Jff-what Is Your Idea of Cooking?

We are about 50 -50 in this household, I bake from scratch when I have time ( it is both cheaper and healthier) but I also use boxed stuff or jarred sauces to save time. I will say that some things made me quite spoiled, now that I have started making brown rice with Real brown rice, even though it takes about 30 to 45 minutes the taste is so much better than the minute stuff, I cannot see myself ever going back.

Almost all of my meals are from scratch, as I have to watch my sodium levels and have noticed that there is some really bad stuff in pre-packaged food.

Telling my husband to bring something home! Used to do a combo, but that was when I was younger and more ambitious.

I cook everyday, from scratch.
That is cooking, to me.

The most expensive food you will buy is food prepared by a chef. Example: Rice-a-Roni, mac and cheese, Whopper, etc

I make 90% of my meals from scratch. I did that when I had just my wife and I. I did it all the way through 8 kids and still do it now when its just my wife and I again.

I learned how to make gravy and never buy pre-made gravy unless they are almost giving it away. The 10% of premade foods I use are cream of mushroom soup, cream of chicken soup, canned beans or corn, peanut butter, jams and jellies or tuna.

Cooking isn't that difficult. Go to allrecipes.com for recipes and videos. It will help you a lot.

Good luck to you and yours.

I cook pretty much all of our meals from scratch. I don't ever use the boxed stuff. Ever. I do use jarred spaghetti sauce most of the time. I don't make my own pastas. But pretty much everything else is made from scratch. It is so much healthier. Not necessarily cheaper, but we are willing to pay the price for all the ingredients. I can't stand the idea of using the boxed stuff. To me, it isn't real food, most of the time.

Pretty much everything is from scratch here. It wasn't always this way. But now I have decent kitchen with enough space to cook in, I am at home all day every day, and we also started getting all our produce from a food co-op last year and I hate to see the produce go to waste. All those things have led me to become a lot more ambitious in the kitchen. On Fridays I am usually worn out from the long week, and that is generally the day of the week that I will go to packaged food.

Wow - so many of you cook from scratch!! I wish I could do that. Well, OK, maybe I CAN, but I don't really have the motivation. If I stir fry some fresh veggies and put them over rice (that came out of a box) that's a pretty good meal over here! We're big Hamburger Helper fans over. Maybe I need an intervention...

I cook all the time and actually love it! I will sometime's buy mac and cheese in the box, only when I don't have time to make it from scratch. I also don't buy frozen cooked food's. My kid's love home cooked meals, especially when I get them involved in the kitchen. You should see our house during the holidays! But then again, I don't work and if I did I would probably have to do take-out. But the thing that sort'a keeps me from boxed, processed, and frozen food's are the preservative's and sodium. The same for take out! For some reason we can't eat out, we all get upset stomach's. Now, I DO buy frozen veggie's when their not in season. But since you make the main meal part like meat's then I don't think there's anything wrong with it...Atleast your cooking something!
Hope you have a wonderful weekend!

I had to laugh at my daughter the other day, ( shes 35)....she says to me, did you know that it only takes a couple hours to make spag. sauce from scratch. All you have to do is chop this, add this, simmer this and that, add more of this etc.......I stated laughing and looked at her and said....LOL, they have that same recipie on asile 5 at the store and all I have to do is open the jar and heat it up. Silly girl.

I do a combination. Don't beat yourself up for not making everything from scratch. Have you ever seen Semi Homemade with Sandra Lee? That lady made an empire out of pulling together boxes, cans, and packets. I do a lot of quick cook meals where a lot of it is homemade, but some helpers. Every now and then, I'll get a wild hair to learn how to make something on my own and then I have that homemade weapon in the arsenal. But I am not a slave to scratch cooking. Cooking should be fun, not a chore.

I cook almost everything from scratch! My son actually said tonight during dinner that I was the "BEST IRON CHEF IN AMERICA!" I just love to cook and love slicing, dicing and chopping food for a meal. I also grow a large garden and use as much as I can in my cooking along with freshly picked herbs every day. I'll admit though that I've never made my own homemade pasta from scratch, I use boxed :(

I love cooking. I try to cook everything from scratch. Everything!!! My mom cooked from boxes a lot - Rice-A-Roni and Hamburger Helper. She did not do it all the time but when I first started cooking I also cooked this way. I have always gotten headaches my entire life and one day I realized it may be what I am eating. I stopped eating all processed and pre-prepared foods and I totally stopped getting headaches/migraines. I will never go back! They ALL contain MSG or MSG-like ingredients and they all have preservatives and too much salt and ingredients I cannot pronounce. I make my own chicken broth, my own salad dressing, my own BBQ sauce, my own brownies, my own pudding, the list goes on and on. I've now turned into quite the food snob, haha. It's more time consuming but so worth it! I feel so much better and I feel like my family is eating much healthier. I used to feel stuffed up a lot and that has totally gone away. I thought it was allergies. I used to feel achy when I woke up and that has gone away. I used to have puffiness under my eyes and that has gone away. I also used to feel spacey and out of it some days and I never feel like that anymore. It's amazing. I would never have known if I hadn't started making everything from scratch.

I *hate* cooking.
That said, I cook from scratch about 85% of the time. No matter how much I hate cooking, my family's health is worth the effort.

I make pretty much everything from scratch - it doesn't really take much longer than making rice-a-roni or mac n cheese from a box

When we went dairy, and then gluten free, I had to give up my "box" cooking. It was one of the best things that ever happened for our family (and I cried for the first several weeks, literally). It was so hard at first.

One of the main problems with box food is the numerous ingredients that most people would be hard pressed to pronounce or spell correctly. If your grandma wouldn't know what to do with it it's probably not that great for your family.

Can't stand "franken-food" anymore.

I do use canned tomato sauce, much to my Sicilian mother-in-law's chagrin. :P

The only marinara sauve my family will eat is my home made one. I make my own twice baked potatoes, veggies, etc.

I also use the RIce a Roni and Knorr mixes.

I cook from scratch every day and I rarely purchase foods that are in a box or a can. I DO, however, have a little craving now and again for beer cheese soup and mine never turns out well from scratch. So, I buy it in a mix or a pint of soup from my favorite local restaurant.

Happy cooking!

I do a mix of both. Mostly because I have three starving children in between each meal (ok, so they claim they are starving I KNOW they are fine) and sometimes using a packaged meal is just so much easier!

I make almost everything from scratch. Dont get me wrong, we still have our pancake or cereal night when i am exhausted :)

Much healthier and cheaper to make your own food most of the time but it does take longer. I've always done this as much as possible, especially when I wasn't working. A crockpot helps. You have to choose some dishes, find simple recipes, make a list and buy the ingredients - enough for a few meals - then think it through the nite before or early that morning at the latest and do what needs to be done. Get the kids to help when you can. Anybody can learn to cook! You don't have to be fancy. It is just so much healther and cheaper.

I can cook just about anything from scratch but often have to go to more convenient foods for the sake of time. I'm very picky about what I will serve my family out of a box. So I'll do quick cooking rice for a fast weeknight meal when I don't have an hour to wait for real rice, but it's still B. - nothing with sauces or seasonings. If I make mac and cheese from a box it's Annie's or Nature's Promise. There's a Ragu sauce that I use for pizza that has no added sugar or artificial sweeteners in it - it just tastes like tomatoes and spices, the way it should. If I can't find that, I make a quick sauce from canned crushed tomatoes and seasonings. If I get a lot of tomatoes in the garden I make and jar my own and use that too. I bake a lot so I use a lot of mixes for cakes and brownies. I also use mixes for pancakes and waffles, and we do a lot of canned soups for lunches (I make corn chowder and beef stew from scratch pretty regularly and turkey soup after Thanksgiving but otherwise I don't have the patience).

I'd like to be one of those people who makes everything from scratch but with 4 kids and both of us working FT, it's just not happening right now so for quick foods, I choose the healthiest, best quality stuff that we can afford.

Haven't read your answers yet but for us, pretty much everything I make is from scratch - for a few reasons. First, I'm very sensitive to food additives, preservatives & artificial flavors & colors - most of them give me BIG headaches. My husband and daughter both have acid reflux (genetic) and whenever they "cheat" and eat overly processed foods with artificial ingredients (like many boxed rice mixes) their reflux acts up. My husband also can't have garlic - and that's in EVERYTHING. So I make some kind of protein (chicken, fish, shrimp, pork, beef, lamb) and most of the time during the summer months just two veggies - mixed salad with lots of tomatoes & veggies (I make all my salad dressings from scratch - bottled ones are loaded with junk) and maybe corn or another cold salad.
I have found only one jarred tomato sauce that doesn't have garlic and I use that for pasta. We don't eat a lot of processed lunch meats either - mostly Boar's Head turkey & ham. I do buy sliced bread - usually potato or wheat.

I cook almost everything from scratch. I make refried beans, spaghetti sauce, flavored rice, mac & cheese, gravy, bread, tortillas, french fries, crackers, and more.

I grow my own tomatoes so a lot of my spaghetti and pizza sauces are made from my own tomatoes too.

I want to make my own noodles, but my husband says to just buy them since it is easier, cheap, and they aren't too unhealthy.

I do keep a box or two of Hamburger Helper in the house for the nights that I need something quick and easy. That only happens about twice a month though.

I never liked cooking until I started cooking from scratch a few years ago. Now I love to cook, and my family says the food tastes better now too.

i have never cooked anything from scratch. we mostly grill our meat, steam veggies and i use the box/bag side rice/pasta dishes. we also eat a fresh salad every night. i guess that is scratch since i use a saladmaster to chop everything and don't buy it prebagged. i rarely make/buy desserts. i feel like we get a good mix of fresh and "fake" since i own a biz and work full time. =)

Lots of the time I do cook from scratch but we're leaving for the beach tomorrow morning for a week so tonight it's frozen burgers and frozen french fries!

I cook from scratch. I don't like processed food and will never eat it unless I am so busy I cannot take 30 minutes to cook. It is really easy if you find some basic recipes and preplan. I have the staples on hand and plan my week in advance. Then the preparation is all I need to do each morning/evening.

No. I work 3 part time jobs and I understand how important it is for kids to stay busy and active so we don't have a lot of home time. I make HB helper several times per week, we eat great value mac and cheese a couple of times per week sometimes we eat cheap hot dogs with it.

I spend about $40 per week of groceries and we eat most of the time at home. I keep fresh fruit, 100% fruit juice, and chocolate milk on hand all the time. We eat like normal people not like health conscious wealthy people. We can't afford to buy fresh food and cook it.

My splurge is a 6 pack of 20 oz.bottles of Dr. Pepper. They last me a couple of weeks. It's too hot to bake too so I sometimes will buy the cupcakes from Walmart bakery with the shipped frosting instead of butter cream.

I cook from scratch because my husband and I decided it was the healthiest for our kids.

I buy pizza about once a month.

I never cook anything out of a box...but boy would I like too!! Many many nights I am so tired and I really don't want to cook, but it is now just a habit to do it. I do have to start dinner at 4:30pm if I want it on the table by 6:00pm, it does take a lot longer!

Hi T.---Definitely from scratch. It's healthiest and really doesn't have to be hard or take a lot of time. Some great sources of recipes:
www.eatingwell.com
www.vegetariantimes.com

Feel free to contact me and I would be happy to share tips and recipes. Have fun with cooking. It is an adventure. Be well...D.