Homemade cold cereal

Cereal grains are cooked as a general rule, so if you want a cold cereal you must cook it ahead of time. You'll have a hard time imitating "flakes" or sugar coated shapes, but you can make tasty cold cereal at home. And who's to say you can't add miniature marshmallows or chocolate chips?

If you need reasons to make your own cold cereal, how about taste? Health? Cost?

The easiest ingredient for homemade cold cereal is toasted oats. Just spread oats - any kind from steel cut to instant - on a cookie sheet and toast in a slow oven until they're very lightly browned. This can take a couple of hours. Alternately, toast them on the top of the stove in a heavy skillet over medium heat. You'll have to stir them often but they toast much faster.

Puff or pop whole grains by adding a few to a hot skillet and shaking it around or stirring until the grains pop. If grains are old or too dry, they won't pop, but most will. Grains to pop are amaranth, wheat, spelt, barley and brown rice. Sort through the grains first and remove any broken or malformed grains as these won't pop. Popping grains is an art rather than a science!

I've tried other things with various results. Some might work better for you.

Soak wheat or spelt in water over night, then blend it (adding more water if necessary) until you have a pulp. Cook this pulp until it's smooth, then spread very thinly on a cookie sheet or dehydrator trays and let dry. I didn't use heat to dehydrate it, but that might work well. Once it's dry, break it into small pieces for cereal.

Store your cereal in air tight containers so they're handy when you want them.

Once you have a good assortment of cold cereal ready to eat, you may never go back to the over priced, over sugared, over treated chemical concoctions they call breakfast food.

Make Your Own Iced Tea

By request:

It's so easy to make iced tea that I can't see spending money on another appliance just to do that, or even worse, buying it already made. People have made iced tea for years (probably centuries) without the aid of a plug in contraption that eats electricity and counter space.

Anyway, here's how, and it's a lot easier and faster to do than it is to tell about it.


First, if you can find it, buy loose leaf tea. It's much better for iced tea. It has a fuller flavor, and it keeps better in the refrigerator.


You'll need a small pan to boil water, a strainer of some kind - cheese cloth or a handled fine mesh strainer will work. You'll also need some tea, sugar if you like it sweet, water, a jar or glass pitcher and a long handled spoon.


Put a cup or so of water on to boil and meanwhile get your jar ready. If you're going to use sugar, put it in the jar now. For sweet tea, southern style, use about a cup of sugar for a gallon of tea, but adjust it to your own taste.


Put some cold water into this, a couple of cup's worth, and mix the sugar into it. Use the cold water even if you don't use sugar, to keep the hot water from cracking the jar.


When the water boils, remove the pan from the stove. For each quart of tea, add a scant tablespoon of looseleaf tea (four per gallon). Cover the pan and let the tea steep for 10 - 15 minutes.


Strain the tea into the jar or pitcher, add cold water to fill, and stir.


This is the best and most frugal tea you'll ever drink.

The cost of biscuits

My daughter is working as a cook in a popular local place once owned by Doug Kershaw. You might not know who he is, but I like to name drop anyway. ;)

The restaurant used to give free biscuits with their breakfast meals, but no more. They don't have the manpower to make their own biscuits, so they buy them at 20¢ each. Each.

I may be living in a world of my own. Does that sound expensive to you, for assembly line style biscuits? The cost of ingredients has gone up, as well as transportation and labor, but 20¢? That's $2.40 a dozen. Can't you buy them cheaper in the grocery store? Store brand, generic?

I don't know how much they sell them for, but I should ask. Or maybe I should go into the biscuit baking business.

Home made versus hand made

I read somewhere that when you give a home made gift, you should call it "hand made," and that makes sense to me.

It's true that "home made" sounds... well, almost tacky, while "hand made" sounds exclusive and special! We frugal folks might as well take advantage of people's perceptions.

That reminds me of how saving money can be considered tacky or special, too. We can look at it either way, and the way we present it to our families can make a difference as to how they accept our frugal ways.

Being frugal is sometimes a lonely place to be, so it makes sense to use all the tricks we can to show others that ours is a logical, legitimate and empowering lifestyle.

There's nothing tacky about that.