Saving Pennies or Dollars is a new semi-regular series on The Simple Dollar, inspired by a great discussion on The Simple Dollar’s Facebook page concerning frugal tactics that might not really save that much money. I’m going to take some of the scenarios described by the readers there and try to break down the numbers to see if the savings is really worth the time invested.

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.

Saving Pennies or Dollars is a new semi-regular series on The Simple Dollar, inspired by a great discussion on The Simple Dollar’s Facebook page concerning frugal tactics that might not really save that much money. I’m going to take some of the scenarios described by the readers there and try to break down the numbers to see if the savings is really worth the time invested.

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.

Saving Pennies or Dollars is a new semi-regular series on The Simple Dollar, inspired by a great discussion on The Simple Dollar’s Facebook page concerning frugal tactics that might not really save that much money. I’m going to take some of the scenarios described by the readers there and try to break down the numbers to see if the savings is really worth the time invested.

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.

Each week, I’ll present a low-cost meal (or a meal that demonstrates a lot of options for cutting costs) that my family eats for dinner and enjoys. Many of the recipes will be vegan or vegetarian, with options to add other ingredients for non-vegetarians.

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.

Saving Pennies or Dollars is a new semi-regular series on The Simple Dollar, inspired by a great discussion on The Simple Dollar’s Facebook page concerning frugal tactics that might not really save that much money. I’m going to take some of the scenarios described by the readers there and try to break down the numbers to see if the savings is really worth the time invested.

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.

Each week, I’ll present a low-cost meal (or a meal that demonstrates a lot of options for cutting costs) that my family eats for dinner and enjoys. Many of the recipes will be vegan or vegetarian, with options to add other ingredients for non-vegetarians.

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.

Saving Pennies or Dollars is a new semi-regular series on The Simple Dollar, inspired by a great discussion on The Simple Dollar’s Facebook page concerning frugal tactics that might not really save that much money. I’m going to take some of the scenarios described by the readers there and try to break down the numbers to see if the savings is really worth the time invested.

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).

Each week, I’ll present a low-cost meal (or a meal that demonstrates a lot of options for cutting costs) that my family eats for dinner and enjoys. Many of the recipes will be vegan or vegetarian, with options to add other ingredients for non-vegetarians.

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.