Are 'convenience foods' really convenient?

garystrickland357

@lemurcat12 I was comparing the time it takes to microwave a raw potato vs a microwave dinner with potato.

aokoye

garystrickland357 wrote: »

If you like to cook and are a skilled cook, then convenience may be relative in several ways. For example, it pains me to watch some people do something like dice an onion. It takes them seemingly forever because they have poor knife skills - I can dice one in a fraction of the time.

Agreed. I also think one's ability and/or experience in cooking can really dictate things like having a sense of timing in the kitchen. Someone above mentioned using minute rice with their stir-fry. In my head I thought, "or you could just cook a number of different types of white rice in a pot or a rice cooker at the same time."

This evening I made roasted potatoes, asparagus, and trout. In all it took around 40 minutes and that's in part because I boiled the potatoes before cutting roasting them. Had I used new potatoes it would have been faster. That said while the potatoes boiled the asparagus was cut and the trout seasoned. Once the potatoes were boiled and cut, those too got seasoned and all of it went in the oven for 25 min.

aokoye

Bry_Fitness70 wrote: »

I have been eating fast food and what used to be called "TV dinners" since I was a latchkey kid back in the day and they are still a significant part of my diet. Back then my parents worked a lot and didn't have the luxury of spending hours a week cooking meals from scratch for us 7 days a week. Today it is the same theory - both adults work full time, I exercise at lunch and eat microwaved food at my desk almost every day, and most evenings we have a very narrow window of opportunity to eat between getting out of work/school and getting kids to event destinations nearly every weekday.

The good news is that "convenience food" has evolved and there are higher quality options available than when I was a kid

See my mother's version of that was, "make a grocery list, I'll buy the food, you cook it while I'm at work". I personally don't think this was a good idea for a number of reasons. There were also probably ways that she could have done things differently as to not put the burdon of cooking the vast majority of my meals on me, but such is life. It meant that I learned how to cook but there were pretty major risks (how I didn't start a kitchen fire... somehow I only gave myself food poisoning once) as well as ill effects in the long run.

paperpudding

estherdragonbat wrote: »

Okay. If dinner=frozen garlic and dried rosemary sauteed in olive oil, to which one can drained diced tomatoes and one can drained chickpeas are added, then tossed with dried pasta (after it's been boiled), is that scratch or convenience? I say both! (And Hubby said, "Delicious!")

I would call that from semi scratch.

using some pre prepared ingredients to make your own meal.

It isnt a TV dinner level convenience food, it obviously isnt take away and it isnt fully from scratch.

Most of my home cooked meals are from semi scratch -some being more toward the fully scratch end and some more toward the semi end

Like today - mince curry.

Meat bought already minced (what you call ground beef, I think) fresh onion diced myself - brown those in pan, then add tin tomatoes, cup or so of frozen diced veggies, pre made curry paste. Let simmer for about 20 minutes.
Use that 20 minutes to cook rice in rice cooker to have with it.

janejellyroll

estherdragonbat wrote: »

Okay. If dinner=frozen garlic and dried rosemary sauteed in olive oil, to which one can drained diced tomatoes and one can drained chickpeas are added, then tossed with dried pasta (after it's been boiled), is that scratch or convenience? I say both! (And Hubby said, "Delicious!")

I personally consider canned tomatoes and canned beans to be convenience foods (ones in frequent use in my kitchen, I'll add).

jjpptt2

janejellyroll wrote: »

estherdragonbat wrote: »

Okay. If dinner=frozen garlic and dried rosemary sauteed in olive oil, to which one can drained diced tomatoes and one can drained chickpeas are added, then tossed with dried pasta (after it's been boiled), is that scratch or convenience? I say both! (And Hubby said, "Delicious!")

I personally consider canned tomatoes and canned beans to be convenience foods (ones in frequent use in my kitchen, I'll add).

That's funny... another example of "it's all relative".

Anything that isn't set it and forget it (either in the oven or in the microwave) I view as cooking and not what I call convenience foods. That includes dry pasta with jarred/canned sauce.

VUA21

Depends on what you see as "convenient" foods. Premade pasta? Personally, I often cook for one. Making pasta from scratch isn't very time effective, nor budget friendly. I use a lot of pre-made foods and ingredients. I know how to make my own tomato sauce, I just don't have the time nor space to make it practical for me.

jgnatca

I’m in the “it depends” camp. My great grandmother was a professional cook so when she was visiting it was all from scratch. Even so it was a mixed bag for my father who still shudders at the thought of stuffed/baked winter squash.

I am convinced that a family suffragette eliminated alcohol in the traditional family Christmas cake recipe.

My mother was not a natural cook and even in the seventies she depended on packaged spaghetti seasonings. That spaghetti was one of her signature Sunday dinners. Another was a sad grey stew as she hadn’t grasped the concept of “browning”.

I like to think I recovered some lost art, absorbing myself in cook books like Fanny Farmer and the Joy of cooking.

There are some convenience foods that we simply cannot make as easily or as cheaply as industry. Take old cheese for instance. If we had to depend on the family cow for our cheesemaking, it could take years of curing to match what we pick up at the deli. Industry can take advantage of economies of scale, and it can warehouse away products to age and appreciate relatively cheaply.

Bread is cheaper at the store. I can pull out my breadmaker and with a little flour, salt and yeast make a fine loaf. But added all up its more expensive than the store bought.

You can’t beat the time savings of pre made pasta. If you don’t believe me spend an afternoon making your own.

ON THE OTHER HAND hubby picked up a frozen dinner that consisted of pasta in a little tomato sauce. With ten more minutes planning I could have boiled some dry pasta and poured on my own canned sauce. We also vastly improved it by adding frozen meat balls we had made ourselves.

I also believe home made meatballs are far more cheap and convenient than the boxed ones. Because I run my own assembly line and prepare a family pack of hamburger meat all at once.