Sustainable & Convenient Living: Making your own convenience mixes

This post is the first in an ongoing stream I'll be doing on sustainable living combined with making household life more convenient & inexpensive. A big part of our moving to the farm is to evolve our family's way of life into a form that works with our busyness and keeps costs down as well as trying to live in ways that are sustainable long term, no matter what sustainable turns out to be in each instance.

The first thing I will have a look at is BBQ Sauce. My favorite sauce is Bull's Eye, but the bottles are small and they cost around $5 a bottle. Great profit margin for the manufacturer, not so much for my pocketbook. I could easily go through a bottle in a week or two. So I found a copycat recipe that tastes close enough to the original rather than go without enough sauce.

I discovered that with a large enough pot, it's -really- easy to make the sauce. The steps are really basic: 1. Measure ingredients into pot. 2. Stir till thoroughly mixed. 3. Heat till simmering, and cook till desired thickness is reached, stirring occasionally. (I'll post the actual recipe once I retrieve it from home.) The ingredients on the list are all readily available, and you can use homemade tomato paste for it. I'll cost out the recipe soon too and post the comparison results here! I added some hot peppers that we grew this year to the mix and it made for a really nice complex sauce mixed in with the smoke taste. The length of time to prepare was only a couple hours. I didn't bother processing the cans in the pressure canner as the first batch was to test it out and I was pretty sure we'd go through it really fast. I was right, and will have to make another batch very soon!

The next batch I likely will process in the canner, and make many more jars than the first time around. I found that pint jars and quart jars are nice manageable sizes for this sauce.

The next thing I made was a copycat of Hershey's chocolate sauce. Again very easy to whip up in a pot on the stove. Add ingredients, boil, and put in jars. Recipe to come shortly and cost comparison. This sauce has found a permanent place for a jar in the fridge.

3rd thing I've made and have made a number of times over the past 10 years is pan grease for baking. It's a half and half mix of crisco shortening and flour, mixed well and put in a tupperware container with sealing lid. I use this mix to grease my baking pans all the time. It works very well and doesn't lend any additional flavours to the foods made, yet helping them release easily from the pans.

So these 3 different things have saved our household a good chunk of change since we don't buy them pre-made from the store, spend the gas to drive to the store, and spend the time heading to the store either. When the batches are big enough and infrequent enough the batch production cost and overhead is very little in comparison.

We now make all of our bread and haven't bought any since we moved into our new farm! It's far better to eat our own than what's in the store. We also are using our -big- crockpot most nights of the week so time is saved when we get home and supper is ready.