Prepared vegetables and salads

Being pressed for time doesn’t mean you have to live on takeaways or commercial frozen dinners. But there are a lot of clever shortcuts and prepared products that can make your life significantly easier without breaking the bank or compromising your nutrition.

* Don’t overlook prepared and semi-prepared vegetables – although they can be slightly more expensive, they’re designed to simplify your life. They allow you to skip several fiddly steps in food preparation: no more peeling, sorting, rinsing or cutting up. And their taste and nutritional quality is generally of a high standard. Weigh up the few extra cents against the cost of your time.

* The fresh food section of your supermarket offers a large choice of prepared salads and different salad mixes. The vegetable selection is also impressive: sliced mushrooms, sliced green beans, chopped stir-fry vegetables and coleslaw, etc. Choose the ones that suit you.

* Don’t forget frozen vegetables – sliced onions, carrots, spinach, peas, cauliflower, green beans, zucchini, broccoli – the range is almost as comprehensive as your greengrocer’s. And snap-frozen vegetables have the same nutritional value as fresh.

Taking stock – cubes and ready-made

* Use all kinds of stock cubes or stock powder any time you need a flavour boost. They are practical, they improve the flavour of all your dishes in a few seconds and they don’t have to be full of MSG and chemicals – buy them from your health food shop.

* Crumble them into the boiling water you’re using to cook your vegetables and pasta, or use them as a base for soups and sauces. Chicken stock cubes (the low-salt version is even better) are the most ‘all-purpose’ and will suit most of your dishes. But beef and vegetable are also useful.

* Ready-made stock in different-sized tetra packs is also a fantastic stand-by for soups, risottos, casseroles and fish poaching.

* For the best flavour of all, explore the frozen section of good delis or butchers for homemade frozen stock. You might not have time to make a delicious veal stock but someone has done it for you. Perfect for de-glazing and quick sauces.

Well seasoned

* Check out the range of premixed herbs and spices in supermarkets and butchers, for marinating or rubbing. Some may not be to your taste, but those that are can be a fantastic addition to a quick meal or barbecue.

* There’s also a huge range of ready-mixed bottled marinades, prepared curry pastes and stir-fry pastes available that can make a huge difference to the time-poor chef’s culinary creations.

* Buy different basic flavouring ingredients, such as minced garlic, chilli, fresh ginger and chopped coriander, etc., in ready-to-go small jars. While nothing is ever quite as good as fresh, the time saved might mean that pre-prepared spices are a perfectly acceptable compromise for you.

* You can also buy various herbs in tube form for a quick flavour hit, but they can vary in taste and often contain quite a few additives.

* If you’re even slightly organised, herbs of all kinds are so easy to chop and store in the freezer, either with a little water in ice-cube trays or simply packed into small zip-lock bags.

A little sauce goes a long way

Another fantastic idea for the cook in a hurry is to use the plethora of prepared sauces available in supermarkets today.

* Pasta sauces come in every flavour and amount, from large jars of classic tomato sugo and single-serve stir-through sauces to small containers of gourmet sauce from the chilled section in delis.

* Prepared cook-in sauces can be delicious and save you time, but always read the labels – you may not want to eat quite as much saturated fat or as many food additives as these can sometimes contain, and they can be quite expensive to buy, too.

* Delis often sell containers of both sweet and savoury sauces that can taste almost as good as your own – an expensive option, but sometimes a lifesaver, especially when you’re entertaining.

* Don’t forget that many leftover sauces and stocks can easily be frozen in ziplock bags for later on.