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"Warp speed cooking" is taking convenience products such as precooked meats, fresh prepared vegetables, and frozen or canned foods, and adding your personal touch to make a tasty meal in minutes. With warp speed cooking, you're heating foods someone else prepared, but making your unique flavor combinations. You get the best of both worlds — creativity and speed.
 | Canned, frozen, and precooked products provide several built in timesaving advantages: |
- Foods are washed, trimmed, and cut into the appropriate shapes. You eliminate most of the preparation time.
- Food packages tell you how much you're getting. In most cases, you don't have to measure food before adding it to a recipe.
- You're warming, not cooking, so you spend less time doing so.
Marketers toss around the phrase "assembling meals," as if it's a revolutionary concept. But assembling meals is nothing new. If you ever stirred chopped up hot dogs into a macaroni and cheese mix or added a can of beans to a can of chili, you've assembled a meal. Although the ideas in this article go a bit beyond "beanie-wienie," the concept is the same: Putting boxes, cans, and a few fresh ingredients together results in a quick meal whenever you're pressed for time.
 | You may feel that you should only use fresh, raw ingredients to prepare your meals. Or perhaps you feel guilty using convenience products because you're not slaving over a hot stove. But rest assured that the quality of convenience food products is better than ever. And the sheer number of products available almost guarantees choices for almost all dietary preferences and kitchen routines. |
Your supermarket offers meal kits from manufacturers. In theory, meal kits are a great idea. Meal kits often package a starch and a sauce for flavor. Some include meat or poultry as well. However, saving time isn't guaranteed just because a food product is packaged as a kit. Before you buy a new product, read the directions on the package label, so you know how long the food has to cook. Some meal kits take as long as 25 minutes to prepare. In that stretch of time, you can prepare any of your own recipes.
Adding a little balance and flexibility to the warp-speed formula gives you foods with the same delicious appeal as just plain fast cooking. These kitchen-gymnastic terms are a way of saying that fruits, vegetables, and grains make convenience foods look and taste better. You can make plenty of substitutions if you can't find (or want to change) some of the ingredients.
Keeping your balance
A warp-speed meal that's well balanced for appeal and nutrition contains a starch, a protein, and a vegetable. You can get all three parts — the starch, protein, and vegetable — in canned, frozen, or packaged precooked versions.
| But adding a fresh touch to packaged food perks up the flavor and color of assembled meals and keeps a nice balance between packaged and fresh. You can do this by one of the following means: |
- Add a sprinkling of fresh herbs to a cooked dish just before you pull it from the heat. Chopped chives or scallions brighten up most meat dishes. Rice-based dishes and Southwestern foods, such as chili, taste better with a tablespoon of fresh, minced cilantro.
- Add a squeeze of fresh lemon juice or a teaspoon of grated fresh lemon rind and simmer the dish for 5 minutes, so the acid taste of the lemon blends into the food.
- Stir a pinch of crushed red pepper flakes into a skillet dish at the start of cooking.
- Add a salad of exotic greens on the side. Just open a bag and pour on your favorite dressing.
- Place washed grape tomatoes and baby carrots in a bowl. Pour ranch, blue cheese, or buttermilk dressing into a second bowl for dipping and serve the veggies instead of the usual salad.
| You also have to balance convenience and content. Packaged foods don't all come in the macaroni-and-powdered-cheese variety. You don't have to eat like a 7-year-old when you cook from a box. |
For example, risotto — slowly stirred rice and flavorings — is often on fancy restaurant menus and in gourmet cookbooks. You can prepare packaged risotto mix in about 15 minutes, half the time it would take you to make the conventional recipe from scratch.
Bacon and Vegetable Risotto
Look for precooked bacon strips in the deli meat case of your supermarket. Choose plain bacon for this recipe. (Maple-flavored bacon is too sweet.) Serve this risotto with a salad of bagged exotic greens and a vinaigrette dressing.
Preparation time: 1 minute
Cooking time: 15 minutes, depending on the brand of risotto mix
Yield: 4 servings
1 package (2 to 3 ounces) precooked bacon strips
1 package (5.4 ounces) chicken risotto mix
1 cup frozen peas
1 tablespoon minced fresh cilantro
1. Place the bacon strips in a hot skillet and heat 1 minute to crisp. Remove from skillet, cut into 1-inch squares, and set aside.
2. Prepare the risotto according to package directions, adding the peas with the risotto seasonings. Cook the risotto as the package directs, stirring occasionally. When the rice is tender, stir in the bacon and cilantro.
Vary It! Sprinkle 2 tablespoons grated Parmesan cheese into the dish along with the bacon and cilantro. Also, replace the bacon with a cup of leftover cooked, diced chicken breast meat or a 6-ounce package of cooked, diced chicken breast if you prefer. A cup of cooked, diced chicken breast meat is the equivalent of 1 small, raw chicken breast half.
Per serving: Calories 240 (From Fat 65); Fat 7g (Saturated 2g); Cholesterol 17mg; Sodium 772mg; Carbohydrate 32g (Dietary Fiber 3g); Protein 11g.
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