Since I work at home, it's smooth for me to restoration myself a day snack each day (generally a bowl of popcorn). For Brian, however, noshing at the interest poses greater of a trouble. Most days he's great between lunch and dinner, but now and again his blood sugar takes a dive and he desires a bit something to get him thru the afternoon. Unfortunately, he is positioned that he can not preserve sweet or another type of candies in his table drawer, because of the truth he can't resist munching on them, and then they're now not there when he clearly desires them. So for some time, he had to rely upon vending-gadget snacks at round 60 cents a pop.
But a couple of years in the past, we hit on a solution. I'd been given a present of a few fancy warm chocolate combination for Christmas, and at the same time as I preferred it, I found I wasn't going via it very speedy. It wasn't that lots better than my everyday domestic made cocoa, and it wasn't any less difficult to make, so I saved saving it for a completely unique event that in no way got here. So I provided the mixture to Brian to take to art work as an emergency blood-sugar booster. This became out to be simply the rate price tag: it become easy enough to brew up a cup if he wanted one, however that extra little little bit of paintings changed into sufficient to hold him from dipping into it at other instances.
So, for the past couple of years, whenever he ran out his supply of cocoa combination, I'd select out up a few other box for him. We tried the chocolate-mint heat cocoa from Trader Joe's (ok, however no longer his desired) and, more nowadays, the natural hot cocoa combination from Equal Exchange, which changed into provided at our nearby Ten Thousand Villages preserve. It have become a piece luxurious, but thinking about that he did now not go through it very speedy, it seemed like an inexpensive splurge.
Recently, but, our Ten Thousand Villages store closed down (waaah), leaving us looking round for a brand new logo to attempt. Unfortunately, the services on the community supermarket have been quite constrained. Basically, we may additionally need to select both a flowery warm chocolate mix that came best in man or woman packets, which we deemed each too costly and too wasteful, or Swiss Miss in a canister, which can in all likelihood serve the purpose, however did not seem like masses of a deal with.
At this point, Brian determined to take subjects into his private fingers and attempt blending up a hot cocoa blend from scratch. He checked out plenty of cocoa blend recipes on the Web, and they all appeared to have the identical number one additives?Dry milk, sugar, cocoa powder, and now and again corn starch as a stabilizer. But maximum of them were lacking one key issue: vanilla. The simplest ones he can also want to locate that protected it referred to as for
Fortunately, my husband is a trained chemist. He was able to come up with a protocol (that's what scientists call a recipe, apparently) for turning our homemade vanilla extract into a form that could be used in a dry mix. He's still tinkering with the proportions, but here's his current protocol:
BRIAN'S HOT COCOA MIX
2 tsp vanilla extract
3/4 c sugar
3/4 c powdered milk
3/8 c cocoa powder
1 Tbsp corn starch
Put the sugar in a bowl and sprinkle the vanilla onto it. Allow to dry for about 2 hours, then stir it with a fork. Place the vanilla sugar and the rest of the ingredients in a food processor (NOTE: Brian used our FreecycledMagic Bullet) and grind to a fine powder.
You can then store this and use it just like a commercial hot cocoa mix, tweaking the proportions to suit your taste. Brian prefers to make it into what he calls "the cocoa equivalent of espresso," adding two heaping teaspoons to around half a mugful of hot water, but the same amount for a full mug would probably give you a standard-strength mixture.
I did some back-of-the-envelope calculations and found that the ingredients for a batch of this come to about $2.25, using organic cocoa (purchased in bulk from Dean's Beans), organic sugar (from Costco), and our homemade vanilla extract. That works out to about 10 cents per serving. By contrast, the Starbucks hot cocoa mix from Costco would cost around 32 cents per serving, and the snacks from the office vending machine around 60 cents. Combine this bargain price with the organic ingredients and the reusable packaging, and you've got an ecofrugal afternoon snack that any cubicle dweller—well, at least one who isn't a vegan or lactose-intolerant—can love.
