Convenience foods you love... mse of course!

Primrose

My favourite short cut convenience food item is the ready prepared short crust pastry cases that come in both savoury and sweet pastry versions. They make it very quick and easy to knock up either a main meal with all kinds of varieties of savoury quiches, or occasionally a sweet tart or flan.

maman

Lizling wrote: »

I forgot about stir fry bags! The fresh kind - I don't like the frozen ones. No one's mentioned them yet, but they are so much quicker than finely chopping everything myself and I get less waste because buying each ingredient individually gives me too much.

Morrisons do a bag that's just the right size for me for 50p. I wish Lidl would start doing them too.

I buy beansprouts (Asda is best value AFAIK) and freeze any leftovers then forage around in the fridge and freezer for whatever veg to hand. This is generally a choice from peppers, mushrooms, cabbage, carrots, spring onions maybe a bit of broccoli and cauli and some green beans from the freezer. 50p sounds a good price though but we don't have a Morrisons.:(

Lance_De_Boils

Frozen mash potato. There are times when I need a bowl of steaming buttery mash, but cba with all that peeling and boiling and mashing vibe.


Particularly good atop a bowl of Heinz tomato soup.
Gotta be Heinz. For me nothing comes close.

JIL

I use jars of curry sauce a favourite being the aldi balti or korma. It has spices in the lid and a jar of sauce in a jar. Much cheaper than a takeaway and I just cannot get my spices right from scratch.

Ladyluck1

Frozen spinach and baked beans

Caterina

Tinned chick peas, especially when there is an offer for 4 for £1. One tin makes the base of a meal for 3 of us. The other day I made a chick pea and chestnut soup using foraged chestnuts and leftover bits of veg from the fridge. Meal for 3 for less than 50 pence!

Another great staple is Sainsbugs basisc dried potato flakes. Useful for quick mash by adding milk powder, hot water and a knob of butter. Also a good basis for bubble and squeak, fish cakes, vege burgers gnocchi and all sorts of rissoles with whatever leftover ingredients are around. Thickens soups beautifully.

kerri_gt

Loving this thread, but makes me think about how we define convenience - to me, a convenience meal is something stabbed and put in the microwave for 5 mins - dinner, done.

But when you think about it a lot of our food is already processed in some way, tinned, dried or frozen. I mean, even the fresh fish fillets in my fridge have been caught, filleted and packaged by someone else. I didn't have to go fishing in the Atlantic to catch them.

How different all our diets and lives would be if we have to grow / catch / forage and cook from scratch everything we ate. Even tap water has been treated and pumped to us.

MandM90

JIL wrote: »

I use jars of curry sauce a favourite being the aldi balti or korma. It has spices in the lid and a jar of sauce in a jar. Much cheaper than a takeaway and I just cannot get my spices right from scratch.

Ditto - I use pastes when on offer! The only curry I seem to have mastered is dahl!

I'm considering getting a spice grinder and some whole spices and finally utilising all my lovely Indian cookbooks - OHs dad makes lovely curries from scratch and it'd feel like such an achievement!

Thanks to someone on this thread I remembered I've had huge chunks of minced ginger and garlic (asian brand) in my freezer which cost pennies. Despite being about two years old they still work a treat and I'm considering switching back from fresh garlic

Eenymeeny

I started buying curry sauces after watching a NZ food programme (What's really in our food?) where they showed that some 'fresh' spices were irradiated to prolong their shelf life. A test on certain curry sauces showed that ingredients were fresher and were recommended. (I recognised Pataks but some others were probably only available in NZ) I also find that it is expensive to keep a selection of spices that I don't use often. I know that lots of people do use them often so it's a personal choice, but it makes my purchase guilt free!

meritaten

I honestly cannot see frozen or canned produce as 'evil'. our ancestors preserved foods this way (or similar) centuries ago. they HAD to! how on earth would you get through winter without preserves?
so I don't see them as 'convenience' foods. they are 'preserved' foods and need to be treated in a different way to fresh - but, can be just as nutritious and delicious. yes, we can get 'fresh raspberries' almost all year round - but the PRICE! and they don't taste as good. yet turn those seasonal raspberries into preserves and you still get the benefits of them.