Tinned food has a best-before date of about three years, but is still likely to be good to eat decades later, making it an invaluable back-up. It also helps you prevent food waste by letting you be more sparing with perishable purchases – though, as with fresh food, it’s a good idea to rotate the cans in your cupboard, bringing short-date items to the fore, so you can build them into the week’s meals.
As well as helping to reduce food waste, tinned food is a good choice compared with other packaged food, because cans are made from a relatively low-impact material that actually gets recycled, unlike most plastics and Tetrapak. It’s also worth noting that, no matter how new it is, if a tin has a dent or is rusty, it is safest to compost the contents to avoid the deadly bacteria Clostridium botulinum.
I’ve usually got a reliable stack of tinned lentils, beans and tomatoes, and today’s dish is a mixture of these stalwarts, made into a super-quick dal. If you have any fresh vegetables that need using up, add them finely diced at the same time as the onion.
Tin can curry: five-minute lentil dal
Tinned food is undeservedly often forgotten about and wrongly labelled as poor-quality, low in nutrition and tasteless. Tinned foods do lose a small amount of their nutrition, but for the added economical, time- and waste-saving benefits, I believe they should be store-cupboard staples in every home. This dal is as simple as can be and takes just five minutes to make from just a few ingredients.
Serves 4
1 tbsp oil
1 onion, peeled and finely chopped
2 tbsp garam masala
150g frozen or canned spinach
1 x 400g can green or brown lentils
1 x 400g can beans – kidney, black or other
1 x 400g can chopped tomatoes
To serve
Rice
4 sprigs coriander, leaves picked, stalks finely chopped (optional)
4 tbsp yoghurt, (optional)
Heat the oil in a saucepan, add the onion and garam masala, and saute for two minutes.
Add the spinach, tomatoes, lentils and beans, including their liquid, swill all the cans clean with a splash of water each and add that to the pot, too.
Bring the mix up to a boil, stirring all the while, then serve with rice, topped with a blob of yoghurt and coriander, if you wish.
