Granola bars

Have you seen the price of granola bars lately? My kids love them.

At Sam's you can get granola bars for 19 cents per 0.86 ounce Quaker Chewy bar. In my state we don't have a food tax. This is actually cheaper than buying in bulk on Amazon, even with free shipping factored in.

On the other hand, if you get this great price you're often stuck with those raisin bars that come in big variety packs that no one wants to eat. The kids might snack on them after all of the chocolate and PB ones get snarfed, but the poor raisin bars languish, unloved, until they expire or my husband takes pity on them and does his duty as the human garbage disposal.

I decided to try making my own granola bars.

A bit of a cost break down:

$0.40 -- 1/4 cup pb (Sam's)
$0.43 -- 1/3 cup honey (cannery)
$0.26 -- 1/4 cup butter (commissary)
$0.27 -- 1 1/2 cups oats (cannery)
$0.50 -- 1/2 cup chocolate chips (commissary, but also a price that can be found at Walmart during the holidays)

$1.86 for a batch of homemade granola bars. 1 batch is 17 ounces. That's about 11 cents per ounces, as opposed to 22.1 cents per ounces on the store stuff. Of course your price goes up if you use organic ingredients, but consider the price of a box of organic granola bars. I also like that the ingredients are pantry staples, so whipping them up is no big deal and keeps me from going to the store as often.

As my husband pointed out, deliciousness matters as well. They get a 5 out of 5 from me. These are denser than the commercial bars and stickier, but otherwise completely comparable and even superior.

Chopped and ready to go

Those are gallon sized bags. I really should have used three for the celery, but it would seem I'm too cheap. 

For dinner we had some of the lettuce and roasted asparagus along with steamed acorn squash (from BB before Thanksgiving -- still good), carrots from a Jamie Oliver recipe, and my mother in law's recipe for barbecue brisket. Yum!

Bountiful baskets

This is how much produce you can get for $30 through Bountiful Baskets. I also split a box of apples with another family, so I ended up with 19 pounds of pink lady apples for $11.25. Some of the less obvious items up there include Asian pears (as crisp as apples, as sweet as pears, and totally delicious), and the real quantity of celery and red bell peppers. The celery is really quite exceptional this time. It amounts to 4 bunches per basket and I always gets two baskets. I'll post later about what it looks like when you cut all of that celery up to freeze it for soup and stew.  :D There were 16 peppers, which is also quite unusual.

The tomatoes are going to make me a mondo batch of spaghetti sauce for the freezer, the asparagus is going to get roasted with olive oil, parmesan, salt and pepper, the peppers are getting chopped and frozen, and those two heads of green leaf lettuce and the radishes are getting made into salad. I'm going to try making the salad all at once so I don't forget the lettuce this time.

This food co-op is how I buy most of my produce. We still get a few things on the side, especially since we don't get potatoes very often. The main baskets are different every time but some frequent flyers are the green leaf lettuce, celery, some variety of apple, bananas, broccoli and some variety of tomatoes. I often buy one of the extra boxes of produce and we just go to town on what the season has to offer. The grapes were wonderful, I've still got a heap of Roma's in the freezer to use in sauces, the oranges were great for cold season, and it took us just a couple of weeks to go through about 20 pounds of cherries whether fresh or frozen, plain or in smoothies.  We don't end up with a whole lot of waste as long as I'm careful about preservation and keeping bulk items on the radar.

$30 (two baskets)
$11.25 (half a box of great apples)
$1.50 processing fee for the whole order.
=$42.75 for two weeks' of fresh produce

Also, the free workout since I went early and helped load the baskets. Slinging 50# bags of potatoes ain't work for no pansy.