Bread and butter

Thank you for your comments yesterday. I'm quite overwhelmed by them. In the next few days I'll work out my plan of attack and write about it again later in the week.

We've had a lot of women sign up for the swap. Please remember the deadline for sign-ups is Thursday, June 12. Sharon and Lorraine are organising it and they will post the list of swap partners next Monday.

In the meantime, let's get back to reskilling ourselves.

If you're like us and enjoy fresh warm bread for lunch, or if you have a family who needs feeding NOW, one of your great frugal standbys is homebaked bread with butter. I have to confess, I like Vegemite on my bread and toast but I won't hold it against you if you don't. ;- )

I baked a soy and linseed loaf yesterday and when Hanno commented on the price of bread now I decided to do a little investigating. My bread cost approximately $2 to bake. Here is the breakdown: my soy/linseed flour cost $2.80 a kilo (2.2 lbs) or 43 cents per cup, white baker's flour costs me $1.52 a kilo, or 23 cents per cup. This loaf uses four cups of flour. All the following amounts are slight over-estimations: yeast 5 cents, salt 2 cents, sugar 2 cents, water 1 cent, butter 5 cents, oats and poppy seeds for the top 3 cents, electricity 50 cents. Total $2.

The Helga's soy and linseed loaf, which is the closest loaf to what I make, is currently listed as $4.73 online at Woolworths. A saving of $2.73 per loaf.

I made this loaf using the breadmaker to knead the dough. I then put the dough in a bread tin and cooked it in the oven. Making it by hand would slightly decrease the cost but increase the time spent on it.

I've been experimenting with spreads for or bread. I LOVE butter - and it shows. LOL! I'm trying to cut down on the amount of butter I eat and have recently been whipping the butter and adding water to it. It increases in volume, so it goes further and is cheaper, but it tastes the same. When you put whipped butter in the fridge it goes hard, just like unwhipped butter, so I've been keeping ours out on the bench so it's ready for use during the day.

You can't bake with whipped butter and if I put it on really hot bread, it makes it a bit soggy. I have to wait for the bread to cool down a bit before spreading the butter. On room temperature bread, it's fine.

To make whipped butter, have the butter at room temperature and place it in a bowl. Beat it with your electric whisk to soften it and break it up. To 1 cup of butter add a ½ cup of lukewarm water, little bits at a time and beat into the butter. To make it go even further, you could add some olive oil as well, about ½ cup. At the moment we are eating the butter and water mix but I've used the butter+oil+water mix over the past month and it's fine. Again, it's not suitable for baking, but excellent for sandwiches.

Make sure you put the butter in the fridge every night but it's perfectly fine to keep it out on the bench during the day - depending on the temperature at your home. If it's very hot, you'll need to keep it in the fridge all the time.

Finally, I had this note from a reader recently:

I'm a student at Pomona College in Claremont, California and recently spent a good amount of time looking into the various clothesline and drying rack options since Pomona is going to purchase some for student use and I wanted to make sure we purchased the best available option.

In my research, I was shocked to find that there is NO good website explaining all the different clotheslines and drying rack options, so I made my own! It's a wiki page on the Tip the Planet sustainable living wiki that ANYONE CAN EDIT. You can check it out here: http://www.tiptheplanet.com/index.php?title=Air_dry_washing

I've looked at the wiki site and I think it's a great summation of how clothes may be line dried. I recommend it to you as a free reference for anyone wanting to line dry their clothes.