We are back, with bread

I’m sorry. I ran out of steam and ideas. And I had a crisis of conscience about not actually being poor*, or indeed consistently frugal. On the other hand there’s a lot of people posting cat pictures who aren’t themselves cats. Anyway, I have decided to get back on this frugal-blogging horse, and I have taken the precaution of preparing a few posts in advance to tide me over the dry patches.

Just to get the ball rolling again, right now this very second, I have bread on. Yeah, I know, bread, we’ve done that to death, who has time apart from childless yuppies and the unemployed? However…

… this is different, honest, in that it involves five minutes a day. Many things are achievable in five minutes a day, supposedly, but this is for real. Unlike the difficult path of dynamic tension, the results are immediate and gratifying.

The basic idea is that you mix a BIG batch of dough. You don’t bother kneading it. You keep it in the fridge, and once it’s had a day to get going, you just take a portion for a small loaf, shape it, and bake it. It’s the NYT no-knead bread approach taken to an extreme. And it works.

You can read about the rest here. (Update: this link went to the wrong place before, but I’ve fixed it now.)

The authors don’t make any claims about the properties of the bread, other than it being delicious, but I’m hearing a lot recently about long fermentation improving digestibility and making bread tolerable for people who can’t cope with bread made by the dreadful Chorleywood process.

But anyway, it tastes great, and the time taken brings this out of the hobby category and firmly into the money-saving.

Do excuse me. I have something in the oven.

* I live in fear of turning into Muriel Newman.

A year of Frugal Me

Sorry things have been a bit quiet in the last couple of weeks. I have a big show to rehearse for so my evenings have been chewed up by practising instead of blogging. And Che has a baby. (That gets him out of everything).

In lieu of a proper new post, how about a one year retrospective?

Last year I was noticing that a lot of the posts on my personal blog about food and money were getting many comments (by the pathetic standards of low traffic personal blogs) and I wondered:

I feel that in these anxious times there might be scope for a specialist blog aimed at the frugal bourgeois, perhaps even a Wellington one that points out local deals. What do you reckon?

And then Che set up frugalme.wordpress.com and the rest is history.

Since then, we’ve published 120 posts, sparked 779 comments, been featured in the Dominion Post and made a lot of yoghurt and bread.

Here are some favourites (many have better comments than the main post):

We look at clothes and mention Vimes’ boots for the first (but not the last) time

Che does the maths on chickpeas.

Meat.

Cheap weddings.

Cheap books.

The start of the yoghurt mania.

The start of cycling mania.

The marvellous pram.

Musing on the dollar-to-jollies ratio.

Plans for the next 12 months? I dunno. We’ll keep blogging. We invite our readers to compose posts themselves which we will happily run. There may or may not be some sort of crowdsourced grocery pricing database — I need to think about how that would really work before I commit to bodging up the infrastructure.

Anyway thank you all for your comments and feedback, which have proved that the main goal of Frugal Me as far as I’m concerned is to provoke people into telling me useful things. Cheers.