As usual, I notice that most of the people who rail against store-bought are people who have one thing…time. For people who are part of a two-job household, or who live alone, or who have kids time is the biggest factor on what gets made vs what gets bought. Yes, I could make my own pizza dough. But if I want a pizza I want it now and store-bought dough gets me that. Same-same for most of the rest.
Yep. Me too. And as I said earlier, for a-buck-twenny-nine, the convenience and price of Trader Joe’s dough-inna-bag outweighs the warm, fuzzy, ‘I made this!’ feeling of making dough from scratch.
LOL, I’m glad I’m not a solo traveler!
Pumpkin pie filling, as others have mentioned, is only worth it if you use the right sort of pumpkin. I’m sold on Sugar Spice. I cut them in half leaving the seeds and stem, then steam them. When tender, I scrape out the seeds, then the good pulp. I process the pulp for about 5 minutes with the chopping blad of my food processor. Proceed as normal to make the filling. Gorgeous and totally worth the effort, in my opinion.
Will you PM me your mincemeat recipe? 
I do have an eclair recipe that makes 6 nice-sized eclairs. I only make them when I have 5 people coming to dinner.
I agree with you on the 6-layer Viennese cakes, for sure. I’ve messed with stuff like that in the past but I’m too lazy for it now.
One thing I’ll say about homemade pie crust. I hate big floury messes, too. Pastry cloths seem to have gone out of style, but I have a dandy one I inherited from my grandmother. It’s basically a super heavy-duty flour sack towel. I use it all the time to contain flour for pie crusts and breads. Once I’m done using it, a quick step outdoors to give it a flap or two in the breeze (be sure to stand upwind), and I can fold it up to use next time. Saves a ton of work.
Do you think people are “railing?” That’s an interesting characterization.
I disagree that the issue is time. I’ve always cooked from scratch, even when I worked a full-time plus two part-time jobs and lived in town.
I think there are two other factors that are much more at work than time: One, having a passion to do it; and two, proximity to “just as good as.”
I’ve always loved to learn how to cook items from scratch. It doesn’t make me better than anyone else. It just happens to be my passion. It has led to lengthy dalliances with sourdough, liqueurs, baking all sorts of things, yogurt, vinegar, lard-rendering, raising animals for food, gardening and all the rest.
I’m more an Alice Waters throwback than anything else.
Now I live on a farm and my nearest Trader Joe’s is 30 miles away. Dashing out for “just as good as” is more trouble than just growing the stuff and making it from scratch. As someone said upthread, no one can say what is too much trouble to make for another person.
Sometimes if I just want a small pizza, I’ll just use pita bread.
Since city chicken is generally considered to have originated in Western PA, around here you can buy it pre-cubed and packaged along with the skewers in most grocery stores.
One year for Thanksgiving I found a recipe for the classic Green Bean Casserole, with the difference that every ingredient was made from scratch. I spent uncountable hours de-stringing string beans, making homemade cream of mushroom soup, homemade crispy onions, etc.
In the end, it was absolutely the best Green Bean Casserole I’d ever had, but it was still just Green Bean Casserole! The phrase “you can’t polish a turd” has special significance when it comes to that dish.
There is such a thing? And, having made it, you did not serve it as soup but put it into-gasp-a green bean casserole?
The World Wonders. :dubious:
Homemade cream of mushroom soup is glorious. It’s quite unlike the casserole paste you get out of a can. (I use the casserole paste stuff for quick dinners, sometimes, but for actually eating cream of mushroom soup, it’s gotta be homemade soup.)
I Googled a recipe, but it’s veracity is questionable because it offered substituting evaporated milk for heavy cream.
Good gad!
It’s pretty straightforward. I grew up with Polish-style cream-of-mushroom soup, which had both rehydrated porcini and fresh button mushrooms in it, sauteed in butter with a some onion, add flour, blend well, stock of some sort, and sour cream. But you can use whatever mushrooms you have on hand, and just regular cream. It’s pretty much like any other cream-of soup. You’re basically just building a soup base with your vegetables sauteed in butter, add flour for thickening (so like making a blond roux), add your liquid, finish with cream.
I make a potato soup that I like, involving potaotes, chicken stock, leeks, garlic and cream. Mrs. Plant (v.3.0) and her daughter like it if I add pieces of potato rather than just pureed potatoes. Here is the mushroom soup that I will try, with cream instead of -shudder-“evaporated milk”.
Now you got my mouth watering.
mmm
So, your idea of an ornate dinner is Golden Coral? :dubious:
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Sounds easier. If I ever want to go the extra mile rather than make the instant potatoes, i’ll remember this.
I have to eat gluten-free, not because of a trendy diet, but out of necessity. It’s a pain in the ass to make lasagna, but sometimes you just want the comfort food indulgence.
UDI’s makes a decent gluten-free frozen, but it’s $9 for 18 oz. I can make like 3 meals, for two people, with just a couple bucks more.
Naw. I’m part of a two job household, and I’m busy with other stuff, and I often don’t have time to cook. But if I don’t have time to make pie crust, I don’t make pie. I eat a lot of rice, quinoa, roast chicken, lentils, chops, and steamed veggies because they are quick and easy to cook. Also breakfast cereal with milk, which is what I had for supper tonight. (Hubby boiled some pasta and had it with plain canned tomato sauce and grated Romano cheese.)
Yeah, that’s a big factor, I agree: How much does food matter to you? How important is it to you to have the BEST possible version of whatever? And whatever your answer is, is that all the time, every meal, or only on special occasions/treats? For me, an awful lot of the time my goal is simply to get something into my stomach that will stop me being hungry and, yes, keep my body reasonably healthy, with as little fuss and delay as possible.
You know that old joke, about Fast/Cheap/Good – pick two? Well, so long as the level of ‘goodness’ reaches a really undemanding standard, as in, the food is nutritious, not spoiled/burned/raw/genuinely bad tasting, I will prioritize Fast and Easy at least 90% of the time. Could I make a better chicken soup by boiling up bones and peeling stuff and shelling peas and sautéing aromatics and whatever? Sure. Would I find the ‘payoff’ of having that bowl of soup vs. a can of Progresso soup worth the time/effort? Hell, no.
I can taste that one is better than the other just fine. It simply doesn’t matter enough to me to ‘pay’ for it.
Take the pie crust example. I am perfectly capable of making pie crusts from scratch. I learned at my granny’s elbow when I was six or so, and was really proficient by the time I hit my teens. Now I do it several times a year, pretty much Christmas, Thanksgiving, and my husband’s birthday.
The rest of the time? Apple crisp is better than apple pie anyway. 
I agree that apple crisp is a fine replacement for apple pie. 
Yeah, I took “with the effort” to mean, “when I have time, and want this dish, I will spend it this way”. Not, “I am never willing to eat the shortcut”. There are some shortcuts I am never willing to eat, but others I eat sometimes, but when time allows, I’ll do the real thing, because it’s worth the culinary effort.
I don’t hear folks railing.
As I said, as the everyday meal producer for a busy two-kid family, I simply did what I could do in 30 minutes and a couple of pans. Hence my post about using crushed garlic vs keeping a bulb around. Drop a spoonful into the pan and keep going.
It’s all good.
Same here, but I get it. There’s something satisfying to me in creating something like biscuits from scratch. It took practice to get it right, but now it’s second nature.
About the only things I don’t spend any time on (like puff pastry and tomato paste) are tortillas and baked beans. Doctored up Bush’s beans are fine for us, and while I’ve made torts in the past, the effort is not worth the payoff, especially since there are locally made torts that are far better than anything I could come up with.
See, the problem I have is that I’ve never had good luck with Trader Joe’s dough. It kind of sucks. No matter how much I rest it or whatever, that motherfucking dough ball wants to pull back on itself and not stay in the shape I want it to be. It’s always a wrestling match with it for me. Maybe I’ve just had bad luck.
That said, there’s a nice Italian place a few miles away whose dough I do like and behaves exactly the way I want it to. Unfortunately, I don’t get a chance to get out in that direction often.
So, I do end up making my own dough (even with two kids under 4 in the house), but I have to have the forethought to do it. With the no-knead recipes, the time investment is minimal, but it’s not something to make when you want pizza tonight. Even with the regular dough recipes, if you want it to taste good, you need to let it rest for at least a day in the fridge. I do wish that pizza place with the dough I like was a lot closer to my house.