Give Us This Day

Give us this day our daily bread....in five minutes or less.

There are few things more appetizing in this world than the smell of fresh baked bread. Thanks to modern technology experiencing fresh baked bread is as easy as throwing six ingredients into a bread maker and pushing start. You know that you have one lying around somewhere...or if you don't you can always join your local freecycling network! Freecycling is one of the greatest things since, well since sliced bread! Freecyclers are folks who would rather see their still useful stuff go to someone who will use it instead of a landfill. Just look up freecycle.org and check it out.

But back to feeding the multitudes with loaves and sandwich meat (one of our kids has a fish allergy so we don't do fish).  When life is moving in relative order....relative being the key word (look for the post on Ordered Living) we usually get bread into the bread maker right around dinner time, set the timer, and in the morning we wake up to the smell of fresh baked bread.....I am getting hungry just thinking about it...how the butter melts right into the soft warm bread...mmmmm

Another little tidbit about us is that we whip our butter (no we don't get it straight from the cow, we buy the butter and we whip it in our kitchen aid stand mixer) whipping for about 10 minutes doubles the volume and keeps the butter spreadable. It is like getting two sticks of butter for the price of one.

Anyway baking our own bread saves a ton.

Here is the math: (keep in mind that our family goes through one loaf a day)

Buying bread from the store:

$3.49/ loaf x 7 days = $24.43week

$24.43 x 52 weeks = $1270.36/ year

Home baked bread:

We buy flour in bulk for $15.29/ 20kg which lasts us about 2 months. It would last longer but we also bake cookies and cakes, not to mention the pancake breakfasts.

So $15.29 / 2 = $7.65/ month on flour.

Yeast costs us about $6.00 for a 5 month supply so that is $1.20 a month we spend on yeast.

The other ingredients like oil (2 tsp per loaf) and water are so small that their cost per loaf is negligible

So, $7.65 + $1.20 = $8.85/ month

Which means that baking our own bread costs us $106.20 a year!!!

That is a total savings of $1164.16. That is a lot of dough.....maybe even a mortgage payment! You will never look at a gingerbread house the same way again.

How's that for food for thought?