Eight Foods You Should Never Buy at the Store

Hummus photo via shutterstock.

I must preface this post with an admission: I am pretty much the furthest thing from a “serious” home cook you’ll ever encounter. I don’t spend my weekends working my way through a Julia Child cookbook. I don’t obsessively pin recipe ideas on a Pinterest board. I don’t make piles of baked goods for the office just because I happened to be playing round with a snickerdoodle recipe the night before. Heck, I don’t even measure when I cook.

So yes, I’m a pretty lazy home cook. I have my stable of a dozen or so go-to recipes that I simply make over and over and over again. These recipes contain just a few simple ingredients I almost always have on hand, and they come together in 20 minutes or less. Sure, they’re delicious, but they are anything but complicated or creative.

I say all of this by way of background for today’s post, because I want you to understand that if a lazy home cook like me can muster the energy/creativity to make the items below at home, rather than buy them at the store, you can, too. Based on my culinary track record alone, you can trust the fact that these recipes are so embarrassingly simple, you’ll wonder why you ever store-bought them in the first place.

So here goes: My list of eight no-brainer, easy-to-make-at-home foods you’d be crazy to buy at the store ever again.

1. Hummus

Once I started making my own hummus at home, I actually started silently mocking those who wasted money on the store-bought stuff. All you need is a food processor (a blender would probably work, too, though I’ve never tried it). To make a basic hummus recipe (Remember, I eyeball everything, so you’re not going to get any real measurements here, sorry), I dump a can of chickpeas (Reserve the liquid!), juice from half a lemon, a drizzle of olive oil, salt, pepper, cumin and garlic (or garlic powder) into a food processor, and puree. You’ll want to add some of the reserved liquid back in slowly while processing until you reach your desired consistency. Technically, traditional hummus contains tahini, which you can find in the ethic-foods aisle if you so desire. But having made it with and without over the years, I can honestly say it doesn’t make a ton of difference, flavor-wise.

The nice thing about homemade hummus is that you can customize the flavors how ever you want. Add some roasted red peppers, sneak in some roasted eggplant (Done it! Delicious.), or, heck, add some spinach for an extra nutritional punch. The combinations are literally endless.

Oh, and if you’re wondering, one can of chickpeas makes almost double the amount of hummus you’ll find in those puny eight-ounce containers at the store.

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