Tuesday: Notes

Part of making a low budget work and still eating well is making food from scratch.   Because you spend a title more time planning a shopping trip , finding ways to efficiently cook scratch is to your advantage. Spending time to plan a  shopping trip saves time and money and helps to avoid impulse purchases. Impulse purchases can take up as much as 70 percent of your shopping cart and jack up your bottom line.   The other way to save money is to scratch cook.   I’m on a mission to effect a handful of recipes that are real money savers.   We will take you along for the experience.

• Pizza dough.   Scratch pizza costs 1.00 a cheese pizza .  Pizza can cost as muc as twenty dollars.   Pizza dough is 1.50 on sale sometimes at safeways.   The crust is 2.00 at central market.   The cost is .17 cents.   That’s at least a 90 percent reduction  in cost.  It takes less than five minutes.   
• Rolls .  A trending meal these days is sliders.   They are made from a sweet dinner roll.  I’m on a mission to find the easiest recipe with the least amount of ingredients.   The simpler the recipe the more you are enthusiastic to make it.  I’m leaning towards the one in Betty Crocker that starts with a bread machine dough.   
• Peasant bread is a piece of cake and takes almost no effort .   It cost .25 cents.   Sourdough bread is 3.00 a loaf and up.   
• Soups are another good meal that can cost little.   Many soups are pushing the two dollar price tag these days.   Don’t get me wrong. A can of soup can be your best friend if you are sick and dont feel like cooking for for a emergency ration.   You can heat a can of soup in the fireplace or on a burner on your grill outside.   Its a bit harder to bake scratch soup without power.   
• Pick your battles.   Pasta sauce is cheaper to buy than it is to make unless your are getting your tomatoes for free.   Use coupons and sales to bring your cost down.   I have been buying sauce in a jar for as little as .59.   Canned sauce is alwasy a dollar or less.   There’s that BPA scare tactic some people buy into.   Tomatoes in cans were tested.  There was 6 parts of BPA in several BILLION.   Safeway also carries diced tomatoes in a bpa free can.  You can limit your exposure.   
•  Learning to make ‘white sauce’ is a real money saver.   A lot of cassarole type ‘meal boxes or bags basically use a roux to begin with.  Gravy that comes in packets, jars, or cans is expensive.   You are paying for some boullion, flour and water:  Sometimes ,  just the flour and boullion.  Gravy can also be made from the drippings after you roast a piece of meat.   Its not had to make aroux and flour cost .07 a CUP.   The cost of two tablespoons is not even worth pricing vs up to a dollar for a jar or packet of gravy.   This technique also makes the basis for cheese sauce or mac and cheese.   
• Boxed mac and cheese is up to a dollar.  Its a few ounces of pasta and a cheese sauce in a packet.   You are better off making the sauce from scratch.   Its a matter of taste.   Again, the cheese sauce has whey ( the part of the milk that is left over after you make cheese ) .  It has protein, but, it is the slop thats left over.   Farmers use it to feed the hogs.   It also has TSP.   TSP is a cleaner we sold at the paint store .  You were not supposed to EAT it.  Scratch has flour, vegetable oil or butter, milk and real cheese.    Annies is a bit better , but it still has sodium phosphates .   
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