Jamie Oliver's Simple Weekday Meal For Using Up Canned Goods

Canned food is an often-overlooked problem when it comes to organizing your kitchen. Canned meats last pretty long if they're kept unopened, but that extreme shelf life is also what causes us to forget about them until we realize they've gone bad. While the cans are just sitting there, they're eating up tons of pantry storage space because of their suboptimal shape. Stacking them on top of each other to save room, however, might damage your canned food. Because of all this, it's usually a good idea to use up a few cans every now and then.

Celebrity chef Jamie Oliver has a particularly tasty way of doing just that. He shared how to make Tin Raid Fishcakes on his YouTube channel, and the recipe clears your pantry of at least three cans. Each one is a must-have canned good to keep at home, so odds are you have them sitting around at home. Oliver mixes together one large can each of tuna, potatoes, and corn, then adds a raw egg, a slice of bread, mustard, and cheese to bind everything together. He tosses in some lemon zest and black pepper for seasoning, mashes it all up, then portions the mixture into eight equal patties. Each patty is then fried with a little bit of olive oil and served with homemade coleslaw.

If you need to use up some cans but don't have the canned tuna, potatoes, and corn in your pantry, you can switch them out with other alternatives. Salmon, for example, is a fairly common substitute for tuna, so you can go with canned salmon if that's what you've got in your pantry (it should be considering it's a canned food you should always get at Costco). If you want your fishcakes to taste a little bit more indulgent, you can also go with a seriously underrated canned ingredient: mackerel. Its flavor profile is richer than tuna's due to its higher fat content.

Swapping out canned potatoes for something else in your pantry can be a little trickier. As Jamie Oliver explained, the potatoes double as a binder when they're mashed, so you need something that gives you a similar texture. You might get decent results with canned chickpeas, since they similarly provide structure for falafel. If you decide to go in this direction, try peeling the chickpeas before mashing them to get a smoother, less gritty texture. Lastly, if you don't have any canned corn handy, any other firm or semi-firm sweet canned vegetable works in a pinch. Canned peas work great, as do canned sweet peppers. If you want to try using canned tomatoes, you might want to add them after mashing everything else together — they might end up adding too much liquid to the mix otherwise.