A good way to start meditation is to sit up in bed, kneeling, with a pillow under your buttocks. Imagine someone kneeling on the floor in prayer, but you’ll be sitting on a pillow on your bed so you can sit for a longer time. There are some important rules:

1. Keep your back straight
2. Keep your face turned slightly down
3. Keep your eyes open
4. Rest your hands on your knees
5. Follow your breath

Some people object to meditation, since they think prayer is better, but there is no reason you cannot do a “prayerful” form of meditation. In order to do this, just silently say the word “God” when you exhale. You can say any word you want. Some say “Love”, or “Jesus”.

If you want to practice a non-prayerful form of meditation then the simplest thing to do is to count your breath. Start at one, count up to ten, and then start over again at one.

Meditation should not cost any money, unless you are going to a temple or anything like that. Even if you decide to get more into it after a while, it will remain inexpensive. I have a formal set of meditation cushions I bought several years ago for about one hundred dollars, but frankly I could just sit on the carpet with a regular pillow for the same results.

Meditation is a great way to improve your mental health. It is much cheaper than Prozac and probably just as effective, since meditation floods your brain with serotonin just like Prozac does. The health benefits don’t stop there; it also reduces stress and the various health problems which stress creates.

The Maasai in Africa hunt lions. They use a spear and shield. They used to hunt lions one on one: one warrior facing one lion on the savanna. Lions, in case you are not aware, are very strong, fast, smart and agile. The Maasai would kill them in close combat. Yet you won’t find a Maasai pumping iron.

Speaking of the gym, have you gone into one lately? Some of the machines cost five thousand dollars or more. An “average” gym contains a hundred thousand dollars in equipment. No wonder they charge so much for an annual membership.

Somehow I stay in shape, yet I have never bought a gym membership. Years ago I owned a pair of dumbbells, but found they were no better than doing pushups. The only reason for me to go to the gym, instead of running outside or doing calisthenics, would be if I wanted to gain a lot of muscle. But I have always felt that beyond a certain level, gaining muscle is merely cosmetic.

It is strange to me that, with so many websites available on topics such as calisthenics and nutrition, people still go to gyms. There certainly are reasons to go to a gym, but not for physical health. The main reasons to go are social in nature. If I were not married with a kid coming, then I would go just to meet girls. This explains why, in the few gyms I have been inside, much of the clientele appears to be less fit than myself (too much time in the gym lounge) or else are overbuffed (too much iron pumping to impress the girls). Nobody seems to look, well, normal anymore.

Financially, gyms make no sense. Why spend thousands of dollars a year on memberships, personal trainers and spandex “fitness” clothing when you can exercise without spending any money at all? In this series I’ll show you how.

The cheapest and still the best way to keep fit is to take up running. There is no need to spend hundreds of dollars on running shoes, and in fact there is some evidence that expensive running shoes lead to more injury. So, as strange as it sounds, being cheap with your shoes will actually help with your running. The best shoes are no shoes at all, but most people who have grown up wearing shoes should be careful about simply discarding them and trying to run. There are plenty of resources on the internet about barefoot running, so I won’t go into the theory here.

I am currently trying to ease myself into barefoot running. This is not something which can be done overnight. I use a treadmill during the cold winters where I live, and I have a pair of thin, rubber-soled water socks from WalMart which I wear while I’m pounding the treadmill. Running without shoes is really hard on the calves and the Achilles tendons, since you tend to land on the front of your foot and the calves and tendon take all the force with each step. So far it is going well, since I’m careful to stop if there are any weird aches or pains, and then I slip the (cheap) running shoes on. By the time the snow melts I should be able to run without even the water socks for an hour or so, and then I’ll be able to try running outside. If all goes according to plan, I should be able to confuse the neighbors with my shoeless look in another month or two.

Another cheap way to exercise is that great stand-by of drill sergeants and sadistic gym teachers everywhere: the pushup. There are some websites which suggest that you should be able to do, oh, one hundred pushups or you’re just not being serious. If you wish to try this then by all means go ahead. Not only can this exercise save money, but it even saves time; I was getting noticeably stronger and my wife was complimenting my new “breasts” after spending ten minutes doing pushups (with frequent rests), three times a week for a few weeks.

The fact is that “having no money” is no excuse to skip exercising. If you want to get in shape then anybody can do it. If a cheapskate like myself can run everyday then you can, too.

Physical Health

I have a fifteen minute drive to work. The bus takes me almost an hour, so the Echo saves me forty five minutes in the morning and forty five minutes at night. In the morning I use the time I save through driving to go for a run. Likewise, when I get home I have time to cook healthy food for my family. When I took the bus I was too tired by the time I got home to cook anything, so I would often eat out, and usually not healthy food, either. As well, I rarely found time to run, unless you mean sprinting after a bus after your connection is late. Overall, driving gives me a better state of physical health.

Financially

Yes, I know, the Echo costs money on gas, maintenance and insurance. However, I live close to work, I frequently work from home and Toyota Echos are excellent on gas. My monthly gas bill costs me less than buying a monthly bus pass. As well, I frequently shop at places like Costco, where I need a car to bring home the twenty pound boxes of hamburger patties, etc. which I buy there. I would need taxis to bring the discount and other items I buy at Costco, and don’t get me started with the savings I’ve had with kijiji and craigslist. To be honest, if I totaled it all up I imagine busing everywhere would, barely, wind up costing me a bit less that the car, but the savings to my finances are just not that important compared to the extra time I have with my family.

Environmentally

Here is where I sputter and fall. I do try to drive as little as possible. I work from home as much as I can. I organize my trips so I run my errands on the way home. Yet I know I’m producing about ten times more atmospheric carbon dioxide taking my small car instead of taking the bus. I am not going to argue about it: this is just a fact. In my case the best solution, though, is not to take the bus; it is to telecommute five days a week instead of one or two days a week. Unfortunately, I doubt that my employer would permit this, but the workforce is changing, and soon many people will be telecommuting instead of sitting in rush hour traffic.

So there you have it: for my own physically health it is better to drive a car, financially it is almost the same (because I drive a cheap car which I drive as little as possible), but when it comes to the environment it would be better for me to skip traveling altogether and just telecommute to my job. Other people, though, might find it is better to just take a bus. The point is that everyone is different. So what are your reasons for driving a car instead of taking transit?

After you start recording your weight every day you’ll soon decide that you could lose a few pounds (which is the whole point of the exercise). So you’ll probably want to try hitting the gym, eating more vegetables, or a million other things. The big secret to weight loss is this: nothing works for everybody. I’ll repeat: nothing works for everybody. I find that running helps me keep trim, but that will not work for someone who hates puffing hard on dark, frigid mornings. I find cutting carbohydrates out of my diet is useless, but you might find that is exactly what helps you drop some flab. The thing is; how do you know what works for you? The answer is simple: you don’t. Not unless you measure it, so measure yourself everyday and write down the number on a calendar.

Some say that you should not measure yourself every day; it should be every week. You might be full of fluids one day, or constipated the next. Sorry, that’s no excuse. If you’re constipated or feel bloated then weigh yourself anyway and write down the number. If it’s a bit high then your own tummy will let you know the reason why, so you’ll know not to worry too much. What you are trying to do is to get a sense of how your weight fluctuates over time; if you have one day when you apparently gained a few pounds but your menstruation is due then at least you’ll know that you maintain fluids during menstruation. Interesting, but not a big deal.

A scale at Walmart will cost less that $20. A calendar and a pencil can often be found for free, so before you start giving a hundred dollars every month to Weight Watchers, maybe you should try the scientific method first. I call it scientific because scientists measure things to get results. That is exactly what you are doing here, but without the billions of dollars in marketing that most “scientific weight loss” methods use.

Has nobody ever suggested that the best way to get the benefits of barefoot running might be to… not buy shoes? The Vibrams and the Frees are each over $100. Some articles on barefoot running note that when running in a city you might be stabbed in the foot by pieces of metal on the sidewalk, or wind up with a nasty cut from broken glass. The thin-soled Vibrams and Frees are supposed to prevent this. Fine, but why not just get a pair of really, really cheap thin-soled shoes? I thought barefoot running was a good idea a while ago, so I bought a pair of water socks from Walmart (also known as aqua shoes or water shoes). The soles on these are about 1/8 inch thick. They are meant to be used while walking on a rocky beach, so they’re fine on a city sidewalk. They cost me $5.99. I run in them every day. I could buy 17 pairs of water socks for the same price as one pair of Nike Free. They look a bit weird (like rubber slippers), but the Vibram gorilla shoes look even stranger.

If you are interested in barefoot running, then I recommend buying water socks. The corporate world, with their brands, marketing and advertisements and useless overpriced products can add nothing to the experience. After all, you already have your own feet.

People make things from scratch for various reasons, such as for health (controlling the ingredients), financial (saves cash), or moral (keeping money from evil corporations). Of course I don’t dismiss those who make from scratch because they expect a social collapse / nuclear war / zombie apocalypse to hit, since such people are likely to be well armed passionate about their cause. Let us take a closer look at the reasons we make things ourselves.

Health

Make something yourself and you know what it is made of. Buy it and you can never be sure. Is your kid allergic to peanuts, but you love bagels? Too bad: there might be peanut residue on that fresh bagel. Any parent with a food-allergic child knows this line of thought. What about sugar-free yogurt for the dieter? Do you really want to eat aspartame if you can help it?

Financial

I can make sesame-seed bagels for about twenty cents each, which comes to less than half the cost of a stale “bagel” at my local store. Good bagels will cost one dollar each at a bakery. It makes no sense for me to ever buy bagels again.

Many items, though, will be cheaper when bought. For example, I could raise my own chickens, but the cost of chicken feed, building a coop, etc. easily outweighs the cost of just buying chicken from Costco. Raising your own chickens would need to be done for health or philosophical reasons instead.

Philosophical

There is too much to go into here for this post, but if you make things from scratch yourself instead of buying them from questionable corporations then you deny the corporation a customer. If a lot of customers refuse to buy a company’s products then that company will either have to change or die.

Impending Social Collapse / Nuclear War / Zombie Apocalypse

What would you ever do if you met a nuclear-bomb carrying zombie who misses the taste of butter? What kind of host would you be if you couldn’t whip up a batch of what the shambling, radioactive hoards crave? At the least, all that shaking will build up your arm muscles enough that you should be able to knock the brains out of the putrid thing before it eats you along with the butter it was planning to slather over your scalp.

The Mixer Bible is divided into sections, such as a bread, cookie, pasta and desserts. There is even a section for sausage making! I would never have thought about using my stand mixer, with the meat grinder attachment, for making sausages, but I’m now quite eager to try it out at some time. Each section has a few pages prefacing it which explain the basics and theory of creating the recipes in that section using a stand mixer, which helps when faced with a food type you’ve never used a mixer to create before.

The best recipe (so far) I have used is the one for German Chocolate Cake. I actually made double the amount of coconut-pecan icing the recipe called for, but I have a fairly voracious sweet tooth: most people won’t need to do this.

Deeds and Snyder seem to write assuming their audience has a large range of skill sets. The prefaces to the sections are quite basic, which I found great when faced with a food type I’ve never made myself before (like pasta), and which I could skim over to see if a stand mixer changes things too much when I wanted to make a food I’m familiar with (like bread).

In future editions of the book I’d like to see some vegan recipes and I’d also like to see a section on creating kids and baby foods (there is a food strainer attachment already available, after all). A minor, personal quibble of mine is that in the bread section there is nothing about how to create bagels. One of the reasons I wanted a stand mixer was to make my own bagels, but doubtless I’m in a small minority. New stand mixer attachments will doubtless have been invented by the third edition, so I look forward to the new recipes Deeds and Snyder will create for these.

Overall, if you own a stand mixer and it’s just sitting on your kitchen counter taking up space, except for mixing cake batters or whipped cream, then a book like The Mixer Bible will help you understand all the amazing foods these devices can help you to create.

Homemade yogurt has a refreshing tart taste. The only ingredients you need are homogenized milk and a ½ cup of yogurt. The ½ cup of yogurt is your starter, which contains the bacteria which convert liquid milk into yogurt. If you know someone who makes their own yogurt then you can ask them for a cup of starter, or you can do what most people do: buy some yogurt from the store and use that as your initial starter.

The equipment you need: a pot, a food-grade thermometer, a large bowl, a colander, and a clean piece of fabric like an old t-shirt. First, heat the milk to about 185° F (just until it’s steaming and forming a nice froth of bubbles on top, but not yet fully boiling). Check the milk temperature with the thermometer frequently. We heat the milk to prepare it to receive the starter. Bacteria in the starter need fairly warm (almost hot) milk to form the long protein chains which we call “yogurt”. Once the milk has been heated let it cool down to about 120° F, then spoon some into a bowl and mix in your starter. Once combined, pour the starter-milk mixture into the pot of milk and mix again. After this you need to keep the milk warm and still for about four to six hours. I suggest either turn the light bulb on in your oven and place the pot there, or place the pot in a microwave.

After the pot of milk has sat undisturbed for four to six hours, take it out and check it. You will find that it has already turned into very runny yogurt. Place the pot in your refrigerator for a few hours until it solidifies a bit. After this place the clean piece of fabric into the colander, and place the colander into the large bowl so you have a simple filter system. Scoop out the runny yogurt from the pot into the fabric filter lining your colander, then place the bowl, colander and the yogurt back into the refrigerator for a few more hours to drain. The amount of time you allow the yogurt to drain will determine the consistency of the final product. If, like me, you prefer a firmer yogurt (which is difficult to buy in the store), then let the yogurt drain for about three or four hours. If you prefer a softer yogurt then allow it to drain for an hour or two.

One important note: the greenish-yellow liquid left over in the large bowl after you are finished draining is called “whey”. Whey is a high-quality source of protein. While whey can be drunk with a bit of sugar, I personally find it unappetizing, so instead I use it in other recipes in place of plain water, such as for baking bread or bagels. This boosts the protein content of otherwise carbohydrate-intensive foods.

That’s all there is to it. After you have your first batch of yogurt you can keep making new yogurt using the last half cup to start a new batch. This homemade yogurt is healthier and more nutritious than the store-bought versions most people are used to.

1. The first step to making these bagels was, of course, to measure out the dry ingredients. According to the website, that would be:

3 1/2 cups (approximately), bread flour [or substitute all-purpose flour]

2 packages, dry yeast

3 tablespoons, sugar

1 tablespoon, salt

Now, I don’t have bread flour, so I used all-purpose flour. I also buy yeast in bulk, so I normally use 2 ½ teaspoons of yeast for each “package” that recipes normally call for. The recipe also said to start with 3 cups of flour in the mixer bowl and keep the other half cup in reserve later.

2. Next mix all the dry ingredients together. Some people use a sifter. I just use my fingers.

3. The recipe then called for

1 1/2 cups, hot water (120-130 degrees)

I just put a bowl in the microwave and checked the temperature.

4. Next was to use the flat paddle attachment of my mixer to beat for two minutes. I only had to beat for a little over a minute before everything came together.

5. I attached the dough hook to the mixer and kneaded for the ten minutes the recipe called for. I love my mixer: I just checked the dough occasionally to see if it was sticky. No hand-kneading for me, thank you. After ten minutes and about three extra tablespoons of flour the dough was ready.

6. I put the dough into an oiled bowl, covered tightly with plastic wrap and placed it in a turned-off microwave oven to keep out cold air. You would not have to keep it in the microwave, but I live in a cold climate so I normally let bread rise in the microwave.

7. After an hour the dough had doubled in size.

8. I took the dough out onto a floured surface and patted it down to remove the air bubbles.

9. Then I cut divided the dough into 8 balls.

10. I let the dough rest for a few minutes then I flattened each ball with the palm of my hand.

11. I used my thumb to make a hole in each flattened piece of dough and formed them into a bagel shape.

12. Then I covered the raw bagels with waxed paper and let them rest for 10 minutes.

13. Next was to bring three quarts of water to a boil. The recipe called for adding malt syrup or sugar to the water. I decided to add a tablespoon of honey instead.

14. I added the bagels to the water, two at a time. The recipe called for leaving the bagels in the water for one minute, but I liked the way the bagels “puffed up” when I left them in the water for a couple of minutes, so I just left them there until they had expanded a bit. This would probably make Jo Goldenberg scream, but these are my bagels.

15. I covered two baking sheets with vegetable shortening. The recipe called for then covering the sheets with corn meal. I cannot use corn meal: it makes too much smoke from my convection over, and I hate having the alarm ring when I’m trying to bake, so I just dipped the bottom of each bagel into a bowl containing a beaten egg white and a tablespoon of water…

16. … and then onto a plate of corn meal. This way the corn meal kept the bagels from sticking to the sheet, but there was not so much corn meal that the oven spewed smoke.

17. Now, onto the baking sheet. I brushed some of the egg white and water mixture on top of each bagel, then sprinkled the tops with sesame seeds.

18. Finally, all eight bagels were done, and put into an oven preheated to 375 degrees.

19. After about fifteen minutes I took the bagels out and turned them over, also alternating the cookie sheets.

20. I am always kind of surprised when recipes turn out well the first time, and this recipe definitely surprised me!

Unbelievable: I had made bagels! Real, tasty bagels. I have not had good bagels in years, and here I had made them myself. What can I say: Jo Goldenberg knows what she’s doing.