Ghee is butter that has had the solid fats and salts removed by slow simmering.  Although it’s often thought of as a part of Indian Cuisine, it can be used in place of oil for sauteeing in any cuisine and can even be spread on toast instead of butter.  Ghee is better for you as it is relatively free of oxidized cholesterol and it also has a much higher burn temperature and is less likely to become rancid.  It will keep for months if store in a closed container in a cool dry place.

Ghee is surprisingly easy to make and homemade is more cost effective and fresh then ghee purchased at the store.

From The Hare Krishna Book of Vegetarian Cooking:

Begin by heating the butter in a large heavy saucepan over medium heat until it comes to a boil. When the surface of the butter is covered with a white foam, reduce the heat to as low as possible and simmer uncovered. From time to time remove the solids that accumulate on the surface. Make sure the ghee doesn’t burn. If ghee
is cooked over too high a heat or cooked too long, it will darken and give off a pungent odor.

How much time you need for preparing the ghee depends on how much you are making (see table below). The finished ghee should be golden-colored and clear enoug~ to see through to the bottom of the saucepan. Carefully ladle the ghee into a can or crock and allow it to cool uncovered to room temperature. The milk solids skimmed off
the surface and the solids remaining in the bottom of the pan can be mixed into cooked vegetables, soups, and grains. Ghee properly prepared and stored in closed containers in a cool dry place will keep for months.

 Note:  I’ve made this with one pound of butter and it turned out fine.

Procuring clean water is one of the nicest things you can do for yourself. 

A good water filter will remove any bad tasting chemicals like chlorine and will also remove contaminants like Cysts, Lead, PCBs, MTBE, Mercury, Asbestos, Chloramine and VOCs from your water.  We bought a Multi-Pure water filter in 1995 and have used it ever since.  The fact that Multi-Pure is still in business and still provides filters for the purification units it sold over a decade ago speaks to the quality of their product and their commitment to their customers.  They have excellent helpful customer service people and have helped us find the right hookups for our countertop unit in several houses we’ve lived in which had nonstandard hardware on the kitchen sink.

These units aren’t cheap.  I believe we paid close to $300 for ours but if you look at the price of buying water at the store - the unit will pay for itself quickly and then start saving money over the cost of store-purchased water.  Of course it’s also much easier to have a unit on your sink then to tote water jugs to and from the store.

It is significantly cheaper to grind your own specialty flours but you need a grain mill to do it.  A bag of organic quinoa flour from Bob’s Red Mill is $6.19.  You can buy a pound of organic quinoa at Trader Joe’s or even Whole Foods for $1.00.  So at 25% of the cost of buying the flour you can grind your own - with the added bonus that the flour is completely and absolutely fresh.  Just about any specialty flour: amaranth, coconut, almond, barley, brown rice, black bean, corn, spelt, millet, oat,  and rye to name some can be quickly and cheaply made yourself.

A good grain mill isn’t cheap though so a purchase of this type probably makes more sense for someone who plans to use non-wheat specialty flours on an ongoing basis.

The grain mill can also be used for other things including, of course, grinding your own wheat.

Back when I ate soy - I ground up soy beans and made my own homemade tofu using the recipe from The Farm cookbook.  The mill easily handled the soy and worked perfectly for tofu making.

We bought the Jupiter Family Grain Mill 8 years ago and are very happy with it.  You get quite a bit of control over the coarseness / fineness of the flour grains and the machine is sturdy, simple to put together and take apart, and clean.  I see that some website are selling it for around $200 and that sounds about right given inflation and what we paid for ours.

Coconut oil quickly goes bad in clear plastic or glass containers because of exposure to light.  Even if you refrigerate the oil when you get home - how long has it been sitting in the direct light at the store?  Coconut oil develops a slightly rancid flavor from light exposure which gets worse as time goes on.  Omega Nutrition, smart folks that they are, package their coconut oil / butter in a dark, opague container.  I’ve never tasted even slight rancidity from Omega’s excellent tasting oil.  Note: it should be refrigeratered after opening.