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.)

The cheapest thought I’ve ever had (I think)

The other day I found myself wondering how much more ink I’ll use over the course of my life by drawing boxes around the headings in my notebooks rather than merely underlining them.

Orange-potato experiment update

Yesterday I reported (and photographed) a small damp spot underneath the potato. Today it’s gone. The potato looks as healthy as ever. Which makes me wonder: At one point I wondered if I should use a grapefruit instead of an orange, given that grapefruit seem so much more acidic and therefore possibly more likely to produce potato death rays. So I swapped out the orange for a grapefruit for a few minutes before deciding to proceed with the original experiment. (Some scientist, huh?) Anyway, now I’m wondering, is the grapefruit so powerful that it produced this effect in just those few minutes? Did I imagine the whole thing? What about the photographic evidence? What would Bill Nye the Science Guy say?

At any rate, here’s what I’m going to do: I’m going to leave the orange-potato bowl alone (except for my previous tampering, I mean) and then I’m going to put another potato in a second bowl with a grapefruit.

Baking soda liberation

What a great feeling to look under the sink and note without dismay that we’re running out of dishwasher detergent -- because for a mere 49 cents, the price of a box of baking soda, I know we can keep feeding the dishwasher twice a day for another week or two. (We still have half a box of borax, the other ingredient in homemade detergent).

Potato disaster yields experiment, recipe

Week before last I bought a 10-pound bag of potatoes on sale at Meijer for just $1.69, well below my target price of $1.99. I remember thinking they looked like good, sturdy potatoes, and knowing that I once counted 41 potatoes in a 10-pound bag, I couldn’t help running the figures in my head, right there in the store: 17 cents a potato if there were just 10 in the bag. But no, there were likely four times that many, so these potatoes likely cost only about 4 cents each.

This would’ve been a fantastic buy -- if I hadn’t plunked them down in a corner of the pantry, next to a giant bag of grapefruit that I’d bought on sale just a few days earlier. I baked a big batch of eight or so potatoes that week, and then didn’t get into the bag again until Super Bowl Sunday, when I was preparing to make diet stuffed potato halves (see recipe below). When I peeked inside, I recoiled in horror: the potatoes on top were slimy, and those on the bottom had literally been liquified into a foul potato soup.

So much for my savvy potato investment. But in grocery shopping, as in sports and life in general, you’ve got to move on. Ruminate on a mistake, and you’ll miss your next opportunity.

In this case, I’m moving on by running an experiment: Do citrus fruits really produce death rays when forced to share housing with potatoes? Or did I just misjudge the quality of the potatoes in the first place? (The potatoes were purchased on Jan. 30, and had been reduced to mush by Feb. 7.)

An initial search on the Web didn’t yield any insights on this question. Plenty of people have theories on the danger of storing onions with potatoes, but apparently nobody else is dim enough to store potatoes with grapefruit (and oranges; a couple of days after I bought the potatoes I bought a big bag of oranges, and put it in the same corner.)

At any rate, yesterday afternoon we put an orange and a potato (purchased on Super Bowl Sunday) in a mixing bowl. When I checked it early this morning the potato looked and felt fine on the surface, but when I picked it up there was a wet spot underneath. We’ll keep you posted.

In the meantime, here’s that recipe for diet stuffed potato halves, courtesy of Weight Watchers Weekly:

Cajun-style Potato Skins
2 large potatoes, baked, cooled and cut in half length-wise
1/4 cup barbecue sauce
1/8 tsp hot pepper sauce
3/4 cup cooked chicken breast, chopped or shredded
1/4 cup shredded part-skim mozzarella cheese

Preheat oven to 425 degrees. Scoop out half the potato from each half and set aside to use later, in soup or mashed potatoes. Combine barbecue sauce and hot pepper sauce and spoon into the potato halves. Fill each potato with 3 T. chicken and top with 1 T. cheese. Put in baking dish and bake for 8 minutes, or until cheese melts and potatoes are hot.

Note: These potato halves are supposed to be 3 Weight Watchers points per serving, but I think that’s if you use the big baking potatoes bought individually. I used regular potatoes from a 10-pound bag, and there was no way I could fit 3 T. of chicken in each potato half. So I’m guessing using smaller potatoes, you might count this as about 1.5 points. But that’s just a guess. (BTW, according to my handy-dandy Weight Watchers points-calculating “slide rule,” three points ranges from 120 calories and 2-12 grams of fat for something with zero grams of fiber to 100 calories and 15-20 grams of fat if it also contains 3 grams of fiber. Actually, that’s not so much a range as simply two different settings on the old slide rule. Not very definitive, but just to give you an idea.)

No-egg chocolate cake with freakish ingredient

This low-fat cake (see recipe below) was tasty enough to satisfy my cravings at a Super Bowl party the night before my Weight Watchers weigh-in, and it occurs to me that with one modification it could also go on my fallout-shelter menu.

The secret ingredient: canned sauerkraut.

I am not making this up. We really did put sauerkraut in this cake. And my kids liked it. And said they’d eat it again, even now that they know about the sauerkraut. I suppose it helps hold things together in place of the eggs.

In a true fallout-shelter situation, you’d have to figure out how to puree it, but hey, people are resourceful under duress. ( I’d probably use a knife.) Everything else -- flour, sugar, cocoa powder, baking soda, etc.-- could easily endure long-term storage, with the exception of the melted butter. Because time was a factor on Sunday, and because even with the butter this cake only registers four Weight Watchers points a slice, I didn’t bother substituting oil or, even better, applesauce. But we’ll definitely swap that out next time we make this and see what happens.

Weight Watchers cost-benefit analysis update: Three weeks, a little over 12 pounds. (But I’ve actually paid for four meetings, counting the initial weigh-in, which I forgot to count last week.) So at a little less than $10 per meeting, I’m looking at a ratio of roughly $10 for every three pounds. If this rate continues (which it likely won’t), it would cost $100 to lose 30 pounds.

Weight Watchers Dark Chocolate Cake Recipe
(This comes from laaloosh.com. For a printer-friendly version, click here.)
Nonfat cooking spray to lightly coat a Bundt pan (we used a 13-by-9 pan, which worked fine)
2 cups all-purpose flour
1 1/3 cups sugar
1 1/2 tsp baking soda
2/3 cup unsweetened cocoa
1/2 cup butter, melted
1 1/2 cups hot water
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 cup sauerkraut, pureed
1 tsp unsweetened cocoa for dusting (you can also use powdered sugar and a light drizzle of Hershey’s chocolate syrup for no extra WW points)

Directions
Preheat oven to 350 degrees, coat pan with cooking spray.
In large mixing bowl combine dry ingredients. Add melted butter, hot water and vanilla extract, then mix. Add pureed sauerkraut and mix thoroughly.
Pour batter into pan and bake 55-60 minutes, until fork inserted in cake’s center comes out clean. Cool for 20 minutes before removing from pan (if you’re using a Bundt pan; we just served ours in the baking dish.)
Sprinkle with 1 teaspoon of coca powder (or same amount of powdered sugar and light drizzle of Hershey’s syrup). Cut into 14 slices to get advertised points value. (We cut ours in to 15 slices, given the rectangular shape of our pan. Better points value, too.)

Paralysis in the grocery aisle

In the aftershock of the job-cuts news at the office, I found myself wandering around the grocery store on my way home from work this weekend, knowing I needed to pick up a few things and seeing the deals I would ordinarily put together -- the “plays I would make,” to put it in the ex-athlete’s sports terms I find myself frequently using in my head -- but somehow not being able to pull the trigger, so to speak. It was like my whole carefully constructed routine was falling down, and my little mind games I play with our grocery budget suddenly seemed silly. Irrelevant.

I made about five laps around the beverage aisle and the frozen foods section one aisle over, unable to decide whether to pay full price for a big package of chicken tenders or knock two dollars off by piling nine 2-liter bottles of pop into a cart. I needed the chicken for a Super Bowl party. It was the pop that was causing my walking paralysis. If I bought the whole ensemble, I‘d be getting our two mainstays -- Diet Pepsi for Bob and I, whose drug of choice in middle age is caffeine, and Mountain Dew for the kids, when they have friends over -- for just 79 cents a bottle. But in a crisis, the only beverage you only really need is water.

Was this a crisis? I couldn’t decide.

We don’t rely on my paycheck for our day-to-day living expenses. Our grocery budget isn’t threatened -- at least not yet. That’s what I kept telling myself as I circled the aisles, while in another part of my brain, my imagination was generating all sorts of creepy sideshows. Finally the message got through, and I “made the play.”

I paid for the bag of chicken with our grocery money, and bought the pop with another fund I call our Grocery Holding Company. That way we get the good deal, without having to sandbag this week’s budget. When we use the pop, I’ll pay the GHC, as I call it, $1 a bottle -- a good price, my target price, as a shopper. But the GHC will make a profit. And eventually those profits will help fund a weekend getaway.

Is that a silly little game? It doesn’t feel irrelevant to me.