You’ll pry my jar of minced garlic from my cold dead, odor-free hand. Yes, it can be easily made (but not more easily that opening a can) and then my hands smell like garlic for a couple of days. Pre-cut fruit? Hell yes. Otherwise I have rind and seeds around my house rotting and stinking. Again, it’s easier to open a package.
My local store sells little plastic containers of pre-cut Jalapenos. I’ve actually bought them. That’s pretty lazy.
Baking powder. A little extra baking soda if you’re using buttermilk.
What your average donor may look like.
Packets of country gravy mix. It’s flour and a touch of salt.
There is or was a pancake mix in a plastic bottle. All you had to do was to add water to the bottle and shake it to make the batter. I bought it once as I was living alone and had a craving for pancakes.
So a box of frozen pancakes is anathema? I don’t eat them myself, but I’ve heard whining all my life that frozen pancakes aren’t good. Fuck. They’re flour, eggs, and milk, what makes them so very bad? I don’t get it, but then, I haven’t voluntarily eaten a pancake since 1965.
But I have to wash the thing! I’ve learned that a lot of my food preparation is centered around using as few dishes/tools as possible because I hate doing dishes.
Hummus is so easy and cheap and has about half the calories or less of Sabra. I buy Tahini (since I don’t want to wash the dishes incurred in making it!) at Trader Joe’s for $2.99. It freezes and last for four batches.
Two cans garbanzo beans with the liquid from one reserved; the other drained
A few tablespoons olive oil
Two tablespoons tahini
A few dashes of lemon juice
A very small palmful of cumin, a tablespoon and a half or so
Salt and pepper to taste
Mix everything in a mixing bowl with a stick mixer adding the bean liquid for the consistency you want.
It’s bland which is what I like as I use it with other things, but pretty much anything can be added. It freezes well and just has to be stirred upon thawing. I have to wash a bowl, a spatula and the stick mixer blades but it’s so worth it.
I can’t remember the last time I ate frozen pancakes, but I do know that there’s a vast gulf between Eggo frozen waffles and real, made-from-scratch Belgian waffles.
Not food…but I make my own laundry detergent. It’s like three ingredients, two of which are just powders. The third is grated bar soap, but I keep an extra cheese grater (with a wheel…not a box) to make that easy. I get to use up the little bar-lets left over from the shower soap.
I make enough to fill one of those big Home Depot paint buckets, and it lasts me something like half a year.
Especially if you make them as cookie bars instead of drop cookies. We use the recipe from the Ben & Jerry’s cookbook most of the time.
Or, if we’re lazy, the bagged Betty crocker mix is about as quick & easy as it gets, and produces a quite decent result.
BBQ sauce, so I can have it just as I like. Plus is there anything you can’t put in BBQ sauce?
Once I was put on a low sodium diet I began to make my own ketchup (Heinz knockoff), from a recipe I found on line. It’s dead simple and I can totally control the salt or use a substitute. It’s dead easy.
(As a home sewer I concur that some things always give you pause. I cannot look at how expensive duvet covers are, without shaking my head thinking, but it’s just two sheets sewn together on three sides. An eight year old could do it! Ditto very basic curtains, in fact!)
All I was interested in were things that could be easily done at home and perhaps instructions on how to do them. Instead it’s a thread on how more intrepid and bootstrappy Dopers are compared to the rest of the lazy world. Curtains? Ketchup?? I didn’t think chili powder qualified for this thread.
I’m told the secret is you pop off the stem cap and look at the color underneath. If it’s yellow, it isn’t ripe. If it’s brown, it’s gone too far. You want a nice green color.
I’ll admit I haven’t mastered avocadological chromometrics. I tend to give them a squeeze and judge by the feel.
I buy bagged salad for one reason: it makes it more likely that I will have a small salad as a side to my dinner. Sometimes, I throw half of it away but if I have to shred lettuce and round up a couple of other ingredients there is almost a zero chance of me making a salad.
I have sewn a wedding dress, multiple prom dresses, and a trench coat among many other projects. I won’t sew my own drapes. It’s mind numbingly boring and it’s a pain in the butt to get the hem straight. Simple cotton curtains with a rod pocket? maybe. Full length drapes for the dining room? Nope. I wait for a sale and buy them. The last ones I bought were $20 a pair and had a thermal lining. They look great and they saved me time and money.
But I’m mean and expect people to be able to cream butter and sugar, so there’s that. 
Pie crust: flour, salt, shortening (butter, lard, corn oil) and water. It tastes so much better than the stuff from the store and it isn’t loaded with preservatives either.
Make a cake from scratch, not a mix. Pancakes, biscuits, etc. do not need a mix.
Macaroni and cheese. I make three casserole dishes of it and freeze two of them or hand one off to a friend. I get to pick the blend of cheeses and let the top brown in the oven. Kraft cannot compete.
I bake my own bread, grind my own spices, make my own jewelry and designed and built my own light fixtures, yet I buy my own pie crust. It is not easy and, even after all that work, the store bought frozen crust was just as good. The non-frozen store bought crust was better.
I think I’ll start a sister thread on things better bought than made. I’d include cornbread too in that thread.
I have found that bagged salad is more work than having a head of lettuce in the fridge. Bagged salad does not last more than 3 days in the fridge before some of the leaves start to rot. A head of lettuce will last for a week or more in the fridge. Going to the super market every 3 days is way to much of a hassle.
Not a decent one, but one that will do a straight stitch for curtains can be had very cheaply. WalMart’s cheapest is $60. Repair shops sell second-hand machines. I sold my mother’s fancy one for a whopping $15 at a garage sale. Then mine promptly broke. Figures.