Golden moment #18 Home-made Mayonnaise.

People, I made mayonnaise, MAYONNAISE!

But there's a back story, a motivation if you will...You see, I like good, whole organic food-but if that food is processed anywhere but your kitchen, good taste can get pricey, even for mayonnaise. And I'm on a budget.

My brilliant husband and I have a savings plan. It's a beautiful plan, broken down month by month on a little chart for the next five years with an estimate of how much we can save each month. Along the way we have bench marks, every six months actually, so that we can adjust our savings course as needed so at the end of five years we have a nice chunk of money to live off of while Josh gets his MBA. (That's the plan at any rate) On that lovely chart, there is a little box for each month that I get to color in green if we save the estimated amount, and red if we miss the mark so we can make up for it the next month. But here's the part where hubby got smart, he told me that anything ABOVE our estimated amount, and any interest the money makes (We invest our savings) he will put toward a down payment on our first home. Ahhhhhh-he KNOWS how much I want to buy a house so this is a HUGE motivation to me. Anything above that big number at the end of five years is for the house baby!

Hence, the desire to do stuff like, make my own mayonnaise, since the organic brand I like best costs eight dollars a container, comes into full force. I mean really, I'm a home-maker, so when it comes right down to it, my ability to save more lies in the little stuff like grocery budgeting and personal spending, and I am determined, by golly, to get me a down payment. And I don't just make mayonnaise, oh no, I make my own deodorant, and face-wash too. I'm also very frugal when it comes to washing windows, there are ways beyond windex and paper towels you know....we'll talk later, for now, here's how I made my tasty good mayo. The success of my first try made me pretty happy, so it's going to be my golden moment today.

I didn't want to go shopping for more ingredients, so I just used what I had and watched a lot of You-Tube videos, then I sort of winged it. Here's what I used.

1.5 cups olive oil

4 eggs (Washed at room temp)

Salt

Cottage cheese? What!?-Yeah, I know I'll explain later. It's good though, trust me.

Turmeric powder

First I washed my eggs really well. Home-made mayo has raw egg in it, and that's okay if you make sure your eggs are fresh and organic and you clean them really well before you use them. Then I separated the yolk and white.

I put two yolks in a bowl and then I blended them with my electric mixer for a few seconds, then I started adding my olive oil, slowly very very  SLOOOOOOLY, I mean, about a drop at a time slowly to make sure it emulsified it with the egg. Basically, our goal is to have a cup of oil suspended in the egg yolk. I did this for a while and then got way bored and impatient, so I dumped all the oil in at once. The emulsion broke (of course) and then my mayo looked like egg drop soup. See.

Not quite the look I was going for. Being of a determined sort of nature, and keeping in mind my back up plan would be to use this as a fantastic hair mask. (Seriously-I do that too, with pretty much exactly the same ingredients) I decided to try again. So I poured my broken mixture into my measuring cup, started with two new egg yolks and SLOOOOOWLY added the broken mixture to my egg yolks. It emulsified beautifully, but because I used all olive oil (It's what I had on hand) the density of the oil made the viscosity (I love that word) of my mayonnaise rather gelatinous.

At this point, I'm sort of thinking to myself.."Hmmmm, what now?" I could use this as a hair mask and I'd have really soft strong hair....or I could try and salvage this by smoothing it out somehow, what is smooth...I figured sour cream might do it, but I LOVE sour cream and if it didn't work I'd be sad to just have to use it on my hair, plus the flavor isn't really what I wanted. Neither was yogurt, especially since I only have vanilla yogurt. Then I figured cottage cheese might do the trick if I blended it up nice and smooth, so I did until it looked like this.

I had to add a bit of milk to the mixture to smooth it out, but it looked like it would do the trick. I folded it into my mayo mixture and then it looked like this....

The consistency wasn't quite as thick as I would have liked it, but my imagination started turning, this would make fabulous dressing, or base for a cream sauce over chicken and veggies, or Alfredo! It would make tasty chicken salad, maybe even tuna...I tasted it, and it wasn't bad, a bit heavy on the olive oil flavor so I added some salt and turmeric to enhance the flavor a bit. Came out tasting very nice! Next time I make it though, I will buy a lighter oil, like grape-seed or safflower. I think both the flavor and viscosity will be even better with a lighter oil.

And that was my adventure in cooking. And I saved $8.00! Yay! That's gold to me!

What are your money saving tips in the kitchen?

-DD