Fake foods I prefer

So based on what I blog about, you probably assume it’s home-cooked, home-grown all the time around my house. Not true, as much as I aspire to it. Not only will you find some meal mixes and packaged processed foods in my pantry (tonight’s pad thai kit-based dinner, for example), I’ve found that there are some food products that I actually prefer with preservatives, extra processing, and their unique food-like characters.

• ReaLemon and Rose’s Key Lime Juice.  It’s a pain in the neck keeping fresh lemons and limes around when you only need a tablespoon every 2 weeks. And I’ve bought the lovely organic stuff only to have it go bad on me in a month or two. But give me a bottle of pasteurized citrus juice, standardized to the correct acidity, with a smidge of whatever chemical they use, and that bottle has a much longer useful life to me. I’ll risk the chemicals for two tablespoons a month. (And besides…canning recipes assume that standardized acidity, and food safety depends on that acidity.)
• Garlic in a jar. It doesn’t taste as good, it’s got the goodness cooked out of it, and it’s hard to find stuff that isn’t from China…and there’s always a jar in my fridge and a spare in the pantry. I just hate peeling garlic cloves, and when I’m mid dinner-prep, I don’t want to fiddle with them. Water-bath canning garlic isn’t safe, unless it’s pickled in vinegar, and pressure canning it kills the flavor (and I can’t find any certified safe recipes to do so), but maybe I’ll freeze some one of these days…
• Kraft “Parmesan Cheese.” I have a friend who grew up calling this “spaghetti powder,” which I think is a much more honest name for the stuff. And still…I love it. I especially love its thickening power. My sweetie makes the best homemade macaroni and cheese on the planet, and part of the secret to the sauce is spaghetti powder. It binds, thickens, and rounds out the cheese sauce better than anything from Parma possibly can. And I don’t particularly care if it does exactly the same thing to my midsection.
• Mac’n’Cheez. Scott’s sublime concoction of noodles and cheeses is one thing…boxed mac-n-cheez is another thing altogether. And when you want mac-n-cheez, nothing else will really do. I do prefer something like Amy’s Organic these days instead of the blue box stuff, and it always has peas in it, too, but I keep a couple boxes on hand always for times I just gotta have it.
• Sandwich and raisin breads. I can make bread. It’s quite good. For about 12 hours. And it rarely slices nicely, or fits in a sandwich bag, or makes a peanut butter sandwich without shedding crumbs all over…including back into the jelly jar, clinging to the knife. And raisin bread…Aunt Millie’s does it just right, and even though the size of the loaf has shrunk dramatically, I still can’t make it as well for the price. I also like sprouted bread, and it’s worth the money to avoid the hassle…and the over-sprouted loaves that taste like a bale of fresh hay.
• Salty, crunchy snacks. Ann Arbor Tortilla Factory chips, Meijer pork rinds, and almost anything else deep-fried and sprinkled with salt. Though I find myself thinking of potato chips as “health food” because they’re relatively unprocessed – just potatoes, oil, and salt. *shakes head*

So how ’bout you? Got any deep, dark, pantry secrets?