If you don't "cook from scratch", what do you eat?

[Notcontent]

Sorry, this is prompted by another thread, but I am really curious.

I am not a super-woman but I do (mostly) "Cook from scratch" despite being a lone parent who works long hours four days a week. I guess I do this because I am not British (but live in the UK now) and have always cooked. I don't really have time to cook when I get home from work so I batch cook on the weekend or sometimes in the evening. Or I make things that are very quick, like egg dishes, etc.

If you don't really cook, then what do you eat? I guess if you are single you can get away with eating out but that's not an option if you have kids...

I cook a lot, but when I don't/can't we have things like:

• Ready made quiche with salad
• Ready made fresh ravioli with packet sauce
• Steaks/pork chops with frozen wedges/chips
• Sausages or boudin blanc with (shock horror) powdered mash
• Tins of cassoulet or saucisse & lentilles
• Frozen chicken cordon bleus with frozen veg or chips
• Ready made fish soup with ready made croutons, cheese and rouille

We are in France so some of the standards are a bit different

Somebody mentioned M&S tinned chunky chicken. Goodness that stuff is delicious!

Unfortunately we don't have kids, if we had a family to feed then we'd obvs make proper meals

Cooking is a chore and just not that interested in food. It's functional and frankly if I could take a pill and not have to eat I would happily do so. Most of the time if I do cook it tastes rubbish, or even if it doesn't, then I just think how long it took to prepare and cook vs how long it took to eat. DH is a much better cook then me so if either of us cooks, it's more often him.

We tend to assemble food rather than cook - quiche and salad, beans on toast, jacket potato, soup and salad, or I'm a big fan of BOL veg pots.

If I cooked more than I'm sure I'd be a better cook, and wouldn't think whatever I made was a total waste of time and effort. But it's hard to summon the desire to cook when you're not that interested in the end result!

Stuff I make when I don't have the time / energy to cook from scratch:

• tortellini or similar with a tub of fresh tomato sauce
• quality ready meals or fresh soups and bread (m&s ones are great and often contain two veg portions)
• pizza with wedges and / or salad
• breaded fish or chicken, potatoes or oven chips, frozen veg, beans or salad
• selection of deli salad pots, cooked meats, crusty bread, salad etc
• those frozen jacket potatoes that everyone takes the mickey out of but actually make decent baked spuds in the microwave!

We rarely use jars or packets. If I'm making lasagne for example I always make the sauces. Same with fish pie, cottage pie. I don't use curry paste either. We also like to use the slow cooker and soup maker. But equally we eat fish fingers, pizza etc. Just depends what we're doing.

Not from scratch meals:
Stir fry with sauce and pre mixed veg mix
Old el passo enchiladas
Pizza and salad
Pre chopped veg, curry sauce, onion bhaji and rice
Cheese and beans jacket spud
Veggie burgers and salad
Quorn mince with mash, gravy and veg
Pasta bake with garlic bread and salad

We eat a lot less home made from scratch food since being vegetarian, we used to make lots of meat dishes from scratch. Yet despite this we are healthier and slimmer since ditching the meat and we didn't do it for those reasons.

I have 2 freezers. It's great . I guess we eat a lot of frozen stuff, fish fingers, fish in bread crumbs, burgers, sausages, chicken dippers, crispy chicken, chicken pie. I always have at least 2 veg with it and usually pasta or rice. Sometimes oven chips or waffles.

The only things I cook from scratch are stew, roast, stir fry and cottage pie. Chilli, curry and spag bol come from jars but I like the taste. We do have stuff like pork chops, turkey steaks, beef frying steaks etc they are all quick and easy to cook with paste or rice and veg. I vary it all a lot so it balances out.

I'll sometimes use bought a quiche, (or maybe even just the pastry case with my own filling), some ready made pesto, tortelloni or quorn sausages etc - but would not normally use any other kind of readymade sauce and would never buy ready meals or precooked rice etc. So expensive for a family x 4! Sometimes I'll buy a prepared pizza to save time and energy - but I find a homemade one or even a French bread one with lots of nice toppings far tastier and it's usually worth the extra effort, unless I'm late home from work or whatever. There is a huge amount of salt and sugar in a lot of ready made food - that is my made concern after cost.

SenecaFalls: yes. Homemade pasta for four takes ten minutes to mix, half an hour to rest, then another ten minutes to roll. All happens while the sauce is cooking. Also do pizza dough, pastry, croissants. Have made our own sausages, mayonnaise, corned beef. Partner and I both work full time, and we have takeaway occasionally, but processed food tastes awful. We both enjoy cooking, and I do understand that not everyone feels like this, but you can make time if you want to. Really object to people who feed small children takeaways and McCrap, though. stands back and awaits the inevitable outcry

Flozle - no outcry from this non cook. Although I don't cook (not just don't cook from scratch, don't cook full stop) and don't eat proper meals (and have a serious Deliveroo habit), that's because sadly we don't have any children. It's just DH and I and so it doesn't matter so much if we don't make proper meals (am not overweight FWIW - actually the opposite, my CBA attitude towards food is partially why I'm underweight). If we are ever able to have a child then obvs we would cook proper meals

Ok I am going to say it. I am genuinely shocked. Both by how much processed / takeaway stuff that people eat. And by how much extreme "from scratch" cooking goes on for an ordinary week day dinner

I buy a lot of Marks and Spencer's precooked stuff as I live alone and the only really things I cook from scratch are: eggs and beans on toast/Croque Monsieur/scrambled eggs with salmon and omelettes.

I mostly cook from scratch as it is sometime I enjoy. We have a small holding so have some animals to provide meat, fresh eggs and some grown produce. As a SAHM I have plenty of time to make pasta, bread etc. I have also managed to turn it into a small lifestyle business.

There are too many of us to use ready meals but I do sometimes use the fajita packs, dried or ready made fresh pasta. We have the odd ready meal in for rampaging hungry teenagers. They like the Charlie Bingham (?) meals or the odd Waitrose one. I don't really like the others, for example we tried a Cook meal as we had a voucher and nobody liked them so it was a waste of money. Sometimes I use a reader made curry base.

The hidden sugar and salt in ready meals worries me tbh and I have the time so don't need to use them.

We are lucky that living where we do we know lots of other farmers, smallholders so we can trade what we have made or grown.

I am intrigued by tinned chunky chicken though.

Phi its chunked chicken breast in a white sauce. In a tin. It's very tasty. Makes a good pie filling or just with spuds and veg. I SO want some now!

I will buy it, if I leave a few chicken feathers out on the side nobody will know!

Your secret is safe with us

It's a great thing to have in the cupboard as a standby. I think they do chunky steak as well and possibly savoury mince.

Think I do about half and half. Last night we had a full roast dinner. Tonight we are having left over beef and veg with onion rings and chips, both from frozen.

We use the Fajita boxes too and frozen mushy peas are like manna.

Oh and I've got some of those really healthy pizzas in the freezer. You know, the ones with hot dog sausages in the crust

My DS has a friend who I know eats takeaway every night, his DM told me. He does have a habit of calling in when I'm cooking and looking longingly and saying thinks like "oh DS, you are a lucky boy".

I reckon DS would look longingly at the child who hass takeaways every night and say he was the lucky one!

You're probably right Bertie. Mind you I think my DS might get sick of it, maybe after a couple of years months.

guys, can we not accuse the OP of being xenophobic - perhaps what she said was badly worded but I didn't read it as her saying that British people don't cook from scratch - more that, in the culture she comes from, a much higher proportion of people cook from scratch so she doesn't really know what people mean when they say they 'don't cook' and is curious, not criticizing.

Haha I'm British and always cook from scratch despite also being busy!

FFS you are a year too late @isawahatonce

it's a ZOMBIE thread

We've had the occasional rabbit stew - criminal shot in the garden and home gutted, home grown veg, rosemary . didn't grow the salt or the tinned tomatoes, so I suppose even that doesn't count.

Bugger. Sorry. Not 2017 now!

Where possible there are certain things I make from scratch, such as pizza (using the recipe earlier but adding semolina), lasagne, moussaka, flatbreads and tzatziki, casseroles, roasts. However if I made everything 'from scratch' I'd lose the will. I work full time and my priority is that we eat together and enjoy what we're eating when I'm not working away. Inevitably we'll have a few nights of fajitas, chicken nuggets, but make sure we have veg to go with it.