Save Money with Fast Recipes as an alternative to Fast Food / Restaurants
Given the ~$15 per person minimum cost to eat somewhere, I wanted to share the concept behind our 2 minute/day Speed Cooking book.
Concept: Faster than Fast Food
Fast food takes some transportation time, order time, waiting, and further transportation time. A re-order delivery is going to beat us, but we can beat a trip to a Fast Food Restaurant ~5 minutes.
We will only count active time as most Fast Recipes take 20+ minutes to cook. You are at home during this 20 minutes of passive time, I can’t think of a better location to use those 20 minutes. Grocery shopping is also not counted in the total time, if you need to bring this time down, I suggest a 4 week schedule of recipes, pick the week you like and it has all groceries needed for the week sorted by isle(See EIE 21$/week).
How To: Faster Than 1000 Calories/Minute.
Everything is throw and go. Meats, potatoes, vegetables, nothing is ever cut into smaller pieces. If you want a vegetable cut, you will need to pay the grocery store premium(We do this for baby carrots).
Nothing is measured. Spices are added fast. Do not pick recipes or spices where slightly too much or too little will ruin it. Fewer spices is faster, however, a motivated chef can put in a dozen spices in far less than a minute.
Typically store bought sauces are used to save time, but taste and cost varies greatly. We personally have 1 exception, and that is to make a ultra massive pot of red Italian sauce. The job is quite easy, open cans of tomato sauce, add herbs, salt, sugar, some baking soda(Life Pro Tip), maybe ground beef. Let it cook and stir every ~30 minutes until it gets to boil. After it boils, turn it off, let it cool, and freeze into ~40 containers.
The big deal: Passive cooking only. Slow cookers, ovens, rice cookers, air fryers, maybe a pot of water if the pot is tall enough that water wont boil over. Nothing can be flipped or touched. Remember that its Throw and Go.
Ideas and Examples
Here are two examples, one from Speed Cooking and another from an upcoming ‘This Time The Food Tastes Good’. Note how many servings these make. Leftovers are the goal to save you time.
Two Minute Broccoli/Chicken Sesame Rice
This is my wife’s favorite. Basically pick out some sauces from the Asian isle at the grocery store. If the sauce is the name of a dish you like, its a safe bet to try it. This is a summary from the book Speed Cooking.
Steps:
- In a rice cooker, add rice and water. Turn on the rice cooker.
- Put chicken or broccoli on a pan and place it in the oven. Turn the oven on to 325°F (163°C) for 45 minutes.
- On a plate, place the cooked rice, and your choice of either broccoli or chicken. Add your preferred sauce at the table.
You may have a gigantic chicken breast on your plate. Time to enjoy conversation with family or TV while you cut the chicken breast into manageable pieces. The goal is to save you time in the kitchen, and give you more time you actually enjoy.
5 Minute Biryani
This one was so good, my surprised Dad chased people around the house telling them to eat it.
Servings: 3300 Calories, ~6 servings
You have 2 minutes to put these ingredients in a slow cooker, if you can’t find a spice quickly, move on, it will taste fine. You also might want to double the spices if you prefer extra aroma. We do not.
In a slowcooker add:
- Chicken (or Potatoes) – 2-3 breasts, and any chicken scraps you’ve been saving.
- Water – ~1 cup, ensuring the slow cooker does not dry out. Excess water is beneficial as it mixes with the rice later.
- 2 tsp salt
- 1 tbsp paprika
- 2 tsp garlic powder
- 2 tsp onion powder
- 2 tsp cumin
- 2 tsp cinnamon
- 2-3 tbsp sugar, depending on your desired sweetness
In a rice cooker:
- 4 cups basmati rice – It’s quite important to use this type of rice for the intended flavor. Other types of rice can be used, but the taste experience may vary.
- 6 cardamom pods
- 1 star anise
- 10 cloves
- 2 tsp salt
Final steps moments before serving in the slow cooker:
- (deliciously optional) 8 tbsp ghee/butter/veg oil/veg shortening/peanut oil
- Cooked basmati rice, you can optionally take the cardamon pods, star of anise, and cloves out. Or just avoid eating it later. To save time, you can basically skim the top layer of rice, depends on how much waste you are okay with.
Now stir everything really good, you have less than 1 minute left. Serve and Enjoy.
By the way I never seem to get the salt right, I always salt a second time at the table.
Math:
8 cups cooked rice * 200 calories/cup = 1600 calories
3 chicken breasts * 250 calories = 750 calories
8 tbsp oils * 120 = 960 calories
Enjoy The Freedom
Save money, save time. These low effort meals are my personal favorite. Get excited about a future speed cooking style book, we figured out how to make Chicken Pot Pie in under 5 minutes of active time. For now, our even faster, but not as tasty Speed Cooking book.
Save $200/yr with Library Apps
Paying for Audible still? With Libby and Hoopla apps and your local library card, you can get both audiobooks and ebooks for free.
That is the entire article, instead of me filling this page with filler, go to your library or their website and see if you can get a library card.
Wish you the best.
Cost of Exercise Per Year
This is probably one of the weakest sources of data in the history of the website, however I think it served its purpose and I wanted to share. The data was made up by chatGPT, it was not collected in the real world. This seems bad, but it could also be advantageous. If I collect prices across the nation(or even between stores in the same city), differences in labor/cost of living prices can make two identical activites cost different prices. This is some ultra aggregate of data, and as long as we can learn from it, its good right?
My 5 second hypothesis was that running is the cheapest. I was wrong.
Data
Conclusions
We can somewhat generalize different categories of costs.
Free
These are home workouts that you can literally do naked. The most I can imagine paying is for internet so you can follow along to a video or buying some supplementary equipment like bands or a yoga mat. However, the moment you buy anything, you have plenty of clothed non-home options.
Regarding my hypothesis, I had forgotten shoe costs.
Less than $200/yr
These mostly involve buying a few pieces of equipment once. Buying a football/soccer ball, shoes, light safety equipment. These mainline sports can give you opportunities to play in public and meet new people, which could have its own positive value.
The biggest bummer here is that shoes do not seem to last. My shoes go from “New Running Shoes” to “Worn Weight Lifting Shoes” to “Grass Cutting Shoes” over their lifetime. I suppose I’m not counting these later lifespans. I personally don’t notice the difference between cheap($60) and expensive shoes($100+) unless there is something weird about the expensive shoes.
Less than $500/yr
These are your sports that require someone to be paid and real estate to be occupied. There are some exceptions like buying a gym membership to do weight lifting or buying an elliptical.
Greater than $1000/yr
These appear to be classes that require an instructor that are a bit more hands on or require equipment/expertise.
Application
Your exercise and social goals may dictate these. However you may find that you can make the choice between a yoga class and a yoga video. You will lose out on potential social benefits.
I have two personal goals, have good cardio and grow muscle. Cardio is low cost between running, $50 stationary bike, hula hooping, and jump roping. To grow muscle, you require weights, the lowest cost solution for us was to buy a home gym once for $1000. The quality requirements for exercise can be more complex than a mere ‘yes this is exercise’.
Thoughts?
Did you forget chatGPT generated this data? I did. If fake/mathmatically reasonable data bothered you, let me know. The conclusions of this study seemed reasonable, however with fake data, I worry we are missing some edge case. On the flip side, there would be no study this week if I had to collect this data myself. Email me at michaelkirk@efficiencyiseverything.com
4×6 Photos Per Dollar: Save Money Printing The Classic Photo Size
This is a simple study that can help you save money on printed 4×6 photos.
You will need to decide if you are willing to drive to a store, and how many photos you are willing to buy.
The Data
I did not include temporary coupons, my wife says these are common. Keep an eye out for them.
If you only want to print 1 photo and are willing to drive to a store, you can use Snapfish and pickup at Walgreens or CVS.
If you want over 75 photos and want it delivered, you are probably best going to Walmart, but there might be an opportunity to save money at Snapfish given they may have coupons.
My number one suggestion is to double check the price you are paying at checkout. It seems every website would bait you in with cheap prices, only to change them at the checkout screen because you had to pay for shipping, or were picking it up in store.
Here is the sheet if you’d like to add your own comparison.
$1.50/per day eating approved, Homemade Yogurt. 2 ingredients, no fancy equipment needed.
Way easier than I ever expected. Grocery store yogurt would never make the $1.50 per day budget. This offers you a solution.
- Boil milk
- Let milk cool (If you want to be scientific 90F-105F, but I don’t think it matters if it goes below 90F. It should be bath water temp)
- Add yogurt with an active culture(the cheapest 4 pack of walmart great value brand yogurt has it, look under the ingredients). If you add less yogurt, it will get thicker. If you add more yogurt it will be runny. I typically add 2 or 3 tablespoons per gallon of milk.
- Wrap in a blanket or put it in an oven/microwave but don’t turn it on. The goal is to keep it at ~90F-105F. I sometimes get paranoid and turn on the oven for about 30 seconds to add a little bit of heat. Don’t forget to turn it off quickly, if it gets too hot, the yogurt will separate.
- Place in your refrigerator when done.
I add 1 tbsp sugar per cup of yogurt. You can add vanilla or fruit, I don’t bother.
I like 9 hours of sitting time(step 4). It reminds me of Yoplait, liquidy and not sour. If you want it slightly firmer and more sour, you can wait longer like 24 hours.
You can use your new yogurt as the starter for next time. I froze a bunch in ice cube trays. Just let it defrost and warm it up closer to room temp before adding it to the 90F-105F milk.
Mrs. Efficiency gets pretty freaked out about dairy and the mere thought of eating bacteria cultures and even she enjoyed the yogurt. I also found myself replacing sour cream in recipes with thick yogurt.
Lowest effort and cheapest homemade alcohol (‘beer’/’wine’)
Disclaimer: Drugs are bad mmk? Save time, money, and increase efficiency by not using them. However if you insist, this article is for you.
The goal here is to make the active drug in alcohol, ethanol. We arent going for fancy flavors, you can figure that out yourself. I drank it with no changes.
Gather materials
- A container, I use a clean 2L bottle or empty juice container
- Sugar
- Yeast, I use bread yeast because its cheap and I already have it at home
- A plastic bag that has no holes in it
- A rubber band
- A pin
Assemble
According to some website (17g/l is needed to get 1% of alcohol). 10% is the max percentage for bread yeast. I want 10% in a 2L so, 340g of sugar. If your final product is sweet, you either added too much sugar, or the yeast hasnt finished metabolizing. Oh well, its sweeter. 340g is about 1.5 cups of sugar.
Enter your desired alcohol percentage(10 for 10%):
Enter your container size in Liters:
Amount of sugar needed in grams =
Steps
- Put sugar into your 2L container, fill with warm water. If you are burning your hand on the water, too hot. Hot tub warm.
- Add 2 teaspoons yeast
- Put cap on, shake well
- Take cap off, put bag over the cap area, seal it with the rubber band. It should be air tight at this point. 2 options, remember to release the CO2 that builds up every day for the first few days(this is called burping). OR take a tiny pin and make a small hole in the bag. (I still burp it, its sastifying)
Wait
People say to wait 2 weeks or longer, not my style. You can get drunk in ~48 hours. Longer means stronger alcohol and better taste, so if you can wait, do it.
I imagine I had such good results with a 48-72 hour brew because I left it in my garage on ~93F degree day. At room temp, you may have to wait longer.
Last step before enjoyment
"Cold Crash"
Put it in the refrigerator, the yeast will settle to the bottom. Separate the good liquid from the yeast. You can do this multiple times if it isnt clear enough. Some people report yeast causes diarrhea. I've never had any issues, but I don't drink tons of yeast.
Variants
"Wine"
Same thing but buy 100% grape juice, just add yeast, no sugar needed. It will turn out dry, you can always add sugar to sweeten.
I personally like this the most, it is lower effort, it's slightly more expensive, but it tastes like full blown (dry) wine.
Final thoughts
The cost is a little bit of yeast, sugar, and time.
You can make "Wine" in less than 3 minutes. You can make the "Beer" in about 5 minutes. (This is active time, not the passive 48+ hours)
Now you can make drugs!
Daycare or stay at home? There is a third way.
I recently saw someone say ‘We did the math and sending the kid to daycare would be break even’. When I inquired further, it turned out ‘break even’ meant they could have profited $12,000/year. Nothing wrong with being a stay at home parent, but a profit of $12k is not close to break even.
Disclaimer, we send our kids to daycare, expect pro-daycare bias.
If you are reading this and have an agenda, to prove that whatever you are currently doing is the best: Just do that. This article’s purpose is to be rational from a monetary perspective. If you are afraid daycare is going to teach your kid bad habits, money won’t change that feeling.
The options
Here are your options to consider
- Quit your job, become a stay at home parent
- Send your kids to daycare or pay for a nanny
- Watch kids in rotation with neighbors, family, and friends
While there is a monetary value to each option, there are some intangibles that should be considered.
Stay at home pros and cons
During coronavirus, I ‘lived the dream’. Me and my 1 year old spent every day together, I built bridges and towers with his megablocks, we went outside, and… quickly this wore off and his fuss drove me to putting on baby phonics and count to 100 videos.
We typically see our stay at home mom friends have a Disney movie on TV in the background of our snapchats.
Recently I got a taste of the stay at home life as I had coronavirus and I watched my kids all day. I think stay at home is fun in bursts, and it may be fun when the kids are a bit older and can play more independently or tell you what they need.
Pros:
- See all the milestones first hand
- Micromanage their education
- No concerns of child predators
Cons:
- Might get old
- You may use TV as a crutch. Otherwise spend lots of time planning activities.
- No growing your resume
- No profit or benefit to external society
- Less socialization for both you(coworkers) and your kids(other kids)
Daycare
I won’t put ‘daycare costs money’ as a con, because daycare allows me to work and make profit.
To calculate if daycare is profitable, find out the cost of daycare. 5 days a week is approx $15,000 per child per year in my area. Then find your after tax earnings (as an estimate take your yearly income and multiply by 0.7). Do yearly after tax income – cost of daycare. If your number is positive, daycare is not ‘break even’, it’s profitable. Consider that the experience you gain from working will pay dividends as well.
Example outputs, assuming 15k/child/yr, a tax burden of 30%. This doesn’t include daycare tax deductions, which were $8,000 per kid in 2021 and only $3,000 per kid in 2022.
1 kid x 15,000= 15,000, after tax income to profit $21,000
2 kids x 15,000= 30,000, after tax income to profit $42,000
3 kids x 15,000 = 45,000 , after tax income to profit $65,000
Enter your yearly cost of daycare:
Enter your yearly post-tax income:
Gain/Loss =
To add qualities, here are pros and cons:
Pros:
- We grow our resume, the extra experience is worth ~30% pay bump every 2-3 years.
- Socialization, me and the kids are probably deep down an introvert. Daycare has been a savior to our oldest
- I get a break from watching the kids, this way I see them 40 hours a week instead of 95 hours a week.
- Meet parents of people who can also afford daycare. Social club!
- Having a break from your kids makes you appreciate them more
Cons:
- You still need to drive to drop off and pick up your kids
- You don’t spend 24/7 with your kid. This is mentioned above as a Pro, your call.
The Third Way – Friends, Family, and Neighbors.
We use this to some extent, for 2 days a week, we have our parents watch the kids. There are pros and cons. Grandparents spoil the kids, but they get that 1 on 1 attention that they wouldn’t get from daycare. I also enjoy having our parents over, I like those days as much as the weekend. It also reduces our daycare bills slightly.
I’ve been offered support from friends and neighbors as well, mostly in the form of trading days of watching kids. This would require finessing around work schedules, so we end up using daycare instead. However, my job is flexible enough to do something like this. I’ve personally been impressed enough by my kid’s socialization at daycare that I don’t think I’d trade it for $20,000/yr… Hmm… when I put it that way, maybe I do need to consider ‘The Third Way’.
Conclusion
If you want to be a stay at home parent, why are you reading this article? You know in your heart what you want.
If you want to make profit and have 1 parent with a flexible schedule, you may be able to set up a system of friends, family, and neighbors to watch your kids.
If you want to make profit, do the math to figure out if daycare is a profitable choice. Even a slight profit will pay dividends with a stronger resume. On a similar note, make sure you are using rational decision making when choosing jobs, benefits disguise how low a job actually pays.
AdBlock Options + Sponsorblock to save 30+ hours per year and save you money
Adblock has been around for over a decade. Today there is a new way to block in-video sponsors, the ads that your content creators are pushing rather than external google/youtube ads.
This will save you time watching ads, and save you money by avoiding witnessing psychology tricks in ads.
SponsorBlock – My best download of 2022
Starting with the reason I made this article, however if you aren’t blocking adds on your computer and cellphone, keep reading.
SponsorBlock skips those ‘N0rdVPN’ type mid-video ads. It also has options to skip ‘Subscribe to my channel’ moments, intros, filler, etc… I have basically all options enabled and it cuts the videos perfectly.
Link to SponsorBlock.
Adblock PC options
This isn’t all encompassing, it’s just my setup. On desktop I have an extension for Chrome/Edge/Firefox “ublock Origin” for ad blocking.
To be clear there is a ‘ublock’ that sold out to… Adblock. If you remember them, adblock sold out and let big spenders pay to let ads through. “ublock Origin” is the one you want.
Unrelated, my philosophy on most software, great software ‘lives long enough to become a villain’, its good to be flexible or use Open Source software because villains can be forked to become heroes again.
tl;dr- ublock origin on PC
Adblock Cellphone options
I use Bromite, blocks most ads and supposedly trackers. However, this is compiled software on an external non-google-playstore website. Its like installing a .exe on your computer… I personally don’t put any of my passwords in it, but I’m likely just paranoid. The .apk can be downloaded near the bottom of their homepage.
I don’t give Apple money or want to enable people to use Apple products so this is up to you. The time savings are worth it to figure it out for yourself.
Other options I never used
I’ve heard of using VPNs and a RaspberryPi and Pihole. I havent tried these, but as long as your method takes less than 30 hours per year to set up/configure, you will be saving time.
Ads are bad… mmk?
Ads have the ability to change your brain. Their goal is to change your perception. They may subtlety make you think you need to own something or you are a loser. They may make you think their product will change your life. Whatever the case, ads have an adversarial relationship with you. Find out how you can block ads – it will save you time, money, and free you brain to think about what is best for you.
Protein Powder Per Dollar 2022
Efficiency User Leo J. reached out with a suggestion for protein powder. It seemed quite a bit more expensive than what the original protein powder per dollar article was suggesting. I looked up our former recommendation and was shocked to see our former leader in protein powder had gone up to $80 for a 5lb bag. It was time to revisit this study. (Old article here)
Hope you like this no-fluff study, its the opposite of the SEO spam all over Google.
Comparison before Marketing/Sales/Discounts
Any long time viewer here knows how much I loathe marketing tricks, so the first set of data that will be presented is without sales. I wonder if there is some sort of dishonesty correlation between companies that run constant sales and the quality of their product.
Comparison With Marketing/Sales/Discounts
Finally, what you actually want, the current cost of protein, including the never ending sales.
Myprotein tops the list again. They seem to have a forever ‘40% ends today’ gimmick. As much as I hate marketing gimmicks, this is where you can get the cheapest protein powder. EDIT: WRONG, MyProtein changed to a 30% off gimmick today. If they don’t have that gimmick, you can use this referral link for a 30% off coupon.
I used to like MyProtein as a company and their protein powder before this silly marketing strategy. I suppose if you can get the discount, its fine. If you can’t get the discount, Walmart is the cheapest. To free yourself from marketing tricks, I highly recommend this article and the exercises suggested, its like a traumatic experience.
$0.04 Sports Drink, using Stoichiometry to reverse engineer the Gatorade and Pedialyte formula
Feel free to skip to the formula later in the article, the rest of the article describes the effectiveness and limitations.
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Using College Chemistry 1 skills, you can calculate the amount of salt(NaCl), NoSalt(KCl), and Sugar needed to replicate Gatorade and Pedialyte.
This can be useful for rehydrating yourself after an intense workout, an intense night drinking, or an intense trip to the bathroom.
Anecdotes on effectiveness
After running 6 miles in 90F+ sunny weather, water will not quench my thirst. I could drink 50oz of water and still be thirsty. This means you need salt. I have used this drink to quench my thirst.
After my friend accidentally drank what she thought was ~15% ‘apple pie moonshine’ but was closer to 30%, she was basically passed out. This ultra sugary drink was the recipe for a hangover. I made the World Health Organization rehydration drink and she hated it. But… no hangover, and we are in our 30s.
Limitations
Some ingredients are more complicated than an element on the periodic table of elements. You can still get within the same order of magnitude by comparing the order of ingredients. If an ingredient is shown after salt, you can assume there is less weight of it. Using this, we figured out that there should be more citric acid than salt.
There also seems to be Sodium Citrate, which I occasionally will add. I consider it negligible. I suppose an improvement would be including it in the sodium calculation. I should note that the World Health Organization rehydration drink includes Sodium Citrate or Sodium Bicarbonate. The scientific article I read mentioned this is for the correction of acidosis. I’m not certain the purpose, especially in the presence of citric acid. My only guess is that it makes a buffer solution. As soon as we talk about Buffers, we leave General Chemistry 1, and find ourselves in late General Chemistry 2. The lazy solution is to sprinkle a tiny bit of sodium citrate, which I rarely do.
You can/should substitute ~5g of sugar for fructose, I’m sure my athlete friends will pounce on me for suggesting we just use sugar. Its what I use. You somewhat need sugar as it helps the rehydration process.
The Formula for Homemade Gatorade and Pedialyte
I used a gram scale to measure these, but I provided the measurements in typical cooking measurements, this loses some of the accuracy but after making a few I started eyeballing it.
Gatorade
591 ml Water or 2.5 cups
0.636 g Salt (NaCl) or 1/16 tsp
0.124 g NoSalt (KCl) or 1 large pinch (3 small pinches)
35g Sugar or about 2 tbsp slightly heaping
0.8g Citric Acid or 1/8 tsp
It should be noted, my wife loves when I add 1/4 tsp citric acid, it makes it more like a candy drink. You can substitute this with lemon or lime juice. As a note my wife told me “Let them know I’m picky and was reluctant to try this, but now its my favorite.”
Pedialyte
360 ml Water or 1.5 cups
0.941 g Salt (NaCl) or 3/4 of a 1/8 tsp
0.534 g NoSalt (KCl) or 1/16 tsp
10g Sugar or a little less than 1tbsp
Bonus: World Health Organization rehydration drink. Warning this is absurdly salty, use this for emergencies only. This one is not fun, but it works. https://www.who.int/medicines/publications/pharmacopoeia/Oralrehydrationsalts.pdf
The Math – Calculate Your Own
Feel free to download the:
to calculate your own size/strength sports drink.
Here is a photo of what you are going to work with, the green is the final answer.
If you want this in Google Sheets format, or a request, shoot me an email. Contact Us is below.