Just doing my Ocado Christmas order and got to wondering, what do you think of frozen roast potatoes and parsnips

[handlemecarefully]

...as an alternative to buying raw parsnips and potatoes and roasting them myself.

My roast vegetables are never that great anyway....

Can you personally tell much difference between frozen roast potatoes and parsnips and home prepared ones?

For me, Christmas isn't about enslavement at the cooker....so am tempted

Yes you can tell the difference. Don't do it!

I mean doing roast potatoes and parsnips yurself won't enslave you to the cooker once they're in you can leave them all frozen ones are doing is saving you time on peeling and for the difference in flavour it's hardly worth it.

Hmmmm well in my case the frozen stuff seems to taste better

Yes, frozen are grim.

FWIW, you can par-boil, drain and toss your spuds in a bit of flour (bash em about in a lidded pan with a bit of flour) and then freeze them.

Et Voila. Homemade frozen spuds without the dubious additions

Frozen roast potatoes are horrible. And roast veggies really not time-consuming to cook: chop, toss in oil, cook.

Frozen potatoes I think in general are grim, but the M&S chilled ready-to-cook ones are fabulous - both their potatoes and their (honey-roast) parsnips, and they can be frozen and defrosted the evening before. I guess Waitrose will have similar.

No No No

Message withdrawn

The parsnips I would buy frozen because I cannot cut one without the smell making me bork.

Roast potatoes are too easy.
Cut, par boil and whack them in the roasting dish with your meat.

Lurrrrvely.

Yuk - they've always got some grim 'coating' which is probably some fatty leftover residue.

oh no - you can deffo tell the difference. We used to have some in for 'easy' roasts when we couldn't be bothered to do the whole thing but gave up when we realised just how much nicer real ones were.

Is it already time to book ocado slots....

The don't seem to have christmas delivery dates on ocado ? Are you doing a non-perishables shop early ??

I've just checked the website and phoned, not slots in my area yet.

I know what will happen I'll not look for 2 days and they'll all be blardy gone!

Well I've got my slot 5-6pm on 23 December, SP5 (Salisbury area)

Keep your eyes peeled! - check twice a day if I were you since if mine are available yours will be soon

homemade are nicer, but if it stresses you out and thats not what you want on xmas day then fine.
My MIL did great spuds, but now gets Aunt Bessies. We can definitely tell the difference but as she's 89 and still doing xmas lunch for us she's excused!

ooh thanks HMC. Will keep a look out.

omg IS IT TIME TO DO XMAS SHOP>????

OMG no sign of the slots here...eeek will keep checking.

did they email you?????

Frozen roast parsnips = acceptable
Frozen roast potatoes = regret

ummmmm - okay, perhaps I just need to practice my parsnip and roast potato roasting techniques before the big day