Chilled noodles make nice cool meals for summer days but we also love to eat them in the winter. You can use any type of asian noodles and even angel hair pasta to make chilled noodles. They are espeicially good with the homemade noodles we blogged about previously.

To prepare the noodles, simply cook as required for the type of noodle you use and rinse in cold or iced water.

To made our Spinach and garlic sauce you will need (for 1 serving):

• 1 tbsp Soy sauce
• 1 -2 tbsp Seasoned rice vinegar (or rice vinegar, salt, and sugar)
• 1/2 tsp Chili oil
• Raw garlic (Diced)
• About 1/4 cup chopped spinach (thawed)

Mix the above ingredients and adjust to taste. Toss in the noodles, add a dash of Furikake (sesame seeds and dried seaweed) and you are ready to eat.

You might add extra sugar if the sauce is too sour. We like Chu Chow Chili Oil best, but you can substitute with your favorite hot sauce or make your own chili oil by pan frying or soaking chili peppers with garlic.

We have always loved noodles: Asian noodles, pasta noodles, rice noodles, egg noodles, noodles in soup, fried noodles, noodles in sauces, and so forth. Growing up, rice was a staple, but noodles were always a treat. And they are usually inexpensive at about a dollar a pack and cook in a few minutes.

But even if something is already affordable, it never hurts to make it cost less. With wheat flour priced at $0.25 per pound at our local grocery store, the cost of making a serving of noodles is incalculably small. Not only is it easy and inexpensive to make our own noodles, but they are so good that we can eat them every day for weeks at a time.

To make your your own noodles, you don’t even need to have a pasta maker or other machine (unless you are feeding an unusually large group of people). You can simply roll out dough with a rolling pin and chop it into strips with a knife (we prefer a cleaver for this job). Not only is it cheaper to make your own noodles, but fresh noodles take less time to cook than dried noodles and so cuts utility costs. Homemade noodles are also less fattening than ramen and many store-bought kinds of noodles.

How to Make Homemade Noodles

Here’s how to make homemade noodles. It is not an exact science, you sort of get a feel for what you like after you make it once or twice.

1. Warm some water in the microwave until almost hot (about 1/2 cup to 1 cup for a medium to large batch)

2. In a bowl, mix a few cups of flour with a dash of salt

3. Stir in the warm water

4. Stir in additional flour one cup at a time until dough no longer sticks to side of bowl

5. Divide dough into manageable sections, place one ball on a well-floured cutting board, sprinkle flour on top, and roll it to the thickness of a pie crust.

6. Using a knife, slice dough into strips

7. Cook in boiling water. These noodles cook really fast (about a minute or less), so don’t wander away.

8. Drain, rinse, and serve.

More Ways to Make Noodles

• You can make them thick or flat, wide or narrow, like udon, or soba, or linguine
• Beat in an egg or two for egg noodles
• Add sugar or other spices and herbs
• Experiment with different kinds of flour such as whole wheat, rice flour or other.
• A dough with more water and less flour will make softer noodles with fewer calories
• Cook several meals worth of noodles and refrigerate
• Uncooked noodles can be tossed in flour and stored in the refrigerator or freezer. If your uncooked noodles stick together in the refrigerator, you need to make a dryer dough or cook them before storing.
• You can also store lumps of dough in the refrigerator and cut out noodles as you need them.

Don’t be discouraged if your noodles are crooked or weird in the beginning. Our first homemade noodles looked so bad that we referred to them as tapeworms. But we love to eat these noodles so much that we are now expert noodle wranglers.

We plan to share the many ways in which we eat noodles at Frugaltroph, including cold noodle recipes for summertime, so check back soon.

Happy noodle making!

For our very first Frugaltroph article, we decided to feature our new favorite frugal dessert. Whenever we bake a whole cake, it often begins to go stale before we’re halfway through it. Therefore we came up with the idea of Cup-o-Cakes, an easy, time- and money-saving way to prepare personal-sized cakes as a snack for yourself, to enjoy with a friend or everyone at your dinner table.

How to Make Cup-o-Cake

1. Prepare cake mix as directed in an airtight container. If you do not consume a lot of cake, just mix 1/3 of a pack of cake mix with 1 egg and cut the other ingredients (oil and water) to 1/3.
2. Store unused batter in the refrigerator.
3. When you feel like having cake, put a few spoonfuls of batter in a microwaveable cup or mug. Do not fill cups more than 1/2 full because the cake will rise quite a bit.
4. Microwave for about 1 – 1½ minutes or until cake is fully cooked.
5. Top with frosting and sprinkles if desired.
6. Eat or wrap as gift.

Sack/School Lunch: Tup-o-Cake

If you have children or bring your own lunch to work, imagine how nice it would be to have a beautiful, personal sized cake for a snack or dessert. To do this, follow the same directions for Cup-o-Cake, but make it in a small microwave-safe Tupperware or food storage container. Top it with frosting and/or sprinkles to make your children feel special.

For convenience, you can prepare a week’s worth of Tup-o-Cakes on Sunday evening.

Varying Cake Flavors

• Swirl different cake mixes together
• Change frosting colors and flavors
• Mix in chocolate chips
• Top with jam
• Mix in blueberries, mashed bananas and other fruits
• Top with maraschino cherry
• Use brownie instead of cake mix
• Top with instant pudding instead of frosting
• For the health & weight conscious, mix some oats or bran into your batter before cooking
• Layer different colors of cake mixes in your cup or container
• Add vanilla, lemon, almond or other extract in your cake mix

Benefits of Cup-o-Cakes and Tup-o-Cakes

• Saves utilities: eliminates oven preheating and baking
• Saves time: only requires 1 or 2 minutes to cook a cake
• Saves money by buying in “bulk” and using as needed
• Prevents waste from making more than you can consume
• Reduces risk of forgetting and burning a whole cake
• Portion control

Cost of a Cup-o-Cake

We tend to eat small servings and usually use about 2 tablespoons of batter in an 8 oz. cup. With cake mix at $1.00 or $1.50, we estimate the cost of each serving to be around $0.20 including the egg, oil and frosting.

Gift Ideas

A Cup-o-Cake makes a great gift for any occasion.

• Present it to a friend or co-worker on his/her birthday.
• If giving a mug as a gift, you could prepare a Cup-o-Cake in the new mug as part of the gift.
• Add candles for a birthday.
• For coffee lovers, make a coffee flavored cake.
• Wrap the Cup-o-Cake in cellophane and tie with a ribbon.

Family Member’s Birthday

On your child or spouse’s birthday, prepare a Tup-0-Cake with his/her lunch. Put pretty frosting on it, or write Happy Birthday in frosting or candy letters, include a candle or put a bow on the Tupperware.

Be creative and have fun.

"Sie essen, sie trinken und bezahlen nicht gern. They like to eat, drink and don't like to pay." -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Image by Madoline Hatter

Frugaltroph is a blog about frugal cooking containing recipes, money saving tips, and simplified versions of traditional dishes. We, Penelope Pince and Madoline Hatter, consider good dining an important part of life, but not so important as to take up a major portion of our time and finances. We have been cooking since our teens and would like to share our experience and a few of our own recipes and methods.

We plan to write on subjects such as school lunches for kids, ethnic foods, holidays an special occasions, creative presentations, and foods of various colors.

A brief explanation of our project title and motto

In biology, the term “-troph” is combined with another word to describe a way of feeding (e.g. autotroph, heterotroph). Therefore, “frugaltroph” is our way of saying “Frugal Feeding” or the diet of Homo frugalis.

Our motto “Sie essen, sie trinken, und bezahlen nicht gern” is a line from Epiphanias, a humorous poem by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe which is one of our favorite songs (music by Hugo Wolf). In English, it says “They eat, they drink, and do not like to pay.” Our three pigs, represent the three kings of the poem.

We currently plan to do one cooking project a week: to make and photograph the process and results, and write up a post with ingredients and instructions which will be posted here and also at the Pecuniarities site, our frugal lifestyle blog. Check back soon for our first Frugaltroph column.