Convenience foods you used to buy

[MissAmy]

Any sort of pasta sauce and salad dressings top my list. When I was growing up, I could never figure out why I liked the salad dressing in nice restaurants so much better than the salad dressing we had at home. Well, DUH! I finally realized that those restuarants were making their own salad dressing and that's why it was better! I convinced my mother to let me start playing around with salad dressing, but my repertoire was pretty limited to basic vinaigrette until I started cooking professionally, where I learned to make all the mayo-based ones as well. I can't imagine buying that horrid dressing in the jar. It all tastes like pure sugar, oil, and chemical flavoring to me. Gack!

I haven't bought a jar of pasta sauce in several years, but I used to all the time back at boarding school and in college. Once I made my own bolognese for the first time, there was no looking back.

Non-fresh (ie, canned or frozen) veggies. Again, growing up I could never figure out why I hated vegetables so much until I started eating more fresh ones. Now I can't figure out why so many people claim to hate veggies!

Pie crust - I used to swear by those Pilsbury frozen crusts thinking a real pie crust would be too challenging until I made my own for the first time. I haven't bought a pie crust in ages.

I have a question for all of you who claim to exclusively bake your own bread and make your own pasta - WHERE do you find the time?! I CAN make my own bread and pasta, but the last thing I'm gonna do after working all day is haul out the pasta machine and start kneading dough. How do ya'll manage that?

[fiftydollars]

hamburger helper

[fiftydollars]

I have a question for all of you who claim to exclusively bake your own bread and make your own pasta - WHERE do you find the time?! I CAN make my own bread and pasta, but the last thing I'm gonna do after working all day is haul out the pasta machine and start kneading dough. How do ya'll manage that?

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I would certainly not be one to claim that I bake all of my bread and I definitely do not make all of my pasta (just the fresh pasta. dry pasta is a far more complicated affair and one that I will happily leave to the right Italians). But I make most of it.

Baking bread is a lot about waiting for things... like proofing, retarding, etc., so it's easy to work it into my schedule. I'm not a great bread baker, yet, so I need all the practice I can get.The more you do it, the better and faster you get at it. At least that's what I hope anyway...

Fresh pasta, on the other hand, is just way too easy to make and the results are superior to anything I can get at even the better Italian delis or pasta places in this area. Once you have it down you can make a pound or two of linguine or tagliatelle in under an hour. That's fast enough for me.

You just have to love it and want to do it. Equipment doesn't hurt, either.

[Chris Amirault]

Bacon and sausage.

[FabulousFoodBabe]

Only on eGullet are things like roasted coffee beans, bacon and sausage, called "convenience foods"! Gotta love this place!

Fabby,

whose Nonna Tonetta taught her to always fry the tomato paste in the hot spot. I miss her!

[annanstee]

Hmm,

Certainly pasta sauce, salad dressing and ice cream ( I got an icecream maker recently).

[H. du Bois]

Applesauce.

Never bought bottled salad dressing, always made it. It's the one item that, when faced with a bottle of glop at someone else's table, almost makes me want to cry.

[David McDuff]

- Pasta sauce of any type, whether tomato, stock, cream or oil-based. I can't remember the last time I bought a pre-prepared jar, commercial or "gourmet," of any of the above.

- Soups and stocks.

- Frozen gnocchi. As a cyclist and occasional carb-loader, there was a time when this was a staple. Since experimenting with various recipes for potato, spinach, ricotta and goat cheese-based gnocchi, I've never gone back to packaged versions.

[Kris]

I've since added more "scratch" items to my repertoire:

Brownies (won't go back to the boxed ones - I can taste the chemicals now)

Pasta (tastes worlds better than the boxed stuff)

piecrust

[MarketStEl]

Updating what I posted well over a year ago:

Pasta sauce is one of those items in the former category for me--I've never bought pasta sauce in a jar.  However:  I have yet to make it from fresh tomatoes.  (Shrimp Creole, on the other hand, I have.)

Hmmmm...mayo.  I know there are recipes in Joy of Cooking for mayonnaise and blender mayonnaise.  I have an immersion blender.  Maybe I should give it a workout on this condiment sometime.  (I use it to make a really tasty blue cheese dip.)

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I've now made both tomato sauce and mayo from scratch.

My days of making large batches of tomato sauce may or may not be over, depending on whether I get and accept a job offer from the software firm in Yardley where I interviewed today. My source of copious quantities of lovely Jersey tomatoes vanished along with my job at Widener, but I found out today that the woman who will be my boss should I get and take a job offer at Activant grows lots on her Bucks County property. (I've already gotten an offer from another firm in a Trenton-area location that would require my buying a car, which is one of the reasons I didn't just jump at the offer yet.)

Making one's own mayo is very easy, but I don't use it often enough to make it all that much.

[eskay]

This is a good topic, it's really interesting to see the range of people and how deep down the rabbit hole they've gone

As for me: Tomato sauce. Soup. Salad dressing.

Recently made chicken stock for the first time, now THAT was a revelation. (I know, I know, you can all say "I told you so")

Experimented with baking my own bread for a while a month or 2 ago, but the results weren't worth the significant time investment. I'll try again when a) I don't have such a weird schedule and/or b) I get something pot-like and large enough and heavy enough to try the no knead bread recipe.

[et alors]

mine are the usual-- vinaigrettes, bread, stocks, etc... but marrying a French man has opened my eyes. Not only did he make all our salad dressing, he did't understand why I would buy mayonnaise. He whips it up! It kinda blew my mind the first time I saw it.

Of course, now that I mention it, elsewhere on Egullet... http://forums.egullet.org/index.php?showtopic=69129

Edited November 18, 2007 by et alors (log)

[Susie Q]

bread crumbs... except I still buy panko

salad dressings

pancake mix....finally found a scratch recipe I like

Edited November 23, 2007 by Susie Q (log)

[bwv544]

stock, pita, marshmallows, "char siu" (i can't get over the fact that to me it sounds like "cha shao",) baba ganoush...

there's a huge list of more stuff i'd like to make on my own, but that i haven't found the time/space to explore. that's the issue with a bunch of college roommates sharing one fridge.

[miladyinsanity]

stock, pita, marshmallows, "char siu" (i can't get over the fact that to me it sounds like "cha shao",) baba ganoush...

there's a huge list of more stuff i'd like to make on my own, but that i haven't found the time/space to explore.  that's the issue with a bunch of college roommates sharing one fridge.

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Cha Shao and Char Siu are both correct, it's just that Cha Shao is Mandarin, and Char Siu is Cantonese *I think*.