Is “home cooking” becoming a luxury these days?

But doing that for four… keeping things warm while you cook the next round!

Another massive privilege is the cost of failure. When I was younger, I didn’t buy joints at all. They were so expensive and never turned out right. I still rarely roast beef. Too unreliable.
If you make something no one wants to eat, it’s expensive in money and energy.

Who on earth is cooking with extra virgin olive oil - just why?

Statistics don’t corroborate your experience. 6% of adults are not confident cooking from scratch when following a recipe, according to a yougov poll. Even I was surprised it was so few, but Gen z are the least confident group and most can access simple recipes if they are capable of watching TikTok or YouTube. These resources can also help adults with literacy problems who would have previously struggled to follow a recipe in a book.

Your profession will bring you into contact with people in niche situations. It’s important that people like yourself support people who have difficulties with cooking, but I feel that the 94% who are finding their own way in the kitchen to cope with the high cost of living need to be the focus for a change.

I also think that proper funding of basic services will better help tackle the root of the problems that some people have with tasks like preparing meals - such as NHS mental health services, adult literacy initiatives.

It really isn't that hard.

A decent sized omelette with cheese and two veg, or a pan fried hake fillet with some capers, sweetcorn and a jacket potato with butter, take 10 minutes.

Today I'll sear some chicken thighs and put them, a can of tomatoes, some cannellini beans, onion, garlic and sliced chorizo in the slow cooker. 10 minutes effort, then ignore it. Six hours later, ready to eat. 😊

The issue is when people cook complicated recipes with lots of ingredients, it takes ages. Keep it simple.

30p difference in that oil is crazy. Some of us live in more expensive areas than others, it seems. That’s, what, 20% more expensive?

I miss salmon and lamb, though I managed a lamb shoulder a few weeks bag and made a fabulous curry. The flavour of the lamb goes a long way, so you can add lentils and spinach and still get a great meaty curry.

Me too, I don't like the taste of olive oil. I use butter to cook stuff in quite a bit with just a dab of oil to stop it burning.

I use olive oil (a premium one) a bit, but I actually usually prefer a good quality rapeseed oil and it's much cheaper.

Your salmon dish sounds lovely Meadowfinch, I will try that soon!
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Unless you are buying the most expensive, or out of season ingredients it is always cheaper to cook at home. I can easily feed four adults for the cost of one standard chain restaurant meal.

I’ve just checked, even one of those tiny bottles is £2.65 , a really expensive way of buying it and would last 2 minutes!

The heat doesn't destroy the flavour of olive oil if you cook at a low heat @Meadowfinch

Re: price of food, it has gone up astronomically. But we are vegetarian which helps keep costs down a bit, and means we can afford to buy better quality basics (good chopped tomatoes, nice olive oil, etc) which definitely makes a difference to how things taste!

Going out or ready meals are definitely a last resort, DS does a lot of our cooking and definitely prefers to make from scratch, says he then knows what’s in it. DD cooks all her meals from scratch and still manages it on top of full time work

I buy mince and chicken and special offers on meat in the supermarket and use an online butcher for all other meat. The range of cuts in the supermarkets is really terrible these days and beef is often just beef joint, which bit? The steaks seem to be a reasonable price, but the quality matches the price unfortunately. The exception is Christmas when suddenly all sorts of nice things are available!

And where is the fresh fish these days?

I do think there is a privilege associated with preparing freshly cooked meals every day. I home educate my DD so, apart from the days when we’re out all day for a trip, I’m at home a lot and can take the time to cook from scratch daily (we often have a ‘proper’ home cooked lunch like a salad, soup, or roast veggies too). And even on busy days I am never so tired that I can’t make a quick sauce and boil some pasta. This also means we can eat as a family when DH has finished work, apart from when DD is out at clubs. But I have often thought about how much harder this would be if we were both working outside of the home. I’m in awe of my friends who manage it!

I'm single and out of the house a lot! I work a late shift so don't cook 'from scratch' when I get in, but I do use my slow cooker and cook three days worth of meals in one go once a week. The rest of the time is usually salads, although I do give in to the odd ready meal. The dog costs more to keep than I do!

I don't mind the odd pre-made meal but I prefer to cook for myself because I can put exactly what I know I will like in. There's nothing worse than sitting down at eleven o clock at night, tired and starving, and starting to eat a ready meal that they turn out to have tweaked the recipe to and now it's 80% potato (I don't like potatoes).

I disagree. For a start, don't use EV olive oil in cooking, the heat destroys the flavour anyway.

I cook from scratch every day. Last night we had salmon cream pasta. £3 for two salmon tails, a handful of frozen mussels, some wholemeal pasta, a few ground-up fennel seeds, some broccoli and a tablespoon of creme fraiche. I used half a kettle of hot water and two cooker rings for 10 mins. About £1.80 per serving. Less than a cheap supermarket pizza.

Our food budget for ds and I for a week is £60. It is all home cooked, varied, healthy. I eat 30 different fruit & veg every week (NHS advice post bc).

It's more expensive than it was a year ago, but still less costly than pizza, takeaways, chicken nuggets, ready meals etc.

Similar with us and I would also add there is a knack to using up leftovers sensibly

We always do extra vegetable with every meal - these get recycled into soup/salad/frittata and once a week on the day the kids have activities at different times, we have wraps for dinner, which is basically raid the fridge for left over meat/fish/cheese/veg and everyone assembles their own.

These threads always go the same way. Ingredients are expensive but folk will strongly push that home cooking is always cheaper and people
are just lazy if they don’t cook from scratch - reminds of the eat less move more than is rolled out to people struggling to lose weight.

These same people then describe meals that always cost ‘pennies’ however by the time you are buying the cheapest ingredients the result is no better nutritionally then the ready meals or the ingredients are so stretched (500g mince does us a meal for six with leftovers for the next day - yeah right!) the calories per person are so low as to not be enough food anyway - therefore needing bulking out with snacks or bread or whatnot.

We cook from scratch but by the time we have bought a decent amount of food and more than the very basic range we spend a significant amount in the supermarket however we can afford to do that. I am not so unaware to understand why others can’t though.

My Asda is all over the place with the reductions and I think it depends who is in charge on that particular day! A couple of weeks ago it was 10% reductions - so a large pack of chicken breasts from £6.50 to £5.85 or similar. Then the next week, the £6.50 pack of chicken is £2.80. Who knows.

I have also had some really good things in my local Co-Op on my way home around 6pm. Always buy the proteins like chicken, the good quality sausages, beef or salmon when I see it.

Re olive oil. I think it's quite reasonable expectation that oil from something we really don't grow, actually most countries don't, will be premium price.

Supermarket veg is really cheap and it's probably even cheaper on the market. Ready prepared may seem cheap but just don't read the ingredient list usually high in salt and sugar, tiny amounts of the most horrible bits of meat (sometimes even mechanically recovered), and very small very expensive portions of vegetables.

Aldi. I checked their website. Tempted to go in for once but somehow expecting it to be a typo or absolutely terrible brisket😂

To me it makes no sense to complain about the price of olive oil but then buy a bottle of wine. We use extra virgin olive oil for all our cooking, but a bottle lasts 3 or 4 weeks whereas wine, what? Some people might stretch a bottle to a couple of nights...?