I’m a big fan of making things like salad dressing, mayonnaise, spaghetti sauce. (I did the Italian dressing, bacon bits and croûtons in that salad up there.) Things that people usually buy at the grocery store, but there’s no reason you can’t make your own.
The Tasty Kitchen Blog had a post recently showing a bunch of homemade recipe ingredients, including several I’ve done, a few I plan to do, and a couple I never thought of. (Nutella? Really, you can make your own? Awesome.)
Go take a look and see if they’ve got something you’d like to try.
PS: If you got this early Monday morning, the links to Tasty Kitchen weren’t appearing. Sorry, I’ve got it fixed now.
Want more like this? For more recipes like this, that you can hold right in your hands, and write on, take notes, tear pages out if you want (Gosh, you're tough on books, aren't you?) you might be interested in How To Cook Like Your Grandmother, 2nd edition, Illustrated. Or to learn your way around the kitchen, check out Starting From Scratch: The Owner's Manual for Your Kitchen.
Subscribe to comments on this post
4 Comments
I love the idea of making my own stuff, but the problem is, that I don’t buy and keep things on hand. I tend to buy for specific menus. So, I’m not likely to have bread that I need to use up, etc. To buy specifically for these items makes no sense either. But in an attempt to make more instead of buy more – I need an entire menu planning cycle and I just haven’t gotten around to doing that. Planned leftovers but by ingredient instead of just buying what I need to go with what I got to make a meal. Does that make sense?
Karen, I understand exactly what you mean. There’s a couple things that might help. First, Check out FrugalUpstate.com. She does regular menu plans that account for shopping once for the entire week, and using leftovers later in the week.
Second, try to think of leftovers not in terms of having a second round of the same thing, but that anything in the fridge is a potential ingredient for a completely new meal.
And third, when you learn how to make some of the things that you currently buy, you have the option to make it or buy it. For instance we don’t buy mayonnaise any more. I can make it once every couple of weeks, it’s much cheaper, and we prefer the taste. Other things we’ve done from scratch, but still sometimes buy it when we’re in a hurry.
For me, cooking from scratch almost always tastes better. But I’m not blind to the fact that convenience foods are … well … convenient. And sometimes we end up with 20 minutes between Girl Scouts and dance practice, and Little Caesars is on the way home.
Thank you so much for, what is now, my 2nd most favorite recipe website! I have a question for you, though. You’ve mentioned that corn syrup is a no-no, but I really, really want to try and make a homemade marshmallow recipe found in the “The Theme is… Homemade Ingredients!” section. However, it calls for corn syrup. What to do, what to do?
Pancake syrup.
I somtimes make pancake syrup by heating up a mixture of brown sugar and water. It works great! Proportions to taste.