Thursday, August 7, 2008

Tightwadding & Cooking

I've been reading the Tightwad Gazette lately. I checked it out from the library a couple of weeks after Kevin lost his job in hopes of finding some new ideas for saving some extra money. There are lots of tips in that book, some a little too far-reaching for me, but many of them make sense and many of them I was already doing.

Anyway, I've found a few cooking-related ways of saving a few extra pennies here and there that could be useful and I plan to try them out. So I thought I'd share them here on the blog for others. I'm only about a third of the way through the book, so if I come across more tips, I'll post them as well.

- Sub 1 Tablespoon soy flour plus 1 Tablespoon water for 1 egg (the author tested this in baked goods and in meatloaf and did not come across any differences)

- Use powdered milk

- Add 1 Tablespoon wheat germ to white flour for wheat flour

- Save half the sugar usage in baking by using baking soda to neutralize the acid in fruit pies, cobblers, crisps, fruit cakes, and fruit salads. Use 1/2 to 1 teaspoon baking soda and half the amount of sugar needed in the recipe. (This was tested by the author and some things actually tasted sweeter when using this tip)

- Save butter wrappers. Keep them in the fridge and use them when you need to grease a pan, then throw it out.

1 comment:

The Voogts said...

Some interesting ideas.

I noticed you had the chicken w/ sage and fontina on your to-try list. I made it a while ago. Very good! Seemed like more work than I had anticipated. But it did taste very good. And the chicken took longer to cook than I had expected. Maybe I should have pounded it out a bit (or a bit more if I did pound it...can't remember). I made the chicken w/ pesto too. Very good. That's how I learned to make spinach pesto :) And that's the only kind I've ever made. Never made it with basil before.