Easy Food to Cook from Scratch

by Mary Ann Romans | More from this Blogger

If you want to get the best bang for your buck when it comes to cooking from scratch, go after those items that are over inflated at the grocery store. A few simple ingredients, and you can shave 50 percent or more off of the cost of making these meals and food items.

Concentrate your effort here to reap the biggest rewards in savings.

Cream Soups

Store-bought cream soups are usually laden with all sorts of extra salt, fat, preservatives and chemical flavor enhancers. Homemade cream soups are easy to make, better tasting and cheaper than the store bought brands. Making a cream soup is just a matter of cooking together butter, milk and salt, and then adding other ingredients to make the particular kind of cream soup, such as chicken stock for cream of chicken soup or chopped mushrooms for cream of mushroom soup.

Rotisserie Chicken

These store bought already cooked chickens are so convenient that many magazines suggest purchasing, shredding the meat and using it in recipes. But you will pay for all of that convenience. A better bet is to purchase a roasting chicken on sale (79-99 cents a pound), season it and pop it in the oven. It takes about five minutes to do this. You'll get a lot more chicken for your money.

Bread and Pizza Dough

A bread machine makes it easy to produce loaf after loaf of fresh bread, sans preservatives. Or make more than one loaf at a time the old fashioned way. You can expect to spend under a dollar for a home made loaf as opposed to three or even four dollars for a store bought loaf. Some bread machines will allow you to make dough for pizza or rolls as well.

Breakfast Foods

Cereal seems to be worth it weight in gold, almost literally. For a few ounces that lasts about one morning in my house and still leaves everyone hungry by mid morning, you can expect to pay $4. Make your own healthy breakfast for at least a third of the cost, and this adds up over the course of a month. Oatmeal (or baked oatmeal), eggs, pancakes, muffins and more all cost less than cereal, pop tarts and other convenience breakfast foods.

Mary Ann Romans writes about everything related to saving money in the Frugal Blog, creating a home in the Home Blog, caring for little ones in the Baby Blog and now relationships in the Marriage Blog. You can read more of her articles by clicking here or subscribe to the blog using the subscription box on the right.

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FreeCoupons

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Learn more about Mary Ann Romans

Mary Ann Romans is a freelance writer, online content manager, wife and mother of three children. She lives in Pennsylvania in the middle of the woods but close enough to Target and Home Depot.

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