I would never apply the expression to cooking, though.

Yet the expression is common here in the USA.

Angel, I do understand the level of satisfaction of which you speak, and I think that it's a factor in doing any activity "from scratch." Nevertheless, I still want to know just how basic one must get to call it that.

I now know that the expression seems odd in Switzerland thanks to WSIEBER, but how about in the rest of the world? Is it idiomatic to the USA in this sense?