Ready meals

How come when they are not ready to eat when you are ready to eat them. Lady next door had terrible trouble with a frozen lasagne.

I do not eat my meals until they are ready, so I don't know.

I am chief cook and bottle washer and normally cook meals from scratch. My wife is not a big eater and "ready meals" come in handy for her to eat. Most people call them "ping "meals because most of these meals are cooked in the microwave. When I was at work for the last few years we had no canteen and only had 30 mins for our meal time so ready meals were the order of the day

I-Spy: “How come when they are not ready to eat when you are ready to eat them?”

I suppose you just have to get your readies steadied before eating.

It’s very nice to have you back, I-Spy!

As to the lady next door’s trouble with a frozen lasagne - that could take a lot of thaw.

I very rarely buy "ready meals" but, living alone, I sometimes tend to forget I'm only cooking for one nowadays and therefore make too much for myself for one sitting.

If it's something like a casserole, a stew, corned beef hash, curry, or anything else of that nature, I freeze the remaining so it's all up and ready for next time; but it's only ready to eat as long as I remember to defrost it in the fridge overnight, so just needs re-heating the following day.

Following day casseroles are notoriously delicious.

Curries retain their heat from chillies, but the nuanced flavours depend upon volatile oils from the spices: they are soon gone.

I have been experimenting with a curry rejuvenating mix to add them back to yesterday's curry. Not quite there yet!

Curries, and corned beef hash, taste much better the second time around.

If anything, curries are hotter after freezing because, as you say, the chillies retain their heat. Mine are anyway!

Unfortunately, I have a friend up the road who is a Type 1 diabetic, but she lives on ready meals as she refuses to learn how to cook, which is sad. I've tried to tell her that microwave/ready meals are higher in salt, sugar and other nasty stuff, but she'd rather read a packet than work out how much of this and that she should have, and she's already in very poor shape for her age - 60.

When I was working I would get home 1 hour before my wife so one day I decided to get the meal ready for my wife and three kids, had a look through her cook book and and chicken coc a van looked good, they all liked it very mutch so I cooked it 3 days running, they refuse to eat it now although it is very tasty.

Was it the overkill that made them refuse to eat it again, Bentlegs? I’ve done similar, cooked a successful dish too frequently, & my family eventually objected to eating it again.

Ena M, here’s a curry recipe which says its flavours improve overnight - could be worth a try:

Chickpea & Cauliflower Curry BBC Vegan Comfort Food

Madhur Jaffrey's recipe for mushroom and black eyed peas/beans similarly improves over a few hours after cooking finished. That is not the point.

The heavy components of flavour, such as chilli, cardamom etc will remain for some time, and you may find, as often observed with casserole that you prefer this matured flavour.

Lighter notes which give the dish the more nuanced spice flavours are not long lasting: the volatile aromatic oils which carry them are quickly lost. Ginger, especially.

Of course, this only applies where the original dish contained such fresh ingredients, if they were not there to begin with, then they aint there to be lost.

So I guess that ultimately, it all comes down to how you make your curry.

It applies not only to curries. When I make a pizza, I often add quite a bit of oregano. This is an intensive flavour which almost completely disappears from cold and reheated left over pizza. Although in this instance it is simple to add some more oregano before reheating.

That does not work for ginger/curry. Obviously you can ginger flavour your reheated curry, but if does not incorporate the flavour in the way that Indian culinary techniques attain.

ps I would never/ have never, make a curry using so called 'curry powder'. Once in 1960's, I complained about a meal in work's canteen. I got told yes it is a curry because it had curry powder added to it! I guess that put me off for life. Later in life, I had a colleague who was Indian, and she was a fantastic cook. We were a department who often socialised and invited the others to dine with us. Since she was a single lady, and cooking for more than a dozed ant that easy, I used to offer to go round a few hours early and help her with the prep. So I got to learn Indian Cooking as done in the home. (Very different to Indian Restaurant style)