@Tyler Laing: Hells, yeah! You eat the pink part, peel off and throw away the hard green part, and then pickle the light green/whitish part. Here's the recipe I use:
[www.uga.edu]

10lbs of F.M.
2lbs of Lg Shrimp

above cost me under $30

The rest of a Steak Dinner I have in my yard. This is my stuff. Now if I am making it I buy the Corn, Green Beans, Other stuff. Still I can make a full steak dinner for under $5. Being I do not need to pay "ME". My dinner when sold, is $49

If your wondering why I do not go out. Its not that I am cheap. I make it better and do not bitch about the it being made (long story). Given that I do eat out only if its being cooked by a Chef not a daily labor.

I think a simple food prep routine (the key words here are "simple" and "routine") and keeping a simple grocery list are essential to making it all work.

Calculating $/hr in a time-value analysis as the amount of money you could have made working is flawed in that, in these situations, it's often unlikely you'd be working anyway. Correct time-value analysis means calculating the amount of money you would make (save) while performing one specific task, like making jam, over another, like insulating your house. You should ask yourself what is the likelihood that if you decide making your own food isn't worth it, then you actually start on insulating the house, or get a second job, or instead turn to the TV.

Technically, "time-value" should be "resource-value," where time is a resource, as well as exertion, base cost, and more. I could get a second job to help me through graduate school, but I already do so much just to keep my funding. I don't have the time or energy for more work, nor the need as I make enough to live comfortably. I instead look for ways to cut spending, like making my own food in my free time (trust me, it's far less taxing than any part-time job or freelance work). $/hr as strict time spent working is wrong in so many ways (especially with my salary :( ).

$7/hr, $15/hr, or (heh) $50/hour? I count my non-vacation free time as $0/hr, as I'm sure most people do (and rightly so).

Or do you just eat it in large chunks? o_o hm...

Now if only I could figure out how to not burn the outside...

Also, doing things for yourself is pretty cathartic. Cooking in particular can be seen more as an act of creativity or relaxation. It's not a drag like actual work can be, and it's certainly mentally more freeing.

Modern meat production pumps animals full of antibiotics, plumps them up on cheap (subsidized) soy and corn. Through selective breeding, animals are more sedentary, mature faster, and increase in bulk, but the end result is a less healthful product that is higher in saturated fats, less flavorful, but cheaper per pound to produce.

Modern farming techniques over-fertilize, and don't rotate crops, and breed selectively for robustness and disease resistance rather than flavor, resulting in fruits and vegetables that grow faster, but contain less nutrients and are less tasty.

If you buy organic produce, go to a farmer's market, join a CSA, or plant a garden, those are ways of declaring food is too cheap and should cost more, but it should also be better, so there is an outlet for people who have made such a decision.

One thing that I'm really thankful for here in NorCal is that we have a lot of local farmers that produce varietal and heirloom tomatoes. In this modern world, a person could go their entire life without eating a real tomato.

You don't have to be creative with a reliable guide. Fortunately.

In my personal experience learning to cook, the worst thing to do is to follow a recipe; you never learn why things are done in that way. Start out with the very simple stuff, one or two ingredients, learn them, and build from there. The sort of food that *requires* a recipe is usually the sort of food that's so rarely eaten day-to-day there's no point in learning the recipe in the first place.

P.S. - I copied your post and saved it to my recipe file! :)

I've found the freezer is the single man's best friend. You can have a handmade pasta dinner in five minutes flat. Hard to beat that, if you can develop the habit (which is an undertaking, admittedly.)

It's a lot harder when you live in a tiny space, I know. I used to live in a one bedroom apartment that the kitchen was one corner of the living room.

Now I have a house (still small) with a little more room, but because I have no one to cook for besides me, I still don't do it much.

I'm with nakedscience...I HATE doing that. I hate leftovers! I try to buy smaller sizes of things so I have very few leftovers. Frozen veggies are da bomb, because I can pop them in the freezer, and grab a handful and nuke them. I control the quantity. The rest stay nice and frosty and don't go to waste.

Lamb chops are one of those things that are a splurge, but are easy to cook at home, so they don't require a lot of time investment. And they are totally YUMMY.

Ooooo. I have a wok I have never used. Now I want to use it. That sounds really, really good. I could cook it in the wok and it would be even faster. (I hate it when it takes longer to cook dinner than to eat it.)

That's kind of how I am. I'm single, so there's usually no one to help me eat all the leftovers and I get sick of eating the same thing all the time. Plus, I'm busy when I'm not working a lot of the time, so don't really have time to make stuff.

I'll buy it mostly.

Oh I LOVE Cheerios and Rice Krispies. I will eat them dry, like popcorn.

The fruit bits in brandy sound good. My mom used to make something similar for very fancy dinners, with mandarin orange slices and some kind of whiskey. I need to ask her what the heck that recipe was.

We made butter in Girl Scouts once, when I was a Brownie. Took turns shaking the jar, then ate the butter on bread. It was a very novel experience which I have never repeated, but it's nice to know that I could do it if I needed to.

@FigNinja: I agree totally--I recently made lamb chops for Mr. Ruthless and myself--expensive, expensive lamb chops--$14.99 a pound, if I recall. However, I'm sure that we would have paid many times that if we'd eaten the same lamb chops "out," and I'm sure that they wouldn't have been raised on a small, local farm.

Fun yogurt tip for the bravehearted who live in hot places:
In the summer, instead of putting your heated-then-cooled milk in the oven, just put that bad boy outside. I live in Texas, where it gets to be approximately 120 degrees (I exaggerate, but only slightly) and in the summer, I put my pre-yogurt concoction in a casserole dish with a glass lid out in the morning, and take it in at night. Voila--yogurt with 0 electricity costs. My mom freaked out a little that I was making yogurt by just letting milk sit outside, but she couldn't say how it was different than letting it sit in the oven for the same amount of time.

@icantreplyright: I make my own jam. I do enjoy doing it, but I also find it cost effective. Also, I never liked jelly/jam until I visited Chile in college and had real blackberry jam. I still don't like and won't eat most commercial jelly/jam. Last summer, I went to a local U-Pick joint and got 2 gallons of blackberries for $20. Add in a few pounds of sugar, some pectin, and mason jar lids (the jars and bands are reusable, and I have gotten them from FreeCycle and Craigslist), and I'd say I spent ~$30. I wound up with 20 or so pints of jam, great for everyday eating, and also a great present. Think about it--a Christmas gift of out-of-season homemade jam--actual cost $2 or $3, but a perfectly respectable gift, especially if you pair it with a loaf of bread.

Also, making my own food allows me to avoid waste, not create it. I made pickles out of watermelon rind (that's usually trash, right?) and gave them to my grandfather--nothing has ever made an 84-year-old man as happy as those pickles. Again, cost: some spices and sugar and vinegar, plus some electricity for canning (I got the rind from a roommate, plus it was trash, right?) I bake my own bread and save the rinds for croutons, bread crumbs, and stuffing. Very little goes to waste in my house, which I am proud of.

- My favorite cereal is $1 more there than it is at Whole Foods.
- Eggs (especially free range varieties) are more expensive than at Whole Foods.
- Limes are 200% the price of limes at C-Town.
- 100% cranberry juice is $3-ish more per bottle than it was at a Key Foods on Montague St in Brooklyn Heights. (They also hide non-HFCS juices in a random "exotic foods" aisle, which is weird.)

My impression of that store is that if you're buying beer & junk, it's probably cheaper than a bodega. But it's not a deal for most stuff I eat.

@ToddBradley: That's a tad simplistic, though a good sentiment. I am a graduate student, and have found that the opportunity cost of my free time is about $50/hour--that's the lowest price I can charge for tutoring undergrads that doesn't leave me resentful halfway through for them wasting my time. I cannot find anyone to pay me $50/hour very often, so I don't do much private tutoring. However, I love cooking--on weekends I make bread, beer, and the occasional batch of blackberry jam. Do I figure in the $50/hour? No, for two reasons.
1) I require $50 to be compensated for doing something I find somewhat tedious, i.e., tutoring. However, I enjoy brewing up a batch of delicious beer, so I'm willing to do that for free. Heck, if I'd planned on doing a little homebrew one fine Saturday, and someone wanted tutoring, I might charge them $75.
2) I can't actually get $50 very often, so it seems a little ridiculous to account that as the monetary value of my time--my jam doesn't cost an extra $150 for three hours of work, because, lets be honest, I wouldn't get that much anyway. Just because I would work for $50 doesn't mean that I can

There was no way I was making some major meal at that point in my life but what is above still counts as cooking. It was cheaper than take out and better than burgers.

I think one of the keys to being a good cook is to understand the individual flavors that something will contribute to your dish. One thing that people forget to do is to taste and taste often. That will let you tweak your ingredients to exactly how you want it.
I've never found exact measuring to be the way to go; with my recipes it's pretty much a throw about this much of that in type of situation and then taste it. I think that one of the perils of following a recipe is that you get stuck into thinking that it has to be that way to achieve the final flavor/consistency. Often times, the results are less than stellar because the ingredients and amount of ingredient is wrong.
I recommend experimenting with flavors at a basic level and then working up from there, like making a ham sandwich with a particular herb or ingredient. That way you will know what flavor you're looking for and how much of it you'll need when you combine it with other complex flavors. Sandwiches are the best for experimenting imo; throw it on or take it off easily so there's no waste, while being able to identify individual ingredients.

I second the making your own hummus. Even buying canned garbanzos from the dollar store can yield a ton of the best hummus you've ever had. Why? Well, you can tweak it to your exact taste. No more bland hummus; add as much garlic and pepper as you want! Want something a little crazier? Just throw it into the blender and see what happens! 99% of the time it's going to be awesome.
PROTIP: Tahini is like peanut butter (but sesame), so it's unsurprisingly sometimes found in the peanut butter aisle rather than the exotic foods aisle.

Plus, I live alone and have a tiny freezer (so no cooking in bulk). Even if my soup turns out wonderfully, I'd have to eat it for breakfast, lunch and dinner for at least two days.

So while I'm happy to cook most of the time, I have a cupboard FULL of Cambell's soup.

I love Good Eats and not just because he comes up with fabulous recipes that are very simple but turn out to be incredible. I'm very interested in the science of food because I want to know how this or that food will react under this or that condition. Then, I can take that knowledge and experiment with it myself. I think that's what Alton really wants; to impart the knowledge of what you can do with a food, so that his viewers can go out and do wonderful things that even he hasn't considered. Isn't that what a true foody really wants - to try new and wonderful flavors? He wants us all to understand our food and make it taste better so when he gets invited over to his house he doesn't have to sneak his food to the dog.

We keg most of our beers, too. One of the most tedious parts of brewing is the bottling. Kegs are so much easier. I've been considering trying the soda thing, too. I don't like the ingredients in most sodas so I'd be able to make something cheaper and healthier that way.

And dakotad555, even if you couldn't reasonably do a second full-time job, I bet you have some skills that you could apply to a part-time job if you wanted. On the high end, consulting. On the low end, washing dishes. I would wager that the only reason you don't spend your evenings washing dishes at Taco Bell is that you value your time more than the $7 an hour you'd get there. But if someone paid you $700 an hour, I bet you'd take that second job in a jiffy. Somewhere between $7 and $700 is your value of your own time, and that helps determine the TRUE cost of making your own saltine crackers or jam.

@icantreplyright:

Fast food is engineered to be as good tasting and as brutally cheap as possible. It's not designed to be unhealthy, that's just a result. If fast food could be made healthier at the same cost and taste, what fast food company wouldn't do it?

In optimizing those two aspects, healthiness decreases naturally. So, to correct OP, there is an inverse relationship between health and taste when cost minimization is also a goal.

@teqjack:

If you do the full blown "preserves that can survive a nuclear holocaust", it is very time consuming. However, freezer preserves are only slightly more work than heating soup from a can; can use glass jars that you've already got left over from buying preserves; and you can customize the recipe to your taste.

Huzzah. I do the same. I lost my taste for factory marshmallows long, long ago. On a whim I made a tray of AB's marshmallows (even if I loathe a food, I'll try it AB's way, I'm even opening up to olives) and it was pure heaven.

I'm even starting to experiment with flavors. Raspberry turned out ok, white chocolate was a total flop (turned into more a gummy candy) and chocolate was good.

* Carbonated water, which is really quite delicious on its own. I drink it by the boat load. If you have snobby friends, you can call it "mineral water." Same thing. Throw a very slight quantity of various salts in there, and it really is mineral water. Similarly for club soda (a little baking soda does the trick).

* Soda-Pop. Now that you have dirt-cheap soda water, it's simple to make your own flavored syrups. Lime, orange, raspberries are simple extract syrups, and with just a vanilla simple syrup, voila!: cream soda.

I'm not that good at it actually, but my wife is. And I help her with it and with buying ingredients quite often. I still think it's a skill that everyone should have at least some expertise in, though, even if you don't particularly enjoy it. It makes for a healthier society when we know what goes into our food.

Now if they would just release it in whole seasons....

@locakitty: I like to buy the local pizza place's pizza dough to make... bread! It's a huge time saver when I have a lot of other stuff going on, but still gives that right-from-the-oven taste. It had never occurred to me to ask them to sell me flour, though; what a grand idea!

I just bought Target brand saltines for $.99 (standard 1 lb box).

The Nabisco variety was somewhere around ~$4.00 so I know exactly what you're talking about.

The store-brand ones taste just like the name-brand counterparts, though, so I was happy. :)

Noah's cream cheeses are amazing, but they're not $10 - (cost of Philly spread) amazing.

At $3, buy, halve, and freeze is the way to go. If you halve them first, you don't need the microwave before toasting, I've found.

Fewer people may enjoy it than you think. My mother is a top-notch, knock-out cook who did three scratch-made meals a day every day of my childhood (including scratch-made cereal and scratch-made pastries and everything) ... and she really DOES NOT LIKE to cook. She did it because it was healthy for her family, and she was good at it, but it's not something she particularly enjoys. She wanted us all to know how because she thought it was an important life skill, not because she thought it was fun. (Not that I learned. Because, well, MOM was trying to teach me, so clearly it must have been lame. I have a) since learned to cook and b) since learned my mom is not lame.)

I found this cream of tomato soup recipe that is even better than Campbells and was not that hard to make. I will never buy canned tomato soup again.
[www.epicurious.com]

My mom has a bunch of these where she "steals" the heat from one dish to make the other, and that makes it less work.

@razremytuxbuddy: I'd have to put a bread machine on top of the like, fridge. I don't have room for a damn coffee maker :(

@FigNinja: Hahaha, yeah. I don't have the freezer space./

@johnva: And I never denied that, and in fact I said there are plenty of people who enjoy cooking.

But everyone who enjoys cooking assumes everyone who doesn't is lying or should just "try it! learn!" and suddenly we'll be cooking masters. It doesn't work like that.

One argument against, from a single man's standpoint, is that the pricier ingredients (beef, buns, cheese) are perishable. I'd need to have it on hand and ready. Beef can freeze, but not indefinitely and not nearly as long as it could in a simple freezer instead of dedicated fast-freezing technology. If I'm making a burger for one that opened bag of cheese (or block of cheese that I'm shredding per use) will go bad before I would want another burger. Buns? Three or four days and the mighty preservatives lose to the almighty bread-is-now-a-hockey-puck demons.

So, unless you're doing a cookout, the actual price per serving skyrockets when you consider the amount you would wind up tossing or scrambling to find use for before it goes bad.

@nakedscience: I cook because I have to. And by "cook" I mean either put it on my George Foreman Grill, microwave it, or boil water for pasta. Also, I have actually started putting the chicken breasts into a pyrex pan and adding sauce and then baking for a while. Vegetables start out as frozen (store brand in a box) and then nuked for however long they tell me to. What's worse than cooking is food shopping (only because of the logistical nightmares caused by checkout counter lines).

@JGKojak: Wont happen i live in ny.

I dont know if I can make bagels from scratch as good as the ones here at my local bagel store. ID rather buy the bagels from them and make everything else from scratch.

Now unless ican find their recipe lol.

@edison234: If you like Alton, I'd suggest 'On Food and Cooking' by Harold Mcgee. It's not a cookbook, but just a book about everything food. And Alton gives Mcgee credit for most of the information on Good Eats.

Although I understand the sentiment that time is money, I think it's silly to put a dollar amount on your time if you're living it like you'd like to. Which in my case means making yummy food even if I can buy it right from the store.

@Spaceman Bill Leah: Growing up with my mom making her 5 trays of Sicilian pizza, we learned the importance of FRESH yeast. One year after we did the work (I don't recall right now what the job was, but she didn't make it for the hell of it), she sees that the dough isn't rising. Sure enough, it was over a year old. So much for getting pizza that day. It's those kinds of mistakes that we tease her about so she doesn't make 'em again.

The potatoes are so easy too. Once you peel them, cut them up into smaller pieces, boil them for about 20 minutes and then mash them and add a little cream, garlic and butter at a time.

Bread with a bread machine
Basic bread mix
Yogurt
Frozen Entrees (which are soups and casseroles I freeze in individual portions.) Examples: Cabbage soup, Lasagne, Spaghetti sauce with meat, Taco casserole, Shrimp Fettuccini

I pack my lunches, too. My grocery bills are under $100 a month, and I spend very little time in the kitchen.

That works if you can bill all your time and you would be doing billable work if you weren't cooking. I'm salaried and don't have enough time for a second job so I gauge whether my use of time is good based on how much free time I have and if I'm enjoying myself. This is why I have a house cleaner and a gardener but rarely eat out.

It's that preference for the 'three course' that tends to make cooking seem so tiresome for me. It's a lot of work for little reward. (It's just me and a cat who really wants what's on my plate.)

Though I did attempt to make broth and chicken noodle soup a few times. The noodles (betty crocker's 1953 recipe for drop noodles) were fantastic. The broths...well, I don't have that 'knack' for seasoning that most good soupmakers have. My mother can taste it and go 'oh, this needs this'. I taste it and just go 'ew'.

I think if I wanted saltines, I'd just buy them at the store. If I wanted those fussy artisan crackers to serve with a really good cheese, I'd be tempted to make my own. Or if I wanted something special like gluten-free I might try to come up with a yummy way to do that.

Try to find the mom and pop shop and they will probably be willing to do the same. Stay away from the big chains, most of their dough is frozen or ordered from a commissary.

We also sell balls of dough, for those who like to make their own pizzas at home. I do have a few customers who buy their pinon nuts from us, it's just cheaper for them to do it that way. :)

When I was single and just cooking for myself, I didn't cook every night. I cooked a couple nights a week and had leftovers. I would portion stuff up in single serving containers and freeze for lunches and dinners. Or I'd cook a chicken and have a little for dinner every night then make soup with the rest. I'd have veggies and salad stuff on hand and usually a few bags of frozen veg in the freezer just in case I didn't have time to shop. Now that I'm married to a man who also likes to cook, it's fun because we cook together and spend the time in the kitchen chatting with eachother. We still do the big batch thing for lunches, though.

My thoughts exactly. At $17\hr take home, 3 hours of work = $51.00. That's some pretty expensive preserves.

However the Yogurt is very worth it since it doesn't require hours of work, and tastes that much better. I'm going to try making some this week I thick since I love my yogurt!

It also makes your house smell downright sinful. :D

True, some of my home-cooked meals are a bit splurgey but if I had that same meal in a restaurant it would still cost me quite a bit more. If I ordered some wine with that, I'd really be paying a premium. When I eat out, it's for the experience and often to have something I can't make well myself. There is the occasional meal out for convenience but I try to keep that to a minimum, not just for my wallet but for my waist.

Gazpacho is your friend in these hot days. It's basically a salsa anyway, but great when you make it right.

My husband and I do beer and wine mostly for the fun of it but it also saves money. Yeah, I could get beer and wine for the cost of making it but it's not stuff I'd want to drink. Besides, it's nice to have a keg on hand for a party rather than have to go out and get one and you get to share something you made with your friends.

There is NOT an "inverse relationship" between healthy and tasting better. Healthy food (fresh vegetables, etc) generally tastes a lot better to me, because it actually tastes like real food and not processed crap. Now, a lot of restaurants DO make unhealthy food, by using a lot of fat and sweetener, etc. And yes, those kinds of foods do taste good (I won't deny that we are evolutionarily hard-wired to like the taste of fat, for example). But that doesn't mean that there aren't OTHER types of healthier food that don't ALSO taste good, in a different way. For example, Japanese cooking uses a lot of fresh, in-season ingredients prepared very simply, and is often quite delicious and quite healthy (although obviously there are exceptions). It's just tasty in a different way than a piece of fried chicken is tasty.

And yes, people who cook a lot do develop different tastes than say, people who eat a lot of fast food. It's called actually enjoying food, instead of just fueling yourself up. And yeah, many people who cook make food that is overly bland and tasteless...those people just need to learn to season their cooking properly.

Every couple of years, we also make our own real maple syrup. That one saves a hell of a lot of money, although it is extremely time consuming.

Of course, comparing do-it-yourself to the fast-food unit price means that fast-food always wins.. except that with grocery store quantities, you could make more than enough for yourself now and in the future at comparable or cheaper prices.

Not to mention the health and labor issues..

@Zyzzyva100: I too *was* a homebrewer, until I finally realized that it's so much work to make beer! I can buy great beers, even imports and micro's, for less time and money than it cost me to make them. So now I buy it, because I don't drink that much beer anyway.

On the other hand most everyday beverages such as coffee, tea, lemonade, etc. are definitely cheaper to make than to buy.

I'm not trying to criticize your choices, but I am just trying to point out that people like cooking for a whole variety of reasons.

..And the wiki, for the sciency stuff: [en.wikipedia.org]

I think alot of people that make their own soy use a machine.

We make almond milk, and it's just soak, blend, strain. No cooking required. And then we use the leftover pulp for all sorts of stuff.

And thanks, guys. Now I'm hungry.

@pecan 3.14159265: I so would not have the patience to stir something for AN HOUR. OMG. I would so throw myself in the pot. Hah!

@mizike: See, this I could "cook" because it's essentially throwing a few things together and bam! done! Which is why I don't have a big problem making chili on occasion or something.

But the idea of making a meal every.single.day basically makes me want to stab my eyes out.

Ingredient Quantity Cost Serving
Hamburger Buns 8ea $1.50 $0.1875
Grnd Beef 80/20 16oz $1.68 $0.21
Lettuce head $0.88 $0.0275
Ketchup 16oz $2.35 $0.0734375
Mustard 16oz $2.65 $0.0828125
Shredded Cheddar 16oz $2.49 $0.0778125
Pickles 32oz $3.00 $0.09375
Total -------> $0.7528125
Electric - $150/month = ~$5 a day, $.208333/hour
Grand Total: $0.9611455 with 1 hour of electricity paid.

Wendys sandwich = $.99 + gasoline to get there

2oz burger, precooked weight
Lettuce head estimated at 32 servings each
1/2 oz of ketchup, mustard, cheese
1oz of pickles

@johnva: And as a single gal, it really isn't *that* much cheaper to cook.

@Eyebrows McGee (on Twitter: LPetelle): Yeah, I've tried cooking for other people. Still hate it. And I don't plan on getting married, ever. So. If I have a crowd, I'll just have everyone pitch in for subs or something, or have someone else cook. Saves me more time to enjoy my friends.

I just don't find the kitchen enjoyable at all. There is no way I am going to make my own crackres! Or bagels! I'll cook simple stuff on occasion (tonight I'll cook fish -- it and some sliced lemon and veggies will go in some tinfoil and I'll make instant brown rice) but that's about it.

@johnva: And that is fine. But not everyone is the same. When I eat at home, I tend to eat simple meals (sandwiches, soup, things like that). I do cook on occasion, but it's usually when I'm craving something (fish, for instance, which I just bought). I also eat a lot of fresh fruits as snacks.

For granola, use honey with a touch of vanilla extract instead of pure maple syrup and it will be WAY cheaper than the storebought stuff (and much tastier). It's also absurdly easy to make; mix ingredients, bake for 20-30 mins stirring every so often (as the edges cook faster than the middle). That's it.

It's pretty easy too if you consider that two lazy blobs such as ourselves do it without the help of an one of those schmancy kitchen appliances.

[www.marthastewart.com]

I don't really enjoy the process ... I enjoy the outcome.

I love throwing bits and pieces of things together and hoping it comes out edible, which it does 99% of the time. I've been told my best cooking is when I don't use a recipe, but just fly by the seat of my pants.

It's true that a lot of convenience packaging is much more expensive than making it homemade, especially in bulk. Either find a great deal, or jump into the kitchen and have some fun! Cooking doesn't need to be a chore ;-)

@johnva: And that is great for those who enjoy it. But they also assume those of us who don't, should.

To get bagels under 20 cents, I buy the already cheap-brand bagels from the reduced "going off in a day" shelf and freeze them. No, they aren't as nice as fresh. Remember my first sentence. This is about cheap bastardry, not about sating your palate.

@pecan 3.14159265: It depends on what you cook. I have friends who love to cook and they spend a LOT of money on food. This isn't chili we are talking about.

@diasdiem: Seriously. This. As a single person, I have no desire WHATSOEVER to spend all my time cooking. Sorry, I hate it, and I do not want to do it, and it's kind of annoying that people always say, "But it's so easy! And enjoyable!" Yeah ... for you. For me, I hate it and would much rather be doing other things.

And as you said, something like wine is HUGELY cheaper at home.

Once we consume enough to burst our stomachs, we freeze the extra dough in little pre-rise balls, freeze the sauce post-cook, and we have some ready-to-assemble pizzas for the cheap future. Even cheaper for us, since commercially prepared vegan pizzas are exorbitantly expensive.

I just buy fewer convenience foods.

But if what I want is a burger now, and I don't already have a grill, or ground beef, or a bottle of ketchup, or a package of cheese, it's definitely cheaper in both time and money to go find some restaurant and buy one.

If you love to drink, however, it generally is...

I grew up low income and my mom would have never gone into a high end grocery store. It was always Food Lion, Wal-Mart or a mom & pop place.

I even cloned a brew that I love (but is 10-12 bucks a 4 pack) and it cost about 10 bucks a 6 pack. Plus I made 5 gallons of 12% cider for about $40 - tastes great and nothing like it can be purchased.

I make/grow food at home because I enjoy doing it. If I save money, thats nice but I don't expect that my veggie garden is saving me any money (even though everything was started from seed). Still fun to do though!

Cooking is an easy skill to learn. Seriously, it shouldn't take that long and you shouldn't start with, "Oh my god, the picture with this 37-ingredient recipe looks so good I'm going to try it."

I have a recipe that I make about once a week. It costs about $5, makes enough for dinner and lunch for my girlfriend and me, and only takes about 15 minutes start to finish. To get the same thing at a restaurant in my neighborhood, it would take at least 30 minutes from the time I leave my place until the food is in front of me. It'd also be about the same to get it delivered, plus cost more. It's also just about my favorite thing in the world to eat. I would make it twice a week if I didn't think my girlfriend would kill me.

Everyone in the world has to eat, it's a pretty good skill to learn, and it's only as difficult as you make it.

Good point about soup. Also, stock is using something you might ordinarily throw away: bones and the little bits of meat stuck to them. People used to take their stale bread and make croutons, migas, or even just bread crumbs for fillers and coatings. Now people throw away their bread and buy these things.

The crouton thing reminds me of another thing that people spend far more on than it takes to make: salad dressing. Why spend $5-$7 or so on a bottle of vinaigrette that's nowhere near as good as what I make myself. I'm going to use organic extra virgin olive oil and good vinegar. The store bought stuff will have canola or soy oil, thickeners, preservatives and sweeteners. Mine will be better for me and better tasting as well as cheaper.

1 can refried beans
1 can black beans, drained
2-4 cups chicken broth (depending on how thin you like your soup)
1/4 cup bell peppers, diced and fried

Voila. You have my famous refried bean soup and it's amazing. :) I'll give you the recipe for my Spicy Thai Chicken Noodle Soup too, if you'd like.

This is probably not the official answer, but my answer for every single one of these mushiness problems is "freeze/refrigerate without it just add that part when you reheat it."

"A" for effort. So, maybe some are cheaper or better. If time is available.

But tastes... Alas, I didn't really get to cheaper/better because of the six four are things I would not buy (actually, three are things I would not pick up a free sample of) and a fifth - jam - is, well, extremely time-consuming even if you have the time. Which I do, but would rather spend reading.

I make my own yogurt all the time, and it's incredibly easy. I make mine in individual serving cups and I add powdered milk to the mix to get a custard (spoon) consistency, so it's ready to eat, no straining necessary.

And it doesn't require any special equipment or anything, so it's probably worth trying if you're interested at all.

Some of us dislike cooking. And that is okay.

I didn't learn to cook until I was 24 and married, and then only with a lot of encouragement from my husband. I have always been a "bad cook." The kind of person who can scorch a pan attempting to boil water, and burn the hell out of chili trying to simply reheat it. I absolutely promise that cooking IS learnable!

For me, it took very clear explanations of what I was doing AND WHY ... I'm very directions and specificity oriented. :) Really good for me was "On Food and Cooking" by Harold McGee which helped me understand the whys and "How to Cook without a Book" which I'm not sure of the author of but made me more confident going "off-recipe" and improvising.

I still can't make a white sauce to save my life, but I'm considered pretty good now and people ask for my food. Although I still need work on the cosmetic end ... learning to cook didn't really overcome the clumsy, so my presentation is usually pretty basic. :)

Stick to simple soups. I find broths to be easier than chowders. Chicken noodle is really as simple as throwing veggies in a pot, cooking them in broth until they're tender, throwing in some noodles and waiting until those are done. I don't make chicken noodle much, though, cause I haven't figured out how to freeze/store it without the noodles absorbing more broth (and then becoming mushy). I prefer chowders because they freeze better. I make a mean chicken and corn chowder.

@JGKojak:
Now I picture in my head Heston standing before the remaisn of the statue of liberty on the seashore shaking his fist and going
"Why didn't I read the article on the consumerist about how to make my own bagels. Damn you!"

Most people don't even think you can make marshmallows from scratch.

"How do you make marshmallows? From other Marshmallows?"

@Eyebrows McGee (on Twitter: LPetelle):
Alton Brown Ala Good Eats gave me my own cottage cheese recipe but I doubt it changes the price much. However, it tastes worlds better than store bought cottage cheese which makes up for any possible difference in price.
[www.foodnetwork.com]

Btw if you are a foodie or want to make things from scratch (his pancake mix is awesome) Good Eats is a show to make some time for.

@pecan 3.14159265: There's an inverse relationship between healthy and taste better. Also, a lot of the people that "cook everything from scratch" are accustomed to the taste and have a different measuring stick when it comes to what is flavorful and taste better.

You'll be thanking her for this article when the apocolypse comes and you get hungry for a bagel.

This used to be my problem until I made friends with a chef ... who can tell me where to locally source ALL KINDS OF CRAZY STUFF! (And I'm in Peoria, 120,000 people city, 300,000 metro.) There are a lot of food service places that also sell directly to the public.

(And my flatbreads kinda suck too. I have a neighbor who's really good at them but I always burn them.)

I'd make my own jam if I had the fruit for free and a lot of storage space.

Making yourself is good if you have some skill, or if the recipe is foolproof. Otherwise, if you count the waste of screwups, it might not be a good deal.

Also, count your time in the 'cost'. If you -enjoy- cooking, then it's a hobby and the time isn't wasted. If you are doing it only to save money, think about what you could do with your time instead.

I made bagels this weekend, they absolutely rock. You can get a little spendy with them if you want to though. You need a high protein flour to really do them right, and unless you're good friends with a pizzeria owner, getting your hands on some can be a challenge. Then of course to really do bagels right, you need some malt syrup - and then what are bagels without some smoked salmon?

You know what's really inexpensive to make? Hummus. I picked up a 5 pound bag of dried garbonzos at an Indian market really cheap. Soak a few cups of beans overnight, boil for half an hour - add some tahini, lemon juice, garlic, salt and lots of olive oil and give it good spin in the processor.

I make my own pitas too, but I haven't quite perfected those.

[www.foodnetwork.com]

But certain things like saltines, yeah, they are cheaper because they've perfected the machinery that makes them as cheap as they can with the least amount of work possible.

Now if you grow your own stuff, that's where you'll save some cash, depending on how crazy you get into it all.

Incidentally, my mom made us granola cereal growing up -- oats, canola oil, honey, and wheat germ, baked in a slow oven. (Plus extras if you want them -- raisins, etc.) Healthy to the extreme and pretty damn cheap. The only store-bought cereal we were allowed was Cheerios and only when the granola ran out because mom, like, had the flu. Not only was it healthy and filling, but I absolutely can't eat anything sweeter than Cheerios or Rice Krispies for breakfast because they strike me as cloyingly, unnaturally sweet.

As for jam, it's sometimes promoted as something to do with fruit at the end of its life, but I find making a fruit syrup for pancakes (or pastry) is easier and cheaper. But then we're talking a pint of strawberries going bad, not a bushel of Meyer lemons. :)

(Speaking of pancakes, making your own pancake mix is DEFINITELY cheaper and can be much healthier.)

My neighbors soak fruit bits in brandy when they have lots of extra fruit. That's also tasty.

I want to try the yoghurt recipe now ... but it would probably gross out my husband.

I need cooking skills.

I have a giant bag of granola, and while I've learned my lesson (it's too big for one person to consume) I've incorporated it into so many things, including parfaits and cookies. I even eat it as a substitute for my cereal (I just add more milk because it's too sweet).

I rarely cook, as I'm not the cook in my household, but I always like to try different things from scratch. Something simple, but amazing to make at home is your own butter. Very tasty!