Basic Bagel Recipe and Cost Analysis

It seems that my previous post could have been a lot more substantial. Not only could/should I have included the recipes for all of the things mentioned, but I could/should have included information about how much money each one saves me. While for some things, this would be hard to figure out, I will do my best to provide recipes/instructions for most of the items, as well as an idea of how much money you can possibly save. So here's the first one!

BASIC BAGEL

The following recipe is for use in a bread machine. I am sure you can make the same dough by hand, although I am lazy and did not look up how to do it. I will therefore just give you the ingredients and instructions as is and if you would like to make the dough by hand (if you don't have a bread machine), then I'm sure it's pretty easy to look that up.

A few things to note when using a bread machine-add the liquids first, then the dry ingredients. Level the dry ingredients, add the butter to the corners. Make an impression in the center of the dry ingredients and add the yeast. Make another impression away from the yeast and add the salt. The recipe should be baked on the setting for dough.

Ingredients for a 1.5 lb loaf

1 cup water, 80 degrees

3 cups bread flour

2 tbsp sugar

1.5 tsp salt

1.5 tbsp, cut into 6 pieces, butter

2 tsp active dry yeast OR 1.5 tsp bread machine/fast rise yeast

After dough is formed and the breadmaker shuts off, remove the dough from the bread pan and place into a lightly greased bowl. Cover bowl and place in the refrigerator for 20 minutes. After the dough is cooled, remove from the bowl and place on a lightly floured surface. Roll the dough in a 1/2 inch thick rectangle. Divide the dough into 8 equal sections, roll each piece into a ball and punch a hole through the center with your finger. Stretch the hole until it is about 1-2 inches in diameter. Place formed bagels onto a greased cookie sheet about 2 inches apart. Brush lightly with cold water, cover and set in a warm, draft free room to rise until they have doubled in size (1-2 hours).

Bring 3 quarts of water to a boil in a 5 qt dutch oven. Add 1 tbsp of sugar and stir to dissolve. Reduce heat to low and carefully add 2-3 bagels to hot water. Let simmer for 3-4 minutes on each side. Remove with a slotted spoon, drain, then place on the greased baking sheet about an inch apart. Sprinkle with garnish, if desired, and bake bagels in a preheated 450 degrees oven for 12-15 minutes or until golden brown. Let cool slightly before serving.

How Much Does This Save?

This is going to be a tough one to figure out, since the ingredients are things that most people keep on hand always and each item lasts for different amounts of time. I will tell you however that the average price of bagels at my grocery store is $3.99 for 6 bagels. In those 6 bagels you also get things like high fructose corn syrup and other additives, preservatives, dyes and fillers. To be fair, there are brands out there that are a lot healthier and don't have these, but, they still cost about $4-5.

So say just one person in your house eats one bagel 6 days a week, that's $3.99 a week for bagels, so $15.96 a month. If you only take into consideration just the three main ingredients-flour, sugar and butter-here is the breakdown of the cost:

5lb bag of flour: $3.69

4lb bag of sugar: $3.89

4 sticks of butter: $3.49

Using these numbers, I figured out how many of this bagel recipe you can make with each of these, then divided the cost, getting the total cost for each of these items per recipe ($0.55 in flour, $0.09 in sugar and $0.16 in butter per recipe). That means each recipe costs $0.80, and each bagel costs $0.08 to make. So 6 homemade bagels cost $0.60, meaning you can save $15.36 a month on bagels...and that's just if only one person in your house eats bagels!

I will admit that this is one of the more involved recipes and we don’t make it all the time, but they are so cheap to make and can freeze well, too. I hope this at least shows you how a little time can save a lot of money.

Our Homemade Lives

No-Spend February went pretty well. We only bought one thing that was not food or an absolute necessity, and when I say "we," I mean Jared. He bought an ice-cream maker and tried to sell me on the idea that it was a Valentine's Day present for me. This was funny because A) we don't EVER do anything for Valentine's Day because I think it's a stupid holiday and 2) he has been telling me for a few months how much he wants one. Of course it's funny that he finally broke down and bought one during no-spend month, but what's done is done. It has turned out to be a really great thing to have, especially if you like ice cream but always feel bad buying it because it's expensive and has a lot of unnecessary ingredients in it. Now we have delicious ice cream that isn't chalk full of fillers!

No-Spend February turned out to be an eye-opener, not because we realized how much money we spend on extraneous things (because really, we only saved probably $50 last month) but because of how much money we already save making things at home instead of buying them. Because of this, there wasn't that much we could do to save more money last month. The one thing I did make this month for the first time was yogurt. I got a recipe about a month ago from a friend's blog and finally tried it. I will never buy yogurt again!

Here is a list of things that we make at home:

Yogurt
Bread, including bagels and rolls (using a bread machine)
Granola
Granola bars
Ice Cream (using an ice cream maker)
Sweets (I don't buy cake or cookies or anything of that nature. If we want something sweet, we make it)
Sweet Tea (using a tea maker)
Beer (thanks to Jared!)
Hard Cider (again, thanks to Jared!)
Popcorn (this one is cheating a bit, but what I mean is, we buy kernels and pop it in our own popper which is not only cheaper, but healthier than buying microwave popcorn)
Laundry Detergent

On my list of other things to start making is all other household cleaners, deodorant, soap, lotion and baking mix (like bisquick).

While I am sad that we didn't save hundreds of dollars last month, I guess it's good to know that we really do live pretty frugally already and that we are already doing (mostly) everything we can to limit our spending to things we truly need.

If anyone has any suggestions of things we can make ourselves to save even more money (or to just have something that's more natural and healthy), please comment below and tell me about it!

And for those who are interested, we are still living happily without a microwave :)

No-Spend February Begins

In this day and age, most people know someone who has done a "no-spend" month. While I usually feel like we do this every month anyway, we decided that for one month (notice, we picked the shortest month), we will literally buy nothing except food and necessities. I have labeled the following items as necessities:

-toilet paper
-wipes
-medicine (if needed)
-kleenex
-toiletries like shampoo or deodorant (because while we only buy these things probably every three months, this month is the month Jared will run out of both of these items and I didn't feel like it would be nice to tell him he had to smell for a month)

For food, we can only buy food at the grocery store, so this does not include buying food at Qdoba for example. While that is obviously food, the point is to not spend money unnecessarily. One meal at Qdoba is three meals I could have made at home.

We are doing this not only to see how much random things we spend money on but also because we know we will need to spend more money in March for a few things, and will use the extra money saved to compensate for this rather than have to change our budget or use credit cards.

~~~

And so we started three days ago, confident that this wouldn't be too hard due to our normal frugality and aversion to consumerism.  And then our microwave died.

This is very inconvenient. As part of our plan to not spend excess money this month, my hope was to spend less money on groceries by making a few larger meals and eating leftovers more often. It's very inconvenient to eat leftovers when you don't have a microwave. This also sucks because every morning I have to reheat my tea or coffee no less than 4 times before I am able to actually finish one cup (anyone else with kids will understand this). While I might be able to get over having to take 30 minutes to reheat all of my meals this month, it will be very difficult for me to drink cold coffee. And of course, I can't just not have tea or coffee in the morning (again, I have children...who don't sleep).

But it made us think: is a microwave a necessity? Can we honestly say that we need one to live and should therefore buy a replacement? We decided no, it is not a necessity. While this obviously will add another "hardship" to our no-spend month, we realized that it will also give us another reason to remember how blessed we truly are. It's such a first-world problem to contemplate how hard our lives are going to be without a microwave. On a night when it's -7 (with windchill), as I sit at my 27-inch Mac, sipping a pipping hot cup of tea, I think we can go without a microwave when so many people go without so much more.

I better go drink my tea before it gets cold.

7 months later...

The last time I posted, I was about to have a baby. Ophelia Maize is now over 7 months old. Some would say that it is excusable to not make writing a blog a priority when you have a newborn. Others would say I'm lazy. While I'm sure my reasons for not continuing lie somewhere in between, I would still like to make the effort to write again. When I started thinking about continuing this blog, I toyed with a few different ideas of how I could write about something different, or choose a different focus...but now it's been months and this lack of focus or direction has led me to do absolutely nothing. So instead I have decided that I just need to start writing and see where it takes me. I'm sure a lot of my posts will be filled with anecdotes about my children or incessant complaining about their sleep schedules (or lack there of), but I am hoping to also fill it with new things I learn as well as generic observations and adventures.

So to begin: If you know me at all, you probably also know that my wonderful son Avery doesn't sleep well. And while I try not to complain about this, I often do. I have to remind myself of all the things he is awesome at (which is everything else, really). So today, I'm going to praise Avery's eating habits. Lately, he has taken to walking to the fridge to ask for something to eat, asks us to open the door, and then looks in the fridge, pondering what to eat. Today, he picked out the following meal: string cheese, turkey, blueberries, broccoli and grape tomatoes. I then put it all on his plate, showed it to him and he said, "oh boy!!" and ran to his chair in the dining room. He was SO excited to eat. This scenario is an almost daily occurrence (with the food varying of course).

It's these little victories that remind me that while Jared and I can't do that much to control his sleep issues (sometimes I think I might have done something wrong, or not done something, to contribute to this problem, but we did nothing different with Ophelia and she has no problems), we have done fairly well when it comes to things we can help control, like helping him develop and create healthy eating habits. I am so thankful that he is a good eater :)

Fried Turkey

Happy Easter!

Today, everyone came over to our house for Easter. Ken recently purchased a turkey fryer for the dual purpose of frying turkeys and using the equipment for brewing with Jared. He decided to fry his first turkey for Easter. So he got an 18 pound turkey. The oil took about an hour to heat up to the right temperature, but once the oil was heated up, the turkey only took one hour to cook! Amazing. On top of that, we used the oil afterwards to fry potatoes to make some homemade fries. Hmmm.  The turkey was really good, especially all the really crispy bits. Next time though, Ken's going to try to put a rub on the turkey for added flavor, and we need to cook the potatoes for longer (we were hungry and got tired of waiting). I can't wait!

What I Learned: It only takes one hour to fry a turkey.

Cantaloupe

I looked ahead on babycenter to see what my baby weighs now (since technically every Friday is when I start a new week of my pregnancy; they just send you the email the following monday). It said that the baby at 34 weeks weighs about 4.75 pounds, about the weight of a cantaloupe. Now I never would have thought that a cantaloupe weighed more, almost a pound more on average, than a pineapple. But sure enough, I picked up a cantaloupe and it does weigh more than a pineapple, I guess because it is more dense. It's just not something I ever would have guessed.

What I Learned: A cantaloupe weighs more than a pineapple.

I'm carrying a pineapple

According to my babycenter.com email today, my baby weighs about 4 pounds and is 17 inches long. The baby weighs about as much as a pineapple. Yikes! I looked ahead to see what the last one was, and at 40 weeks, I will be carrying a small pumpkin. Geez. When you look at it like that, it seems so much heavier! And, that's not including all the other extra weight you carry due to a significant increase in blood, the placenta, your giant uterus, etc.

What I Learned: The baby weighs the same as a pineapple.

Jicama

This week, according to Babycenter.com, my baby is roughly the size and weight of a jicama. I have never heard of a jicama or seen one. So of course I looked it up.

A jicama is also called a Mexican Turnip or a Mexican Yam. The jicama is actually the name of the vine, but people most commonly call the edible root of the vine a jicama. Jicamas resemble potatoes and the starchy inside is most like an apple. It is most commonly eaten raw with salt, lemon or lime juice and chili powder. It is also used in soups.

What I Learned: What a jicama is.

Eating Out is Gross

Today is our last day in Georgia and I am seriously tired of eating out. We had originally planned to buy groceries so that we would be able to make all our meals, not only to save money, but also so that we wouldn't have to eat fast food every day. But when we got here, the fridge was already unplugged and the entire kitchen was packed up in boxes, so there was nothing with which to make food and nothing to store the food in. So we have literally eaten every single meal "out." I feel so gross. I can't wait to be able to make some food at home!

What I Learned: Eating fast food for 5 days is gross.

Five Guys

Tonight, Bill decided to take us all out for dinner so we went to Five Guys. I have never been there but have heard my dad rave about it. While we were waiting in line, Ken was saying how you have to be careful with the fries, because once you start eating them, you can't stop. I didn't really believe him because I'm not much of a fries person, but sure enough, one fry, and I couldn't stop. They were the best fries I've ever had.

What I learned: Five Guys has the best fries I've ever had.

Brussels Sprouts

My mom and I were taking turns reading each other trivia from her new Trivial Pursuit book that she got for her birthday from Blake. The answer to one of the questions was Brussels sprouts (something like, what vegetable is named after the capital of Belgium, a no-brainer). My mom told me that until recently she never realized that the real term was BrusselS sprouts, not brussel sprouts. Well, until that very moment, I didn't know that either. Most people don't really think about it since when anyone says it, no one pronounces two separate "s" sounds. And I suppose I've seen it written out before but never actually paid enough attention to realize that there is an "s" at the end of brussel since it is named after Brussels. I wonder how many other words are like this.

What I learned: Brussels sprouts is the correct spelling of the vegetable.

English Hothouse Cucumber

I am currently helping Sarah out with a photo project by posing in pictures that include me holding produce that corresponds to the size of my baby in utero. Every week I get an email from babycenter.com that details the length and weight of my baby and compares it to a fruit or vegetable. Sometimes they choose a fruit or vegetable based on length and sometimes on weight. This past week, it stated that my baby was approximately the length of an English hothouse cucumber (14 inches) (see picture here). But what really is an English hothouse cucumber and how is it different than a regular cucumber? Wikipedia for one doesn't even have a page for it! But according to this website, a hothouse cucumber is longer and has less seeds. Okay, that's really not that much different.

What I learned: A hothouse cucumber, often just called an English Cucumber, is longer and has less seeds than a regular cucumber.

The Nutritional Merits of Jell-O?

Recently, my mom and I have had several conversations about the nutritional value of Jell-O. My mom thinks it's healthy for you (I think her exact quote was, "It's filled with protein!") and I do not. Now, this isn't to say that I don't like Jell-O or think it's terrible for you or don't eat it myself, because I really like Jell-O. I just think that we have very different ideas of what "healthy" means in this case, so I decided to do some research and this is what I found.

Daily recommended intake of protein:
women-46 grams
infants-10 grams

Daily recommended intake of sugar:
women-20 grams
children-12 grams
(these numbers are confusing because on the same website it said that your daily intake of added sugars should be 40 grams or less, and then it says that the American Heart Association states that you should only have 20 grams of sugar a day, so I'm not sure which numbers to go with).

Jell-O has 2 grams of protein and 19 grams of sugar per serving. I think it's fair to say that the amount of sugar contained in Jell-O overrides the fact that it has 2 grams of protein in it. Again, there are WAY worse things for you to eat, and I am not advocating not eating Jell-O. I just think that choosing to give Avery meat for his protein intake instead of offering him Jell-O is probably the way to go :) Sorry, Mom!

What I learned: Jell-O has a LOT of sugar in it and not much else.

Burned Cheese

We are at my dad's house today to hang out and watch the Superbowl. I brought over some tortilla chips and shredded cheese to make nachos in the oven. At home, we have a gas oven and when I make these at home, I use the broiler and I wait about 3-4 minutes, check on it, and usually keep it in for another minute or so before it's done. Well, my dad has an electric oven and I put them in on the broiler, waited three minutes and when I walked into the kitchen, smoke was billowing out of the oven. I opened up the oven and was engulfed in smoke. The entire pan was black and burned and the kitchen and the entire downstairs of the house filled with smoke. After THREE minutes. Geez. I hate electric ovens!

What I learned: Apparently electric ovens broil things at a much faster rate than gas ovens do. Either that or my dad's oven is super powered and mine is crappy.

Cream Cheese Pillows

Today I made some cookies to bring with to MN for my Uncle Harold's funeral as the family will be providing dessert after the funeral. I first made some no-bake cookies, a family favorite. I then decided to make something I have never made before. I looked in various cookie cookbooks that I have and settled on making Cream Cheese Pillows. This recipe has dough made out of butter, cream cheese and flour which is rolled into a ball and then refrigerated for four hours. Then you roll the dough very thinly and cut it into 2.5 inch circles. In each circle you put 1/4 teaspoon of raspberry jam, then fold it over and press the ends together with fork tines. While the process was easy, it was really time consuming, especially rolling out the dough, which took me about 45 minutes. After the mini pastries bake for 10 minutes, you dip them in a cinnamon-sugar mixture. While these "cookies" took a long time to make, they turned out to be delicious.

What I learned: How to make cream cheese pillows.

Trifle

Tonight I went to my friend Angela's house to watch Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part II in Maximum Movie Mode on Blu-ray. We all decided to make something Harry Potter related for the party. I borrowed The Unofficial Harry Potter Cookbook from my other friend Christine and quickly decided on making homemade Raspberry Trifle. This involved making homemade yellow cake and homemade custard. While the recipe called for strawberries and strawberry jam, I had homemade raspberry jam from Jared's parents as well as raspberries from their garden, so I used those instead. The outcome was delicious and satisfying. I wish I had taken a picture.

What I learned: How to make homemade trifle.

Sam's Club

Jared and I buy a lot of organic food, especially produce. Awhile ago, my dad bought a family membership at Sam's Club, giving us the second card, so we could save some money. We were only there for a little bit and I didn't see anything organic there, and since Pick n' Save is just two blocks from our house, we usually just go there to grocery shop since they have a wide selection of organic food (in fact, Roundy's brand often is the only organic option available, which is great because it's generic so the organic is oftentimes cheaper than the regular brand name option).

Yesterday we went to my dad's house for the day and he had these giant containers of salad from Sam's club that were organic. This is the exact kind of salad we usually buy at Pick n' Save. Apparently they do have organic food there, I just didn't see it. So since we need to go grocery shopping anyway, Jared and I are going to go to Sam's Club tomorrow to see what else they have. It would be great if we could save more money on food!

What I learned: Sam's Club sells organic food.

Sushi!

Today, Jared and I were so graciously invited to go out to lunch for Sushi with our friends, the Jacobson's. We went to Fujiyama in Brookfield. It was delicious. I LOVE sushi. Apparently, the sushi menus we got are special lunch prices for Mondays and Tuesdays, and you can get a roll anywhere from $3.75-$8.00 instead of $8.00-$16.00 that they usually cost! They also have a Maki Lunch Deal where you can choose any three rolls of sushi for $11.75 and it comes with soup and salad as well. What a great deal for sushi! Once Jared and I have disposable income (so...when we're 65...), I think we will plan to go there more often. If you love sushi, you can't pass up this deal!

What I learned: Fujiyama has great lunch deals on Mondays and Tuesdays.

Bagels

Jared decided he wanted to make bagels in our bread machine today. I guess I had seen the recipe before in the booklet that came with the bread machine but never once thought to make them. Seeing as we eat a lot of bagels, it seemed like a good idea. If we can make bagels at home, that could save us some money. So Jared put in all the ingredients for the dough and when it was finished, he formed the dough into bagel shaped portions. Since he had to leave for work, it was my job to complete the bagels.

After letting the bagels rise for 45 minutes, I had to boil them in water, three at a time, for 3-4 minutes on each side. Then I placed them on a greased pan and put cinnamon and sugar and half of them (yum) and cheese on one more of them. Since I didn't know if that's how you actually make bagels with cheese, etc on them, I figured I would try it. Then four of the bagels were left plain. I baked them for 20 minutes and they were ready!

Looks like the cheese kinda burned to the pan and the sugar kinda caramelized a bit but they tasted delicious. Looks like there will be a lot more bagel making in the future.

What I learned: How to make homemade bagels.

Chicken and Dumplings

When I got married I received a lot of different recipes from relatives as gifts so as to pass on traditional family meals. I had a lot of these in a recipe box already but some of the recipes came on full sheets of paper and I had yet to organize any of them. So at the beginning of this week when I was making the menu for the week, I decided to finally get things in order. I discovered that I had a recipe for my Grandma Miller's chicken and dumplings and realized that a)I had no idea how to make dumplings, b)I have never eaten dumplings and c)I have never really known what dumplings were made out of. So I decided to make this recipe.

Today was the day to make the meal and I discovered that not only are dumplings basically just dough but they are also really simple to make. I think the dish turned out well except that I used way more chicken than the recipe called for because I had it (you can always have more meat, right?) and didn't think it would matter, but then there was not enough sauce to properly drop the bits of batter into it. Instead I had to just place the dumplings on top of the chicken and therefore, the dough didn't sink into the batter and get all gooey and juicy. Instead, it all stayed right on top of the chicken, making a sort of crust over the top of the dish. It still tasted fine, but I guess it probably wouldn't officially be called dumplings. Now I know for next time-when it says to use three chicken breasts, don't use five.

What I learned: I learned how to make dumplings, even though I sort of made them incorrectly...