I will never EVER give up my recipe for the best spaghetti sauce in the world, which is paste-based.
No mention yet of canned potatoes?
Ooh, potatoes! It’s been years since I actually bought whole potatoes from the produce department. I just don’t have time to spend peeling potatoes; it’s never been my fave kitchen chore.
Canned potatoes aren’t the greatest, but I try to keep a can on hand ‘just in case’ I want to add some potato goodness to something quick. The mashed potato flakes where you can measure out how much you want, (as opposed to the ones with separate ‘packets’ designed to be used at the same time,) are pretty good; I love making soups with them as much as actually mixing them up with the hot water/milk/salt recipes.
But my favorite for ‘pre-made’ potatoes are the bags of peeled and diced potatoes that you buy frozen and steam-to-cook in the microwave. 
I’ve got two of those bags sitting in my freezer, and a quart bottle of turkey simmered in stock that are all waiting to be prepared when I get home from work this evening. 
Pizza.
Sure, a pizza costs very little at PizzaSlut, but it doesn’t taste the same as my home-made. Sometimes I cheat and use a Boboli crust.
I’ve purchased boiled, pre-peeled eggs. My wife makes a pretty mean deviled egg, and is routinely asked to bring them to holiday dinners, etc. We needed to whip some up at the last minute during the holidays, and we only had fresh eggs at home. I tend to get a bit…perturbed when I’m peeling a hard-boiled egg and half of the white comes off with the shell, and it usually leads to the total destruction of the egg I’m peeling.
Other than that, we boil 'em and peel 'em ourselves.
The only other thing I can think of is sliced melons or pineapple. I’ve been disappointed by buying under ripe cantaloupe (avocados too) in the past, and when I see it sitting there well-ripened in it’s little plastic bowl, I may opt to purchase that than roll the dice on sub-par melon. Plus, my wife and I get to eat it whilst we continue our shopping.
Add another vote from me. Vile stuff. I admit, I don’t really like chopping garlic. I do it, but it’s not one of my favorite kitchen tasks. So I’m happy to try to find shortcuts. A few months ago, I was at an Indian market and saw jarred garlic paste and jarred ginger paste. I thought, hey, that would speed things up if I’m trying to make a South Asian dish of some sort.
Ugh. The ginger was at least somewhat passable, but the garlic was awful awful awful stuff. Had this weird tang to it (I assume some acid to preserve it) and didn’t remind me much of garlic at all. It was even worse than the prechopped jarred garlic.
However, I did find a solution that I’m somewhat happy with. I still buy fresh garlic and use it as needbe. However, you know those jars of whole, peeled cloves of garlic? You get, I dunno, 50-70 cloves for like $4-5, and it’s actual garlic, not preserved in anything. Here’s a picture. I freeze those. When I run out of garlic or just don’t feel like smashing open a head, peeling, cleaning up, etc., I just pop a couple of frozen cloves and chop them up. Yes, the garlic isn’t anywhere near as pungent as fresh, but at least it still tastes like garlic and is recognizable as such. I’m happy with this solution.
The other shortcut I discovered is just making my own ginger-garlic paste, freezing it in ice cubes, popping it out and storing in a Ziploc bag. Then, when I need ginger and garlic for my curry or whatnot, I just pop out a cube. Makes life easy for, especially as one breakfast I’ve recently gotten hooked on is egg bhurji/akuri (kind of an Indian/Parsi scrambled eggs dish), and I don’t really feel like grating up ginger and chopping up garlic in the morning. And while I still have to chop up some onions and chile peppers (unless I have some leftover from the last night’s dinner prep), the fewer things, the better.
Not that I’m defending instant potatoes, but if you’re that person who’s just worked that 12 hour day and is hungry and tired and has explicitly stated “I don’t want to spend an hour cooking dinner” then, yes, the difference between five minutes letting fake potatoes soak up water versus half an hour to wash, peel, boil and mash real ones is significant.
This, too. Canned tomatoes are usually better than fresh for most things. It depends on the time of year, as you note, and your source, but my supermarket doesn’t ever carry any tomatoes I would use for sauce.
The thing about jarred spaghetti sauce, though, is some people really love that taste. There is a particular flavor to almost all major jarred sauces that I don’t like, but some people grew up with it and love it. So I can understand some people’s preference for it.
Mayo is another good one. I love homemade mayo. But, goddammit, I love my Hellman’s too. I can’t make that exact flavor at home. I can make a different flavor that is “better” to me for many uses, but sometimes I just want that Hellman’s taste.
Is that like italian passata (which is pureed/sieved tomatoes)? There’s nothing wrong with that as a short cut. Canned tomatoes can often be better for cooking than the force grown fresh tomatoes you can buy in supermarkets.
Some things make sense as short cuts. I’m all for buying fresh pastry rather than labouring through making it. But some stuff just tastes rubbish and doesn’t save much time.
Looks up thread: curses, beaten to it on the tomatoes.
This exactly. The “OMG real mashed potatoes can be made practically as quickly as boxed instant” argument is just flat-out wrong, especially if you use a microwave to make the latter. As a broke grad student I used potato flakes (bought on sale in bulk) for a quick, cheap comfort food and there is just no way you can even boil the water for mashed potatoes as quickly as you can nuke a single serving of potato flakes.
The real thing does taste better, but just getting the water up to a boil, much less scrubbing, peeling, chopping, cooking the potato chunks, checking a few times to make sure it’s done or not, draining, mashing, mixing in stuff to make it taste good, and that’s just effort to make a carbohydrate side dish? Yeah, I totally get why so many people say, “screw it, get boxed flakes.” Especially because their kids and/or spouse will probably hate the “lumpy” from-scratch kind anyway.
I prefer homemade mayo in just about every way, but it’s so damn wasteful when you aren’t going to eat it all in a couple of weeks.
As much scoffing as I’ve done about all the overpriced convenience items at the grocery store, I purchased a small package of mirepoix last weekend to throw in my lentil soup. While I go through onions quickly and always have them on hand, I very rarely eat carrots or celery and hate throwing out the leftovers. Sometimes you can buy single carrots (although not at this store), but I usually only see celery in monster bundles. This package was the perfect amount.
I have no idea what a bottle of Italian dressing costs. It can’t exceed $10 I would think. And it probably contains enough for at least 20 servings of salad. So, who cares about the cost? For me, the choice is eat at home or eat at a restaurant. Every meal at home is considerably cheaper than any meal at a restaurant. So, if something is a few bucks more than I could do it myself, I’m happy to pay a few bucks and not have to any pend time dicing up some veggies and mixing it with oil/vinegar/sugar/salt/spices.
A side note to this thread would be the recent New York Times in depth article about the modern processed food industry. They don’t leave anything to chance, everything gets tested repeatedly. People used to be happy with traditional tomato sauces that were you know, mostly made from tomato and a few other ingredients.
Extensive testing by the food processing companies found that basically there were three flavor profiles that activated all the “pleasure centers” for most of the market. The most popular by far was the smooth, heavily sweetened sauce that is typical of most sauces still sold today. That’s probably the biggest difference from traditional sauces, and if you’re used to eating traditional sauce that’s where you’ll probably notice the biggest deviation. The most popular processed store sauces are heavily, heavily sweetened.
When I make mayonnaise, it is usually just enough for the meal I’m preparing it for.
Now that I think about it, though some restaurants make at least some of their own salad dressings, I’m sure you can find plenty of restaurants that serve pre-made dressings. If a frickin’ restaurant can’t be bothered to make their own dressings, why would you expect me to?
100% agree. :mad:
I usually only make it when it’s part of a recipe. It’s basically impossible to make just enough for one sandwich.
If a dressing includes more than oil, vinegar and a couple of spices, it better be using something that I’m already chopping up, otherwise it’s way more trouble than it’s worth. I’m spending my salad time to wash and prep the lettuce, cut up the vegetables, not run through a complicated recipe for the dressing.
Hopefully everyone will reach a point sometime in their lives where the cost of a jar of dressing or package of fruit ceases to be a deciding factor. Convenience, need, quality, variety, there can be any number of reasons driving a choice.
Yes, it does. For me, anyway. It takes way more time to peel and boil potatoes than it does to heat water in the microwave and add a few cups of potato flakes. I can still add milk and butter to it, too. It takes far less time than just peeling several potatoes.
This will make some people gag, but years ago Heinz made ketchup with diced onions in the bottle. I loved it, but they must have been just test-marketing it because it was only on the shelves for a short time. I wish it would come back.