I love oatmeal. I eat it for breakfast probably five days a week. It’s a very healthy fuel to get your motor running for the day, plus it can be very tasty if it’s made well.

Whenever I find myself using something almost every day, I begin to wonder if I can’t reduce the cost of it somehow. This led me down the path of making my own instant oatmeal packets. Could I make them as well as (or even better than) the instant Quaker Oats packets for a cheaper price?

The answer is … sort of. For me (and for anyone else who consistently eats oatmeal for breakfast), the answer is emphatically yes - you can make packets significantly cheaper and far tastier over the long haul. For people who might eat oatmeal once a week or less, though, you’re likely better off buying the Quaker Oats packets.

Here’s the plan.

The Basic Recipe
All you really need to make your own basic oatmeal packets at home are instant (ready to eat in one minute) oatmeal, salt, and sealable baggies to store them in - you might also want sugar or another sweetener if you wish to pre-sweeten the oatmeal.

The procedure is really easy. Just add 1/4 of a cup of the oats and a pinch of salt (1/8 of a teaspoon if you must measure it) to each baggie. Out of that container there, you’d get about 48 bags. I also like to pre-add a bit of sugar to it - about 1/2 of a teaspoon. You can choose to add none at all or add another sweetener like Splenda at your own discretion.

These will result in basic oatmeal packets very similar to the “regular” oatmeal packets sold by Quaker Oats. If you like the basic oatmeal with no changes, this is a very cheap route to go - since you can re-use the baggies, the only recurring cost over a realistic timeframe is the oatmeal itself - a bag of sugar and a canister of salt will last you effectively forever with this recipe.

Flavoring It Up
Of course, I like to flavor it up.

On the left are the ingredients for cinnamon-raisin packets. On the right are ingredients for blueberries & cream packets - dried blueberries and fat-free non-dairy creamer. Why not powdered milk? It tends to potentially mold and have other bad effects if left in baggies for too long - Coffee Mate is an excellent substitute.

For my cinnamon-raisin packets, I just add about 1/4 of a teaspoon of cinnamon and about two dozen raisins to each bag. For the blueberry packets, I add a tablespoon of the creamer and about a dozen and a half blueberries. Perfect.

Here’s a finished blueberries and cream packet:

The nice part is you can basically make anything you want if you’re making your own packets. You can experiment as your heart desires - any dried fruit pieces, any seasonings you can find - anything. I’ve actually made batches of cranberry oatmeal using dried cranberries in the past - I love it, but it’s not something you see sold on store shelves.

Adding the ingredients yourself make for tastier packets. The pre-mixed packets that Quaker sells seem to use low-quality versions of the added ingredients. For example, the dried blueberries in this packet are way better than the blueberries used in the Quaker Oats packets, resulting in a much tastier blueberry oatmeal.

Storing the packets is easy, too. Just stuff the baggies into the oat canister. That’ll hold 80% of the baggies - just sit the rest next to them and eat those first. Problem solved.

I Like It Thicker
One thing I don’t like about the Quaker Oats packet in the stores is that the oatmeal is almost always too thin. Personally, I like thick oatmeal, the kind that reminds me of the stuff my great grandma used to make at her house.

Since you’re making your own baggies, you can make it nice and thick, too. All you have to do is puree some of the dry oatmeal in your handy-dandy blender.

Put in about a quarter of a cup at a time and put it on puree for about ten seconds. You end up with oatmeal powder.

Then, just add a tablespoon of this powder to each baggie to make it thicker. I actually add two tablespoons to each baggie - that makes it really, really thick - just how I like it!

Here’s the bowl of thick blueberries and cream oatmeal I had for breakfast this morning:

I just dumped the baggie into the bowl (saving the baggie for reuse, of course), added about a quarter of a cup of skim milk, and microwaved it for about sixty seconds. Nice and thick and warm and delicious.

Cost Analysis
I wound up making 42 baggies with this batch. Normally, one would make 48 baggies out of a normal-sized canister of instant oatmeal, but I pureed enough of the oatmeal to make only 42.

15 of the baggies were blueberries and cream and 27 were cinnamon-raisin.

Unsurprisingly, there were a lot of ingredients left over:

I used all of the oatmeal and all of the blueberries, but I still had almost a full container of salt, an almost full container of cinnamon, an almost full container of sugar, a 2/3 full container of Coffee Mate, half a box of raisins, and 58 Glad baggies.

This means that if I were to make a second batch, I’d only need to replace the oatmeal and the blueberries. Since I can reuse the baggies and I have enough salt and sugar to last effectively forever, those are sunk startup costs - after that, you just need to replace oatmeal and the flavorings when you need to - and most of the flavorings will last for multiple batches.

Batch 1 - More Expensive
Of course, the first batch was a bit more expensive per packet than just buying the Quaker Oats packet. Here’s my receipt from Fareway for the stuff for 42 homemade packets:

The cost per homemade packet during the first run is $0.46 per packet. The cost would have been $0.43 per packet had I not ground up some of the packets to thicken some of the others. We’ll figure up costs for future runs in a minute.

What about the time cost? It took me about thirty minutes of mindless work to make these packets. I spent the entire time making them on the phone with my mother - I just conversed with her while my hands were busy with… well, busywork. Thus, I don’t consider the time sink to be significant.

How about the Quaker Oats packet? To control for location and store differences, I bought a box of packets at Fareway to compare the price:

The cost per packet for Quaker Oats is $0.30 per packet. Yep, the prepackaged ones are cheaper at first. But let’s keep looking.

Batch 2 and Future Batches - Less Expensive
The kicker with making your own packets is that they get cheaper on future runs. You don’t have to buy the sugar, the salt, or the baggies any more. Let’s say I made another identical batch to the one above - 42 packets. Using what I have on hand, I only have to repurchase the oats - $2.99 - and the blueberries - $3.29. The second homemade batch has a cost per packet of $0.15 - way cheaper than the prepared packets. In fact, averaging the two costs ends up with an average cost per homemade packet after two runs being almost identical to the cost of buying prepared packets - $0.30. If I had not ground up some of the oatmeal to make thicker packets, it would have been cheaper - $0.28 per packet.

Runs beyond the second further reduce the cost. And when you consider the flexibility of your homemade packets - and the fact that they taste far better - it becomes a pretty clear bargain after a while.

Reducing the Costs
Even more important, I didn’t optimize my ingredient purchases very well. A bit of optimization shaves off a lot of the cost.

The biggest way to save more money is to buy a giant canister of the oatmeal rather than a fairly small canister. Buying the oatmeal in bulk cuts down on the cost per packet significantly. Similar logic applies to some of the ingredients - if you particularly like blueberries in your oatmeal, for instance, buying them in bulk cuts down on costs, too.

Also, re-use the baggies. There’s no reason not to here - you’re only storing dry ingredients in them. Use them again.

Another tip - buy snack-sized baggies instead of sandwich baggies. I bought sandwich baggies in the example above because the store’s baggie selection was small - snack baggies are cheaper, easier to store, and hold an oatmeal packet easily.

All of these tips can trim the cost significantly, particularly on future batches.

Conclusion
If you or your family eat a lot of oatmeal, making your own packets is a cost-saver over the long haul - plus they make for tastier packets. In our house, I eat oatmeal four to five times a week, plus my son eats it twice a week and my wife perhaps once a week. That makes eight packets a week. In ten weeks, homemade packets become cheaper per packet. In twenty weeks, we’re now saving, on average, a dime for every packet we’ve eaten - $16. After that, it’s just gravy - another $1 or so each week saved while eating better oatmeal packets.

The key, though, is that your family eats a lot of oatmeal. If they don’t, then making your own packets probably won’t be cost-effective for you.

Over the last year, I’ve gradually moved more and more towards making my own food at home. There are several reasons for this: it tastes better, it reduces preservative intake, it’s more nutritious, and it’s often substantially cheaper than what you find in the store. It does take time, but once you get used to it, most food preparation doesn’t take much more time than going to the store, buying it, taking it home, popping it out of the package, and following the directions.

Breadmaking is a prime example of this phenomenon. Homemade bread is substantially tastier than store-purchased bread, isn’t laden with preservatives, is very inexpensive to make, and doesn’t take all that much time, either.

The Problems With Industrial Bread

Most people in the United States today view the bread purchased at the supermarket as what bread should be. The actual truth is that the bread you buy in the supermarket has the texture and substance that it has for one reason and one reason alone: so that it can be made on an industrial scale and not grow “old” on the shelf at your supermarket.

There are two big explanations for this. The industrial scale process is designed to maximize profit while still producing an edible loaf of bread on the table. This is done by using an excessive amount of yeast in order to create lots of air bubbles in the bread, hence the “light” texture of store-purchased bread. It also allows for the use of lower-quality grains because of this yeast abundance, thus the bread is far from nutrient-rich. In the United States, most recipes are trade secrets, but in the United Kingdom, the standard recipe, known as the Chorleywood Bread Process, is widely known. The goal of this process is to make a loaf of bread as cheaply as possible, foregoing flavor, nutrition, and texture along the way.

The other bothersome part of industrial breadmaking is the appearance of a healthy dose of preservatives. These preservatives are there solely to extend the shelf life of the bread, again reducing costs for the manufacturer. Every time you eat a piece of store-purchased bread, you’re getting a healthy dose of preservatives with each bite.

Take a look at the ingredient list from a loaf of Home Pride butter top honey wheat bread, a fairly standard store-purchased loaf in my area. I bolded some of the ingredients.

Enriched wheat flour (flour, barley malt, ferrous sulfate (iron), “B” vitamins (niacin, thaimine mononitrate (B1), riboflavin (B2), folic acid)), water, sweetener (high fructose corn syrup or sugar), yeast, wheat bran, whole wheat flour, wheat gluten, molasses. Contains 2% or less of: soybean oil, salt, sweet dairy whey, butter (cream, salt, enzymes), maltodextrin, honey, corn syrup, calcium sulfate, soy flur, dough conditioners (may contain: dicalcium phosphate, calcium dioxide, sodium stearoyl lactylate, ethoxylated mono and diglycerides, mono and diglycerides, and/or datem), yeast nutrients (may contain: ammonium sulfate, ammonium chloride, calcium carbonate, monocalcium phosphate, and/or ammonium phosphate), cornstarch, wheat starch, vinegar, natural flavor, beta carotene (color), enzymes, calcium propionate (to retain freshness), soy lecithin.

That’s what a slice of store-purchased bread contains.

How to Make Your Own Tasty Homemade Bread, Easily and Cheaply

What I’ve found is that many people are simply intimidated by the seemingly complex and work-intensive process of making bread. It seems difficult and loaded with steps and significant work.

In fact, bread is quite easy to make at home, and you only need a few staple ingredients to make a simple loaf. Here’s exactly how to make a delicious loaf at home from scratch.

What you see on the table there is every ingredient and piece of equipment that you need to make a loaf of bread (except the oven). Nothing complicated at all, just basic ingredients that you can often get very inexpensively at your local grocery store. In fact, the ingredients on that table (except for the yeast) is enough to make several loaves of bread.

Here’s the equipment you need…
One large mixing bowl A second one is useful, but optional - you can get by with one if you’re willing to wash it in the middle of the process.
One spoon You need a spoon to stir the dough.
One measuring cup A 1/4 or 1/2 cup measuring cup will do the job.
One measuring spoon A one-teaspoon measurer will be just perfect.
One bread pan Obviously, to bake the bread in.
One hand towel This is just to cover the bread dough as it rises so it doesn’t get drafts or dust or anything on it.

That’s all you need, and it’s all stuff that’s pretty common in most kitchens.

Now, for the food ingredients…
1/4 cup milk
5 teaspoons sugar (or 1 1/2 tablespoons)
1 teaspoons salt
5 teaspoons butter (or 1 1/2 tablespoons)
1 package active dry yeast (you can get yeast near the flour at your local grocery store)
2 1/2 to 3 1/2 cups flour (get unbleached white for your first attempt)
Corn starch or nonstick cooking spray (just to prevent the bread from sticking to the bowl or pan)

That’s all you need for homemade bread, period. There are some neat things you can do with added ingredients, which I’ll talk about later, but all you need is that stuff. Nothing complicated or “secret” or confusing at all.

Ordinarily when baking bread, I would mix the dough with my KitchenAid stand mixer, but making bread is easy enough that this is just a convenience, not a requirement by any means. Basically, instead of doing the kneading and stirring described below, I just flip a switch and this machine does it for me.

OK, let’s get started. First, you should warm up the bowl - the best way to do that is to just fill it with hot water, then dump out the hot water, leaving the bowl rather warm. Then, mix up the yeast according to the directions on the packet. Usually, it will say something along the lines of “add a cup of warm water to the yeast and stir.” What you’ll end up with is some tan-colored water with some bubbles in it, as shown above. You should stir this until there are no lumps in the yeast.

Melt the butter in the microwave, then add it, the milk, the sugar, and the salt to the yeast liquid and stir it up until everything looks the same (a very light tan liquid). Then add two cups of flour to the mix - don’t add the rest yet. Your bowl should look something like what’s shown above, where I have the spoon on board ready to stir.

Start stirring, and then add the flour about 1/4 cup at a time every minute or so. It will stick to the spoon big time at first - don’t worry about it. Keep stirring and adding flour until the dough is still slightly sticky, but it doesn’t stick to your hands in any significant way. Also, it should largely clean the sides of the bowl, leaving just a thin layer of floury stuff. It’ll look something like the above.

Now comes the fun part: kneading. Take a bit of flour between your hands and then rub them together over the top of an area on the table where you’re going to knead the dough. Do this a few times until there’s an area on the table lightly covered in flour. Then grab the dough ball out of the bowl, slap it down on the table, and start beating on it. Do this for ten minutes. Just take the dough, punch it flat, then fold it back up into a ball again, and repeat several times. I also like to take it in my hands and squeeze and twist it.

When the ten minutes are up, shape it into a ball (like shown above), then either clean up the bowl you were using before or get out another bowl. Either coat the inside lightly with corn starch or nonstick cooking spray, depending on your preference, then put the ball of dough inside the bowl.

Put a cloth over the bowl and sit it somewhere fairly warm for an hour. If you have a warming area on your stove top, that’s a great place to put it - set the warming area on as low as it will go, as I’m doing in the picture above. This is a good time to clean everything else and put the stuff away, but leave the flour out and the floured area on your table untouched.

Here’s what the dough looks like before rising…

… and then an hour later after rising, still in the bowl…

It should be roughly double the size that it was before, but don’t sweat it too much if it’s larger or smaller than that, as long as it rose at least some amount. Punch the dough down (three or four good whacks will cause it to shrink back down to normal), then lay the dough out on the floured area and spread it out in a rectangle shape, with one side being roughly the length of the bread pan and the other side being about a bread pan and a half long.

You may need to put a bit more flour on it and on the table to prevent sticking. Then, roll it up! The roll should be roughly the same size as the bread pan, as shown below.

Tuck the ends of the roll underneath, with the “under” side being where the seam is. Then spray the bread pan down with nonstick cooking spray (or coat it with cornmeal) and put the loaf inside of the pan.

Cover that loaf up with the towel, put it back where it was before, and wait another hour. This is a good time to clean everything up, then go do something else fun. The loaf should raise some more:

Put that loaf in the oven at 400 degrees Fahrenheit (200 degrees Celsius) for thirty minutes. When it’s done, pull it out and immediately remove it from the pan to cool. It’ll look something like this, hopefully.

Let it cool down completely before slicing.

This bread will make mind-blowing toast. Seriously, pop a slice in the toaster, get it golden brown, and spread a bit of butter or margarine on it. Truly, truly sublime.

On Beyond the Basic White Loaf

If you get into making your own bread (and why not? It’s inexpensive, tasty, and healthy), you’ll eventually want to start experimenting. Here are some tips I’ve learned over the last year or so.

Different flours work differently. If you try making a rye bread or a whole wheat bread, you’ll discover the flour has different properties. Just stick with adding it slowly to the bowl until it’s just barely not sticking to your hands, and you’ll be fine. Whole wheat flour, for instance, generally requires about half a cup less flour than white flour to reach the right point.

For a delicious Italian bread, replace the salt with garlic salt and before you start stirring, add in some Italian seasonings, like oregano and rosemary - or an Italian seasoning mix.

You can easily double this recipe and make two loaves at once. The time investment is virtually the same and you get twice the bread.

Eventually, you’ll start really experimenting. Making pizza dough from scratch is similarly easy, as are cinnamon rolls. I’ve reached the point where I feel confident making most bread recipes in the oven (except for sourdough loaves, which always seem to turn out wrong).

What’s the take home? Baking homemade bread is a very worthwhile thing to try. It’s inexpensive, healthy, and teaches you a lot about how to cook at home. Best of all (for me, anyway), it makes mindblowingly good toast - I love to start off my day with a slice of toast made from homemade bread and a cup of tea.

About two weeks ago, I made a brief comparison between a McDonald’s Value Menu double cheeseburger and a homemade cheeseburger, concluding that the homemade one was price competitive. This brought out a ton of commentary from people standing up for the double cheeseburger (as well as fast food critics) questioning the conclusion.

After reading through all these comments, I decided there was only one thing to do: do the thing right.

So I headed to McDonalds.

While there, I bought a single double cheeseburger for $1.06 after tax. I had to wait for a bit to get the double cheeseburger, as there were three people in line in front of me. From the time I stepped out of my vehicle and I got back into my vehicle, I spent eleven minutes at McDonald’s.

I got home, opened up my bag, and here’s what I found:

I will confess that this doesn’t appeal to me at all, although I know that these double cheeseburgers have a lot of fans. I smelled it, shrugged my shoulders, and looked up the nutrition facts (found here at McDonalds.com):

Serving Size: 5.8 oz
Calories: 440
Calories From Fat: 210
Total Fat: 23 grams
% Daily Value: 35%
Saturated Fat: 11 grams
% Daily Value: 54%
Trans Fat: 1.5 grams
% Daily Value: 80%
Cholesterol: 80 grams
% Daily Value: 26%

I don’t really need to go on from there - from a health perspective, it’s definitely worth being concerned about. I did note the serving size - the single cheeseburger is 4 ounces, while the double cheeseburger is 5.8 ounces. That means a beef patty at McDonald’s has a weight of 1.8 ounces and a double cheeseburger has 3.6 ounces of meat. In other words, you can make just about five patties at home out of one pound of beef - each of these patties would have the same amount of beef as a McDonalds’ double cheeseburger.

I opened up the double cheeseburger to see what ingredients were on it:

I spy two slices of cheese, ketchup, diced onions, and some slices of pickles. So, in order to construct a similar burger at home, I need hamburger meat, buns, cheese, ketchup, onions, and pickles.

A confession: I can’t stand ketchup. I like homemade ketchup alright (basically tomatoes boiled down into a thick paste with some vinegar and a bit of spicing), but the store stuff, with high fructose corn syrup as the third ingredient, makes my stomach turn. So, even though it will increase the cost for my own burgers in this price comparison, I’m going to substitute a slice of fresh tomato for that ketchup.

Off to the store. I bought these items as part of a regular shopping excursion, so the time for buying these items was maybe two minutes. I went shopping at a Dahl’s grocery store.

First, I shopped for hamburger meat, and there were several options:

The cheapest option was 80/20 meat at $1.99 a pound. 80/20 means that the meat consists of 20% fat. Since that was the cheapest option, I went for that one, though I would normally tend to spend more and get a pound of the 97/3 meat, which is far healthier.

Here’s the nutrition facts on the 80/20 meat I bought, per one fifth of a pound (I did the conversion from the one ounce numbers), if I were to broil it. I’m actually intending to grill it, which is far healthier as it allows much of the fat to drip away.

Serving Size: 3.2 oz
Calories: 243
Calories From Fat: 144
Total Fat: 16 grams
% Daily Value: 24%
Saturated Fat: 6 grams
% Daily Value: 30%
Trans Fat: 0 grams
% Daily Value: 0%
Cholesterol: 80 milligrams
% Daily Value: 26%

A patty of the 80/20 stuff, even if you just prepare it by broiling it instead of grilling it, is roughly as healthy as the meat on a McDonald’s double cheeseburger.

What about the cheese? Again, several options:

I ended up buying the American slices for $1.89 for 16 slices, which you can check the nutrition facts on here. If you tack the cheese onto the meat, you start to approach the nutritional levels of the McDonald’s double cheeseburger, but this again assumes that you broil the meat instead of grilling it (grilling it is far better for you).

I then picked up a jar of pickles for $2.49, a package of hamburger buns for $1.99 (this was overpriced), an onion for about $0.40, and a tomato for about $0.40. These ingredients are all very healthy, so I won’t reiterate the nutrition facts on these items - the “bad” ingredients are the cheese and the meat.

My total grocery bill for all ingredients was $9.16. Here’s what I bought:

I can assemble five double cheeseburgers from this material. Let’s get started on the cooking.

I pattied and got the burgers on the grill in about two minutes, then I spent the ten minutes that they grilled slicing the tomatoes and dicing the onions and opening up cheese slices. With twelve minutes of effort, here’s the food I had:

So what did this homemade cheeseburger end up looking like? Here’s the opened view, with a giant pickle slice on it:

Note the tomato slice instead of ketchup, a personal choice that makes the burger more healthy, more tasty (for me), but more expensive. Here’s what it looks like assembled:

And here’s that McDonald’s double cheeseburger for comparison:

I’ll allow you to draw your own conclusions.

After eating the meal, though, I had quite a bit of food left over:

That’s six slices of cheese, most of a diced onion, almost all of a jar of pickles (which will last for a long time), and three buns. I have almost all of the ingredients for more sandwiches with the cost already covered!

What about the time? Let’s assume that you’re going to make these burgers at home, and intend to eat them over two meals. It took:
two minutes to shop for the supplies
two minutes to make the patties and get them on the grill
ten minutes for the patties to cook and to prepare the other stuff
one minute to reheat the leftover cheeseburgers later to build more sandwiches
one minute for cleanup (with a dishwasher)

That’s a total of sixteen minutes for the homemade cheeseburger. How about the McDonald’s version? It took me eleven minutes for the burger I bought, so if I went there twice for cheeseburgers for two meals, that’s a total of twenty two minutes for McDonald’s.

That’s right, it was more time-effective to make the homemade cheeseburgers and enjoy them again later than it was to go to McDonald’s twice and pick up the double cheeseburgers.

What about the cost? The burger I assembled above cost $1.83, while the McDonald’s double cheeseburger was $1.06. However, there are a few factors that aren’t considered in those numbers.

First, the homemade burger was healthier. It was grilled, and thus much of the fat dripped out of it. The nutrition facts numbers above consider only a broiled burger, not a grilled one.

Second, the homemade burger had leftovers. That cost per burger assumed no leftovers, but I had most of a diced onion, almost all of a jar of pickles, six slices of cheese, and three hamburger buns left over. Without much more, I can make another meal out of these ingredients - just give me some cold cuts, for instance.

Third, the homemade burger had many more options. I can do whatever I want with my homemade burger in terms of options - for example, I made the audible switching the ketchup for a tomato slice.

Lastly, the homemade burger was far, far tastier (at least for me). I tasted them side by side and it wasn’t even close. Of course, this really is a matter of opinion.

For me, these factors make the homemade cheeseburger blow away the McDonald’s double cheeseburger. I might spend pennies more on the homemade cheeseburger when all the costs are considered, but the healthiness, the flavor, the configurability, and the surprising time efficiency makes the homemade cheeseburger.

What do you think of McDonald’s? Basically, I’m indifferent. I think fast food restaurants fill a role and have some big benefits (convenience, mostly), but it is my belief that the other factors that are negatives towards fast food should usually swing things back towards preparing food at home.

The take home point? Don’t eat fast food because you believe it to be “cheap.” The only real advantage of fast food is convenience - in the end, it has almost nothing to do with money. In fact, if you choose anything but the absolute best value on the menu - which the McDonald’s double cheeseburger might be - it’s going to be far more expensive to eat fast food than eat at home.

A technical note: morels are technically considered to be a cup fungi, a relative of the mushroom but biologically distinct. In this essay, I’m using anecdotal and folk terminology rather than strict biological and taxonomical accuracy.

In the past, I made a reference to a friend who hunted for mushrooms in the forest as a profitable enterprise, and I went on to mention that I, in fact, did the same, the only difference being that I generally hunted them for fun and for eating. For me, morel hunting is a fun exercise that’s free and can potentially result in a free, delicious meal or on occasion some surprising profit.

The idea of this struck a chord with several of my readers, so when late April and early May rolled around in Iowa, I took a digital camera along on several of my morel hunting trips in order to give an idea of what the process is like, as well as give some idea of how to prepare them and also an indication of the surprising value of these forest edibles.

Please, if you’re not sure what you’re doing, don’t try this at home. This is a folk art I learned from my grandfather and there is a lot of danger involved in picking fungi in the forest, taking them home with you, and eating them. If you don’t know what you’re doing, you can become extremely ill and kill yourself. Do not attempt this!

First of all, morels are a type of fungus that grows naturally in forested areas in North America and Europe in the early spring. They’re most easily found in an area where a forest fire has occurred two or three years past, but with some effort, small numbers can be found in any forest. From my experience, they tend to grow well near sycamores and fallen elms. They are quite delicious and are especially prized in French cuisine. Even more interesting, they have never been grown successfully and can only be found in the wild. I invite you to read the Wikipedia entry for morels for more information.

Each spring, I tromp around in the woods looking for these delicious fungi. They’re a bit of a challenge to find, making it a fun adventure to hunt for them. Plus, they are delicious (they make a stellar gravy, complement beef very well, and are also tasty fried on their own) and they are also quite valuable due to their culinary use and lack of growth in captivity - which I mention in more detail below.

Before I go out on a hunt, I make sure to get permission. The DNS rules vary from area to area in terms of whether or not they can be picked on state land - in my area, they cannot. As a result, I have to look for them on privately owned forested areas.

One of the best parts of hunting for morels is that it’s a great excuse to take a walk in the woods and admire the beauty of early spring. Here’s a violet growing in the wild. Interestingly, violets are edible if you ever find yourself in the woods and desperate.

Here, I stumble across a bracket or shelf fungus. These generally grow on the side of trees in the forest, both standing trees and fallen trees. While there are a few of these that are edible - my uncle is particularly fond of a bright red type of shelf fungus that I’ve tried in the past - I don’t trust them as many of them are inedible or poisonous. So we’ll move on.

Here’s a puffball fungus that has been apparently nudged pretty severely by an animal of some sort. Puffballs are fungi that you’ll often find in the forest that grow quite large, then eventually “pop” and spray spores everywhere after some period of growth (days to weeks). My wife thought this might have been one that popped, but it looks to me like an animal was investigating it.

Paydirt! In the picture above, you’ll see a morel growing in the forest right in the center of the picture. You can click on the picture to get a larger view of it. Generally, when there’s one, you’ll find more of them nearby, so I started looking around very carefully.

Unfortunately, I didn’t find any morels nearby, but what I did find was a garter snake, another interesting example of forest life. In the picture above, you’ll see that same morel in the lower left along with a garter snake in the middle near the top. The garter snake is a bit tough to see, but trust me, it’s there. Garter snakes are very common and relatively harmless - just leave them alone and you’ll be fine. That’s not to say I didn’t have a pet garter snake when I was a child.

Here’s a picture of my haul from one afternoon. As soon as I got home, I washed them carefully and laid them out one at a time on a paper towel as I washed the rest. This eliminates a lot of the spores and dirt on them.

Next, I slice them in half horizontally and put them in a bowl full of water with some salt in it. In this environment, morels can remain in the refrigerator safely for up to 48 hours. After that, it’s up to you to decide how to prepare them. Here’s a large collection of morel recipes.

Unless you’re skilled or quite lucky, morel hunting isn’t very profitable for the time involved, but the photo above gives a good indication of the kind of money you can make. The above picture shows half an ounce of dried morels, which add up to about four or five ounces when hydrated. For comparison’s sake, I had about a pound of them above. This small amount of dried morels is selling for $14.99. Check the price tag in the picture.

I hope this was an interesting introduction to a fun, frugal activity. If you’re interested in trying it for yourself, I highly recommend asking around for a guide. Contact your state’s Department of Natural Resources if you don’t know where to begin - they may be able to point you in the right direction. Do not go out in the woods and start picking fungi without knowing what you’re doing, however; some fungi are poisonous.

This morning, I went grocery shopping with my son and took my digital camera along to record the experience of grocery shopping with a penny-pincher. Let’s see how it went - maybe we’ll both learn something.

Welcome to Hy Vee! I went shopping at the Hy-Vee grocery store in Ankeny, Iowa, a northern suburb of Des Moines. Hy-Vee is a midwestern grocery chain that is almost ubiquitous in Iowa. There are many, many Hy-Vees in the greater Des Moines area; I like this one because it’s fairly new, very clean, and the prices are competitive right now due to a new Fareway that opened up about two blocks away. Generally, stores where a new competitor is opening nearby are a good place to shop because they trim their prices quite a bit so that when people inevitably try the new place, they’ll remember the lower prices at the other, more familiar store.

On grocery lists I prepare a grocery list before I leave the house. In this case, the list roughly matches the route I’ll take through the store, except for two items that I’m unsure about (I guessed where they were on the list). I usually head to the farthest point from the checkouts immediately and then work towards the checkout. Since the milk is in the back of the store, I head there first.

On comparing generics to name brands The first purchase I want to look at is Crystal Light, which is what my wife and I used to replace soda in our diet. It’s healthier and cheaper for us. I need to buy a variety of flavors, though, so we have enough to last a while and don’t get sick of the same flavor. Quite often, we will buy the store brand of Crystal Light, Hy-Vee Thirst Splashers, because most of the time it’s a lot cheaper per quart. Today, however, the eight quart containers of Crystal Light are on sale! The Crystal Light containers are $2 a pop, while the Thirst Splashers are $2.33 a pop. Clearly, the eight quart Crystal Light is a better deal here (and the flavors are better, too). But what about a size comparison?

The larger twelve quart size of Crystal Light is almost double the price of the eight ounce size. Clearly the eight ounce name brand is the best choice here, so I stock up on them, particularly on the flavors that we don’t usually buy because they’re not available in the generic brand.

On size comparisons I used to be of the belief that the larger size was always cheaper per ounce, but in fact this is not true on a pretty regular basis. Here, I’m shopping for Life cereal (my favorite cereal which I eat for breakfast multiple times a week). Here, you can clearly see that the 21 ounce box of Life cereal costs $3.88. I happen to have a coupon for fifty cents off, but I’ve bought Life pretty often, and I know even without calculating that it’s pretty high per ounce, even with the coupon, so I keep walking.

Not much further down, things get better for me and my Life cereal. Here is a 15 ounce box for $2.00. With my coupon, that makes it only $1.50 for a box. I pounce and toss a box in my cart, even though I find the child on the box somehow vaguely disconcerting.

My wife, on the other hand, insists on Special K cereal. Here, I have a 12 ounce box of Special K for $3.66. That comes out to $0.305 per ounce. However, I also have a coupon for 50 cents off a box of Special K. With that coupon, it’s $0.263 per ounce. Is that better than the larger size?

Right next to the first Special K box, we have a 16.7 ounce box of Special K for $4.98. That makes it $0.2982 per ounce, cheaper than the smaller box. With the coupon, though, it’s $0.2683 per ounce, which is more expensive per ounce than the smaller box. So which do I choose? I go with the absolute cheapest rate I can get per ounce, which happens to be the smaller box with the coupon. If I didn’t have the coupon with me, it would have been the larger box.

In short, a pocket calculator can be really really useful at the grocery store. I usually make several such calculations on a shopping trip, ones that are close enough that I can’t quickly determine with just a glance which is the best deal.

On shopping with children Near the end of the trip, I was walking down an aisle toward the checkout when my son spotted his favorite snack in the whole world: goldfish crackers. He nearly dove out of the cart reaching for them. He doesn’t eat them at a very high rate, though, so the big packages get stale before he gets through them. Thus, we buy small packages of them. We also buy him the whole grain kind because it’s better for his digestive system.

Of course, the problem is that he wants something that’s not necessarily a need. Although he’s young enough now that he doesn’t realize that there is a cost for these items, I do want to teach him that just because he wants something, he doesn’t always get it, either. This happens to be about the twentieth thing he’s almost dove out of the cart for, though, and when I’ve walked away from other things, he has been perfectly fine with it. He also happens to be nearly out of goldfish crackers; we have a plastic goldfish container in his diaper bag, which I checked and saw that it was empty.

After picking up the goldfish, he’s distracted for the rest of the shopping trip just by playing with the bag. Was it a good choice? He was out of crackers, after all, but I still felt like I bought him something he didn’t need. I suppose, though, if my biggest guilt during a shopping trip is buying a bag of whole grain goldfish crackers that cost less than two dollars for my son when he’s out of crackers … well, I must be doing something right.

Hopefully, you learned something from this trip. Let me know if you enjoyed it, or if you have any ideas for future photo diaries.