The Price of Eggs and Homemade Bread

The Price of Eggs and Homemade Bread.

Have you purchased eggs lately? According to the USDA the rising costs and shortages are due to a strain of highly pathogenic bird flu. In December alone, it wiped out 13.2 million commercial egg-laying hens. Wow! Poor chickens.

I love cooking, especially baking. I love making goodies from scratch and it is something that my sweet Mom passed on to me. She was the master baker. I hope to reach her level of skill.

If you are going to bake, you need eggs. I go through a dozen quickly, so I buy the 18-count carton. Last Friday as I placed our grocery order, I almost fell out of my chair when I saw that an 18-count of Walmart brand eggs is right at ten dollars. WHAT?

As I scrolled to look at other options, to my delight I saw that the 18-count carton of organic, cage-free, brown eyes were two dollars less! SCORE! I would prefer to use the better egg all the time, but when you are on a tight budget and the normal price is less than five dollars for an 18-count, well…you know…

I encourage any fellow cooks to check on the cage-free options. If we must spend double, we may as well get the cream of the crop, right?

If history continues to repeat itself, and it does, we will experience more economic struggles. Food prices across the board have risen significantly since COVID. Merchants raised their prices to stay in business but when the epidemic was under control, prices never went back down. Have you eaten out lately?

These days I am making more things at home. I cook every day, but I admit that my husband and I love eating out. Being foodies, it’s a highlight to try new restaurants. We will sit and critique every bite and then I will come home and try to recreate it. 

The new rule is that nothing goes to waste and even though we are not overly crazy about leftovers, we eat it until it is all gone. We have improved greatly in this area. This also means we are very selective about what I do fix to ensure we will not get bored.

This leads me up to homemade bread. I have been making bread for a while, but I had never found that one recipe that worked well for sandwiches. The breadcrumb lacked cohesion, or the procedure was overly intricate and time consuming.

Recently, I stumbled upon the recipe that I will continue to use over and over. The best news is that it is easy and requires no eggs and you can make it completely vegan if you have dairy issues.

This recipe produces two soft white loaves. No special equipment is required, and this can be made by a beginner baker. I’d love to take credit for it, but I found it on Lion’s Bread. I encourage you to visit LeAnne’s site, here: https://www.lionsbread.com/.

We may not be able to do much about food prices, but we can get creative and learn new ways to make our food stretch. Sadly, I will always need eggs for my cooking. Now would be a great time for someone to get backyard chickens and offer eggs for sale. 

Any takers? I’ll swap two loaves of freshly baked sandwich bread for an 18-count carton. If interested, hit me up!