Cooking During the Recession

Now I have over heard people at work complaining about how badly they have to eat because of this economy or how expensive certain things have become. Take for example bread, sometimes you can get lucky and catch a 2 for $5 special, thats $2.50 a loaf. Now lets say you your family goes through 4 loafs of bread a week. We are up to $10 a week of cheap on sale bread and thats on sale! Lets say one week the store doesn't have a sale on bread and the price jumps to $3.50 now the cost of bread alone for the month is $56. For about a tenth of that you can have all the bread you can ever eat. Now I am sure you are asking "How in the hell can i get bread for 50 cents?" or "This probably involves dumpster diving or buying stale bread by the pound from a baker" but no its an age old secret that very few people think of today. You won't see it on CNN you won't read about it in Suzie Orman's book nor will Jim Cramer give you this hot tip. Are you ready gentle reader...

It's called buying a bag of flour and some yeast and making it yourself!

Now in our busy days of buying everything that we barely have time to pick up the kids, the dry cleaning and the kid's dry cleaning, pay bills so on and so forth how can you have time to make bread. Well its easy to make time because its fast and the time that you are actually doing work is minimal. Hell make the kids do the dirty work, thats what they are there for.
Step 1: Measure the flour, I use 2 cups for a loaf
Step 2: Get hot water, about a 1 1/2 cups, not boiling but about 120 degrees
Step 3: Measure the yeast, I use 1/4 tsp
Step 4: Mix, put the yeast in the flour and add water gradually. This is where it gets messy because you need to mix the flour, with your hands, as you are pouring in water. Stop adding water once it looks like dough, this part takes some experiementing. Also add some salt, I gave some bread to a co-worker without salt and she damn near threw it at me. My method is I let the naked, unadulterated dough rise for an hour before I add in other dry ingredients, try chopped garlic, oregano, cheese, jalepeno slices or really anything.
Step 5: Knead the bread, this helps to get things moving. For those who are new to this kneading is like pounding. I like to get the dough in one hand and punch it with the other. Then flip it over and do it again.
Step 6: Cook. 350-375 for 30 minutes or until it looks like bread.

I know that this isn't exact information and exact measurements because every batch of dough is different so play with it, have fun and all in all each batch of dough takes me about 10 or 15 minutes to make.