My regular readers know of my penchant for cooking from scratch as much as possible. Not all of my attempts to create scratch versions of store-bought foods and restaurant dishes are successful, but in general scratch recipes taste better, and are healthier, and more satisfying. Here are some examples of scratch substitutes that we enjoy and use regularly:
Coffee and tea mixes
Homemade spice blends
Harvest Grain and Nut Pancakes
Bread mixes for my bread machine
Missouri Mix - an all-purpose baking mix which is much less expensive than commercial mixes, and can be used for cakes, cookies, biscuits, breads, muffins, and pancakes.
Baking regularly can be simplified and made easy by mixing dry ingredients for your favorite recipes ahead of time whenever possible. For example, because my husband loves cornbread (a lot), and I try to make it for him at least once a week, I made my own cornbread mix by simply mixing up the dry ingredients for one batch of our favorite cornbread, and then measuring the volume with dry measures. I then assembled a quadruple batch (enough for one month), mixed it very well to ensure that all ingredients were well-combined, and transferred it to a storage container. I labeled it with the other ingredients needed, and the baking time and temperature, so that I wouldn’t even need to look up the recipe.
Now I can whip up cornbread for my sweet husband in just a few minutes, and this makes him very happy. The man is a cornbread fiend. Once, when we were dating, I found him in the kitchen, eating a box of dry Jiffy mix with a spoon. I’m serious.
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