h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Ok, so I'm at university in a catered hall (they make me 2 meals a day). I have very limited cooking facilities: a Baby Belling cooker, a microwave, and a kettle. I have even more limited ingredients, and am not really prepared to go out and buy anything unless I know I'll use all of it.

But I do have the following:
1 can of fruit cocktail in fruit juice.
1 can of fruit cocktail in syrup.
2 cans of peaches in fruit juice.
2 cans of peaches in syrup.

So does anyone know a good, simple way to cook these?

Take them out of the can first! They are edible then, without being cooked.........

Do you have any other ingredients to use?
Get a tin or carton of custard & you can heat them up together in the microwave.
Frozen pastry could be used to make a fruit pie.

Is that the sort of thing you had in mind?

Go shopping and buy something that won't rot your teeth away, you idle sod!

B

If you are going to make a fruit pie, cook the pastry first using lentils in place of the fruit. When the pastry is cooked, discard the lentils and replace them with the fruit and put it back in the oven for ten minutes to finish it off.

Theres not a lot else you can do with canned fruit except serve it up with a good dollop of ice cream.

Sod the sugar, there are some pretty good toothpastes on the market these days.

Donald

Your lucky, when I was in catered halls we weren't allowed our own kettles, and there wasn't a kettle in the 'kitchen' half the time, no fridge, no microwave no cooking device of any kind; hence with a simple rice cooker there are a multitude of rather nice tasty dishs you can cook of course we weren't allowed rice cookers either they conviscated that, my kettle and coffee machine the b******s and the food they provided often made me very ill t'was a good deal the room was on the sixth floor and the heating couldn't be turned off so I didn't sleep

I would not bother cooking canned fruit. From a vitamin point of view heating them up would merely reduce the goodness in them. Eat them raw with ice cream or cream if you must. If you do need to cook them poach the pears in red wine or champagne - yum.

Once yuou have finished your canned fruit you can then go on to proper meals with the microwave or hob - a classic student spag bog is dead easy in the microwave as is healthy fish. But if you get two meals a day cooked for you and you are a student you can not be doing that much to use all your energy up and if you are I can give you an alternative to just drinking the remainder of the champagne. ;-P

Put the canned fruit in a big ziplock bag with a few bits of bread and some water, then beat the whole lot to a pulp. Next warm the bag of fruit pulp in a hot bath for about 15 minutes.

Leave to one side in a warm place for a couple of days.

After two days, open the bag and throw in some sugar. Shake it all up and warm it again in a hot bath.

Leave for another few days.

Open the bag and you've got yourself a couple of pints of prison hooch

Why not throw in a table spoon of yeast and really make it go!

Have to be careful the bag doesn't explode though.

Donald

tablespoon?

tea spoon!

I thought so, I'd be inclined to make wine with that fruit as well.

GD's suggestion would work better if organic wholemeal bread was used. Then if the mashed up mixture was left exposed to the air for 24hrs, there would probably be enough wild yeast settling in from the air to ferment it all. I'd only add sugar if a sweet wine was wanted

Add custard and a good quality jelly, you've then got yourself a nice trifle

No you need sponge and sherry to make a trifle. Plus you need sprinkles to go over the top.

... and you need whipped cream.

Even better

*Now wants some trifle for breakfast*

My money says he's actually bought more food by now.

B

Let's have less of this arguing over trifles.

If you've got a liquidiser or a hand held power whisk (known in our house as 'the whizzy thing') you can make great milkshake using the fruit-in-syrup (not juice), a dollop of icecream and a glass of milk.

Just whisk/liquidise them all together for a few seconds.

F

You can make nice smoothies with the fruit in juice.

Ofcourse the tomato fruit is not normaly featured in smoothies or milkshakes

I used to live on special offers and would get by on whatever was on a two for one or specially priced that week it kept my diet varied I just had to be careful not to get into buying too much processed stuff just because it was cheap, but fruit and fresh veg can normally be bought quite cheaply from markets.

one love

It wasn't the only food I've got, I also have loads of packets of tesco value noodles and soup. anyway I did one load of peaches in syrup on a baking tray under the grill so far, which turned out nice.

How about investing in some jelly.Then you can have fruit in jelly.