I’ve long been intrigued by what is worth making from scratch. Some items when sourced and prepared yourself end up being much more expensive and less enjoyable, not to mention taking up loads of your time. On the other hand, some items can be made inexpensively with little effort resulting in disproportionately improved quality.
Books like Jennifer Reese’s “Make the Bread, Buy the Butter” provide ample tips and suggestions from countless hours of hard-won experience in the kitchen. Kris Bordessa’s “Attainable Sustainable Pantry: A Back-to-Basics to Stocking Your Kitchen” offers a similar compendium of tips for from-scratch food preparation. Bordessa began her blog, Attainable Sustainable, in 2011, sharing from her experience gardening, cooking, and canning.
In the “About” section, Bordessa writes, “In a world where soup comes in a can, pudding from a box, and bread from a bag, it’s easy to forget that just a few decades ago those items were made at home from scratch – maybe even from foods grown right outside the door.” It’s true. Many years ago, I met a child who did not know that the vegetables in the grocery store had been grown somewhere. It’s easy to scoff at such ignorance, yet I could not until recently fathom how blue cheese dressing was made.
I have not read Bordessa’s first book, which explores more generally self-reliance. The book about pantry staples I found accessible and practical. Her suggestions for dressings was along the same lines of all the dressing lore I have found over the past few years and her recipes were just as simple and satisfying as the ones I’ve incorporated into our meals.
Getting back to homemade yogurt and finding a good homemade granola recipe remain on the bucket list. We did not have a chance to try Bordessa’s granola recipe before the book was due at the library, but the recipe she offered looked quite good and likely beats the pants off the over-sweetened bagged stuff at the grocery store.
The success story for us was homemade Cheez-Its. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy these greasy, tangy, crunchy crackers on occasion. This is the type of product, like dressing, that in all my years of living I had only ever seen purchased in a box, readymade. Bordessa’s recipe was eye-opening. It had never occurred to me that cheese crackers are essentially a cheesy pie crust, rolled thin and baked until crisp and starting to brown. Very satisfying results! Crunchy cheese crackers without the metallic aftertaste of preservatives.
Finding someone to point you in the direction of simple and successful swaps is a great gift. I won’t be canning any time soon, but we will bring crackers and granola into the regular cooking program with joy.
