Hacking Canned Goods and Other Prepared Foods

You get home from a long day at work... shuffling upstairs, you look through the junk mail and collection agency letters addressed to the previous tenant who is on the run from unpaid medical bills... you don't feel like cooking anything, don't want to get fast food, in fact you just want dinner quick and be done with it, but you don't want it to suck either.

A can of soup sounds great! Except it probably doesn't because it's overly salty and more than a little bland. Salt is hard to fix except by buying low sodium, but bland is very much in your control. Sure we've all put some pepper or whatever in canned soup, but a very modest effort in preparation can turn Bland Americana into something that is, while not superlative, at much less lame.

Example: Chef Boyardee, Mark II

I'm a fan of the Chef because he's the doppelganger of my late Uncle Alex, who passed away doing something he loved---eating a fine Chicago style Vienna beef hot dog---at the age of 87, and because it reminds me of some happy childhood memories. But, alas, the Chef is aimed at the eight year old palate, not an adult's.

Cooking Time: Under 10 minutes

4 Spanish olives, crushed
2 cloves garlic, smashed
1 tsp olive oil
1/4 cup Italian cheese blend
1/2 small onion, diced
a few slices of bell pepper, chopped
1 sun dried tomato, cut fine
1 can o' the Chef
1 tsp Italian herb mix (or mix your own)
grind of black pepper
cayenne, to taste

Saute the garlic, onion, pepper olives, and sun dried tomato in the bottom of a sauce pan with lid. Add the Chef, herbs, pepper, and put the cheese on top. Lid up until the cheese melts. If you are feeling really ambitious, do this in a pan that you can put in the broiler so you can brown the cheese for that "baked dish" thing.

No, this isn't gourmet but it's fast, cheap (maybe $3?), and tastes a hell of a lot better than the Chef Mark I.

This doesn't even really require any particular cooking technique, just a willingness to think outside the container and add a bit of extra flavor ingredients, primarily avoiding salt. The Maillard reaction and caramelization are very much your friends as each adds A LOT of extra flavor in a short time.

The same basic principle can be adapted to most decent canned soups (I like Progresso). Examples: Lightly saute some sliced mushrooms in the bottom of a sauce pan and add cream of mushroom soup, with a nice grind of black pepper. Low sodium minestrone on its own is fairly flat but if you saute a bit of onion or shallot and garlic in the bottom of the pan first, add some herbs and then drizzle a bit of olive oil on top when you serve, it's much better. Clam chowder gets a whole lot better if you add a dash of clam juice and some extra dried thyme.

Frozen pizza? No problem, buy a cheese one and add a bit of extra toppings... whatever you like, be it pepperoni, kalamata olives, spinach, etc. Just don't go too crazy or it won't cook properly.

Note: Measurements here are very much approximate because (a) you're really just trying to intensify or alter the flavor of the food, not add a lot of volume, and (b) actually measuring involves, well, work. So just eyeball it. If your prep time is longer than a few minutes of chopping, you've missed the point.

Also, I'm sure that somewhere in Berkeley, CA, Alice Waters just felt like someone just walked over her grave, which makes me feel happy in the way I did when I snuck a smoke or a beer as a teenager when Mom wasn't looking. :)