Who else cooks like this?

[Anythingyoulike]

I think we eat well as a family and I would say I cook “home made” rather than “from scratch”, as in we don’t do very much freezer food and no ready meals or anything like that, but I do like convenience.

For example, tonight we had meatballs from M&S in their “family hidden veg sauce” with spaghetti and salad. I just use a jar of sauce for things like that and obviously haven’t made my own meatballs. When I make bolognese I used tinned chopped tomatoes and tomato purée and build the flavour with garlic and herbs etc and never use a jar of sauce. If we have a roast chicken I will roast the veg and potatoes or peel and mash potatoes, but I don’t roast a chicken myself I buy one from the rotisserie section in the supermarket ready to go and just add our trimmings.

I’ll use the leftover chicken for making a chicken risotto with onion, garlic, and lemon. Or we’ll have it with a creamy tomato sauce I make myself with sun dried tomato paste, garlic, shallots, herbs, cream and lemon. I use the slow cooker to make curries and chillies where everything is just flung in and left to it.

We also eat a lot of simple tuna pasta dishes, baked potatoes, omelettes, baked salmon, and so on.

Are most people cooking like this? I think it’s a decent balance of kind of home made with convenience. I’m definitely not a natural cook but our family eat fairly healthily I think and we have a good rotation of curries, chilli, pasta dishes, tacos, risotto, fish, as well as the odd night of fish finger sandwiches or pizza!

Similar OP - I tend to buy rather than make meatballs, the ones that have recognisable ingredients and decent meat content. I’ll always make my own sauce - it probably wouldn’t pass muster with any self respecting Italian but we make it how we like it.

I used tinned beans when using them, sometimes the slightly fancier ones in jars. Used to cook lentils from raw, but to be honest I don’t use much of either now - I don’t tolerate pulses well these days.

We love a rotisserie chicken now and then, but I’ll also pick my own and roast it myself sometimes too.

Try to make my own bread, have occasionally done wraps/ rolls/ pittas etc too but equally will buy it sometimes if busy - I’ll try and do the bertinet/ Jason’s/ Costa & mollica non upf versions, or there’s a bakery opposite DD’s school which I like to use. But I’m not above the odd warbutons white toastie loaf when we fancy it either.

I have a jar of pesto in at all times for an easy meal, I’ve never made my own mayonnaise or anything like that though I tend to do my own salad dressing. There’s a couple of tins of cream of tomato soup in the cupboard for emergencies but I’m far more likely to make my own soup most of the time.

I do go for convenience with veg quite often - we use lots of frozen veg, and frozen berries too but that’s more because I’d go bankrupt otherwise the rate we go through them.

Even if cooking ‘from scratch’ it’s very rare a meal would take me more than 30 mins active cooking/ prep absolute max, usually coming in closer to the 10-20 mark. I just do lots of quick meals, or use the slow cooker. I might get a bit more involved at the weekend, depending on how much energy I have left over from the week.

If it can be air fried, jobs a good ‘un. 👍

Hate cooking!!

I love cooking. My aunty by marriage is italian and she taught me years ago how to make a basic red and white sauce and then showed me how to make pasta.
I steam all my veggies. I get a chicken from our butchers, season it and bang it in the oven and forget about it until the timer goes. I do use marmite for my roast spuds though. Make gravy from meat juices and veggie water ect. Make my own soups. When my boys were young and felt ill they'd ask for "poorly soup" and it was just chicken and vegetable soup.
But i honestly have never and will never pass judgement on anyone using packets and jars.

Only jars I regularly use is red pesto or very occasionally M&S everything pasta sauce if I haven’t time to make my own

Personally I don’t use jars of sauces (I don’t like the flavour of the few I’ve tried, they’re a bit sweet. Plus several allergies in the house limit the options a bit) and would always roast the chicken myself so I could make gravy.

I don’t make meatballs myself though. Can’t be arsed. I know it’s not much work, and I’ll happily make fishcakes from scratch so not sure what my objection to making meatballs is.

If you can’t be bothered then you can’t be bothered and that’s your prerogative.
It’s not how we eat because our prerogative is different to yours and dh very much loves cooking. I grew up on ready meals/freezer to oven crap and they tasted revolting to me even then. We don’t use jarred sauces, curry pastes, bisto gravy, rotisserie chicken etc, they taste artificial and just not as nice as freshly made from ingredients made at home (to us at least).
regarding meatballs that are 3 ingredients, they would just be terrible value for our family of 5 (sometimes 7 if the dds boyfriends are here), dh and ds and the boyfriends would easily eat 6 meatballs each - we get the butcher to mince up some beef for us if we want mince, it’s probably the same cost wise as several packs of the meatballs but we know the quality of the meat and the provenance, we do buy all our meat from the butchers - again, it’s a priority to us but it won’t be to everyone and that’s fine, everyone is doing what they think is best for their families.

I feel like a lot of people aren’t reading my post. We have a jar of M&S pasta sauce maybe 3 times in a month when we have that specific meal. I always have that particular jar of sauce in the cupboard as it’s delicious and the ingredients seem absolutely fine. in any given month I’m also cooking curries, chilli, salmon, chicken dishes, baked potatoes, lamb, bolognese, lasagne, soups etc. “All those sauces” is a stretch.

That's exactly how I cook. I chuck a cauliflower cheese ready meal in the oven for example as I roast potatoes, carrots n Parsnips or some such and serve it up usually with meat I cooked or sometimes a rotisserie chicken or the like.

Practical time saving.

There are only 3 of us and we don’t eat ready meals. The only frozen food we have are ice lollies for the summer, frozen peas, and fish fingers because my son (and I!) love the odd fish finger mayo sandwich.

Yes to tinned tomatoes (Mutti)

Are you a cajillionaire? I LOVE these but they're so pricey.

Very much like us. With only 3 of us, a lot of cooking from scratch isn’t as efficient as it seems. I don’t batch cook either but I do tend to make double the amount of things if they are slow cooker meals and freeze half for another day.

They’re not ALL full of additives

Another appliance I should probably buy!

I also eat fake meat and sometimes buy those little packets of microwave rice.

COME AT ME MN

I don’t even use jar sauces but if you shop smartly you can find the ones with the same ingredients as you would use at home
nothing in there I wouldn’t cook with

I use lots of convenience foods but never jar sauce, think it’s awful! But I will buy things like bagged salad and chicken in a bag type convenience foods!

Get them on Amazon when they're on offer. Often £5. xx for a 6 pack, so less than a quid a tin. And they're so much better.

I use a lot of simply cook spice kits - my H assures me they tasste amazing ( better than most restaurants in his opinion) and I no longer have cupboards and top shelf of fridge full of once used pastes and spices. Does mean I use a lot more cans of coconut milk and frozen shallots ,

No, no, no. You’re literally poisoning your family by not feeding them only food grown, harvested and butchered by your own hand. Bread flour ground between the thighs of virgins…

Honestly mumsnet gets very snobby about food - I remember a thread where someone likened giving your child a bowl of cereal being akin to feeding them crack. Meanwhile in the real world people use all kinds of shortcuts, including jars of sauce.

We are often short on time here, so we do like convenience when cooking, but that usually means prepared and/or frozen veg so it doesn't need chopping. We never use jars or packet sauces when it's so easy to make your own. Sure the M&S hidden veg sauce only has one additive in, which you also find in most tins of chopped tomatoes, but it hardly has any veg in at all really and I wouldn't say it helps towards nutrition. I wouldn't consider it a balanced diet eating things like that. It isn't the worst of course, but you can't kid yourself that it is a really healthy way to eat.

Err!
I wouldn’t want my bread flour ground between someone’s thighs
virgins or not
all those skin cells 🤮

Exactly and then you get home and decide you dont really want pesto pasta after all and do something different. Next time you decide you want the pesto, your basil has gone black

Thank god for that jar in the cupboard.

Where do you all buy rotisserie chickens? I’m always shocked how few supermarkets near me (London) have them. Off to France soon where a rotisserie chicken from a supermarket is utterly divine…

I love to cook and I cook like you do midweek. The only thing I never use is jarred sauces, I just find them too salty.

I tell you what I am in the middle of doing: I’m slowly working through every ‘shortcut’ item I buy and checking the ingredients and if there are any UPFs in there I’m swapping them out, one item at a time. Wraps and bread products (like fuck am I making those) were the worst actually, so I’ve made some good swaps, eg the Crosta and Mollica (sp?) wraps only have flour, water, oil and salt in them.

I think that's a really normal way to cook and not far off what I do too. I am conscious of UPFs though and I think it's really easy to be consuming a lot of them without realising when you are buying processed, "shortcut" ingredients.

Burgers for example are one of those products where it's easy to think they're just beef, salt and pepper but most supermarket burgers have preservatives in them - dextrose, metabisulphites, maltodextrin etc. So annoyingly you do have to look at labels if you want to avoid additives.

I now have certain brands I'll use for certain items to make things easier for myself because I know they're UPF free. Crosta and Mollica for wraps, Heinz ingredients range with the white label for jarred sauces, M&S only ingredients range items etc.

I've never actually bought a rotisserie chicken! I can see the appeal if you're buying one of them with a baguette and some salad for a quick meal but for a roast dinner if you have the oven on anyway it would take two minutes to stick a raw chicken into a tray and in the oven and would be cheaper.