Other ingredients
Herbs
Supermarket herbs can be a rip off from the start. If they don’t smell or taste of anything. You may as well add grass clippings to you food. Herbs can be dried but I find the flavour is almost all gone. If you intend to use the herbs in pickles you can preserve the herbs in white wine vinegar. If you have a freezer you can chop the herbs and stuff them tightly into ice trays. Once frozen you can put the cubes in some tupperware and put them back into the freezer. Melt one of these in some tomato soup just before you serve it. You will notice the difference.
Spices
Supermarket spices can be a similar rip-off. 28 grams for £1.99 etc . Have a look online where you can get 500g of yellow mustard seed for £1.89 .
Some spices lose their flavour very quickly. For example I cram cinnamon into jam jar and fill it with vodka. When you use spices preserved in vodka you will need to pour some of the vodka in too as the flavours will have leached from the spice to the vodka.