Food Shopping in America

[Earlybird]

Just back from the supermarket where I stood and stared for a long time at the many boxes of 'just add meat and cook for a delicious/easy meal'. You know what I mean - Tuna Helper, Homestyle Bakes, Shake and Bake for chicken, Hamburger Helper, etc.

Are any of these edible....or dare I say it, reasonably OK for putting a hot meal on the table on a school night? Any specific brands/makes you'd recommend or stay away from?

Have never got the hang of cooking in bulk/freezing, and don't feel comfortable leaving something in the oven while I go on the school run....so am hoping to add a few easy/tasty dinners to my school night repertoire when time is limited.

I never tried any off them when we lived out there tbh, I was totally overwhelmed when I first went into a supermarket. Then I found Whole Foods and did all my shopping there (but I am a cook from scratch kind of person, make my own bread etc etc).

Read the labels carefully.

I mostly stayed away from those, although I always kept a few to hand for camping or when I just couldn't be arsed.

MSG is nowhere near as common there as here.

I was patrial to hamburger helper.

[cringe]

I also did all my shopping in Whole Foods - aka Trader Joe's on the East Coast.

We tried the dayglo mac'n'cheese once and nobody ate it. We did like chiller cabinet cookie dough and cinnamon rolls that you put icing over when they are warm. (Sorry, that isn't really a reasonable dinner!)

shake and bake can be quite nice on chicken, it's a coating that you 'shake' onto the chicken. hamburger helper is a bag of spices and things that you can add to ground beef to 'spice it up'

they aren't all bad

I thought Trader Joe's was a different store altogether? Isn't it a wholesale place like Macro, or am I geting it mixed up with some other one?

Ha, I made Tuna Helper two nights ago, my dh bought it. It looked like Tuna Pasta bake, it was a little 'processed' tasting, but we ate it and so did dd2. Nice with salad and crusty bread.

Very quick and easy to make. I would buy it again, but I didn't read the label, (except to check for peanuts)

Lol at you staring at the supermarket shelves, I do that all the time, been here a year (Canada) and I think I am still shopping like a foreigner.

COV-Trader Joe's and Whole Foods ARE two entirely separate entities.

Earlybird--put down your crazy and STAY AWAY from the Tuna Helper/Homestyle Bakes. Actually, I'm betting you would anyway the 1st time you taste them. The Homestyle Bakes totally freak me out, anything that has "meat" in it, but can stay good on a shelf has to be scary.

DH won't eat any food like that, so I don't have a lot of experience in the area, but I have a lot of friends who swear by Stouffer's (sp?) lasagna that you just heat up and stick in the oven. When DH lived away from us for 5 months, I tried a Tuna Helper once because I was in a pinch for time. I threw it out and we went out to Taco Bell instead, it was so bad. Come to think of it, the last time he was out of town we got back home late, and I tried a Bertoli's (sp? again) Mediterranean Style skillet meal. They are in the frozen section, and usually have pasta, meat, veggies and some kind of sauce you just heat up in a skillet. Can't say I'd eat it very often, but it was better than most.

Do you have a Costco close by? They have some not-too-bad heat up type meals in their frozen section. They also have meals that they prepare there. They have a chicken alfredo thing that while DH would never eat it, I kind of liked it, and it was so big it provided 3 meals for the kids and I.

That was just from what I understood, Trader Joe's was like Whole Foods, but on the East Coast.

Don't know, I never set foot in one, only Whole Foods.

Not been in the US for nigh on 6 years, but remember Shake n Bake and Hamburger Helper quite well.

The Stouffer's frozen lasagne is brilliant, though.

Unfortunately, not available in the UK at all, even in Costco.

The grass is always greener, Kerry.

I don't get homesick except for food every now and again, but I don't miss live to work, 40 hour min., fortnight's holiday, health insurance and all that crap.

Among other things.

Horses for courses, but there's no way I'd live there again unless I were independently wealthy.

What my girls chose remains to be seen, but I made my choice long ago.

TJ's are all over the West Coast, too. We have 3 of them in the Portland area, I think. I love them, they are so reasonably priced and really good quality. There are lots of Whole Foods here, too, but they are kind of more "granola-ey" than I am, and I can't really be bothered.

Whole Foods is due to open near us sometime before Christmas, so that will be a good addition to the shopping in this area.

C&Cmommy - if I read it correctly, most of those on-the-shelf-meals don't have the meat already in them (that would be beyond bleurgh!). You're supposed to add in the tuna, chicken, hamburger etc with their packets of spices/breadcrumbs - and voila - a yummy/easy meal! At least that's what they claim on the box....

There are so many different variations of those things on the shelves, I figure someone must be buying them/liking them.

Earlybird, seeing all those endless roads of cardboard boxes in the supermarket was soul destroying for me.

I found the easiest way to cook was simple meals with ingredients you could recognise , eg chicken and rice.

Hamburger Helper is basically quick-cook pasta and powdered cheese. You brown some mince, and then add the dried pasta and flavourings, then top up with water and cook for 10 minutes.

An improved version is to use your own pasta (cooked) and make the sauce of of Campbell's condensed soup. It's not much more effort that HH. The next stage up is to chop and onion and cook this with your mince. Then add the pasta, and your choice of flavourings (eg Worcester Sauce) along with sour cream. This was a weekly meal for my DH when he was growing up.

Hamburger Helper is basically quick-cook pasta and powdered cheese. You brown some mince, and then add the dried pasta and flavourings, then top up with water and cook for 10 minutes.

An improved version is to use your own pasta (cooked) and make the sauce of of Campbell's condensed soup. It's not much more effort that HH. The next stage up is to chop and onion and cook this with your mince. Then add the pasta, and your choice of flavourings (eg Worcester Sauce) along with sour cream. This was a weekly meal for my DH when he was growing up.

Whole foods also tend to have a section that does delicous ready cooked dishes, potaoes and veg dishes, whole chickens, and salads. A lot of people tended to fill up one of the plastic containers with their supper on their way home from work for a hot freshly cooked meal without the hassle of cooking.

whole foods is agreat place to shop although I used to get very distracted there by all the interesting stuff. my sister lives in NJ and advises me to steer clear of ready made of most thingswhen i visit, she has a slo cooker too. And I think you need to watch all the brands you recognise too as the sugar content etc is much higher than in UK. A friend's children put on alot of weight eating what she thought was a similar diet to at home until she twigged this. Also, growth hormones in the meat??

Thanks for the suggestion of checking ideas on soup cans. Might makes things taste much better and not be so bright orange as whatever is in the boxes that stopped me today!

I hear very good things about the Whole Foods Rotisserie chicken. (Don't think anyone much roasts a chicken here, btw as they're so readily available/cheap instore...)

Stoffers lasagna is v. good considering and their chicken parmesan isn't bad either. I do fried pork chops in shake n' bake which dh loves (but he is from Ohio) and in the winter I couldn't live without my slow-cooker. Southern Living have just brought out a slow cooker recipe book which I think would be a bit more sophisticated than most of the slow cooker books.

Some of them do, and some of them don't, I just went shopping and checked. DH and I looked at a box that had the dehydrated meat in it one time just for kicks, and I have never gotten over it again.

A lot of stores have pretty good rotisserie chickens that are fairly cheap and you can make a meal out of it and then have some meat left over to throw in another meal quickly. The food section of the paper here had an article about them not too long ago about how good most stores are. Costco and Whole Foods ranked at the top if I remember correctly.