AIBU and very stupid to say this isn't junk /convenience food?

[dottytablecloth]

Right am really exposing myself for a potential flaming here but anyway...

Am making a sausage casserole today with the following ingredients:

Butcher sausages
2 peppers
Tomatoes
Mushrooms
Onions
Tin chopped tomatoes
Fusilli pasta

And now for the bit a JAR of Lloyd Grossman tomato sauce

It's a made up recipe a la dotty so please forgive me if that's not what a sausage casserole is supposed to be like!

Anyway SIL was her earlier and says she wouldn't feed that to her 3 year old as it's junk food.

I'm mortified

I thought it was quite nutritious.

I've a very fussy 20 month old who loves sausages.

AIBU and deluded to serve this up and think it's not junk food?

I have LOVED this thread. Hilarious, all the "evil sugar-laden sauces".

I make pasta sauces from scratch, but if a Loyd Grossman tomato & chilli sauce is on offer I snap it up (and also the dopiaza curry sauce from the same brand) cos I think it's delicious. On white pasta with lots of salty Parmesan. Possibly I'll add a courgette or something if I can be arsed, but as it's likely to be my guilty-pleasure-serve-only-myself tea, I might not.

Sausages are also not evil, neither is white pasta.

Your SIL was rude, and should get over herself.

There's loads of food that are "evil" if NOT eaten in moderation, but of course you're not an idiot, OP, so you are eating and serving them in moderation. Pfft. I worry about all sorts of foodie-related things, but to be perfectly honest it's total bullshit, and as long as you're balancing fresh veg, carbs and protein, and keeping an eye on fats/salt/sugars in moderation you'll be fine, fine, fine.

There's hope for your SIL - most people relax considerably once their children are past pre-school age.

A bit of hysteria on this thread

I love a sausage casserole, but I make my own sauce.

I used to use a lot of packets in casseroles - sausage/chicken/beef etc.

Then I just started looking on the back of the packet for what was in them, herb wise. Now I just make my own which consists of stock, tinned tomatoes and various dried herbs.

My sausage casseroles have stock, tinned tomatoes, herbs, sausages, onions, peppers, celery, mushrooms and baby corn. Junk food my arse.

I sometimes use a jar of white sauce in my lasagne

Dotty I do hope that it's at least a home grown coconut

Caff honestly, you don't know? You take two little homegrown marmites....

Giles No.....curry paste, terrible, evil, wicked stuff - just look at all of the spices in it

Jamie Oliver's Ministry of Food book uses curry paste for the curry recipes, but he's also got a section on how to make the curry paste yourself if you're interested.

Thing is, with all this 'you shouldn't eat even a single jar of tomato sauce ever' hard line people are more likely to go 'fuck it' and be turned off healthy cooking as something really hard and time consuming. Over what? A couple of grams of sugar. It's a tomato sauce, not liquidised haribo. It would be a lot easier to say cut down on biscuits or the homemade cake beloved of MNetters if you're interested in lowering your sugar intake.

Although if anyone has an easy to do white sauce recipe that doesnt take long and isnt runny id be willing to try it!

There's me thinking spices were actually good for you.

Now, where do we stand on cartons of passata, tinned tomatoes and canned beans/check peas?

Yeah, like others have said, not junk, but you could do without the jar sauce if you wanted with a pinch of mixed herbs, tomato purée, I do it with carrots and peas and serve with rice as I'm the only one who likes mash, inexplicably.

I usually stick a tin of reduced salt baked beans in with mine, which possibly makes it 'junkier' than yours, but it is my DH and ds's favourite and differentiates it from other casseroles/tomato sauces.

At no time is MN less like the real world than when food is discussed. Most people I know try to eat reasonably healthily but I don't know a single person who obsesses endlessly about the fat/salt/sugar/carb content of every microgram of food that passes their or their DC's lips. It sounds like such a fecking miserable way to live.
DD 12 does a lot of sport, as do I. Before big events, the coach advises the kids to 'carb load' with, shock horror, white pasta.
When I ran the London Marathon, a lot of the charities do pasta parties for runners the night before.
Carbs are not intrinsically evil.

I actually found though, once I taught myself to cook my own sauces it is hard to go back to packets and jars, as the extra sugar and salt is noticeable and my palate had changed to find it overpowering.

I remember once being at my SILs and she declared the shepherds pie she had been planning to make was off because she didn't have the ingredients. I thought she was missing mince or potatoes but it turned out to be a colemans shepherd's pie mix packet. She had a full rack of herbs but no confidence to make one without the packet. It was like Dumbo's magic feather.

caff - do you really want to know? You go to the local brewery, one that still does things in traditional style, and you ask to get into their mash room - then you take a jar and scrape off the brown gop around the side of the vats. That = marmite.

I love marmite

Havana
I use the chuck it all in me method for white sauce and its never thin
I use a desert spoon of flour and margin and about 1/2 pint of milk.
Put it in a pan and stir till it thickens. You can add more milk if too thick
I add a pinch of black pepper and 1/2 teaspoon of wholegrain mustard
Add cheese and you've got a cheese sauce
In use this for lasagne and tuna pasta bake and also cauliflower cheese
Takes literally a couple of minutes and no longer than a packet sauce

Excellent, thanks, Thumbwitch, as it goes there is a brewery in our village, so I'm going to pop down now. Obviously, I won't put it in a jar though, as they, as we have established are evil.

Incidentally, if anyone would like to call social services, I'm going to make a roast dinner later, and I'm intending to poison everyone with BISTO. Is there no limit to my depravity?

Oh Giles, all of those are fine.
If they come from Waitrose.
(does not know anyone in RL who shops in Waitrose. Mainly because there isn't one around here, but also because my friends and I can't afford the prices and are more the Asda/Lidl/Aldi types)

When you rely on the Daily Mail and Google to determine how to eat, you get warped attitudes like your SIL's and some of the posts here.

I agree andywarholsorange, talk of 'carbs' seems to have taken over a bit recently.

Everyone seems to be low carbing or something. You can't have a meal out now without everyone talking about 'all these carbs' 'having a post-carb slump', 'craving some carbs'. Argh, just eat your potatoes and get on with your life! There is such a wide margin for healthy eating in moderation, there's no need to obsess over it.

Thanks insancerre, I think sometimes due to time im trying to make it too fast, was thinking sticking it all in the blender might help make it smoother and thicker?

Tbh my sauces were nicer before ds3&4 came along and I could take my time with cooking

Damn

Dare I say I always put salt in my white sauce?
And in the water for boiling pasta in?

Actually, I always use salt when cooking, because IMO food tastes ghastly without it.

Re: the carb police, I remember once posting on a skiing thread and mentioning that I gave my kids Cadbury's Dairy Milk squares to take with them as a mid-morning snack. God, you'd think I'd been injecting them with heroin! It was suggested I try raisins or cutted-up pear or something.
PMSL trying to imagine my hulking great teens going for that!

With white sauce I make sure I cook the butter and flour together for a few mins to make sure they're well blended as this seems to make a difference with mine, I then add the milk gradually and whisk it quickly over the heat rather than stir until I have the consistency I want. It's lovely with a bit of nutmeg for lasagne.

I'm aware no one asked

Katie I never use salt purely because I don't like the taste, not because of any health benefits.

Katie - I have a friend who never uses salt. She didn't even have any in the house, except for a tiny little salt cellar that her DH may have filched from work at some point (and I mean tiny). I went to hers for dinner once, but because I and my DS are GF, I took GF pasta to cook and make tuna pasta. I always use salt in the water, so asked her where it was and this tiny salt cellar was all she had.
Anyway - cooked the pasta meal for all of us, and her DH started eating it and said "OMG, this is so GOOD - this pasta is really nice, what have you done to it?". Answer: added salt.