Make Your Own

The main reason to Make Your Own is that you will know what you are eating. If you can't pronounce it, you probably don't want to ingest it. These are just a few ideas of things we routinely buy in disposable containers that we can make at home easily.

 
White Sauce or Bechamel

A white sauce is a simple thing to make, but after decades of recipes which read, “Use a can of mushroom soup,” or “Use a jar of Alfredo sauce,” this may have become a lost art. But look how simple it is to make a quality white sauce!

The great thing about making your own is that you can decide what goes into it and you can alter the flavors to suit your particular dish.

½ cup butter

4 tablespoons flour*

2 cups milk**

Seasonings

1. Melt the butter in a saucepan over medium heat. Add the flour as soon as it is melted. Stir continuously and bring the butter flour mix to a boil. Add the milk and continue to stir and cook until it gets to the thickness you need.

2. For the standard white sauce, salt, pepper and a spoonful of vegetable or chicken bouillon powder will give it a good flavor. You can also add any herbs or spices that fit with your use for the sauce. A few good ones are: parsley, basil, caraway powder, curry powder, thyme, and coriander.

3. To make a cheese sauce, add grated Parmesan and/or Romano cheese.

4. If you want a garlic flavored sauce, add a couple of cloves of mashed, roasted garlic.

*You can use nearly any kind of alternate flour if you don’t want the wheat flour. A tiny bit of cornstarch mixed with water, chick pea flour, or rice flour will work as thickening agents.

**Almond milk, coconut milk or any combination of the two will work as well.
In addition to milk, you can use chicken stock or broth and white wine in your sauce.  The combination of stock, milk and wine will change the flavor. Go ahead and experiment. The total volume of liquid should be around two cups, but white sauce is virtually foolproof and it's hard to go wrong. Once you know the basic formula, you can have some fun. Heat some oil and flour until bubbly; add some liquid and flavoring, and stir. Simple!

White sauce has only a few ingredients and is easy to make. Now, go look on the label of the mushroom soup!

Beer  Sauce!

I make nearly all of my own sauces. The ingredient list on a can or a jar puts me off buying them. Last week, I wanted to make a chicken and vegetable lasagna. I had everything I needed, but when I got to the white sauce, I realized that I didn't have any broth or white wine or milk of any kind. Hmm.

So I grabbed a can of beer. It's not white wine, but I was willing to give it a whirl. I spiced it just the way I would have if I had used broth or white wine, and it turned out great. Scroll up for basic white sauce directions. Just thought you'd like to know!

 
Curry Powder

There are no shortage of curry blend recipes on the Internet, but many of us are still tempted to purchase the tiny container in the grocery store labeled, "Curry Powder." This is an unnecessary expense and an inferior way to get the curry you want. The most common ingredients in curry are turmeric, cumin, fennel, ginger, coriander and chili powder. If you cook very much, you will most likely have these spices on hand and may as well make your own curry. If you are a fan of ginger, you can go heavy on the ginger; likewise with any of the other ingredients.

Supermarkets are a poor place to buy spices. The little containers are kind of cute and handy, but international markets are much better places to get spices. They often come in cellophane packets, but you will want to store them in a reusable glass container when you get them home. The price difference is astounding.

Salad Dressing

Salad dressing is one of those things that we buy in the supermarket almost without thinking for years and years. Once you realize how simple it is to create a tasty, high quality dressing in just five minutes, you will not want to keep on purchasing plastic bottles of dressing made with cheap, industrial oils. When you make your own, you will use olive oil or avocado oil or other high quality, cold pressed oils. 

The basic recipe for salad dressing is: 3 parts olive oil, 1 part vinegar, 1 part mustard. 

Blend this with an immersion blender for 1 minute and you have a fantastic dressing.

Variations on this basic recipe are endless and depend on what you have in your pantry or refrigerator. Other common ingredients are:  honey, a spoonful of jam or jelly, yogurt, herbs such as basil, dill or parsley, tahini, and citrus juice. You can feel free to experiment with salad dressing, because if it goes awry, just add some more olive oil and dilute your misstep!

Barbecue Sauce

 I do not care for the chemical taste of commercial barbecue sauce, so I prefer to make my own. I have a formula for barbecue sauce, but experimentation is the satisfying part of making your own. Ninety percent of the recipe should depend upon whatever is in your refrigerator, pantry or freezer.

The ingredients for a delicious barbecue sauce are not all that specific. The recipe can work with a wide range of ingredients.  You will need - 

1. Some fruitiness: Tomato paste, apricot, peach or mango sauce or any combination of these

2. Some spiciness: Chili powder, curry powder, pepper flakes, sautéed chilies, hot mustard

3. Some smokiness: Any salt or spice mix that has smoke flavoring. These can get overpowering very quickly, so this is one ingredient to add carefully. There is a commercial preparation called Liquid Smoke. It works well, but be careful not to overdo it. Think drops rather than spoonfuls.

4. Some sweetness: Brown sugar, honey, maple syrup, or whatever you have on hand

5. Some umami: Roasted garlic, sautéed onions or fennel or shallots or leeks, anchovy paste or fish sauce

You can also use wine, Worcestershire sauce, olive oil, salt, and butter in your sauce. 

Specific ingredients are not as important as the combination of these five flavor categories. Based on these categories, you can use whatever you have in your kitchen to create a fabulous sauce for your barbecued ribs (or chicken, steak, or fish). 

Once you make your own sauce, you will realize that it is truly easy to do and tastes much better than the commercial kind.

Broth

Not only is broth a pretty expensive item to purchase, but it is probably not the quality product that you can get by making your own. Whenever you cook a good quality meat, i.e. organic chicken, grass fed beef roast, local, pasture raised meat of any kind, save those bones! 

Put bones, scraps, and scraping from the roasting, braising or frying pan into a large soup kettle, add 3 plus quarts of water and simmer on low for as many hours as you can. Add spices, herbs, vegetable scraps, salt and pepper. When the bones are cooked clean, pour the broth through a metal sieve. Transfer the clear broth to a container that can go into the freezer if you are not going to use it right away. Use the broth to make soup, to cook legumes or to make risotto. Homemade broth adds tremendous flavor to whatever you are cooking and it also a far superior product to the factory produced, supermarket kind.

Syrup

If you eat pancakes, waffles, crepes, or French toast, you will want a flavorful syrup. Maple syrup is a great option, but fruit syrups are also good to have with your top of the line breakfasts. You can use canned, fresh, or frozen fruit to make a delicious fruit syrup. Peel and core the fruit you are going to use and puree it in a blender. Pour the puree into a saucepan and cook until it reduces to a thick sauce. You can add sugar, honey, cinnamon, cardamom, nutmeg, mace, vanilla, almond extract or whatever seems like it would enhance the flavor. Allow enough time to cool the syrup slightly before serving. It will have a better consistency if it isn't boiling hot when served. A fruit syrup will last a week or two in the refrigerator. 

You can also cook the fruit first along with sweetener and spices, let it cool a little, and then puree it. You may want to return it to the saucepan after the puree for a few minutes to get a more syrupy texture.

 

Almond or Oat Flour

A coffee grinder is a great friend  for creating flour from ingredients other than wheat.If you have almonds - whole or slivered - you can grind them to make almond flour. Old fashioned oats can be ground to make an oat flour. Whole flax seeds are also easily ground. The whole seeds store a little better than ground flax, so it is better to buy them whole and grind them as you need them. 

Spice Blends 

The spice blend with which we are most familiar is curry powder. Although there is an actual curry plant, most curry powders are made with a blend of turmeric, ginger, cumin, fennel, chili powder and coriander. There are a few other commonly used spices used in curry, as well. 

You can also make a Chili Powder blend for adding spice to dishes that you want to brighten up just a bit. Adding straight chili powder can take the dish from bland to fiery hot, and that might be too much for some diners to handle. Combining chili powder with a little salt, some onion powder, a bit of cumin and maybe coriander or caraway powder will give you a blend that is textured and just spicy enough. As with the curry powder, you can switch these ingredients up a bit with no down side.

Sage Blend or Poultry Seasoning 

We usually buy this already mixed in a little can, but it's more fun to experiment with your own spices and herbs. If you grow your own herbs, dry them on a baking sheet in a 200 degree oven until they are crackly. pick out the stems, and crush them with your hands. A combination of sage, rosemary, chives and thyme and oregano with a small amount of mint will give you an all purpose blend that you can use for much more than poultry. Sausage, lamb, pork roast, beef chuck roast, and roasted chicken can be liberally sprinkled and rubbed with this blend. It's also a great addition to meatloaf.