I mostly try to avoid eating a lot of stuff out of boxes because I do worry about all the additives and things that are meant to make it shelf-stable and the amount of sodium and unnecessary sugar and all sorts of things like that. I don't eat exclusively things I've made for/by myself, but I definitely lean strongly in that directly.
This, though, all boxes. The rice pilaf is by the same company whose whole wheat couscous I buy. (I can't think of the brand name just now.) They do a number of boxed tabbouleh and flavoured couscous and rice pilafs, so I thought I'd give one of their pilafs a try. I don't think it was worth it. It tasted too much of a very salty broth and the nuts had no flavour and neither, really, did the spice mixture that went into it. It smelled a little of cumin, but I certainly couldn't taste any of it over the saltiness.
I think I could probably do something similar, but better, myself. Maybe toast the nuts first, so they have a strong nutty flavour and then stir them in at the end so they retain crunch, rather than cooking the taste and texture away. And the spices, I have a recipe for yellow rice that would work for flavouring, though I'd probably leave out the turmeric for something like this.
And then the fish, well, it didn't all come out of a box. (You can get some bagged fish things in the meat department that would probably come out similar to this, though.) The spice mixture did, though. All it was was a bag of spices that you stirred into plain yogurt with some oil and then used as a marinade. It had a really nice flavour, a bit spicy but not too hot, but it had a terribly grainy texture that I didn't really care for. I'm not sure what I could do to get rid of the graininess, though.
I used Basa fillets for the fish, which seemed to work out quite well. It was nice and firm and plain enough that the Tandoori didn't compete with the taste of the fish.
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