Why You Should at Least Learn to Bake:

My quest for an amazing blueberry muffin recipe has been a thorn in my side for a year or two now. I try (emphasis on try) to bake something for my breakfasts every week. I don't really like cereal in the morning. I do like oatmeal and other hot cereals, but I prefer for my breakfast to be a grab and go affair.  Buying pre-made breakfasts (bagels and the like) is a good plan, and when the price is right, totally affordable. But every time I buy bagels or muffins or another pre made breakfast food, I stare at the big jars of flour and sugar on my counter and sigh.

This week, I finally found an amazing blueberry muffin recipe. These are coffee shop caliber muffins. The only changes I made were to reduce the amount of sugar and flour in the topping (to 1/4 cup sugar and 1/3 cup flour) and to make 12 muffins instead of 8. If you follow this recipe, be sure to cube up the butter for the topping fairly small.

If you live in California and you step into your local Albertson's this week to purchase ingredients for blueberry muffins, here's how much this recipe would run you, per muffin. Except for the Barbie muffin wrappers part. I found those on manager's special at Food 4 Less. You could also jam aluminium foil or wax paper into the muffin pan cups. Or just forgo the wrappers completely.

40 cents a muffin! And that's assuming you haven't shopped around a little for the best ingredient prices. I did, and the batch I made last night probably came in at closer to 25 cents per muffin, meaning that a muffin and a cup of Starbucks coffee made at home runs me about 28 cents total. (We've got a friend who works at Starbucks, he sells/gives us his weekly pound of coffee.)

If I had homemade coffee and a muffin everyday for a year, I'd be paying $102.20 a year to do so. By contrast, spending $3.25 on drip coffee and a muffin at a coffee shop once a week would cost about $169 a year. Homemade coffee and muffin just once a week for a year? $14.56, for me.  Which, if you're still with me, saves $154.44 a year on muffins and coffee.

And the kicker? Once again: homemade coffee and a muffin, every day, for one year, would cost me $102.20. Buying it at a shop, everyday, for a year? $1186.25. That's assuming you're buying a cup of brewed coffee, as opposed to a latte which would bring your yearly coffee and muffins total to about $1825.

And no, I didn't forget a decimal point.

A Universal Casserole Recipe

In The Tightwad Gazette III, Amy Dacycyzyn gives a universal casserole recipe, sent in by one of her readers.

Universal Casserole Recipe
1 cup main ingredient
1 cup second ingredient
1-2 cups starchy ingredient
1.5 cups binder
.25 cup "goodies"
seasoning
topping

She suggested mostly meats for the main ingredient (tuna, chicken, turkey, ham, seafood), but you could also use vegetarian options: kidney beans, tofu, even veggie dogs. Her suggestions for a second ingredient were celery, mushrooms, peas, & chopped hard boiled eggs, but this could really be anything. Starchy ingredients could be potatoes, noodles or rice. Suggested binders are soup or sour cream. Mix your ingredients, place the mixture in a casserole dish and then bake at 350 degrees for 30 - 45 minutes.

My favorite variation on this is what I call Quasi Jambalaya Casserole (emphasis on the quasi). The main ingredient is a combination of shrimp/chicken/sausage, the second ingredient is a combo of diced tomatoes/celery. My starchy ingredient, rice. I usually use a combo of tomato sauce and sour cream as the binder. I season it with cayenne, paprika, thyme, oregano, some onion powder, and a pinch of ground bay leaves. For the topping, I'll make a small batch of biscuit dough or cornbread batter and spoon it over the top.

It's fairly easy to take this universal recipe and use up your leftovers or random packages of food given to you by sympathetic parents/teachers/neighbors. Heck sometimes you just have random food sitting around - a casserole is a great way to make sure those foods don't go to waste.

Knowing how to make a casserole might not make you hip (in fact, it might be one of those things that officially qualifies you as an adult on some level), but it'll definitely use up the last chicken breast and the last bit of that package of frozen cauliflower you'd completely forgotten about until it resurfaced on top of the ice cream. It's a perfect cheap meal for weeks when the bills swing your bank account just a little too close to zero for comfort.

The Spice Must Flow

Once you've acquired some cooking equipment, a cookbook you like, and you've gotten used to the idea that sometimes you're going to have to clean up after other people, you'll want to start stocking up on some essential ingredients, specifically- spices. The 'spice rack' in my first apartment was salt, pepper, lawry's seasoning salt, jambalaya mix, and unused ramen flavor packets. Yikes.

A spice rack doesn't need to be gorgeous or full of Every Spice Ever. I keep mine stocked with the spices I use most often, and I buy spices I might need only once or twice in very small quantities. Here's the list of essential spices for my kitchen, yours might be different, and it might evolve as time goes on. More seasoned cooks might look at might list and say, "OHMIGOD! You skipped _____!" But remember, this isn't about how to be a gourmet cook, it's about how to cook pretty well for a fraction of what you might be spending on eating out.

Salt
Black Pepper
Cumin (a must for me, I put cumin in nearly every soup I make)
Paprika
Cayenne
Basil (I usually use fresh basil from the container garden, but I do have a stash of the dried stuff)
Oregano
Bay Leaves
Thyme
Dill (I usually buy it fresh instead of dried)
Cilantro (I generally use it fresh from my garden, but you can keep dried cilantro [coriander] on hand just in case)
Ginger
Allspice
Cinnamon
Ground Cloves
Ground Nutmeg
Onion Powder
Garlic Powder

I don't recommend buying spice mixtures (chili powder, taco seasoning, pumpkin pie spice), as most of these are simply combinations of other spices (which is another post). I can make just about anything I want with the spices on this list, though I'm sure that the more I cook- the bigger my spice rack will get.

Buy a spice rack with empty jars and then fill the jars with spices. Buying pre-jarred spices is insanely expensive (not to mention really cluttery after a while), try buying them in bulk or in bags. If you live in California, Stater Brothers has bagged spices (brand: Sunripe) that are generally $2 or less, and much cheaper per ounce than the stuff in jars. Try the ethnic foods aisle, or an ethnic grocery store. If you can't find anything but over-priced pre jarred spices, try googling "mail order spices."

I sometimes see unopened, well stocked spice racks at Goodwill, obvious wedding gift cast offs. Obviously if you score one of these, double check the jars to be sure all safety seals are intact before you eat any of it.

The No-Groceries Experiment Update

This month's experiment to spend no money on groceries is going swimmingly so far. (Well, it is only the 9th. But still!). The closest I've come to grocery shopping is paying one roommate back for 6 or 7 bottles of beer and asking the other to please pick up a lime. I've eaten/drank:

Leftover Pesto Pasta
Bow Tie Noodles with Tomato Sauce
Pea Soup (vegetarian)
Biscuits
Pancakes (make a Big Batch on a weekend morning, and then freeze enough for quick breakfasts during the week)
Irish Soda Bread
Peanut Butter Cookies
Black Bean Soup (with cilantro from my container garden!)
Corn Bread
Chocolate Truffle Cookies
A Bagel or Two
Sweet Iced Tea
Apple Juice
Coffee
+Burgers from Work (about 5 a week)

The soup + bread combo works wonders for me. I can make a big batch of soup and I'll get about two dinners (me + Boyfriend), one or two lunches for me, and I can send some with him to work. If I make a batch of a quick bread to pair with it, I've got quite a filling meal indeed.

Because even Pea Soup haters love my Pea Soup, though it might more accurately be called Vegetarian Pea Stew, here's my recipe (in all of it's guesstimating glory):

1 lb Split Peas
7 c water
2 vegetable boullion cubes
2 large carrots
2 small potatoes
1 brown onion
1 1/2 Tbs Cumin
Pepper
Salt
2 or 3 Bay Leaves
Tabasco Sauce

Place the split peas in a bowl with 3 cups water to soak. Put the other 4 cups of water in a stock pot to boil. Chop the carrots and potatoes into your version of bitesize. Peel the onion and chop it in half. When the water in the pot boils, toss in the boullion cubes. Once the cubes dissolve, dump the split peas (do not drain), the half onion, carrots, and potatoes into the pot. Add the cumin, bay leaves, and salt & pepper to taste. Add Tabasco if desired. Keep in stock pot over medium-low heat for about 30 mins, or until peas have become mushy and potatoes are tender. Remove onion and bay leaves before serving.

You can replace the boullion cubes + water with vegetable broth if you like.

I make a batch of this soup about once a month. I eat at least one meal a day for about week with it, and that includes feeding my significant other when he comes over. I serve it with Irish Soda Bread or plain old biscuits.

And the very best part is that this soup costs me less than $5 to make. Much, much less. More often than not, I'll offer this one up to the roommates for dinner, because they love it. Even my roommate's 5 year old daughter will attest that the mushy green stew "... looks yucky but it tastes really good!"

Where Even Roaches Fear to Tread

Here's a bit of advice you won't find in too many finance blogs; What do you do when the kitchen in your communal apartment (or house) is far too filthy to cook in? I consider myself very lucky- our kitchen is so huge that even when the dishes pile up a bit, there's still room to make dinner. And even when the dishes pile up, you'll never find actual food still stuck to them. But we're in the very lucky minority. Most twentysomethings living in apartments (or houses) with more than one roommate have kitchens a Hazmat team would balk at, and it's not just about who left their plate & spoon in the sink for a week.

Four week old leftovers rotting in the fridge. Some of the dirtiest stovetops known to man. Pots and pans and baking sheets that would be better suited to a scrap metal shop (or a landfill). The list goes on. Not to mention the fact that most apartment kitchens are more like the tiny galleys you might find on a submarine. And just as amazingly, it's never anyone's fault, even though the filthiness of communal kitchens is generally everyone's fault, whether they realize it or not.

So what do you do? Grumble to yourself a bit, and then clean it yourself. The half hour to hour a week you'll spend cleaning your kitchen is worth it. If you spend an hour a week cleaning your kitchen so that you can prepare meals in advance, you won't have to go out and drop $5-$10 (or more) every time you walk into the kitchen and sigh at the filth. Just pull out the pasta you made on Tuesday while the kitchen was clean for 24 hours, warm it up, and wash your spoon and bowl when you're done.

One hour of your time to clean up a mess that is at least partially yours is certainly worth not spending $40 or more a week on fast food. Right? Cleaning up after someone else might suck (and most of us have been on both sides of this equation, I think), but in the long run isn't your financial bottom line more important than the injustice of washing out your roommate's girlfriend's cereal bowl?

I've Got All These Pans...

If you're outfitting your kitchen with proper implements, you need to outfit yourself with some book-learnin'. So get a cookbook. A basic cookbook- if you're learning to cook more than Instant Whatever, you'll need one.

I'm partial to the red-checked cookbook, but that's most likely because my mother was too. In fact your mom (or dad) might have a recommendation for good a general-use cookbook. Your best bet (as suggested by my mom) is to head over to a Big Box Bookstore (Barnes & Noble or Borders) and flip through a few until you find one that suits you. Then leave the store without spending any money. Buy the book you chose (used!) on Amazon, or try to find it on bookmooch.

I should mention now that the purpose of this series is not to teach anyone how to become a gourmet cook. The purpose is to teach those who might be spending exorbitant amounts of money on overpriced brand name and prepackaged foods how to eat well for a fraction of what they're currently spending eating gunge.

In order to accomplish that, I'll be showing you- not telling you. I will not be spending one penny on groceries during the month of April. Intrigued? Come back on the first of the month for the first installment.

Use Your Kitchen!

And I don't mean to make instant ramen or a Hot Pocket, either. I would argue that one of the biggest leaks in our cash supply is food, and not just because we like to eat out with our friends. Most of us can't really cook anything that requires more than boiling water and a flavor packet. One of the great failings of school systems today is that "Home Ec" and "Bachelor Living," (as the male version was called in North Carolina in the 70s) are no longer required courses. The vast majority of twentysomethings have no idea how to make pancakes without a mix, or the basic construction of a casserole. Many of us were raised by parents who couldn't cook either, and it all adds up to a great, big waste.

I was lucky enough to be raised by a mother who wanted to be a chef (who eventually became one) and a stepdad who was part of a vegetarian collective in college, before he married into fatherhood. So, my parents can cook. My sister and I have a more advanced knowledge of how to move around in a kitchen than most people our age. So, in a semi-weekly series, I'll be writing a post about how to use your kitchen. Everything from basic tools, ingredients to have on hand, recipes for your own convenience foods, even making your own junk food. Most of these posts will probably involve a pretty hefty pick of my mother's brain, and this first one is no exception.

Before you can start using your kitchen to save money, it's got to be properly equipped. So here's a list of tools you should have in a functional kitchen. I'm not saying you need to run out and buy all of this right away, but keep at least a mental note of this list for when you're at Goodwill. These items would definitely count as a purchase with utility! And now, a list I got my mom to write for me:

General Use:

• A paring knife and 8- and/or 10-inch french knives. Buy just the two or three of a good brand and you'll have them forever. Buying a whole set of a cheap brand may seem more useful, but the knives won't sharpen well, and might even bend. A few good knives are more use than any number of slicing and chopping gadgets and take up less room too. If you don't know anyone who can tell you how to use them properly, go here: http://usa.jahenckels.com/index.php?simple_view=88
  
• A knife sharpener. Get one where you get the knives. Not a supermarket gadget.
• A knife block, magnetic knife holder, or drawer inserts (Target used to have plastic version.) Please don't store them loose in a drawer with other items. Please.
  
• 2 cutting boards, non wood can go in dishwasher, if you have one.
• A grater. You can buy grated cheese, but block cheese is cheaper. Besides, you may need to grate vegetables or fruits or other things.
  
• A set of measuring spoons and cups.
• A strainer and/or a colander
• A couple of mixing bowls and miscellaneous small bowls.
• A veg. peeler, bottle opener and can opener
• A couple of large spoons and spatulas wooden or high temp. resistant silicone.
• A pancake turner/burger flipper/fish slice/spatula (I've heard this tool called so many names!) Heat proof plastic is best on your non-stick skillet.
  
• A whisk.

Cookware:

• Non-stick skillet, thick and heavy, the best you can afford, on sale.
• 1 small and 1 large saucepan, thick bottom, can be found at middling prices.
• Large pot for boiling water, can be quite thin and cheap--but will only be good for boiling water as anything else will stick.
  
• 2 Heavy duty baking sheets for pizza, cookies, baking potatoes. Heavy means get professional half or quarter sized sheet pans from a professional supply store if you can. Otherwise, as heavy as you can get.
• Heavy, non-stick 9"x11" inch pan for lasagna, roasts and cakes.
• Casserole dishes. You know, Corningware ™. If you are buying this item in thrift shops, look for the brand name. Anything else you can't be sure if it is dishwasher and freezer and microwave safe, and there's usually plenty available at thrift shops.
  

Appliances:
in descending order of usefulness

• A stick blender, the stick part should be metal not plastic. Try to get higher wattage.
• Slow-cooker [Crockpot! -M]
  
• Microwave
• A regular blender.
• A food processor.
• Toaster oven/regular toaster
• Coffee making equipment: if you really like coffee, splurge a bit for an espresso machine and bean grinder. It will save you money in the long run. [I use a french press for my everyday morning coffee. I'm convinced it tastes better, and it's easier to clean. - M]
  

Baking:
If you like baking, add a scale, and baking pans of whatever sizes
suit you.

• a 9" square, 2 8" rounds, a loaf tin, and cooling racks.

You'll also use the 9"x11" lasagne pan from the general list. Get pie
tins and a rolling pin if pies are your thing.

Dining:

• Minimum: enough plates, bowls, glasses, coffee cups, and cutlery for the number of chairs you have at the table. Useful are extra spoons and bowls. But, in general, nobody will wash dishes until every last dish is dirty, so don't oversupply yourself with plates and glasses and cups.
• The mixing bowls can double as serving bowls. Extra plates are fine for serving platters, until you come across one in a thrift shop. A couple of serving spoons with and without holes.
  

I was lucky, I wound up inheriting a lot of my parents' old kitchen stuff so I got a lot of these items for free. In fact, it might do you well to see if your parents want to replace any of the items on this list- then you can take the old one! Yard sales & thrift shops are almost always guaranteed to have most of these items on the cheap. But please with pots, pans, baking pans, don't buy cheap just because it's cheap. Buying a cheap cookie sheet or saucepan will just end in misery, a cooking implement that's a pain in the ass to clean. It goes without saying that you shouldn't buy cheap knives. (Though we've said it twice now!) Bigger ticket kitchen purchases are investment purchases, if you shop for them wisely they can save you hundreds of dollars in the long run.