Home made mayo - deliciously tangy and not sickenly sweet
Home made stock - It takes about an afternoon every 3 months and nearly everything you cook will taste 10% better because nearly anything can be improved with a bit of stock in place of water.
Home made mac & cheese - again, so simple it’s criminal.
Home made salad dressing - you can use top quality ingredients and it still only costs pennies.
Homemade Hollandaise. You go to hell for eating half a stick of butter at a single sitting, but it’s worth it!
Homemade Pickles. 10% salt brine, the way great great granny made them, cherry leaves to keep everything crisp, random bacteria from the air making everything all bubbly and fermented. They taste like Pickles, not ‘American pasteurized process pickle food product’.
Tortillas. Flour, or flour/corn, with or without fresh Basil leaves. Once you get the hang of making them, you’ll cringe at buying the store brands.
home roasted coffee
Pierogis and cabbage rolls. Not my home, but my step-mother’s.
Guacamole.
Ripe Avocados, Sour cream, chopped red onions, salsa ‘juice’ (no chunks), mixed smooth, eat it up YUM!
Hmm, I’ll second the pizza, and bread. Unfortunately neither the strawberries, nor the raspberries last long enough around here to be made into jam. I’ve been threating my wife with bodily harm if she doesn’t leave me enough raspberries to make ice cream for the picnic this weekend. I’m able to nip a couple at a time into the freezer, it’s going to be close.
Don’t forget tomato season will be here soon, so homemade salsa, speghetti sauce, (and of course pizza sauce 
), and just plain good eating.
I’m not much of a vegetable eater, but my wife assures me that salads made from spinach and broccoli (and tomatoes) from the garden are much better than anything you can get from the grocery store.
Oh, and I’ll take the roses from my garden over the store bought ones. The store bought ones don’t smell.
Take care,
GES
Porn.
:smack:
I mean, spaghetti sauce.
Banana pudding. I’ve never had banana pudding in a restaurant that even closely approximates my mother’s. Banana pudding should not ever be of the Jello instant banana flavored pudding mix variety with a few banana slices thrown in and a vanilla wafer placed on top. It must consist of a custard cooked on the stovetop with banana slices folded in, then poured over a layer of vanilla wafers, covered with a meringue topping and baked until the meringue turns a golden brown. It can be served warm, but is even better when it has chilled in the fridge for a few hours or even overnight.
I made homade chikkin noodle soup tonight, with curry. Mmm…can’t get that from a can.
No no no. Guacamole:
3 squishy avocados, peeled and seeded
2 Roma tomatoes, red and sweet, diced
1 small onion, chopped
1 medium serrano pepper, finely diced
juice of 2 limes, fresh
1 T garlic, finely diced
kosher salt to taste
chopped cilantro to taste
Chuck it into a bowl, mash with a fork or potato masher, enjoy with plenty of beer. There is no finer guac in the world, and the best part is that everything is straight from scratch.
Soap
Oh. Dear. Og.
How did I know my Guru would be involved with this?!
Weird. I made that yesterday (sans curry though).
Pavlova. The ready-made ones available in the shops are revolting in comparison.
I’m surprised. I sort of expected one of our hardcore foodies to come in and chime “I churn my own butter, that thing they sell at the supermarket is for chumps”
Simple? Not the way I make it.
Criminal? Yup because it will kill you of a heart attack.
Try this when you get a chance. You’ll blow a joy gasket.
My answer to this thread: spaghetti sauce. By miles and miles. I mean, you could add black pepper to a can of crushed tomatoes and I’d rather eat it than Prego, Ragu, Newman or any other of that sweet, gummy store stuff with all that weird crap in it.
Homemade marshmallows are fun! I’ve made them twice from Martha Stewart’s recipe. It’s a mess, but you can cut them into any size you want, making them perfect for s’mores. Next time, I’m adding candy flavoring to see how they turn out.
I think there are two big factors in why homemade tastes so much better. The pride and feeling of accomplishment was already mentioned by susan_foster. The other is that it’s made just the way you like it.
Like silenus, I’ll take my own homebrewed beer over anything you can buy in a bottle (or shudder a can). My favorite hand-tweaked recipes all have exactly the right (in my opinion) mix of grains and hops, with the flavors and aromas that I think are perfect. I enjoy experimenting, too. While most of my recipes follow the Reinheitsgebot (Bavarian purity laws), I love to try new stuff, and I’ve made some great stuff with wild honey, pumpkin, rye, and oatmeal (not all in the same batch!).
When I buy ice cream at the market, I tend to buy heavily flavored stuff. When I make ice cream, it’s usually good old-fashioned vanilla, colored pink from the pure vanilla extract. I can always add something to it later (fresh-picked blackberries–heaven!), but it’s wonderful straight from the ice cream maker. No artificial flavoring required.
My taste in bread runs heavy for an American (must be the German blood from Mom’s side of the family), and fresh, hot, homemade, whole-grain rye bread just has no store-bought equivalent.
Salsa. Wow. There seem to be billions of varieties of store-bought salsa, but nothing compares to the joy of eating your own home-made salsa.
Guacamole is one of the few things that I only eat homemade. It’s easy to make good guacamole at home (and with a bit of work you can make great guacamole at home), and impossible to store the stuff for any period of time.
I’m surprised to see that no one’s mentioned sausages. With a good local butcher, meat and casing is cheap and plentiful, and with a sausage-making attachment for a meat grinder, it’s trivial to do.
Soup. Putting together a pot of soup takes about 15 minutes tops, it makes the place smell great while cooking, and it feeds me for a week.