Kind of a funny discussion over at Faith and Family Live.
Eventually I decided that homemade food is more of a continuum than a single standard.
For instance, many people would say that my enchiladas are not homemade because I use canned sauce. What if I made my own sauce? Would my enchiladas be homemade then? But I could be making my own tortillas and my own cheese. I could be cooking chickens raised in my backyard. I could be growing and grinding my own corn for the tortillas!
It seems that the line between “homemade” and “not homemade” is somewhat arbitrary, and different people draw it in different places.
I, personally, like to take the approach of giving the cook the most credit possible. I think that as long as you’re buying ingredients rather than the pre-made entire food item, you can call it homemade.
So, in my mind: if you buy a cake it’s not homemade. But if you make a cake from a box you can call it homemade (although you can’t call the frosting homemade if it’s from a can). Pasta salad in a container from the deli is not homemade. But if you cook some pasta and add bottled salad dressing, voila! Homemade pasta salad.
See the comments at the link for discussion.
I have long disagreed with my friend Chris, a wonderful cook, about what sorts of things constitute "cheating" on so-called homemade stuff in the kitchen. Let's say that Chris and I were both planning to prepare a dish of spiced bean tostadas, with guacamole. Chris would tell me I was cheating on the beans: I often use canned beans, but he nearly always cooks beans from dry. I would say Chris was cheating with packaged tostada shells; I always use fresh, home-fried corn tortillas when we make tostadas.
Convenience "ingredients" I don't typically buy: prepared spaghetti sauce, baking mixes of any kind, premade dough products, instant anything (except pudding).
Convenience ingredients I do use frequently: canned tomatoes, beans, chili beans, and refried beans; Pace salsa; bottled Asian sauces; canned tuna and sardines and kippers and anchovies; frozen vegetables and fruit; box dried pasta. Crackers. Cans of soup for quick kid-lunches.
I sort of split the difference on some things. I keep canned enchilada sauce and canned chicken broth around for when I run out of time and homemade stock. I make my own yogurt, but I usually have store yogurt too because I'm always forgetting to save some yogurt back for the starter.
There's a lot of stuff I keep around only because I feed 10 children on a regular basis. The aforementioned instant pudding is very useful for finishing off extra milk, as is Ovaltine (Chocolate Malt Flavor). There is a special corner of my pantry devoted to crackers, applesauce, fruit cocktail, pretzels, granola bars, and boxes of instant pudding, so when it's my turn to provide "tea snack" for everyone I can just grab a couple of things and go.
For some reason, I feel totally fine about instant pudding, but horribly guilty about feeding my family spaghetti sauce from a jar or brownies from a mix!
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