Breakfast – Page 2

I don’t know whether I’ve mentioned this before, but E. will not eat bread.

When it comes to carbs, he will eat pasta, crackers, Cheerrios, sometimes rice or quinoa, and potatoes (but only in the form of French Fries). He will occasionally eat the crust of bread if I lie and tell him that it is a cracker.

From a nutritional standpoint this isn’t much of an issue. He is still getting plenty of whole grain carbs and he likes his fruit and veggies, so I really can’t complain. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t days when I don’t wish I could just slap together a sandwich and call it lunch.

I guess he really is a little Texan at his core, because a quesadilla is as close as this kid will come to a sandwich.

His tastes have changed a lot in the year or so that he has been eating solid food, but he has always loved Tex-Mex, so much so that we set up a make-your-own taco bar for his first birthday party.

Because of him, tortillas are as much a staple in our house as milk….

We eat a LOT of yogurt.

So much so that I can’t count the number of times that grocery store cashiers and other shoppers have stopped to comment on all the plastic yogurt tubs in my shopping cart.

The baby and I both eat plain, Greek-style yogurt and fresh fruit for breakfast almost every morning. At dinner, we dollop yogurt on top of soups and alongside spicy Indian-inspired entrees. Last night, we spooned some onto our tacos in lieu of sour cream and sometimes I mix it into baked goods instead of buttermilk.

So when I decided earlier this year to start reining in our grocery spending, yogurt was a natural place to look for savings.

We were going through at least three gallons of Greek yogurt each month (plus another gallon or so of the coconut milk yogurt that Paul prefers) and we were spending a lot of money on it.

We try hard to buy dairy dairy from producers that take good care of their cows, which means we inevitably end up paying premium prices. My back of the envelope math shows that we were spending upwards of $100 a month on yogurt, for both the cow milk and coconut milk versions.

I couldn’t find a way to spend less without reducing our consumption or compromising our ethics, neither of which we wanted to do.

Years earlier, I’d made yogurt a few times with lackluster results. I used an electric yogurt maker I’d received as a gift and powdered yogurt starter cultures, but my homemade yogurt was runny and too tart. I quickly went back to the store-bought kind.

But monthly yogurt expenditures in the triple digits compelled me to take another stab at homemade yogurt….

Fried egg tacos

Homemade Greek Yogurt