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My husband always commented that he found it ridiculous that his parents grew potatoes and onions when they were so inexpensive at the store. Then again, guess who's chore it was to weed the garden!

I totally agree about the puff pastry and the artichoke hearts. Also, I'm not above using frozen pearl onions - cleaning the fresh ones is such a pain. I rarely use frozen spinach, though.

Sushi. It always ends up being cheaper and tastier (and neater) when I buy it.

stock.

Puff pastry for me, too. Making it at home is just not worth the hassle.

definitely stock, and I agree on sushi. I make it, and even if it's good and pretty, it's just too expensive and too time consuming. mmmm. . . now I want some sushi.

Ohh, snorri, I'm with you. When I make black bean soup, it's never what I need it to be. Easier to order in a restaurant.

stock is just a giant pain to make. I sometimes make soup for us to eat but I am w finsfan I always have canned soup in the pantry.

pasta, phyllo, puff pastry

Pasta
Phyllo/puff pastry

But stock? Really? I've only recently started making it, and that was because I thought it better than throwing that stuff away; chicken carcass from roast chicken, the tops to various greens like beets or carrots and other random veggies lying around on their last legs.

Put all in pot, cover with water, wait a few hours. The stock always comes out better than whatever organic stock I buy in a box, costs practically nothing considering I was going to junk the chicken and veggie scraps. I said to myself that I'd never go back to buying stock because what I can make cheaply always tastes better.

Was surprised to see stock on this list.

yogurt!

Totally disagree about the stock. It's fun to make, tastes way better home made, and it makes my whole apartment smell great while it bubbles away.

Curry paste

I agree with puff pastry, and though I tried to make a wild yeast sourdough starter, it didn't work. I've found that Buitoni refrigerated pesto sauce is as good as any I've ever made.

Roasted chicken - the $4-6 bucks for a big juicy one at the grocery store sure beats paying for a chicken, then prepping it and roasting it, etc.

Love.

just kidding.

@lawofmurphy, I'm with you on the bread. I'd bake bread every day, just for fun, if someone would eat it that fast for me. And the best thing is that I can have any shape and flavor I want, without running from store to store and finding out that they've sold out of caraway rye or baguettes for some mysterious reason.

And homemade pita bread is soooooo good.

My mother-in-law's eyeballs almost fell out when I told her that two days before Thanksgiving, I made bread and cornbread specifically to use it for stuffing.

Completely disagree about the stock! Not utilizing a whole chicken when you buy it to make stock in my mind is a waste of food (maybe I'm just too cheap to shell out 4.99 for a little container of organic stock when I already have a chicken).

Dinner rolls. I homemade dinner rolls for Thanksgiving this year and it wasn't worth it. The turned out too dense and not even as good as store bought rolls. Actually, any bread making is a waste of time for me. I live in Brooklyn, we have excellent bakeries for these sorts of things.

Indian food. I tried once. Never again.

Pasta, frozen veggies, veggie burgers, hot sauce and spinach.

@midgepingleton,

i make homemade rolls for the holidays, and they are divine. you're using the wrong recipe!

For me stock is something I rarely make- it's not the effort, it's not the taste, it's that I live alone and so I buy veggies and meat in smaller cuts and it's too hard to save up enough scraps to make a pot of stock. (I am thinking of getting a small chest freezer and that my change my mind as I can keep a bag of scraps frozen in it.)

I also buy frozen peas and corn off the cob, butter, yogurt, and I sometimes I buy bread, sometimes I make it myself.

cmtigger, i live alone and make excellent vegetable stock thusly: sweat a couple of onions and chopped garlic in some olive oil with salt, pepper, thyme, and red pepper flakes until transparent. add a tablespoon of nutritional yeast, cook a couple more minutes, add a handful of chopped parsley and a chopped carrot, cook a few more minutes, and add a couple of bay leaves and water to cover. simmer for half an hour, then strain. you will have a rich, delicious stock. the nutritional yeast is a tip i picked up from edward espe brown. it makes the stock nice and deep, not weird tasting at all.

oh, i forgot to add that when i have a place where i have room for a bread machine, i will probably start making my own bread (because then i will most likely not be living alone, so i won't have to worry as much about the bread getting stale).

I forgot one - pickled daikon radishes. I thought something had crawled into my fridge and DIED.

I didn't think about condiments but that isn't a bad point. We made our own ketchup once out of desperation, and while good, it's just not the same thing.

In my case: pasta. It's soo cheap and just way better than my attempt at homemade.

Pizza. I know it is rather easy to do but I feel like by the time I get around to finally finishing a pie, I just don't have the will to eat it. I would rather just go some where and get a good pie and relax.

It truly depends on how good you can cook/bake it yourself, and how much you enjoy doing so. I buy bakery bread (sourdough, brioche, ciabatta), yogurt, eat sushi/japanese food out. I like to roast my own pumpkin for pie, and I do like to make my own puff pastry.

Mayo! I'm one of the weird ones who prefers Miracle Whip over the real thing. Why waste a cup of olive oil for something that will go unfinished and perish at the end of the week, when you can buy a gigantic jar of fake-mayo that will last you months. (Or in my case....weeks.)

Miracle Whip is not entirely a purists' condiment, but even if I did prefer real mayo, I'd still buy it instead of painstakingly making it.

Pasta, whole berry cranberry sauce, orange extract and emulsions, puff pastry, and stock are some of the items I'll buy to have as back up for the real deal. While I try to make most of the aforementioned from scratch, sometimes life gets in the way and you need a helping hand.

Fried chicken...enough said.

i love to make bread. i'd like to try the pasta route but it's so easy to open a box.

Since there's no bakery nearby except for some chains that charge way too much for a loaf, baking bread has become both hobby and habit for me. If I was really pressed for time, I might buy a loaf (I haven't since the oven has been replaced, but something could happen) but I just can't justify regularly paying $6 for a loaf of bread when I can get a 25# bag of flour for about $10. And I can have any bread any time I want it, I'm not stuck with buying what they happen to have on hand that day.

As far as stock, I've always got some in the freezer. I often make mine in the crockpot, so it's not like I even have to babysit a pot on the stove. When I put away whatever leftovers there are from a chicken, the bones and bits go into the crockpot along with whatever else is going in there, and I turn it on and let it go until the next day. It doesn't take that much more work to put the stuff into the crockpot and add water than it does to throw it in the trash.

I guess part of it is that these are things that have become so ordinary to me, I don't have to think about them, I just do them. Throwing stock ingredients together after a meal is no more complicated to me than putting the leftovers away. If I seldom made stock and I was dealing with a recipe and reading instructions and trying to be precise, I can see how it might be more of a chore.

@db - you know, stock puzzles me the most on this list. I always make my stock in a slow cooker (other than prawn stock), have been doing this forever (have been talking about wonders of slow cooker stock/broth making forever, too:-)), and there is absolutely nothing easier than that. It requires no skill or effort whatsoever, nor does it take much time or real expense (if I buy bones for beef stock, it costs me about $2) - then again, if it's not a "natural" thing to do, it may probably seem like a bigger deal than it is. And it really isn't. On top of everything, I've never tried a store-bought stock that was as deep and flavourful as homemade (granted, I've only tried whatever my MIL buys, which may be not the best out there, but still).

Bread. Mostly because we're trying to stay as close to whole grains as possible and the only bread i've been successful with is white flour. If I could make a great 100% whole grain bread I'd totally do it.

Now, however, after reading dbcurrie's post I'm really yearning for some great sourdough! @dbcurrie, would you consider sharing the recipe? If so I'll write for the free starter. Then I just need to figure out what to do with it!

To put my 2 cents in on the stock issue, I really adore making beef stock. I love buying the bones, roasting the bones, painting the bones, simmering the bones (all w/veg of course), and lastly taking a gallon or so of the final stock and making espagnole sauce.

Forgive the rambling... I went on a beef stock, mother sauce and compound sauce rampage in the kitchen not too long ago. Had a blast! Took me all weekend, too!

@nightmoon, I don't have a real recipe for sourdough or pretty much any other everyday bread I make. Basically, once you have a starter established and you want to make some bread, you start feeding the little bit you've got stashed away, until it fills your container happily (I use jars that are about a pint or so).

At that point, I take out the majority of the starter, leaving maybe a tablespoon in the jar. I give that a litte feed and it goes back to the fridge for a nap until I need it again.

The stuff I scooped out goes into the bowl of my kitchenaid mixer and I add water and flour, maybe tripling or quadupling the amount I have. Keep in mind that none of this is measured, and I really don't think precision is important, because all you've got is flour and water, and it's just going to be more or less goopy. The looser it is, the faster it will rise, so if it's pretty lively, I tend to make a stiffer dough so it won't blow itself out of the container overnight.

The next day, I proceed to make bread using my usual haphazard methods. I add more water and flour to get the right consistency, and I knead it in the kitchenaid. I always add salt -- about a teaspoon. And I usually add some oil -- about a tablespoon or two -- but not always.

On average, I make a loaf of bread or a dozen dinnner rolls at a time, and use about 2 1/2 - 3 cups of flour to one cup of water. Since the sourdough is built in stages, the flour and water don't get measured at all, but I end up with a loaf of about the same size and weight when I'm done. So those numbers are probably close.

I let it rise one more time, like a regular bread, then I shape it, let it rise appropriately, and bake it.

You can skip the rise after the final additions and just shape it at that point and let it rise once before baking, but after it's been around that long, it's not like I'm in a hurry.

Sometimes I add different flours besides white. I seldom add any flavorings to sourdough, though, because I really, really like plain old soudough flavor. Unlike the breads I make with commercial yeasts, I'm not as often temped to start throwing in the kitchen sink. But you can go wild and add all sorts of things -- and you can make pancakes, english muffins, and all sorts of other things with the starter, as well.

I had a rye starter from wild yeast, but it suffered a bit of an accident, and I haven't recreated it yet. The three remaining starters are all fed with plain white AP flour. If I want to add a different flour to the bread, I do that after I've transferred the starter out of the jar it lives in.

If, for some reason, you can't bake when the dough is ready, you can always punch it down and let it rise again. If you do that, it helps to give it another feeding of at least a little flour and water to keep the little yeasties happy.

You can slow down the rising by putting the dough in the fridge, and you can leave it sitting there for days, if you can't get to it. Just let it warm up and give it a little feed before you move on.

Like most other breads, you can make sourdough with very slack (watery) doughs, or you can make a stiffer dough. The wetter the dough, the more active the yeast will be, but if it's too wet, you end up with a flattish loaf because the dough can't keep the structure. A dense dough will take longer to rise, it probably won't get the big and uneven holes that some sourdough people are so in love with, but it will be easier to shape, and it should hold that shape as it bakes.

Some people say that the sign of a good sourdough is when you take it out of the oven and set it to cool, and you can hear the crust cracking. It's like rice crispies, sort of.

If/when you go to the Carl's page, you'll see his suggestions for getting the starter active, and for making bread. He probably uses actual measurements, too. :-) Just make sure you're looking at the recipe that doesn't use potato water.

If you have tap water that's heavily chlorinated, you may not want to use that, or at least let it sit overnight before you use it, so you don't kill the yeast right off the bat. My tap water has never been a problem.

Anyway, I hope that's been somewhat helpful.

Puff pastry, stock, baguette, and above all, macarons. Why take the carefree enjoyment out of 2 bites of bought perfection?

Stock and pie crust

Filo! And Puff Pastry. It's been said before but it bears repeating!

Pasta. Boxed dried pasta is cheap and nearly as good as fresh. Also available in great variety of styles.

Pie crust. It's almost the same...and the filling is more important. Well at least for me.

i can't believe people really feel this way about stock! my heart hurts. and my head too.

puff pastry's the one thing i'd never make on my own on a regular basis.. i've failed too many times, and after a while it just becomes a sin to waste that much butter-glorious-butter.

MAKE YOUR OWN STOCK, PEOPLE! If you do it right then you'll realise why it's worth the difference!

Amen to pumpkin. During a period of righteous self-sufficiency, I bought pumpkins, cut them up (a perilous chore) and made my own (stringy, mealy) puree for pies and bread. Yuk! Good ol' Libby's every time now. As for stock, I know you can avoid all the preservatives, especially sodium, making it yourself, but there IS a kind that's better than MY homemade: Pacific Natural Foods Organic Free Range Chicken Broth - Low Sodium. Just 70 mg per cup of the salty stuff, and so help me, when rice is cooking in the boiling broth, you'd swear there was a chicken in the oven. Also if I can find it in MY little bitty town, you can, too.

@chanterelle, the secret to polenta is that you don't actually have to stir it all that often if you put it on a flame tamer, and you don't have to cook it for an hour -- 20 to 30 minutes is just fine. you can also bake it in the oven and it will turn out great.

I can't believe anyone considers stock a problem to make, just put it in a pot and simmmer. How hard is it to strain,skim and freeze to have fresh stock for your cooking? It only costs a bit of time and is so superior to any you can find in the stores!

Puff pastry is the thing I find totally unnecessary to make yourself unless you enjoy the satisfaction that comes with making such a time consuming recipe, if so then more power to ya!

I read everyone of these and i agree with some of them, but I sense a serious case of laziness running deep in this thread ;)
Nobody said Pâte à choux, or Crème Anglaise, which are more tedious than difficult, I remember making 200 Eclairs for a family gathering, and spending hours whipping by hand and stressing the final result was a labour of real love only to have my favorite aunt say "you could have just used vanilla pudding, nobody would have known any different", I was crushed..I would have known, but made from scratch is worth it almost 97% of the time IMO.. happy HoliDaze Everyone, Love to ya SE!!

OK, I have to throw in the southern holiday favorite sweet potato casserole with brown sugar-pecan crust.
Bake, or nuke, the potatoes, cool, peel, haul out the trusty Kitchen Aid and mix with vanilla, sugar, etc. Chop pecans and mix streusel topping.
For the last 2 years I have been buying the St. Clair's casserole and honestly my family and I thinks it is even better than homemade.
And I appreciate the time to prepare other goodies I can't, or won't, order.
Happy holiday eatings to all.

Bagels