Meal Stretcher Monday: Brownie Bites

My Husband has a weakness for pre-packed desserts. His ideal grocery trip likely involves buying his weight in PopTarts. For the sake of convenience, he picked up some Little Bites Brownie Bites to throw into lunch boxes or keep kids quiet in the car (okay, that actually wasn't a bad idea).

The problem is that this little box here contains 5 envelopes of 3 brownie bites each, and costs around $3.50.

Nope. I can do better.

Thankfully, I have this pan here:

The wells are the same size as the Little Bites, but there are 24 of them instead of 15. Already we're on a roll.

You can use a mix (usually about $1.50), or if you have the ingredients, make them from scratch with a recipe like the Best Brownies recipe from Hershey's.
Fill your wells, and bake!

(Pardon the mess along the sides of the wells. There was a toddler attached to my leg chanting "browniebrowniebrowniebrowniebrownie".)

Note: these wells are small! You'll need a MUCH shorter cooking time (mine took 8 minutes). Had I tried to leave them for the 25 minutes in the original recipe I would have had charcoal briquettes.

Voila!

It's a messy picture. I planned to take a better one with them all stacked nicely on a plate, maybe with a glass of milk in the background.... Too late. I was overruled and the brownies were gone way too fast.

Let's look at the savings here. Assuming that 3 brownies is a serving...

Little Bites: 5 servings for $3.50. That's $0.70 per serving.

Mix: 8 servings for $1.50. That's under $0.19 per serving.

Mine were from scratch and since I had all of the materials, they cost me nothing.

I know what's going into our lunch boxes.

Meal Stretcher Monday - Split Pea Soup

I love fall. I love the colors, the holidays, the excuse to wear sweaters...

I don't love the cold. I don't love the rain. I don't love the cold rain. I also don't love the hurried rush for dinner that comes from my return to teaching. When I get home, I want a healthy, hot meal that requires no actual thinking.

Soup!

Split pea soup is one of my favorite soups (because it's insanely easy, and I have been known to be lazy.

Here's how it goes:

Get a bag of split peas (I got this one at a discount store for $3.50). Do the whole sort/rinse/drain thing recommended on the bag (it takes about 3 minutes). Put them into a big soup pot.

Chop an onion and add it to the pot.

Now add your liquid of choice. Some use broth, but I chose to use 8 cups of water to two cups of peas, plus some vegetable bullion to round out the flavor. If you are so inclined, you can add ham. Due to the whole vegetarian thing, I didn't.

Now you just boil it on medium until the peas are soft (about 30-40 minutes). I finish mine up with the immersion blender to make it a little smoother.

Voila!

This bowl is larger than it looks and makes enough soup for a whole family, plus lots for freezing. I freeze mine in small zipper bags, so I can grab one and throw it in my lunch box and heat it at work.

The total for all of this? Just that $3.50. It works out to be about 20 cups of soup (so at least 20 portions), which is around $0.17 per portion. This is way better than a can of pre-made soup with about 2 portions for $2.

Enjoy!

Meal Stretcher Monday - Bread

Due to the drought conditions around our country, groceries are going up in price. Again. This is perfectly understandable, but also a cause for long-term concern. Remember when the gas prices shot up, then food prices shot up, then gas prices fell, then food prices...didn't? Yeah. I find myself scared that this is happening again.

Fittingly enough, it's time for...MEAL STRETCHER MONDAY! This is my weekly attempt to make some recipe that will save us grocery money in the long run. This week: bread!
Note: this is coming out on a Tuesday. Sorry! Our internet failed yesterday, so I'm a day late.

I have been trying to find a bread recipe that can mimic the springy quality of the store bought bread that we use for sandwiches/toast/etc around here.

Seeing as how I'm not terribly skilled at making bread...this could take me a while.

The recipe for this attempt comes from The Progressive Pioneer and claims to be no-fail. Hm... Let's give it a go!

Ingredients:
7 cups whole wheat flour
2 tsp salt
2 (heaping) Tbsp olive oil (or lecithin granules - which I don't own)
3.5 cups warm water
1.5 tsp yeast
1/4 cup honey

First, I mixed the warm water and honey together, then sprinkled the yeast over the top, then got distracted by the kids for a few minutes.

Next, I mixed half of the flour (3.5 cups), the salt, and the olive oil in the bowl of my mixer and stirred it together, slowly adding the yeast mixture.

Once it was mixed into a smooth batter, I added the remaining flour and switched to the dough hook.
The Progressive Pioneer recommended mixing for 7 minutes. I have no idea how long I mixed, because the kids managed took that moment to mutiny. Next time, seven minutes for sure.

After the mixing, my dough was a little less stretchy than it should have been (probably from over-kneading), but still looked good. I split the dough between my only two bread pans and baked.

Look at that deliciousness! You want to bite the screen, don't you? Yeah, you do.

It's tasty, it's springy, it's filling, it cuts beautifully without crumbling. I'm in love. Okay, my preschooler won't eat it because it's not exactly like the store-bought kind, but the toddler and I have been demolishing it. Amazing.