Column: The simple -- and cheap! -- joy of making your own food

I was at the grocery store, minding my own business, when I saw something that shocked me to the core.

As you have probably guessed, it was a jar of sauerkraut.

It was an ordinary jar of sauerkraut, at an ordinary store, albeit one with excellent chicken salad. What stopped me in my tracks was the price.

It was 12 dollars. Twelve dollars for a jar of sauerkraut.

Sauerkraut is not some magical substance, painstakingly created with secret, biodynamic ingredients in a process that requires superhuman precision and skill. Sauerkraut is made from exactly two ingredients, cabbage and salt.

That’s all. And they happen to be two of the cheapest ingredients you can find.

And it’s not like they’re hard to combine. Cut a cabbage into shreds, add salt and let it sit for maybe a week. Voila — sauerkraut.

That does not cost 12 dollars. That’s less than a buck and, at most, 10 minutes of your time.

I would like to tell you that homemade sauerkraut tastes better, much better, than the sauerkraut you buy at the store. But it actually tastes exactly the same. We’re dealing with cabbage and salt here, and there’s not a lot of room for variation.

I am not what you would call a do-it-yourselfer. I come from a non-do-it-yourselfing family. We aren’t good with our hands. In junior high school, I took typing instead of shop, and to this day I don’t understand how machinery works or even how to use certain tools.

I was a pretty decent typist, though, which made me stand out until cell phones came along and now everyone touch-types with their thumbs, and my thumbs don’t move that way.

What I’m saying is, I usually buy my sauerkraut. I know how to make it. I have made it. I happen to be out of it at the moment, so I may make some more, especially now that I’ve written about it.

But I still believe — firmly, passionately — in the virtue of making your own food. Making your own pies. Baking your own bread. Grinding your own cashew butter to spread on the bread you made.

In my pantheon of heavenly foods, cashew butter sits at the head of the table. It’s so smooth. So satisfying. So ridiculously delicious.

It’s also expensive. So, because I believe in the virtue of making your own food, I used to make it all the time.

I stopped a couple of years ago, though, because along with being delicious it is also decidedly fattening. At the rate I was eating it, it was certainly fattening me.

But cashew butter is not the sort of thing you can put aside for too long. It started calling to me. I wanted it. My wife wanted it. So she bought a bunch of raw cashews and asked me to make it.

Then, fearing that I had forgotten how to make it (I hadn’t), she went online to look up a video on how to make it.

The video took six minutes and forty-six seconds. It took the guy all of 45 seconds to actually make his cashew butter. I have no idea of what he was talking about for the rest of the time, but I do know I would hate the cashew butter he made.

He made raw, unroasted cashew butter, without salt. In other words, it had the texture of cashew butter, but only enough flavor to be frustrating.

I know that some people like it that way, so I won’t actually hold it against him, too much. But personally, I follow the Cookie + Kate blog recipe and roast my own raw cashews at 350 degrees for 10 minutes, stirring occasionally (OK, once) to keep them from burning.

Roasting your own cashews brings out their oil, so you don’t have to add oil to the process as you would if you used pre-roasted cashews. Even so, be sure to let them cool before adding them to a powerful blender or a food processor. Add a healthy sprinkle of salt — one-quarter teaspoon for a pound of cashews — and blend or process until the butter is smooth and creamy.

Serve it on bread or crackers (I like it with Triscuits) or, my favorite, on slices of apple. Feel good about yourself for making something that other people buy.

Don’t serve it with sauerkraut. That would be gross.

We've got an easy-to-follow recipe that's sure to take your homemade butter to the next level. And trust us, once you've made macadamia and cashew butter... You'll never want to have it any other way.