Am I "cooking from scratch".....

[Janeymoo50]

or not...

Curry - brown onion, garlic, chicken, add jar of paste/sauce?

Shep pie - brown mince, onions, carrots, add tomato paste, stock, flour, marmite, seasoning, herbs, etc

Fish pie - put frozen salmon and cod fillets (Iceland bargains) in bit of milk, butter and dried herbs, then make proper roux with the liquid, top with frozen mash (with added butter and good shake of black pepper)

My DP says I cheat, I might concur on the frozen mash (but it works better on fish pie).... But I've always thought this was ok....am I really cheating???

My personal view on cooking from scratch means not adding any jars or prepared food items.i usually cook from scratch so I KNOW WHATS GOING INTO THE FOOD sorry for caps toddler kicking the screen

What is a prepared food item Yasmin - tinned chopped tomato? tomato puree? Dried lasagne? I do get where you are coming from, but drawing lines like that is always a bit arbitrary.

libraries, of course. To me cooking from scratch means using single ingredients, so although I use tinned tomatoes, I don't use a jar of tomato sauce, Of course it's more complicated than that, I don't make my own cheese and I do use Worcestershire sauce.

Well precisely! Cheese, pasta, rice noodles, stock cubes, hoisin, garam masala, harissa, ras el hanout....

I tried to post this before. Sometimes we value women's work more if it is time-consuming and inefficient, with no particular gain for the extra effort.
This is one of those times.
You are cooking, not ordering pizza, pinging a sugarsaltfest ready meal or serving up improbably shaped beige oven food. You are winning at life.
Well done!

There's a fantastic comedy sketch hidden in here.

I can imagine Jamie's next voyage into cooking from scratch "for those of you who don't own an Ayrshire dairy cow, ask your neighbours if you barter your home grown onions for some milk and cheese."

Agreed trickle! I mean, who really cares if your curry comes from a paste and your tinned tomatoes come with oregano already added?

Trickle yes!! Also often men who cook for a hobby have a rose tinted idea of what it's like day in day out. .. Thanks to tv chefs like HFW.
That, twinned with the martyr - housewife stereotype can get quite toxic.

My geeky hobby is food history and the idea everyone cooked from scratch in the old days is bollocks frankly. In many eras city homes didn't have much of a kitchen and you bought in a great deal! Not to mention the Victorian ' love of all things canned, jarred and dried!

There is a great bit in a book called Night waking (by Sarah? Moss) where the character is having to bake her own bread and gets asked if she normally does. As a history lecturer her response is pretty scathing.

Frozen mash is preprepared food, but contains potatoes, salt and milk/butter. Exactly what you'd put in it if you were 'cooking from scratch'.

But because it's quicker and takes less effort, it's somehow cheating?

Makes no sense to me.

Most of our meals are "cooked from scratch" although that is a phrase we don't really use. When you are feeding a large family it is probably the easiest way. We even produce some of our own meat and veg. More a sign that I don't have much to do and should probably have a job rather than something to be smug about tbh.

Does it taste nice? Is it reasonably nutritious? (Caveat - we're all allowed an odd instant crap meal - I quite often succumb to the lure of spaghetti hoops on toast for DS at the end of a long week!) Can you do it fast enough that you don't feel like it's taking over your whole life? (Unless of course you really enjoy cooking as a hobby in and of itself, in which case, do whatever you enjoy in the kitchen for as long as you want). Will your DC actually eat the end result without too much complaint? (Mine is very much of the "it isn't beige and it may taste of something interesting and there's an outside chance it contains vitamins... yeuch" school of thought).

If yes to these, you're doing better than I am!

Sometimes we value women's work more if it is time-consuming and inefficient, with no particular gain for the extra effort.

This with knobs on. I wonder if unchopped onions/garlic/tomatoes etc would even be on sale if men did 99% of day to day cooking?

Restaurants use bottled egg ffs.

Trickle and Squiz are spot on. Time-consuming= virtuous bollocks, and the pontificating "occasional" cook who has no idea of what it is like to do it day in day out. I used to really like cooking when I was just cooking for me (bit of a foodie on the sly). Then I had DS, who (like most small children) turns his nose up at 90% of what I cook. It has turned cooking from a soothing way of unwinding after a day at work to an unappreciated slog which will go in the bin half the time. And I either live on beige crap too (yuck) or double the amount of work by cooking something I actually want to eat. (Actually, have new system in place - bulk-cook stuff I actually want to eat at the weekends, make sure DS's beige-ness includes a portion of veg and some fruit, and then try not to fret).

MrsHathaway someone on the BBC food board many years ago (10+) used to say bottled egg should be banned as it "promoted laziness" ... even though I know of no domestic cooks who buy it! They were clear it was the cheat nature not nutrition or environmental waste that concerned them.

Interesting!

I think they sound fantastic, because I use far more whites than yolks.

And I use Birds Custard powder too. MICROWAVE METHOD.

Why does it matter? Use fresh when you can, use convenience foods when you need to. Don't beat yourself up !!

So it is OK to outsource grinding corn, but we must mash our own potatoes?

I'm joining in just for that tomatoe machine link.

Must dash, I have frozen chopped onions in the pan, you see I have no fucking knives after moving

Mash is a nuisance. I give mine the poncey name 'crushed potatoes' to cover up for the fact I can't face getting all the lumps out.

I do too! "Crushed potatoes" are lovely - its got nothing to do with saved effort .
.

Please tell me more about these potato ricers. Are they really that good? I mean do they give a truely smooth mash without effort?

I've just bought some frozen mash after reading this thread (I didn't know it existed before)! I hope it's nice.

Yes, they do, Why.

In fact, DH doesn't even peel the potatoes before boiling them, and the ricer separates the skins out, as he's mashing.

(I do peel, as its "proper" .)

So have I Mary

I got one! I got one!

Arrived today, all shiny and red

Tomatoes, know your place!!

'If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe'

Carl Sagan