Boxed/Canned or from Fresh?

[Reckoner]

After a day of work, how many of you cook using fresh ingredients, as opposed to canned/boxed items?

 

[zerocool84]

You only know it's fresh if you picked it yourself.

 

[JulesMaximus]

The only time I eat boxed items is cereal and things like couscous and pasta. I generally only cook with raw ingredients and fresh herbs and vegetables whenever practical and I'd say at least half my meals are prepared using such ingredients and some portion of my meals to follow are using leftovers.

 

[mmntech]

Every chef uses canned vegetables. Tomatoes especially. Great time saver and you often get better results.

Now packaged prepared food I stay away from. Lot of kids I knew in school grew up eating that garbage. No wonder so many people are fat and have diabetes today.

 

[lxskllr]

I use packaged food almost exclusively. I don't like cooking much, so that saves a lot of effort. In the case of vegetables, I like them canned, sometimes even better than fresh.

 

[TraumaRN]

Try to use ingredients that as fresh as possible. Tomorrow for dinner will have all items except the pasta(which is made 3 miles from my house anyways) fresh from my garden. We avoid canned/frozen etc whenever possible unless we canned and/or froze those items.

 

[BoomerD]

In our house, it's "some of both."
We use fresh when we can, canned for some things, and frozen for others, especially for vegetables that we don't grow. Frozen veggies are so much fresher tasting than canned, they're crisp instead of soggy, the color is more appealing, and you can open a bag, use how much you want, and put the bag back in the freezer for later use.

Pasta is always from a box or bag, and sometimes...MOST of the time, she uses the "pasta roni" types of boxed pasta for a quick and easy side dish
(I'm not a big fan of pasta, so it's rarely worth the trouble to make it from scratch, but she still does on occasion)

Baked goods are nearly always made from scratch. It's rare to find a cake mix or anything similar at our house.

 

[GodlessAstronomer]

Prefer to use fresh, yet I mostly use canned/boxed because I'm lazy and not a talented cook.

 

[ahenkel]

As much as I can I use fresh food. Made a pot of cioppino last night.

 

[Ksyder]

Stay away from canned stuff due to the BPA liner. Glass jars or frozen stuff would be better from what I have heard.

 

[Malak]

My pizza trees are in harvest this time of year.

 

[eits]

rarely canned. that shit causes health problems.

always frozen or fresh (almost all vegetables on the market that are frozen are better for you and fresher than the "fresh" produce because they're frozen within an hour of getting picked and none of the nutrients are lost).

you should almost always eat fresh and as close to natural state as possible

 

[KMFJD]

For some reason i enjoy canned mushrooms for certain things like Chili