Thriftism

Walking along a bustling street in the center of Manhattan, you can smell the hundreds of different food cart options available for lunch. If you're lucky there won't be too long of a line and you can grab a plate from the Halal Guys or maybe find a good Shawarma place. If you're anywhere else that doesn't have these types of food available you're usually out of luck and have to settle for something from home or typical chain fast food restaurant food. But maybe you don't have to settle... By making your own version of this chicken and rice dish along with that mystifying white sauce, you can have almost all the joy of eating from your favorite food cart anytime. An added benefit is you can reduce your sodium intake or avoid certain ingredients if necessary and you can save a lot of money by not eating out. So whether you're in the heart of the Midwest and can't get to a restaurant or in the center of Manhattan and just want to save some dough, try you...

Happy Summer! We are finally having warm, actually HOT, weather. With it being over 80 almost every day last week, it was far too hot to eat warm food. There was no way I was going to cook anything after working out in the garden for hours. Salads have proven to be my savior on sweltering days, so there may be lots of different salad recipes coming out soon. J To begin my salad adventures, I've chosen one that feeds my buffalo sauce addition. Side note: buffalo sauce can be combined with just about anything and taste even better! If you're like me you don't have a whole lot of time during the week between work and housework and still trying to do some fun things in there too. That's why I try to cook all of my food on the weekends to reduce wasting that time during the week. If there are any ingredients on my salads that need to be cooked, I do it ahead of time and freeze them or store in the refrigerator if possible. For my chicken salad-I have a ...

Part 2 - The Process In this post we will detail our approach to the soap crafting process. The recipe we used is simple and easy to follow, listed below in no particular order are the ingredients. 2 oz - Lye 16 oz - Olive Oil 6 oz - Water Begin by gathering some necessary tools, you will need; Scale - Preferably accurate to the 0.01 oz but we made do with a shipping scale only accurate to 0.1 oz Thermometer - Working range of 100F to 150F, 2 thermometers are ideal  Bowl - Used to mix the lye/water solution, be careful as the lye can etch glass products PPE - Personal Protective Equipment, lye is caustic and can cause skin irritation and blindness if contacted on your eyes, rubber gloves and safety goggles people Kettle/Pot - Used to heat the olive oil and mixing vessel Wand Blender - Used to accelerate the saponification process by emulsifying the oil, lye, and water Soap Mold - We used a silicon 2 oz bar mold, if usin...

Today we turn a handful of fake flowers and a heart shaped Styrofoam blank into a welcoming heart shaped flower wreath. Assembly only takes about half an hour and the total cost is under 10 bucks.(3.97 for the wreath & 4 sets of flowers @ 0.97 each) Follow along below for an how to! Start by acquiring a Styrofoam wreath blank, we selected a heart shape for the season but a circular wreath will work too. These can be purchased at any craft store or the craft section of most big box stores. The second part you will need are some fake flowers preferably with plastic coated metal stems. The metal stems will allow the flowers to be pushed into the Styrofoam wreath with relative ease. For our wreath we selected three different colors of roses but any flower type will work a great Spring Season wreath. Begin the assembly process by cutting the flower buds off of the stems leaving about an inch of stem behind to stick the wreath with. I would s...

This post is a continuation of the previous post Hobby Grain Milling in which some of the ideal characteristics of a good grain mill were described. Our topic for today is the actual milling/grinding process. The first step is to aquire your feedstock or whole grains, these can be essentially any seed grain but a few of my favorites are red wheat, rice, black beans, and corn. I recommend purchasing at least 10 lbs of grain before doing any milling to minimize clean up efforts and produce a good quantity of flour. Chickpea (Garbonzo Bean) Flour Begin by loading the hopper on your mill and set the clearance on the grinder head. The clearance or gap between the grinding disks essentially controls the final quality of the flour as well as the efficiency of the mill. Your initial clearance will vary by grain type but I recommend an initial setting of approximately half the diameter of the selected grain.  This ...

Hello All, I received a hobby grain mill for my birthday recently and got to test it out this last weekend. This post will hopefully be one of many as I experiment with grinding my own grain flour. With any luck you will be able to pick up a few pointers and benefiting from this healthy option.         Grain Mill with Rice THE MILL:Obviously the most important piece of equipment in this operation, and subsequently will have the most influence on the quality of your grain flour. A grain mill can range in price from tens to hundreds of dollars, be hand/human powered or even equipped with an electric motor. My grain mill is one of the cheaper models made and can be found on Ebay for around $25 - $30. Unless you already have experience with grinding your own grain flour or wish to use the flour on a commercial level, I would strongly recommend you purchase the cheapest cast iron hand powered mill available. A fe...

Supposedly Monday (January 20) was the most depressing day of the year and I guess that means this is also the most depressing week of the year. I choose not to believe that and am going out of my way to beat the wintertime blues. Here's a list of what seems to work for me. 1. Avoid fatty comfort foods. Whenever it's cold I get the worst cravings for everything that is unhealthy, whether it is chocolate or chips or fast food. I basically crave carbs, fat, and sugar.  This year I have been trying really hard to substitute fruit or vegetables in place of the less healthy options of snacks. I've also made a huge effort to only eat if I'm actually hungry. I'm usually guilty of eating out of boredom, stress, or because I happened to be passing through the kitchen. The first couple weeks were rough. I had my boyfriend kindly remind me that I probably didn't really want to eat whatever it was I thought I wanted. (I asked him to do this and it ...