Thanks for all of the ideas! Definitely some great options for quick meals with shelf-stable-ish ingredients, and I hear loud and clear that it's perhaps easiest to just get in the habit of freezing my own leftovers. I have some base distaste for that for some reason, but I cook a lot of stews and soups anyway, so they should reheat well.
But you will spend more for poorer quality processed frozen meals?
Can you help me understand this??
It's not entirely rational. I think it's a combination of:
1) freezing is not fool-proof. Some foods don't freeze/thaw well. There's potential for freezer burn. In general, I've come to think of freezing as a last resort form of food storage – the food will be less tasty than if you had eaten it refrigerated or fresh. Though this thread has convinced me to revisit that as it doesn't feel justified in all cases, plus it's immensely practical
2) freezer-aisle meals are designed and packaged to be frozen, so they don't suffer from the above issues
3) re: poorer quality, freezer-aisle meals are definitely lower nutritional quality, but in terms of subjective experience, I enjoy them the same way that I enjoy McDonald's – it's an occasional guilty pleasure. There's also a novelty factor.
4) re: cost, the difference is nominal since this isn't something I'm doing regularly. The freezer meals I've seen are only $2-3 dollars/serving more than cooking.
$2-3 is more than I spend per-serving period, so to me, that's a lot.
I also have a prissy little spoiled palate that is so adapted to nutrient-dense food that I can barely tolerate processed frozen meals. I do intermittent fasting so I'm more likely to just skip a day of eating than eat a grocery store frozen lasagna.
My local store has a lot of ethnic foods and does have quite good frozen saag paneer, so that's my go-to on the very rare occasions that I don't have a fridge full of bulk-cooked, nutrient dense meals.
Even my DH who uses to be able to eat just about any quality of food has become a finicky food quality snob. The last time he ate a frozen meal he made a face and said "this tastes like salty cardboard" and threw it out in favour of eating a raw pepper and hard boiled egg, lol.
As for freezing meals, I agree, I don't like to freeze any of my bulk cooking if I can avoid it,.but when I do, I keep tabs on my inventory and cycle through everything quickly. The key is to not treat the frozen stock like desperation backup food that you never eat, you work it into your routine.
You can usually know how many days per week/month you typically aren't up for cooking. Keep a constant cycle of meals in the freezer (frozen for a few weeks max) available on hand for those regular occurrence days.
That said, if you really don't want to eat frozen food, that's fine. I'm all about making things more simple, easy, and enjoyable, not worse.
If you want more on-demand easy options, the key is to get really familiar with simple combos that can be shaken up in terms of flavour. So, for example, with pantry staples you can make an enormous range of legume based meals where the flavour comes primarily from onions, garlic, and spices.
If you learn certain spice combinations, you can make a huge range of meals from any combo of beans, lentils, rice, quinoa, millet, pasta, potatoes, canned tomatoes, frozen spinach, coconut milk, etc, and those meals will taste radically different from one another.
I have a smokey quinoa and black beans salad that tastes completely different from a buttery quinoa and black bean Indian curry, which also tastes very different from a tex-mex quinoa and black bean taco filling which again tastes different from a quinoa and black bean red curry pasta.
When you delve into the vast world of legume based cooking, you figure out that it's really a paint by numbers process that takes very little effort and thought once you get the hang of it. I have recipes that take less than 10 minutes of effort, yield 8-10 servings, and cost less than $1/serving and are absolutely delicious and very nutritious and filling.
