You can make a fruit syrup that’s to die for on ice cream. It works with most fruits, but berries are great. Blackberries, raspberies, blueberries. Straw berries. Some mix of all of them. Get a pot, sort out the bad berries, cover in water and simmer until it’s mush. run it through a strainer or sieve or somethingt to clean out the worst of the mush/seads and add sugar, lemon and maybe some cinnamon to taste. while you still have mostly-liquid juice, take some out to make a corn starch slurry. mabye a tablespoon of juice and a half to a quarter for the corn starch. (this helps it become glossy.) Sugar to texture/taste, and reduce to the desired thickness.

(Yes, it’ll eventually become jam.)

Also goes great on waffles, pancakes or anything like that… cheesecake, brownies. I can think of a lot of things.

I mix Frank’s wing sauce and Mayo for my breakfast sandwiches.

Frank’s wing sauce and ranch for lunch wraps.

Frank’s wing sauce and sour cream makes a good dipping sauce too.

Stick chipotles in adobo into a blender then mix with mayo.

any time you use a pan to cook meat throw some onions, or whatever in with a little more oil, get them going, pour in wine, and cook till thick. ad a couple pates of butter to finish for extra gloss and richness, season to taste, serve

Warm some sour cream, mix it with enough yellow curry powder that it starts to look a bit like light mustard. That sauce on top of white rice got me through undergrad, and it’s also good on food that costs money

I’ll mix mayo with pretty much anything. It’ll mostly work. Although I tried making garlic mayo by mixing mayo and some garlic paste: that was way too garlicy.

I make scalloped potatoes in a cream sauce.

3 pounds potatoes, peeled and sliced thin (1/8")
3.5 cups half and half
2.5 teaspoons kosher salt
1/2 teaspoon fresh thyme (or 1/4 teaspoon dried)
2 cloves minced garlic
8 hunks of butter

Cook the sliced potatoes down on the stovetop for about 13 minutes until the sauce thickens. Transfer all to a buttered baking dish, top with 8 hunks of butter, then bake in a 350° oven for 1 hour, rotating 1/2 way through.

Honey mustard. Honey mixed with mustard to taste. Add mayo for extra richness.

I find gravy to be one of the easiest sauces to do quickly and with whatever I have on hand (1:1:8 ratio for fat, flour and liquid).

I made a brown sauce for poutine and some other potato dishes kind of like this the other day: melt butter at medium low heat in a small pot, say about 2 tbsp, add equal amount of flour by volume and fry until getting a little nutty. Whisk in broth or stock (I just use Better Than Bouillon) until consistency of thin gravy achieved (about a cup) and it begins to bubble. Add light and dark soy sauces for flavour and colour to taste. It’ll thicken as it cools.

Sour cream works well with basically anything tomato, including ketchup. Or a hot sauce of right consistency, not so hot that you only use a few drops.

For best results, use the sauces cold, and don’t mix them too much — so you taste them both separately instead of blended mush.

I like mixing various spices with olive oil to dip bread in. Literally just whatever catches my eye in the cabinet.

Sauces for what? A lot of sauces you can buy pre-made and are perfectly acceptable—also some sauces you would not normally make yourself, e.g. soy sauce.

Sauces as in dipping sauces, I normally use pre-made hot sauce.

You can also make a lot of passable pasta sauces very easily. One way is to fry up garlic, chilli, and any other aromatics you like in a pan. Add white wine. Add parsley. Add pasta water. Add spaghetti (or other pasta).

Another pasta sauce I like that’s very easy to make is just putting silken tofu and miso paste into a blender/food processor and blending until creamy smooth. There should not be any chunks; it should be completely smooth and creamy. If you see any lumps at all, keep blending—it will get smooth. That makes for a good creamy vegan sauce you can put on pasta or other things.

Alfredo sauce:

500 grams of heavy cream with salt to taste heated to boiling on medium heat. Boil for 3 minutes. Add 250 grams of shredded real parmesan (don’t use bagged or canned as the cellulose added may fuck up the consistency of the sauce). Turn off the heat and mix until fully melted. Let the sauce sit for 5-10 minutes before adding to 500 grams of pasta. Feeds 4.

1/3 cup Kewpie mayo, 3 Tbsp sweet chili sauce, 1-1.5 Tbsp Sriracha. Makes a nice dipping sauce that is basically bang bang sauce with less sweetness.

Whorcheschire sauce and Ketchup makes a passable BBQ sauce

Mayo and dill pickle relish (or chopped dill pickles and pickled jalapenos) is the best tartar sauce IMO.

Chipotle salsa - dump a can of chipotles en adobo into the food processor, press start, turn it off when they are smooth.

Black bean sauce. Dump a can of black beans in a pot with some of the chipotle salsa, heat them together, hit with immersion blender and then whisk in some sour cream.

If you have an abundance of basil (if you have a plant, you will have an abundance) pesto is easy.

Slightly more work but so easy and so good, sheet pan salsa, put tomatillos and fresh hot peppers on a sheet pan and broil them until soft and a little blackened, slide the whole mess into the food processor, season with salt, a little olive oil and vinegar and either cumin seeds or cilantro (you don’t need both), pulse until chopped up and combined.

I find vegan gravy so good for the amount of work too. Make a dark roux of oil and flour, mix soy sauce into water until it looks like diet coke for the broth, add it slowly into the hot roux while whisking, season with pepper, salt if needed, rosemary is good as are mushrooms, miso, but it’s plenty good on its own.