Yes you CAN! Store cupboard dishes that are just as good as fresh
Jack Monroe is an award-winning food writer and bestselling author. She works with Oxfam, the Trussell Trust, Child Poverty Action Group and many schools to teach people on low incomes how to cook and eat well. Her latest book, Tin Can Cook, features recipes using basic, cheap tinned ingredients from the back of your cupboard. For the next two weeks she will be sharing nutritious, fun recipes with Daily Express readers every day...
I’VE SEEN inside enough kitchen cupboards by now to be fascinated by our relationship with tinned foods, and what those tins can say about us. Our abilities, our fears, our emergencies, our comfort zones.We have an odd culinary relationship with tinned food. In higher society, rare and supposedly exquisite goods like tinned baby octopus, foie gras and caviar come in beautifully crafted, artistically designed tins.
One former friend kept a display of every tin of caviar she had ever eaten, an understated trophy cabinet of excess and moral turpitude.
At the other end of the spectrum, I fill my shopping trolley with identical white labelled tins, the contents scrawled on the front as though in a child’s hand, with no ring pull on the top, and barely a clue to their contents.
I have spent years rinsing the sticky orange sauce from 23p baked beans to reveal the runty little haricots beneath, at a third of the price of the plain ones – a great alternative if you can handle the slightly luminescent tinge that doesn’t quite come off.
At 20p, carrots in a tin are cheaper than fresh. But tinned tomatoes contain more lycopene, a cancer-fighting agent, than their fresh counterparts. Tinned potatoes can be a sixth of the price of even the cheapest fresh varieties. Sweetcorn, mushy peas, beans and lentils are all basic staples that can be thrown together into a variety of meals. Tinned sardines contain almost an entire day’s recommended intake of vitamins D and B12.
The Tin Can Cook is one who can open their cupboard and create a meal from its contents on any given day, whatever they may be.
We all have tins lurking in our kitchens, and I’m here to show you how you can create beautiful, delicious and nourishing meals by simply chucking a few of them together.
I’m kicking off my new Daily Express series today with two recipes and I’ll be sharing a new one every day for the next 10 days in the newspaper.
If you find yourself unable to shop for a period of time, here’s what to keep in case of an emergency. These ideas aren’t exactly haute cuisine, but they are surprisingly delicious, and will see you through difficult times without having to compromise on taste or nutrition.
Plus, these recipes are designed for everyone – from those with very little cooking
confidence and ability, the smallest of kitchens and the scantest of equipment, all the way up the culinary spectrum to the gourmands, the bon vivants, the entertainers.
A detailed study by the University of California found that the freezing and canning processes “may preserve nutrient value”.
It reported: “The initial thermal treatment of processed products can cause loss of water-soluble and oxygen-labile nutrients such as vitamin C and the B vitamins. However, these nutrients are relatively stable during subsequent canned storage owing to the lack of oxygen. Frozen products lose fewer nutrients initially because of the short heating time in blanching.”
It continued: “Many fresh fruits and vegetables have a shelf life of only days before they are unsafe or undesirable for consumption.
“Storage and processing technologies have been utilized for centuries to transform these perishable fruits and vegetables into safe, delicious and stable products… In short, although canning can cause a slight loss of some nutrients, notably vitamin C in some fruits and vegetables when heat-treated, the nutrient value once canned remains stable.
“And nutrients from canned and frozen fruits and vegetables are arguably more desirable than none at all.”
IONCE cooked a three-course meal at a five-star hotel entirely from the cheapest supermarket tins. The diners loved the food, but their reactions when we did the “big reveal” and showed them it all came from a pile of tin cans, were absolutely priceless.
Most laughed, some were embarrassed, one man was memorably apoplectic.
I laughed at his furious notion that somehow tinned potatoes were going to kill him, when moments before he had declared it the best meal he had ever eaten.
As a novice cook I found myself put off by overtly flouncy language and unfamiliar terminology, and my readers tell me the same.
So, I hope you take these recipes in the spirit that they are intended; as a beginner’s guide to cooking with tinned and pre-prepared ingredients, rather than anything that will ever compete for Michelin stars or similar. For the new cook, as your confidence grows in the kitchen, I hope you will stray from these recipes, add your own twists to them, venture into fresh ingredients if you want to, even make your own garlic pastes, pestos and similar.
You can, of course, recreate these recipes with fresh ingredients if you like, but where’s the fun in that?
So grab your tin opener, and an open mind, and come with me.