Not personally, but you do you.
I like cooking from scratch but most of the times, I do pretty much like you : I start with a few ready-made ingredients and tweak them to add a whole layer or two to my meals.
Let’s call it “home-tweaked”.
I’d just call it “semi-homemade.” Wasn’t there a trend for this kind of stuff back in the mid-2000s? I feel there was some Food Network show called “SOMEBODY’s Semi-homemade” – yeah, Google says it was “Semi Home-made Cooking with Sandra Lee.” That gets the point clearly across, at least to me.
I’d call it homemade.
What exactly would be home made in this situation? Can instant rice be used, for example? Or only bulk rice?
Because at some point, everything comes from somewhere else.
Probably not starting with premade fried rice and precooked chicken. Sounds like a great meal, and it’s cooking, but it’s not home made chicken fried rice. I’d say that needs to start with raw chicken and uncooked rice.
Definitely home made. You applied heat to ingredients. You made it at home.
OK, how do you make a sandwich? Most likely, you take two pieces of store-bought bread, and put some store-bought fillings between them. You assemble them, though, which is “making the sandwich”.
So sticking a can of condensed Campbell’s soup in a pot with some water would qualify as “homemade soup”? I suppose by some definition, it would, but not what I would generally think of as “homemade soup.”
If you fed me that fried rice, and told me it was homemade, and told me how you’d made it, I’d raise an eyebrow.
Well, that’s not true, because one of the great tragedies of my life is that I can’t raise just one eyebrow at a time. But I would try.
But if you fed it to me without calling it homemade, I’d say it was delicious, and thank you.
The former First Lady of New York! (via Cuomo)
Sure, but I’ve never heard anyone refer to a “home made sandwich”. The only distinction I’ve ever heard for sandwiches is that someone might refer to a “pre-made” sandwich , meaning the ones that you pick up from a cooler at Walmart or the convenience store as opposed to a sandwich freshly made either by the speaker or the person behind the deli counter.
I, too, have never heard anyone refer to a “homemade sandwich”. You usually use the word “homemade” when distinguishing between a dish cooked at home and one often purchased ready-made. So, “homemade cake” I’d expect to be baked in the house serving it (quite possibly from a mix, unless they also said, “from scratch”).
I guess in this case the “trader Joe’s fried rice” might be considered like the cake mix? That’s not a product I’m familiar with. Does it come ready to eat? Ready to heat and serve? It’s it a dried seasoned rice that needs to be cooked before you can eat it?
You can draw the line where you want. We had some friends over and I served sushi. One of our guests asked where I bought the sushi (she said it was the GOAT) and I told her I made it. She initially refused to believe it was possible.
I explained that I’m in a buying “club” with three other people, and we got good deals on fish that way. I brought a block of frozen tuna out of the freezer to show her, then showed her my fish knives. I explained how I’d made the sweet & sour soup. I admitted to buying the seaweed salad.
Bread is one of the ingredients of a sandwich, no matter who makes it, no matter where. The origins of the bread is not relevant to the status of the sandwich.
Pre-made fried rice and cooked chicken are not the ingredients of chicken fried rice when someone typically makes the dish. Their origins is fundamental to calling the dish “home made”.
Good questions. Is Rice-a-Roni homemade? IIRC, you have to combine ingredients, add water and butter, and cook for some length of time.
Further - what is the context in which the designation even arises? Is the food preparer asking themself whether they “home-make” certain dishes? Is someone else - say a dinner guest - asking whether it is home made?
I’d suspect a great percentage of what is prepared at home involves the use of ingredients that are - at least partially - pre-prepared.
However, situations vary. After thanksgiving I like to make turkey sandwiches with leftover white-meat turkey. Traditionally I like to bake a farmhouse loaf and use that bread for our sandwiches.
It’s frozen fried rice that requires heating in a frying pan or microwave. Adding some chicken, an egg and soy sauce, salt and pepper is the equivalent of adding sliced pepperoni , red pepper and garlic to a frozen pizza - and no one would call that “home made”. At most, someone might say they “doctored up” the pizza and that’s how I would describe the fried rice as well.
But you can’t say you started with fried rice, and then say, “look I made fried rice.”
You are missing the crucial step of modifying the name to reflect the difference.
Start with fried rice…, finish with, ‘Wildly, Wonderfully, Enhanced Fried Rice’!
NOW its homemade, definitely!
FWIW This wasn’t a Principal Skinner SuperNintendo Chalmers situation. Not conning anyone. It was just an idle thought while I was cooking and thought it would be an interesting topic.