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The overwhelmingly vast majority of the money spent by Americans on food is actually spent for its preparation (from restaurant food to ready-to-eat/easily prepared food mixtures). If you just buy flour, sugar, eggs and various other ingredients and do the preparation yourself, the money would go a very long way.
The real issue is that most Americans have never been taught even the very basics of cooking. I even had one guy place a whole egg (in the shell) in the skillet in order to fry it. Cooking is NOT simple or particularly easy without practice.
I had the fortune of being taught how to cook by an Italian monk while in college. He also taught me where to buy from wholesalers and get great deals, all tasks that were helpful a decade later when I was running kitchens in large hospitals.
I have been in many homes in Chicagoland with $50-100k KITCHENS with all of the finest equipment and layout. What is funny is the better the kitchen, the more likely I am to eat food from Costco.
I looked the other day at one of the 86c cake mixes at my supermarket. The box contained a half pound of sugar, a half pound of flour, a bit of baking soda, and some flavorings. And a long list of very scary looking chemicals that I'm sure would not contribute to the success of the cake/cookies. At double the price of sugar, flour and baking soda.
I love to cook. If you see the picture of a recipe you think you would like it's fun to shop for the ingredients and make it. It can be a very creative experience and most times you can cook once and eat twice, by doubling the recipe. I've been cooking for over 40 years and still enjoy it. Of course I like going out to a nice restaurant too. One place to discover new recipes you might like to try is on recipes.com.
Last edited by Newdaawn; 05-19-2010 at 03:52 PM..
Reason: spelling
I looked the other day at one of the 86c cake mixes at my supermarket. The box contained a half pound of sugar, a half pound of flour, a bit of baking soda, and some flavorings. And a long list of very scary looking chemicals that I'm sure would not contribute to the success of the cake/cookies.
When people used to bake cakes from scratch, some of them had a serious problem with cakes falling. I think this problem is much less frequent with cakes made from cake mixes.
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