Frugal Food Tips: Bake Your Own Bread - bread baking tips and hints

Frugal Food: Bread Baking Tips
There's absolutely nothing that smells as delicious as freshly baked bread! Slathered with butter and jam, it's a simple, old-fashioned treat that really satisfies. Here are some bread baking tips to make yummy homemade loaves that are frugal and fantastic all at the same time:

• Research to find the most frugal ingredients: basics like flour and yeast might seem cheap already and they are when compared to prepared commercial bread. But, make a comparison search of the prices of bread ingredients like all-purpose flour, whole wheat flour, and yeast. Buy in bulk for those ingredients and really reduce the overall cost of each loaf of homebaked bread.
• Freeze it: Running your bread machine or oven too often won't help with the electricity bills! Instead, bake a few loaves at a time, and then freeze the loaves, or switch things up by also baking a batch of rolls or cinnamon buns with basic bread dough.
• Add Interest: Basic bread can be turned into some decadent gourmet treats - add herbs, spices, cheese, or sweet ingredients like dried fruit, sugar and cinnamon to create all sorts of wonderful treats from one basic bread recipe.
• Make Mine a Pizza: Remember that yeast bread dough also makes amazing pizza dough. Just spread fresh dough in a pizza pan, making sure to grease the pan first and add a sprinkle of cornmeal to make the pizza pie just slip right out when you're ready to eat it. Pizza is a frugal meal that can be made healthful - just add more fresh veggies, less processed meats, and lower fat cheeses for a yummy meal that the family won't even realize is good for them.

Always looking for new frugal tips? Please check out my NEW book: Living Large On Less: A Guide to Saving without Sacrifice for inspiration to get you started on your reasonable new frugal lifestyle.

A Beverage that's good for you AND Your Budget - Tea - Frugal Food

A delicious cup of tea makes you feel like all is right with the world, AND it's easy on your budget. It can even be good for your health: studies have shown that both black and green tea (which are, after all the same tea plant, just picked at different stages of maturity) are very good sources of antioxidants.

Make a delicious cup of regular orange pekoe tea and serve with milk, sugar and/or honey. Or, chill that same tea for a yummy - and oh yes, cheap! - glass of refreshing iced tea. Add a wedge of lemon and you have a delicious drink on a warm day.

Or, herbal teas are a great alternative to other types of less healthy (and costlier) drinks, such as soda. Try combining a few of your favorite herbal teas together, or trying them iced as well. Some of the fruit 'teas' are so flavorful it's almost like drinking fruit punch!

And the best part of all for us frugalites is knowing that tea is a very affordable treat - a box of tea can cost $2.00 or more, but usually provides 16-24 tea bags at a time. Watch for sales and then stock up on tea - so that you can have a comforting hot or cold drink whenever your thirst strikes.

A Latte A Day Wrecks the Budget, Okay?

Just a crazy little calculation to ponder on:

A tall latte at Starbucks everyday doesn't seem like such an extravagant indulgence, right? Wrong! Around here, each tall latte costs $3.31. Over the course of one year (not including any lovely pastries to go on the side) that would set you back an astonishing $1208.15!! That's just about enough to choke any true blue coffee afficionado.