To wonder how people find the time and money to cook from scratch

[Mummyof287]

We sometimes have a roast, cooked from scratch or Jacket potatoes with toppings and salad.Everything else tends to involve something from a box/packet/jar.
That's not to say every meal is total 'junk food' and the meals are always balanced (protein, carb, fibre) but usually include something processed.
Here are some examples of what we eat;

-Salmon/smoked basa, rice (microwave packet rice) veg
-Quiche (good quality boxed) new potatoes, veg
-Sausages (butchers or supermarket good quality butchers style)
-Old el Paso Fajita kit using quorn chicken

• Burgers (from butchers) in buns with salad

-Pizza with corn on cob/salad

• Breaded/battered fish portions, homemade chips/wedges and beans
• Lasagne (using jar sauces) & veg
• Tortellini (packet) and sauce (ready made in pot/packet)
• Stit fry using quorn chicken

I find cooking really stressful and am not very good at it 🙈 My DH likes cooking and used to do more recipies from scratch, but since having our two daughters time is stretched especially on the days we both work, and when he has done recipes they don't eat it as they are really picky eaters, so feels like a waste of effort, half of it goes in the bin.

I want to stop using so many processed foods as know its not ideal health wise, but time and especially money are fairly short, and most recipies seem to have so many ingredients, it all gets so expensive!

Any ideas of recipies that are very quick, cheap and easy please??

Find a website, BBC Good food, for instance, it tells you roughly how long recipes take, but the ingredients and follow the steps. I cook from scratch 6 days a week, but I’m a fussy eater who loves cooking!

One quick change would be to make a big batch of tomato sauce and freeze it in portions, very easy and much cheaper than buying in a jar.

No advice, but I hear you. What makes it worse is that me and my son have different issues which means we eat different foods! By the time I’ve made something for the kids I often can’t be bothered making food for myself.

I double cook, freeze or repurpose, the old trick with mince making Bolognese, chili and shepherds pie. Its easie and less messy to make more for next day or 2.

So give meal planning and prepping a go. Be realistic and give yourself nights off with oven food at least initially. I use the slow cooker a lot in colder season and I hear people praise air fryers.

I precook rice and portion it into freezer. It's then ready for any meal requiring rice from just side to egg fried rice etc.

It's about the balance. I aim for like 20% max processed. Whether that's frankfurter or sauce in a jar.

You can make your own yomato base sauce from mix of fresh and tinned tomatoes and fresh veg in slowcooker. I put basic seasoning (onion, salt, pepper, garlic, cinnamon, basic herbs) cook for few hours just to marry flavours and melt everything, portion in a freezer and then spice when using it based on what dish it goes into.

DH and I both WOTH. Earliest home is 5/5.30pm and then there are usually activities to run the DC to so cooking from scratch during the week might be a pasta sauce or soup. Otherwise similar to what you list and I save more adventurous cooking from scratch meals for the weekend. I get very little free time and don't want to spend my weekends batch cooking.

I think what you're doing there is a sort of halfway house between cooked from scratch and easy life stuff, and that's quite expensive. That list reads to me like people who enjoy 'proper' food but don't have time to make it. The premade stuff you're buying is more premium type, like the naice quiche. Not things like cheapo frozen pizzas.

Whereas cooking from scratch proper, when you have enough time, means you can go for the more budget efficient stuff like making meals out of what's left in the fridge. You're stuck between the two extremes and that's why it's expensive- basically because naice ish food with minimal prep time is dear.

Batch cooking is good. I also use the mealime app, you choose meals for the week and it generates a shopping list for you. Most meals take 30-40mins.

How much freezer space do you have OP?

For me, it's far cheaper to cook from scratch. Time consuming, yes. My DC are grown and do their own cooking too, so I probably have more time than you.I also batch coook and freeze.

Also if you want to use less UPF then... Say bye to quorn "chicken"... If you want veggie meal just go old style without these fakes.

A lot of simple from scratch things would take less time than your kits, be much cheaper and less processed.

It’s definitely time consuming. I find if I can manage to do some big batch cooks, it’s very helpful as it means I have something healthy and home cooked in the freezer - but it’s a big time commitment to do that. Worth it but not always easy to find the time. Weeks where we’re busy, we’ll often do a roast at the weekend and use the meat for “picnic tea” for a couple of days - so meat, nice bread and salad and fruit, which is quick and easy, and feels healthy thanks to the veggies etc. but there are definitely a few days a week where convenience wins.

I don;t use kits myself, and we don't eat fake meat.

A few of the ready made items you use save very little time and are more expensive. Sauce in a jar, microwave rice, fajita kit - they are pointless.

A boy called Jack. Whatever you think of her politics the first book is simple cook from scratch recipes with limited and very repeated ingredients , cheap, and if you ignore the baking stuff usually quick.

Need to meal plan it first though

For me, it's cheaper to cook from scratch.

A jar of herbs/spice costs 80p but then you've got that for another load of meals. So cost per meal is low.

Tinned tomatoes, 4 for £1.50 but you can make enough pasta sauce for 10 meals with a chicken stock cube, some veg and a blender. Etc etc

Yeah I agree. Cooking is very time consuming which tv chefs never admit ! I love cooking but don't have the time every evening. Slow cookers / batch freezing definitely make a difference.

You sound as though you're doing fine, OP! I always say: don't let the best be the enemy of the good - in other words, just because you're not catering like some TV chef, don't beat yourself up.

One thing I do is to batch-cook portions of ragu sauce and bechamel sauce and freeze them so that I can put together lasagne and cottage pie very quickly. These 2 dishes are simple to cook, though time-consuming to do from scratch but they're family favourites. So we just get the relevant things out of the freezer in time and then assemble them when required. Also - just add beans and spice for chilli con carne.

I also do a vegetable sauce using onions, garlic, celery, red pepper and tomato and freeze portions of that, which can be used with pasta or gnocchi - or with fish etc, and spiced up if necessary. I'm a non-meat eater so I have this a lot!

To me, heaven is a baked potato with grated cheese, coleslaw and some other salad, and nutritionally that's fine - I don't stress about being original...

As you can see, I'm hardly an adventurous cook day-to-day - I tend to reserve the fancy stuff for guests!

Whatever perfectionists say, good quality convenience food nowadays is fantastic, so don't let anyone guile you about that. If you can afford it - why not? It's the old time versus money equation and sometimes you're happy to pay when time is short. I love the fresh pesto sauces (red and green) for a very quick pasta meal with salad.

Fajitas from scratch cost way less and are no more time consuming than the kits.
I do a mixture of cooked from scratch, curry, bolognese, etc and freezer food like sausage and chips.
Mostly cooked from scratch, but I'm currently not working.

I'm always interested in the "mince 3 ways" thing though. I make chilli, shepherds pie, bolognese, lasagne etc all slightly differently. Different herbs, veg, Spices. The only ones I could sub would be bolognese and lasagne.

I cook a lot from scratch, never have anything from the freezer for dinner unless a one off pizza for example. I do add some cheats sometimes though. I work from home 3 days a week so I’ll sometimes start something off at lunch, eg fry up the chicken with lazy garlic for example. Last night I made chicken in honey & mustard sauce. I got the recipe from Courtney black fitness and it’s just chicken fried up with lazy garlic, Philadelphia, chicken stock, honey and whole grain mustard (plus seasoning). That’s 10 mins once chicken is ready.

My son (back to Uni now) likes a lot of homemade pasta dishes. Things like carbonara are super quick to make. One quick meal is chicken with pesto and pine nuts. Fry up chicken, add pine nuts, add a bit of single cream, few cubes of frozen spinach, bit of the pasta water and obviously pasta, finally pesto. That’s super quick and can be served with garlic bread. All these dishes he likes take 20 mins max.

That sounds a lot like what we eat although we also throw in plenty of pizza, chicken nuggets, and the occasional ready meal. I make most pasta sauce etc from passata rather than a jar but don't bother with butcher sausages or burgers or whatever.

It's totally fine if you actually want to cook from scratch more. Don't feel like you should for some unspecified reason. What you eat is not unhealthy and is varied.

MN food threads are usually absolutely mental and don't reflect reality so expect someone to come along momentarily to give you a row for not only eating home grown lentils.

Planning makes things easier- eg if I wanted to make lasagne I’d probably cook 4 meals of bolognese at the weekend, freeze 3 and use 1 in the lasagne. So that’s 4 meals in total. Same with anything freezable- chilli, tomato sauce for pasta, curries and stews.

Fajitas etc are really easy- you don’t need a kit. I do buy the wraps though unless it’s the weekend.

If you enjoy cooking then you are half way there, you will have more inclination to source good cheaper ingredients and want to spend the time doing it. I have the time but not the inclination so don't

I dont understand why you think its automatically more expensive?

E.g. Buying a kilo of dry rice is going to be cheaper per portion than buying microwavable packets.