Cooking With Packaged Food Is Great, Actually

Packaged, processed, and semi-prepared foods are convenient and economical, but sadly, cooking with peel-apart biscuits and microwaveable pastas has endured a host of disparaging titles, including “cheap,” “low-class,” or “gross,” depending on who you’re talking to. My advice? Don’t talk to those people anymore. Semi-prepared, packaged ingredients are accessible and easy to put together, no matter your level of cooking experience. And let’s not forget that these ingredients are damn delicious with plenty of nutritious potential. Grab your casserole dishes, it’s time to embrace the convenience and creativity of pre-packaged meal prep.

Let’s be real, if you worked all day, can’t afford to order in, and don’t have the time or energy to make everything from scratch, packaged ingredients are a real boon. Semi-homemade meals are low-cost and faster than those that are cooked from scratch, and they can slide in between fully home-cooked meals on days you don’t feel like cooking an entire meal. Packaged foods can be a good starting ground for folks just learning how to cook or how to season, or those who simply have no interest in cooking jargon or “proper technique”.

Enter heat-and-serve Madras lentils, boxed cake mix, canned chilli, Spam, instant mashed potatoes, and all the condensed cream soups. They’re simple to prepare with a “just add water”-style, but more importantly, these packaged, shelf-stable goods have helped entire cultures flourish with their availability and endlessly riff-ability. Condensed soups run the casserole game, and can transform into a creamy, Swedish meatball-esque sauce in the slow cooker. A tub of mashed potatoes can make the breakfast of your dreams. Boxed muffin mix can become black and white cookies, store-bought biscuit dough makes a damn fine sausage biscuit, and if I get started on Spam, I might not be able to stop.

Riff with canned soups

Canned soups come in a wide variety these days, but I separate them into two categories: creamy and brothy. Both types are valuable for bulking up meals or creating a speedy sauce. One of my favourite ways to turn one can of soup into a multi-serving dish is to add a protein and a carb, plus a vegetable (usually frozen). Let’s say I have leftover meatballs and rice in the cupboard. Dump the soup, meatballs and raw rice into a casserole dish with a frozen veg. Any vegetable will do, but amplifying a vegetable that’s already in the soup is nice.

Cover the dish with foil and bake at 180°C, checking every 20 minutes or so for doneness. The water from the soup will cook the rice and leave you with a flavorful sauce coating all of the ingredients. The same goes with any carb, so try sliced raw potatoes, pasta, or farro if you get tired of rice. Depending on the soup’s available water content, and how hearty the carb is, you might have to add time or a splash of water, so periodically check on the dish, and poke at the potatoes or grains to see if they’re cooked through. For a low-carb take, I usually try to stick to the creamy soups since the proteins and vegetables won’t be absorbing any of the extra water.

There are other ways to use your canned soups, like a lazy chicken pot pie, and exploring beyond the world of casseroles is highly recommended. Add a can of beef vegetable soup to your slow cooker with a tough cut of meat and chunks of root vegetables. Make a stellar mac and cheese sauce by melting shredded cheddar and havarti in a pot with canned creamy potato soup. The thickeners in the soup will accept the cheese into the mixture like an old friend. Add cooked macaroni. (No one’s gonna be mad about potato pieces in their mac and cheese, I’ll tell you that.)

Jam with instant carbs

My love for packaged food goes beyond canned soup. I’m a huge fan of instant dry bases too. My go-to since childhood is Knorr Pasta Sides and its ilk of fast-cooking pastas. Anyone who thinks, “just make pasta then” doesn’t understand the magnificent sauce that emerges from this lovely green paper package. The flavour dust is already mixed in with the dry pasta, so you don’t need to own a whole spice cabinet or know which seasonings go well with others. It’s pre-portioned, so I can’t do what I could do and eat six servings, and its assembly is straightforward but flexible. Boil with water. That can mean in a pot on the stove, or in my case in a casserole dish with frozen spinach and leftover seared chicken thighs in the oven for 20 minutes.

Other prepped carbs like instant mashed potatoes, canned biscuits, or dry pancake mix offer a great deal of versatility beyond face value. Mashed potatoes can be used for crispy baked chicken breading, or to thicken soups. Canned biscuits can be mixed with cinnamon and sugar for a celebratory pull-apart dessert. Pancake mix can be hydrated just enough to make plump and savoury chicken and dumplings. Just in case this isn’t clear, you can, and should, combine the tips from canned soups and instant carbs to continue your packaged food explorations. (I’m looking at you creamy chicken corn chowder and Bisquick mix with added shredded chicken.)

Using only natural, elemental ingredients is a fine way to cook, and if you Uber-order every meal, live your best life, but never underestimate the opportunities that store-bought components present for creative meals. Free yourself from the food bully mentality and openly boast about the Vienna sausage ramen you made last week.