I make my own chili powder, five spice and garam masala. These are not difficult to make but I wouldn’t call them exactly easy as there are more than 3 steps to making them. But one thing I make instead of buying is so easy I don’t know why everyone doesn’t do it. Tahini. Toast the sesame seeds in a dry pan. Put seeds in food processor and process until it’s a crumbly powder. Add vegetable oil a little at a time until it’s the consistency that you want. Add salt to taste and pulse to mix. Writing it all out was harder than actually making it.
Now you. Is there something you make from scratch that most people buy-- that’s easy?
I also make my own chili powder/taco seasoning. I also make my own enchilada sauce,my own pasta sauce, my own marinades, a lot of my own bread…
The Stickler household is on a low-sodium diet for the foreseeable future and these are areas it can be annoying to find processed low sodium options for.
Vinaigrette. Stupid easy. 3 parts oil, 1 part vinegar or lemon juice, herbs or other flavorings, whisk or shake. You make as much as you need and flavor it how you like.
Yeah, well, does orange juice count? 'Cause I know you can buy “fresh squeezed not from concentrate” in a carton, but…making it yourself IS literally the easiest thing. And if you’re homeless and don’t have a squeezer you can just eat the orange.
I agree that mayo is easy to make. However, Hellman’s has got it down. I have not got it down. Mine just tastes weird.
Hollandaise, now–can you even buy it? That’s easy. Microwave Hollandaise, about 3 minutes. I don’t know why that comes out okay for me and mayo does not.
Every time I tried to squeeze a glass of OJ, it took a gazillion oranges to make a teaspoon of juice and it always taste thin and watery. What’s your secret?
Sure, it might be easy, but I think it’s going to be expensive, based on the retail price of a bag of oranges. If I still drank OJ, I’d still buy it rather than make it.
Juicing oranges. The varieties bred for juicing are basically peels full of liquid. You cut them open and they gush all over the counter.
I know this only because friends brought some back to the Midwest from sunny Florida. It is not a commodity Midwest grocery stores commonly supply.
And I came into the thread to say spice blends. I just went to Whole Paycheck this morning and goggled at the ridiculous, but elegantly packaged, selection of them.
Salad. People buy salad in a bag, and it’s not that great. It’s wilted and has very little taste. How hard is it to cut up some lettuce, and grate a carrot? and you get exactly what you want-- nothing missing, and nothing you don’t like.
I get that yes, it’s always going to be easier to open a bag than do anything additional, but considering how awful bagged salad is, and how you can make a fresh one in about two minutes, seriously?
But I can keep frozen garlic bread in the freezer for weeks and have it ready in very little time, whereas homemade requires remembering to buy bread at the store and then using it before it molds. (We don’t eat a lot of regular bread around Casa Silenus.) Ditto the tahini in the OP - buying it already jarred means I don’t have to clean out sesame seeds from various places for the next week.
There are only two of us, and we don’t eat salad that often. If we bought the lettuce, romaine, carrots, field greens (what’s a field green, exactly?) and mixed them up ourselves, the rest of the vegetable would go bad before we got around to making salad again. It’s cheaper, easier, and gives us greater variety to just get a bag of whatever salad we’re in the mood for.
For me, it’s not the ease or the time, it’s the taste. I have a lot of admiration for you people who can do things like “add vegetable oil a little at a time until it’s the consistency that you want,” or throw together salad ingredients and not have it come out tasting like you’re eating a bunch of weeds from your backyard. I have taken cooking classes and tried to cook on my own, but the bottom line is that if I follow the recipe exactly, measuring everything to the exact specifications, I have about a 50% chance of it being edible. Any kind of deviation, or “just add a pinch of this, or throw in this ingredient that sounds good,” results in a disgusting mess. Purchasing the items I like means that I get consistent taste, every time.
Chocolate chip cookies. Not only are they stupid easy to make at home the varieties made in the store are so inferior as to be barely worthy of the name. For the life of me I can not understand why chips ahoy ever sell. Even the bakery cookies are grossly inferior to homemade. I don’t know that everyone is buying CC cookies, but enough are to keep the stores well stocked with them.
Olive Garden pasta. They have some of the best pasta in the world, but making it at home is easy. Of course it’s no comparison to the real thing, but you can save a few dollars on every meal.
This. Some baked goods take a fair amount of time, skill and/or equipment to do right, but chocolate chip cookies (and most other cookies) aren’t one of them.
The thing that came to mind for me when I read the OP was soup. It’s stupid easy; most soups are just a mixture of broth and solid ingredients. Which in basic terms, means that you get some frozen chicken breasts, some celery, carrots, zucchini, pasta/red potatoes and any other veggies you may like, along with a couple of quarts of chicken broth and some thyme.
Cook the chicken- you can saute, roast, broil, or grill it; doesn’t matter. You can also use leftover chicken of just about any kind- fried, roast, rotisserie, etc… Throw it in the pot with the broth and the chopped vegetables. Cook on relatively low until all is cooked.
All of the replies so far have been food-related, but when I saw the thread title the first thing I thought of was a statement made by Joe Rogan in an early episode of NewsRadio: “Duct tape? Man, that stuff’s a rip-off. I make my own!”