What is this “stew seasoning” of which you speak? Mirepoix to start, wine for body and roux to thicken, with pepper, salt and herbs. Potatoes at the end, but carrots and onions go in the mirepoix with celery, where they do the most good.
Ravioli, tortellini, tagliatteli etc…
Cake
Bolognese Sauce
Teriyaki Sauce
Cheesecake
Vinaigrette
Shortcrust Pastry
never buying those again.
Salad dressings and pasta sauces like all those above, it’s so easy once you have the spices, herbs, oils and vinegars available to use.
I never buy curry sauces or pastes, much better to make these from scratch.
I’ve been making pie since I was about eight, and I have never, ever bought a pie crust. Store-bought ones are simply awful. There’s absolutely nothing hard about making one at home, and the difference between homemade and storebought is really too vast to even try contemplating.
For something as divine (and simple to make) as pie, there’s nothing quite so disheartening as to be offered pie, and then you get the pie, and it’s either got a storebought crust (ick) or the whole thing came from the store (jeezopeet!).
I love pie.
Also:
• really, really good pasta sauce is super-easy to make (and fresh basil and oregano are growing on our deck right now),
• my pizza-pie-makin’ skills are getting good enough that I foresee a time in the near future in which we don’t need to order it,
• and homemade soups and stews have a tremendously high payoff for the effort it takes to make them.
On preview:
I cannot imagine a world in which people don’t make their own mashed potatoes, teela brown. Please tell me it’s not the one on which we live.
Bread
Cookies
Cupcakes / cakes
Salad dressings
Hummus
Pasta sauce
Frozen spinach (which sounds dumb, I know)
Apple butter. Actually we’ve always made it, but I had the store-bought stuff once at my Grandma’s house when she ran out of the good stuff. Never again.
I’d never buy guacamole or pico de gallo.
I make my own spaghetti sauce. Of course, now instead of buying a can of spaghetti sauce, I now buy a can of tomatos, a can of tomato sauce, a can of tomato paste… :smack:
Guacamole - who knew it was so easy? I just ate some for lunch.
Lemonade - I’m a lemonade snob. CountryTime is a joke. Fresh lemonade is soooo delicious.
Salad dressing - except I cheat and use the packets with store-bought mayo. Even that is reams better than the pre-made stuff. I’d love some of the recipes mentioned. (Hint, hint)
Things that I won’t make anymore because I prefer the store version:
Fried chicken. Made it once. The time and mess just wasn’t worth it. KFC for me.
Mashed potatoes - I’ll still make them from scratch but the new refrigerated ones are great for days that I don’t have much time.
I didn’t know you could buy pre-made guacamole. I’ve never heard of such a thing.
I don’t quite understand convenience versions of things like that which are so incredibly easy to make.
Soup. A great way to use up leftovers, takes about 10 minutes to make, and smells so good.
I still buy pre-made, cause I’m lazy. But I make my own egg rolls fairly often. I buy shredded cabbage cause I can’t seem to cut it fine enough on my own. I buy the wraps too. But its fun to add extra bits of this and that to suit your mood.
About fifteen years ago I had a roommate who bought this thing called “Pour a Quiche” and ate it about 3 times a week. It was a milk carton thingy full of eggy stuff that you poured into a frozen pie shell and baked.
I explained to her about 5 times that quiche was just eggs and milk mixed together. If she wanted other stuff in it, she could buy ham, shredded cheese, whatever she wanted all pre-cooked and sliced and it would be about 1/2 the price of pour-a-quiche, 2 minutes more work, and taste better. She was a single mother with a baby at the time, and very money conscious.
She never did it. She insisted that making a quiche from scratch was really, really hard.
That’s the sort of thing that puzzles me. I’m not a serious cook like most of the people in this thread; I like convenience foods and eat them all the time. But making a quiche with a storebought crust? Easy as can be, and you get to have exactly what you want in it. Making a vinaigrette? Takes like two minutes. Pancake mix? It’s not any easier than starting from scratch. On the other hand, I totally get not wanting to make tomato sauce, even if most of the jar stuff is not that great. It takes some time and some knowledge of basic cooking, so the jar is substantially easier to use. But quiche-in-a-bottle? Sacré bleu!
Tomato sauce definitely. Especially since my tomato sauce is what helped convince my Dad that I had just reasons for wanting to go to Culinary school. My mother was Italian and I have no idea why buying the stuff in a jar never bothered her. Same goes for Pesto, although the store bought kind isn’t as bad.
Cheesecake and real cakes, once I buy myself a new mixer. Unless you are buying it from a really good bakery cheesecake is always better homemade and a lot cheaper.
Meatballs. Store bought meat balls taste like… well, balls.
Salad dressing. They are so easy to make , you can customize them so much, and you can make single serving. Hell, good rice wine vinigar is almost all I ever use anymore for salad.
Long Pig. Too hard to find in the market anyway.
I’ve bought it before. Depending on the brand it can be decent. Sometimes it is hard to find avocados around here (especially cheap ones), which is why they sell premade.
Wow, that is really sad. I made my first quiche when I was ten or younger. It is just as easy to make cookies.
Wow… is there any question of my sexuality after I made that quiche comment?
Corn chips. I’m done paying $4 a bag for what I can make at home for less than a buck with a stack of soft tortillas, salt, and 30 seconds worth of hot oil.
Me too and if I’m going to indulge in my favorite fried foods they just taste so much better when I make them.
Tortilla chips
French fries
Pizza Crust
Soup
Salad Dressing
Any type of dip or salsa
Any type of pasta sauce, marinara, alfredo, pesto, etc.
And I’ve just discovered the joy that is freshly made gnocchi but I have to admit that it is time consuming, labor intensive and messy but it’s really the best gnocchi I’ve ever had. Now I want to try making sweet potatoe gnocchi.
Peanut butter. Shell peanuts, dump into food processor, flip button, run for 5 minutes. How easy is that? And, as a bonus, you wind up with stuff that actually tastes like peanuts! I was raised on Skippy, and thought that’s what peanut butter is supposed to taste like. Now that stuff makes me gag.
I’d be interested in seeing a good spaghetti sauce recipe. I usually buy jar sauce because the recipe I have, while decent, never seems to come out quite right. It’s either too salty, or not salty enough, or doesn’t seem to have the right balance between tomatoes and the other stuff. Or maybe that’s just my lack of culinary skill. Anyone got a good recipe (with cooking instructions; not just the ingredients)?
Vinegarette isn’t so much a recipe as it’s a technique. Here’s the basics:
1 part mustard
3 parts acid
9 parts oil
Salt
additional herbs and seasoning
You can omit the mustard if you want, but when you’re learning the technique it adds taste and helps with the emulsification.
Using those ratios and your kitchen cupboard, you might come up with:
1 teaspoon dijon mustard
1 Tablespooon red wine vinegar
3 Tablespoons olive oil
salt
chopped fresh basil
Put the mustard in a bowl and add the vinegar. Whisk together until mixed. Sloooooooowly start adding the olive oil, one drop at a time, whisking briskly. It will start to thicken (emulsify). Once the emulsification starts, you can add the oil a little faster.
Once all the oil is combined, salt to taste and throw in the herbs. Deeelishous!
By changing the basics - lemon or lime juice instead of vinegar, different types of oils, etc - you can change the recipe based on what you’re in the mood for. Plus it gives you an excuse to buy all those fancy vinegars and oils you know you’ve always wanted to buy. I have a bottle of Herbes de Procence vinegar - basically a bottle full of herbs topped with white vinegar - that makes INCREDIBLE vinegarette.
I’ve also heard that people throw everything together in a jar or tupperware and shake until it’s thick. I’ve never tried that. Does it really emulsify, or does it just sorta thicken for a while then separate?