A couple of days ago after work, I was shopping for healthy food I could bring to work for lunch. While I was getting thin sliced turkey, I saw, “White Meat Chicken Salad”. Looked interesting, so I bought a container.
When I got home, I decided to taste a spoonful and discovered that it was a chicken salad without the salad part. It was “Chicken … … ?” So, I just put it in the fridge and left it there. I thought about it at work and decided to get several ingredients I really like on the way home. I got diced jalapeno, white onion, celery and small green olives and voila, I made a rocking Chicken Salad out of my “Chicken … …”
So, does anyone else doctor up food from the store? It’s kind of a compromise between eating exclusively “store bought” and eating “made entirely from scratch”. I do that with my lights out red sauce, also. I have a couple of store bought brands that I really like, and then I add to it to produce my final product. I researched the topic before posting, and I did notice that there was a thread about doctoring up store bought pickles, which really interests me because I love “Crazy Dave’s Devil’s Spit” pickle slices but cannot find them many times because they sell out quickly. Anyone else?
Good one! I like Digiorno better than some of the pizzeria sold pizza such as Little Caesar’s, etc. It’s much cheaper and, when doctored up, makes a cheap but very acceptable meal.
I love chicken pho (Vietnamese noodle soup) but currently love in a bumfuck pothole in the middle of nowhere a charming small town, where such an exotic delicacy in a restaurant setting involves a lengthy drive.
However. Boxed chicken broth - or homemade if you have it - can be upgraded into an ersatz pho if you have the right condiments in your fridge.
Squeeze tube of cilantro, and garlic. (Not the whole tube, obvs. Jeez.)
Hoisin sauce.
Leftover chicken shredded up from that thing you made the other day.
Minced green/yellow onion, if available.
Something spicy: sriracha, chili crisp, etc. A packet of red pepper flakes from your last pizza delivery will suffice if that’s all you got.
Optional carbs - thin flat rice noodles if you be all fancy, or a handful of mini pasta shells if you ain’t & the Authentic Cuisine Police ™ aren’t watching.
Easiest way is to dump it all into a big 4-quart glass measuring cup and nuke it.
I can obtain all of the ^^ ingredients at the Wal-Mart here, and none of them even involve refrigeration until after they’re opened … other than the chicken meat.
I love a well-seasoned bulk breakfast sausage, but Jimmy Dean’s original falls a bit short. The seasonings are accurate, but there aren’t enough of them. So before I cook up some Jimmy Dean’s, I add:
Fresh cracked black pepper
Red pepper flakes
Minced rosemary, if I have any fresh
Sage
And now it’s up to my standards. The same goes for sweet Italian sausage. There’s a deli that makes it perfectly, but that place is far away, so I usually have to settle for grocery store stuff. To blah bulk Italian sausage, I add:
Cracked black pepper
Crushed fennel seeds
Red pepper flakes
Thyme
And then it’s ready to drop in little chunks onto the top of frozen pizza, or to make into sausage balls to put into tomato sauce.
Ah, yes, I have noticed that you don’t have to buy several sausage brands as links. I never had a reason to, but now I see what you can do with it. I have a number of spices in my rack that I don’t use because, I must confess, I really don’t know how. I really need to force myself to use things like sage, thyme, rosemary, etc, otherwise I’m never going to.
Wow, the last time I did that was in college when I’d have my besties over. They were good, actually, and pretty cheap to make, just the thing for a student’s budget. The next time I host “NFL Sunday”, I might do that.
Last night my wife decided to make a southwest style corn chowder recipe. Which called for a bunch of cooked chicken, various spices, some frozen vegetables, corn, stock, and sour cream to thicken.
Relevant to the thread, she bought a plainly-spiced whole roast chicken from the groc store & tore abut half of it to shreds to go into the pot. Which was much easier & quicker than roasting one herself.
Yeah, it makes sense! The uneducated have looked at me and asked in shock and in an accusatory fashion, “You don’t make it from scratch?!” They don’t realize that “from scratch” simply means that you boil fresh tomatoes until you have boiled away most of the water, which is something that is tremendously time consuming and requires virtually no skill whatsoever.
When he was little, my kid was probably the only child on the planet who turned his nose up at Kraft Mac 'n Cheese - a major tragedy since this is surely the world’s best go-to food for busy parents with no time to cook.
I could get him to eat it by adding pesto, a can of diced tomatoes, extra shredded cheddar, and sometimes some chopped ham. I called it, “grown-up macaroni and cheese,” which probably was one reason he’d eat it.
They told me to diet
I promised I’d try it,
Yet somehow my weight would not budge
Each Metrecal cookie
To me tasted ooky,
So I covered it with hot fudge
One of my favorite pastas, surprisingly, is to saute a little of the rotisserie deli ham we get from the store, a little thick sliced so its not like thin sandwich ham, nuke some frozen peas in the microwave briefly so they are thawed, and combine into a cream or alfredo sauce (Raos Cacio de Pepe is especially good for this but any creamy sauce will work) and serving over noodles. I did it on one of our normal nights out when we didn’t feel like going out and just grabbed what I had on hand. It’s amazingly good.
