There's an article up on Serious Eats called "Five Star Meals In Just Four Cans. I was impressed by the project. I use a lot of canned food (mostly tomatoes), but I figured they were going to produce some amazing food using nothing but cans.
The first recipe is for Corn Chowder:
In a medium pot coated with olive oil, sauté 2 cloves of garlic (if you have celery or bell peppers, dice and add them to the pot) for about 1 minute, add 2 cans of drained corn and 2 cans of cream of potato soup. Add salt and pepper to taste.
So let me get this straight, I'm using canned corn and canned potato soup and garlic, bell pepper, and celery? That doesn't sound like canned food to me.
The next recipe, for Crab Cakes, is more grievous:
Mix 1 pound canned crab meat with 1/4 cup mayonnaise, 1/3 cup crushed cracker or bread crumbs, 1 teaspoon minced garlic, 1 tablespoon lemon juice, 1/4 teaspoon garlic powder, salt and pepper. Form cakes with the mixture and dredge both sides in flour. Coat a large skillet on medium high heat with vegetable oil and cook the crab cakes on each side until golden brown, about 4 minutes on each side. Serve immediately with lemon wedges
Oh, they sell canned lemon juice now?
Anybody can make delicious food using canned stuff. The idea that you can't use canned food in real cooking is absurd elitism that further contributes to the idea that cooking is something that is hard and should only be done occasionally. Overall, this sort of thing is why I get so absurdly angry about modern cooking writing: it perpetuates this idea that you have to use the freshest ingredients available and that cooking a meal is something that should take hours to complete, should involve complicated skills like butchering, and should involve expensive and difficult to obtain ingredients.
These are lies.
Anybody can cook. It's easy. If you want to start acquiring some easy recipes that *gasp* use cans, I've been really enjoying my subscription to Martha Stewart's Everyday Food (I've also been really enjoying being able to crank dinner out in 20 minutes some nights. Awesome).