In April and May, National Public Radio featured a series on inexpensive gourmet dishes entitled “How Low Can You Go?” Although many of the dishes looked quite tasty, most of the dishes weren’t actually all that inexpensive, often narrowly getting below $10 to feed a family of four, and many involved arduous cooking processes. I decided to try out some of these recipes throughout the summer to see how I could take the recipes and reduce them down to a simple and very inexpensive form.

Jose Andres’ Moorish-style chickpea and spinach stew looked and sounded delicious – a vegan recipe that appeals to a burger-eating guy like me. Andres’ recipe was submitted as follows:

9 ounces dried garbanzos (chickpeas)
Pinch bicarbonate of soda
6 garlic cloves, peeled and whole
1/4 cup Spanish extra-virgin olive oil
2 ounces white sliced bread, with the crusts removed
2 tablespoons pimenton (Spanish sweet paprika)
1 pinch Spanish saffron
2 tablespoons Spanish sherry vinegar
1/2 pound spinach, washed and cleaned
1 teaspoon ground cumin
Salt and white pepper to taste

The day before you cook, soak the chickpeas in cold water with a pinch of bicarbonate of soda. The next day, drain and rinse the chickpeas.

In a big saucepan, combine the chickpeas with 2 1/2 quarts of water. Bring to a boil, reduce the heat to low and simmer for two hours, until the chickpeas are tender. Every 10 minutes or so, add 1/2 cup of cold water to slow down the simmering. By the end, the water should have reduced so it is barely covering the chickpeas. Turn off the heat and let sit.

In a small saute pan over medium to low heat, brown the garlic in 1/4 cup of the olive oil. When the garlic is browned, after about 3 minutes, remove from the pan and set aside. Add the bread and brown on both sides, about one minute each side. Remove the bread and set aside.

Remove the pan from the heat and allow to cool for a few minutes. Add the pimenton and saffron to the saute pan, and the sherry vinegar immediately afterward to prevent the pimenton from burning.

In a mortar, smash the reserved garlic and the browned bread to make a very thick paste.

Bring the chickpeas back to a low boil and add the spinach. Simmer for 5 minutes. Add the pimenton mixture along with the garlic and bread paste, to create a thick, stewy sauce. Simmer for another 5 minutes. Season with salt and pepper to taste, and serve immediately.

Got that? It seems rather … involved … to me, but the end result sounded fantastic, so I gave it the old college try.

I went through the cupboard and discovered what we had on hand. We had some ordinary extra virgin olive oil, plenty of slices of whole wheat bread, sweet paprika (I decided pimenton was a bit much – ordinary paprika should do), saffron, red wine vinegar (which we decided to substitute for the sherry vinegar), cumin, salt, and pepper – all of these items can be reasonably expected to be found in the cupboard of a person who cooks regularly.

I then purchased half a pound of spinach for $1.66, a pound of dried garbanzo beans for $1.99, and a garlic bulb for $0.30, finishing out the recipe for a total cost (to us) of $3.95.

I then put the beans to soak overnight with just a tiny pinch of “bicarbonate of soda” … which is a five-dollar term for plain old baking soda. I made the conscious decision to use all the beans in the soup and increase the other ingredients by roughly 50% in order to make plenty of the stew so it could be enjoyed for lunch the following day.

I then set the beans on to boil in a small pot for two hours, adding a cup of water every ten minutes or so. Trust me, if you try this at home, it won’t take this much work – see my conclusions below.

With the beans well in hand, I pulled out the other ingredients and set to work. First, I peeled out the cloves, then I decided I should probably take a picture of the ingredients I used…

I then took 1/3 cup of the oil, tossed in the garlic cloves, and began to brown the cloves over medium heat. This part smelled fantastic – my mouth was watering.

When the garlic cloves were fairly brown, I took out the cloves, then put a piece of bread into the hot olive oil, flipping it after twenty seconds and removing it after twenty more, then repeating it with a second piece. If you waited much longer, the bread started to burn.

I then took the bread and the cloves and smashed them into oblivion. We own a mortar and pestle, but I couldn’t locate it, so I improvised with a spoon, a bowl, and some extra time. Here’s the “mash” I wound up with.

I put the spinach in with the chickpeas and let that cook together for five minutes. Meanwhile, I put the saffron and red wine vinegar in with the still-hot garlicky olive oil, then, confused as to what to do with the cumin, tossed that in there as well. I stirred this up a bit, then added the saffron/vinegar/olive oil/cumin mix straight into the chickpeas, then dumped in the obliterated bread and garlic and stirred, letting it boil for five minutes more. Here’s what it looked like, near the end.

As with many soups and stews, a hearty bread on the side is a good idea. We picked up this loaf for a dollar on sale rather than making our own and had it on the side.

And then, the meal is served!

We had enough stew for all four of us as well as lunch for all four of us the following day with still a fair amount left over. If I were to do it again, I’d make less soup.

Did we like it? I liked it quite a bit and thought it was just right. My wife wasn’t sure at first, added significantly more salt, stirred her bowl, and then seemed to like it quite a bit, having a small second bowl. The children didn’t like it nearly as much, though they both enjoyed the bread.

Our total cost (ignoring fractional items we had on hand): $4.95. Our cost per meal: $0.62. Not bad. But we can do better – and we can certainly make it less involved.

Changes I Would Make to Save Cost and Time
First of all, I’d buy two cans of garbanzo beans instead of soaking and boiling the beans. The dry beans are cheaper and they are nominally better for you than canned, but for most working families, the distinction isn’t enough to make the effort worth it in this case.

Second, I’d cut the saffron. Saffron is easily the most expensive item in the dish and you’re only using a pinch of it. Although it does add a nice, subtle flavor, I think it can be dropped without too much concern.

Third, I’d substitute garlic powder for the cloves. Although you miss the caramelization of the cloves, you also save the work of peeling the cloves, cooking the cloves, and smashing the cloves.

Fourth, I’d use bread crumbs instead of “cooking” the bread and smashing it. Obviously, this change is for similar reasons as stated above.

These changes modify the recipe quite a bit, but it also reduces the cost and vastly reduces the time. Here’s the new recipe, as I’d do it:

Trent’s Moorish Chickpea and Spinach Stew

2 cans garbanzo beans/chickpeas
Garlic powder equivalent to six cloves
1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil
3/4 cup bread crumbs
2 tablespoons paprika
2 tablespoons red wine vinegar
1 teaspoon cumin
1/2 pound spinach, washed and cleaned
Salt and pepper to taste

Rinse the chickpeas thoroughly, then put them in a pan, add 1 1/2 cups of water, and bring it to a boil. In another pan, bring the olive oil to a boil, then remove from heat for two minutes. While stirring the olive oil, add the paprika, the cumin, the red wine vinegar, then the bread crumbs (slowly). Set this aside. When the beans are boiling, add the spinach and allow it to boil for five minutes, stirring a bit. Add in the olive oil mixture, stir, then allow it to boil for another five minutes. Serve, preferably with bread. This should be enough for at least three meals.

One of my favorite comfort foods growing up was my mother’s tuna noodle casserole. Here’s her recipe for it:

1 medium sized bag of egg noodles
1 large or 2-3 small cans tuna
2 cans cream of mushroom soup
1 can peas
8 slices American cheese
1 handful potato chips

Cook the noodles, then drain. Add soup, mix thoroughly. Add tuna, mix thoroughly. Add peas, mix thoroughly. Spread mixture in 9″ by 13″ baking pan. Put slices of cheese on top. Crumble chips on top of that. Bake at 350 degrees for 30 minutes or until cheese is very lightly browned.

I loved this stuff growing up. We would have it every two weeks or so and I would happily eat the leftovers until they were all gone.

Naturally, with a recipe I liked so much, I started making it on my own when I moved out. I would make it roughly once a month and eat it for leftovers for three days. By myself, I could literally get five meals out of a pan.

As time wore on, I gradually began to modify the recipe a bit in order to make it healthier without reducing the qualities I liked about it. Here’s what I make today.

1 medium sized bag egg noodles
1 large or 2-3 small cans tuna
2 cans 98% fat free cream of mushroom soup (or make your own cream of mushroom soup/bechamel)
1 12 oz. bag frozen peas
8 slices American cheese (fat-free doesn’t melt well at all for this)
1 handful baked low-fat potato chips (usually Baked Lays)
1 tablespoon black pepper

Cook the noodles, then drain. Add soup, mix thoroughly. Add tuna, mix thoroughly. Add peas, mix thoroughly. Spread mixture in 9″ by 13″ baking pan. Put slices of cheese on top. Crumble chips on top of that. Bake at 350 degrees for 30 minutes or until cheese is very lightly browned.

This recipe has about 12 servings in it – I’ll eat two servings if it’s the only item for the meal. Each serving has roughly 8 grams of fat, so while it’s not the most healthy thing, it’s pretty good.

It takes about 30 minutes to prepare a single pan of this casserole and the ingredients add up to about $11 per pan. (Most of the time is invested in boiling the noodles.) That creates a per-serving cost of $0.92 – not bad. I’ll eat two servings for dinner, as will my wife, and our children will each eat one serving. Then, for lunch the next day, my wife and I will each eat two more servings, then I’ll often eat the final two servings a couple days after that for lunch. All for $11 – not bad at all!

But, with some advance planning, I can not only drop that price per casserole a fair amount, I can also shave the time per casserole. Both goals are achieved using the same technique – simply making a quadruple batch.

4 medium bags or 2 large bags egg noodles
4 large or 10 small cans tuna
8 small cans (or 3 larger cans) 98% fat free cream of mushroom soup (or make your own cream of mushroom soup/bechamel)
2 24 oz. bag frozen peas
32 slices American cheese (fat-free doesn’t melt well at all for this)
4 handfuls baked low-fat potato chips (usually Baked Lays)
4 tablespoon black pepper

First, let’s go shopping for ingredients. Remember that, above, I estimated a single pan of this casserole as having a cost of $11. I went shopping at Fareway for the ingredients for four pans, and here was the result:

The ingredients for four pans cost $35.63 – or $8.91 per pan. That’s a savings of $2.09 on each pan – a total savings of $8.37. That’s definitely a good way to start!

This is a great example of how buying bulk items can pay off. Since I needed such a large quantity of each item, I was able to compare all of the prices per unit – and I chose the version with the lowest price per unit in each case. Quite often, the large bulk items aren’t sensible purchases because there’s no good use for the leftovers within the expiration dates.

The real savings, though, is in the time you save. The preparation of the casserole is much the same, just multiplied by four. First, you boil all of the noodles in a large pot:

This adds about five minutes extra time because it takes longer for the water to get to a boil plus it takes a bit longer to drain that many noodles. Then we simply add the frozen peas, the pepper, the tuna, and the soup to the mix – I save about 10% of the soup for later use. Stir thoroughly – this usually adds another two minutes or so to the time invested in a single pan because of the challenge of stirring so many ingredients.

Once it’s mixed up, I usually start pre-heating the oven, then I begin filling the pans:

I have four 9″ by 13″ pans with covers that I use for such batch casseroles. I spread the mixture evenly into each pan. Quite often, no matter how much I stir, I find that the noodles near the bottom (the bottom third or so) are drier than the ones on top, so once I’ve scooped out the majority of the mixture into the baking pans, I then add the remaining soup and stir it in before continuing. This all adds about four minutes onto the time of cooking a single pan.

Here they are, all lined up like ducks in a row:

I then cover the surface of each casserole with slices of American cheese, then crush a hand full of baked potato chips on top (to add a bit of crunch to the casserole – and a bit of distinctive flavor, too). Almost always, as soon as I finish the first casserole, the oven has just finished preheating, so I pop in that first casserole for dinner that night. Putting slices and chips on the remaining casseroles takes another ten minutes.

Here are the three finished and covered casseroles (the fourth is in the oven):

These three pans go straight into the freezer. Every three weeks or so, I’ll pop one out of the freezer the night before we intend to use it (putting it in the fridge to thaw), then bake it at 350 for thirty five minutes. Let’s say that takes a minute each time, totaling three minutes.

Thus, the total preparation time for making four casseroles at once is 54 minutes, compared to 30 minutes for a single pan. This cuts the prep time per casserole down to 13.5 minutes – a savings of 16.5 minutes per casserole!

So, here’s the real result. Preparing four casseroles at once instead of just one at a time saves 66 minutes in preparation time and $8.37 in ingredient cost. That’s both time and money straight back in your pocket.

The same general principle applies for any freezable entree you might make, from lasagna to chicken parmesan. Preparing the casserole in multiples not only saves you time over the long run, it also saves you money – and that’s the kind of bargain I like.

I’ve mentioned many times on The Simple Dollar that I enjoy brewing my own beer at home, and just as many times, readers have requested a walkthrough of this process along with some cost analyses.

Recently, I made a batch of porter and took some photographs along the way to illustrate the process. Let’s dig in!

Equipment
If your goal is simply to brew a batch of beer and consume it in one sitting with a group of friends, all you need is a brewing bucket, a bubbler, and a siphon hose, depicted below.

These supplies are available at any home brewing store.

When you mix up a batch of beer, it needs to ferment for a week or two, and this bucket makes it quite easy. You simply put your unfermented beer in the bucket, put the bubbler in the little hole on top of the bucket (the bubbler allows gas to escape without contaminating the beer), and let it sit. When you’re ready to drink the beer, just open the spigot and drink a glass – the hose can make it easier to pour.

Most home brewers tend to want to bottle their beer for long-term storage. If that’s the case, you’ll need to accumulate roughly fifty empty, clean beer bottles and also a simple bottle capper, again available at your local beermaking supply store.

This equipment, all together, will cost $20 or so and are often available in kits.

When making beer, I use a few optional items:

The large glass jug is called a carboy. You can use it for long-term storage of the fermenting beer – it doesn’t last too long in the bucket. Also, I use an auto-siphon (which makes it very easy to siphon beer out of the carboy) and a bottling tip (which makes it very easy to put beer in the bottles). You may also want a hydrometer, which you can use to calculate the alcohol content of the beer you make.

You don’t need these things to make beer, but it does make it easier in some ways. You can leave the beer for a very long time in the carboy and bottling is a much easier process with the auto-siphon and the bottling tip.

The only additional items you’ll need to make your own beer can likely already be found in your kitchen. You’ll need a large pot (one that can hold four gallons of liquid or so), a large spoon to stir it with, a thermometer, and a funnel (if you’re using a carboy). You’ll also need to carefully sanitize any equipment you may use – I use a bleach solution to make sure everything is as clean as possible.

Making Beer
As I mentioned earlier, I planned to make a porter. I found an interesting recipe on the internet:

6 pounds plain amber malt extract
8 ounces crushed crystal malt (60 L)
4 ounces crushed chocolate malt
4 ounces crushed black patent malt
1 ounce cluster hops (bittering)
1/2 ounce Williamette hops (finishing)

Along with these ingredients, there are a few standard items you’ll need for any beer making journey: a grain steeping bag (essentially a teabag for steeping the grains in the water), priming sugar, yeast, and caps.

All of these items are available at a beermaking supply store. I acquired all of the above for roughly $35.

A big part of the fun of homebrewing is that you can experiment with the recipes as much as you want. For example, my wife and I made an oatmeal stout that went off the recipe quite a bit and it turned out sublimely delicious.

Most beer making recipes follow a pretty standard procedure. Just pour two gallons of water into your large pot, heat it to 160 degrees F (80 degrees C) or so, put the grains in the grain bag and tie it off, then drop the grain bag in the water to steep for twenty minutes or so.

Above, I took the picture just after dropping the “tea bag” into the water. The steeping will cause the water to change color, usually to some shade of brown. Here’s what it looks like after the steeping.

Once the steeping is finished, you simply bring the pot up to a low boil and add the malt extract (a brown liquid) and the bittering hops. Leave this at a low boil for an hour (stirring it regularly), then five minutes before the end, drop the finishing hops into the mix. Once it’s finished boiling (it’s now called “wort”), you’ll need to cool it down to 70 degrees – I usually do this by dunking the stock pot into ice water in the sink. I then pour this into the carboy, though you can also do it in the bucket if you don’t have a carboy, then I add two to three gallons of filtered water. I then drop in the yeast, stir it a bit, then put the bubbler on top and let it ferment. Here’s a picture of my porter in the carboy at the start of fermentation.

Then you wait. Usually, you’ll wait for roughly two weeks. What you’re looking for is whether or not there are bubbles coming through the bubbler. Watch it for a minute – if you see no bubbles, wait another three days and you’re ready to finish it up.

When you’re ready to finish it, you simply add the priming sugar to two cups of boiling water, boil the priming sugar/water solution for a few minutes, then add that to the beer. You can then bottle it – if you’re not going to bottle it, you should serve it in the next couple of days.

Bottling is similarly easy. You just thoroughly clean 50 to 60 beer bottles, fill each one carefully, then put a cap on each one with the capping tool (basically, you just put a small disc on top of the bottle, put the capping tool on top, and squeeze). Let the bottles sit for a few weeks and then it’s ready to drink.

Is This Cost Effective?
The $64,000 question, indeed. Is home brewing a cost effective hobby when compared to just stopping at the store and picking up some beverages?

If you are comparing the cost of homebrew to the cost of well-made craft beers at the store (which is what most homebrews are comparable to), then homebrewing is actually quite cost effective. In the above example, I used $35 worth of ingredients to make seven six packs of porter, a cost of roughly $5 per six pack. This doesn’t include, of course, the cost of the equipment, but this cost is pretty small per six pack if you make many batches. Comparing this to my favorite porter at the local liquor store (Fuller’s London Porter, which cost $8.99 per six pack), homebrewing is substantially cheaper than the craft option.

On the other hand, if you are comparing the cost of making that same porter to the cost of a case of Old Milwaukee (or a similar very inexpensive beer, which can be found for less than $10 per 24 pack), homebrewing isn’t cost effective at all and is in fact more expensive than such beer. Admittedly, recipes for mainstream beers are less expensive than recipes for top quality porters – I called a homebrewing supply store and was quoted about $24 for the ingredients I would need for something approximating Old Milwaukee – but the homebrew is still more expensive.

So, the real question is what kind of beer are you replacing with homebrew? If you’re replacing great craft beers with your own homemade beer, your costs will in fact go down – and you’ll have found a very fun new hobby. However, if you’re content just buying some Miller Genuine Draft, homebrewing isn’t going to save you much money (if it saves you any at all).

Recently, I made a purchase that’s right on the fine line between my desire to investigate frugality and my enjoyment of new technology. I purchased three very expensive 60 watt light bulbs, not much different than any other light bulb. The catch? These bulbs were LED bulbs, among the first LED bulbs designed to replace incandescent bulbs available on the market.

About LED light bulbs To put it simply, LED light bulbs will eventually be what we use to replace incandescent bulbs – CFLs are merely a stopgap measure. LED bulbs are made out of clusters of light emitting diodes – you’ve seen them in use in countless places, but perhaps most commonly as the small indicator lights on electronic devices. LEDs use very little energy for the amount of light they produce.

The problem with using LEDs for normal light bulbs are many fold. For one, the light they produce is directional, meaning that they work great for things like flashlights where you want to point the light in one direction, but they don’t work nearly as well for general room lighting. For another, individual LEDs generally aren’t all that bright – individual ones don’t produce a great deal of light, certainly not enough to light up a room. Another problem is that the process for making truly white LEDs pushes the very limits of technology.

In short, LED light bulbs are just barely at the edge of being commercially viable. The first manufacturer that I’m aware of that’s producing direct replacement bulbs that replace normal 60 watt light bulbs is C. Crane, which is making what they call GeoBulbs. These bulbs cost an astounding $119.95 a pop, but they last for 30,000 hours and use only 7.5 watts of energy (less than the 13 watts or so an equivalent CFL would use, and far less than the 60 watts a comparable incandescent would use). Even better, they light up immediately like an incandescent and don’t have disposal hazards like CFLs do.

Still, $119.95 for a light bulb? Can that possibly be worth it? And if it’s not, at what price point would such an LED light bulb be the most cost-effective method of home lighting? And how’s the quality, anyway? Do they really compare well to incandescent bulbs?

I decided to thoroughly compare them by comparing three different 60 watt cool white light bulbs – one CFL, one LED, and one incandescent. Let’s see how they work out.

Incandescents, CFLs, and LEDs in Action
I decided to test three roughly equivalent bulbs – a 7.5 watt LED bulb, a 13 watt CFL bulb, and a 60 watt incandescent bulb. The CFL and LED were common generic bulbs as purchased at a typical department store, whereas the LED bulb was the GeoBulb produced by C. Crane. Take a peek at this puppy.

Interesting, isn’t it?

Here they are, all laid out, like daisies in a row.

The big question that most people ask is about brightness, so I installed all three bulbs in a single ceiling fan, flipped on the light, and here were the results.

In this picture, the incandescent is on the left, the LED bulb is in the middle, and the CFL is on the right. This shows clearly that the LED bulb is quite bright. It’s also a rather different color than the other bulbs, but that’s primarily due to the difference between “cool” and “warm” lighting – you can choose the particular type of lighting you like.

The LED does have a minor drawback, though, which you can see here:

Quite a bit of the GeoBulb’s light is directional. It’s very bright directly underneath it, but if you move far off to the side, it’s not producing nearly as much incidental light as the incandescent bulb. For many situations, this isn’t a problem at all – recessed lights and lamps won’t skip a beat. However, for other uses (such as a single bulb that lights a small room), you may want to wait for next generation LEDs.

On startup time As soon as I flipped the light switch, the LED and incandescent bulb lit up immediately. The CFL also came on as well, but it had a brief five second (or so) warm-up time before it reached full brightness.

On heat This was the one area where the LED really blew me away. After five minutes or so of taking pictures and examining the light for myself, I turned off the lights and removed each bulb, intending to see how warm they got in the process. Both the CFL and incandescent bulbs were too hot for me to immediately touch. However, the LED GeoBulb was still cool to the touch. It had produced almost no noticeable heat.

This is a very important but difficult to quantify factor. The heat produced by these bulbs escapes into your house, contributing subtly to the heat level in your home. Over a long period, light bulbs can actually make a noticeable difference in the amount of energy required to heat your home (lessening it a bit) or cool your home (increasing it a bit). The LED bulbs would factor into that equation much less than CFL bulbs or incandescent bulbs.

In short, the LED bulbs flip on as quickly as incandescent bulbs (and faster than CFLs) and produce roughly the same amount of useful light, but much of that light is focused in one direction. This makes the GeoBulbs just fine for most uses, but perhaps not appropriate in some cases.

Comparing Costs
The best way to compare the three types of bulbs is to calculate their costs over 30,000 hours of usage – the lifespan of a single LED bulb.

Standard incandescent bulbs The CFL used here has a lifetime of 1,300 hours, so we would need 23 bulbs over the period of this study. I was able to purchase a single incandescent of this type for $0.34, so our total cost for bulbs over 30,000 hours would be $7.82.

As it uses 60 watts, over a period of 30,000 hours, an incandescent bulb would use 1,800,000 watt hours, or 1,800 kilowatt hours. At the current approximate price of $0.10 per kilowatt hour, you would have to pay $180.00 to run an incandescent bulb over this period.

Thus, the total cost of a 60 watt incandescent bulb over a 30,000 hour lifespan is $187.82.

CFL bulbs The CFL used here has a lifetime of 8,000 hours, so we would need 3.75 bulbs over the period of this study. I was able to purchase a single CFL for $1.24, so our total cost for bulbs over 30,000 hours would be $4.65.

As it uses 13 watts, over a period of 30,000 hours, a CFL bulb would use 390,000 watt hours, or 390 kilowatt hours. At the current approximate price of $0.10 per kilowatt hour, you would have to pay $39.00 to run a CFL bulb over this period.

Thus, the total cost of a CFL bulb over a 30,000 hour lifespan is $43.65.

LED bulbs The LED bulb used here has a lifetime of 30,000 hours, so we would need only one bulb over the period of this study. Unfortunately, that single bulb has a cost of $119.99.

As it uses 7.5 watts, over a period of 30,000 hours, an LED bulb would use 245,000 watt hours, or 245 kilowatt hours. At the current approximate price of $0.10 per kilowatt hour, you would have to pay $24.50 to run an LED bulb over this period.

Thus, the total cost of an LED bulb over a 30,000 hour lifespan is $144.49.

What’s the Best Deal Right Now?
Clearly, given the current market conditions, CFLs are the best bargain at the moment for our home lighting needs. However, they have drawbacks – they have special disposal requirements and do not provide immediate illumination as incandescent bulbs and LED bulbs provide.

However, if you’re avoiding CFLs and are directly switching to LEDs from incandescent bulbs, replacement LED bulbs are already there in terms of cost. You’ll have to judge for yourself if the light quality matches your needs.

My current plan is to use the CFL bulbs for general lighting purposes, incandescent bulbs for focused reading (where immediate light is important), and the LED bulbs will be used in a few very hard-to-reach sockets, since they have a very, very long life span. As the price on the LED bulbs goes down (as they inevitably will over the next few years), I’ll replace the incandescent bulbs first, then the CFLs.

When Will LED Bulbs Be Ready for Prime Time?
My advice is to keep a close tab on the prices of LED bulbs. Ignoring light quality entirely, LED bulbs are already cheaper than incandescent bulbs over a long period, but as they are manufactured by more and more companies, the prices on such bulbs will drop over time – and I believe a rapid drop will occur over the next one to two years.

If you’re switching directly from incandescent bulbs, I would wait for one to two years for the market on these bulbs to mature just a bit – let the technology mature and let other manufacturers get into the game, driving prices down. Wait until the prices on LED bulbs drop to half of their current price – say, $60 a bulb – then begin replacing incandescent lights.

Why not just replace all incandescent bulbs with these bulbs now, since they’re cheaper over the bulb’s lifetime? I believe that in the short term, the prices on LED bulbs like these will actually drop faster than the energy cost savings in buying them now, so I would hold off for a year or so before replacing all of my incandescent bulbs.

If you’re just looking for the cheapest lighting possible, your magic number for LED bulbs is in the $15 per bulb ballpark When those prices are reached, LEDs will then be the cheapest solution for light bulbs in the home – and they won’t have the challenges that CFLs provide, either. I would estimate this price point will be reached in three to five years.

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.