I make bread at home for a lot of reasons: I like how it tastes, I think it’s fun to make, I get to control what goes in it, and I feel connected to generations throughout history, across all classes and creeds, who in making bread daily expressed their humanity (yeah!). But the nagging question in these “trying economic times” ( ) is, does it save money? 

It was pretty easy to break down the costs for my standard bread which is from a recipe published in the March & April 2006 Cook’s Illustrated and yields two (~1.5#) loaves:

That’s $1.93/loaf or about 8 cents/oz of bread. A recent trip to Cub revealed the white Wonderbread can be had at the price of 2 for $3 for 20oz loaves. For good quality multigrain bread it’s probably a lot more; I haven’t bought bread in so long that I don’t know. Looks like baking bread at home saves a little money.

Saves money, that is, if you leave out the cost of labor (not to mention gas to heat the oven, electricity to boil the water, and cost of the water reflected in rent). Assuming my time is worth $16/hour counting just the active time for making this the bread costs more like $6 a loaf. For a lawyer to bake bread would cost much more! But baking bread is fun and fulfilling—it makes you human. And if you refuse to commodify your time, you are definitely saving money on the ingredients.

Obviously I’m not the first person to think this way. For a historical perspective, check out this letter to the NYTimes from 1916. Prices were also going up in the writer’s time: $1.10 for 24# of flour!

Finally, for those of you curious about the process behind this bread, it is very simple. First, pour the boiling water over the cereal and let it soak for one hour. After that, you mix in all the other ingredients and knead for ten minutes. Let the dough rise in an oiled bowl for an hour and a half, then divide it into two pieces. Shape the pieces into cylinders and proof in loaf pans for another hour, until they are bursting out of the pans. Bake at 375° for 35-40 minutes. Bread! For a more detailed explanation, check out Cook’s Illustrated #79, March-April 2006.

In the Home & Garden section of this week’s New York Times, there’s a short article about people who’ve decided to get rid of their refrigerators. 

For some this means switching to a freezer-only or a mini fridge in lieu of the “normal” giant American fridge, so they’re not totally giving up cooling food. Still, it seems like a decent idea given the energy suck that is the refrigerator. I grew up in a house with not one but TWO of them, so it’s also a pretty radical idea to me.

Today, we have a new fridge in the apartment because I requested that the landlord install one. While the new fridge still has issues that more expensive ones wouldn’t (running water down the back, caking ice in the freezer), I don’t miss the old fridge. Like the one of the women quoted in the article, we do the “easy” environmentally friendly things well-known to most people. I try to replace our incandescent bulbs with the squiggly energy saver ones (even when it looks awful) and we recycle all glass, plastic, cans, and newspaper. Most of the time, we use reusable bags at the store… and when we do get the crappy most-people-throw-away plastic bags, we reuse them instead of buying trash bags. While it’s easy to “do our part” in these ways which don’t inconvenience us too much, I’m not sure I could give up the fridge. In fact, I really wish we had another debatably earth-friendly appliance: a dishwasher. 

Could you get by in a household of 2+ people with just a college dorm fridge?

We’ve been Earl Grey drinkers for a long time. I, personally, come from a long line of Earl Grey drinkers. That is, until some of those drinkers concluded that bergamot might cause spikes in blood pressure—I’m dubious.

Recently I found Ahmad tea at Marshall’s discount stores. I thought it was going to be a mix of teas inside the fun little red bus (the confusing labeling is not pictured below… but you can see it in the Amazon link), but it’s actually just one kind of tea called “English Afternoon.”

Has anyone actually heard of this before? English Breakfast is a favorite for a lot of folks (I don’t like it), but English Afternoon? Reading the ingredients, it turns out this is basically Earl Grey masked with a new name. At first upset that I wasn’t getting a variety pack, I’m now happy about what’s inside. And, since I obviously bought this for the CUTE LITTLE RED BUS, it’s a bonus that there’s anything usable inside of it at all. Plus, we’d run out of our giant 2-year lasting supply of Twining’s Earl Grey, and I had never had another brand I could swallow with that classic flavor.

Ahmad isn’t bad. I wouldn’t pay $8 + shipping for it, but if you see a tin at Marshall’s the next time you’re perusing the gourmet offerings, pick some up.

So maybe I’m crazy… but I think these would be a lot of fun in an entryway. Maybe not *our* entryway, but surely someone out there has an appropriate space on a wall with an inviting color. For $12? It’s a deal.

I grew up in a household virtually free of beets. My dad did not, and I think still does not, like beets. In college, I started to experiment with beets and found I didn’t mind them. It’s only in the past year that I’ve started to fully appreciate the glory of the beet. They were big on beets at Blackbird, where I was briefly employed during the past summer, so I became familiar with the process of roasting, slicing, and tossing beets in salad. And then just last week, with beet matchsticks left over from beetza, I put raw beets on a sandwich.

In addition to beets, there was

• Multigrain Bread
• Sprouts
• Turkey
• Mayo

I was really surprised by how much I liked raw beets. They were crunchy, giving a real bite to the sandwich, and still had that characteristic beet sweetness, just less so than if they had been roasted. Less sweetness is almost always a good thing! So, the moral of the story is, beets: not just for roasting!

Since I make pizza regularly, I am always trying to come up with new ideas for toppings to keep things interesting. I also have been trying to buy food that is local and in season. Those two concepts intersected recently to result in: the beetza.

Beets are not, strictly speaking, in season since everything here is dead, but these beets were local and probably have been stored away somewhere since the fall—as seasonal as I’m going to get in January in Minnesota. To accompany the beets, I thought I’d aim for the classic combination with basil and goat cheese. I bought basil but since I already had feta so I decided to use that in place of goat cheese (I defy you to find a difference between sheep and goats). Almost all the beets I’ve ever eaten have been roasted, but I figured with 9 minutes in a 500 degree oven thin matchsticks of raw beets would be fine. As it turned out, the beets were still pretty crunchy, which I didn’t mind, but some probably would. This was a good pizza, although the beet flavor wasn’t especially strong. The color of the beet juice bleeding out from the beet pieces made it very visually striking; it was probably worth it just to see that.

I also made a couple of other pizzas which were somewhat less exciting. Here’s a marinara pie with capers and rosemary added:

And a pizza with mushrooms and brie (on a side note, I’m pretty sick of brie): 

I did not get the crust on these pizzas as dark as I usually do and I couldn’t figure out why at the time. Same oven, same maximum heat, same crust (Peter Reinhart’s napoletana dough from American Pie). It was only the next day when I remembered that I had my pizza stone set up on a rack in the lowest position, rather than on the floor of the oven. Putting it on the floor gets the stone a lot hotter since the gas burns just below the floor. In fact, it gets too hot for bread, burning the crust before the inside is cooked, which is why the stone was on a rack in the first place. But for pizza, you want everything as hot as it can get, so I have to remember to move the stone. Those 2″ make a big difference!