Posted by kathryn in Shopping Basket, A Balanced Diet and Vegetables

I blogged last week about fresh vs frozen vegetables. While frozen vegies have lots of good points nutritionally, up until recently, one of the problems here in Australia, has been the limited choice. For a long time frozen vegies meant bags of peas, or peas, corn and carrot, or frozen spinach. There was nothing much else available.

However in the last couple of years food manufacturers have cottoned on to the growth in stir-fries as a common dinner. We’ve become a nation of Thai and Vietnamese eaters and we are replicating those meals at home. A stir-fry is seen as a quick and easy meal to end the day with.

There’s now a growing range of frozen vegetable options, with a variety of ingredients and a variety of choices. Two of the best ones I’ve found recently are the Findus Wok Asian Greens and the Bird’s Eye Stir Fry range.

• Asian Greens: bok choy, sugar snap peas, broccoli, green capsicum and spring onions.
• Thai Style Stir Fry: broccoli, carrots, green beans, snowpeas, bamboo shoots and baby corn.

The Bird’s Eye brand is also available in five other vegetable mixes% . Both brands contained a good mixture of vegetables. Another problem in the past has been mixed veg packets full of the cheaper vegetables, such as carrots, corn and peas. This is not a problem with these two products.

Both worked really well in the stir-frys I made. I was particularly impressed with the Asian Greens mix, because, at the moment, no other company is providing these vegetables in the frozen form.

I eat a lot of vegetables, so one of these packets would provide me with about two meals (for one). They cost between $3.00 and $3.50 each, depending on where you shop, so it’s not the cheapest way to get your vegies, but it’s super-convenient and worthwhile having a couple of packets in the freezer.

These are two of the dishes I made:

I added cauliflower to the first one and used a mixture of both packets in both stir-frys.

NB: The first picture is the result of the Bihon Guisado packet I received from Sugar Cocoon as part of Food Blogging By Post . As it was a pre-mix, I haven’t posted a recipe, but according to Sugar Cocoon, there’s one here .

12 October, 2006