Remember: always be prepared.

Maybe you’ve seen a too much Walking Dead. Maybe you’re one of those urban preppers with a bug-out bag in the closet. Or maybe you’re sensible and actually taking precautions for the obvious impending zombie apocalypse. Either way, you’re going to need to feed your fleeing body as the hordes of the undead ungentrify Brooklyn. Stockpiling Clif bars seems necessary, but at $1.50/bar, totally bank-breaking. And you know there won’t be any left at Trader Joe’s once the looting starts. So we’ve taken a stab at making our own homemade energy bars, or what we call Caloric Living-dead Invasion Food (CLIF) bars.

We searched around for an easy, no-bake option (who’s going to have an oven in the woods of the Adirondacks?) and found a great, flexible recipe over at Hammertown, which is where we’re headed when the plague comes. Let’s see if it’s worth it. You can uh, also make them for some quick energy while you go on hikes or ride your bike. (more…)

Worth it? Photo from Big Red Kitchen.

Let us, for a moment, set aside the fact that if you’re a decent cook and you have decent ingredients, whatever you make at home WILL taste better than its packaged counterpart from the store. Similarly, ‘making it’ is usually a better fiscal decision than ‘buying it.’ But there’s still a gray area in the make vs. buy debate that needs to be addressed. The question needs to be asked: Is it really worth it to squeeze those 50 oranges for the Sunday brunch, or will Tropicana do? We visited supermarkets around Brooklyn to price-check a few kitchen staples. Then we explored making them ourselves and did some math. Here’s what we found. (more…)