Scratch-Batch Fever

Downsized out of her job as a book critic at Entertainment Weekly in 2008, Jennifer Reese felt the classic impulse to economize. The grocery bill seemed a good place to start.

It turned out to be a good place to reinvent herself. Reese, '88, who blogs as the Tipsy Baker, began to explore the economics of home cookery. It came as little surprise that a freshly spread PBJ beat a thawed Uncrustable—or that homemade peanut butter tasted great and cost 80 percent the price of Jif. But then, did she need to bake the bread and put up the jelly, too? Liking to cook was one thing; living in Marin County like a latter-day Ma Ingalls was another.

Her epicurean experiments have become Make the Bread, Buy the Butter: The Tipsy Baker's Guide to the Best Homemade Foods (Free Press, $24). Other cookbook authors have examined which homemade foods are cost- and time-efficient, but Reese does so more comprehensively—homemade dumpling wrappers!—and entertainingly —"Don't slosh [cooking oil] down the drain unless you have a crush on your plumber." Many cooks have made their own yogurt or applesauce, but Reese ventures on into Danish pastry warm from the oven, advanced charcuterie, and the backyard husbandry of bees, poultry and goats. More than 150 foodstuffs are annotated with remarks, a recipe, the cost analysis, a determination of the hassle involved and a clear recommendation on whether something is best made, or bought, or either option exercised depending on the cook's bandwidth at a given moment. Some of her recommendations are below.