DIY iced tea

One of our latest projects is to brew our own iced tea. Iced tea is a healthy alternative to other cold flavored drinks like soda or even juice; it has very few calories, and benefits from the same "superfood" qualities that hot tea does. And it's easy to make yourself!

Our recipe (if you can call it that): bring one gallon of water to a boil. Remove from heat and add two generic tea bags and one flavored herbal tea (e.g. rasberry, ginger peach, etc.). Stir once, then steep for about 15 minutes. Remove the tea bags, allow to cool, and refrigerate.

If you prefer sweet tea, you can add the sweetener of your choice to each glass. It would probably also work to dissolve in some sweetener right after you remove the tea bags.

We've tried it using only generic "TEA" bags, and with a blend of flavored tea, and definitely prefer the flavors. The result is similar to the flavored iced teas sold as soft drinks.

At our grocery store, generic tea bags cost about 2 cents each, and fancy flavored tea costs about 25 cents each, so a whole batch costs about 29 cents to make. If you get a full gallon batch, that works out to about 2.7 cents per 12 ounce serving. Which is pretty cheap.

We'll be experimenting with different flavors to see which one we like best. I also want to try using green tea, like some of the new green iced tea products I've seen.

Homemade yogurt: batting .500

Yesterday we succesfully made homemade yogurt. We used a simple recipe based on the one in The Tightwad Gazette, by Amy Dacyczyn:

1. Mix a quart of milk with 1/2 cup dry milk powder.
2. Heat to 180 degrees F.
3. Cool to 115 degrees F.
4. Whisk in 2 tbsp store-bought yogurt with live cultures.
5. Incubate at 110 degrees F for 4-8 hours.
   

A few days ago we made a valiant first try that utterly failed. Following Dacyczyn's advice, we used a heating pad on "low" to keep the yogurt warm during the incubation step. However when it was finished Amanda noticed that the yogurt was at room temperature -- not 110 degrees. And, I completely forgot to add the milk powder. The result was a batch of milk with a slight sour taste. Ooops.

Yesterday we tried again, but this time I remembered to add the powder, and we set the heat pad on "high." This batch turned out to be actual yogurt! It was a little runnier than store-bought, but in retrospect I had doubled the amount of milk but forgot to double the amount of dried milk. I plan on using the prescribed proportion of milk powder next time, which I think will yield a thicker consistency.

At our grocery store, organic milk costs $3.50/half gallon (5.7 cents/oz), and generic plain yogurt costs $2.79/32 oz (8.7 cents/oz). We typically use about 40 oz/week, so making our own yogurt saves about $1.20/week and gives us an "upgrade" to organic. Not a huge sum, but a buck's a buck. There's also a convenience factor, since the store containers never last the whole week, but we can make a homemade batch in whatever size we want.

Crockpots are great

Man, crockpots are great.

Crockpots are a rare "quadruple crown:" simultaneously cheap, healthy, time-efficient, and environmentally sound.

Every crockpot recipe we've tried so far follows the same pattern:

1. Throw a bunch of vegetables, spices, and maybe some meat, into the crockpot
2. Stir it
3. Set it to cook for 8 hours on low, or 4 hours on high

Aside from a couple simple rules, like leaving it closed the whole cooking time, and not under- or over-filling it, you can pretty much experiment with whatever ingredients you want.

It's cheap because recipes tend to be mostly inexpensive vegetables, and the slow cooking process makes inexpensive meats more tender and flavorful than other forms of cooking. It's possible to make an entire recipe out of stuff from the produce section (plus spices), and you can "get away" with using a lot of cheap ingredients like potatoes or canned tomatoes. We tend to get about 10 servings per recipe, so the cost per serving is pretty low. Leftovers are great, which helps us avoid eating out for lunch. And crockpots themselves are cheap; about $20 new, and perennially available at thrift stores and garage sales.

It's healthy because it's a low-impact way of cooking from scratch and incorporating lots of vegetables. I'll readily admit that home-cooking a healthy meal every day of the week is impractical for a lot of people, myself included. A typical crockpot recipe takes 20-30 minutes to prepare and makes enough food for several meals. Also it's easy to mix and match ingredients, so we've been substituting low-fat and "superfood" ingredients when possible.

It's time-efficient because you get so much food for so little effort. What's more, the cooking can happen unsupervised, so you can start a recipe before you go to sleep or before you leave for work, and wake up/come home to a hot, cooked meal.

It's environmentally sound because, again, you can use a minimal amount of meat. When you cook from scratch it's easy to use all organic food, and you waste very little packaging. Finally the crockpot throws off much less waste heat than an oven or range.

So far we've found a few recipes we really like, and only one that was truly bad. Our favorites include Chicken Tikka Masala, Chicken, Chickpea and Apricot Tagine, and Chicken and Dumplings. Next time I want to try a Manhattan-style salmon chowder filled to the brim with "superfoods," and I'm embarking on a quest to fine-tune an authentic New England clam chowder to soothe my Yankee homesickness. We'll see how that goes.