Pasta and pizza sauce. I make it from crushed tomatoes from the can, but that’s okay. I just don’t like the weird stuff they add to jarred pasta and pizza sauces. It’s just as easy to cook and tastes better. Also mac and cheese. Every time I’d buy a box I’d have to add so much stuff to make it palatable I realized it was just as easy to make the sauce myself. I’m not in any way a food snob, but if it’s the same effort and tastier I’ll avoid the box stuff.
I’ll agree with Amateur Barbarian on both the cranberry sauce and pasta sauces. I can tolerate some of the canned cranberry sauces, but not the jarred pasta sauces. I just don’t like 'em. Most barbecue sauce sucks, too. If it’s got liquid smoke in it, I don’t want it, which severely cuts down on my choices.
That doesn’t matter. What matters is if you like it. I can be a shitty-ass cook, but if I like what I make better than store-bought, that’s all that matters. I prefer 90% of the stuff I make to what I get at a restaurant or can buy, which is why I only eat out once every couple of weeks.
I’ve always wondered why pre-made tomato-based pasta sauces are so disgustingly sweet. Every brand I’ve tried has that problem, and I do not have an aversion to sweet flavors in other situations (as my waistline can testify. Sigh).
A hot cup of tea. Though this is changing (Argo Tea in Chicago is excellent), usually when you get is lukewarm water with a bag of Liptons on the side.
I’ve rarely found any restaurant that made omelettes right. Even the best are just scrambled eggs with something mixed in.
Potato latkes. Not hard to make, and no one makes anything close.
Now, instant mashed potatoes aren’t as good as ‘real’, of course, but they aren’t THAT bad if they are simply used as a base to hold stew, or meat and gravy.
I would add in cake, frosting, pie crust, and pie filling. Blueberry pie, made with fresh and cooked berries, sugar, lemon zest, and a dash of cinnamon on a made-from-scratch piecrust? Heavenly. One of those gluey frozen blueberry pies they sell on holidays as a loss leader? they’re good for filling up stomaches of children and big eaters. (I’ve often told the tale of a frozen blueberry pie my mother passed on to me, after 2 years in her freezer, and I passed it on to someone else, and they finally threw it away as it was 4 years old and no one wanted to eat it. A waste all around).
Macaroni and cheese, home-made, is one of my favorite things, but the peons here demand Kraft mac and cheese, nothing else will dol Nothing wrong with it, but it’s nowhere near as good as home-made.
Mashed potatoes.
Chicken soup. I’ve not found a canned chicken soup really worth eating. My homemade is fast and tasty.
Because when tomatoes are stored, they breakdown and become very acidic. The sugar masks that flavor.
I was gonna say any Potato; baked, fried, mashed.
Hash browns and Fries are a toss up, the frozen work just as well.
Anything stuffed is better homemade; Mushrooms, Peppers, Dolmades, Cabbage, etc…
The store bought or even most restaurant bought seems pretty bland compared to what I stuff in it.
Fresh salsa/pico de gallo…
Stuffed cabbage. Not that I have ever noticed it for sale in the supermarket, but it has to be home made.
And another vote for gravy. Now now people; drippings, flour, salt, pepper. You’ve already done the hard work, this is just whisking stuff together.
For me it’s spaghetti, lasagna, basically any kind of meat/pasta/tomato combo.
I will eat instant mashed potatoes, but family won’t. My husband won’t eat Kraft mac and cheese, my son and I like it just as well or better.
I also don’t care for frozen meat dishes of any kind , because usually the meat sucks. For example meatloaf or fried chicken , but a frozen good quality pot pie is fine.
When I buy store gravy (and it isn’t often), it’s because I don’t have drippings – I’m extending leftovers or otherwise need gravy in a situation that has no roasts present. The jarred stuff is perfectly serviceable for that.
guacamole…I like it chunky…green paste in a tub is what they sell around me.
I agree with the mashed potatoes people too.
I hate anything watermelon except watermelon. artificial watermelon is gross.
Does “home-grown” count as “home-made”? Because if so, tomatoes. There’s just no comparison.
I’ll grant you that actually cooking them is easy but grating the pile of potatoes required to make them is an hours long job. This is one of those dishes that I normally order in a restaurant to get my fix. 
Nah, 15 minutes.
6-8 washed potatoes and 2 medium onions through the grater blade of my Cuisinart. Remove to large mixing bowl. Take half the mixture back into the processor with the steel blade and process to rough purée. Mix all together with two eggs and 1/3 cup matza meal. Salt and pepper.
Nice happy medium between too stringy and too mushy.
Gravy for sure. There has never been a good store bought one. Not ever.
I don’t care for mashed potatoes much, but those must be home made for me to eat them at all.
there are lots of things I prefer home made to boxed. Heck, just about most things, but I refuse to eat a store bought pancake syrup. I can’t afford maple syrup, so pancakes are always eaten with “maple flavored” stuff. The store bought versions are all sickly sweet with this weird almost chalky/bitter after taste and so thick! ugh. It’s horrible and it sticks to your tongue and won’t go away. If that is the only thing available, I skip the pancakes. It’s not worth it.
At my house pancakes are eaten with a heavy sugar syrup flavored with a bit of Mapline. It’s not the same as the real deal, but it’s exponentially better than anything found in a bottle at the store.
I would extend that to any canned soup. Now, I do use canned soup as a shortcut ingredient for certain things, but as soup? Don’t like any of them.
I’ll second the mashed potatoes. The only time in recent history I craved boxed mashed potatoes was after I had my wisdom tooth pulled and needed something heavily pureed and was too out of it to want to bother with cooking and mashing my own potatoes. They are also reasonable as part of the binder in meatloaf. But as mashed potatoes? Blech. They remind me of my grammar school hot lunches.