imple Vegetarian | Thrift Week 2018, Day Seven: Chocolate Pudding

In the number one six days of Thrift Week, we've blanketed recipes for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. But what about dessert? Does consuming frugally mean you have to visit bed and now not the use of a dessert, despite the fact that you have not completed whatever naughty?

Of direction now not! Frugality is all approximately getting the maximum viable joy out of the smallest charge, and there's little pride in a life with out chocolates. Brian and I sincerely have several dessert recipes we experience often, but our actual pass-to recipe is chocolate pudding. It's our number one preference for numerous motives:

1. It's pretty easy to make, and much less time consuming than a pie or a cake.
2. It's healthier than most desserts. We make it with skim milk and just a tiny bit of oil or butter, so the only thing in it that's not so healthy is the sugar, and there isn't too much of that.
3. It's filling. One batch makes two good-sized bowls, so this dessert doesn't leave us hungry for more.
4. Most important of all, it calls for nothing we don't habitually have in the house. So any time we're in the mood for dessert, we know we can always make pudding, with no trip to the store required.

Brian's chocolate pudding recipe is a variant on the basic chocolate pudding recipe in the Betty Crocker Cookbook. (Actually, it's a vanilla pudding recipe, with variants for chocolate or butterscotch, but why make vanilla when you could make chocolate?) That recipe makes four small servings and calls for two egg yolks, no whites. When he first started making it, he used to halve the recipe and make one big bowlful, which we would share.

Now, that identical cookbook additionally has a recipe for tapioca pudding, which calls with a purpose to separate the eggs, beat the egg whites one by one, and fold them into the pudding. Doing this allows you to get two times as many servings from the equal extent of milk and eggs, with form of half of the energy according to serving. So sooner or later, we got here up with the idea of adapting this approach to the chocolate pudding recipe, and our fundamental recipe now makes a bowlful for every of us. The charge and the calorie rely are quite much the equal, however we get nearly two times as much meals?This method that we are much less likely to go seeking out a few aspect else (maybe a few factor tons much less wholesome) to nosh on later.

Here's the recipe as Brian now makes it:

Brian's Healthi(er) Chocolate Pudding

1. Divide1 large egg.Place the yolk in a cup or small bowl and the white in a larger bowl.  Set both aside.
2. Whisk together3 Tbsp sugar, 4 Tbsp cocoa powder, 1 1/2 Tbsp cornstarch, dash salt, 1/2 Tbsp coconut oil (or butter), and 1 c. milk. (We use skim milk, which makes the recipe lighter, but you can use whatever you have.)
3. Heat in a saucepan on low heat, stirring constantly until the mixture thickens and begins to bubble.  Let it bubble for one minute (still stirring), then remove from heat.
4. Pour about 1/3 of the mixture into the cup or bowl containing the egg yolk and whisk to combine.  Add the combination back into the saucepan and stir to mix.
5. Return the saucepan to low heat and continue to heat, stirring, until the mixture begins to bubble again.  Remove from heat and add 1/2 tsp vanilla. Set mixture aside.
6. With an electric mixer or equivalent, beat the egg white, gradually adding 1 Tbsp sugar.Beat until medium-to-stiff peaks form.
7. Fold the chocolate mixture into the beaten egg whites and mix carefully.  Distribute into bowls. Pudding can be cooled in the refrigerator or served at room temperature.

This dish fees us $1.25 to make: sixty seven cents for the cocoa (natural and Fair Trade), 25 for the egg (herbal and Certified Humane), 17 for the milk, and eight each for the sugar and coconut oil (each herbal). The cost of the salt and cornstarch is negligible. If you made this pudding with conventional cocoa, sugar, and egg, you could probably whip up a batch for spherical eighty one cents.

Now, I must confess that once Brian and I actually have chocolate pudding for dessert, we will be predisposed to add to the cost by way of topping it lavishly with whipped cream. The cans of whipped cream we purchase (having decided that whipping our very personal without a doubt isn't always fee-effective, and having discovered that we are able to absolutely recycle the cans with a piece of exertions) are approximately $3 apiece and, according to the label, include 61 servings. However, the label additionally claims that a serving is two tablespoons, that's surely to chortle. We need to have whipped cream in every spoonful, so we cover the ground of the pudding with it, then come decrease back for extra even as we get right down to the subsequent layer. Altogether, we possibly use at the least a half of-cup of whipped cream for each bowl of pudding, so that offers at least 20 cents steady with serving. But nonetheless, the whole rate of this dessert is most effective round 83 cents in keeping with serving, that's a small enough price for the sheer hedonic pleasure it brings us.

And with that, our Thrift Week of ecofrugal ingesting involves a near. We now return to our regular weekly blog agenda, so I'll be again this weekend to talk about what Brian is constructing me for my birthday gift.