Making A Meal Just From Convenience Store Ingredients | Mac's Cooking Diary

Convenience stores these days are truly convenient. In some stores, you can even get vegetables and fruits. This wasn’t a thing in the past but these days, some convenience stores introduce fresh products into their aisle. While you can’t find a lot of things, there are ways of turning them into gourmet and homemade meals. Where I am from, the convenience store sells a few items of basic vegetables and sometimes they come in bundles and it has a label that says it's for a certain meal. For example, today instead of getting water spinach only, I ended up getting packaged vegetables that were intended for sayur asem jakarta. The vegetables inside the package were quite odd for a meal that was supposed to be umami and a little sour. So, I was thinking, “ What can I make with this?”. Afterall, my palate is a lot different from local cuisine.

I ended up coming to the conclusion to make curry. I am inspired by a friend of mine who always orders curry whenever we dine out at a cafe. The curry sold in the cafe comes with rice and diced vegetables. They also added some type of protein like katsu/fried chicken. It always looks delicious but because I am a little hesitant most of the time, I never really ordered curry. Considering the curry costs about $2 to $3 at a cafe just from one meal, you can try making it at home for a lot cheaper.

A comforting meal

Today was the first time I made curry in this style. It’s Sunday, the weather is a little chilly and pleasant and I need some comforting food. Anyhow, instead of making the curry seasoning from scratch, I got this instant mix seasoning with coconut milk. This seasoning is intended for Indonesian types of meat curry. Indonesian curry is known to be a little watery but today, I was trying to go into a little japanese-indonesian fusion where though it’s not entirely made with roux and has that gooey texture, it still has a little thickened sauce over it.

The protein that I chose was a sausage. Instead of buying a pack of them, I got a single bite sausage that was available at the convenience store. This sausage is pretty popular these days and comparatively cheap. They are a good source of protein as well. I also cubed them and put them into the mix to add more protein source into my vegetables.

Cooking the meal

Making this curried vegetable isn’t that hard. Afterall, we already skipped the seasoning. However, you’d still have to dice the vegetable, sauteed the seasoning and the garlic. Add about 250ml of water and then vegetables(don’t forget to wash them) eventually add the cubed sausage into it. Pair them with steaming hot rice, you’re good to go.

This meal is perfect for broke adults. The total cost of the curry ingredient was 1.58. That excludes ingredients that you might have at home such as garlic or the cooking oil to sautee the meal. They are good for 3 portions and that means it’s a lot cheaper. While it’s not necessarily the healthiest considering the instant seasoning + the processed sausage, it gets you by when you want to live cheaply, especially for a single meal person. Considering the nutrition it has, it isn’t that bad. There are vegetables, protein, and carbs. But that was all on the surface and I won’t go deep into nutritional value.

The taste of this curry was like the taste of curry that I tried a few times at coffee shops/cafes. It’s not that different except the cafe has a lot more roux than this. I would definitely eat this dish more often now and will keep this recipe in mind. Perhaps on a good day, I can add other types of protein like chicken or meat.

Instead of just eating packaged ramen that might cost the same, especially the top line ramen like from Nissin and Shin Ramyun, why not eat vegetables and add a little vegetables to our life. Sometimes I am amazed by this particular skill of mine that I can make decent meals for cheap and something that fits my palate which is often meals from cafes/coffee shops.