Canned Tomatos and frozen pie crust
“I suggest a new strategy, R2. Let the wok hei win.”
I submit that puff pastry dough is not feasible to make in a home kitchen, and that even if it is made with the proper pastry equipment (marble slabs) and time (days) the difference in quality from good ol’ Pepperidge Farms frozen dough is negligable at best.
I’d say duplicating Lucky Charms and other such in your kitchen is on another level from “time wasting”.
You can do puff pastry at home. You don’t need marble slabs. The professional kitchen I worked at for a couple of months made fantastic puff pastry from scratch, and they did not use marble slabs–just worked fast. That said, puff pastry is a royal pain-in-the-ass, and I would not want to make it home. It’s just not worth the time, in my opinion, when there’s reasonable commercial products available.
I knew a Culinary School Graduate who said that Phylo dough (as in baklava) is one of those things that no one makes from scratch twice.
Many other things are worth it to make from scratch, but not so much phylo dough.
I dunno that I’ve ever had stuffing I liked better than Stove Top.
I will make things USING phyllo dough, but yeah, the dough itself I’d rather buy frozen.
And I have a few things that yep, I can make, but it’s not worth it to.
I just call them ‘not worth it’. Effort > Result = ? Maybe a financial term? My brain’s trying to wriggle something out about financial terminology that but I’m too tired to listen to it, so maybe someone else knows what I’m trying to say. ‘Unprofitable’ isn’t quite it. Effort effectiveness? Oy, I need more coffee.
Yeah, I didn’t mean to say that it couldn’t be done in a home kitchen, I just meant that it can be terrifically impractical. 
It’s incredible to watch the old women (sorry, that’s usually, in my experience, who makes them) make phyllo/strudel dough from scratch. When I lived in Hungary, the equivalent was something called rétes. It was said (in an old cookbook) that a housewife knew her strudel dough was good enough when she could take a mound of dough the size of a bread roll and stretch it out thin enough to encompass a Hussar (a cavalryman) and his horse in the dough. Here’s a video of it being made. She makes it look so easy. It’s not. It really isn’t. The dough is stretched so impossibly thin–you can read a newspaper through it.
Lordy, I heard stretching it to cover a kitchen table was sufficient! Why bother a Hussar and his horse?
this thread reminds me of a baking experiment where I bought something called Vanilla-Butternut flavoring (not plain Butternut, that is something entirely different). ‘gives your baked goods added flavor’, it promised. It did! It made delicious home-baked cake, made from scratch, taste exactly like any 99 cent box cake mix. Gave it that nice ‘artificial and natural flavors added’ chemical funk. Ick.
“Comparative [dis]advantage”.
Opportunity cost is the term I was taught. The opportunity cost of making your own food as opposed to buying it ready-made is mainly that you lose time you could have used on something else.
This one is probably particularly German, but red cabbage from a jar is very delicious, and I have yet to eat some home made stuff that comes close. The combination of shredding, cooking and spices are apparently very hard to get precisely right. Not worth it - just dump the contents of a jar in a pot and enjoy!
How about Money-Munchie?
Take-home (or Take-Out) Treat
mmm mmm Roam Cookin’ (instead of “home”)
Economies of fail.
How about “resignation casserole”? As in, I’ve resigned myself to the canned stuff because I can’t improve on it from scratch.
Or “ointment food,” as an alternative to scratching.
Not an existing phrase, but let’s add to the language one hole at a time.
How about “Don’t Bothers”?
Like growing your own potatoes. Tomatoes are worth it because home-grown tomatoes are so much better tasting than store-bought. Store bought potatoes are cheap and I’ve never heard anybody particularly raving about their home-grown potatoes.
My parents do, and, for earlies simply boiled straight from the garden, I’d agree with them.
Gnocchi is on my personal not worth the faff list.
It will take a few hundred more failures transferring into the oven for pizza to join it. I’m not even in double digits on this score yet; flavour is easily ahead of frustration thus far.