As you know, I am working my way through the Valley Food Storage 1 Month Food Gluten Free Value Food Storage Kit this month and with just 9 days to go, you can bet your bottom dollar that come November 1st, I’ll be standing in line at a bakery picking out some sort of delicious pastry at 6am sharp. 🙂 🙂 🙂
The funny thing is, even though I’ve been totally gluten free this month, I don’t feel any different. Which honestly, I think is a little strange. Mrs. HB was totally convinced there would be some sort of earth shattering Ah-Ha moment. But nothing.
This week while I made a turkey {breast} dinner, turkey soup and chicken stir fry for my people, the HH was busy in the kitchen whipping up plates of potatoes for my “supplemental” meals. What a supportive guy that one is. 😉
I cannot recommend having some form of potatoes in your food storage bin enough. Ideally, fresh would be best, but since that’s highly unlikely, what about a giant bag of mashed potatoes or some sort of dried potato soup or something?
The HH, he’s gotten pretty good at fixing potatoes.
Did I ever tell you he’s part Irish?
Hey look, MORE potatoes, this time served over beans and rice. Bahahahaha. 😉
In between devouring heaping plates of potatoes, I went to the mall last week. I don’t even remember when the last time I was in a mall, but I can tell you prices have gone up since I last ventured into the real world. Guess how much Williams-Sonoma wants you to pay for 4 ounces of cinnamon sticks?
$14.95!!!!! That works out to $59.80 a pound. You can buy 2 pounds of cinnamon sticks off Amazon for $12.74. Granted, the cinnamon sticks from Amazon don’t come in a glass bottle with a pretty label, but c’mon now…. Who are these crazy people who are paying $14.95 for 4 ounces of cinnamon sticks? I want to meet them.
Costco $36.77
I went to Costco with a friend to get my eyeglasses adjusted and walked out a few goodies. The HH and The Girl scarfed down the pie within 3 days. The Dubliner cheese though, if anyone touches that before November 1st there is going to be TROUBLE!
Oh, and the price of vanilla extract these days? INSANE. $34.99 for 16 ounces. I have never seen it that high, have you? Maybe I should look into growing vanilla beans in the greenhouse.
How about YOU? Have you been shocked by the price of a particular product lately? Does it make you feel old? Like when your grandparents would tell you they paid a nickle for a loaf of bread?
Have a great Monday everyone,
~Mavis
Total Spent This Week $36.77
Total Spent in October $129.61
Total Spent in September $180.97
Total Spent in August $259.90 <– $30 on salami splurge
Total Spent in July $276.56 < – $38 Spent on Amish meat and cheese
Total Spent in June $206.47 <- Attempting once a month grocery shopping
Total Spent in May on Groceries $216.50 <- Included a stock up trip to King Arthur Flour
Total Spent in April on Groceries $169.98
Total Spent in March on Groceries $306.75 <– Apartment life, moving across the country and settling into a new house
Total Spent in February on Groceries $259.81 <- Living in an apartment and buying a lot of ready-made meals
Total Spent in January on Groceries $240.15 <– Packing mode and not cooking from scratch as much
Go HERE to read more Shopping Trip Stories.
Jennifer says
Here at our WM in NC, you can buy an 18 ct. carton of eggs for just 71¢. Yes, I said seventy-one cents!!!! I make dh a 3 egg white omelet EVERY day of the week and deviled eggs EVERY weekend during football season, so I buy a lot of eggs. This is a record for me though. To compare, it’s unusual to see any of the grocery stores around here, except maybe Aldi, have a dozen for less than $1.
You should just make you own vanilla out of those cinnamon sticks. Much cheaper than buying it at those prices!!
Linda Hart says
How do you make vanilla out of cinnamon sticks?
Jennifer says
My mind is gone, y’all. I don’t know what I was thinking about the cinnamon sticks. I was thinking about vanilla beans and vodka, but somehow my mind substituted vanilla beans with the cinnamon sticks Mavis had been talking about.
Diana says
Don’t need to grow vanilla in the greenhouse. They’re the seed pod for a specific orchid and can be grown in the house. I’ve been growing a couple of them for a few years now and am still waiting for them to get big enough to flower. They’re vining orchids and have to be about 20 feet long before they’ll flower. After 3 years – 19′ left to go.
Once they flower (and the flower is only open for ONE day, so you have to make sure you see it, not to mention the fact you have to have TWO of them open on the same day so you can hand pollinate them – there is only one insect that pollinates these things and it’s somewhere in South America), the seed pod takes 9 months to mature.
At this point, I totally get why they’re expensive, lol..
Danyell says
It was just a couple yaera ago Costo vanilla was 8 bucks? I also couldn’t believe the price last I checked. I have been buying from Amazon at around 11 dollars I think. Wild!Beef prices in store are shocking. We raise our own for butcher. And we come in at 3.25 a pound after feed and paying the butcher.
Wendy Clark says
Yes, vanilla is through the roof. And it seems like the instant milk is rapidly going up, as are all dairy products.
Alice says
Mavis, I sorry, you’re a little late to the show. Vanilla has been that price for over a year. AND I thought it was terrible at $27.99 before it jumped to the $34.99. I used to buy that same bottle for somewhere between $7-$11
E in Upstate New York says
10 Years ago had some quotes for work on our house. Came in around 40 grand [yes, some big time work]. For very good reasons we didn’t have the work done then. I’m in shock! Just talked to contractor, quote now is $100 thousand!!!! Same scope of work, just much higher everything.
Marcia says
Yes, I was chatting up a contractor adding a second story to the house across the street. In the last few years, the cost of plywood has tripled. From $9/ sheet to over $25 or 30.
I’d like a second bathroom. I just don’t think I want a $100,000 bathroom.
Charity says
Storms have almost decimated the vanilla supply. I’m a baker and I have to treat my vanilla like gold. No more extra vanilla just for fun. Also you can thank the tariff crap that’s going on for raising the cost of building supplies. 🙁
Cheryl says
My daughter works in a bakery also and they are seeing the high prices of pure vanilla too. Something happened to the crop and now we just wait till the price goes down. Have you raised your prices? I can’t remember if my daughter’s work has or not, probably have to.
Rosaleen says
If HH is part Irish, have him look up colcannon, an Irish dish of mashed potatoes and greens, often cabbage. Right now you would skip the butter, but there should be lots of it. I read somewhere that potatoes and milk can cover nearly all of one’s nutritional needs. I don’t know if commercial instant potatoes count for this purpose, as so many processed foods lose a lot of nutrients. Maybe add dehydrated butter or “Butter Buds” to your emergency storage.
Now that you live in New England, look for Ocean State Job Lots and Big Lots. Most of my vanilla, spices, and Bob’s Red Mill purchases are from these stores. You could also check Aldi for vanilla. Artificial may be OK for cookies or cake, but I insist on real vanilla for treats like custard.
Donna says
I bought real vanilla at Aldi several months ago. Don’t remember the exact price now, but much more reasonable than even WM.
Helen in Meridian says
Actually the Costco Vanilla price has gone down. It was $37 or $38 4 months ago. That vanilla is not even Madagascar vanilla. I was down to 2 Tbsp since last buying it 2 yrs ago last May at Costco for $12.99 when my dh cleaned out the garage tiny room where power is located. He found a sack that was 10 yrs old of 15 bottles of vanilla that were 2 oz. They were dark glass, so I figured that like fine wine, these improved.
KC says
Cinnamon comes in (at least) two varieties: the cheap stuff and the expensive stuff. There is a superficial resemblance, but the cheap stuff has more heat than flavor compared to the expensive stuff. Cinnamomum verum is one of the names for the more expensive stuff (“real cinnamon”) and cinnamomum cassia is the cheap stuff (which is most of the cinnamon in the US). The thickness of the “rolls” or scrolls will tell you, if you have sticks, which they are; there are photos of both online, but basically cassia cinnamon is more likely to form scrolls, with mostly a maximum of two layers wrapped around each other, whereas “true” cinnamon wraps around and around itself into a single roll, with 4+ much-thinner layers in the roll. (see wikipedia or other sources online for photos and verification of this)
The Williams-Sonoma stuff is yet another species name, and I don’t know where it fits in the Great Cinnamon Hierarchy, so I can’t identify whether it particularly is overpriced or not.
But from what I’ve read (no, I’ve never bought the expensive stuff, for lo, I am a cheapskate, and the not-as-nice cinnamon has been fine for what I’m using it for… and if the other is really *that* much nicer, part of me would rather not know the difference!), the baking difference between the two is more like “margarine vs. butter” or “vanilla vs. artificial vanilla” – and due to the higher expenses of production, the pricing is also dissimilar, although both cinnamons are natural products.
KC says
There’s a legitimate (and substantial) price difference between Cassia Cinnamon (cinnamomum cassia) and Ceylon Cinnamon (cinnamomum verum) – the flavors are different, the difficulty of growing and harvesting is different, and (more important health-wise), Cassia Cinnamon has massive amounts of coumarin, whereas Ceylon Cinnamon has minimal amounts. Of course, the latter detail is only relevant if you’re eating, say, a teaspoon in a day. Still, the flavor differences are reputed to be enormous, with true cinnamon being more flavor than heat, and cassia cinnamon being more heat than flavor. (I say “reputed” because I haven’t tried the “better” cinnamon, lest I develop a preference for it… for lo, I am a cheapskate. But opinions of chefs online seem to be close to unanimous, although some do prefer cassia for specific applications where the “heat” is definitely wanted and the nuance would be lost.)
Cassia cinnamon is most of the US’s cinnamon – thicker bark that forms into “scrolls” more than “rolls” and which doesn’t wrap around itself more than twice, usually. True cinnamon wraps into rolls of 4+ really-thin layers and is more crumbly. It’s usually pretty easy to tell which kind you have if you look at photos of the two online; aside from that, if you get cheap cinnamon in the US, it’ll be cassia (although if you get expensive cinnamon in the US, it might still be cassia…).
That said, I have no idea where the varietal of cinnamon listed on the Williams-Sonoma bottle ranks in the cost-of-production and difference-in-flavor scales – that’s not one I’ve run into either in culinary reading or in medical reading. But from everything I’ve read, it’s more of an apples-to-oranges comparison (or margarine-to-butter, or real-vanilla-to-imitation-vanilla, or wool-to-polyester) sort of comparison than a truly-equivalent comparison.
KC says
Sorry for the duplication! It had looked like my comment didn’t go through (there wasn’t a “your comment is waiting to be moderated” thing as has previously happened), so I tried again… oops.
Laura says
I just make my own vanilla. I have reused the beans now for the third time and it still tastes good. I have a good supply of beans built up from buying the overstock markdowns at Costco after Christmas several years ago. Our vanilla got as high as 36.99 but has dropped down from there. Vanilla did this about a decade ago but dropped back down after a year or so. This time the price hike has lasted over 3 years! Yikes. I stopped adding it at all to baked goods as I don’t think it makes much difference in the flavor.
Kaia says
Yep, unfortunately natural disasters devastated the vanilla supply and it will be a long time before it recovers.
Andrea says
We don’t have a Costco near us, so hubby stops when he travels further north on business. Last time he stopped I asked him to pick up vanilla extract. He grabbed two bottles and did not pay attention to the price. His total at the register was higher than he expected, so he looked at the receipt in his way out of the store. WAIT! $72 worth of vanilla extract!?! He called ask asked me if he should bubble-wrap it for the trip home!
Kim says
Another reason the vanilla prices have gotten so high is that consumers are demanding more natural ingredients in their foods so major companies (i.e. Nestle) have changed their recipes to include natural vanilla instead of artificial. Unfortunately, due to the long growing time (vined take 3-4 years to mature), the suppliers were not able to quickly react to this increased demand.
Mable says
I use amaretto instead of vanilla in cooking. Cheaper and I like the taste better.
Marcia says
Vanilla: I’d heard it was through the roof.
Gluten: I started having digestive issues about 1.5 years ago, when I was 46. I tried, half-heartedly, to figure out what was causing them. But it’s really hard to self-daignose – because is it what I ate an hour ago, this morning, yesterday, 3 days ago? I mean really. What I did figure out is that – first, I started having problems when I started running a lot. And second, when I started running a lot, I started eating more carbs, particularly bread and pasta.
It all came to a head last July at my then 5- yo’s birthday party where we made homemade pizza. And we had leftovers. So I had pizza for dinner, breakfast, lunch…and I was curled in a ball with stomach pain all weekend. Ah. Pizza. Is it cheese or is it bread? Please don’t be cheese. So I sort of halfway tried to cut out bread/ gluten. But that is really hard. Then we vacationed with friends, one of whom has a dad with Celiac. She mentioned that unfortunately, half assing doesn’t work AND a month isn’t enough to figure out if you have an issue. Sigh.
So, I went cold turkey on wheat/ gluten by the end of July. I was feeling better in Aug/ Sept (no stomach pains) but didn’t feel much different. Then I tested the waters in mid Sept with a single donut hole and some pizza. And…I was miserable that whole weekend.
Haven’t had wheat since. I did, last December, decide to test out barley (which has gluten), and barley is just fine. So for me, it’s just wheat.
In short (too late!) One month might not be enough to see or feel a difference. Not everyone has a reaction to gluten – I was blissfully fine until I was 46. As a side note, I lost 12 lbs in the space of a year after giving up wheat. Inflammation? I don’t know. I didn’t cut my calories – I eat oats, potatoes, corn, rice, etc. instead.
Kipper says
A clerk at a local store told me to go to their bulk food section for spices and herbs. I’d mentioned the $$ of name brand bottled spices. What great advice! I now buy bulk spices, only as much as I will use in say six months. Usually it costs me less than $2 per packet. I can try different spices without buying too much. They have a smoky spice rub mix that is fabulous. Will have to check the cinnamon.stick and vanilla prices next time.
Mary pearce says
Buying vanilla beans isn’t cheap ($52.00 for 1 ounce or 5-7 beans at Mountain Rose Herbs today) but you can make a quart of extract from half a dozen beans, vodka and patience.
Mel says
Everyone I know is getting a pint of homemade vanilla extract for Christmas. I bought a ton of beans when the price started going up, and my husband found vodka on clearance. I almost didn’t buy any because I read the prices would recover, and I’m very glad I did. I still have some beans and a half gallon of extract for myself, but I bake like crazy and make ice cream, so I use quite a bit.
Mavis Butterfield says
People are going to LOVE that gift Mel!
Wendy L. says
I resorted to buying vanilla beans from Winco when they were less than $10 for a small bottle.
I let them soak in vodka. I was still not pleased with the strength of the vanilla so I added some
imitation vanilla (under $2 at the store). It works very well now.
Diane says
My Polish grandmother never “wasted” money on vanilla for baking. She always used bourbon! I don’t drink bourbon so have never tried it myself, but I might buy a tiny bottle and give it a try when my vanilla runs out. I imagine you could use a teaspoon of rum also. She was well known for being a fantastic cook and baker so I guess it made a good substitution.
Lori says
Hi Mavis,
Though you don’t notice the gluten free effect now, you will likely notice the difference when you return to gluten foods. I have no gluten issues, but went on a “sympathy” diet for my daughter when she was diagnosed as a child with Celiac. It took a while for my body to be ok with the gluten again. But, I love all things bakery, so I couldn’t resist!
Karin says
Just yesterday I was talking to my son about inflation and how I’m starting to feel like an old person, always saying “I remember when _____ used to cost $__” And I used your exact same example about my grandfather telling me that he remembered when bread used to cost 5 cents! The timing on your post is too funny!