Egg substitutes for baking

From the Tightwad Gazette books I knew that soy flour could be substituted for eggs--one tablespoon soy flour plus 1/4 cup water per egg, if I remember rightly.

Some time after we got our Komo brand electric grain mill, I started wondering about whether flour made from other kinds of beans would work as an egg substitute, too.  The Komo mill can grind dried beans into flour, but it takes two passes through the machine:  one on a coarse grind setting, and then one on fine grind.

I tried this in recipes that called for one or two eggs, and it seemed to work all right. Today I put it to a bigger test, using bean flour in place in 7 eggs in a doubled puff pancake recipe (which can be found through the Recipes tag at the right).

That definitely came out differently, which is not really a surprise. Bean flour plus water doesn't have the viscosity of raw eggs, and so the pancakes didn't really rise at all. Usually they rise quite high, well over the tops of the pans).

The kids mostly liked the pancakes, though, and some of them preferred them to the original recipe.

How to adjust a reel mower to cut well

I was hoping to quickly find a good link to give you, but apparently the internet is getting stupider. So I'll have to write one myself.

Reel mowers need to be sharpened sometimes, but not frequently.  Usually if they are not cutting well, it just needs a minor adjustment with a screwdriver.

On the mower, there is the reel of blades that spins.  There is also a steel bar that the blades come very close to, which creates a scissors-style cutting action.  The bar has four adjustment screws, two on each side.

To start with, cut yourself some long strips of paper, these are for testing how well the mower is cutting.

The thing to remember--besides keeping your fingers out of the way as you're spinning the blades--is that however much you loosen/tighten the front screw on one side, you have to tighten/loosen the corresponding back screw by the same amount.  The bar is on a pivot; the front screw lifts or lowers the front edge of the bar, and the back screw pushes down against the back edge.

You should only be turning each screw slightly; these are fine adjustments.

And hopefully your bar is even enough that you will be adjusting the screws on each side by about the same amount.

So, insert a strip of paper between the blades and bar, and turn the reel by hand.  You want it to cut the paper cleanly, all along the length of the bar, but without scraping the blades against the bar too hard, which would make them go dull much more quickly.

If the bar is too far away from the blade, loosen the front screw and tighten the back screw. If the bar is too close to the blade, tighten the front screw and loosen the back screw.

When it's doing well on paper, get up and try it on grass.  It may need to be loosened back up a bit so you can push it easily. That's okay--grass cuts more easily than paper does. The mower should be making a whirring noise, not a grating noise.

Apparently some reel mowers come with a special gauge to use to adjust the bar. And some only have two adjustment screws. But the general principle should be the same.

The cheapest foods in the store

I finally finished my grocery costs calculations; there was one last price that I kept forgetting to gather.  These are based on my local chain grocery store, on either the regular prices or on sale prices that I've frequently seen.  Other grocery options, such as Aldi, will often be cheaper.  We buy a large fraction of our food from Costco and from the local meat market.

I decided to standardize and rank these foods by figuring out the cost per 1000 calories of each. And I don't recommend basing your diet on the cheapest foods alone; that would be very unhealthy! But this list may help you to avoid overpaying for convenience foods that are made mostly of the most inexpensive and least healthful ingredients, and also help you to make the dollars stretch further when money is tight.

Food, Cost Per 1000 Calories

White flour $0.27
White sugar $0.29
Canola oil $0.33
Lard (hydrogenated) $0.46
White rice, 10 lb bag $0.50
Peanuts $0.56
Cornmeal* $0.62
Pasta $0.63
Popcorn (plain unpopped)* $0.90
Oatmeal* $0.83
Peanut butter $0.90
Butter $0.94
Cornstarch $0.95
Pop/Soda, 2 liters $0.97
Milk (whole) $1.16
Dried beans $1.33
Potatoes $1.43
Ice cream $1.62
Banana* $1.64
Tortilla chips $1.79
Olive oil $1.83
Bread, fancy brand $1.87
Chicken nuggets $1.85
Eggs $1.90
Raisins $2.11
Frozen juice concentrate $2.26
Cheese (block) $2.36
Ground beef (80/20) $3.46
Carrots $4.18
Yogurt (local brand, based on whole milk)  $4.59
Chicken breast $5.32
Cocoa powder (the baking kind) $6.64
Canned olives $6.77
Apples $7.46
Onions $9.90
Romaine lettuce $18.43
Green pepper $41.25

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* = For these products I had to guess a bit about price, or calories in a package, or how many it would take to make a pound

Time studies

I've been timing my housework tasks, so I can better understand how to fit them within the general routine.  Here are a few:

Unloading the dishwasher:  4 minutes.
Cleaning the stovetop:  5 minutes.
Making the bed fully (with baby help):  7 minutes.

Killing the watts

Our library has power check meters (similar to the "Kill-A-Watt" device) available for checkout. I hadn't bothered to try one before, because I'm already going around turning things off all day long, but my husband checked one out and brought it home.

So I was able to determine that our TV setup, which includes an older VCR, is drawing almost 10 W of power, even when everything is Off. It takes electricity for a remote-controlled device to stay awake enough to listen for the remote.

Doing some math, there are approximately 8800 hours in a year, so we are using at least 80 kW-hours of electricity per year for this.

Using 10 cents per kW-hour as our approximate electric rate (with taxes and service fees, it's actually closer to 15 cents per kW-hour), gives a cost of about $8 per year.

That doesn't sound like much, but if it only takes me a few seconds to reach down and hit the off switch on the power strip that these things are plugged into, then my "hourly wage" for doing so will be something like $6/hour--and that's assuming that it only stays off for 8 hours at a time.

So even if I don't get to it every evening, it is worth doing when I can.