Try this lot:
I do not especially dislike cooking but tend to be lazy. Nevertheless it is quite easy - and cheap - to make a simple, reasonably nutritious meal with little effort.
I do not believe in the "one-ingredient" concept. Ready-cooked meals do need selecting with some care and are not for everyday use, if only on cost grounds (I do use them).
I am an omnivore but the following concentrates on fish and vegetables, including fruit. You can replace the fish with tinned or cold meats:
Some examples of my own:
- A fish fillet or fish-cakes... with a boiled potato and (tinned) peas, baked-beans or fresh salad.
- A small, one-serving, basic pizza from my local bakery...
- Tinned fish (one of those small, rectangular tins of mackerel, tuna or sardines in oil or sauce)...
Each served with a boiled potato and (tinned, frozen or fresh) peas, baked-beans or fresh salad. The fish also goes well with a micro-waving packet of rice instead of the potato, though the portion of rice is a bit large (probably intended to serve two!).
- One or two eggs, boiled and accomanied by bread-and-butter; or scrambled or poached and served on toast. Add salad if wished.
Potatoes: No need normally to peel spuds: just wash them, cut off sprouts and damaged bits. I don't add salt.
... BUT...
You do need remove any green part; caused by exposure to light. This is chlorophyll as in lettuce or cabbage, itself harmless; but the tuber accompanies it with solanine, its natural pesticide. The affected spud is trying to survive as what it is: a plant. The solanine is toxic, in extremis a potential "homonidicide" too, and concentrates in the green bits and the sprouts. Luckily the green colour and the solanine's own bitter taste warn us off, and the affected layer develops from the peel inwards so can usually be removed.
[Source: https://www.ndsu.edu/agriculture/extension/publications/garden-table-my-potatoes-turned-green-now-what ]
Salads: Preparing salad just for yourself is very simple: wash it thoroughly, cut as wished. Do that while the spud or egg is cooking, or the bag of rice is being microwaved (2 minutes). Remember some fruits can be added to salads: apple, pineapple, strawberries, perhaps banana. Grapes too, fresh or the dried form as cake-making fruit. (Botanically of course, the edible parts of the tomato, cucumber and marrow plants are fruits anyway.)
Frozen, tinned and pickled foods; fine!
Pizzas: Ignore the would-be food-faddists! A basic pizza is essentially cheese-on-toast, so very flexible. I sometimes buy the part-cooked, fancily-topped ones from the supermarket, large enough to be two portions. (I halve it, cook one half, keep the other in the 'fridge for the next day, with different accompaniments.)
So is a Yorkshire Pudding, which is even more basic. Like a pancake, it can be used as a sweet or savoury base. You need normally make your own Yorkshire Puds and pancakes, but I have not tried doing so.
Salt: We do need salt and certain other metallic compunds but in very low levels we can normally obtain from a reasonably good diet, naturally. Too much is bad for us. I never add salt even to fish-and-chips, never have a salt-cellar on the table.
Sugar: Nice but of very little nutrional value. I have cut down on sugar to some extent but am still partial to cakes and biscuits! The type of sugar - fructose, maltose, etc is irrelevant unless your are intolerant to lactose (milk-sugar). Honey is mainly sugar, by the way. Most carbonated drinks are sugar solutions with colours and flavours: the brown of colas is from the sugar having been roasted to caramel.
.
I have seen scare stories about "processed" foods on SW and elsewhere. Errr, meaning what? Tinned peas are "processed": the seeds are extracted from the pods, washed and sealed into slightly salty water in cans. A sponge-cake is "processed": a baked mixture of wheat flour, eggs, butter and sugar. Flour is "processed": harvested seeds milled to extract the flour.
The scare comes from artificial and natural additives added excessively or gratuitously (mainly salt and some types of sugar - all natural) to some very heavily "processed" foods, but the ingredients lists on different types of foods in my kitchen revealed nothing to worry about. The salt and sugar levels are in the Nutrional Information on the packet anyway - and I never add salt unless according to a recipe.
I do though live in a country in which a combination of strict laws and customers' demands on food-safety, advertising and information, has been honoured accordingly by the manufacturers.
The ingredients lists seem to have dropped the notorious "E-Numbers", too. Those are international, or at least EU-wide, designations for additives; but although simple and well-meant they frightened buyers unable or unwilling to look up the designations, hence the notoriety. Most "E-numbers" are nothing to worry about.
