If you haven’t noticed, your portions are shrinking while your grocery bills (and restaurant tabs) continue to grow. We won’t stand for this, will we?! Cooking good food from scratch is a great way to make those dimes stretch more!
Beef Jerky
Love beef jerky? It’s a great snack, but it’s not a cheap snack. You can make your big batch of beef jerky at home pretty easily. You don’t even need a dehydrator (even though that makes it easier).
Frozen Burritos
Need a quick and easy breakfast or lunch on the go? Instead of spending money on store-bought frozen burritos (probably high in sodium), you can easily make big batches. Use veggies, eggs, meat, beans, and rice to make a large batch and then freeze them individually.
Granola
Buy some oats. Sweeten them up. Chop and toss in nuts of your choosing. Mix in some fruit if that’s your style. Toss with oil and bake. Voila, granola! Hear me out: It’s high time for a homemade granola revolution. So put on your hiking boots, let your hair grow, and start making your own granola like it’s 1969 again.
Bread
Making bread hasn’t been this cool since 90s-era hip-hop was all the rage. Bread is an essential pillar of most peoples’ food pyramid, so why not learn to make it yourself? Not only can you save money, but your brand of bread could taste way better than the generic, pre-bagged grocery store fare.
Hummus
Smashed chickpeas, tahini, lemon juice, spices. That is the extent of ingredients in one homemade hummus recipe. That’s it. So, considering that a modest tub of Sabra ain’t cheap, what is your excuse for not making your own hummus?
Salad Dressing
Many homemade dressing recipes are far less complicated than you probably assume. A simple combination of olive oil, balsamic glaze, and lemon juice with salt and pepper makes a Caprese salad pop. More seasoned kitchen hands might even venture to make Caesar and other beloved salad dressings from scratch.
Ground-Beef Based Dishes
Ground beef is simple to season and cook in large batches. One innovative chef and saver has found that making large batches of chili, sloppy Joe’s, and other ground beef-based dishes from scratch is simple, delicious, and cost-effective.
Related: 60+ Ground Beef Recipes For Delicious Dinners
Dessert
Once you start baking your own desserts, you’ll find that shoppers pay an outrageously high price to satisfy their sweet teeth. If you can find your way around an oven, baking your own desserts from scratch is the thrifty move.
Related: 15 Tasty Mason Jar Desserts To Try
Indian Cuisine
One former serial eater-outer noticed that the price of restaurants’ Indian cuisine was high, so they tried whipping up various Indian dishes at home. They found that, while many Indian meals are pretty complex, butter chicken and tikka masala were easy enough to cook regularly. Remember the homemade naan, too.
Mexican Food
Mexican cuisine offers some of the easiest, most dollar-stretching dishes known to humankind. Sorry Chipotle (and even more so, your local mom-and-pop Mexican restaurant), but most Mexican dishes are ones you should be cooking from scratch.
If you regularly pay someone else to cook your fajitas, you should consider your financial decisions.
Related: 60 Delicious Recipe Ideas For Mexican Dinner
Smoothies
It’s about time we start putting Jamba Juice and the Columbo Crime Family in the same sentence. They’re both rackets of the highest order, after all. John Gotti? Meet Smoothie King.
If you’re getting your smoothies from anywhere other than your own blender, you’re paying a premium for something you could easily make from scratch.
Any Dish That You Consume Regularly
If you find yourself eating or drinking anything regularly, consider whether it is something you could be making yourself.
Remember that restaurants and food manufacturing (for lack of a better term) are for-profit businesses. So you aren’t just paying for the food. You’re also paying for the labor and overhead that goes into the food.
More items are readymade for from-scratch cooking. A quick search shows that there are many easy recipes that can “copy-cat” your favorite restaurant recipes.
If you have the time and will to make food from scratch, even some of the time, you’ll save money and gain a cool cheap new hobby.
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This thread inspired this post.
