Actually, I love those! They keep me from losing the tape when I’m wrapping and they keep my daughter from stealing the tape too. I used to take the tape and make a bunch of little strips and stick just the end of them to the table - now I just pop on the little tape dispenser.
I feel like a total shmoo now for using all this crap. :eek:
I always buy pre-grated cheese, unless I need a block of cheese for slices. I hate grating cheese and cleaning the grater, and the convenience is worth the price. I occasionally buy pre-cut lettuce/salad mix, but I usually just get a package of romaine hearts from CostCo and cut my own. I could see buying hardboiled eggs if I were staying in a hotel room or something, but I’d never do it otherwise.
See, I buy these. Why? Because every time I buy just a hunk of meat, I forget to break it up into patties before I freeze it.
Yup, I’m that dumb.
Also, just because, uh, I, uh… forgot, yeah…
What is in pancake mix, and how do I make it myself?
(Be easy on me. I’m young and naive.)
I find that my grand plan of separating things at home gets forgotten in the chaos of bringing in the groceries, tripping over the kids and the dog and forgetting to tell the hubby some stuff needs to be separated and then I remember when I go to grab it out of the freezer a couple days later. :smack:
Pancake mix is just flour, baking powder (or you can just use the self-rising flour), pinch of salt (also optional if using self-rising flour), sugar, and a dash of vanilla. Mix in an egg and milk and fire up the griddle. How much of each thing? I have no idea, honestly. I just keep mixing till it tastes right and is about the right consistency.
The recipe I use (that my mom figured out the measurements and wrote down for me when I went to college, although plenty of people do different proportions) is:
(the part that’s in the mix in the box)
1 1/2 cups flour
3 1/2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
1 tbsp sugar
(the part you’d add to the mix)
1 1/4 cups milk
1 egg
3 tbsp butter, melted
some people add vanilla, and you can put fruit in or substitute chocolate milk or whatever.
I’ll leave figuring out the cost difference as an exercise for the reader. Suffice it to say that the ingredients in Aunt Jemima’s pancake mix ought to already be in your cabinets and a whole lot cheaper, too.
Are you talking about Bisquik? The pancake mix I buy doesn’t even require eggs or milk, just water. I only buy this because I never buy eggs. (And I eat pancakes so infrequently that one box lasts me several years.)
As for our produce department, you can buy a pound of strawberries for, oh, around $3. You can also buy a pound of strawberries in a segmented deli tray with one of the parts filled with “cream” (which I assume is some icing from the bakery department) for $7.99. It’s downright evil genius!
For some reason the recent glut of “newfangled” toilet brushes make me want to pull my hair out. First, there’s the one where you buy special toilet cleaner inserts that fit into the brush and dispense through it, because it’s SO HARD to dump a glug of bleach or bowl cleaner into a toilet. Second, there’s the paper toilet brush with the disposable head, because EWWWW! A regular toilet brush has germs on it. Who gives a crap? It’s only going to go back in the toilet!
Well, some folks use Bisquick. There are a lot of brands of pancake/waffle mix, most of which are sweeter than Bisquick. It seems entirely pointless to me, since all the ingredients are staple items in the minimally-supplied kitchen.
Um, shouldn’t you fork it first? I’ve heard jokes about kids exploding potatos in microwaves (always wanted to try it when I was a kid, but thank heavens, I was too scared of what would happen when my parents found out!)
Grated cheese-I will grate cheddar for tacos and salads and other things, since I usually don’t use it that much-most of the cheddar blocks go to salads (in mini cubes) and crackers.
But the big bag of grated mozarella is the only way to go for pizza.
Oh, and I like Bisquick. I admit-I’m a sucker for the Impossible Cheeseburger Pie. YUM!
Yes, that sometimes happens to me, too.
But if you look at the prices, you can afford to have about half of the bag rot and you will still save money by buying the whole bag. (But it just bugs me to let food go to waste like that.)
Here at Casaflodnak we use this pancake recipe (doubled). It’s simple, cheap, and tasty.
Incidentally, you don’t need to buy buttermilk for it, you can use sour milk. Put a tablespoon of white vinegar or lemon juice in the bottom of the measuring cup for each cup of milk you want. Add the milk, don’t stir, just let it sit for five minutes.
Funny thing: I buy shredded cheese, and sometimes bagged salads, because they save me time. And I usually have some pre-formed hamburger patties in the freezer, because I can just pull them out and cook them as part of a last-minute supper. (The ones I make always seem to shrink to little spheres instead of patties… why is this?) But I don’t buy pancake mix, or cake mixes, or pudding mix, because I really don’t think they save me any time. The little extra time it takes to make these things from scratch is well worth it when you consider how much better the scratch items taste. But pre-shredded cheese (provided it’s real cheese, of course) tastes just the same as cheese you buy in a block and shred yourself…
Huh. My kitchen is pretty decent, and I cook from scratch more often than not, but believe it or not, I don’t have any flour on hand. Well, I have cornmeal. Correction, my husband has cornmeal, because he likes to make cornbread, but we have no wheat flour on hand. No vanilla, either.
You know, not everyone is into cookies and cakes. I don’t batter anything either, so there ya go. No need for flour in my cooking repetoire.
Don’t eat panckaes either. But yeah, if I did, I’d probably make 'em from scratch - after I went out and bought the flour.
Actually, pre-formed patties are all I buy. If I need a pound or two of ground beef for meatload or some such, I squish several burgers together; I’ll tell you why: at the Sam’s Club we buy our meat at, 80% lean pre-formed patties are ten cents cheaper per pound than 80% ground beef! I dunno why. Doesn’t make any sense to me, but I’ll save money when I can!
I have a minimally stocked kitchen. I don’t have eggs, flour, or baking soda, and I only keep a small container of milk. It’s easier to buy pancake mix than buy the ingredients to use maybe onc e a month or so.
No flour in the kitchen? But…but…how do you make biscuits? And cornbread? And chicken pot pie? And cinnamon rolls?
Kraft Mac and Cheese, much as I love it (god how I love it), bears little resemblence to actual macaroni and cheese.
The one thing I haven’t seen mentioned is microwaveable green beans. Just stick a fork in the bag and nuke them for a couple a minutes and you get well… something I don’t want to know about.
-Lil
You’d best not be putting flour in your cornbread, unless you want my grandmother to come back from the dead and beat some sense into you.
Otherwise, I often find I need just a tiny bit of flour, say, for keeping things from sticking to one another, or for other batters, or to thicken gravy, or whatever. Flour’s easy to keep around, you just get a nice sealed Tupperware canister and it keeps forever. I can’t stand it when I want to make something and I have to run out to the grocery store for something I consider a staple, when it’s just a tablespoon or something but you know you need it. It’s really infuriating, so I try to keep a basic set of dry goods around even if I don’t really think I’ll need it, because when I do need it I always think I already have it.
Plus, the boxed mixes suck even if you use them because you hardly ever make pancakes, because they sit there in that box with all that air and it’s already open and you don’t know what’s eating it. It can get weevils, or roaches, or who knows what else, and just thinking about that makes me throw it away and get more anyway. Now, if you kept it in some airtight container, then that would make some sense, but it seems like nobody does.
Well… I don’t make those things.
I cook a lot of stirfrys and soups, niether of which requires flour. I just don’t make chicken pot pie, or rolls, or biscuits. Not really interested in eating 'em