though, I find that I do like this new ingredient. Even during the worst case scenario, where I find the meal inedible, I can always find something else to eat if I’m hungry.

The upside to discovering something new that I like is far greater than the downside of a dollar or two lost and the potential prospect of remaking a single meal.

A regular repertoire of meals is invaluable
We’re a two income family with three children, two of which are in multiple activities. The simple reality of things is that we don’t have the time in the evening that we would often like to have. Quite often, one of the parents is on autopilot when it comes to dinner preparation. We simply want to be able to prepare something easily, something that we know how to do, and something that will please everyone while being reasonably healthy.

When we try new meals, we’re often asking ourselves whether this meal should become part of our regular meal repertoire. However, most nights, particularly during the school year, we just pull a meal from that repertoire and assemble it for dinner.

Adventuresome meals are fun, but they often don’t work in the context of a typical day at our house. The vast majority of the time, we rely on things we know how to make or variations on those themes.

Preparing meals in advance is invaluable, too
Along with that tactic is the incredibly useful tactic of preparing meals in advance. We’ll often prepare a full meal, store it in a sealed container in the freezer, and pull it out the night before or in the morning of a day when we know that dinner plans are going to be tight. Sometimes, we actually just pull out a kit we’ve assembled from the freezer and just add it to the crock pot. Other times, we put out a frozen casserole dish with a note saying “put this in the oven at 350 degrees at 4:30.”

These meals prepared in advance also make being adventurous a bit more difficult, as you don’t want to prepare a quadruple batch of something before you’ve tried it out with the family. Thus, our premade meals are invariably old standbys, like tuna casserole or vegetarian lasagna.

Having these meals on hand makes it possible to get one kid to soccer, another kid to dance, and still have a good meal on the table when everyone converges at home.

Let what you have on hand lead you
People often get stressed out about following recipes and finding a bunch of obscure ingredients. You really don’t have to do that. Just use what you have on hand and you’ll almost always come up with something good.

What really works well is when you have a “framework” recipe, like the flexible casserole recipe or ratatouille. These are recipes where you can basically plug in whatever ingredients you happen to have and make something that works. At least a couple of the “Dinner with My Family” posts resulted from this type of experimentation.

Instead of panicking about what to have, just throw open your cupboard door and try to assemble something. Keep an open mind and you’ll be surprised at what you can come up with.

Let what’s on sale in the grocery flyer lead you, too
We love using fresh ingredients in our meals, but they can often be expensive at the store. So, often, we just buy whatever produce is on sale and use that as the backbone for our meals for the week.

If cabbage is on sale, we’ll make some sort of cabbage rolls or cabbage-based soup. If eggplant is on sale, we’ll make eggplant lasagna. If spinach is on sale, we’ll make a spinach alfredo and have spinach salads with other meals. If bananas are on sale, we’ll eat one bunch and use another to make a loaf or two of banana bread.

Again, many of our “Dinner with My Family” recipes have resulted from just this type of purchase. We buy some vegetables that are on sale and make a dish based on them. It’s cheap, tasty, and fun.

Each year, my mother takes charge of preparing a huge family Thanksgiving meal. Each year, there’s a small mountain of leftovers to deal with.

I know that many other families find themselves in the same boat. What do we do with all of these leftovers? This year, I spent some time perusing a pile of old Thanksgiving food magazines, cookbooks, internet sites, and other places looking for good things to do with leftovers from Thanksgiving. Here are some of the ideas I found.

Leftover turkey can easily be cut into small pieces and used as part of a pasta dish three days later or so. Preparing a turkey marinara or a turkey alfredo is easy – just prepare the sauce, add some cubed turkey, and put the sauce over your preferred pasta. The sauce alters the flavor of the turkey so much that it becomes a new meal.

Another approach is to use leftover dark meat and bones to prepare some turkey stock. Take everything that’s left from the turkey and put it all in a crock pot along with any extra leftover vegetables (such as green beans), some pepper, and a small dash of salt. Let it cook on low all day, then filter out all of the leftovers, leaving behind some delicious turkey stock. Freeze the stock, then use it as the base for soups and other things throughout the winter.

My favorite use, though, is to just cube it and save it in small bags. This way, you can quickly pull a bag of the turkey out of the freezer and use it as a salad topping. I did this for multiple Thanksgivings and found that I was always happy to toss some cubed turkey on top of my salads at home.

Leftover mashed potatoes can be used in a lot of ways. My personal favorite is to save them for a few days, then form them into discs and fry them with a bit of vegetable oil, making potato pancakes. If your potatoes are particularly soft, you may want to add just a bit of corn starch to thicken and harden the pancakes so that they don’t fall apart in the pan.

Another use for leftover mashed potatoes is in shepherd’s pie, which can be made a day or two after Thanksgiving and easily frozen for later use. Just fill a 9″ by 13″ pan about half full with leftover vegetables, add some cooked meat that you prefer, pour some appropriate broth on top (about a cup), and then spread the mashed potatoes on top. You can even sprinkle a little cheese on top if you’d like.

One final trick – and this is a great thing to do if you have mashed potatoes that you’re going to freeze – is to incorporate them into a simple biscuit recipe. Just add them in to give your biscuits a special texture and flavor. Biscuits are easy. All you need is 3 cups of flour, 2 tablespoons of baking powder, a teaspoon of salt, a quarter cup of sugar, half a stick of cold butter, a beaten egg, and somewhere between half a cup and a full cup of buttermilk. Combine all of the ingredients until the dough you make is just barely sticky (start with half a cup of buttermilk and add more if it’s just too dry). If you’re using potatoes, just mix in the potatoes with the dough for a bigger batch.

Leftover dressing (or stuffing) can be a bit of a challenge. One technique that seemed interesting was to press as much of it as you can into a square container, squeezing it in there very tightly. Leave it there for a while, then remove the stuffing. You can then slice the stuffing, using it for sandwiches (yes, that would be pretty carb-heavy, but you could also add plenty of other condiments and toppings).

One important thing to note, though, is that stuffing/dressing freezes really well. Usually, we freeze our leftover dressing and then use it in a month or so with another meal when we’re in a pinch. It can make a great side to an otherwise dull meal.

Leftover cranberry sauce simply begs to be used in muffins or scones, particularly if you have the whole-berry kind and not the gelatinized sauce (though that can be used, too). Simply find your favorite muffin or scone recipe and use the cranberries as an ingredient in them. Delicious!

My favorite use, though, is to turn it into barbecue sauce. That’s right – barbecue sauce. Just take a cup and a half of the sauce and put it in the blender with 3/4 cup ketchup; 1/4 cup honey; a tablespoon of cider vinegar; a teaspoon each of Worcestershire sauce, onion powder, and garlic powder; and a pinch of cayenne pepper and ground black pepper. Mix this into a puree, then save it for next summer for a tremendous barbecue sauce.

Leftover turkey gravy can be used much like a stock if you freeze it. You simply water it down and use it as the base for a soup at a later time. It works surprisingly well, as the boiling and the stirring causes the gravy to thin out into a flavorful soup starter.

You can also save the gravy to use as part of a pot pie, or use it as the liquid ingredient in the shepherd’s pie above (though that may be too much Thanksgiving taste right after the meal, so if you do this, I’d freeze the shepherd’s pie to use at a later date).

Hopefully, these tactics will keep you from throwing out perfectly good holiday leftovers this year!

Laura writes in: roasting a whole chicken, only costs about a dollar more to buy it cooked at Sam’s Club and mine didn’t taste as good

For starters, part of the problem may have been your technique. I use a default “beer can” technique whenever I roast chickens, in which I insert a tin can or a beer can into the cavity of the chicken. The can is mostly full of some sort of liquid with various herbs and spices, such as garlic and peppercorns. When the chicken is roasting, the entire chicken is balanced on the can.

I do it this way in both the oven and on the grill and it works great in either context. The flavor and moistness of the meat is wonderful when finished.

I’d highly suggest looking for an oven-roasted “beer can” chicken recipe and using it for your next chicken roast. It really does produce a wonderful whole chicken.

Now that we have this issue out of the way, the real question is whether or not the amount saved on buying a whole roasted chicken is worth the additional time. I went to my local Sam’s Club to find prices on roasted chickens. I found whole chickens for sale for $0.89 per pound and pre-roasted chickens for $1.29 per pound. Assuming I buy a four pound bird, I’m saving about $1.60 buying a raw chicken.

So, what about the prep time? I can take a chicken out of the package, insert a can into the cavity, and have the chicken in the oven in about five minutes, according to my own estimate. It would then take roughly an hour for the chicken to roast, which is passive time. I’d then have to stick the tray upon which the chicken baked into the dishwasher, but that time is negligible.

So, if you assume that you have plenty of time to prep your own dinner, roasting your own chicken is the way to go. You’re saving $1.60 (in this example) for about five minutes of work.

However, the key thing to remember is that when you’re buying that whole roasted chicken, you’re basically paying for convenience. There are evenings where busy families simply don’t have an hour to set aside while the food cooks in the oven.

This is the voice of experience here: on evenings where my children have soccer or tumbling class, it can be a juggling act to get a home-cooked meal on the table at any reasonable dinner time.

Lining up a recipe in the oven like this can be a trick, so we often use a slow cooker for meals on these nights. For us, a slow cooker is the best solution to the family time crunch that many families seem to have in the evenings. It enables us to have a lot of flexibility with regards to when we get a meal on the table.

There’s also the health factor. When you prepare food yourself, you have much more control over the ingredients in it. Food sold in stores has a lot of questionable things done to it, from food coloring to imitate freshness to all sorts of artificial things to enhance flavor through chemistry. If I have a choice, I’ll pass on this.

So, if I were doing this, I’d never buy a whole roasted chicken unless it was an emergency. If I had time, I’d enjoy the $1.60 in savings I got from putting five minutes of prep work into the chicken. If I knew I wouldn’t have the time, I’d set up a slow cooker meal. The only time I would consider it is if I had planned to have a lot of time, but something unexpected changing that schedule.

Our garden is producing a few last-minute things – well, mostly onions at this point. Along with that, we have our ongoing crusade to use up all of the things in our pantry and freezer, including such items as cans of diced tomatoes and premade pizza crust (as I mentioned before, I’d rather make my own crust, but Sarah found an amazing sale on several cans of it and picked them up).

What to do… what to do… how about we mix all of these things together and make something of a ratatouille casserole? Sounds like a plan to me.

What You Need
The nice thing about ratatouille is that you can pretty much use whatever flavorful vegetables you have on hand. In our case, we had a can of tomatoes and an eggplant, as well as some onions and a pepper from the garden. All you need is eight or so cups of your favorite vegetables.

In addition, you’ll need three teaspoons of olive oil, 2 teaspoons of minced garlic, a taspoon of dried basil, a teaspoon of red pepper flakes, a dash of salt, 2 teaspoons of balsamic vinegar, a package of refrigerated pizza dough (or a small batch of homemade dough, which is my own personal preference), and two cups of shredded cheese, preferably mozzarella or a mix with at least some mozzarella in it.

The Night Before (or Early That Day)
Chop up your vegetables! This is always a good thing to do the night before you prepare a homemade meal. Just chop them into small pieces and store them in the refrigerator until you’re ready to use them.

Preparing the Meal
Since this recipe is so quick to put together, the first thing you should do is get your oven preheating to 425 F. After that, put the oil into a large skillet and start adding your vegetables.

Can’t you just smell the onions cooking?

You’ll want to add vegetables in order of firmness, so you’ll add things like onions and pepper first, let them cook for five or so minutes over medium high heat while stirring, then add some softer vegetables like eggplant and garlic, cook for five more minutes while stirring, then add the very soft vegetables like tomatoes and cook for five more minutes. Add your spices with the softest vegetables, so toss in the basil, red pepper flakes, and salt at this point.

Right as you pull the mixture out of the pan, add half of the cheese and mix it thoroughly into the vegetable mix. Then, put the mixture into a 9″ by 13″ casserole.

Sprinkle the remaining cheese on top of the mix, then put the pizza crust on top of the casserole. Cut a few slices in the dough so that the steam has a place to escape, then put it in the oven for 15 minutes.

You end up with a beautiful and tasty casserole. We served it with some fresh applesauce and a few remaining green beans from our garden.

Optional Ingredients
As I mentioned above, you can use pretty much any vegetable in this. Corn, spinach, potatoes, broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts – you name it and it’ll probably work in this. You can also vary the cheese, using other types in a mix with the mozzarella or on their own. No matter what you do, this pot pie will turn out well.

My wife loves this recipe and finds reasons to make it often. It’s helped by the fact that we had a giant harvest of squash this year, so we had to find lots of ways to use it. I like curried soups and stews, so that definitely contributed to my desire to share this one with you.

Most of the cost here is going to be the vegetables, so the more of these you have access to outside of the grocery store, the less expensive this recipe will be.

What You Need
Here’s what you need for this meal…

You’ll need:
a diced bell pepper
half of a diced onion
one minced garlic clove
a cubed and peeled eggplant
a cubed and peeled butternut or acorn squash
1 cup cooked chickpeas (canned is fine)
1 cup water or vegetable broth (we used stock)
1 1/2 teaspoons curry powder
one teaspoon of olive oil (or other vegetable oil)
salt and pepper to taste

The Night Before (or Early That Day)
The best thing to do in advance is to chop up all of the vegetables and store them in bowls in your refrigerator. You can store the bell pepper and onion together, and you can store the eggplant and squash together, too.

Preparing the Meal
Preparing the meal is really simple. Just put the oil in a large saucepan over medium heat until it’s shimmering. Then, add the bell pepper and onion and stir for five minutes.

It’ll smell really good at this point!

Next, add the garlic, curry powder, and a dash of salt and pepper and stir for a minute more, then add the remaining ingredients. Wait until the liquid is at a low boil, then reduce heat until the liquid is barely simmering.

Let it sit for twenty five minutes, then serve. We accompanied it with a simple sandwich.

Optional Ingredients
You can make all kinds of vegetable substitutions in this meal and still have a great soup. You can use any kind of bell pepper, replace the chickpeas with other kinds of beans, use pumpkin instead of the squash, and so on. As always, use what you’ve got on hand or have inexpensive access to.

Jeff writes in: How much money do you ACTUALLY save in time and money by making your own coffee at home? I would appreciate the assumption that the user is using non-generic, non-Folgers or Maxwell House coffee.

For some standardized data on this, I visited the website of the SCAA – the Specialty Coffee Association of America. In one of their protocol documents, I found this information, which I’ll use to analyze how a great cup of coffee is constructed at home:

The optimum ratio is 8.25 grams of coffee per 150 ml of water, as this conforms to the mid-point of the optimum balance recipes for the Golden Cup.

Let’s say we’re looking at a 16 ounce cup of coffee – what you might fill a to-go cup with from a coffee shop, for example. A 16 ounce cup of coffee is approximately 473 mL, which, using the ratio above, would require 26 grams of coffee to make it yourself. An ounce is 28.3 grams, just for measurement’s sake.

So, how much does “good” coffee cost? I asked my wife to select what she considered to be a very good coffee for the price and she chose Eight O’Clock Coffee’s original ground, which can be obtained at a rate of $0.39 per ounce.

Simply put, you’d need about $0.38 of decent ground coffee to make a good 16 ounce cup of coffee at home. There’s also the negligible cost of water and electricity (say, one cent per cup), plus the ongoing cost of filters (say, two cents per cup), plus the cost of the cup (say, one cent per drink prorated out over time), plus the startup cost of purchasing an inexpensive pot to brew the coffee with (say, another two cents per cup, prorated out over time). That’s a cost of about $0.44 for a 16 ounce standard coffee.

Now, if you add cream or other ingredients to that, you’re increasing the cost, but not significantly. For example, International Delight French Vanilla liquid creamer costs $0.08 per cup. Other options might ding you as much as a quarter per cup for flavoring, which is still leaving you below $0.70 per cup.

Depending on what exactly you order at your typical coffee chain, a 16 ounce coffee will set you back somewhere between $2 and $5. The variation here is pretty impressive, but even if you’re comparing the low end of a purchased coffee with the high end of a homemade cup, you’re still talking about a savings of a dollar per 16 ounce cup. It’s quite likely you’re saving even more than that.

What about the time? I’m not a coffee drinker, but Sarah usually sets up the coffee pot the night before. It takes her about a minute. When she gets up, she flips a switch, and then she drinks a cup a little while later, then fills her to-go cup on her way out the door, taking her maybe another minute or two. She usually cleans the pot up when she gets home from work, taking another couple of minutes.

The time invested is perhaps five minutes total per day, and she’s probably saving $2.50 or so per day, making for a pretty good hourly rate. Plus, she believes the coffee made at home tastes better.

If you drink coffee more than a time or two a week, you’re going to save money making it at home, and it’s probably going to be well worth the small amount of time invested, too.

Melissa writes in: I’d be interested in knowing if its economical to make your own pasta. I did it the first time the other day to make noodles for my chicken noodle soup because i didn’t want to run to the store. The noodles were far superior, but it did take a bit of time as opposed to dumping a bag of egg noodles in the pot.

This is fairly hard to quantify, actually. Making your own noodles can be surprisingly inexpensive. All you really need are eggs and flour to put together noodles at a lower cost than what can be found in a store, and, as you mentioned, they are just fantastic noodles. Once you start using them, it’s really tough to go back to purchased noodles because the quality difference is immense.

The challenge here is time. To make your own noodles, you’re going to have to invest some significant time in making the dough, rolling it out thin enough to make noodles, then cutting it up.

Just to measure the time, I made a batch of egg noodles in my own kitchen recently. You just take four cups of flour, plus four eggs, plus enough water to make the volume of the eggs equal a cup (if needed, it might not be depending on your egg size). Knead the eggs and flour together until it makes a dough, then roll it out flat repeatedly, folding it over, and rolling it out again on a floured surface, then cutting the noodles and leaving them out to dry. This is about $1.20 worth of ingredients, and it took about forty five minutes to convert all of the dough into noodles working at a steady pace.

I then went to the store and found a pound of extra wide egg noodles for $2. In terms of cost, I saved about $0.80 on the batch, but the noodles I made were light years ahead in quality.

If you’re doing a strict cost comparison, I saved about $1 per hour of work making the noodles from scratch in a typical home kitchen environment. If you’re making them from scratch just to save money, it’s not worth it.

The problem with that simple conclusion, though, is that you’re not quite comparing apples to apples. The quality of homemade noodles far surpasses what you’re ever going to buy in a store.

If you really value the food you make at home, then making homemade noodles is going to be worth it. It’s enough to turn a regular meal into a memorable one and a great meal into a fantastic one. It’s the kind of thing that will leave your guests truly enjoying the meal you prepared and leave you with a satisfied mouth and stomach.

It’s also going to be healthier, because you control the ingredients. If you want to use whole wheat flour and egg whites, you can. If you want to make your own specific flour mix, you can. If you want to use farm fresh eggs, you can. You control it all. There’s no hidden ingredients or preservatives or mysterious industrial processes or anything else.

Such value, though, is incredibly hard to quantify because it comes down to the value you hold in such things.

If it were all about the dollars and cents, you’d probably never make your own noodles.

But sometimes, it’s not about the dollars and cents.

Alexis writes in: My husband and I go through a jar of salsa a week. Problem is, the brands without high fructose corn syrup average $2.79 at our grocery store. Would it be cheaper to make our own? Since tomato season is about to end on the East Coast, would canned tomatoes make a difference in the DIY route?

I’m with you on avoiding the high fructose corn syrup in salsas. I try to avoid it in everything I eat. The human body doesn’t need it, to say the least.

Of course, when you make that choice, prices go up. As you mention, it’s pretty tough to find salsa in the store without corn syrup in it for under $3 per jar.

But how much does it cost to make salsa at home? I like Alton Brown’s simple salsa recipe, so I’ll use that as an example. It contains:

6 Roma tomatoes, chopped
4 garlic cloves, minced
2 seeded and minced jalapenos, plus 2 roasted, skinned and chopped jalapenos
1 red bell pepper, fine dice
1/2 red onion, fine chopped
2 dry ancho chiles, seeded, cut into short strips and snipped into pieces
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 lime, juiced
Chili powder, salt, and pepper, to taste
Fresh scallions, cilantro or parsley, to taste

I went to the local grocery store and price-checked these items, using a few simple substitutions (like diced tomatoes for the Romas). I came up with a total of $4.40.

I then made a batch of this and found that it made a volume of salsa equal to about two and a half typical salsa jars. I saved it fresh in the refrigerator.

So, my cost per jar of making it from scratch is about $1.80. This assumes, of course, that I keep it fresh in the refrigerator and don’t can it. If I choose to can it, the cost is going to start approaching that of just buying a jar in the store.

My conclusion is that if you’re just making some fresh salsa for a party or something, it’s cheaper to make good salsa yourself. However, if you’re making it to can, you’re going to want to think about your approach carefully.

Of course, there’s one big key to all of this: the garden. If you have a garden that can provide you some or all of the ingredients in the recipe, your salsa is going to be less expensive whether you can it or not.

For example, pulling just the tomatoes and a bell pepper from one’s own garden drops the price of ingredients by about half. Plus, your salsa will taste better. This saves dollars, not pennies, and it saves your taste buds, too.

As we slip deeper and deeper into fall, our family is starting to eat more cold weather food – thicker soups and chowders and so on. Hand in hand with this is our ongoing effort to slowly clear out the recesses of our pantry and our freezer by using items that have been in there for a while and largely forgotten.

The result of this is our own homebrewed “Wisconsin farmhouse chowder,” which takes several different ideas from recipes we’ve heard and things we’ve tried in the northeast Iowa and southwest Wisconsin area. It’s simple to make and I hope you enjoy it.

What You Need
The ingredient list is pretty straightforward. You’ll need:
- 3 1/2 cups of milk, separated into 1 1/2 cups and 2 cups
- 2 medium potatoes, cubed
- 3 or 4 shiitake mushrooms, chopped (morels would also work if you have a source for getting them)
- A bag of flash-frozen mixed vegetables -or- one cup each of corn kernels, diced carrots, and chopped broccoli
- Dashes of a few spices, including thyme, black pepper, red pepper flakes, and salt
- Half of a cup of peas (frozen or fresh, whatever works best for you)
- 1 cup shredded sharp cheddar cheese

The Night Before (or Early That Day)
If you’re using fresh vegetables, it’s always worthwhile to make them the night before, as well as the potatoes. You’ll also want to chop the mushrooms. You might also want to make the mushroom cream as well…

Making the mushroom cream is simple. Simply take two cups of milk in a saucepan, toss in the dried mushrooms, and let it simmer for half an hour. Add a dash of pepper and a dash of salt, then add two tablespoons of flour and stir it until the mushroom cream thickens a bit. You can add more flour if you’d like, but don’t thicken it until it’s solid.

Preparing the Meal
Once you have the mushroom cream, described above, add the remaining milk to it, stir thoroughly, then raise the heat to a low boil (medium to medium-high heat should do it).

Add all of the rest of the ingredients at this point except for the peas, stir thoroughly, then allow it to simmer for fifteen minutes, stirring regularly.

Add the peas at the fifteen minute mark, stir thoroughly, and allow to simmer for about three more minutes. Pull the soup off, allow it to stand for five minutes or so, then serve.

We served the soup alongside the wraps from last week. Many different types of wraps or sandwiches could accompany this soup.

Another option is to simply toss a small handful of shredded cheddar on top of the soup, as shown here.

Optional Ingredients
One simple step would be to replace the homemade mushroom cream with canned cream of mushroom soup, though there may be a flavor degradation here. Since switching to making my own by boiling mushrooms in milk, I’ve never really wanted to use the canned kind. You can also somewhat vary the vegetables according to what’s available to you.

Jenny writes in: One thing my mom always did and that I’ve started doing is to make the equivalent of prepackaged meals and store them in Ziplocs to use in the future. How much does this really save?

On the surface, I think this is a really good idea. Many mixes that you buy at the store can very easily be assembled at home, where you have much more control over the individual ingredients and thus the healthiness of the meal mix as well as the price.

The question is whether or not you can actually save a significant amount of money by doing this. My calculations seem to show that most of the time, you do save money by making the mixes yourself.

I’ll use minestrone soup as an example.

You can easily get Bear Creek minestrone soup mix for $3.96 a bag. A bag mix weighs about 9.3 ounces and has the usual ingredients you’d expect for minestrone soup.

What about a dry soup mix? I based my “dry” minestrone soup off of this recipe from the Washington Post. A dry mix would thus contain:

2 tablespoons plus 1 teaspoon good-quality beef bouillon granules (may substitute vegetable bouillon granules)
3 tablespoons minced dried onions
3 tablespoons coarsely chopped dry-packed (not oil-packed) sun-dried tomatoes (may substitute chopped freeze-dried tomatoes or dried sweet pepper pieces or dried chives, or a combination)
1 1/4 teaspoons dried oregano leaves
1 teaspoon dried marjoram leaves (may substitute dried thyme leaves)
1/2 teaspoon dried minced garlic (may substitute garlic powder; do not use garlic salt)
Scant 1/8 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes (may substitute 1/4 teaspoon ground black pepper)
1/4 cup uncooked pearl barley
1/4 cup dried red or brown lentils
1/4 cup dried green or yellow split peas
1/4 cup dried kidney beans
1/4 cup dried cannelloni beans or great northern white beans
1/2 cup dried medium-size macaroni, penne or corkscrew pasta

This recipe ends up making about twice as much as the Bear Creek mix.

Much like the Bear Creek mix, I found each ingredient on Amazon, estimated how much of it I would use in this mix, and added up the cost. It came up to about $4.23 a batch, which is about twice the size of the Bear Creek bag. If you divide this in half, you have a total of about $2.11 per bag – about $1.85 cheaper than the Bear Creek minestrone mix.

I did some very rough estimates of other mixes and consistently found myself coming out with an ingredient cost adding up to about 60%-75% of the prepackaged mix.

You might be thinking, “Great! Let’s make our own mixes and save money!” Not so fast.

First of all, there’s a time cost involved. You’re going to have to invest some time into this project. Each mix will have to be made by hand, measured out, and mixed.

Second, you’re going to need containers. We often use small Rubbermaid containers for these kinds of things, but Ziplocs work, too. Yes, you’ll reuse these containers a lot, but there’s still a cost.

Third, and perhaps the most painful, you’re going to have some leftover ingredients. Unless you want these ingredients to go to waste (which would reduce the value you get from doing this), you’re going to have to plan for other mixes and meals to use the leftover ingredients. One solution, of course, is to just make a lot of mixes and give the extras away as gifts.

For me, these three drawbacks aren’t severe enough to overcome the benefits and savings of making my own mixes. I love having a container in the cupboard that I can just toss into a pot, add some water (and maybe some vegetables), and immediately have soup. This is especially nice when I know the ingredients in the mix are good and it’s less expensive than buying a soup kit in the store.

This week’s goal was simple. What sort of healthy lunch can we make with the stuff on hand that’s in the spirit of fall (and has some of the flavors of the season), while still being relatively light, appeals to the kids, is inexpensive and uses a lot of what we had on hand already, and can easily be made in a large batch to pull out of the refrigerator in a day or two for a tight meal?

I think we pulled all of that off with this one. These wraps make for a perfect lunch and can also accompany a stew or soup for the evening meal – in fact, I ate these wraps in both of these settings. They’re a bit sweet (from the peanut butter), but both fall-flavorful and fairly light at the same time.

I’ll give Sarah a lot of credit here. She came up with these during some of her kitchen alchemy, where she just seemingly pulls out a bunch of random stuff and assembles a meal from it.

What You Need
All you’ll need is some peanut butter (I’m honestly not sure how much – just get out a jar and a butter knife), some tortillas, 1/4 cup minced apple per tortilla, 1/8 cup shredded carrot per tortilla, 1/8 cup granola per tortilla, and 1 teaspoon of roasted wheat germ per tortilla.

Roasted wheat germ is easy. Just spread out the wheat germ on a baking dish and pop it in the oven at 350 for about five minutes. Perfect.

We were able to find all of this stuff on hand at our house except the granola, which we picked up for a few nickels at our local grocery store.

The Night Before (or Early That Day)
The thing to do beforehand is to prep the carrots and apples. Simply chop the apples into oblivion and shred the carrots. You might also want to toast the wheat germ.

Of course, assembling the wraps is so easy that this is the real work of the meal.

Preparing the Meal
Lay out a tortilla in front of you. Cover it in a thin layer of peanut butter, then add the other ingredients as described in “What You Need.” Here’s what one looked like before wrapping.

Once that’s done, simply wrap it up, slice it in half, and enjoy!

These wraps work as a standalone meal. They also work as an accompaniment to other foods, particularly soups.

Optional Ingredients
You can substitute other spreads for the peanut butter. In fact, the last time I made these, I actually used almond butter. You can try things like hazelnut butter as well, though it’ll make the wrap very sweet. If you want it less sweet, use cream cheese as the spread. For other ingredient substitutions, you can leave things out as you wish or used other vegetables as a substitute, such as shredded sweet potato.

Calista writes in: Does making your own baby food purees save pennies or dollars?

As always, it depends on the source of the food you use to make the puree. If you’re using excess produce from your garden, it’s going to be cheaper, of course.

However, where Calista raises an interesting point is with fresh fruits and vegetables that you can buy at a very low price at the grocery store. How do you decide when it’s worth it to make it yourself versus simply buying those convenient Gerber baby food containers?

I’ll use bananas as an example. I can frequently buy bananas at my local grocery store for $0.49 a pound – and, often, they’re on sale for less than that. If I peel out a pound of bananas, I’m left with about eleven ounces of fruit, based on my weighings on my kitchen scale. To this, I would add roughly five ounces of water, milk, or formula to create a smooth texture, then puree it in a blender. After that, I’ll have to individually package it in some method, usually by filling up an ice cube tray with the puree and freezing it. Boom – a pound of “banana baby food” for about $0.50.

On the other hand, I can buy a 3.5 ounce tub of pureed bananas from Gerber for $0.57 per container (16 containers for $9.13). A pound of these containers would be about the same as four and a half of these containers, or $2.28.

In other words, I’m saving about $1.78 per pound of bananas that I turn into baby food. This requires the time to peel a few bananas, put them in the blender, add some liquid, hit the puree button, then pour the liquid into the ice cube tray and pop it in the freezer. That’s about five minutes of work for a pound of baby banana puree.

So, in the case of straight-up bananas, you’re saving dollars and not cents making the baby food yourself.

So, what’s the cutoff for value? I’d be willing to make my own baby food if I were saving about $8 per hour. I would estimate that I could convert a pound of raw foods (like bananas) into baby food in about five minutes, and a pound of food I’d have to cook (like broccoli) into baby food in about ten minutes. Thus, I’d have to spend an hour to convert twelve pounds of raw food into baby food or six pounds of cooked food into baby food.

It costs roughly $2.28 to buy a pound of processed baby food, or $13.68 for six pounds of processed baby food or $27.36 for twelve pounds of processed baby food.

To make cooked baby food worthwhile, I’d have to find a source of the food at $5.68 ($13.68 minus $8) for six pounds of the food, or about $0.95 per pound for the raw food. So, if you can find, say, broccoli at $0.95 a pound or less, it’s probably worth your time to turn it into cooked baby food.

To make raw baby food worthwhile, I’d have to find a source of the food at $19.36 ($27.36 minus $8) for twelve pounds of the food, or about $1.61 per pound for the food. So, if you can find, say, bananas at $1.61 per pound or less, it’s probably worth your time to turn it into cooked baby food.

In the end, you can certainly save dollars by turning some foods, like bananas, into baby food. It gets trickier when you look at out-of-season fruits and vegetables, though, as the cost for a pound of those foods tends to make the savings quite small (and can even result in a loss).

As I’ve mentioned several times, Sarah and I are making a special effort to spread out our trips to the grocery store – and with some real success. Part of this is simply using things that we’ve had in the refrigerator, the cupboard, and the freezer for a while.

One item that’s been in the fridge for a bit are some rolls of prepackaged pizza dough that we got on sale a few months back. We like to make our own pizza crust, but the price was low enough on the prepackaged pizza dough that we simply bought some.

How do we use it, though? Usually, when we make pizza, I just make a crust from scratch.

The solution was obvious: sandwich pockets. We simply take ingredients that we have on hand, fold pieces of the dough around those ingredients, and bake them in the oven.

What You Need
Last night, we made two large batches of these sandwich pockets. One variety (the one I took lots of pictures of) included broccoli, fresh chives, and cheddar cheese. I also made some pockets using bell peppers and ricotta cheese. Both types included a mix of dried herbs (oregano, basil, and so on).

To make four pockets, you need a roll of refrigerated pizza dough (or a small batch of homemade dough), the ingredients you wish to put in the middle, some salt and pepper to taste, and a single egg.

The Night Before (or Early That Day)
If you’re using any fresh vegetables in these pockets, chop them in advance. This always saves time.

Preparing the Meal
The first thing you’ll want to do is mix together your filling ingredients. For me, this means for four pockets, I’ll mix together a cup and a half of broccoli, a cup and a half of shredded cheddar, a dash of salt, a few dashes of ground pepper, three tablespoons of chopped chives, and a few dashes of mixed dried herbs.

I simply toss all of this stuff together with my hands until it’s reasonably consistent.

After that, I unroll a container of the pizza dough on a surface lightly coated with flour or with canola oil to prevent sticking.

Cut this pizza dough into four equal pieces. In the center of each piece of dough, put roughly a quarter of the mixture.

Simply fold over one side on top of the mix, then fold over the opposite side. After that, fold the remaining two sides over the mixture, forming a pocket. Easy as can be!

Crack an egg into a bowl and beat it with a fork. Then, brush the egg on top of the pockets. This will create a wonderful golden crust on top.

Preheat the oven to 425 F, then place the finished pockets onto a baking sheet that had lightly been coated with canola oil to prevent sticking.

When I had the sandwiches all ready to go into the oven, there was a bit of the mixture left over, so I sprinkled some on top of each of the pockets. Here’s eight of them, ready to go into the oven.

Bake the sandwiches for fifteen to seventeen minutes, until golden brown on top, then serve. We had some sliced apples along with the sandwiches, making for a great lunch or a light dinner!

Optional Ingredients
Obviously, you can put pretty much anything you want into these pockets. One thing I like about these is that you don’t have to stick with what you might think of as pizza toppings. It might seem odd to put broccoli on a pizza, for example, but it works perfectly here. Just use roughly three cups of filling for every four you make and let your imagination run wild – meats, vegetables, cheeses, mushrooms, whatever you want.

Kate writes in: I love to cook, and one of my favorite things to make from scratch is chicken stock. I know making it yourself saves money, but I would love for you to go over how much it actually saves. If you’d like to factor it in, I also save vegetable scraps (carrot peels, potato skins, vegetables in the fridge that are starting to look a bit mushy) and chicken bones when I cook and freeze them, so it cuts down on the amount of vegetables and chicken I have to buy to make the stock. That might be a tip to pass along to readers, apparently this is something only I do among people I know who like to cook, and it has spread since.

We sometimes make stock ourselves out of leftover vegetables. Before we made the switch to being vegetarian, we also used to make stock out of chicken bones and spare vegetables, much as you describe.

Typically, we make about four quarts of stock at a time. We use our crock pot for this and simply dump in about two or three quarts of various kinds of scraps, fill up the crock pot with water, turn it on low, and let it cook gently for several hours. When it’s complete, we simply strain the liquid and store it in quart-sized containers in the freezer.

Our crock pot runs at about 100 watts, so we use roughly $0.12 of energy when making a batch of stock. This adds about $0.03 per quart for energy. The amount of water used is negligible.

At the store, I can easily find (somewhat) comparable stocks for approximately $3 per quart. This means that my crock pot produces about $12 worth of stock at the store price. There’s also the option of buying broth, which is thinner and a bit less flavorful, at a lower price ($1.50 or so a quart).

The value of the stock really comes down to the cost of the ingredients that you use to make it. If you use nothing but the scraps left behind by other meals and view homemade stock as a “bonus” of sorts, stock is incredibly cheap and an enormous bargain.

The question of value comes into play when you start looking at actually buying things to supplement the stock. It doesn’t take a whole lot of purchases to add up to the value of the stock itself, so you have to be very careful when making purchases.

For example, if you’re making chicken stock and purchase a whole chicken, you’re sinking $6 into the stock (ideally, you can still use the chicken for other purposes here, but not always). If you buy even a few vegetables to go along with it, you’re quickly approaching the cost of just buying stock at the store.

For me, given the extra time invested and the cost of the ingredients, stock is really only worth it when you’re using scraps, such as leftover vegetable pieces and/or bones.

Our method for accumulating these scraps is to simply save the uneaten and unused remnants of meals. For example, if we cook too many green beans, we’ll toss the remainder into our “scrap bag” in the freezer with the intent to use it someday for stock. When we reach a certain amount (usually a few quarts), we use it as the basis for vegetable stock.

Another possible option for making stock occurs if you have a free source for the needed ingredients. For example, if you’re facing an overabundance of garden vegetables, you might want to make some vegetable stock using some of them. If you’ve suddenly acquired a large amount of chicken or beef for free or for a very low price, you may want to use some of the meat for stock.

Stock is simply an effective way of using materials that don’t have a direct food use without these items going to waste. Using items directly for stock isn’t a big money saver, but using items indirectly for stock in the form of scraps can indeed save dollars.

My family is considering a move to a smaller town for professional purposes. The only problem with this move is that we’re Orthodox and thus we follow the dietary laws. This means that the food our family eats must be kosher. Where we live now, we have great access to kosher foods but we’re pretty certain that our access to such foods is going to become much more expensive when we move. Do you have any suggestions for making this work?

Just to clarify, Abbie is referring to Orthodox Judaism for her family’s religion.

First of all, good luck on making such a challenging move. From what you describe here, this is clearly one of those moves that would come with a long list of “pros” and “cons.” From the way I understand it, your list that would be in favor of moving includes professional reasons as well as some cultural reasons, but the cons list includes other cultural reasons and spiritual reasons. Finding the right balance there can really be a challenge and I can understand a desire to mitigate some of the cons.

So, how can you handle this situation?

The first thing I’d do is study small towns that would be a good match professionally for your family. There are many smaller towns with an Orthodox Jewish community in them. The single member of the religion that I’ve had a strong relationship with lived in Madison, Wisconsin and seemed pretty happy with it.

Since I’m unclear as to exactly what the professional reasons are for the move, you might have a lot of towns that will work or you might be highly restricted. The less restricted you are, the greater the possibility you can find a town with a community in it that can support a local grocer that matches your spiritual needs.

What if that’s impossible? I see several things that you can do.

One option is to talk to the local grocers and see what they have in stock. I’ve had great success in the past requesting that grocers carry specific items with narrow appeal simply because I’ve requested them. Of course, this may have to do with the specific grocer that I often use (Hy-Vee, which is an Iowa grocery chain), but I do know that some grocers are flexible on what they choose to have on their shelves. Come armed with information on brands that you use that the store does not carry and see if they can help.

Another option is to buy in tremendous bulk on occasional food buying trips. This is going to require a lot of planning, of course, as well as some food storage space. Let’s say you live two or three hours from a large city that contains a grocer that sells a wide variety of the foods you need. This my be something that you can do in conjunction with working with your local retailer.

Yet another option is to rely on online grocers. One example of an online grocer that might meet your needs is All in Kosher. Amazon offers a pretty solid selection of certain types of kosher goods.

You might want to supplement these options by starting a garden. Since you’re involved in the entire growing process, you can be sure that the vegetables and fruits that your garden produces match your dietary and spiritual needs. This is also an incredibly inexpensive route for obtaining food, plus it’s an option that’s much more viable in a smaller town.

Most likely, you’ll have to use some combination of these tactics. If you’re looking at things through a frugal lens, though, my recommendation would be to have a very large garden and a freezer. This way, you can produce tons of vegetables for your family, which can provide the backbone of your diet and store them easily. If you work in conjunction with local grocers, you may be able to fill in most of the rest of your diet, leaving more expensive options for rarer occasions.

Good luck on your move!

Gretchen writes in: I have a grain grinder and I make my own whole wheat bread using freshly ground grains. The taste is so good but how does grinding grains compare to just buying whole wheat flour? Although I don’t think I could go back to store bought flour because the taste is so much better.

Honestly, this is something I’ve been thinking about doing. I would love to make bread using freshly ground grains in exactly the method you described, mixing grains the way I would like them. I’ve never really thought about it from a money-saving perspective, though, so I guess it’s time to run the numbers on that.

I can get a sack of whole wheat flour weighing five pounds for $1.50 to $3, depending on what I get. The brand I’m most happy with is King Arthur, which comes in at around $3 a bag, while the generic is at about $1.50 a bag. We’ll use the King Arthur kind for comparison’s sake here, because the purpose of doing this is to have higher quality flour.

A five pound bag of flour has about twenty cups of flour in it. My homemade bread recipe uses a little over three cups of flour, so I’d get enough flour for about six loaves of bread out of one bag. That gives me a cost-per-loaf for just the flour of $0.50.

A home grain grinder can cost around $20. It’s extremely similar to a home coffee grinder, actually, in that it takes larger grains and grinds them into a fine powder. Both devices even look fairly similar.

Now, let’s look at an example of wheat. You can get whole wheat berries dried for approximately $1.10 per pound. This was the best price I could find by asking around and searching websites – it was suggested by a person at a local food co-op.

In this case, to get five pounds of flour, you’d need five pounds of wheat berries, costing $5.50. You’d also need to pro-rate in a bit of the cost of the grinder (say, $0.05 if you use it a lot) and the energy cost (say, $0.02). This gives you a cost per loaf of about $0.93 for flour you grind yourself.

So, clearly, buying flour at the store is less expensive than grinding it yourself, at least in the quantities that you’d be able to do it at home. The large flour manufacturers work on an enormous scale and thus are able to buy the wheat at a much lower price than we’d be able to.

This isn’t to say that you won’t have access to less expensive grains. I can easily get access to dry corn for an extremely low price. I have farmer friends who would sell me a bushel of corn kernels for $7 or $8 – that’s 56 pounds of corn. If I’m interested in making corn meal at home, this would be an incredibly inexpensive way of doing it. If I had access directly to a wheat farmer, I could probably make a similar deal. (For some reason, I’m tempted to make homemade corn bread now.)

In other words, you probably can make flour at home cheaper than you can buy in the store if you have direct access to wholesale grain prices. The problem is that most of us don’t have this kind of access.

Regardless of the price, if you’re the type of person who deeply enjoys making things from scratch, this isn’t a terribly uneconomical thing to do. If you have the right sources, it can even be the less expensive option.

Either way, it’s inexpensive enough that I’m tempted to get a grain grinder and try to make a truly from-scratch loaf of bread.

At this point in late September, we’re starting to reach that point of using what things are still coming in from the garden along with the things we can find in our freezer and pantry to make new dishes. We’re also starting to move into more “fall”-type dishes, such as heartier soups and stews.

Our vegetarian gumbo is a great example of all of these things at once.

What You Need
You’ll need a half a cup of flour and a half a cup of your preferred vegetable oil to make the roux, a key flavorful part of the gumbo. You’ll also need a variety of vegetables – we used a small onion, a small bell pepper, a stalk of celery, a diced tomato, a handful of green beans, two sliced carrots, a handful of sliced okra, and a bit of cumin, paprika, and oregano for spicing. This will all be served over rice, so you’ll also need that.

The Night Before (or Early That Day)
The biggest preparatory step you can take is to simply chop up all of your vegetables in advance. This is a great prep step that you can always do the evening before or the morning before a meal prep.

Preparing the Meal
The first step is to get your rice cooking so that it’s ready when the gumbo is finished. Rice is quite simple to prepare, so I won’t focus on the details of that here.

The next step is to make the roux, which is essentially just a mix of flour and fat. Since we’re making a vegetarian gumbo, your fat will come in the form of a vegetable oil. Simply stir together the flour and oil over medium-high heat for about ten minutes, constantly stirring, until it begins to turn a bit of a caramel color, something like this (I perhaps added a bit too much flour to the roux here, but it’s workable).

As soon as you have roux, add the stiffer vegetables (like the onion, bell pepper, and celery) and cook for another five minutes, stirring a lot at the start to distribute the roux, then regularly thereafter.

At this point, add all of the remaining ingredients and about four cups of water. Stir thouroughly and then let it simmer for about forty minutes, stirring regularly.

When everything’s finished and the vegetables are tender (the carrots are probably the best ones to check), simply put some rice in a bowl or on a plate and pour some of the gumbo on top. Delicious! We served it with a fruit medley.

Optional Ingredients
You can get away with using pretty much any vegetable in gumbo, though I would consider tomatoes and onions to be pretty essential, and okra to be nearly so. Simply use up whatever your garden is providing or whatever vegetables you can easily acquire.

If you wish to add meat, you can easily add sausage and chicken to this meal. Cook the sausage and chicken in the pan before you do anything else. Remove the meat and leave the fats behind, using them as the “fat” portion of the roux that you make by simply adding flour to the liquid in the pan after you remove the meat and stirring it rapidly.