> I’ve seen £5 for a tube of normal toothpaste and £6 for a tiny Pizza that is sometimes available for £3. How people on modest salaries survive I don’t know.
I took up cooking from scratch as a hobby a couple of decades ago. I highly recommend it.
After a bit of a learning curve, it's cheaper, tastier. and better for you than highly processed foodlike substances.
Firstly cooking from scratch is absolutely a life skill and nominally cheaper.
But food is also a class issue. Those with time to spare (ie rich) can indulge in for example "stuffing a mushroom" - Shirley Conran famously recanted twenty years of writing cookery lifestyle books exhorting women to become corden bleu cooks by saying life was to short to stuff a mushroom - and that is kind of my point.
I mean Gordon bloody Ramsey does not prepare food the way he tells you to in his cookbooks - it's too slow and inefficient.
All the recipies I love to cook - getting the temperature of the linguini just right before pouring over eggs and pecorino for carbonara for instance - is frankly, a nightmare nutrition wise (even if it's a hit kid wise) and a plate of chicken breast and five different veg and fruit for after is waaaay better - but how many recipients books will do that, how many blog posts extoll boiled peas.
Maybe we would learn from the staff of life - Bread. In the first weeks of lockdown, flour vanished from shelves - obviously because of a shortage but mostly because flour was diverted from domestic use to go to actual bakers and factories who could efficiently mass produce the staple of life that was then shipped to our supermarket shelves to eat. Yes there were bakers running triple shifts, logistic planners sleeping in the office and HVV drivers going every which way. But in the end feeding millions is like Gorden Ramsey says - if you do it like the instagram post says, you are doing it wrong
> Firstly cooking from scratch is absolutely a life skill and nominally cheaper.
> But food is also a class issue.
If we put these two beliefs together (and I think we're of similar minds), I think we should amend the first to be "meal planning and preparation is a life skill". Unfortunately the cooking craze over the past few decades has done nothing to improve, let alone restore, that life skill.
> I mean Gordon bloody Ramsey does not prepare food the way he tells you to in his cookbooks - it's too slow and inefficient.
Here I disagree. Someone like Gordon Ramsey possesses incredible knife and other preparatory and cooking skills. To use an analogy, he may not run a sub 4 minute mile every time he goes for a run, but even his leisurely runs would exhibit abilities that would seem extraordinary yet appear effortless on his part to most people.
That said, as a successful restaurateur Ramsey likely has meal planning skills at least as impeccable as his culinary skills. And meal planning is the most critical aspect to successful, economical home cooking. People seem to think the reason for failure is difficulty in preparation and cooking, thus the popularity of slow cookers, instant pots, etc. But such gadgets address the wrong set of problems. (The emphasis on recipes is misplaced for similar reasons.)
FWIW, I have horrible meal planning skills. Developing a good sense for how to mix and match ingredients is one important aspect; among other reasons, so you can reuse ingredients across multiple meals in a week. Relatedly, learning specific styles of cuisines and their rules also helps--French, Spanish, and Italian cooking all commonly use what in Spanish-influenced cuisine is called a sofrito. But there are many other dimensions to meal planning.
On that note, anyone know of good meal planning books or resources?
I bought a couple of the Budget Bytes (https://shop.budgetbytes.com) meal plans a while back. They're not fantastic if you're outside of North America, but I was able to make them work. Haute cuisine it ain't, but if you're looking for a starting point I recommend them.
I also recommend starting to put your favourite recipes into a recipe app (I use Paprika, available on most platforms). Even add simple stuff like Yogurt and Fruit Breakfast. Then you can use the app's built-in meal planner and grocery list generator.
If you're not shy of a few swear words, Nat's What I Reckon has some great recipes that are straightforward. Here's link to his bolognese - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sw_Ze9zIafM
I took up cooking from scratch as a hobby a couple of decades ago. I highly recommend it.
After a bit of a learning curve, it's cheaper, tastier. and better for you than highly processed foodlike substances.