Why I prefer to 'cook from scratch'

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I don’t have chickens. I don’t grow my own fruit or vegetables. When things are really tight, I might make my own yoghurt, cheese, fruit juice or sometimes I just make those things because I want to. I don’t advocate to being some organic, cooking from scratch guru either. I buy supermarket rotisserie chickens all the time. But what I do love is cooking food from scratch that, to me, is tastier, healthier, more economical and just because I love to do it.

Take Sweet and Sour sauce for example. This takes me no longer to prepare than opening a jar of sweet and sauce and this is way more tastier than from a jar and you could nearly always have all the ingredients on hand. As I walk the aisles of the supermarket, I see all these canned, jars and packet meals that just make me shake my head. Tinned soup is the biggest one that makes me laugh. Nothing tastes as good as homemade soup. 

People who are struggling are always wondering how they can make ends meet but their shopping trolleys will be full of these types of groceries. I find that if I have a basic pantry full of ingredients, I can cook whatever I want, whenever I want. I might not have the ingredients for Sweet and Sour Pork, for example, but if things were really tight and all I had was those pantry staples, an onion, a carrot, a tin of pineapple and a couple of sausages, I could easily make Sweet and Sour Sausages (which is really quite tasty).

For the home made sweet and sour sauce, these are the ingredients with an approximate cost (*).

1 tbs (15g) cornflour = $0.07 (Homebrand $1.50/300g)
1/4 cup (60ml) vinegar = $0.04 (Homebrand $1.19/2L)
1 tbs (20ml) soy sauce = $0.05 (Homebrand $1.18/500ml)
2 tbs (30g) sugar = $0.03 (Homebrand $2.07/2kg)
2 tbs (40ml) tomato sauce = $0.11 (Homebrand $1.59/600ml)
200ml (1 tsp or 5g powder + water) chicken or vegetable stock = $0.11 (Brand name chicken stock powder $2.55/120g)
Vegetables of your choice, eg onions, carrots, capsicum (bell peppers), beans, peas, zucchini = $5.00 (approx)
Fresh or 1/2 canned pineapple pieces = $0.63 (Homebrand $1.25/440g)

4 tbs juice (I used the pineapple juice from the canned pineapple but have used normal orange juice before)

1 cup (200gm) rice = $0.72 (Sunrice Long Grain $1.80/500gm)

Total cost without vegetables and rice = $1.04 for 4 serves

Total cost with vegetables and rice = $6.76 for 4 serves (approx)

Total cost with meat (500gm chicken breast @ $10/kg), vegetables and rice = $11.76 for 4 serves (approx)

Total cost of pantry staples to make many serves of sauce = $11.33

Compared with:

“Popular” Stir Fry Sauce Sweet & Sour Vegetable 250g = $2.73  

Ingredients:

Water, Vegetables 23% (Capsicum, Onion, Carrot), Tomatoes (From Paste), Sugar, Pineapple 8% (Pieces & Concentrate), Vinegar, Thickener (Modified Cornstarch), Salt, Spice Extracts, Spices

My calculations might be a little out but just for the point of the exercise I can have cornflour, vinegar, sugar, tomato sauce, chicken stock powder, soy sauce and canned pineapple in my pantry for $11.33 and make any number of dishes or the Sweet and Sour Sauce over and over again or I could open the jar of sauce and wonder what the heck it was I was eating and only have one meal made for $2.73.

Taste is the number one factor for me in what I cook. Price and economy is second. I find bottle and packet mixes taste terrible. I apply this same principle to everything I cook. A simple chocolate cake, for example. You can pay $0.70 for a homebrand cake box mix to make 1 cake or you could spend short of $10 for flour, cocoa, eggs etc and make heaps of cakes, cookies, hot chocolate and lots of other yummy things.

My advice is to get a basic pantry started, keep it topped up with various things. Having a can of pineapple in the pantry to me is like gold. I could use half for a sweet and sour dish and the other half for a Hummingbird Cake or some other delicious sweet treat. 

(*) prices sourced from one of Australia’s major online shopping supermarkets so prices are slightly higher.

Home cooking

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One of the best jobs about homemaking for me is home cooking. There’s very rarely a day I don’t look forward to the planning, preparation and cooking of my meals, whether they be breakfast, lunch or dinner, even with the fussiest eater in the whole entire world, my 11 year old daughter. I just ignore her. (No, just kidding. It’s a work in progress and we’ve made great progress in the last couple of years.)

 

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I love food (if you haven’t already guessed) and I love how simple ingredients can come together for a taste sensation. I sometimes go weak at the knees when I taste things. I love looking at food and recipes and coming up with new and exciting ways to cook these ingredients.

Cooking from Scratch

So how can you get inspired to cook everything from scratch? And to keep costs down? I guess I learnt at a young age from my Mother (when the only takeaway was maybe fish and chips or Chinese food was just becoming the rage), the food wasn’t going to get on our plates without cooking it and sourcing it from the cheapest possible places.

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My family was a one income family with Mum helping out with babysitting, ironing, dressmaking and a little cleaning from time to time. Dad was a keen recreational fisherman and we lived on fresh fish and seafood. Steak was saved for Dad while us kids had beef mince or sausages. No chicken breast or thigh fillets in those days either. It was a whole chicken or nothing and Mum made sure we had the pieces we wanted, ie is breast, leg or wing and Mum got whatever was left. The bones went into a soup for the next night’s dinner.  There was always a Sunday roast for lunch and leftovers were made up into a Shepherd’s pie, rissoles (hamburgers) or meatloaf and sandwiches for school lunches

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I guess I’m saying that we’re spoilt for choice these days with convenience foods in the form of takeaways and meal kits, etc from the supermarket. If we kept things simple like generations before us, I think we’d start to enjoy food more and enjoy the whole

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process. (Well, that’s what I’m hoping for.)

There’s a lot to be learnt from an outdoor market place

Sourcing Ingredients

Last month I wrote about buying versus growing your own vegetables and the importance of buying in season if you’re not going to grow your own.  To me, this dictates what I’m going to be eating. A local supplier delivers my fruit and vegetables. They only deliver what’s in season.  I use the supermarket for basic pantry staples like flour, sugar, milk, butter and other basic items. I buy my meat in bulk from a wholesale chain of butchers here in Brisbane. A little bit goes a long way. I try to keep the cost of my protein to $10 per kilo or less whether that’s beef, chicken, pork or fish etc. I  have a local egg and bread supply.

Finding Recipes

Besides the lovely cookbooks I have accumulated over the years, Google is my friend when it comes to searching for recipes. For example, if I have sweet potato and chicken, I type chicken sweet potato in the Google search field.  There are magazines, cooking shows, cooking DVDs, library for cookbooks etc, blogs, the newspaper, so many different sources for hunting out recipes and inspiration for something new. I also sometimes look at those bottles of ready made meal sauces in the supermarket for flavour combination inspiration. Home made Asian sauces taste so much better than those in a jar. You can make just about anything from scratch. Sure, I use Thai curry pastes from a jar but that’s about it.

 

Recipe Inspiration

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I am forever on the hunt for recipes from different cuisines. With a few basic spices, you could be eating a spicy chicken dish from Brazil or a quick salad from Vietnam. Changing the Google search criteria will present many more recipes from other countries as well.  I have my ‘family favourites’ I cook without ever thinking about but I love to try new dishes all the time.  I hope that I’ll be able to pass on a few thrifty tips on how I can throw together these quick meals for next to nothing without giving up taste.