Introducing Scratch Week

Cooking everything from scratch and on a budget…

Can you cook everything from scratch and on a budget and still have time for a life? The goal of Scratch Week is to find out. 7 days. 21 meals. A lot of restrictions.

The Coronavirus pandemic has created a renewed interest in home cooking, which is a good thing, but making sourdough bread, which can sometimes feel like the part time job, is only the tip of the iceberg, when it comes to making meals from scratch. At it’s core, scratch week is an empathy exercise. Making food from scratch is incredibly time consuming. Making it healthy and doing so on a budget is extremely difficult.

If you are reading this, home cooking is probably a fun (and admirable) hobby, but the majority of the world’s population still cooks this way. Not because it is awesome (it is) but because they have no other choice.

The Rules:

The rules for scratch week are fairly simple. Buy single ingredient items and use them to create 21 meals for yourself or for family and friends and do so while staying below the average SNAP (food stamps) benefit of $1.40 USD per person per meal.

We did make some exceptions to the idea of “single ingredients.” For the purposes of the challenge, water, oils, vinegar and salt are not counted as ingredients, so carrots canned in water are fine. A frozen vegetable medley is not. We also allowed some things like ketchup, which no one makes anymore, but we give extra credit for making it yourself. For a full rundown of the rules and a scoring system to chart your progress, check out our challenge description page.

Join us in the challenge and let us know how it is going. Follow our progress on Instagram. @baserria_institute . If you are up to the challenge let us know by tagging us in your posts and using the hashtag #scratchweek.

Good Luck!