Thread: Frozen pre-preapared foods

In this day and age it is quite common to purchase frozen foods that are easy to throw in the oven or prepare on the stove. My wife and I were doing this fairly frequently until we realized that I can often prepare a meal from scratch in the same time it takes a lot of the frozen things to cook in the oven or even the microwave.

If you live in Canada you will have noticed that all food products now have nutritional information on the labels, this can be quite an eye opener. When you prepare food from scratch you have greater control over what is going into your food. Usually pre-prepared foods are quite high in salt. Spice mixtures such as seafood, vegetable, and barbeque seasonings tend to have a high percentage of salt in them as well. When I cook I almost never add salt to the food and if I need a spice mixture I mix it myself. For those with high blood pressure using cayenne pepper in your food can help control the blood pressure.

Hi, never thought of using cayenne pepper, I am always looking for healthier ways of cooking and seasoning, will try it out next time.

Hx

I also try my best to use foods prepared from scratch. Just there for dinner, Dad prepared a spaghetti bolognese from scrach(he didnt make the spaghetti, but the bolognese). It was light and easy to consume. Unlike the jar which can make you feel very heavy and bloated, and of course it took about the same ammount of time!

Pierce

My tip is to make at least double what you need for a meal and freeze the rest. This way you have a home cooked takeaway style meal.

Not only does this save money but you halve your number of trips to the shops, you halve your washing up and cleaning the hob. Not only that you can decide before freezing into those little foil containers what a real portion actually is and make the rest up with veggies if you are hungry.

I am doing a very low calorie diet but choose a good day to cook enough meals for my hubby to last the whole month. All I have to do is cook fresh veg and tatties which isn't so easy or damaging to pick at.

we dont buy any ready made or processed food nowadays i hardly ever shop in a supermarket. most of our food comes from the farmers markets, the pick your own and the organic farmshop. we're lucky living in the country i guess. theres a fab farm shop a 5 min drive away, and several towns closeby where there is an abundance of locally produced meat and veg available. whereas before id call it hippie food, now im out there with the tofu munchers looking for homegrown, home reared foodstuffs.
we bought locally made steak burgers with sundried tomato yesterday,from a farm up the road. they were amazing taste. today we have homemade fishcakes with salad and wholegrain bread. and we treated ourselves this weekend to a bottle of apple and pear juice with some parsnip/carrot/beetroot crisps.
im off to an argicultural show later this week, so will get some nice meat and cheeses whilst im there