Six Kitchen Staples I Make Regularly so Life is Cheaper & Easier

With their points of origin, though they're mostly memorized

There have been times—far off times—in my life when I have loved the relaxing hours spent in the kitchen cooking. And their have been times when I have embraced recipes that require only one hand and a fifteen-minute maximum cook time, the less expensive the better.

In fact, in the eighteen months following the birth of my second child, I generally swore off most two-handed kitchen tasks. Did the recipe specifically say to grate my own cheese? Of course it did. But I ignored it. Oh, a cookie recipe that calls for chopped chocolate because of the “melty pockets”? What is this, a Michelin establishment? Pull out the club size chocolate chip bag. Semisweet or bust.

I wouldn’t say things have slowed for me, but now my kids can stand on their own two feet most days, and sometimes they can even play for several minutes together before the screaming starts.

Actually, they often like to join me in the kitchen—one helping and the other trying extremely hard to attain a sharp object or touch anything scalding hot. The upshot is, as long as I maintain basic vigilance, it mostly frees up my hands and attention to get some more done in the kitchen.

With this increased flexibility, I have returned to making more things from scratch like I did in the before-kid times. Most of these are cheaper than their store-bought counterparts, and they taste very good, too.

Here are the staples I make regularly and rely on routinely to bring down my grocery bill and ease some of the weeknight and morning grind.

1) Yogurt

Every week or so, I make two quarts of yogurt. I’ve been making yogurt on and off for years, and I use an Instant Pot method cobbled together from Dinner in an Instant by Melissa Clark, Instant Family Meals by Sarah Copeland, and Rise & Run by Shalane Flanagan and Elyse Kopecky. I’ve also picked up new tips from this helpful post by

Hannah | A Feral Housewife

and Instant Pot Cheese by Claudia Lucero.

Essentially, I remove the sealing ring from my Instant Pot, and then boil 8 cups of milk on the yogurt function. After it boils, I take off the lid, and hit boil on the yogurt mode several more times, for about 30 minutes. Then I let it cool for an hour or so, stir in my starter culture (just a bit of last week’s yogurt), and culture the whole thing in the Instant Pot for 24 hours on the yogurt setting. Apparently the longer culture really does a number on the lactose content, which is good news for me and my stomach.

When it’s done, I proceed to use it for everything, as I wrote over in

Kerry Faber

’s great round-up post. I thin it as a sub for buttermilk, and strain it for a thicker Greek-style yogurt, Labneh stand in, or sour cream sub. I also use it to culture cream for crème fraîche.

We eat this yogurt all kinds of ways. Most days, my kids and I blend it up with some kind of frozen fruit and then drink it as a smoothie and/or freeze it into popsicles. I use it to make pancakes and these waffles. I mix it with mayonnaise and some powdered ranch mix for a ranch dip. I’ve churned it into frozen yogurt using this recipe from America’s Test Kitchen (behind a paywall, sorry—I copied it from an old mag). I swirl jam into it for a family snack. And, of course, I also eat it for breakfast with granola.

When I strain off the whey, I love using the leftover liquid in lemonade (a tip from Melissa Clark) or baking it into bread.

You need to buy commercial yogurt to start, but once that’s out of the way, yogurt is self propagating, a great way to use up milk that’s about to go, and an excellent sub for the million half-used dairy products that always seem to pile up in the fridge. Plus, it’s super easy and only costs as much as you spend on milk.

2) Granola

Granola is the absolute classic example used to shame people into making homemade food. You’ll read everywhere that homemade granola is cheaper, healthier, and simpler than its grocery store counterpart. These people have evidently never tried to switch around baking sheets while holding a moody ten month old, or chopping nuts in a terrible kitchen, or leaving an oven on for 45 minutes without air conditioning in the summer. Bagged granola is much easier than that, cost and nonspecific oil(s) be damned.

But, admittedly, specific examples aside, homemade granola is pretty easy. Lately, I’ve been using the recipe by Lidey Heuck from Cooking in Real Life, a book I wrote about last year. On that post,

SallyT

recommended I try the granola, so I did, and it has become a great little staple.

I’ve tried a million granolas in my day, and this one is a really pared down recipe in a good way. It requires about five ingredients and uses fairly modest amounts of both honey and oil. This is good news for anyone who has shed a tear pouring a half cup each of maple syrup and avocado oil into a batch of hazelnut granola, really calling into question the whole “frugal” aspect of it.

I use whatever nuts or seeds I have on hand. When I want to be extra cheap and lazy, its sliced almonds and sunflower seeds, which require no chopping at all, but generally I make a double batch with a mix of almonds, walnuts, pecans, sunflower seeds, and pumpkin seeds. I also sub in olive oil because I don’t mind the taste, I buy it in bulk, and it is supposed to make me live longer.

As we all know, however, the relationship between granola made and granola eaten is proportional: the more I make, the more everyone eats. So no matter how big the batch, it somehow only lasts a week. Good thing it’s easy.

3) Salsa

As I mentioned over in this post, we go through a quart of salsa a week, and this here is usually the salsa we’re dipping in. It’s a teeny riff on the Badass Blender Salsa from Trejo’s Cantina by Danny Trejo, which I received free from Clarkson Potter two years ago. The recipe basically requires you to throw a bunch of salsa regulars—cilantro, lime, onion, garlic, chiles—into a blender with canned tomatoes and blitz it up.

The original calls for jalapeños, but I don’t generally keep them on hand at all times, so I throw in frozen Hatch chile from my freezer. With this modification, I can almost always make this salsa on a moment’s notice, and it is super affordable.

Then, we mostly use it in traditional salsa places, like as a dip for all vaguely Mexican/New Mexican/Tex-Mex dishes. It makes for fast meals of quesadillas, tacos, or nachos whenever necessary, and it is great stirred into our house staple fideo soup.

When we don’t go through it as a dip fast enough, a rare occurrence, I’ll pour it over some kind of meat, add a little taco seasoning, and stick it in the slow cooker.

And yes, we usually go through all four cups in a span of seven days, which is why I choose to make it and not buy it.

4) The Great Tomato Twosome: Marinara and a Meat Sauce

I’ve already written about Ready, Set, Cook by Dawn Perry, but here are the staples I keep on hand to wean me off my expensive jarred marinara habits. Both the 15-Minute Marinara and the 53-Minute Ragu are frequent fliers in my home.

The meat sauce is great, because it is delicious and it stretches one pound of meat to three pounds of pasta. I assume this might enrage ragu purists, but for the more meat-reticent in my house, the small sprinkling of meat is appreciated. I prep the sauce once, and have enough for three Pasta Mondays in a row.

The marinara is even more versatile. I put it on pizza dough, doctor it up into tomato soup, and sub it in wherever marinara is called for. It is super simple to throw together, and excellent to have on hand at all times.

Both sauces freeze well and are consistently replenished.

5) Pizza Dough

I have written about our pizza habits before, and our longtime reliance on a Friday night frozen pizza. I have no regrets about this, but whenever I have a bit more time on my hands, I like to make my own pizza instead of dropping a lot of money on something that’s not too hard to throw together. In fact, once I have sauce and dough in the freezer, along with my handy club size packs of shredded mozzarella and pepperoni, the effort required to put together a pizza is not that much more than the effort required for frozen.

I still love cooking from Pizza Night by Alexandra Stafford, and I also like to keep a big batch of dough from Seriously Good Freezer Meals by Karrie Truman hanging out for when I feel extra lazy.

These doughs fulfill different purposes in our house. While the former feels like pizza you would get from a nice restaurant and could serve to polite company, the latter is great for the times you have a hankering for DiGiorno Rising Crust Pizza, two glasses of wine, and minimal input.

One note, however, is that the recipe from Karrie Truman is written as a stand mixer dough that can be batched up in huge quantities. If you don’t happen to live in a commercial bakery, making a large amount of dough in a mixer is not just inadvisable, it’s probably impossible. I mix it in my most enormous bowl, enough for six pizzas, and hand knead it every time. Correcting for this oversight, the dough freezes well, behaves exactly as promised, and can be easily pressed out and topped without a rolling pin or difficult technique.

6) Cleaning Spray

Okay, this one isn’t food, but I make it with ingestible ingredients and use it in the kitchen so it kind of fits.

A few weeks back, as I embarked upon ordering another bulk package of cleaning spray through Amazon Subscribe & Save, I decided I was just going to make some.

The recipe I use from Clean Mama is just three ingredients and little-to-no hassle. It is, moreover, super cheap for me, especially with the rock bottom price of vodka in these parts, for better or for worse.

Now look, I’m not Wirecutter, so I’ve done no rigorous testing on how it performs or disinfects. And I still keep bleach wipes on hand for, you know, the gross stuff. For the workaday cleaning, however, I am super pleased with this little concoction.

Is it more work than Subscribe & Save? I don’t know, it depends on how obsessive your commitment to price comparison is (mine is excessive) . But I timed how long it took me to put it together this evening, and it clocked in at two minutes. Not bad.

I also like the glass cleaner recipe.

Those are mine, but I am always looking for more great, repeatable, real life, foundational recipes. Please share yours with me if you have some!