Big Savings
I just did the math for how much money I saved last weekend by making my own chicken stock.
I made 6.75 quarts. My local grocery store sells low sodium, organic chicken stock for $3.99 a quart. That means that right now I have $26.93 worth of stock in the freezer. Maybe a little less, because while all the vegetables I used were organic, the chicken wasn't. Let's call it $25.00 even.
How much did it cost me to make?
Nothing.
Or at least, nothing more than I would have spent anyway in the course of a couple of weeks. Every major ingredient in that stock was something that a few years ago I would have thrown away. The meat and bones were the carcass of a chicken I had roasted earlier in the week. After we had dinner that night, we pulled all the meat we could off of it, and then stashed what was left in the freezer. The vegetables were things like carrot tops, celery leaves, slightly mushy leeks, and other things that I wasn't going to use in any other recipe. The only other ingredients were water, a little salt, a little apple cider vinegar, and some peppercorns.
Added: I maybe spent $5.00 on those additional ingredients. Probably less, but it might have been that much. That's at least $20 less than it would have cost me to buy the same amount of stock. That doesn't sound like much, but if I make the same amount every couple of months it will save me at least $100 over the course of a year.
I'd like to do the same sort of analysis for my homemade applesauce, but I didn't do as good a job tracking how much I made, and I didn't track how many apples I used for it at all. I suspect the savings aren't as dramatic as for the stock. /Added
I started with the stock instructions posted by meilin_miranda over in the BPAL forums a long time ago and adapted and changed to suit my taste. I've already started filling up the giant ziploc bag in the freezer for the next round.
I made 6.75 quarts. My local grocery store sells low sodium, organic chicken stock for $3.99 a quart. That means that right now I have $26.93 worth of stock in the freezer. Maybe a little less, because while all the vegetables I used were organic, the chicken wasn't. Let's call it $25.00 even.
How much did it cost me to make?
Nothing.
Or at least, nothing more than I would have spent anyway in the course of a couple of weeks. Every major ingredient in that stock was something that a few years ago I would have thrown away. The meat and bones were the carcass of a chicken I had roasted earlier in the week. After we had dinner that night, we pulled all the meat we could off of it, and then stashed what was left in the freezer. The vegetables were things like carrot tops, celery leaves, slightly mushy leeks, and other things that I wasn't going to use in any other recipe. The only other ingredients were water, a little salt, a little apple cider vinegar, and some peppercorns.
Added: I maybe spent $5.00 on those additional ingredients. Probably less, but it might have been that much. That's at least $20 less than it would have cost me to buy the same amount of stock. That doesn't sound like much, but if I make the same amount every couple of months it will save me at least $100 over the course of a year.
I'd like to do the same sort of analysis for my homemade applesauce, but I didn't do as good a job tracking how much I made, and I didn't track how many apples I used for it at all. I suspect the savings aren't as dramatic as for the stock. /Added
I started with the stock instructions posted by meilin_miranda over in the BPAL forums a long time ago and adapted and changed to suit my taste. I've already started filling up the giant ziploc bag in the freezer for the next round.