Livening up ready meals

[HephzibahRose]

I’m going to be relying on easy-cook meals for a while and looking for ideas for how to jazz up commonly-found microwave meals. Things which can be done at the start of the cooking process but not need too much about faffing with once heating up.
Is anything improved with a bit of herbs or additional of a common ingredient, or air-frying rather than microwaving?

To give you some examples:
Putting cheese or cheese and breadcrumbs on the top of cottage pie
Cooking scoops of the potato from sausage ‘n’ mash into balls in the air fryer rather than the microwave so it goes crispy rather than soggy
Adding blueberries to plain instant porridge

Anything tried and tested to put on oven chips or baked potatoes?

Tabasco on eggs
(no suggestions for spuds I’m afraid)

Grated cheese, rinsed and drained tinned black beans, chopped spring onion for the last 5 mins or so on the oven chips

Vegetables and salad

A lot of ready meals are protein and carbs and very little in the way of fresh ingredients.

I do a tray of roasted veg or a big bag of kale to sautée or broccoli to steam all of which can keep in the fridge for 3-4 days.

I also do lots of raw veg on the side - lettuce or bagged salad with a vinaigrette or I chop up carrot sticks, cucumber slices, baby tomatoes. It rounds out a stodgy meal and you can stretch a ready meal easily to 2 meals with a good side of veg and salad.

Had lunch at a friend's recently, she added more ham, cheese & jarred red peppers to a bog-standard pizza - great improvement.

Ready made pastas with cherry tomatoes, ham, spring onions, tuna, capers, olives etc.

Add some mixed frozen veg or a tin of beans/lentils to ready made curries.

Nothing wrong with eggs and beans on toast!