Reply to Someone explain to me how cooking from scratch is cheaper

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[quote=Anonymous]Comparing a microwave dinner tray of mac and cheese with homemade gourmet mac and cheese is like saying that it's cheaper to buy Hungry Man salisbury steak than to buy and make steaks on the grill.

A more apt comparison is if you get a block of cheddar cheese and a block of monterey jack cheese (probably about $2-3 each), a box of macaroni (about $1.50), milk, flour, butter and spices (depends on what you have, but you'll only need probably $1-2 worth of these combined) you can make a good mac and cheese that is better than any frozen premade processed mac and cheese.  You'll make a pound of macaroni plus cheese for about $7-9 which will be the equivalent of about 4-5 of those frozen mac and cheese meals at $3 each.  So, yes, you can make $7-9 worth of mac and cheese for less than $12-15 worth of trays.

And for basic mac and cheese (not Velveeta), you cook the pasta.  Shred the cheese on a box grater.  Make a roux of butter, and flour.  Add milk to loosen.  Add in cheese slowly so it melts into the sauce.  Add spice/flavors to taste.  Add the macaroni.  You can serve it stove-top style (ala boxed mac and cheese) or you can put it into a dish and add bread crumb s (two slices of bread, toasted and then crumbled into a bread topping) and bake.

As for your other concern, if you only cook once in a while and have to buy the extra components, then yes, cooking gets expensive.  If you cook regularly and have those components on hand, then it gets less expensive.  Just like buying in bulk, buying one ginger root that can be used for 3-4 recipes before it goes bad is cheaper.  If you are going to be cooking infrequently, then you should not be looking at fancy recipes that have specialized ingredients.  You want to make recipes that have ingredients that you either have, or that you can purchase and have a shelf-life or can be stored so that they'll be usable the next time.  As has been pointed out, that includes items such as ginger and garlic.  Ginger can be frozen and garlic can be minced and then coated in a little olive oil and refrigerated and will last a few weeks (you just want enough oil to coat it so that it isn't exposed to the air).  When you have reusable ingredients, then the cost of cooking goes down.  [/quote]

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