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Ya, I hear you on the carbs. Hubby likes it because it’s so versatile. He found some hams (spiral sliced no less!) in the managers special corner and we cooked one and the little fiddly bits that didn’t look like they would fit on a sandwich got chopped up and added to a batch of that stuff. With a couple ounces of real cheese and some cream cheese. And a part of a chopped onion and some chopped bell pepper and seasoning to taste. Yum Yum.

I think the main reason the fed-ed stopped teaching home ec in the 70’s and 80’s was to foster this type of food dependence. They don’t KNOW how to cook from scratch. And being 2 and nearly 3 generations out from that would feel put upon if you asked them to do it.

One of my cousins (in her early 20’s) didn’t realize how much cheaper it was to make cookies from scratch than buy the slicenbake ones. She was pricing out the bags of ingredients in her head and totalling that for the cost of cookies. Not realizing she’d have most of that stuff left over for other stuff when she was done. That generation had moms who worked and bought convenience stuff because they were tired and just plain too busy to do it. The moms didn’t teach cooking and the schools didn’t teach it anymore either. To my cousin the $15 she’d spend on ingredients for the homemade cookies was WAY more than the $3.50 for the slicenbake ones. No one had ever told her about ‘per serving’ costs and how to budget using raw ingredients. She does this same ‘cost analysis’ with raw ingredients for hamburgers vs. drive thru. I’m not sure how we fix this. She is VERY unwilling to learn. She’s addicted to the quick fix and she’s not even on assistance from the government.