Posted on 06/01/2007 5:27:07 PM PDT by Huntress
I like to grind my own spices and surprisingly, I found very reasonably priced whole spices at the otherwise insanely overpriced Whole Foods.
A Penzey's opened near me and I bought enough whole spice for under $5 that I have not been back for a year.
I love Penzey’s, both the spices and the recipes in their catalogs and magazine.
I have a feeling this thread will continue for days (and I hope so)........but for me, I need to call it a night.
Ironically I was scoping out possible $1 meals a couple days ago while shopping at Wal-Mart (didn’t need to, just made shopping more interesting).
No problem.
Just walking in and getting a meal for $1 is no problem - if you’ll spend a few minutes looking around at prices instead of labels.
- A can of mixed veggies, a package of Ramen noodles, and a can of Vienna sausages: $0.93
- More spaghetti & sauce than you can eat: $0.75
A day’s food comes in a ready-to-heat packages.
- La Choy canned complete oriental meal: $2.75
- A decent large frozen pizza: $3.00
Of course, if you’re willing to actually buy basics in bulk with care, you can get pretty elaborate for a week or more with just $21.
And I grew up in a family that had a huge garden, growing half a year’s food. You can get a lot of carrots for a $0.10 pack of seeds.
Yes, the author’s tone is awful - making it sound like it’s so horribly hard to live cheaply. No, it’s not THAT much work - though it does take work; our trivially easy meals cost a lot more precisely because we have someone else do all the work.
Well yeah, those are features of a luxurious society.
If you insist on "one fancy latte", swing by my place and I'll whip one up for pennies. The cost isn't so much in the coffee, cream and flavors, it's that someone wants to be paid for making you a very good one in a minute on demand.
If you really insist on drive-thru meals, McDonalds has a $1 menu: your double cheeseburger + fries = $2. Taco Bell serves surprisingly well-balanced food (a square meal, with extra grease, in a bag) for cheap: their half-pound burritos are $1.29 or less.
The prices are precisely because people value "I want" over "I have".
But which one makes the better peanut butter and jelly sandwich?
Humans were designed to operate in a perpetual state of mild hunger. Feeling “full” means your body has consumed WAY more than necessary.
I hear ya! Nothing better than the heel from homemade bread, imo. My mom used to get ticked because I would cut *both* the ends off first - but only because she wanted a heel too!
Funnily enough, some of the kids in his class didn’t like it (the WonderBread crowd, I guess.) I followed a Spanish Bread recipe his teacher gave to me and she said it was excellent. And my son loved it. But some of the kids said it tasted ‘funny’ and was a weird texture. I guess they’ve never had homemade bread before. It was just...bread, lol.
I have to say I do sympathize with anyone not wanting to buy plain ol’ white bread. I bake some but I always buy whole wheat (the *real* kind of whole wheat), no matter what it costs. One of my splurges but I never throw any of it away. Once I had to buy white (late at night, no bread for lunch the next day, all the store had) and that night my son said “What was that stuff you made my sandwich out of? That was NASTY. It was...gooey.”
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