I like to make life easy wherever possible and I’m certainly not averse to the odd shortcut here and there. In fact, I’m more than happy to take advantage of anything that makes my life a bit simpler.
My latest kitchen shortcut is frozen mixed veg – not exactly ground breaking I know but seriously, I love it. I’m sure all supermarkets do a similar thing but the one I’ve been using is the Tesco Value range which is ideal for cooking and adding to recipes as the veg is chopped into quite small pieces which makes it easy to eat for kids and I find that they’re more likely to eat it because the pieces are so small. This one is made up of carrots, peas and cauliflower and it’s great value for money at less than a pound for a large-ish bag.
Apart from being great value and easy to add to meals, frozen veg is apparently better for you than fresh veg although that information comes to you courtesy of a quick Google so may not be entirely accurate. I’ve seen sites that suggest that fresh veg that you buy in the Supermarket could be as old as nine days and that fresh veg can lose up to 45% of important nutrients by the time you serve it to your family. Frozen veg however appears to be better for you as it’s usually frozen very early on and the freezing keeps all of the nutrients in there.
And as if that wasn’t good enough it’s already peeled, chopped and prepared so you just have to grab a handful and add it to your pan!
Another good thing about it is that it’s so much easier to get veg in the kids because it’s in small pieces which are easy to throw in to lots of dishes and the chances are that the kids won’t notice as much as with the larger chunks.
I thought I’d show you today just how versatile a bag of frozen mixed veg can be by sharing just a few of the meals we’ve had recently….
It’s amazing in this colourful and simple vegetable risotto.
You can hardly even notice it’s there when you add it to minced beef and onions or other casseroles and stews.
It’s great just to add to plain rice – Miss Frugal cooked some rice in veggie stock and then added it the veg to serve as an accompaniment to her chicken breast stuffed with Philadelphia and garlic.
It’s great added to a beef casserole and you can see from the picture just how little you notice the veg when it’s cooked.
I even tried it to make soup but I wasn’t a fan to be honest but that’s the only thing I haven’t liked so far. On my next to try list, I have frozen mixed veg fritters and some sort of spicy chicken thing that I can picture in my head but have no idea what I’ll use or how it’ll turn out!
I’m sure there must be loads of uses for it that I’ve missed though – what would you use it for?
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