pre-prepared or just prepared

[chipmunk1]

can someone please settle a discussion between dp and me? can food really be pre-prepared? surely its just prepared? we're starting to get tetchy about this and it needs put out of its misery. thanks.

Hmm - good one! I would have said that a meal can be prepared (ie the ingredients chopped and assembled) but if it is pre-prepared it is partly or fully cooked. And then re-heated.

That's how I would have read it.

pre-prepared means prepared in advance.

So does prepared, sleepy!

No, I mean that pre-prepared means prepared before the time it should be prepared...am I making sense?

I would prepare vegetables just before I cook them.

I would pre-prepare them if I chopped and bagged them and put them in the fridge in the morning, in order to cook them in the evening.

So, yes I think food can be pre-prepared.

Yes, amuminscotland, that's what I mean!

so if it gets prepared twice its then pre-prepared?

No, I'd say it's only been prepared the once, but way ahead of the time when it needs to be used.

So when is it just pared?

When you get takeaway.

pre-cut beans are pre-prepared imo - because they have to be cut again to get rid of the nasty dried ends anyway, thus making the initial end-cutting a complete waste of time.

So yes, you can pre-prepare things.

Rachmum has a good point

Prepare comes from the Latin prae = before + parare to make ready.

So actually the 'pare' bit means make ready, so prepare means 'make ready beforehand', so pre-prepare means......?

It's like when you re-iterate again. Re-iterate means to say again anyway.

Oh and I read about a mirror which had been 'decimated' (they meant ruined). Decimate means reduce by one-tenth (not to one-tenth which is another thing which annoys me..) so difficult to see how that can apply to a mirror which looked whole and ok in my view