If you buy local milk at the store here, it costs let's say, 10 crowns (that's like a dollar and a half or so) for a litre. Of this, the farmer gets maybe 4-5 crowns. If you go to the farmer directly and get milk from them, you'll most likely pay 3-5 crowns, with the possibility to pay them more, and if the farmer is willing to do things illegally then you can even buy 100% fresh milk that hasn't been edited in any way. So not only are you getting the milk cheaper and possibly healthier, but if you just went ahead and paid the normal store price directly to the farmer, you'd be paying them double.
There's a big cultural difference in what takes "time". Here, spending 20-30 minutes on a meal basically means "instant", and soaking something overnight doesn't even count as time spent. Spending an hour is normal. You can make yoghurt or soft butter overnight and depending on where you live, it saves both your health and money (apparently here it's not any cheaper to make butter at home but "it tastes heavenly". Obviously if you could buy milk/cream directly it would be cheaper).
Over time you figure out better and faster recipes, you realize that if you spend one day just making tons of dough then you can freeze it all for those times when you do want to make pizza quick, then suddenly making a nice, cheap meal that's also fast takes no time at all.
You can make flavoured drinks and candy even just from boiling certain flowers (violets, elderflowers) and likewise there's tons of edible plants that we don't eat anymore - in the old days they even made flour from tree bark. You can make normal bread at home - when lazy, just make pancake-style bread and use that for sandwiches instead. If you save the root-end of a leek or onion after cutting one up, you can regrow them and it doesn't take long at all.
If you buy full stalks of celery, you can dry the leaves (takes like 10 minutes in the oven but 3 days with pure normal air) yourself then add them to anything you want as spices. I doubt making meatballs at home is much cheaper (you "fill out" the meat with milk/cream and oats and onion and stuff) but they certainly taste better.
Making a serving of french fries takes like what, 15 minutes to chop and prepare it all, from full potatoes to in the oven? Making pasta doesn't take much time once you get used to it or once you get a machine. I mean, how much TV do people watch every day, how many blogs do they surf, how much time do they completely waste while at work? How much time does it even take to walk into that convenience store and buy that soda, or sit in that drive-through line?
And in all these cases you can make the food a lot healthier. When I make french fries I put on spinach or celery leaves, then when they dry from being baked in the oven the vegetables don't actually taste like anything - so you can put a whole bag of spinach on even if you hate spinach. When making pasta, you can put tomato paste or fish meat in or whatever and likewise, the taste isn't so strong, so you can do it even if you hate it. Instead of pasta with cheese I make pasta with egg sauce (not sure how to explain the end result but it DOESN'T taste like omlette and it's more like just having the texture of cheese).
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There's a big cultural difference in what takes "time". Here, spending 20-30 minutes on a meal basically means "instant", and soaking something overnight doesn't even count as time spent. Spending an hour is normal. You can make yoghurt or soft butter overnight and depending on where you live, it saves both your health and money (apparently here it's not any cheaper to make butter at home but "it tastes heavenly". Obviously if you could buy milk/cream directly it would be cheaper).
Over time you figure out better and faster recipes, you realize that if you spend one day just making tons of dough then you can freeze it all for those times when you do want to make pizza quick, then suddenly making a nice, cheap meal that's also fast takes no time at all.
You can make flavoured drinks and candy even just from boiling certain flowers (violets, elderflowers) and likewise there's tons of edible plants that we don't eat anymore - in the old days they even made flour from tree bark. You can make normal bread at home - when lazy, just make pancake-style bread and use that for sandwiches instead. If you save the root-end of a leek or onion after cutting one up, you can regrow them and it doesn't take long at all.
If you buy full stalks of celery, you can dry the leaves (takes like 10 minutes in the oven but 3 days with pure normal air) yourself then add them to anything you want as spices. I doubt making meatballs at home is much cheaper (you "fill out" the meat with milk/cream and oats and onion and stuff) but they certainly taste better.
Making a serving of french fries takes like what, 15 minutes to chop and prepare it all, from full potatoes to in the oven? Making pasta doesn't take much time once you get used to it or once you get a machine. I mean, how much TV do people watch every day, how many blogs do they surf, how much time do they completely waste while at work? How much time does it even take to walk into that convenience store and buy that soda, or sit in that drive-through line?
And in all these cases you can make the food a lot healthier. When I make french fries I put on spinach or celery leaves, then when they dry from being baked in the oven the vegetables don't actually taste like anything - so you can put a whole bag of spinach on even if you hate spinach. When making pasta, you can put tomato paste or fish meat in or whatever and likewise, the taste isn't so strong, so you can do it even if you hate it. Instead of pasta with cheese I make pasta with egg sauce (not sure how to explain the end result but it DOESN'T taste like omlette and it's more like just having the texture of cheese).