But I am coming back. Posts in preparation: Buy it or make it: Yogurt and a update on my average weekly grocery spend.

Flybuys

For every dollar you spend at Coles you will receive one flybuys point. Once you have amassed a healthy points balance through the flybuys scheme you can trade them for flybuys dollars, shopping or activity vouchers or goods. The flybuys dollars can be bought in $10 increments for 2,000 points, giving each point a basic value of 0.5c.

There are also opportunities to redeem points for ‘double rewards’ for certain vouchers, experiences and goods (e.g. get two adult passes to Sydney Aquarium for the price of one) but we will ignore those for now because these types of deals can often be found elsewhere through other memberships or a quick Google search.

Everyday Rewards

For every dollar above $30 that you spend at Woolworths, you will receive one Qantas point. You may then trade these for shopping vouchers or goods in the Qantas online store, or use them to book flights or secure a class upgrade to a flight you have already booked. Here’s where it gets complicated: the value of a Qantas point varies widely depending on how you wish to spend it.

The basic value of a Qantas point is 0.63c, since by redeeming 5,000 points you can receive a $25 Woolworths gift card. Redeeming them for flights or upgrades can bring you between 0.7 and upwards of 3c per point, but deciding on an end game of a ‘free’ flight needs some careful thought.*

Comparing the programs

If you don’t spend much in the supermarket, the $30 minimum spend at Woolworths is really going to hamper the number of points you can collect. At what point does it become ‘worth’ collecting Everyday Rewards?

If you aren’t going to use Qantas points for flights…the tipping point is a regular shop of $150 or more each and every week. At this amount, you will collect the same value in points by doing your shop at either Coles and Woolies, assuming similar prices and bonus offers. If you spend less than $150 a week in a supermarket and don’t have travel plans, you will collect a higher $ points value by shopping at Coles.

If you will use your Qantas points to redeem a flight….then the tipping point falls dramatically. If you intend to swap your points for a flight and spend a minimum of $106 weekly, you will collect a higher $ points value by shopping at Woolies. This assumes that you might buy a long haul flight that is on sale and each point is worth about 0.7c. However, if you are planning to use your Qantas points for an upgrade and therefore getting much more value for them, then it is almost definitely not in your interest to shop at Coles.

In our case, we don’t spend $106 regularly in a supermarket each week, and a $150 spend is even more rare, so I do the bulk of our supermarket shopping at Coles but also visit Woolworths infrequently to a) collect any particularly good specials and offers and b) to keep Coles on their toes (and so they keep sending me good offers to get me back in their store!) We do collect Qantas points with an end game of booking a flight, but I think it’s better for us to search out the big credit card sign-up bonuses to boost the balance rather than trying to spend our way to a free flight.

And remember that if you have a good rewards credit card, you’ll earn points wherever you use it so the supermarket loyalty schemes are really just the icing on the cake.

Happy grocery hacking (and travel hacking)!

J

*To fly to Europe and back on a Qantas Classic Award seat (the name given to the ‘free’ seats), one person will need 128,000 Qantas points and a couple will need 256,000 points, so collecting 5,000 or 10,000 points each year at the supermarket is not going to get you there very quickly.

If you really want to travel using Qantas points, I would suggest you read up on travel hacking and then live and breathe it. As a start, you would need to be making all your purchases on a rewards credit card (become that annoying “Do you take Amex?” person) and repeatedly sign up for credit cards with initial point bonuses and low or zero annual fees. It is a time consuming activity and very risky if you do not have a 100% record of paying your credit card bill in full every month. If the annual fee is high you might never recoup that cost in rewards so you need to actually estimate your likely spend and points earning capacity before signing up.

If you are not totally across all your finances I wouldn’t even consider travel hacking and instead just search Webjet for the lowest fares (and then book then via the airline to save on booking fees!)

For comprehensive information on travel hacking, visit www.pointhacks.com.au and the Australian Frequent Flyer forum. Here are some simple steps for the beginner:

1. Consider the trips you might take in the next 1 to 5 years and search the Qantas website to find out if they fly that route.
2. Go to the Frequent Flyer section of the site and use the Qantas calculator to establish the number of points you (and your partner/ family) would need to make the return trip.
3. Enter some likely travel date options into the online booking page to establish the cheapest fare and also for comparison the Classic Award seat cash payment. Make sure you select the flights that you would normally consider i.e. would you normally discount flights with many stops or at unsociable times when it is difficult to catch public transport to/from the airport?
4. Estimate the value of the Qantas points for that flight (cost of the cheapest flight minus the Classic Award flight payment, divided by the number of points required).

If the value of the point is close to what you might redeem for a grocery voucher, consider whether you might rather just spend the points on groceries as you accrue them, rather than collecting them for years to take a flight.

Hint: if an international route you are wanting to travel regularly has sale fares, you will find that the value of a point will plummet to around .7c. As an example, a return flight to London requires a cash payment of almost $1,000 when booking a Classic Award flight, but a Qantas sale fare (including all fees and taxes) can be had for less than $1,900.

Another hint: Some popular routes and flights never have Classic Award seats. I have come across this when looking at direct flights to Queenstown or Christchurch, New Zealand during snow season, even a year in advance.

Now if you are a regular traveller with Silver, Gold or Platinum Frequent Flyer Status and/or you are considering upgrades rather than economy class bookings, then your points value will be higher, but you are a pro travel hacker, so you already knew that!

Much to my joy I found free range split chickens marked down to less than the price of a regular whole bird so I had to have a couple of those… One has gone in the freezer, which is only small and now full to bursting so we won’t buy meat for a bit. Everything else I bought there was on special – coconut and rice milk, Heinz baked beans for $1 (so much better than Coles and great for a quick budget meal), fancy Birds Eye frozen lemon pepper salmon (it’s pretty yummy but too expensive normally – $7 for two small fillets makes it a little less outrageous than the normal $10), Nando’s Hot Peri-Peri sauce (half price so I got one for the pantry) and Nice and Natural cereal bars (I’m still making my own but need back ups).

The supermarkets have a few things for Xmas on special like frozen turkey and chocolates, so if you are celebrating with a big spread it’s a good time to make a list and think about what will keep in the pantry or freezer until December. Then you can pick it up beforehand if it goes on special and, best case scenario, you’ll only need to fight the crowds to get a few perishables a couple of days before. I only just decided to cater for 6 to 8 people last week so I need to get on to it myself!

This week I spent $28.43 in Coles (after the $10 voucher) and $12.63 in Aldi on food. Take off 14c for the value of the flybuys points earned and add on $40 for our organic veggie delivery and that makes $80.92. That brings our our average to date down to $126.82.

Meal plan

Friday – Lunch: tuna salad; Dinner: chicken tacos using shredded meat from one of the split chickens I got marked down.

Saturday – L: lunch at a cafe; D: left over roast chicken with salad

Sunday – L: we are volunteering at a charity day with a sausage sizzle; D: salmon with green salad, asparagus and potatoes

Monday: L: steak sandwich with some healthy green trimmings D: veggie stir fry with nuts and seeds

Tuesday – L: left over stir fry D: chicken risotto

Wednesday – L: left over risotto D: some sort of made up on the spot slow cooker lentil & veggie curry

Thursday – L: left over curry D: slow cooker sausage casserole

Happy grocery hacking!

J

At least every fortnight, and sometimes every week, we’ll buy a six pack of craft beer to drink at home. This can add anywhere from $15 -$22 to the grocery bill. To brew beer ‘properly’ at home takes some considerable equipment and expertise and isn’t cheap at all. So when I came across this post, I was happy to learn that homebrewing cider is a very simple process indeed.

Ingredients

The key ingredients are: champagne yeast, great tasting apple juice with no preservatives added (preservatives would kill the yeast) and an air lock (to stop air getting in and turning the juice mouldy).

I didn’t really want to spend too much on equipment and ingredients just to try this out. After a bit more googling and searching, I found a supplier that could supply a very small amount of champagne yeast without a huge postage charge (try eBay) and an alternative to purchasing a brewing air lock – a balloon! Then I waited for a 2 litre bottle of Nudie apple juice to go on special at one of the supermarkets. And I was set.

Method

Not quite trusting that the whole thing wasn’t going to fizz up in my face and create a sticky mess, I took everything outside to set up the experiment. Here is everything you’ll need:

Prick the balloon four times with a needle to create some holes for the carbon dioxide to escape as the fermentation process takes place. If the bottle of juice you are using is very full, you could pour out a tiny bit of  juice to leave a little bit of space at the top for any fizzing action. Add a half teaspoon of the dried champagne yeast, replace the cap and shake or swirl the yeast into the juice. Remove the cap and position the balloon around the mouth of the bottle.

Retain the cap to reseal the bottle later (once it’s ready and you want to keep it in the fridge). If you’ve kept the juice in the fridge til now, nothing will happen for a few hours but the next day, you should definitely see some fizzing action.

Ten days pass… You’ll see that the fizzing has pretty much slowed to a halt. I think the number of days this takes will depend on the room temperature – longer in winter, shorter in summer. Remove the balloon, replace the clean bottle cap and keep in the fridge until it’s all drunk. There is a further step you can try to make a fizzy cider (the gas escapes through the balloon during first fermentation). Add a tablespoon of sugar, replace the cap and allow to ferment a little more before placing in the fridge. At this point, I’d definitely be moving the bottle to the garage in case of explosion, although you should be pretty safe with a plastic bottle.

How easy is that!

Cost comparison

The price of shop bought cider varies, but let’s look at Dan Murphy’s offerings. Monteith’s Heritage Cider comes in bottles of 500ml for $4.59, so 2 litres costs $18.36. A six pack of Strongbow cans (3,300ml in total) costs $19.99, so for 2 litres you pay $12.12.

To make 2 litres of cider at home the cost of the juice and yeast is $5 plus about $1 for the portion of yeast used and a few cents for the balloon. The cost of your time is negligible as it takes about 60 seconds to set this up. So let’s call the total homebrew cost $6.

If you made it regularly you’d invest in a couple of air locks at a few dollars each to keep the waste to a minimum. And if you have fruit trees or access to fallen fruit you could make this almost for free!

Buy it or make it?

At half the cost of Strongbow, this has to be a resounding MAKE IT!

Happy home brewing!

J

In terms of specials, I picked up a couple of frozen Balfours premium potato topped pies for the freezer for $4.65 and my favourite tomato sauce by the brand Outback Spirit for $2.25. We also picked up a free range Lilydale chicken mini-roast for $10, which is $3 off the usual price. I am aware that a whole chicken is a similar price but these are stuffed with dates and quinoa and my mouth started watering and I was sucked in…

Tip Top ultra thick sliced raisin toast was on special $2.90 and the plan is that hubby takes it for snacks at work (if I don’t eat it first). Non-food specials – if you need laundry liquid, Dynamo is half price in Coles and Omo is half price in Woolies this week. I don’t think I ever pay full price!

I got a few markdown bargains in the organic meat section – two packs of organic beef sausages (nitrite free as far as I can tell) have gone in the freezer for a future sausage casserole and a BBQ and a pack of frying steak will do for a future beef stew or weekend sandwiches or maybe tacos.

The grocery bill got a bit blown up by spending $18 on coffee beans but I’ve worked out it costs about a dollar to make a flat white at home compared to $3-4 at a cafe. So if like me you live with a caffeine addict that $18 is well spent!

Altogether the bill at Coles was $139.47 but $25.23 was on non-food items. I used a triple points voucher and so collected 442 points, or a future saving of $2.21. So the adjusted total at Coles was $139.47 – $25.23 – $2.21 = $112.03. Add to that the $40 veggie delivery plus $19 for beer and that comes to a whopping $171.03. Our average weekly spend to date is $136.00, about $36 higher than I’d like.

Meal plan

Snacks: We are going to make our own South African rusks this week instead of paying $5.75 for imported rusks at Coles – I have high hopes for this week’s Buy it or Make it installment! Then we’ve got muesli bars and the raisin toast plus fruit to snack on.

Friday – Lunch: salad with roasted beets and radishes with fennel and feta; Dinner: chicken risotto (we didn’t have it last week, had pizza from the freezer instead…)

Saturday – L: left over risotto with avocado salad; D: out with friends for a birthday dinner at a seafood place

Sunday – L: beefburgers with salad and feta; D: roast $10 chicken with roast potatoes, fennel and carrots

Monday – L: left over chicken with salad and rice; D: slow cooker veggie stew with chickpeas

Tuesday: L: left over chickpea stew eaten cold with boiled egg; D: beef pie, mash and veggies

Wednesday: L: tuna and rice salad; D: slow cooker chicken curry

Thursday: L: left over curry; D: lazy day – something from the freezer like a veggie pizza…

Happy grocery hacking!

J

This experiment to compare the cost of store bought vs homemade banana bread will also compare any basic cake recipe that is easy to put together and doesn’t involve layers or icing.

I’m not a huge fan of bananas because they give me a cracking headache, but hubby buys a bunch every so often, and every so often a couple get left to rot in the fruit bowl. He also likes a treat sometimes with his morning coffee when he’s working in the city but cafes can charge $3-$5 for a muffin or slice of banana bread that’s bigger than you wanted anyway. You could also buy a banana bread in the supermarket – Coles sell one for $6. If I bake a banana bread loaf I reckon we’re killing two cost saving & waste reduction birds with one stone.

The recipe I use is adapted from Nigella Lawson’s ‘How to Be a Domestic Goddess’. I removed the alcohol soaked raisins and walnuts from her recipe, which that cuts not only the cost but the prep time, and I also factored down the quantities to suit the size of my silicone loaf pan (approx 18 x 8 cm at the base). I’ve made this so many times that it takes me maybe 15 minutes, or 20 minutes at most. You can add choc chips or nuts or alcohol into this if you want to spice it up, but as it is it’s a pretty nice basic cake that goes well with your coffee. You’ll get 10 – 12 thick but short and squat slices from this recipe (it’s a treat, not a meal!) and it lasts about a week in an airtight container.

Ingredients

130g plain or wholemeal flour

1.5 tsp baking powder

0.5 tsp bicarbonate of soda

2 ripe bananas (approximately 200g without the skin but it doesn’t matter if it’s 50g one way or the other)

95g butter

110g sugar (not caster sugar, use about 80-90g if that’s all you have as it will taste sweeter)

1 teaspoon vanilla essence

2 eggs

Method

Preheat the oven to 170 degrees C. Grease and flour your loaf pan. Mine’s silicone but it still needs greasing and flouring or it sticks, I think it’s the sugar content.

Melt the butter in a pan on the stove or the microwave and leave to cool slightly. Mix the flour, baking powder and bicarb of soda in a large mixing bowl using a wooden spoon.

In another bowl, measure out the sugar and then beat in the melted butter. Ideally it will change consistency and become lighter and fluffier but if you’re doing it by hand, don’t worry, it won’t change the outcome too much. Beat one egg into the butter/ sugar mix and then the other. Mash the bananas and then mix them in, along with the vanilla essence. Then add the flour mix one third at time and stir it in well.

You should have a slightly runny gloopy cake mix. Pour this into the loaf pan and place in the oven for 1 hour. After 50 mins, check it’s not burning by looking though the oven door as all ovens are different.  After an hour, the loaf should be well browned on the top but not blackening. Remove the cake and check it’s done all the way through by inserting a skewer or tooth pick – it should come out clean. If it’s not done, give it another 10 mins.

Leave the loaf in the pan to cool on a wire rack because if you cut it when it’s warm it will fall apart. Then dust with icing sugar if you are about to take a photo for your blog – otherwise skip this, it’s for eating not looking at!

Cost comparison

I used the Coles online shop to estimate the cost of the ingredients and the total comes to $3.22. This assumes you’ll use Coles home brand products where available, free range eggs and non-organic bananas. Given that so little is used and to make things easier I ignored the cost of the baking powder and bicarb. When bananas are cheaper than $4.50 a kilo then obviously the price of ingredients will come way down!

My time – 15 minutes @$25ph – is worth $3.75.

Given that the oven is on for an hour and 15 minutes for this recipe, I think we should add the power cost. For most other sweet baked treats  that take 20 minutes or less I think I can argue that they could be put in the oven at the same time as something for dinner and ignore the power cost. At a rate of 2.4kWh power use for an electric oven, at a cost of 25c a kWh, the power costs 75c.

The smell of banana bread filling the house… priceless.

Total cost: $7.72

Buy it or make it?

Compared to paying $3 for a slice from a cafe, or $15 for a week’s worth, it definitely makes more sense to make banana bread yourself. You can also freeze half the loaf if you don’t want to have a sugary treat every single day.

I’ve never tried supermarket banana bread and maybe it’s ok. So feasibly if you need your morning fix, you could buy a loaf for slightly less than it would cost to make at $6 and cut a slice to take to work each day. But if  you don’t want to eat preservatives, mysteriously named ‘raising agents’, cage eggs and you want to be able to choose how sweet your cake is, then definitely make it yourself.

Verdict: Make it!

Of course, we could all save money by not eating cake and goodies at all, but then what would our lives be like? I say, everything in moderation..!

Happy baking!

J

This week we went shopping at Woolies AND Coles. We didn’t need a lot of things, so we just mainly bought specials for the pantry and freezer. I don’t really like going to two places, it is such a waste of energy, but Nudie juice was $5 at Coles and I’ve been waiting for some preservative free and not from concentrate juice to go on special so that I can make some homemade cider. We also picked up Ayam coconut milk (two for $3.60 at Coles) to satisfy cravings for Tom Ka Gai (coconut milk based chicken soup) and coconut cream for future dessert treats. And I needed to spend the $5 voucher we received last week.

At Woolies, their Select home brand pizzas are half price at $2.60 so we are trying them out tonight. Also half price are Stewarts frozen fish portions (2 portions for $3.50) and Twinings tea bags (worth getting for the flavour, also $3.50). Macro free range chicken breast fillets are on special this week also at $14.99 a kilo which was cheaper than their thighs so I got a large pack of 3 breasts which will cover 2 meals (one large breast has gone in the freezer). Hubby talked me into getting some Magnums (no, I shouldn’t take him shopping) which were also on promotion, I think 40% off. Woolies markdown stickers are not brightly coloured and almost impossible to spot but we did get some smoked salmon pieces for a birthday brunch at home for $2.50 (down from $6).

Altogether on the shop we spent $53.04 in Woolies (plus $6.14 on non-food items), $16 in Coles and $40 on our veggie box delivery, which totals $119.04. That inches our weekly average spend down a bit to $127.24.

Here’s the meal plan:

Friday: Lunch – rice salad with tuna; D – tom ka gai with chinese greens, carrot and capsicum.

Saturday: L – left over soup; D – frozen pizza

Sunday: L – chicken salad; D – Out with friends

Monday: Brunch- salmon, avocado, spinach and poached eggs; D: spinach and ricotta cannelloni

Tuesday: L – left over cannelloni; D – frozen fish with potatoes and plenty of veggies

Wednesday: L – tuna sandwich; D: chick pea veggie curry with boiled egg

Thursday: L – left over curry ; D: chicken risotto

Happy grocery hacking!

J

Verdict on the Woolies Select pizza: more Pizza Hut than Italian restaurant, but edible. The base was on the thick side and the topping needs extras adding at home to beef up the flavour. We won’t get them again unless they are half price.

I love grocery shopping and I love supermarkets, always have. I remember how exciting it was when the first large supermarkets appeared in our area as a child (yes, I know that makes me sound old). At university I took a course called Retail Geography that included a study of the psychology behind the layout, colours, music used by supermarkets; I was fascinated. So I’m not going to start hating on the big supermarkets on this blog.

However, the reality is that here in Australia, we are faced with almost a duopoly, with Woolworths and Coles commanding a 78% market share of the grocery sector. Compare that to a 48% market share for the top two supermarkets in the UK and alarm bells should start ringing at the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), it certainly rings alarm bells with me. The third strongest player is Aldi with just a 10% market share.

The size of the two main players creates economies of scale and greater bargaining power with their suppliers, allowing them to offer lower prices and attract more customers. Without decent competition their stronghold on the market could continue to increase and the worry is that if this were to happen, in the long run we could end up with even fewer store options and brands than we have now. It’s the job of the ACCC to step in and make sure that that stronghold is not preventing fair competition.

If a supplier refuses the deal offered by one of the big two, they are turning down access to 40% of the Australian market, so they are caught between a rock and a hard place and are put under enormous pressure to cut their costs and lower their prices.  If you wanted to help the situation and don’t want to wait for the ACCC to act, you could buy direct from farmers and market stalls and shop at your local butcher, delis and grocers. Of course that could get really expensive so you could also support the smaller players such as Aldi and IGA so that their market share increases and they become a viable option for the supermarket suppliers. Aldi’s market share is growing and other European budget chains like Lidl are eyeing up Australia so I imagine that soon those types of discount supermarkets will become available to everyone.

Now for the bright side! We the consumer do have an opportunity to cash in on promotions and lower prices as the two compete with each other and try to outdo smaller players like IGA and young upstarts like Aldi. So for now, I focus on collecting all the very best of the discounts that Coles and Woolies want to offer me and try to play them off against each other.

I don’t buy fruit and vegetables at the big two supermarkets so that I know that it is fresh and seasonal, to lend some support to organic veggie farmers and the local business that organises my weekly organic box delivery, and to help to protect the natural environment from agricultural chemicals. It doesn’t matter to me that I could get non-organic and cheaper produce at the supermarket, it’s just not what I want to buy. Plus the organic veg at supermarkets is heavily packaged to distinguish it from the regular produce, which is also not appealing!

Instead, I try to limit what I buy at the big two supermarkets to anything processed, frozen, canned or baked since I’ve assumed that the suppliers of those products are themselves medium to large sized businesses and can stand up for themselves during those hard nosed pricing negotiations. And that way I still get to maximise my rewards, make some great savings and spend quality time with the supermarkets I love!

But I have no loyalties, this is free market economics as far as I’m concerned! If a cheaper option of the same quality is available outside of the big supermarkets, I’ll happily take it. I do shop at Aldi occasionally but I’ve had an issue with the quality of some of their products when I compare to what I’d buy elsewhere, primarily the sugar and salt content of things like breakfast cereal or tomato paste and things like the percentage of tomato content in a simple can of chopped tomatoes. I think there is a whole blog post to be written to work out what products are cheaper in Aldi AND of equal quality to my usual brand in Coles or Woolies. Feel free to offer any suggestions!

I also buy meat at the big supermarkets because it is vastly cheaper that all the local butchers in our area and that position I can’t really defend, except to say I mainly purchase the markdown food that might otherwise end up in the garbage. This interesting article on aquaponics caught my eye though – maybe growing our own fish could be an option in the future!

Happy grocery hacking!

J

We wouldn’t have hit the $120 without some decent specials to stock up on. This is not a particularly healthy list of things, but we’ll generally only eat one or two of the naughty things a week, they are to stock the freezer while they are cheap. We bought frozen Seargent’s chicken pies, Angus beef burgers, 3 x boxes of Weetbix Bites (hubby’s fave), Nutella, Ribena, Nice and Natural muesli bars, Lindt chocolate, Sakata rice crackers, corn chips and a tub of ricotta, all on special.

The ricotta has a really long use by date so sits in the fridge for some future spinach and ricotta meal (I have the cannelloni tubes and tomato passata in the pantry and the spinach comes fresh in my weekly veggie delivery). The corn chips and crackers are for some future social gathering either at mine or someone else’s. I hope they last that long!

We also got a few goodies on markdown: A shepherd’s pie from the cooler section (got it for $5, was $14 – who pays that?), some scones from the bakery ($1.80 for six) and $1 for a couple of chocolate mousse tubs.

Here’s the meal plan:

Breakfasts are the usual (see earlier weeks)

Snacks: homemade muesli bars, chocolate (one Lindt square after dinner is our treat!), fruit, scones

Friday: Lunch: chicken pie with braised red cabbage side; Dinner: Store bought shepherds pie with salad leaves and left over red cabbage.

Saturday: L: left over shepherd’s pie with salad; D: we’ll go out and have choc mousse for dessert at home

Sunday: L: beef burgers with lots of salad and home roasted beetroot; D: kind of nicoise tuna/ egg salad with asparagus.

Monday: L: more salad (we have lots of beetroot and green leaves in the fridge!); D: green soup, followed by fish and chips from freezer.

Tuesday: L: tuna sandwich; D: slow cooker beef stew with mashed potato

Wednesday: L: egg salad; D: tacos using the left over beef stew plus tomato, salad, onion

Thursday: L: anniversary lunch out??; probably a sandwich or salad, or maybe a pizza from the freezer.

We spent $124.35 in Coles, but $14 was for non-food items, so that’s $110.35 on food. Add $40 for our weekly veggie delivery and that makes $150.35. The Coles total does include ammonia and Coke that hubby is using to speed up the garden compost breakdown (he found some recipe on YouTube, I don’t ask questions!) so that we can use it on our edible garden, so it seems right to include that with our food total.

Average weekly shop to date: $129.97. We’ll be needing a couple of small spend weeks to bring this average down if I’m to meet my goal of $100 average spend a week!

Happy grocery hacking!

J

Buying it

The best muesli bar I have ever tasted was Carman’s Classic Fruit Muesli Bar. I tried most of the varieties when they were half price at Coles for a time and the classic bar was the best. But that Carman lady doesn’t price her stuff cheap, she knows how good it is and the ingredients are all real things you could use to make you own, not hydrogenated this and soy that, which would no doubt add to the price.

So – is it possible to make a bar at home that is as tasty as Carmen’s or even just more satisfying than the Nice and Natural range, and make it for the price of the Nice and Natural range ($1.04 / 100g on half price special) or less?

Making it

I have tried previously to make cereal bars but found that they fell apart when I tried to eat them so ended up with rather nice toasted breakfast cereal. The only time I managed to get them to stick together was when I added a shit load of honey and syrup, but then they were too sweet for my taste.

Then my friend offered up her recipe and swore it would work:

1 cup oats (rolled or quick oats)

1 cup pumpkin and/ or sunflower seeds/ chopped nuts/ chia seed

1 cup dates (or other dried fruit, but dates are nice and sticky which helps the bars to stay together)

1 heaped tablespoon honey

1 heaped tablespoon coconut oil

The method is too easy. Pre-heat the oven to 180 degrees Celsius. Line a deep sided baking or cake pan (approx. 20x20cm or equivalent area) with baking paper but leave a bit sticking out the sides to enable you to lift the bars out later.

In a small pan or in the microwave, heat the honey and oil so that they become a thin liquid. Chop the dates as finely as you can or use a processor if you have one. Mix the dry ingredients and then add the honey & oil, mix again, and then press the mixture into the pan.

Use the base of a drinking glass and another bit of baking paper to really press the mixture together – you want to really squash it down. This is really important if you want to make bars not toasted breakfast cereal!

Pop the pan in the oven for about 20-25 minutes or until the oats have browned a little. Remove from the oven and set the pan aside on a wire rack to cool totally. If you put the pan in the fridge for an hour or two once it’s cooled it will set harder.

Lift the lining paper out and place the solid square of oaty goodness on a chopping board. Using a large sharp knife or cleaver, chop the mega-bar into the size bars you’d like. You should get about 10 bars that are 10cm long by 4cm wide.

To be honest, you’ll still get crumbly bits on some edges (see my latest batch below – I was rushed!) and a couple of the bars might break sometimes, but if it happens often, add more honey or try adding a spoon of brown sugar. You can fiddle with the amounts of oil and honey to your taste or try butter instead of coconut oil but be aware that it could alter the stick-together-ness. Cinnamon is a great addition for flavour.

I calculated the cost of ingredients using the Coles online store prices for the cheapest per unit brand available, but you can get all of these things on special if you prefer another more expensive brand. I recently got coconut oil for 40% off and I think my big bag of oats was also on special.

Total cost of ingredients: $4.59

Total weight of finished bars: 415g

Total cost per 100g of finished bars: $1.10

Well, that’s just as good as the cheapie supermarket brands! But I also like to put a value to my time as well, since I am self employed and in theory I could be earning money when I’m not cooking. Time to make them: 20 mins at $25/ hour = $8.33

Total cost per 100g including my time: $3.11

Ok that’s 150% the price of the Carman’s brand. But, buying muesli bars in the supermarket doesn’t fill your house with the smell of baking, which is priceless… And knowing exactly what you’re eating is pretty priceless too. And hey, you can always ignore the cost of your time.

Muesli bars – buy ‘em or make ‘em?

MAKE ‘EM! Homemade bars are so yummy you’d be mad not to.

So the only thing to figure out now is how to safely transport the home-made muesli bar so it is convenient to have on the go. I generally put one or two in a plastic takeaway box or in a ziploc bag, but the box is not great as I don’t want to pick the bar up with my hands (I work with animals and I’m always dirty), and the ziploc bag ends up getting thrown away after a couple of uses. I guess I could take the bar in a box along with a tiny pair of tongs or chopsticks! If you have any great ideas I’d love to hear them.

Happy grocery hacking!

J