Well, i wouldn’t call it “home made”, but i would think you’d done some cooking, and not just heated a ready-made dish. It’s now your recipe, not something i can just buy. I dunno, maybe i don’t have a name for that. “Doctored up” sounds good.
Absolutely! You made it, and you were home at the time! 
Exactly. Being excessively pedantic about what “making from scratch” means is essentially an infinite regression.
I started using bottled pasta sauces several years ago so I no longer call my spaghetti home made even though I massively Dr. it up with canned tomatoes and spices. however I use the same sauces on my lasagna and for some reason I call that homemade, I have no idea why.
That’s the term!
I wouldn’t be mad at someone who called the OP’s food “homemade,” nor would I look down on it. It just would hit my ear funny, as if they called their minivan a bus, or said that their fried rice was paella.
I think the “did you change the name of the thing” rule might apply. You made “spaghetti with sauce” in one case, except you didn’t make the sauce. You made “lasagna” in the other case, and it wasn’t lasagna until you made it.
It’s an interesting linguistic question.
I’d give a pass for the chicken because what’s the difference between that and throwing a chicken in the oven? But not making your own fried rice eliminates it from the homemade category.
Serious question.
You buy a cake in the store. No argument: not home made.
Make a cake from a mix? Home made, or not?
Take a mix cake, but add things, like chips or peanut butter cups? Y or N?
Make a cake from bulk flour, sugar, butter, eggs and vanilla? Home made or no?
Live on a wheat farm, grind your own flour, use eggs from your own chickens, use sugar from your brother in Louisiana, use vanilla you made from your own orchids? Y or N?
I don’t know where the line is.
I know where I draw the line: between “doctored up box mix cake” and “bulk flour cake.” The former is doctored, the latter is homemade.
What complicates it is this:
- Biscuits made with self-rising flour: homemade.
- Biscuits made with Bisquick: not homemade.
Why? Hell if I know.
That’s a tough line for me. They’re both homemade of a sort, but the first is “from scratch” in my prep taxonomy. I think. I can be persuaded on this.
I planned to post the story of how cake mix sales plateaued until some marketing genius figured out that by requiring the housewife to add fresh eggs it convinced the public that it was baking rather than just following instructions from a box.
But alas, that’s not accurate. According to several sources online the legend doesn’t match reality. Adding fresh eggs makes the cake mix taste better, but what made sales take off was the addition of frosting and decorating.
How do you feel about a minivan being used to regularly take children to and from school being legally designated as a “school bus”? Or about the airliners produced by Airbus Societas Europaea (aka “Airbus Industrie”) implicitly referred to as “buses”?
My view is that “home made” should refer to anything made at home that you did not buy in a store, other than merely reheating or the trivial addition of seasonings.
I wouldn’t call the OP’s recipe homemade.
However, there’s a magic to making a dish from preprepared ingredients and serving something that tastes homemade. Trader Joe’s frozen stuff is excellent but it’s still obviously frozen stuff.
It’s not hard to make chicken soup from a rotisserie chicken that you’d swear was from scratch. I call it “cheater chicken soup” because I don’t really consider it homemade.
If I made the OP’s dish and managed that same trick, I’d call it cheater fried rice and would be very proud of myself. My guess is that it’s very tasty but also very obviously premade.
These are really fuzzy terms, though, and I think the goalpost is eminently movable depending on the cook’s skill level and comfort in the kitchen. If you served me the OP’s dish and proudly called it homemade, I wouldn’t blink.
I remember Hardee’s used to advertise their “Made from scratch biscuits” (Maybe they still do, but I no longer live in the part of the country that has Hardee’s). From what I understand Hardee’s restaurants get a bag of mix containing all the dry ingredients, mix in the liquid ingredients at the restaurant, roll out the dough, and bake them. That is a lot more work than most fast food places do; IIRC most other chains just get a bag of frozen biscuits. But is that really “from scratch”, or is that making biscuits from a mix? I don’t know.
Hah! I’ve told the story here before of a silly but passionate argument I got into with someone about exactly that, some thirty years ago. Someone was telling me that they loved Hardee’s biscuits because they’re made from scratch, and I was like, the hell they are, I know what scratch biscuits taste like and it’s not that.
We went back and forth on the subject for awhile before the person, exasperated, said, “Listen, dude, I have literally seen the barrel labeled Scratch, don’t tell me they don’t make their biscuits from scratch.” At which point I burst out laughing and realized that they and I meant very different things by the term.