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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   1061 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for February 27, 2026

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Cooking

Looking for some delicious meals to make for family. But upgrading easy meals seems to have more bang for the buck than making hard meals. For example: fish tacos.

Caesar salad kit from the grocery store. Frozen fish sticks. Tortillas. Combine them and they make acceptable fish tacos. My girls won't eat those fish tacos, but they will eat fish sticks with their chosen sauce, and Caesar salad.

Anyone have any similar food hacks?

Buying premade staple ingredients is usually both good value and efficient. For example, I regularly cook with what I guess is a standard vegetable / ‘soffritto’ base (very finely diced onions, celery, carrots) as a base for sauces, stews, whatever. Could I buy the ingredients myself and make this on the weekend, freeze it in bags, then use it when I’m cooking? Sure.

But I can also get it perfectly, finely and evenly diced, with no waste or disproportionate amounts of celery or whatever from the grocery store, where 1lb of the “frozen soffritto mix” costs me $2.50. There’s a French grocery store I found that sells pre-finely-diced frozen shallots, perfect for a fast pan sauce if you don’t want to buy and chop shallots, which I use too.

I also buy pre-peeled garlic, which keeps pretty well (the “hacks” for quickly peeling garlic have never worked for me). I buy jarred diced ginger, chili etc in vinegar, which saves both time and in the latter case that horrible feeling when you chop chili and imperfectly wash your hands and then touch your eye or something.

The store also sometimes has very good pre-marinated meats which, again, save a lot of unnecessary time and effort at miniscule cost (perhaps an additional 10% on top of the price of the meat itself). Store-bought curry sauces are also great; the gain from hand-grinding spices, mashing chillies, hand-making a massaman or red curry paste over a good store-bought base is real, but minimal. I think the same about homemade pie crust. A premium store-bought brownie mix is likewise superior to most homemade alternatives.

I also buy pre-peeled garlic, which keeps pretty well (the “hacks” for quickly peeling garlic have never worked for me).

Chinese cleaver is your friend.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=UYCKIroDVBY&t=183

My technique is a little bit different. I smash it with root and unpeeled. Once smashed the skin is usually in one peace and you just remove it.

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