You can still make good food and not have to spend all day in the kitchen and cook from scratch. There are recipes all over the Internet, and appliances that save time and money.
Whether you have been thrust into economy scratch cooking on purpose or by someone else’s bad decisions, it is reality and we can take positive things from the experience. Scratch cooking is more healthy than the alternative ready or half ready made meals. You are eliminating the preservatives and other chemicals manufacturers use to stabilize their products. Most people don’t sit and read the ingredients of pre packaged food. It’s a real education.
Some Mac and cheese boxes have tsp in them. Tsp is what we sold at the paint store to wash the grease off the walls to ready them for paint. You were cautioned to wear rubber gloves 🧤 to protect your hands from its harsh properties. Some things have wood pulp in them as an anti caking agent. Some cold cereals have tsp in them as well. Fake butter can have palm oil in it . So does Nutella. Palm oil as well as a host of other oils are hydrogenated. Hydrogenated oils can thicken your blood. Not a good thing I’m guessing, Vegetable oil is a necessary part of cooking, we use as much olive oil as we can. But, some things require a lighter oil. The least of the oils in my opinion is canola oil.
The more bulk you buy, the less packaging you will buy. Less garbage to lay to be removed and the less garbage to put in the landfill. We do recycle a lot. Our town has a plastic bag ban, the brown paper bags we get are recycled to the food bank to be reused. We have bags that clip on the sides of the grocery cart. This restricts the amount of things that can be loaded on the cart, that’s a good thing. The grocery carts are larger for a reason. The grocers want you to fill them up. But that’s another blog in itself I have already written. The bags are also good because studies have found feces on the bottom of carts —a lot. Think of the contamination and how it can spread.
If I do buy something in a box and with a bag inside like oatmeal, I recycle the box and cut the bag into a tube and save it for when I want to separate things to go on freezer bags, like hamburger patties or tuna cakes. I get two uses out of them and I don’t add another piece of plastic to the landfill or spend more money.
The box of regular Quaker Oats at Costco is about eight dollars . It makes a serving .085 each. One serving is equivalent of four of those instant packets, even at a dime each, that’s 40 cents and over four times the price. It takes four packets to get the same nutrition as one 1/2 cup serving, The time is about the same. Anything that we buy in bulk that takes the same measurement consistently, I leave a measuring cup on the canister. You can get measuring cups at the dollar store or at the goodwill or other thrift store. One cup of water, 1/2 cup of oatmeal and 1.5 minutes in the microwave. Use a cup bigger than you need to reduce spill overs. My husband usually makes it, I suspect he uses less water. Experiment to get the consistency you like. I recently found oatmeal sprinkles at Winco. They had a dollar coupon on them so the end cost was a dollar. They were 1 to 1.5 carbs and a slice sized bottle has lasted a long time, We have also used a shaker of cinnamon sugar in the past.
Dried beans can be purchased on the bulk department, or in bags at Costco . Smaller quantities of pinto beans are cheapest at the dollar tree, (DT) they are 1.5 pounds, grown in the USA and non GMO.
The cost of store bought bakery items can be up to 90 percent more than making the same thing at home. Make your own muffin mix. It takes very few minutes to whip up a muffin tin of muffins. The cost is .30 plus the spices or fruit you put on them. The cost of four muffins can be five dollars.
The size is smaller when you make them at home, but that can be a good thing, the volume is the same. You are making 12, not four. Most of the things I have cost are 90 percent cheaper. Artisan bread aka peasant bread is a quarter and ten minutes hands on time, it cost upwards of 2.50.
Homemade just tastes better.
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