I cook at home because it really saves money than eating out. It may cost a fraction of your time but I still do it because I can choose what food I eat and I can eat healthily. Since I am busy, I find recipes online which are easy to do and can be done in a couple of minutes. The usual dishes I cook are soups, stir-fry or baked dishes which can be done in just an oven toaster. These are very fast and easy to do which save me a lot of time. Sometimes, I also buy pre-marinated or pre-prepared food in the grocery and just freeze them and cook at a later time. These are still made from scratch and are fresh and not processed, but they are just prepared beforehand.
Yes and no. I would say I cook from scratch about 40% of the time and cook semi-homemade meals about 60% of the time. If I had a bit more time in a day, I would cook more meals from scratch. For myself, I can't really see a major difference in saving money by cooking from scratch vs. cooking semi-homemade meals/frozen entrees since I shop very cheap and use coupons. However, when it comes to taste, cooking from scratch is always the winner.
Cooking from scratch can save money, but it depends on how much you are making and whether you can eat it all to make it economical. For example buying too many fresh vegetables would not help me as I cook for myself, but if I was cooking for several people it is more economical. I think baking cakes and making pancakes is much cheaper than the ready bought ones, but some other dishes can work out to be the same unless you have the ingredients to hand or got them on special or on sale reduced. For example a prefer a can of potato and leek soup because buying cream, cheese and leeks would go to waste for me as I don't use them for anything else. Even if I could freeze the soup I would end up forcing myself to eat it for the sake of it.
I'm a fan of batch cooking - I'll cook maybe six or eight portions worth of a meal, eat two that night and put the rest in the freezer. It works out much cheaper in the long run. Cooking from scratch gives you the opportunity to eliminate as many additives as you can. I prefer the overall control it gives me too - no nasty gristly lumps or unidentifiable chunks at all.
