Cooking from Scratch

I have always enjoyed cooking from scratch because it is fun, tasty and economical. However, with this being said, I still enjoy buying mixes, pre-made cookies, frozen prepared foods and other "fun" items at the grocery store.

With the price of gas going up, and our grocery prices rising yet again, I began wondering just how much a person saves when making foods from scratch.

Lets start with homemade peanut butter cookies;
After calculating just how much I pay for each ingredient, I had a very clear picture of how much one batch of peanut butter cookies would cost.

Flour came out to 5-cents per cup

White sugar came out to 15-cents per cup

Brown sugar came out to 25-cents per cup

Margarine came out to 20-cents per stick

One egg was free since I have laying hens

Peanut butter came out to 48-cents for half a cup

For the remaining ingredients (salt, baking powder and soda) I added 3-cents

My batch of peanut butter dough made 50 cookies and weighed just over 1 1/2 pounds. The total cost came out to 1.02; peanut butter was the most expensive ingredient.

Our local Wal-Mart has Chips Ahoy on Roll Back for 1.98 per package; each package weighs anywhere from 9-ounces to 13-ounces. The Wal-Mart brand cookies were priced 1.16 for a 1-pound package.

Most of my baking ingredients are purchased on sale and stock piled. If I had gone to the store and purchased each item when I wanted to bake then my final cost would have been higher.