This week's Frugal Friday is extending into Saturday due to the need to soak dry beans overnight. Sorry about that - we're still bouncing back from the blizzard last weekend and the very busy week I've had at work.
So I've seen a bunch of suggestions online saying that it's more economical to cook dry beans than to use canned, with the slow cooker being the best choice for cooking in terms of energy efficiency. We're using a lot of canned beans in recipes as of late so I decided to put that to the test this weekend.
1 pound of dry beans equals roughly 2 cups of volume. According to the Internet, 1 cup of dry beans will produce 3 cups of cooked beans (assuming most liquid is cooked off or drained). A 15 ounce can of beans produces 1.5 cups of cooked beans when drained and rinsed. Therefore, we can expect a 1 pound bag of dry beans to replace four 15 ounce cans of beans (6 cups / 1.5 cups = 4).
I purchased two 1 lb bags of dry black beans from Target for $1.39 each. I probably could have found them cheaper at Aldi or Stop & Shop on sale, but we were there anyways so I got them there. One 15.5 ounce can of Stop & Shop brand black beans is $0.67, while the same size can of Goya beans is $1.00. By cooking dry beans at home, portioning, and freezing, that $1.39 bag of beans will replace four cans of canned beans. That's a theoretical $0.35 per can equivalent for cooking dry beans and $0.67 per can to buy them - you clearly save money by cooking dry beans rather than using canned!
(How many times do you think can I use the word "beans" in this post?)
The actual results of my home-cooked beans experiment: Two 1 lb bags of dry black beans produced 7.5 portions of 1.5 cups each (the equivalent of one can of rinsed/drained black beans). I soaked overnight and then cooked the beans for around 6 hours on "low" in the crock pot, so the cost of electricity for cooking is negligible. I packaged them in 1 quart freezer bags and once they cooled I put them in the deep freeze. Rounding down, I got 7 can equivalents from the 2 lbs of beans. 2 lbs of beans cost $2.78, for a can-equivalent cost of $0.40 apiece. Since the best price I found for canned black beans was $0.67/can, we're still saving money.
As a nice side benefit, my home-cooked beans are completely free of any added salt (as a helpful hint when cooking beans at home, do not add salt during cooking as it can make the beans tough). Low sodium canned beans are either unavailable or hard to find in store brands, and having the beans be salt-free means we can adjust seasoning to taste.
Saturday, February 16, 2013
Friday, February 8, 2013
Frugal Friday: Hot Cocoa Mix
This is a new thing I'm trying, called Frugal Fridays. I'm going to attempt to post about something frugal that we've tried each week on Friday (makes sense, no?).
With a blizzard barreling down on us, I've been thinking about what kinds of foods are nice when you're snowed in (and potentially without power for days given CL&P's performance in recent years). I realized that hot cocoa fit the bill perfectly - it's hot, tasty, and only needs hot water. Then I went and looked at the ingredient list of commercial hot cocoa powder and was kind of horrified - corn syrup, partially hydrogenated oils, cellulose gum, soy lecithin, even artificial flavor. Um, doesn't the cocoa give hot cocoa its flavor? Why is artificial flavor even needed? Some name brands contain artificial sweeteners (which we don't eat in our house) or even more chemical soup.
I went online and found a recipe for homemade hot cocoa powder, courtesy of Alton Brown. Now, Alton's recipes have never steered me wrong and this one was no exception. The ingredients are super-simple:
2 cups powdered sugar
1 cup cocoa (Dutch-process preferred)
2.5 cups powdered milk
1 tsp salt
2 tsp cornstarch
Pinch cayenne pepper.
Combine in a mixing bowl and mix evenly. Fill a mug halfway with the mixture and add hot water, stir to combine.
I already had the salt, cornstarch, and cayenne pepper so I stopped at Aldi to pick up the powdered sugar, cocoa, and dry milk. I measured and mixed and ended up with 5.5 cups of hot cocoa mix. I put 1/4 cup into a mug, added hot water, and it was AWESOME! Just like store bought hot cocoa, but it dissolved easily and tasted more rich.
(Kindly ignore my cheap pink laminate countertops. They came with the house and we've been too poor to remodel.)
The question - is it really frugal? I spent $2.49 on the cocoa powder, $1.39 on powdered sugar, and $6.99 on dry milk. Based on the quantities in each package I have a per-cup cost for each major ingredient of $0.885/cup, $0.185/cup, and $0.655/cup. For the quantities used to make 5.5 cups of mix, the ingredients cost me $2.90 (neglecting the extremely small incremental costs of salt, cornstarch and cayenne).
So for those keeping track at home, 22 1/4 cup servings of homemade hot cocoa cost $2.90, for a per-serving cost of $0.13/cup. The cheapest package of Stop & Shop brand hot cocoa comes with 17 1/4 cup servings and costs $3.29, for a per-serving cost of $0.19/cup. If you go for name brand hot cocoa you'd spent roughly 40% more per serving. Plus, the homemade powder has simple ingredients with no wacky food chemistry involved - a win/win!
With a blizzard barreling down on us, I've been thinking about what kinds of foods are nice when you're snowed in (and potentially without power for days given CL&P's performance in recent years). I realized that hot cocoa fit the bill perfectly - it's hot, tasty, and only needs hot water. Then I went and looked at the ingredient list of commercial hot cocoa powder and was kind of horrified - corn syrup, partially hydrogenated oils, cellulose gum, soy lecithin, even artificial flavor. Um, doesn't the cocoa give hot cocoa its flavor? Why is artificial flavor even needed? Some name brands contain artificial sweeteners (which we don't eat in our house) or even more chemical soup.
I went online and found a recipe for homemade hot cocoa powder, courtesy of Alton Brown. Now, Alton's recipes have never steered me wrong and this one was no exception. The ingredients are super-simple:
2 cups powdered sugar
1 cup cocoa (Dutch-process preferred)
2.5 cups powdered milk
1 tsp salt
2 tsp cornstarch
Pinch cayenne pepper.
Combine in a mixing bowl and mix evenly. Fill a mug halfway with the mixture and add hot water, stir to combine.
I already had the salt, cornstarch, and cayenne pepper so I stopped at Aldi to pick up the powdered sugar, cocoa, and dry milk. I measured and mixed and ended up with 5.5 cups of hot cocoa mix. I put 1/4 cup into a mug, added hot water, and it was AWESOME! Just like store bought hot cocoa, but it dissolved easily and tasted more rich.
(Kindly ignore my cheap pink laminate countertops. They came with the house and we've been too poor to remodel.)
The question - is it really frugal? I spent $2.49 on the cocoa powder, $1.39 on powdered sugar, and $6.99 on dry milk. Based on the quantities in each package I have a per-cup cost for each major ingredient of $0.885/cup, $0.185/cup, and $0.655/cup. For the quantities used to make 5.5 cups of mix, the ingredients cost me $2.90 (neglecting the extremely small incremental costs of salt, cornstarch and cayenne).
So for those keeping track at home, 22 1/4 cup servings of homemade hot cocoa cost $2.90, for a per-serving cost of $0.13/cup. The cheapest package of Stop & Shop brand hot cocoa comes with 17 1/4 cup servings and costs $3.29, for a per-serving cost of $0.19/cup. If you go for name brand hot cocoa you'd spent roughly 40% more per serving. Plus, the homemade powder has simple ingredients with no wacky food chemistry involved - a win/win!
Tuesday, February 5, 2013
Cloth diapers for Wiggle
So we did the cloth diapering thing part time with Lily, and we didn't start until she was ~4 months old. I've never used cloth on a newborn, so our stash is exclusively one-size diapers which typically don't start fitting nicely until a baby is ~2 months old. This newborn cloth diapering thing is new to us and I've been trying to plan out a diaper stash for baby Wiggle!
With Lily's diaper stash, the biggest mistake I made was investing in a certain brand/style of diaper before we was sure it was the most effective choice for us. I went nuts and got a half dozen Thirsties Duo pocket diapers - only to decide 6 months later that stuffing pockets is a time-consuming pain in the ass. Also, at around the 1 year mark of use we started having issues with the Thirsties, where the pocket material began looking a bit threadbare and the Aplix (velcro-like) closures got less secure. As we tried other brands/systems of diaper (BumGenius 4.0 pockets, GroVia All-in-ones, Flip hybrids) we found that we preferred those other methods. By then we had a half dozen expensive Thirsties Duos that were way too worn to resell. I should have bought one of a bunch of different options and then we could have sensibly spent money on the ones that worked best. It wasted a lot of money when we added it all up.
For Wiggle I plan to keep it simple for the newborn stage: covers and prefolds and maybe one or two AIOs for when we're out and about. A newborn is changed so frequently that there's really no need to worry about heavy absorbency. I can buy a newborn prefold package that will let me wash every other day for the princely sum of around $100. That same amount of money would buy four 88-count boxes of newborn Pampers Swaddlers Sensitive disposables (on Amazon, the best prices I know of without serious couponing). For a newborn that many disposables would last us roughly 5-6 weeks, so the newborn prefold package will have paid for itself before my maternity leave is half over! Newborn prefold packages don't get a lot of wear and tear because they're used for a relatively short time, so resale value would be high if we chose to unload them after Wiggle can fit our one-size stash.
We'll still have some disposables in the house for when we come home from the hospital if I'm just not feeling up to starting diaper laundry right away. Mark knows how to wash diapers already (it's not hard), and I can give instructions to relatives or friends who might be over to help out. With prefolds and covers, doing diaper laundry is no more difficult or time-consuming than washing clothes.
Of course, once Wiggle starts daycare we'll need to send disposables. The center we use doesn't handle cloth unless there's a doctor's note and we're OK with using disposables there. By then we will have transitioned to the one-size stash anyways. We found that even part time cloth diapering for Lily still saved money in the long run, or at least until she started potty training. Now she's day trained but still needs a diaper at night, so our disposable diaper expenses are very low - we basically have Pullups in the house for when we're out and about and that's it (this is only because I've been too tired to actually sew cloth trainers for her).
Based on our experience with Lily, I think the foundation of our one-size stash will continue to be the hybrid/cover and prefold style with a few AIOs. Covers and prefolds are the most economical choice and we know that we hate stuffing pockets, so it seems like a pretty straightforward decision. We do like AIOs for when we're out of the house or have a babysitter, though. The nice thing about part time cloth diapering is that you don't need anywhere near the stash that a full time cloth diapering family would need, so that also costs less (but of course there's the ongoing need to purchase disposables for daycare).
With Lily's diaper stash, the biggest mistake I made was investing in a certain brand/style of diaper before we was sure it was the most effective choice for us. I went nuts and got a half dozen Thirsties Duo pocket diapers - only to decide 6 months later that stuffing pockets is a time-consuming pain in the ass. Also, at around the 1 year mark of use we started having issues with the Thirsties, where the pocket material began looking a bit threadbare and the Aplix (velcro-like) closures got less secure. As we tried other brands/systems of diaper (BumGenius 4.0 pockets, GroVia All-in-ones, Flip hybrids) we found that we preferred those other methods. By then we had a half dozen expensive Thirsties Duos that were way too worn to resell. I should have bought one of a bunch of different options and then we could have sensibly spent money on the ones that worked best. It wasted a lot of money when we added it all up.
For Wiggle I plan to keep it simple for the newborn stage: covers and prefolds and maybe one or two AIOs for when we're out and about. A newborn is changed so frequently that there's really no need to worry about heavy absorbency. I can buy a newborn prefold package that will let me wash every other day for the princely sum of around $100. That same amount of money would buy four 88-count boxes of newborn Pampers Swaddlers Sensitive disposables (on Amazon, the best prices I know of without serious couponing). For a newborn that many disposables would last us roughly 5-6 weeks, so the newborn prefold package will have paid for itself before my maternity leave is half over! Newborn prefold packages don't get a lot of wear and tear because they're used for a relatively short time, so resale value would be high if we chose to unload them after Wiggle can fit our one-size stash.
We'll still have some disposables in the house for when we come home from the hospital if I'm just not feeling up to starting diaper laundry right away. Mark knows how to wash diapers already (it's not hard), and I can give instructions to relatives or friends who might be over to help out. With prefolds and covers, doing diaper laundry is no more difficult or time-consuming than washing clothes.
Of course, once Wiggle starts daycare we'll need to send disposables. The center we use doesn't handle cloth unless there's a doctor's note and we're OK with using disposables there. By then we will have transitioned to the one-size stash anyways. We found that even part time cloth diapering for Lily still saved money in the long run, or at least until she started potty training. Now she's day trained but still needs a diaper at night, so our disposable diaper expenses are very low - we basically have Pullups in the house for when we're out and about and that's it (this is only because I've been too tired to actually sew cloth trainers for her).
Based on our experience with Lily, I think the foundation of our one-size stash will continue to be the hybrid/cover and prefold style with a few AIOs. Covers and prefolds are the most economical choice and we know that we hate stuffing pockets, so it seems like a pretty straightforward decision. We do like AIOs for when we're out of the house or have a babysitter, though. The nice thing about part time cloth diapering is that you don't need anywhere near the stash that a full time cloth diapering family would need, so that also costs less (but of course there's the ongoing need to purchase disposables for daycare).
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