How do you make frozen vegetables. I realized I don't like them, and the only thing that works making them edible is loads of butter or lots of salt..?
I've found that some frozen vegetables just aren't very good, but the ones I like I tend to mix into things instead of cooking them up alone. Like this week I made chicken and vegetable enchiladas and used frozen cauliflower and broccoli in it, mixed with all the enchilada sauce. Plenty of flavor. I also add frozen veg to spaghetti sauce, or soups (e.g. adding frozen peas to a beef stew or frozen cauliflower to minestrone). The ones I try to keep on hand are peas, corn, broccoli, and cauliflower. Carrots are OK frozen, but I'll only use them where I want them to be cooked thoroughly (they're a little weird if you cook them 'al dente'). Frozen pearl onions are also good for soups and stews, but that's kind of a niche vegetable that I only use once or twice a year.
That's a great way to use them. I don't know why I didn't think of that. :)
To expand on Dollar Slice's excellent ideas (some of which I will be stealing!), here are a couple of formulas I often use in my own kitchen:
Leftover sauce + leftover starch + frozen vegetables = dinner
Leftover sauce + leftover starch + frozen vegetables + cheese and/or breadcrumbs on top = casserole
This is a great way to clean out the fridge, and it produces unique combinations that may never exist again. ;-) The leftover sauce and starch may of course be either replaced or supplemented by newly-constructed items, depending on what you have. You can also add sliced/shredded leftover meat for more protein or bulk, or just to use up something else, or just because you like it.
Ways this plays out often in our house:
Leftover rice + mixture of sauce ingredients (soy sauce, sesame oil, chili oil, sherry, ginger, hoisin sauce, etc) + frozen veggies = vegetable stir-fry (add meat if you like!)
Leftover pasta + leftover sauce (or can of cream-of-whatever soup) + frozen veggies + panko, cheese and herbs sprinkled on top = casserole
I will often intentionally make a double batch of sauces in recipes I'm making, or make extra rice or pasta to have on hand in the fridge, so that I will have leftover items on hand to use for just this purpose. It is often a feature of my weekly meal planning--like I'll say Friday night is a "clean out the fridge dinner" night, where we see what the fridge has to offer that night and create dinner around it. It helps that my husband is very open to consuming the results of this application of my creativity--it helps that 99% of them are edible, of course, and that many of them are actually qualitatively GOOD. Even when we do have the occasional dud, we have fun talking about what went wrong and how we might avoid it next time. ;-)
I tend to keep big bags of Costco stir-fry veggies in the freezer for this very purpose. I do occasionally buy other single-item frozen veggies for some recipe or other, but then use up little bits of leftovers from those bags in the same way described above.
Have fun! :)