If you have a non-electronic meter with dials to indicate electricity or gas consumption, you may have noticed how turning on the oven makes the dials spin madly around. Creative Tightwads have not invented a secret way to change this.
We have. however, found some ways to reduce the damage the oven does to your frugal budget. Not all of these tips will work for everyone. Use the ones that work for you.
1. Know your alternatives.
Is microwaving a good alternative to baking? Does radiating your food cause diseases? Microwaving things wrapped in plastic or in plastic-coated cardboard or paper will, unfortunately, add plastic residues to your food. Microwaving things in glass or china containers seems to be much safer.
Microwave popcorn comes in bags coated with toxic chemicals. Popcorn is a nice natural snack or breakfast cereal when it's not smothered in carcinogenic compounds. An air popper may be a better investment than a microwave if you and your household use a lot of popcorn.
Several other small alternative appliances may or may not serve your purposes better than a full-sized oven. Check and compare the ones you use for the things you bake at home:
* A pressure cooker concentrates energy from one burner on the stove, using steam, to heat foods fast. It's possible to steam breads in a pressure cooker, sealing the dough inside a metal container with plenty of room for expansion. Steamed breads have a heavier texture than conventional sandwich bread. For multi-grain or vegetable breads, this effect can be regarded as a feature.
* A toaster oven works just like a traditional oven, only in miniature. If you bake only small batches, a toaster oven might be a good investment.
* A slow cooker uses a small steady amount of electricity to keep things warm or barely simmering for a long time. This is not usually recommended as a good way to bake breads, but it's an excellent way to cook beans or stew cheap, tough chunks of red meat.
Other unconventional alternative methods like cooking on laboratory or repair shop equipment work better as jokes than as frugal alternatives. When Mrs. Murry (in A Wrinkle in Time) cooked stew on a Bunsen burner in her home laboratory, readers were meant to recognize her as a lovable mad scientist, not ask for recipes. And nothing cooks very well on pavement, even if the pavement is hot enough, and nobody would want to eat it if it did.
2. Bake off the grid if you can.
Wood stoves, camp stoves, bottled gas or kerosene heaters, charcoal grills, hibachis, etc., are not feasible alternatives for everyone. They work, but you must follow all the special safety rules for whichever you are using. Depending on where you live, they may or may not actually be cheaper than using your gas or electric oven in a frugal way.
You can, however, bake things in a tightly covered Dutch Oven (heavy lidded pot) between layers of coals in a grill or even in the fireplace. This will require attention and practice, and will help you understand why, in cultures where traditional food was so plain, people sang the praises of "good" cooks and bakers.
3. Cook more, bake less.
Cooking on the stove top tends to take less time and electricity than baking. So, cook oatmeal instead of baking biscuits. Cook pudding instead of baking cookies.
4. Plan ahead to consolidate cooking times. Use the whole oven if using the oven at all.
Traditionally "Baking Day" meant Saturday. For the rest of the week the frugal housewife did not heat the oven or soil the baking pans.
5. Use the free heat.
You have to preheat the oven in order for things to bake properly. You can, however, turn off the gas or electricity (or stop feeding the fire) for the last ten minutes of baking time. The oven will stay fairly hot, and the baked goods will finish baking on that free heat.
6, Count the costs.
When it's most frugal to buy and when it's most frugal to bake, will vary depending on your specific situation. Grain loses nutritional value in the process of being dried out, ground, stored as flour or meal, and eventually baked into bread. Supermarket sandwich bead is pretty much empty calories, its main value being as a handle for the meat, vegetables, or peanut butter in a sandwich. (Try "sandwiching" those things between leaves of dark green lettuce.) If you can buy freshly harvested whole grains and grind them as needed, you can make better bread, because almost any other kind of bread is more nutritious than supermarket sandwich bread. Do you and your family really need to eat that much bread? If the grains available to you have had poisons sprayed right on the grain, to harden the grain faster or keep out weevils when the grain is stored, their nutrient value will be negative in any case.
In theory, if you had access to unsprayed, mold-free, insect-free, whole grains, you could rely on grains for most of your protein, vitamins, and minerals. The expense of time spent baking your own bread (or cooking your own cereal grains) would be offset by reducing your family's need for meat. You could meet any remaining needs for protein and B-vitamins by using milk and eggs, and not need to kill any animals, a diet plan that always appeals to animal lovers. You could bake big batches of bread in winter, when the oven would heat the house. Depending on the local climate, it might be feasible to freeze some of this bread for use in summer. This plan works for some people. It's a good bargain: the home-baked bread may cost less than supermarket bread, certainly is fresher and contains more nutrients, and also is fun for the whole family to make. Children enjoy being part of a self-sufficient frugal family farm. In fact the main drawback to that lifestyle is that the children may want to stay on the family farm more than they want to go to college.
Then again, you might perfect your bread-making skills and then find out that most or all of your family do not actually digest wheat and rye, or corn, or rice, anyway. Diet for a Small Planet was a well written book by a lovable person who didn't realize that a minority of humankind are not built to digest grain very well. Celiac genes are uncommon among people of Irish descent and nonexistent in the rest of the world. (People all over the world are now reporting celiac-type reactions to wheat. A few of those people really have inherited celiac genes from an Irish ancestor. Most of them are sensitive to glyphosate and/or other chemicals sprayed on wheat.) Other types of grain intolerance are less dramatic than celiac disease, but there are people who are or will be healthier when they avoid eating wheat, corn, or rice. Not everyone on the planet can eat a grain-based, mostly vegetarian diet.
For many people it is a good frugal bargain to raise their own grain and bake their own bread. The time involved in making five acres of land into a self-sustaining micro-farm may become a full-time job for one family member, who "sacrifices" a nine-to-five commuter job. (Oh, the sacrifice. Freedom, you see, has got our hearts singing so joyfully...) I grew up that way, so I am not impartial. What I feel a need to say here is that there's no need to judge people who find that it's more frugal for them to keep their nine-to-five jobs and eat less bread.
7. Stay flexible.
Good food is one of the things that are worth spending money on. Especially for young working parents who need to economize, it's hard to overstate the important of good nutrition for mothers and babies. A well nourished fetus is a healthy fetus, likely to pop out easily at the right time and become a healthy infant. A well nourished, preferably breast-fed, infant is a healthy infant who doesn't need dozens of vaccinations, is not much of a distraction from home-based work, absorbs language from listening to adults, becomes a fast learner, and doesn't have "the usual number of colds."
Exactly what good food is, for you, depends on who you are. And who your family are. And what's available to you.
Many books have been written on the subject of nutrition and dietetics. What a study of this subject should give you is a sense of the vast complexity of the subject and the amount that remains to be learned. We know that there are optimal levels of various nutrients in healthy bodies; we know that simply ingesting food that contains those levels of those nutrients does not guarantee that the optimal levels of those nutrients will be maintained in the body; we're only beginning to find out some of the reasons why.
Of course, one big reason why what we think we know about nutrition is still far from being a settled science is that the effect of pesticides and other pollutants on crops has been categorically excluded from most of the studies. People who say "wheat is good" or "wheat is bad" are not comparing sprayed and unsprayed wheat in a scientific way. Corporate sponsors of these studies want to assume that sprayed and unsprayed wheat are equally nutritious (or harmful). They are not.
Experiment. Read the books. Crunch the numbers. But realize that what actually nourishes you or your children is unlikely to be a plan worked out on a computer. If you try a plan that seems to offer frugal nutrition, on paper, and it doesn't seem to be working for you, it's better to try a different plan than to stick to the one that wasn't working.
Children tend to be wary of new foods--which is a good survival trait--even without being exposed to unhelpful messages from school, television, and neighborhood busybodies. Try to avoid being too dogmatic in encouraging children to try modifying their diets for optimal frugal nutriton and health. In the long run it will be better to have said "Let's see whether you have fewer colds this winter than last winter," rather than "Eating something you liked CAUSED you to have so many colds last winter." For one thing, primary schools tend to be boring places, so children are apt to agree that "Staying in bed and being sick is better, as a rule, than grammar and arithmetic and all such things at school," and may feel that more colds = more time at home = a net gain. There are children who might be motivated to eat more vegetables by the idea that, if they build up more resistance to colds, Mommy or Daddy will try homeschooling next year. Then again there are children who, given a free choice, prefer primary school to homeschooling.
Baking at home may be part of your family's system for maintaining frugal good health, or it may not. Eating fewer baked foods may be part of your family's system for maintaining frugal good health, or it may not. Find out what works for you. Understand that what works for you may be different from what works for someone else. It's possible to talk about how your plan seems to be working for you without being judgmental about other people's plans.
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