Thrifty sleepover strategy

After working hard last week to come in nearly $20 under our grocery budget goal, we decided to ease up this week and let ourselves spend the full $90. Pacing is important if you want to keep morale up. It’s funny how you can feel like you’re living large on $15 a person per week when you’ve been getting buy on considerably less than that for a few weeks in a row.

For us, living large included takeout pizza, trying a couple of new dishes for a Super Bowl party and hosting not one but two sleepovers -- one on a school night during a stretch of three straight snow days.

Sleepovers needn’t be expensive, though. For us, the key is making a big batch of bread dough. Use half the dough to make pizzas, and the other half for cinnamon rolls the next morning. Throw in some popcorn and Kool-Aid, and you’re all set.

The bread dough I make most often now is both tasty and simple:

Take 2 cups of prepared mashed potatoes (I usually make instant in the microwave, if I don’t have any already made in the freezer), add 1 tablespoon of yeast, three tablespoons of salt, four cups of warm water and about eight cups of flour. (You might need more or less, depending on the flour; keep adding until the mixture is not too sticky for you to start using your hands.) I usually use a bit of whole wheat flour in my flour mix, but obviously you don’t have to.

Cinnamon rolls are easy, too. Just spread some dough on a greased surface, as if you’re making a pizza, only slather it with butter instead of tomato sauce. Then sprinkle it with a mixture of cinnamon and sugar, and roll it up into a log. Slice each roll off and set it in a greased baking dish. Then butter each top and sprinkle with more cinnamon sugar. Bake at 350 degrees for 10-12 minutes (it depends on the size of your rolls, which depends on the size of the “log” you rolled up.)

For icing, the simplest is to just pour a dab of milk into a cup of powdered sugar and whisk with a fork until your get a consistency you can deal with. If you want to go all out, though, caramel icing isn’t too much harder nor much more costly. Just heat a stick of butter and cup of brown sugar until it boils, stir for a minute or two, add 1/4 cup milk and heat til boiling again, then remove from heat and cool. Add 1 teaspoon vanilla flavoring and a couple of cups of powdered sugar. (That’s what the recipe I use calls for, but I sometimes like to use a little more than that.)