Commuter CookingMore than ever, we rely on convenience foods for midweek meals, but it doesn't have to be that way. Sometimes fresh is fastest, argues Catherine Cleary - convincingly - in the first of a series
It is a typical evening in commuter Ireland. You have just spent 70 minutes in a river of red brake lights on the journey home. You crawl from the car to the supermarket. Inside it is a scene from Night of the Living Unfed. The aisles are full of zombies peering into fridges all hoping that maybe the dinner inside the packaging will live up to its photograph.
We zombies know this is purely functional food and it will be about as authentic as a pre-election promise. But we trade a pierce-and-press meal for a bit of time. Time to get the kids fed and into pyjamas or to just kick off our shoes in front of the telly for 10 minutes.
The real con in convenience food is that if you factor in the supermarket queue, the reheating in the oven and the trip to the recycling centre with all the packaging the alternative of cooking clever fast meals from scratch begins to make much more sense.
There are commuters who love to cook. At the weekends we reach for oil-and flour-spattered cookbooks and spend a happy couple of hours sauteing, reducing and simmering. But on a week night, if you offer us a choice between a vegetable peeler and an oven chip, most of us go for the chip, or the takeaway menu. But it is possible to cook real food real fast. The result will be cheaper, healthier and more satisfying. Do not go softly into that frozen food aisle. All it takes is a small bit of planning and a few ideas to make a passionate weekday chef out of the longest-distance diner.
Over the coming weeks we will look at how to fit good eating into the daily grind. This week, a couple of handy dinners that can help make life taste more like the weekend.