Feed your family real food on a budget.
There are several free Kindle cookbooks today that I’m interested in reading. Free downloads are typically available for one day only, and if you don’t have a Kindle you can download the books to your computer. I’m especially eager to check out the farmers market cookbook. Click on the images below to go to their pages on Amazon.
When I started Real Food Real Deals last March, I didn’t realize what a wonderful community I was joining. I’ve learned so much from other writers and readers in the blogging world, and I’m looking forward to more great recipes and inspiration in the year ahead. Eating unprocessed food has so many benefits, but it can be challenging to stick to such a countercultural approach to food. When I find myself standing in the kitchen scrubbing my measuring cups for the third or fourth time in one day, I love knowing there are so many of you out there who are in the same boat.
These are the three recipes on my site that had the most views this year:
Chewy Blueberry Banana Oat Bars
Homemade Larabars
Pumpkin-Glazed Popcorn
And these are my favorite non-recipe posts from the past year:
How Much Money Can You Save by Making Food Yourself?
Happy New Year, and here’s to another great year of real food!
Linking to Monday Mania, Fat Tuesday, Fight Back Friday.
Here are some free Kindle titles that look good. I haven’t read them yet, but you can’t beat free. I love flipping through cookbooks for inspiration, so I grab free Kindle cookbooks whenever I can find them.
Note: This post contains affiliate links.
Life can get hectic, I get that. There are lots of foods that are easier to buy than to make from scratch. But it’s amazing how much money you can save by making food yourself. Many people are used to making homemade dinners, but snack foods, condiments, and bread often find their way into people’s grocery carts. I’ve gotten into the habit of making most of these items from scratch for two reasons. First, I can control what goes into our food and make sure I’m sticking to real food ingredients. Second, I can save a lot of money.
Below are pictures of 10 foods that people often buy at the store. I make them at home, and I’ve done the math to find out how much money I save by making each recipe myself. Under the picture of each item, you’ll see the cost of the homemade version as well as the grocery store price of a comparable product. In many cases, there is nothing I can buy in the store that reaches the same quality as the homemade version, but I did my best to find a comparable product for each item. By making just these 10 foods at home over the course of a month, I save nearly $100. These foods are snacks and condiments, so this barely scratches the surface of how much you can save by making breakfast, lunch, and dinner at home. It’s not all about the money, either. Homemade foods almost always taste better than their store-bought counterparts.
Total Cost of Homemade Items: $42.59
Total Cost of Store-Bought Versions: $137.77
Difference: A Savings of $95.18
Raspberry Jam (3 cups): $3.48
Stonewall Kitchen Jam: $15.90
Greek Yogurt (2 cups): $.96
Chobani Greek Yogurt: $3.49
Corn Salsa (4 cups): $4.39
Stonewall Kitchen Corn Salsa: $11.98
Honey Whole Wheat Bread (2 loaves): $3.50
Great Harvest: $9.90
Pickles (6 cups): $2.90
Root Cellar Pickles: $17.97
Ghee (7.5 ounces): $1.50
Purity Farms Ghee: $5.99
Chewy Blueberry Banana Oat Bars (16 bars): $4.43
Store-Bought Larabars: $20.00
Homemade Larabars (24 bars): $11.54
Store-Bought Larabars: $30.00
Ice Cream Sandwiches (12 sandwiches): $5.76
Julie’s Organic: $9.96
Linking to Make Your Own Monday, Monday Mania, Traditional Tuesday, Fat Tuesday, Frugal Tuesday Tip, Frugal “I Did It” Tuesday, Real Food Wednesday, Frugal Days, Sustainable Ways, Healthy 2Day Wednesday, Whole Foods Wednesday, Keep it Real Thursday, Frugal Food Thursday, Simple Lives Thursday, DIY Thrifty Thursday, Eat Make Grow, Frugal Friday, Fight Back Friday, Fresh Bites Friday, Farmgirl Friday, Show and Tell Saturday, Hearth and Soul Blog Hop, Pennywise Platter Thursday.
One lesson I learned from our 10 days of real food experiment was how easy and economical it is to make your own bread. While I don’t eat a lot of whole wheat bread because of my mild gluten intolerance, my family does love their bread for sandwiches and toast. The bread at the grocery store is unacceptable from a “real food” perspective, because even the “organic” and “all-natural” varieties tend have at least 20 ingredients, including added sweeteners, refined oils, and other mysterious ingredients.
We enjoy the honey whole wheat bread from Great Harvest, but it costs $5 a loaf. I’d rather not have to keep up with that price tag since my family goes through 2 loaves of bread a week. Lisa Leake of 100 Days of Real Food created a good copy of this bread, but hers calls for a bread machine. I make it in the oven with a couple adjustments.
Ingredients:
2 tsp. active dry yeast
4 cups white whole wheat flour
½ tsp. salt
¼ cup honey
2 tbs. olive oil
1 cup warm water (give or take)
Price Breakdown:
This loaf of bread weighs 2.2 pounds, the same as the Great Harvest loaf. Here is what I paid for each of the ingredients:
2 tsp. yeast: $.37
4 cups white whole wheat flour: $.75
½ tsp. salt: $.01
¼ cup honey: $.50
2 tbs. olive oil: $.12
Total cost: $1.75
The Great Harvest store is 30 minutes away from our house, so it takes us a lot more time to buy a loaf from Great Harvest than to make it ourselves. It takes me 10 minutes to mix the ingredients at a moderate pace, and the rest of the work is just watching the clock and doing things at the necessary times. Going through 2 loaves of bread a week, a homemade batch costs $3.50 as compared to $10 for a similar amount of bread from Great Harvest. It’s definitely worth it to me!
Back in the days before there was a New Jersey Turnpike lined with chemical factories, before the people at Paas started churning out those little petroleum-based food coloring pellets, people found natural ways to dye eggs at Easter time. Our family wanted to use natural dyes this year, and I found lots of different options. After looking at ideas from several different sources, I settled on some of the coloring instructions I found in a Better Homes and Gardens article. We decided to go with four different food-based dyes from the BHG list of 16 possibilities.
Pink: Chop one medium beet and boil it in a pan with 4 cups of water. Strain the beet chunks and bring the water to room temperature, then add 2 tablespoons of vinegar.
Red: Boil a tablespoon of paprika in a cup of water. Bring the water to room temperature and add 2 teaspoons of vinegar.
Blue: Chop ¼ head of red cabbage and boil it in 4 cups of water. Strain the cabbage and bring the water to room temperature, then add 2 tablespoons of vinegar.
Yellow: Take the skins off 4 onions and simmer them in 2 cups of water for 20 minutes. Strain the onion skins and bring the water to room temperature, then add 2 teaspoons of vinegar.
Before starting, we noticed that the beets and the red cabbage were about the same color, so we were curious if they would really yield different colored eggs. Also, after boiling the cabbage, the water looked purple instead of blue. We were curious again, wondering how this would give us blue eggs. I was most skeptical about the onion skins, wondering how exactly they were going to make our eggs yellow.
The directions told us that the colors would be most vibrant if we soaked the eggs in their dyes overnight. We did leave most of them overnight, but we also pulled a few of them after just 10 minutes of steeping.
The left egg was soaking in the beet dye overnight, while the egg on the right just got a 10-minute dip.
Surprisingly, the onion skins had the strongest and most immediate impact. This dye yielded a yellow-orange color that looks strikingly similar to the brown eggs that we usually buy. The blue didn’t seem to be working at all in the early stages, but as the picture at the top shows, the blue eggs did come out beautifully in the morning. The paprika eggs came out a bit speckled, and it seemed like actual grains of paprika were sticking to the eggs in a splotchy pattern. I think we’ll skip the paprika next time. My children had a great time with this little science experiment, and we look forward to trying new combinations next year.
Move over, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. I have a homemade recipe for a chocolate peanut butter treat, and this one is actually good for you! When my family did 10 days of real food, I knew I’d need some real food treats to get my children through the process. I was happy to discover a no-bake chocolate coconut fudge recipe, which my whole family enjoyed. I adapted it to highlight the nuttiness of this decadent-tasting dessert. The result is a high protein bark that also takes advantage of the benefits of coconut oil and coconut flakes.
¼ cup chopped walnuts or cashews
¾ cup unsweetened shredded coconut
1/3 cup cocoa powder
¼ tsp. sea salt
¾ cup chunky peanut butter or other nut butter
¼ cup melted coconut oil
¼ cup maple syrup or honey
2 tsp. vanilla
This post is part of Real Food Wednesday, Whole Foods Wednesday, Allergy Free Wednesday, and Whole Food Wednesdays.
We’re on our way! Here is our menu from Day One:
Breakfast: whole grain pancakes with berry sauce
Morning snack: brown rice cakes with peanut butter, apple pie bread, carrot sticks, Triscuits
Lunch: cheese sandwich on honey whole wheat bread from Great Harvest, fruit salad (kids); leftover lentil sweet potato dish (adults)
Afternoon snack: popcorn, fresh organic mandarin oranges from Trader Joe’s, cranberry orange muffin, more apple pie bread
Dinner: chicken pineapple stir fry with brown rice
I’m excited to be starting this adventure! Going into these 10 days, I wanted to have a clear plan of what we would be eating before we started. I don’t have everything worked out yet, but I do have a plan for most dinners and breakfasts, as well as a list of ideas for lunches and snacks. Between menu planning, shopping, and cooking, it does take some work to get real food on the table. But I think it’s well worth the effort. It’s frustrating to realize how pervasive processed food has become, and how counter-cultural it is to make a commitment to eating real food.
I’d like to say that our menu went off without a hitch today, but there was one minor snafu. For breakfast we made whole wheat pancakes for the kids and my husband, and they were delicious. I made a separate batch of pancakes for myself with gluten-free flour because I have a mild gluten intolerance. When I have a lot of gluten in my diet, I tend to get colds, sinus infections, and other pesky ailments. Without gluten in my diet, my immune system is much stronger and I don’t get sick. I typically bake with a combination of white rice flour, tapioca flour, and potato starch. With the real food pledge, white rice flour is out of the picture, so I made an experimental batch of brown rice pancakes. They were atrocious. I did manage to eat two of them thanks to the lovely berry sauce. I don’t think I’ll be able to handle the other 10 pancakes that were in the batch, though, so they will be turning into bread crumbs shortly.
The kids each had a challenging situation where they had to resist a processed food temptation. My daughter’s dance teacher was giving out candy at the end of class today, but fortunately she had told the parents ahead of time. I told my daughter that if she wanted to stick to the pledge, she could either not take the candy or take it and save it for day 11. We’re being clear with the kids that they have a choice in this matter. My daughter decided to take the candy and save it, and she didn’t complain about it. Meanwhile, during dance class my son and I stopped at a local market to pick up the scallions I forgot for tonight’s dinner. This market always has a bag of pretzel sticks on the counter, and kids are allowed to take one for free. As we approached the counter, he started to reach for a pretzel. I whispered to him, “No pretzel,” and he whispered back, “Why?” I said, “Processed flour,” and he said, “Oh, yeah.” No complaints from him either. I hope this attitude lasts!
And on a side note, who knew you could get mandarin oranges that weren’t packaged in a plastic cup or metal can? Thanks, Trader Joe’s!
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