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??

What do you think is a reasonable amount of time to spend cooking? I spend 30 minutes to cook fresh food most nights.

It’s usually boiled potato / pasta / rice with boiled or stir fried veg, and some sort of meat which is either pan fried or chucked in the oven. Eg mince with potato and broccoli, bolognese pasta, pork steak with sweet potato and kale, chicken salad, salmon with rice and broccoli, etc.

You can't just fry up mince, then add some gravy afterwards to call it cottage pie- unless you want it to be bland and disgusting! The flavour comes from cooking the mince with onions, carrots, mushrooms, and then simmering slowly with stock for a good amount of time to soften it and release and meld the flavour.

Rebecca Wilson Cook books are fantastic with quick recipes that are easy, fast family food and what mummy makes, highly recommend :)

I think my super power is speed cooking. I honestly think I could win awards for it. Unfortunately the same can't be said for the cleaning up afterwards as cooking quickly is hella messy 😂

I always brown the mince (and veg) before adding the the herbs/spices/flavour/seasoning. Adding uncrowned mince to a dis would lose you a lot of umami meaty flavour. The resulting cottage pie etc then sits in the oven getting tasty for 50mins plus.

My partner couldn’t even boil an egg then got Hello Fresh when it was on offer.Kept the recipe cards yes you need to buy some spices but food does work out cheaper and tastier when cooked from scratch .However the washing up and cleaning the cooker is a bit of a chore.

I agree about quorn! Tex-mex style (or our bastardised version of it!) is great for quick weeknight dinners imo.

If you’re trying to cut down meat I’d use beans, either whole black or kidney beans, or you can cook a ton of black beans in a little lime juice and soy to make refried beans. Then fried strips of pepper, onion, and mushroom, whatever spices you like.

We also like quesadillas, mix sweetcorn, black beans, grated cheese, cumin, paprika and garlic, warm a frying pan then bung a wrap in, add a bit of filling and fold. Fry on both sides till crunchy and cheese has melted (if your children are fussy do this with baked beans to start!)

in terms of sauces for pasta I tend to bulk cook tomato sauce. I usually do onion, peppers, garlic, herbs, tinned tomatoes, grate mushrooms and carrots in, add some spinach, blend it all up. I also use this as pizza sauce although I can’t get myself sufficiently organised to make pizza bases so I usually buy them.

home made pesto is also very quick, I make it without nuts as daughter is allergic but literally takes a few minutes. Ditto houmous but that’s not necessarily the foundation of a quick dinner!

I’d also invest in a slow cooker as they are great for soups (lots of lentils and root veggies over winter) which is just some chopping in the morning or even the night before, then blend when you get home (a stick blender makes this quicker!)

my quickest dinner is a big tray of roasted veggies and chickpeas, couscous, and houmous (I make it in batches as we eat a lot).

When did I say I didn't brown the mince first?

Here You can't just fry up mince, then add some gravy afterwards to call it cottage pie- unless you want it to be bland and disgusting! what did you mean if it wasn’t that you can’t fry it then add the rest of the ingredients then cook?

She meant people can't just do plain beef and gravy.

Why can’t you just do beef and gravy? Mince and onion is literally just beef and gravy with an onion chucked in.

And this is why people take piss out of British food. Sorry

I am with her that this does not make nice cottage pie.

In my house you get what I can be bothered to cook. It might well be mince and onion with gravy! It’s freshly cooked and tastes acceptable. I don’t have time to mess about with sautéing garlic and reducing stocks, and who can afford to put the oven on for an hour nowadays?

Then I am assuming you are not making cottage pie which is what the poster was talking about

@InYourHeadZombieeeaeaeaea what? Cottage pie is traditionally the leftovers from a roast beef Sunday lunch. It very much IS precooked meet, chopped veg, and gravy topped with mashed spuds. Nowadays people tend to cook the meat and veg as they don’t have the nub of a roast hanging around.

I get you re effort but it’s definitely cheaper to cook from scratch overall (and we definitely don’t do that so no judgement here!)

Oh how I wish basic cooking was once again taught at schools. I went to a very, very academic school for girls - many decades ago - but for one year, when we were about 12, we had cookery lessons. They were not so much about recipes as about the principles behind them. We were taught to understand what to fry, what to roast, what to casserole etc etc and WHY each method is suitable for each particular food. We were taught - with diagrams!! -the nutritional components of basic foodstuffs - eggs, potatoes, peas, meats, bread etc etc. We were told how to make a white/bechamel sauce - the basis for so many other sauces and dishes. (As previous posters have said, it's really easy.) We learned how to cook vegetables. And I can still remember the basic proportions of ingredients for (eg) simple cakes or pastry- we had to learn them by heart and recite them, just like times tables.

I think, as teenagers, we rather giggled at our very earnest domestic science teacher, but really we should have been so thankful. She taught us an essential understanding of basic cooking techniques. With them, you don't usually need a detailed recipe. They give you an understanding of what you are doing when cooking, and a lot of confidence. That's so helpful and so empowering. If only children were taught the same today.

For very simple quick recipes - that go beyond bolgnaise and chilli and are really quick and really tasty - I'd recommend Nigel Slater's " Real Fast Food" and "Real Fast Puddings" or his "The Thirty Minute Cook" .

Yes, but only if you do it all the time and you re-use anything you buy a bottle/jar/packet of for your cooking. If a recipe calls for a drop of something you still have to buy the whole thing. You don't have the economies of scale that a factory has to make it worth buying certain things or you can't necessarily buy them in season. Making your own pesto, for example, would often be more expensive than buying it.

Oh I did it for miles when I had a full time teaching job, 3 dc under 5 & was married to a dickhead, who worked away anyway.

The time it took to make spag bol one week, dhal the next etc etc was totally worth it - I could defrost it, come home, cook pasta or rice, & serve up something everyone would cheerfully eat.

I was so exhausted on weeknights back then that I usually made sure I dished up before I took my coat or boots off.

These days I've had to actively wean myself off the batch cooking habit! Two teenagers still at home. They're much less fussy & love fresher, lighter food - salads & stir frys - plus they're out quite a lot.

So NOBODY needs me to cook 24 portions of veggie chilli ever again. Phew.

But it got me through those years - & we all ate cheap healthy meals.

Now I get to cook much more for fun - or just NOT cook & keep the fridge well stocked. Win win, horses for courses etc etc.

But it isn't cheaper than a few tins of tomatoes & whatever fridge veg wants using, & no roasting or sieving is required.

I do use fresh tomatoes. I live in country where they're cheap & gorgeous, but go squidgey VERY quickly! I still don't sieve them. Into the slow cooker they go, with the fridge veg, & then I blend the sauce later.

'Supermarket sauce' would be far pricier.

Given that so many people are incapable of basic arithmetic which they work with for YEARS at school, I highly doubt that they're magically going to remember all this stuff to do with cooking.

The good news is there's tons of help on the internet, forums, FB groups, YouTube videos etc there's really no excuse. If people don't cook they just CBA full stop. Example:
https://www.thespruceeats.com/cooking-techniques-everyone-should-know-4169657

My super quick cheap pasta sauces are basically variations of:

Fry some onions, a tin of tomatoes, a tin of anchovies in garlic (use this oil to save your olive oil!), and a load of herbs. Bung it all on the hob, and boil it down. Add a beef stock cube, Worcester sauce or a splash of red wine if you want to zsuzs it up. Or chillis if you like it hot.

If you want a quick creamy sauce, fry the onions/garlic and your protein, add a veg/chicken stock cube in a bit of water/white wine, half a tub of philly. You can add prawns and parsley, or chopped sausages and whole grain mustard. You could add chicken and chopped asparagus. Anything you like!

@nameXname absolutely brilliant! Exactly what we need. I’m 31 and I can remember being taught the recipe for a simple cake batter, in primary school

I don't think PP understands the concept of batch cooking. Quite simply, it means making more than you need for a single meal, so you can eat some later. It doesn't necessarily mean that you need to cook a week's worth of food all at once!
Currently we have takeaway once a week and homemade pancakes (made by hubby), leaving 5 days for me to cook for.
Batch cooking for 2/3 days means I only need to cook twice a week, instead of 5!

Of course some people like you do a whole week's worth but many like me just make enough for the next day and maybe the day after, hardly 'days later'. And once you've gotten everything out and prepped for, say 4 portions (for a 2 adult 2 kid family) it's not a lot of additional effort to double that!

@PurpleButterflyWings I'd say that cooking daily is more of a 'cooking and baking slave' behaviour because you're doing prep, cooking and clean-up every day. Who has time for that? With batch cooking (or even meal prep, where you cut up all the ingredients before) you save on the cleanup. Which is the actual onerous part, not the cooking itself...

@OspreyLambo cooking enough so that there are leftovers for the next few days is what I'd call 'cooking'.

Cooking enough to freeze at least 10 meals worth of some dish is what I'd call batch cooking.