What's considered "made from scratch"?

At the far end of the "from scratch" scale is pre-made canned food, heating up a frozen pizza or shepherd's pie, cooking instant noodles. That gets 0 points and does NOT count as from scratch.

On the far end is using home grown vegetables, dairy and poultry - that gets 5 points, but most of us don't have the luxury of living on a farm; and you'd be very limited food-wise if you could only rely on your own produce. I mean, if you live in a northern climate, you'd probably never get... a fresh, home-grown coconut. But hey, a pina colada in Canada is never going to taste as good as one in Puerto Rico, so being as close to source as possible does get the best points. Wink

So we all fall somewhere in between.

Here's my scale (and warning, I'm a food snob, so it's harsh.)

The next best thing to growing your own food is buying fresh ingredients, and making something out of them. So, for instance, you can buy fresh tomatoes and make tomato paste, and you can get buy fresh basil and chop that up, you can get flour and make your own pasta, you can get beef and grind it up yourself. That gets a 4 in my books - and I know that's not perfect, but it's still amazingly impressive

That's still pretty time consuming, though. So I grant you that you can get store-bought pasta, maybe pre-ground beef, maybe pre-made sauce. But there still has to be an element of preparation and a margin of failure involved. This gets a 2-3 depending on level of difficulty/complexity. For instance, you could buy the lasagna noodles but you'd still have to layer the lasagna, yogurt, ground meat, cheese, etc. If you boiled pasta and opened tomato sauce but you still made the tomato sauce your own by cooking it up with eggplant, cheese, basil, red wine etc. ... that counts too. I think most of our "from scratch" dishes fall into this category.

On the other hand, if you just boiled the pasta and just opened the sauce and dumped it on, with no fresh ingredients (or even cheese!) added, that gets a 1. If you open a box of cake mix and just add eggs and milk, that also gets a 1 - because it's more or less foolproof. It's not as foolproof as popping frozen pizza into the oven, but it's as close to prepackaged as you can get.

Of course, it's tough - some things are inherently easier to make from scratch than others, and maybe there are no inbetween steps. Like, toast. Actually, I think toast does too. Wink If you bought the bread and toasted it/ate it as is, you get a 1. If you make a Pb&J sandwich of it (buying the PB & the J) you'd get a 2. If you made a sandwich with lettuce and tomato and grilled cheese etc., or a croque monsieur, or french toast.. you'd get a three. If you baked the bread yourself you'd get a 4. If you harvested your own flour you'd get a 5.

So that's my ranking system!