You’ve survived the initial disaster, scraped by on what bits of food you could find, and you’ve scavenged a healthy inventory of canned goods. What’s for dinner? Franks and beans again? After a while, you’re going to get bored with eating the same stuff day in and day out (a luxurious problem to have in this scenario, but a problem nonetheless). You can do some things to spice up your meals so they aren’t the same drab thing all the time.
In this day and age you can get nearly anything canned and if its in a store now, it’ll be there after the Apocalypse. From canned fruits and vegetables, to the more exotic canned meats. There’s even a company that sells canned bacon (shelf life ten years!). The point is that you can find all sorts of items in canned form and you can then mix and match these to make a more palatable meal than just eating a hunk of spam until you’re full.
At the very basic level, you can make a proper meal by just pulling out some canned meat and a vegetable for a side. You can go a little further and mix some things together. Got a can of stewed tomatoes, corn, black olives, and jalapeno peppers? Mix them up for some salsa (chips not included). Want to go all out? Add some none-canned goods into the mix. Remember the recipe for Bannock? Use that dough to make a shell and put a stew inside, cook it and you’ve got yourself a pot pie.
The key is to add a little something to your meal to make it different enough that it’s no longer a bland meal. Even just adding a shake of some seasoned salt or some other spice to a can of food can make it so much better. From personal experience, I added a few shakes of generic seasoned salt to a can of corn one time and I’ll never eat corn without it again. You can find all sorts of canned food recipes on the internet, unfortunately most of them have 15 ingredients, only one or two of which are actual canned food and the rest would be highly difficult to find post-Apocalypse.