If You Can’t Beat Them, Join Them! The Foolproof Guide to Homemade Pre-made Meals Is Here

A colleague of mine once shared tips for avoiding pre-made meals on takeaway platforms — rigorous, scientific logic — yet still gets caught out from time to time. She is certain she has dodged every trap, but when the takeaway arrives, it is a pre-made meal after all. “How could you not lose it in that moment?”

Although the friends around me are fiercely resistant to stumbling upon pre-made meals in a takeaway or a restaurant, they are very positive about my home-made pre-made meals. They often forward me articles about pre-made meals, saying, “This made me think of your homemade pre-made meals.”

Indeed, if you can’t beat them, join them — not a bad coping strategy. With so many friends asking, I might as well share my approach and step-by-step guide to homemade pre-made meals.

1. A Pre-made Meal Journey That Began with Cat Food

As for how later on, even in Shanghai and beyond, people could not buy vegetables and even freezers sold out — that is another story, almost too much of a coincidence.

At first I was simply making cat food from scratch — blending different meats in proportion, mincing them and steaming them through. But doing that every single day meant more work than feeding myself. So I started bulk-buying meat during the big e-commerce sales events (at my peak, 25 kg in one go), spending a whole day cutting, portioning and freezing it all in one session. After that, I just need to take one portion out each day and steam it.

After doing this a few times, I slowly began to appreciate the benefits of processing ingredients in large batches: Less repetitive work; time and energy saved.

And so my thinking opened up: if I can batch-cook for the cats, why not for myself too? Double the time and effort saved!

I started with bread, because once a loaf is baked, sliced and frozen, simply reheating a slice before eating brings it back to almost its just-out-of-the-oven state — barely any impact on texture.

Before, every loaf took a whole day, most of which was spent waiting for the proving and watching the dough.

This is one of the rare moments when my brain actually stops racing: while kneading, I focus entirely on how the gluten is developing; during proving, I picture the yeast eating its fill and burping. My mind is busy yet perfectly at ease. Not only does my brain slip into a flow state, but pressing my fingertips into the dough feels almost therapeutic — probably the same reason some people love squishy stress toys.

As a child, solving these puzzles made me think: how wonderful — finishing several tasks in one go, time saved for free! Now that I cook for myself, I unconsciously apply that problem-solving mindset, mentally running through every step before I start. My water purifier is slow, so I start filling a jug while the bones are blanching. While vegetables soak in bicarbonate of soda to strip away pesticide residue, I start the rice. I prep the vegetables before cutting the meat, so the chopping board doesn’t need an extra rinse. In short, I refuse to let any moment pass where I stand at the stove, watching a pot of soup roll, and do absolutely nothing.

This principle is especially true of big, time-consuming cooking projects. Making bread, braised pork or dumplings — the difference in time and effort between one batch and ten is marginal. Spread the cost across ten servings, and by any reasonable rounding, it is as good as time-free.

On a related note, largely because of the unusual circumstances in recent years, I have felt uneasy about the large volume of waste I produce each day, worrying that if I could not go out, I would not know how to get rid of it. Should a city ever grind to a halt, waste collection would become a serious problem. Since 2020, I have been composting plant-based kitchen scraps at home to reduce my waste output (my primary concern was public health, not environmentalism). Food waste composting demands a fair amount of daily labour. Cooking every day and also processing food waste is not exactly easy — at least not for me. Batch cooking and preparing pre-made meals also concentrate the time when kitchen waste is generated, compressing household chores even further.

So reducing repetitive work and saving time is my single biggest motivation.

2 Reduce Unnecessary Decision-Making

As an anxious, pessimistic pragmatist, the list of things I worry about each day is rather long. But a person’s cognitive bandwidth is limited. Once you factor in work, study and social obligations that simply must be done, the everyday decisions of looking after yourself also eat into that cognitive bandwidth.

Bandwidth is the mind’s capacity, encompassing two abilities: cognitive ability and executive control. Scarcity shrinks all bandwidth, leaving us short of insight and foresight and weakening our executive control.

— Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much

So it is no surprise that stay-at-home mums often feel perpetually stretched thin. Unlike me, who only has to look after myself, a “competent” stay-at-home mum typically doubles as nanny, tutor, cleaner, chef, accountant, bookkeeper and personal butler. Just listing all those roles already makes me tired.

My job requires intensive mental effort every day. If I still have to figure out what to eat for breakfast, lunch and dinner, that drains even more cognitive bandwidth, and my brain simply does not have the capacity left. Once mental bandwidth is exhausted, tightly wound nerves only accelerate the drain, much like an overheating CPU — a crash is never far away.

So if a single decision can sort out several meals at once, the cognitive bandwidth consumed during the subsequent mealtimes shrinks dramatically. What cures my mental burnout is not Second Uncle — it is homemade pre-made meals!

Could ordering takeaway solve this problem? In truth, the decision-making is not one bit less — after all, genuinely tasty and healthy takeaway options within your budget are few and far between, especially if you also want to steer clear of industrially produced pre-made meals whose seasonings, ingredients, additives and hygiene standards are all a mystery. But if economic pressure, work demands and social obligations have you gasping for breath, or if the 996 work culture alone has drained you dry, your brain genuinely lacks the energy to work through that long list of decisions shown above. At this point, the brain hands its decision-making authority over to path dependence, and ordering takeaway may well be a form of self-preservation rather than laziness.

3 Takeaway Cannot Meet Dietary Needs

As a Cantonese person, I am terribly fussy about food. It is not that I have many dietary restrictions, but rather that I hold all manner of unreasonable fastidiousness about ingredient combinations and cooking methods. For instance, I cannot abide chive filling, I refuse to accept broccoli stir-fried with meat, I dislike vegetables cooked in heavy oil, I loathe most wheat-based noodles yet adore bamboo pole noodles, and I enjoy rice noodles but only the thin ones — never the thick, chunky varieties.

Later, after getting into nutrition science, my need for ingredient diversity grew while my tolerance for ultra-processed food dropped, and takeaway could barely turn up anything I actually wanted to eat. I may also be the sort of person for whom the gut–brain axis is particularly pronounced — if a meal does not agree with me, my mood plummets almost instantly. As a child, I would burst into tears over a badly cooked meal. If poor eating ever drags your mood down, it is absolutely not because you are being fussy. It is perfectly valid. Please, treat yourself to something good.

*The gut–brain axis refers to the interaction between the gut and the brain, involving complex interplay among the gut, the nervous system and the immune system. It plays a vital role in both physical and mental well-being.

4 Be Free — Do Not Be Controlled

The single most important question these companies consider when formulating a product is: how much salt, sugar and fat do we need to maximise the food’s allure?

And in fact, some experts argue that Wall Street is itself one of the principal causes of the obesity epidemic. …They enlarge package sizes, ensure their products are ubiquitous across every supermarket of every size, make the packaging endlessly convenient, and even cultivate a sense of permissiveness — you can eat it all day, eat it anywhere, eat as much as you like, and it is no problem.”

— Salt, Sugar, Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us

Rejecting ultra-processed food began as a defence of my freedom to choose what I eat, but I soon discovered that my body was actively refusing these foods on its own — too sweet, too salty, too oily. Having (partially) reclaimed my food sovereignty, I realised that capital’s manipulation of our taste buds had gone far beyond what I could have imagined.

It is a shackle forged from layer upon layer of constraint, each nested inside the next: the food industry produces cheap, instant nourishment by exploiting workers, the environment and food cultures; the excessive salt, sugar and fat it pumps in has domesticated our taste buds into craving over-processed food — even becoming addictive; crushing workloads (physical exhaustion, cognitive bandwidth depleted) leave people psychologically dependent on takeaway and fast food, pouring their money straight back into the food industry. No one is held accountable for the natural environment, for personal health or for the labour of others, and the cycle of control feeds itself in a vicious loop.

One way to break free is perhaps to reclaim our food sovereignty — to cook for ourselves and snap the loop of control.

3. A Foolproof Guide to Homemade Pre-made Meals

If you have been tempted by the idea of “home-made pre-made meals”, please help yourself to the tips below.

1 Borrow a Page from the Industrial Pre-made Meal Playbook

As the old Chinese maxim goes — learn the masters’ craft to turn it to your own advantage. The home kitchen is hardly the ideal setting for frozen pre-made meals, but if you have decided to give it a try, minimally processed frozen ingredients or shelf-stable convenience foods are worth considering. The most common options are frozen vegetable mix, frozen prawns, and the ready-to-eat corn on the cob that has been growing in popularity lately.

I love browsing the freezer section in supermarkets — the ready-made dishes on display are an enormous source of inspiration. Established frozen foods have already been battle-tested by the market and are unlikely to be terrible. We can use them as blueprints to recreate at home, including how far they have been cooked beforehand. Take steamed scallops with garlic and vermicelli, pizza or lo mai gai — buy them, dissect them, figure out whether they were par-cooked, left raw or fully cooked before freezing, then mimic the process at home, reducing the risk of failure and the cost of trial and error.

The food industry has already paid that tuition for us.

2 Keep Meat and Vegetables Separate

Plant fibres, starches and proteins all respond differently to freezing and reheating. This is not only because their freezing curves differ — their cooking requirements are different too. If mixed together, the uneven rate of ice crystal formation during freezing degrades texture, and after thawing and reheating the dish becomes genuinely unappetising.

Skip the Full Cook, Skip the Thaw

Ginger, spring onion, garlic and vegetables such as sweetcorn kernels, peas, carrots and celery can all be diced or finely chopped and frozen (take a cue from the frozen vegetable aisle in the supermarket). Grab what you need, use it straight away — this lets you burn through surplus ingredients quickly, cuts down on waste and trims prep time at the stove.

Vegetables that do need cooking through should not be fully cooked beforehand. Simply blanch them briefly until barely tender — a softening is all you need. This quick process draws out moisture, reduces ice crystal formation, preserves texture and leaves room for the reheating step later on.

When it is time to cook, frozen vegetables should not be thawed at all — a brief spell in the fridge to take the edge off the ice will do, and they can go straight into a pot of boiling water or a fierce wok stir-fry.

Thaw Meat Dishes, Then Reheat

The meat dishes referred to here are pure-meat dishes — red-braised pork, for instance. Unlike plant fibres, meat undergoes minimal texture change after thawing, provided you actually thaw it. The best method is to move the meat from the freezer to the fridge the night before and let it defrost slowly. This applies to raw meat just the same: meat that thaws gradually will not leak excessive bloody juices, and you avoid the dismal, watery texture of badly frozen meat that wipes out any appetite.

Stews Work, Stir-Fries Don’t

This is not to say that meat-and-vegetable combinations cannot be turned into pre-made meals — it is just that most of them do not fare well, and there is no hard-and-fast rule; you need years of cooking under your belt to develop a feel for what works. What is fairly certain, though, is that dishes requiring long, slow simmering can very often handle a meat-and-vegetable mix. Classic examples include curry, dishes made in master stock, and all manner of meat broths. Extend this to Western and Southeast Asian cuisines, and a bacon and cream pumpkin soup or bak kut teh are well worth a try. On the other hand, leafy greens that need a fierce, high-heat wok blast are almost certainly not going to work as pre-made meals. Again, the frozen food section at the supermarket is a great source of inspiration and ideas.

Similarly, stews are one of the few dishes that can skip the pre-thawing step — simply take them out and heat them straight through, saving you the decision-making labour of planning dinner the night before.

3 Less Bacteria, Less Contamination

Do Not Dig In First

After you have made a pot of braised meat, do resist the urge to stand at the stove and wolf down a bowl of rice right there. The bacteria in your saliva will multiply rapidly, producing unpleasant off-flavours that seriously diminish the deliciousness of the braised meat — and they will eat away the umami compounds in the food.

If you are packing tomorrow’s lunch, please portion out the food you need to take first, and then sit down to eat. Leftovers tasting worse than they should is not your imagination — saliva on the chopsticks and prolonged sitting at room temperature both take their toll.

Low Temperature, Low Oxygen, Fewer Bacteria

Once your pre-made meals are ready, do not wait for them to cool — seal them immediately in clean (ideally heat-sterilised) airtight containers and pop them in the freezer. If you have the means to vacuum-seal them, go for it. This is essentially the industrial food-processing playbook: low temperature, low oxygen, sterile environment — maximising flavour preservation and extending shelf life.

Frozen food does go bad. And before it actually spoils, it will first become unappetising.

The same principle applies to storing fresh ingredients, especially produce: a cool, dry, low-oxygen environment slows the plant’s respiration, thereby extending its life. Wrap your leafy greens in kitchen roll, tuck them into a sealed bag and refrigerate. I have tested this myself — a fortnight is no problem, and a month is not a pipe dream either. P.S. Once the kitchen roll dries out, it can still go back to service.

4. Home-Cooked Meals Should Not Be a Luxury

In closing, I hope a little of my experience can offer some useful reference to anyone who wants to cook at home — to ease the pressure, save time and spare you the long detours.

I also understand that eating home-cooked meals or making your own pre-made meals is, in a sense, a privilege. Spare time, mental bandwidth to spare, a just-right hobby and a touch of talent — or family who can contribute these things — in today’s high-pressure, fast-paced world, all of that is practically a luxury.

Every great endeavour begins with a difficult first step, but our actions are themselves a vote cast on the world beyond us. Choosing to skip the takeaway might just be the moment the gears of fate begin to turn.

And if, having read all this, you are still reaching for the takeaway app, then all I can offer is my colleague’s little trick for dodging pre-made takeaway food — though in practice it works about as often as it doesn’t:

1. Do not order the cheapest options.

2. Check the shop’s in-situ photos — make sure it is a proper restaurant with a dining area, not a takeaway-only kitchen.

3. Do not choose shops that sell every cuisine under the sun.

4. Do not choose heavily seasoned dishes — Sichuan cuisine, grilled skewers, pickled cabbage fish, and the like.

Foodthink contributor

Doudou

A practitioner of sustainable living who loves exploring consumption-free ways of life.

 

 

 

 

Editor: Tianle