Make your own gourmet ready-meals

In the winter I love to spend a bit of time in the kitchen making bigger quantities of food than normal, then at mealtimes I have a ready-made meal.  There are boutique cafes and food stores that offer fresh, chilled gourmet ready-meals and the prices can be quite high for a single or double serving.  So why not make your own?

With a few Gladware or Tupperware containers you can easily replicate these gourmet ready-meals at a much lower cost and with ingredients to suit your taste and any preferences or health issues.

I chopped and prepped vegetables for an hour yesterday afternoon, and the beautiful result is a huge pot of soup which will be lunch for the next week, and a pasta bake which will do at least two or three evening meals for us both (and my husband is a big eater!).

Since I was in the kitchen by myself, I happily had my iPod earphones in and listened to Oprah interviewing JK Rowling.  It was very interesting and I could chop away without getting bored.

Vegetable soup

1 kumara (sweet potato)

¼ pumpkin

½ onion

1 clove of garlic

1 carrot

1 courgette (zucchini)

1 leek

1 stalk of celery

Peel/wash/chop where applicable.  Fill a soup/stock pot to half way with vegetables and fill the pot to three quarters with hot water.  Add the appropriate amount of stock seasoning (I use four Massel stock cubes for the size of my pot) and anything else you’d like.  For example, sometimes I add a heaped teaspoon of yellow curry powder for a mellow warming taste and other times it might be mixed dried herbs.

Once everything is soft, use an immersion blender to puree.  Top up with some more hot water to adjust the thickness to your preference.  If you want to sautee the onions and celery first in olive oil and/or butter you can, but I haven’t been doing this lately and the soup is just as delicious.

Serve with a decent-sized dollop of greek yoghurt or sour cream (yum, this is the most important step).

Soup simmering last night, and 'pasta' bake about to go into the oven.  I realise uncooked meat is never that appetising to look at so sorry about that.

Pasta Bake

Now the funny thing about the pasta bake I made last night is that I realised I didn’t have a single piece, not even one, of pasta in the house when I went to use it.  I wasn’t about to go out just for that (even though it’s quite a main ingredient in pasta bake…), so I substituted rice and it was a success.  My husband was dubious at best but raved about it afterwards.  I reminded him that risotto is Italian and it has rice in rather than pasta.  But calling it rice bake sounds a bit weird doesn’t it?

500g (1 pound) lean beef mince

1 400g (14 oz) can chopped tomatoes and juice.  Rinse the can out with a small amount of water - less than 1/4 can) and mix this in too.

Seasoning.  Sometimes I get fancy and make it up myself and sometimes, I use packets.  Last night I used:

1 packet Simply Organic Mushroom Sauce mix

1 packet Simply Organic Tomato Basil Spaghetti Sauce mix

1 large 500g (18 oz) tub of full-fat cottage cheese

1 cup of rice, rinsed in a sieve

If you actually do have short pasta in the house, add 2 cups instead of the rice

½ onion chopped

Small amounts of kumara and pumpkin in tiny dice

10 mushrooms chopped

Usually I would mix everything together and put in a rectangular oven dish which I’ve wiped over with olive oil and a paper towel.  But the ingredients added up to so much bulk that I couldn’t fit the cottage cheese in at the end so I did a lasagne style arrangement where I put half of the mixture on the bottom of the dish, spread the cottage cheese over, then put the other half of the mixture on the top.

Cover with foil and bake at 180 deg C (350 deg F) for an hour.  Then take the foil off, grate some cheese over the top and return to the oven for half an hour.  I love meals like this where all the prep is at the beginning and then you can relax while it cooks.

Both the Massel stock cubes and the Simply Organic products I tried because they are gluten-free (I am celiac) but they are actually an upgrade, both in taste and ingredients compared with the stocks and gravy mixes I used to buy.  What a bonus!  And the funny thing is that even the beef and chicken flavoured stock cubes from Massel are vegan.  My sister has been vegetarian/vegan/vegetarian since she was thirteen so I could happily serve up my vegetable soup to her even with a beef or chicken stock base from this brand.  I feel like I would want to check with her first that that was okay though!

I know it’s summer where a lot of you are, so please do stash this post for the winter months when you will be looking for something warming (hard to imagine when it's hot I know).

These are just two examples of meals you can create ahead for your own 'gourmet ready-meal' menu.  I'd love to hear your ideas so I can add to my list!